itsgilbo

‘It’s a fucking joke,’ the blond said, leaning against the bar and spreading his hands out expressively at the man standing next to him. ‘You don’t see fucking Real Madrid getting this shit do you? No, of course you don’t. Fifa’s out to fucking get me.’

 

‘Sure,’ the man he was talking to shrugged, looking half interested and half not. Laura couldn’t tell if he was blond. In some lights it looked almost silver. Weird.

 

‘Oh come on. You don’t think that I have a right to be fucked off?’ the first snarled, as if the other had insulted his mother. ‘You’d be throwing a fit if this was Bayern Munich we were talking about!’

 

‘Aha!’ the second man smiled knowingly. ‘And that’s where you’re wrong. I don’t give a <i>shit</i> about Bayern München because, my friend, you should know that I always hated that cunt Bayern, not that I should have expected you to remember that, since you were busy playing “la- la- la- not- listening” at the time that I kicked West’s arse into shape. Point is you used a shitty example. Now… Berliner FC Dynamo? That’s a football team,’ he said emphatically, accompanying it with a slam of his palm, flat onto the surface of the bar.

 

‘Umm… can I get you lads anything?’ Laura interrupted, seizing upon the momentary lull in order to get a word in edgewise.

 

They blinked at her, as if they had momentarily forgotten that she was there. She didn’t take it personally. It often happened when men got talking about football (which, in a pub, was often.)

 

The blond(er) one spoke first. ‘Sorry, love. I’ll have a pint of Newkie Brown, please.’ Laura had to fight back the eye roll at how cliché it was when non- Geordies ordered Newkie Brown in her pub. It was pathetic and probably how the Irish felt when people ordered Guinness in their pubs. Still, she considered as she turned to the other man, blondie was obviously English, but fuck if she could place his accent. He was probably a southerner, she reckoned, though he sounded like no southerner she’d ever met before.

 

‘Do you have Beck’s?’ the not- English one said.

 

Laura glanced at their beer selection. ‘We have Grolsch?’ she offered.

 

He pulled a face at that. ‘Just give me whatever then. As long as it’s beer I don’t really care.’

 

For the ease of it, she decided to pour him Newcastle Brown Ale too, stealing casual glances at the two as she did so. Much as the English guy was dressed like a ponce, and the… German? was dressed like he was trying to look like a teenager going through an awkward, and half- arsed Goth phase, they were both pretty lush. Personally, Laura preferred the one with weird- coloured hair. She liked foreigners. They always had such sexy accents.

 

‘So…’ she said with a well- practiced, flirtatious little smile as she handed him his ale. ‘You German or something?’

 

He pulled a strange expression, but it quickly faded into an oddly proud look. ‘Prussian, actually,’ he corrected.

 

Laura, having left high school three years previously with four level A- C GCSEs, (none of which being in History), cocked her head prettily to one side as she pulled the other pint. ‘Is that like being Russian?’

 

The English guy snorted in laugher as the German guy immediately deflated. ‘No. No it’s not.’

 

‘Look, don’t worry about it, Laura,’ the English man said, having recovered from his laughing fit, leaning over to drop a ten pound note into her waiting hand. ‘Keep the change.’

 

He pulled his companion (definitely German. “Sheiße” had been one of the first words she’d learnt in her first German lesson back in high school) away by the arm and settled into one of the booths opposite the bar.

 

She smiled after them. At least this shift she’d have a nice view.

 

She was startled out of her thoughts when she felt nothing but the softness of her left breast under her hand. Looking down at herself, and patting across her chest, she realised that, as usual, she’d forgotten to put her nametag on.

 

She stared at the two men in confusion for a moment. Weird.

==============

‘Anything else?’ she asked as she handed them their third pint.

 

The German bloke looked to Arthur (‘Arthur!’ she’d heard the German shout five minutes earlier, almost making her drop a bottle of Aftershock on her foot, ‘you can’t seriously think that you’re going to win Eurovision next year!’) with a questioning look.

 

Arthur shrugged. ‘Crisps?’

 

‘Ah!’ the other said with a comical widening of his eyes. (They were red. Must be some weird contacts or something. Whatever. He was still fit.) He turned back to her and slapped his hand against the surface of the bar again. ‘Crisps!’ he demanded.

 

‘What flavour?’ she asked politely. ‘We have Ready Salted, Ba-’

 

‘All of them,’ Mr. Red Eyes interrupted with a slightly manic grin. ‘Oh! And a bag of nuts too.’

 

Laura excused herself for a moment in order to raid the crisp boxes in the stock room, taking a good minute to gather all of the various flavours up and balance them properly in her arms.

