Caring

Peta Bowden extends and challenges recent debates over feminist ethics. In this book the author takes issue with accounts of the ethics of care which try to pin down the 'principles' of caring rather than taking account of caring in practice. Her unique approach is that caring must be understood by working through examples. Caring explores four main caring practices: mothering, friendship, nursing and citizenship. Her consideration of the differences and similarities in these working practices - their varying degrees of intimacy and reciprocity, formality and informality, vulnerability and choice - reveals the complexity of the ethics of caring. This work recognizes the ways in which ethical practices outrun the theories that attempt to explain them.