Carol Gilligan, the originator of the Ethics of Care thesis, says that “The ethics of care starts from the premise that as humans we are inherently relational, responsive beings and the human condition is one of connectedness or interdependence.” Link She repudiates the ideas of moral developmentalists like Lawrence Kohlberg who consider universal ethical principles such as just laws that all live by as a higher order of development. So stealing drugs from a pharmacy to save your daughter’s life when you are too poor to buy them is ethical for Gilligan but unethical for some versions of Kohlberg’s thesis. And in focusing on those closest to you, you are also making ethical judgments where you are best informed. A mathematician might argue that the quality of an ethical judgment is the product of p*c, where p is the importance of the principle applied and c is the degree of cognizance. If the knowledge of the situation is inadequate, you cannot get good decision.
In our classrooms, the ethics of care frequently develops spontaneously. This might be a good thing. The cooperative learning movement inspired by Johnson and Johnson Link argues that learning together is a better environment than that of competition. [Learning alone being the third option] Competition is great for the winners, but it necessarily creates failures in some and anxiety and stress in almost everybody that inhibit learning, such as test anxiety. In higher education, we have failure rates that would be intolerable in industry. It is intolerable even in the ubiquitous education programs run in industry. Industry wants to enhance productivity by enhancing all their human capital. In education, we sometimes lose sight of this by concentrating on ranking students according to what we have defined as merit. Many think that this is what the post education world needs. It is not. Teach and test (T&T) anticipates little or nothing in the world of work where productivity is everything. It helps us sort, select, and channel students into various futures, but there are other ways to do that.
It is the bottom of the T&T curve, not the top, that is most important, because incompetence means failing technology and no one wants that. And the ethics of care can remove incompetence from more students than the ethics of competition, which tends to create it. Teams can be judged, in part, on their ability to remove incompetence from their team members. I am sure this is already being done somewhere. The people at the top of the T&T curve should also get every chance to excel. There is nothing caring about systems that help only those at the top or those at the bottom. But advancing the social good means maximizing everyone’s productivity so that everyone gains, and working to minimize the costs of carrying miseducated workers in an economy that demands the opposite.
Unfortunately, the ethics of competition has harsh sanctions in academia. If you cheat you can get thrown out of the university with negative implications for the rest of your life. If you cheat on Wall Street, you will probably be promoted – or at least get very rich. If cheating is wrong, and I think it is, that is what we should teach. And we should explain why, or, better, get the students to explain why. But I should note that misuse of the internet for personal gain (anonymous cut and paste) is not protected by the ethics of care, and it is very easy to catch.
But I do not think we should promote the idea that cheating is wrong because you can get caught and punished. This is just the flip side of if you do not get caught, you will be rewarded. And this is what happens, as those who are caught are typically incompetent cheaters. We should educate the students to believe that it is wrong. We may sometimes fail to redirect students on this issue. The same can be said of the justice system, but we should at least try our way first.
Unfortunately, if you share and help you run the risk of incurring the same sanctions that are applied to cheating. We say we teach team work and collaboration, but as soon as one student’s work looks like another student’s work, or actually is the same, the red flag goes up. In a team, this outcome could have been deliberate, known by all and accepted by all. It could be that they have loyalty to their team members and want to help them. This maybe because they care and maybe because it raises the productivity of the team as a whole. And one student checking another student’s work in order to improve it is essential in engineering design to avoid later failures of the product designed. This is rarely taught in T&T systems, and perhaps too rare in teaching teamwork but the ethics of care is the right home for it. Such checking is ethically required in the design process if engineers are to “Hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public,” [universal principal in the NSPE code of ethics] not to mention sleep well at night [the ethics of care].
The ethics of competition breaks down peer relationships in favor of hierarchical relationships. And when we speak of accountability, we usually refer to supervisory accounting not a peer group accounting. Conversely, the ethics of care weakens hierarchy in favor of lateral social bonds – long thought to be the way to modernize organizations. This contrast between ethical systems is, in fact, a contest, and it is clearly political. IT and Social media have strengthened the role of the ethics of care, in my view, and authoritarian politics either fights it or coopts it. Authoritarian politicians tilting at social media windmills illustrate this well. Currently, in early 2014, it is Erdogan in Turkey taking on Twitter. Erdogan won the election, but he also energized and enabled his opposition as huge numbers of Twitter users learned to cloak their identity. Link
The ethics of care probably describes more ethical behavior globally than any other ethical system. It is rooted in emotion and the strongest and closest relationships. At Penn State, we are seeing some engineering classes where the majority may be foreign born, and where 5-10 nationalities are present in a class of 32 students. The ethics of care is important in the United States and in some sub-cultures more than others, and among women more than among men. It is more important in the countries that some of these foreign students come from. We are now getting mixed culture teams without using virtual teaming. There are a lot of reasons why we can, and should, teach cultural leaning and adaptation in our classes. One is to enhance team performance. An old research finding is that diverse teams can either have higher or lower team performance [the bath tub curve] depending on how well that diversity is managed. Another reason is the opportunity to revisit some of our core beliefs. This might lead us to have half the grade based on measures of individual ability, but the other half based on team grades which include an acceptance of the ethics of care as the best way to enhance team performance and individual learning. In this way, we can enhance the strength of both ethical systems, and if they keep each other in check, so much the better. And in mixed cultural teams it will provide a home that most will recognize.