 

‘But fuck, really,’ Red Eyes was saying as she returned, not noticing as she piled her armful onto the bar. ‘You should have seen Romano’s face. If Spain stopped buhyoo-ing over him for five seconds, he’d realise that the little shit’s practically giving him an open invitation. You don’t blush like that if you don’t at least want to fuck. Well,’ he said, taking a swig of his beer. ‘I don’t blush full stop, but you know what I mean.’

 

Arthur shrugged. ‘What the fuck can we do about it anyway? Romano shits his pants the moment you or I so much as look at him, and talking to Spain is like talking to a retarded puppy. Either way, I don’t give a fuck about the pathetic state of their shitty love life.’

 

‘Then why did you bring it up?’ Laura couldn’t see the German guy’s face, turned, as she was, to pluck a packet of nuts off of one of the shelves behind the bar. She could practically hear the smirk in his voice.

 

‘B- because they piss me off! Just looking at them dance around each other like a pair of school children drives me up the sodding wall. It’d be bad enough if it was just in UN meetings, but it’s in the EU meetings too and—urgh,’ he finished with an irritated huff.

 

‘The EU?’ Laura joined in as she set the nuts down on the bar. She couldn’t help it. Part of the reason why she was a barmaid was because she was a naturally chatty person. ‘Is that like the European Union?’

 

Caught off guard, the two men glanced at each other cautiously. ‘Uh… yeah,’ Arthur said slowly. ‘We work for the… commission.’

 

‘Government types, eh? Can’t you, like, stop that thing that makes us pay for France’s farming or something? I don’t like the French.’

 

The German guy smirked and rolled his eyes. Arthur chuckled around something that sounded vaguely like ‘That’s my girl.’

 

Gil (‘Go and get the next round in, will you, Gil? I need to take a piss.’) was the one to approach the bar next. Rather than order their sixth pint, as she was expecting, he instead looked thoughtfully at where the schnapps hung above the bar.

 

‘Same again?’ Laura pushed after a few drawn out seconds of silence.

 

Gil shrugged and grinned, turning his attention back to her. ‘Nah. Get me two shots of peach Schnaps, will you?’

 

‘Sure.’

 

She was pouring the second shot out when Arthur rejoined them, sliding straight up to the bar to lean against it next to Gil.

 

‘Do you have a beer garden?’ He asked, knocking the shot back almost before her fingers had left the glass.

 

‘We don’t, unfortunately. Just the car park outside,’ she answered.

 

Arthur nodded, and then inclined his head towards the empty glass. ‘Same again, please.’ He turned to Gil, who mirrored his gesture, and stared right back at him. ‘Fancy going for a fag?’

 

‘Outside?’ he grimaced.

 

‘Yes, well, if I don’t adhere to my own laws, then it won’t look very good will it?’

 

‘Stupid law,’ Gil muttered (Laura had to agree. Alcohol laws were down since the smoking ban) before clinking his newly refilled glass of schnapps against Arthur’s, gulping it down and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘Come on then. Let’s enjoy the cold, summer air.’

 

They were gone for more than five minutes before they returned, laughing raucously and talking in stuttering German. It made Laura wish that she’d taken her language GCSE further. She’d all but forgotten everything but “danke” and “kaput”.

Among the fiercest critics of contemporary political theory are feminists. In some cases, feminists may offer alternative institutional designs. One such example of this is the ethics of care. However, as with any theory, is it a viable alternative to justice in the non-ideal world? This essay seeks to explore this question, focusing on critique by authors such as Brian Barry representing an Impartialist point of view, and Martha Nussbaum representing a Liberal perspective.

The founding mother of the ethics of care, Carol Gilligan, initially developed her thesis as a critique towards Kohlberg, and, in particular, his six stages of moral reasoning. Gilligan argued that women rarely made it past the first three stages after she conducted studies with women who were choosing to abort their babies. From her findings, she went further into studying the difference in which the way men and women made moral judgements and perceived justice.

Her book, In a Different Voice revolutionised ideas on women, morals and justice and bought into focus an alternative to the ethics of justice- ethics of care. For example, one of her conclusions was that “Men’s emphasis on separation and autonomy stresses justice, fairness and rights. Women’s emphasis on connections and relationships leads them to develop a style of moral reasoning that stresses the wants, needs, and interests of particular people,” (Tang, 1998, p. 154). Care ethics, she states, focuses on interdependency, and relationships shaping the moral agent, placing them in a web of care for others around them, rather than the typically male agent who focuses on autonomy, independence, justice and rules.

She also argued that women are not morally inferior to men, but morally different and that “Gilligan contends that most earlier studies of human moral development generalised the experiences and views of men as adequate to describe human moral development generally and that, thus, women’s moral development usually is judged as deficient” (Johannesen, 2001, p. 212).

