Nel Noddings
American · North America · 1929 to 2022
American philosopher and educator who held that ethics begins in caring relations, more than in abstract rules.
What it is
Nel Noddings was an American philosopher who worked on the ethics of care, the view that caring is the foundation of morality. Her book Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, published in 1984, set the idea out and applied it to moral education.
She is usually named beside the psychologist Carol Gilligan in the emergence of care ethics as a distinct moral theory.
The main ideas
- Caring comes first. She argued that caring is the foundation of morality, more basic than approaches built on justice.
- Two parties. Every caring relation has a one-caring, who cares, and a cared-for, who is cared for, and the cared-for must respond in some way to the caring.
- Taking the other in. To care, the one-caring has to be fully engrossed in the other person and to set aside her own motives. Noddings called these engrossment and motivational displacement.
- Wanting and having to. She separated natural caring from ethical caring, the response of "I must" to another person's plight.
- Particular cases over principles. She held that care is applied in the particular case, between particular people, and is not worked out from universal rules.
- Moral education. She applied the idea to the practice of moral education, and argued that the relation between teacher and student is itself a caring relation.
What it looks like in practice
Imagine a teacher whose student has gone quiet in class. A rule-based approach might ask what the school policy says about it. Noddings would have the teacher first turn toward the student, take in how things look from where the student stands, and then decide what to do with that particular child in view. This is an illustration of her line of thought, not a passage from her writing.
Books and moments
- Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (1984) is the book in which she set out the relation between the one-caring and the cared-for.
- Her work is placed beside that of Carol Gilligan, whose work on the moral reasoning of girls and women helped start the movement in ethics known as the ethics of care.
Questions and criticism
- Care and self-sacrifice. Critics of care ethics ask whether a morality built on caring can drift into expecting people, especially women, to put others first without limit.
- A feminine ethic? The subtitle of her book calls the approach feminine, and it is fair to ask whether care belongs to women in particular or is a human matter that everyone shares.
- Beyond close relations. Her account starts from people we know. It is fair to ask how far it reaches to strangers, and the obligation to a stranger is limited within the ethics of care.
- Care and justice. She treated justice-based approaches as real alternatives but took caring to be the more basic. It is fair to ask whether either can do without the other.
Close neighbours
The pages on Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill show the duty-based and outcome-based approaches that the ethics of care is usually set against.
Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.
Who they connect to
Reacted against
- Immanuel Kant · She argued that ethics built on rules and duty, in the way of Kant, misses the care at its root.
Other American thinkers
- Ralph Waldo Emerson · 1803 to 1882
- Henry David Thoreau · 1817 to 1862
- Charles Sanders Peirce · 1839 to 1914
- William James · 1842 to 1910
- Josiah Royce · 1855 to 1916
- John Dewey · 1859 to 1952
- George Santayana · 1863 to 1952
- Roy Wood Sellars · 1880 to 1973
- Ayn Rand · 1905 to 1982
- Thomas Kuhn · 1922 to 1996
Sources we used
- Nel Noddings · Wikipedia, read on 29 October 2026
- Care Ethics · Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, read on 29 October 2026
- ethics of care · Encyclopaedia Britannica, read on 29 October 2026