Frontiers of Care

This thesis evaluates how far our moral obligations to others stretch under the feminist morality of care ethics. A common criticism of care ethics is that it fails to detail the strength and extent of our moral obligations beyond our close relations. While recent literature has tried to respond to this criticism and articulate care ethics as a cosmopolitan and political ethic (including Virginia Held, Daniel Engster, Michael Slote, and Sarah Miller), I do not find these attempts fully convincing. I instead propose a new argument for demonstrating how care ethics can successfully show our moral obligations transcend our close relations. This argument is termed “obligation through caring values”. What shall require further exploration, however, is just how far this transcendence extends. In what follows, the frontiers of care ethics (with the “obligation through caring values” as its foundation) will be determined through analyzing three contexts: our moral obligations to fellow citizens, to the global population, and to future generations. To offer a common framework to bind these three contexts together, the theme of climate ethics will be specifically examined.