Care ethics — justice from relationship

Care ethics, developed by Carol Gilligan and Nel Noddings in response to Kohlberg's male-normed stages of moral development, holds that justice grounded purely in abstract principles misses what morality is actually for: the maintenance of caring, responsive, particular relationships. The insight is that moral reasoning from lived relationship — attending to specific needs, maintaining connection, responding to vulnerability — is not a lower form of moral development but a different and equally valid one. Juana would have recognized the framework: the justice she cared about was always personal as well as structural, always about specific people in specific situations.