 So, imagine the following situation, suppose it's Christmas morning, and the children come downstairs to open up their presents. And little Bobby opens up his present, and it's, you know, the bicycle he always wanted, and little Gloria opens up her present, and it's the set of children's books that she always wanted, and, you know, the kids are just thrilled, they love their presents, you know, they're just celebrating the holidays, you know, they're enjoying each other, enjoying their family, and they turn to their parents and say, thank you, thank you mommy and daddy for giving me, you know, giving us these wonderful presents. And then the parents say, well, you know, it's our obligation to do that. You probably have some really upset children, right? There's something missing there, right? Suppose a different situation, suppose you're, suppose you're about to fall off a pier, you know, fall off a cliff, and you're going to fall to your death, right, and you're kind of stumbling back, and then you see your spouse over there, and your spouse is running towards you, and, you know, is leaping in the nick of time, and grabs your arm and pulls you off the edge of the cliff, pulls you from the edge of the cliff, you're falling back and pull you forward, and say, thank you, thank you, thank you for saving my life. And then your spouse says, well, I couldn't have done, I couldn't have just sit there and done nothing, that would have been a negligent homicide, right? I was obligated to save your life. I imagine there would be, how shall we say, separate sleeping arrangements that night. You know, this morality is supposed to tell us how we are to live our life, right? Now, a lot of morality does a really good job of that when we're talking about relationships between people that's not at all personal, that's not at all personal. You know, when we're talking about rights and duties and, you know, moral norms and moral principles, like principles like justice, principles like impartiality, these things work really well when we're talking about how to interact with people that we don't have a very close relationship with. Now, you really can't apply those principles to your personal relationships. If you try to have, I mean, this is just a matter of fact, if you try to have a marriage or any kind of relationship, an interpersonal relationship that's based upon justice, where you give back to somebody what's due to them, where you punish people for when they've done something wrong, you will have a relationship that does not last very long. Anytime you talk about giving gifts to somebody out of a personal relationship and you cite obligation as a reason why you do it, it's not a very warm relationship, it's not a satisfying relationship at all. Alright, it seems like it's forced and people are doing things because they have to. So duties, rights, obligations, these things don't cover personal relationships very well at all. Yet this is a significant part of our life when we're talking about how to live our lives. There seems to be ways that are good ways and ways that are not good ways for where we're dealing with relationships. And this is when we start bringing in the ethics of care. Now, the way that Rachel introduces this topic is he's talking about feminism and he's talking about different, or different ideas about how women think differently than men. And there's some interesting things happening there. One very important thing I think he points out, he does a pretty good job of emphasizing is to say that, yeah, there's differences. Now difference doesn't mean better or worse, it just means different. It's more data to think about, maybe another way of saying that or something else to consider is another way of saying that. And there's a lot of work trying to figure out if men think differently than women and I'm really sure that there is this difference. But I'm pretty sure that's because people just think differently from other people. I've known a lot of different people in my life and there's no single mold that fits like this person or this group. But there's quite a variety. There might be patterns of thought and a person might have certain groupings of patterns of thought, but I've yet to see any really hard and fast lines for any particular group. So that's just kind of my way of saying that there's a lot of talk out there about whether men and women think differently. I'm sure there's something going on, but we need to really spend a whole lot of time on the question of whether men think differently than women and what's it supposed to involve in logic and everything else in order to study the ethics of care. The ethics of care is a separate question than feminism and whether men and women think differently. I think those are fine important questions and there's something interesting happening there, but if we're going to focus on the ethics of care, we need to really worry so much about the question of whether women think differently than men and who's better and so on and so forth. So this idea of the ethics of care has a really kind of several important consequences. Remember this idea behind the ethics of care is that personal relationship is very important when dealing with moral reasoning. Now one of the implications is that we're dealing with personal relationships. If it's your spouse or your friends or something like between child and parent, obligations go bye-bye. If you are, say, remembering your anniversary because it's an obligation, you have missed something. You have missed something. You should remember that anniversary and try to celebrate that anniversary, not because it's a rule or because it happens once a year, but because of the love that you feel for your spouse or your romantic partner. So when you're dealing with these personal relationships, if you're with your spouse, say you're sharing a