In her latest book, Virginia Held elaborates on themes from previously published articles to explicate and defend the ethics of care. For those unfamiliar with this well-developed tendency of feminist thought, she reviews its evolution from the 1980s writings of Sara Ruddick, Carol Gilligan, and Nel Noddings to the more recent work of theorists including, among many others, Eva Kittay, Annette Baier, Joan Tronto, and Selma Sevenhuijsen. Held also underlines the differences between the ethics of care and dominant moral and political perspectives, including Kantian universalism, utilitarianism, liberal contract theory, and virtue theory. She proposes that care is, compared with justice, the more basic value, on the grounds that society can exist without the latter but not without the former. She recommends that men and women participate equally in care activities; that care infuse citizen as well as familial relations; and that society beat back the imperializing thrust of the market ethos and the conflict-mongering thrust of the militarized state to improve the well-being of children, the elderly, the sick and disabled, the community, culture, the environment, and deprived regions of the world.

Historically, women have devoted themselves to domestic care work or at least have done most of the nursing, cooking, cleaning, child-rearing, and cultivation of personal relationships on which society relies. Women's care has both nourished men and freed them from the tasks of tending to the immediate needs of others so that at least a few of them could write academic books. Perhaps this is why many modern male moral and political philosophers have been able to ignore the crucial importance of caring relationships to self and society, positing instead the self-sufficient, self-interested, and essentially self-authoring self as the human norm and ideal. In contrast to such delusions, Held embraces a relational rather than individualist notion of the self. The very capacity of the self to survive and thrive, she reminds us, is a function of every human being's dependence—especially but not exclusively in childhood, illness, and old age—on others who care particularly for each one. She affirms the central role of love and empathy in human development (for true care is not simply a matter of mechanical behavior) and valorizes affection for family members, neighbors, friends, and fellow nationals as the glue that creates social bonds without which individuals would wither—although she also dreams of expanding “the multiple ties of care … to encompass the whole human community” (p. 166). Held asserts that without the values of loyalty, nurturance, mutuality, and cooperation, no one would identify enough with others to want to uphold the different values of rational detachment, impartial treatment, fairness, and individual rights promoted by the ethics of justice. Hence, the ethics of care is the truest and broadest foundation of moral life, and the ethics of justice secondary and limited.

While The Ethics of Care clarifies the evolution and principles of that tradition, many of its chapters circle around similar ideas. This has the effect of making the book seem helpful at the beginning, repetitive in the middle, and a bit tiresome by the end. By condensing her analysis, Held could not only have tightened the book's formal structure but also cleared room to confront one of the thorniest aspects of care work today. This is the growing trend of female migration from poor countries to rich ones to perform care work for strangers under what are often highly exploitative conditions, while leaving behind children, spouses, and parents for whom they care in the emotional sense of the term and for whom they otherwise would be caring in the practical sense. Especially given her scorn for neoliberal globalization, the author is inexplicably silent on the numerous ways in which the ethics of care goes awry as both the cause and consequence of the contemporary international division of care work.

More problematic than what the book says too much or too little about, however, are certain features of its orientation to the world. Held periodically alludes to the criticisms that have been leveled against the ethics of care: that it reinforces the image of women as nurturers and provides allies of the traditional sexual division of labor with ammunition (Look how important you women are when you stick to kinder,kirche, and küche!); that its focus on particularistic relationships directs attention away from oppressive social structures; that it exalts caring above all other values; that it is cloying and smarmy in its wish to turn citizen relations into caring relations; that it is naive to think that “if we only cared more” the world would be harmonious and peaceful. Not all theorists in this tradition are vulnerable to these charges, but Held frequently is. Yet instead of defeating her critics with rigorous counterarguments, she attempts to satisfy them with pious shoulds (“Within caring relations of family and friendship, we should make room for treating others equally and for respecting their rights” [p. 136]) and woulds (“In a society increasingly influenced by feminism and the values of care … society would learn to bring up its children so that fewer would sink to violence or insist on pursuing their own individual interests at the expense of others” [p. 153]). She sees liberal individualists as her main foes, but leftists who share her disdain for market hegemony as well as her admiration of solidarity and democratic citizenship are nonetheless still likely to find her book mawkish. In fact, for her emphasis on mother love, social cohesion, social trust, and particularistic loyalties, Held is bound to appeal most to communitarians and religious conservatives, even if they will not be thrilled with her call for greater male participation in care activities, the preservation of a limited place in law for the rhetoric of individual rights, and sustained government efforts to rein in the power of corporations and the military.

Held slides seamlessly back and forth between asserting the centrality of care to society and urging us to embrace caring as our supreme goal and ideal. She thereby elides the possibility of saying yes to the empirical claim but no to the normative one. She also conflates social relations and caring relations in many of her descriptions and prescriptions, as if to be “in relation” is automatically to be in a caring relation, and as if care ought to be what all relationships are most fundamentally about. One might emphatically agree that people are constituted through their relations to others and propped up by relations of dependence for long chunks of time, without proposing that those relations are always or even usually the milk-and-cookies sort that the author portrays. In turn, caring is crucial, and it can be delightful, but one of the points of growing up is to be able to indulge in connections that offer quite different pleasures. From friends, we might sometimes prefer wit or intellectual stimulation or excitement; from lovers, edginess or mystery or the capacity for great physical passion; from citizens, exhilarating oratory, courage, or the sparks that fly when political positions clash. The wide variety of imaginable and desirable adult-to-adult ties should make us balk at Held's hopes to replace a liberal model of social relations as “contracts between self-interested strangers” with an ethics-of-care model of social life based on “the relation between a mothering person [!] and child” (p. 77). One does not have to be a fan of liberal individualism to find something unappetizing, if not downright creepy, about that!