Bad Care

Abstract Feminist criticisms of the ethics of care – from both within and outside the approach's own fold – have historically charged care ethics with “valorising caring”. Feminist care ethicists have responded to this criticism by acknowledging that care can sometimes be bad – it can be performed poorly, prove lacking or deficient in some respect, or take place under deeply unjust structural conditions. But this consensus leaves the harder and more important question untouched – and it is this question that explains why the criticisms persist. Can caring actions be bad insofar as they are caring? Can the very feature that makes an action caring also make it morally bad? I argue here that it can. Analysing a range of caring actions that strike us as bad, I identify one category – which I call ‘true bad care’ – wherein the very feature that makes the act caring is also what makes it morally bad. Here, the badness stems from the agent's intention to fulfil another's needs – one characterised by a paternalistic disregard for the recipient's say. Since such cases of true bad care exist, caring actions are not necessarily valuable even insofar as they are caring. This finding clarifies the moral valence of care ethics' foundational concept and paves the way for further development of the approach along these revised lines. It also demonstrates that paternalism and care are more conceptually intertwined than philosophers acknowledge. Paternalistic actions are not separate from care. They are the central case of bad care.