Feminine virtues or feminist virtues? The debate on care ethics revisited

In this paper, I would like to offer a reinterpretation of care ethics both as a feminist perspective on moral reflection and as an interesting remapping of the moral domain in itself. The feminist nature of care ethics can be understood in different terms. The leading idea of this paper is that the effort of distinguishing these terms may have important implications for a more structured philosophical understanding of our account of care ethics (and therefore of ethics). As I hope will become clear in what follows, this can be thought of in terms of distinguishing – at least metaphorically, if not technically – between considering care ethics as an ethics which puts at its centre (more traditional) “feminine virtues” or alternatively (some new) “feminist virtues”