Her focus on how women were different, and not inferior inspired many other feminist thinkers such as Nel Noddings. Noddings’s book Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education took Gilligan’s ideas further and developed them. For example, on the subject of justice, Nodding’s stated that women are just as able to speak in the language of justice as men are, but it is not their native tongue as women are more likely to focus upon concrete need over abstract rights. She also went onto suggest that men and women’s perception of ‘evil’ is different; women perceive evil as harming others (an experience of evil), whereas men perceive evil as breaking rules (an idea of evil). Noddings also drew a distinction between natural caring and ethical caring (I want to care, versus, I must care).

Another theorist inspired by the ethics of care was Virginia Held. In her book The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, Global, she went even further still into exploring care ethics as a theoretical approach and a viable alternative to other moral theories.


However, the question that this essay asks is whether care ethics is a viable alternative to ethics of justice. As Engster states, “it remains unclear whether care ethics can be developed into a distinctive institutional political theory, or represents only a supplement to liberal theories of justice.” (Engster, 2004, p. 113) This is a question that many of the critics of care ethics ask. Noddings herself stated, “caring is untranslatable into a general moral and political theory.” (Engster, 2004, p. 114) This understandably fuels some of the scepticism of the critics of care ethics.
One argument against care ethics is the issue of ‘impartiality’. Impartialists criticise Gilligan’s vision of care ethics, since the very concept of care and relationships are anything but impartial. In the famous example, a man cares more for his wife than a stranger and so, will choose to save her, which can lead to care being said to “outweigh considerations of impartiality” (Adler, 1989, p. 150). Furthermore Noddings in her book Caring opposes the ideas of justice as impartiality. Barry, on the other hand advocating ‘second- order impartiality’, in his book Justice as Impartiality counters her arguments by stating that ‘I do not believe it is possible to find a legitimate conflict between an ‘ethic of justice’ –construed in terms of justice as impartiality- and an ‘ethic of care.’” (Barry, 1995, p.251) Here he refers to Noddings and the partisans of care ethics who reject justice as impartiality, believing that they are just as guilty as Kohlberg in entailing a ‘universal first-order impartiality’, leaving no room in their moral space for any other basis of moral judgement. He goes on to say that in a society where all members act exclusively in regards to a Noddings form of ethics of care, there would be no cooperation towards the greater good as the concerns of the people within it would not extend beyond the nuclear family. He concedes that care ethics from a Nodding’s point of view may encourage a sense of obligation towards others in the society, but “nobody would feel that these obligations must be subordinated to the demands of justice as impartiality.” (Barry, 1995, p. 253)

He does reflect upon the views of the more moderate advocators of care ethics, however, saying that their demands are more focused upon more recognition and a fairer distribution of care. He states that, given this view, the principles of justice that come of justice as impartiality actually endorse these demands, thus reiterating his earlier point of the conflict between justice and care being a fake one. He later accuses anti- impartialists such as Noddings of focusing too much on universal first- order impartiality such as Kantian or utilitarian views and not accepting that impartiality does have a role to play in the ethics of care.


However, Virginia Held herself replied to Barry’s views in her book The Ethics of Care. While she agrees that Barry’s second- order impartiality is an improvement upon universal first- order impartiality, she accuses him of focusing too much upon the ideas that justice as impartiality should be prioritised, and that care is simply just the basis of choice “only where the requirements of justice have already been fulfilled.” (Held, 2006, p. 79) Furthermore, Held discusses the fact that care and justice are two different kinds of morality that may provide different moral judgements on the same issues. In these cases, one cannot follow both and so, a choice must be made between the two, thus highlighting again the conflict between care and justice that Barry deemed so bogus.

Finally, Held, on the subject of Barry’s overall research, accused him of focusing too much on what he thought to be a failing of Kohlberg’s theory, blaming him for confusion caused that led to the feminist critique of impartiality, whereas Held argues that it is Barry himself who misinterpreted Kohlberg. As a final point, Held points out that Barry also neglected to acknowledge that care ethics, unlike second- order impartiality, is not limited by the fact that we do not live in a just world.


Another critique of the ethics of care comes from another feminist- Martha Nussbaum. Essentially, she claims that care ethics merely traps women in their classic roles as carers, and that liberal universalism is superior to care ethics.

Nussbaum utilises the capabilities approach in her work, focusing instead on women’s equality in international law and universal human rights, rather than offering an alternative to justice. Her approach helps to explore the understanding of “barriers to women’s equality as not simply the product of inadequate resources but as the product of curtailment of women’s capabilities imposed by tradition and culture.” (Charlesworth, 2000, p. 78). Capabilities (as developed as Amartya Sen) in this context being essential to human nature, and the very notion of humanity (hence the close connection with human rights).

