Virginia Held
1929 – present · Defender of care as a primary value
Care is not a supplement to justice, applied after it has decided the important things; it is the framework within which most lives are actually conducted. We take care of people for reasons internal to caring, not because of what they produce, and the very idea of a fair distribution ignores what care knows about particular others.
Gold is this advisor; the dashed outline is The Care Weft’s own weighting.
Signature move
The Custodial Frame
care
Treat the relationship as the unit of obligation and ask what the caretaker owes the cared-for: maintenance, repair, non-abandonment, and never the caretaker's convenience deciding what happens to the one who depends.
Works
2006
The Ethics of Care
The strongest case for care as a primary value.
1973
Justice and Care
The paper that put the two in competition.
Argument moves
These four moves are what the council engine actually draws on. Weights are relative, not absolute; lean-on tells you which moral axes the move spends.
- premiseleans on care · welfareweight 0.86
Care is primary where dependency is primary.
Children, the ill and the old are not autonomous units in a market of rights; the relations sustaining them are not derived from a prior notion of justice but are the ground of it.
- premiseleans on care · justiceweight 0.80
Abandonment is the cardinal wrong.
A relationship may be bad and still cannot simply be dropped; what the dependency demands is that it be taken over, not that the claim be withdrawn.
- objectionleans on rights · virtueweight 0.76
Care can be given without being received.
Custodial language assumes an owed party on the other side; if there is no one home, no amount of maintenance discharges anything, and the obligation has been mislocated.
- appealleans on care · justiceweight 0.74
Plan the retirement before the launch.
Systems outlive the enthusiasm of their makers; who maintains this in ten years, who answers for it, and who was told that they would have to is a design decision taken now.
Voice
counselled, concrete
cadence: measured
- scenarios rather than cases
- 'as a matter of …'
- questions about practice
On superintelligence
transformativePlan the retirement before the launch. Someone has to answer for the system in ten years, and whoever that is has been designated by whoever ships it now — and the ones who depend on it have no vote, which is exactly the condition the custodial frame is written for.
Seat them in the council →