THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ETHICS OF CARE AND SENTIMENTALISM

The article analyses the currently emerging tendency to identify ethics of care with sentimentalism. Through comparison of philosophy represented by one of the most prominent representative of this trend, Michael Slote, with the ideas of Nel Noddings, one of the founders of ethics of care, the relationship between ethics of care and sentimentalism is identified. The question arises whether sentimentalist moral vocabulary is adequate for conceptualising the peculiarities of ethics of care? The paper argues that any attempt to elaborate ethics of care while at the same time invoking the conceptual apparatus of sentimentalism, which is based on the notion of empathy, actually conceals the relational nature of this ethics. Further analysis of the notion of attention found in the works of Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch highlights the theoretical influence of this notion to ethics of care in general.