Held, Virginia

Introduction

Virginia Held is a feminist moral, social, and political philosopher. She is best known for her work in the ethics of care. Evolving over the past three decades in response to the exclusion and undervaluing of women’s moral experiences by the mainstream philosophical tradition, the ethics of care sets out an alternative and distinctively feminist moral perspective. Held develops the ethics of care as an important counterbalance to the methodology and conception of the person at work in much moral, political, and legal theory.

Held’s work in the ethics of care builds on the work of developmental psychologist Carol Gilligan, who initially inspired the development of care ethics as a distinct moral theory (Gilligan 1993; Kittay and Meyers 1987). Care ethics provides an alternative framework for understanding moral life that is both diverse in its various instantiations and yet unified in its commitment to examining the values, dispositions, and practices that have been...