Caring: Gender-Sensitive Ethics

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. Gender-Sensitive Ethics explores four main caring practices: mothering, friendship, nursing and citizenship. Bowden's 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. Gender-Sensitive Ethics is groundbreaking in recognizing the ways in which ethical practices outrun the theories that attempt to explain them. It will be essential reading for all those working in philosophy, gender studies, nursing and the caring professions.