However, liberalism has frequently come under attack over the years by feminists for reasons such as it relying too heavily on reason rather than emotion, and too individualistic. As a liberalist, Nussbaum sought to refute these arguments with her own, individual brand of feminism.
Her capabilities approach effectively seeks to achieve the same goals as care ethics, in that women, along with the weaker members of society are allowed to develop their capabilities. Her capabilities approach also “recognises one of the central tenants of care theory: that people in need are simultaneously capable of providing care for others when adequately cared for themselves.” (Engster, 2004, p. 124)

And yet, despite possessing a similar opinion on the necessity of care, Nussbaum does not entirely support care ethics. As stated earlier in this essay, she feels that care ethics actually traps women in their classic roles as carers. Agreeing with critics such as MacKinnon and Card, Nussbaum questions whether the supposed “voice” of women (as believed by Gilligan and Held) that speaks out of care and forms the core of women’s morality is actually a socially constructed belief born of inequality. She states that “Anyone who believes, as I do, that emotions are in part made up out of socially learned beliefs is likely to share MacKinnon’s suspiciousness of emotions formed under conditions of injustice.” (Nussbaum, 1999, p. 14). Later in her book Sex & Social Justice, she argues against Noddings and her opinion that emotions should not be questioned and that reflecting upon them sullies them, since liberalism calls for scrutiny of emotions before they can be trusted as ‘guides to life’ (Nussbaum, 1999, p. 74). Also in reference to Noddings and her views on maternity and the relationship between mother and child, and following this example, people should give themselves over to others without question, Liberalism- and Nussbaum- argue that people should choose their relations freely. She confirms this by saying “Liberalism says to let them give themselves away to others- provided that they so choose in all freedom.” (Nussbaum, 1999, p.75)


Once again, Held defends care ethics in her book The Ethics of Care, stating that Nussbaum’s research is too narrow, and focuses too much upon blind care, as opposed to the favour reflective care that most advocators of care ethics prefer. She states that from this, true to Nussbaum’s Kantian liberalism, Nussbaum sees care ethics as “bad for women” (Held, 2006, p.94). She concludes, in argument to liberal individualism, that “it is not satisfactory to think of care, as it is conceptualised by liberal individualism, as a mere personal preference an individual may choose or not.” (Held, 2006, p. 95), summarising quite efficiently the general argument of the advocators of care ethics in regards to liberal individualism.



Ethics of care is successful in adding a level of humanity to justice; however, it is not a viable replacement for justice. To answer the initial question that this essay proposed more fully, schools such as the Liberal school, and the Impartialist school argue that ethics of care is an effective supplement to theories of justice. Neither approach denies the importance of care in both morality, and in society, but neither feels that care ethics should replace current institutional designs. Furthermore Gilligan believed the two ‘voices’ to be incompatible initially, but in her later work she admits that the two ethics “are both adequate from a normative point of view; that they are compliments of one another involved in some sort of tense interplay; and that each is deficient without the other and thus ought to be integrated.” (Flanagan, and Jackson, 1993, p. 75)
In conclusion, in accordance to critique, and to influential figures in the care ethics approach, care ethics- while not a particularly viable replacement for justice- can be used to supplement it effectively. It adds an element of humanity to current approaches and, rather than being incompatible with justice, care ethics could well be a necessary consideration in modern political theory.


Gudykunst W.B, (2001), Communication Yearbook 25, London, Sage Publications. Inc.

Larrabee M, (1993) An Ethic of Care: Feminist and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, London, Routledge.

Barry B, (1995) Justice as Impartiality, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Held V, (2006), The Ethics of Care, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Nussbaum M C, (1999), Sex & Social Justice, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Charlesworth H, Martha Nussbaum's Feminist Internationalism, Ethics, Vol. 111, No. 1 (Oct., 2000), pp. 64-78, The University of Chicago Press.  

Engster D, Care Ethics and Natural Law Theory: Toward an Institutional Political Theory of Caring, The Journal of Politics, Vol. 66, No. 1 (Feb., 2004), pp. 113-135, Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Southern Political Science Association.

Adler J E, Particullary, Gilligan, and the Two-Levels View: A Reply, Ethics, Vol. 100, No. 1 (Oct., 1989), pp. 149-156, The University of Chicago Press.

Blum L A, Gilligan and Kohlberg: Implications for Moral Theory, Ethics, Vol. 98, No. 3 (Apr., 1988), pp. 472-491, The University of Chicago Press.

You're all gay for using this and I don't want to come here again.

Have some shitty fanfiction I'll probably never finish:

Eurovision
( Blahblahblah )

Lol someone stole starshards