house or a home and one spouse asks the other, say, hey, would you mind picking up and doing a little laundry? And the other spouse says, well, I don't see why I have a moral obligation to do that. Very quickly, there's going to be a few problems with that relationship. I'm sure there's going to be some minimal kinds of moral obligations, things like promises. Okay, you have to keep your promises. But when you're talking about how to relate to one another, this isn't going to be a set of obligations. In fact, there just isn't going to be one handy rule book for any of this. When we're dealing with care, impartiality also goes out the window. It's just simply false that you treat everybody the same when you deal with personal relationships. The way you treat your spouse or how your spouse treats you is going to be different than how a friend is treated. It's going to be different than how your child is treated. It's going to be different than how a co-worker or an employer is treated. It's going to be different than how a complete stranger is treated. It's perfectly acceptable for you to tell your deepest fears and worries to your spouse as a way of together coping with these worries, these concerns going out into the world. It is exceedingly weird to go to the bus stop and start talking to the random stranger next to you about how you really are just afraid of failure. That would be weird. So impartiality also goes out the window as well as these duties, rules, and obligations. Just the fact that we're dealing with personal relationships means that the interests are not all created equal. So just to perhaps forestall some worries, the ethics of care are really not going to deal with obligations and more rules or laws. With the ethics of care, you don't do things for another person because you have to. You do things for another person because you want to, because you are concerned about their well-being. Impartiality also goes out the window. You simply don't treat your spouse the same way that you treat a stranger. And if you do start doing things like that, you probably very quickly will not have a spouse. Now, Rachel's doesn't spend a whole lot of time talking with this, but I think it's important to remember that we are going to keep at least two things from what we've talked about. We are going to keep interests. We still have a lot of this talk about benefits, about interests, and what's going to be important for another person. And this is going to be involved a lot when we're talking about the care of another human being. That's going to involve the interests. Similarly, since we're dealing with interests, we're talking about what's going to benefit a person. Well, we're still dealing with rationality. Rationality has not gone by by. Obligations may have left. Rules and laws may have left. But reasoning has not. There is going to be something of what it means to care for another person. That's going to be a matter of what's true and false. Some things are good for a person, some things are not good for a person. And we have to use reason to figure those out. The only difference is, is that in caring for another human being and in caring for those interests, and you're figuring out what those interests, you don't do it because you're obligated. You do it because you're concerned about that other person's well-being. So the ethics of care is really kind of a minimal claim. And the minimal claim is that personal relationships are going to be involved in moral reasoning. And one reason why you already think so is you already think that there's good ways and bad ways that your friends and family and loved ones treat you and how you treat them. Now, there's still going to be some limitations. The ethics of care doesn't look like it's going to be very good when we start talking about impersonal relationships. So let's say we drift back over, thinking back over to social contract theory. And, you know, the idea there is what's moral is going to be what rational agents agree upon and agree to abide by to. And the point is, is like these are the rules that we'd form that best serve everyone's interests. Okay, now, if you deal with ethics of care and moral and your personal relationships factor into the moral reasoning, you know, the idea is that the closer that somebody is to you, or the more important they are to you, the more you might be concerned about them, or you might try to deal with them or try to look after their interests. Now, if that's all there is to the ethics of care and you don't know, you know, you have no personal relationship with a complete stranger on the street, you are, it seems like you have no obligations on how to treat them at all whatsoever, right? Whether they're poor and they need $5, you know, it's kind of like just like a piece of charity or whether, you know, whether you even follow the rules of the streets, you know, say, hey, you're driving the wrong side of the street. It's like, I don't care, I don't know you. It seems like there might be something missing there. Now, this doesn't mean that the ethics of care is somehow false, it just means that there's more to consider morality than simply impersonal rules and, you know, impersonal relationships. You gotta consider personal ones as well. So, what this does is it sets up a challenge for an overarching moral theory. What moral theory is going to account for the impersonal relationships and the personal ones and the personal ones. You have the impersonal relationships and maybe something like social contract theory we do very well with that, but when you're caring for another person, they don't seem to say too much to each other. And if you try to apply some of the reasoning in social contract theory with, say, your spouse, you're gonna have a big problem. So, we're looking for a theory, a moral theory, that's gonna account for both of these.