The concept of care has the advantage of not losing sight of the work involved in caring for people and of not lending itself to the interpretation of morality as ideal but impractical to which advocates of the ethics of care often object. Care is both value and practice.
(..)
Dominant moral theories tend to interpret moral problems as if they were conflicts between egoistic individual interests on the one hand, and universal moral principles on the other. The extremes of “selfish individual” and “humanity” are recognized, but what lies between these is often overlooked. The ethics of care, in contrast, focuses especially on the area between these extremes. Those who conscientiously care for others are not seeking primarily to further their own individual interests; their interests are intertwined with the persons they care for. Neither are they acting for the sake of all others or humanity in general; they seek instead to preserve or promote an actual human relation between themselves and particular others. Persons in caring relations are acting for self-and-other together. Their characteristic stance is neither egoistic nor altruistic. (..) In its more developed forms, the ethics of care as a feminist ethic offers suggestions for the radical transformation of society. It demands not just equality for women in existing structures of society but equal consideration for the experience that reveals the values, importance, and moral significance, of caring.(..) The ethics of care is (..) hospitable to the relatedness of persons. It often calls on us to take responsibility, while liberal individualist morality focuses on how we should leave each other alone.
(..)
Fiona Robinson asserts that in dominant moral theories, values such as autonomy, independence, noninterference, self-determination, fairness, and rights are given priority, and there is a “systematic devaluing of notions of interdependence, relatedness, and positive involvement” in the lives of others. The theoretical-juridical accounts, Walker shows, are presented as appropriate for “the” moral agent, as recommendations for how “we” ought to act, but their canonical forms of moral judgment are the judgments of those who resemble “a judge, manager, bureaucrat, or gamesman.” They are abstract and idealized forms of the judgments made by persons who are dominant in an established social order. They do not represent the moral experiences of women caring for children or aged parents, or of minority service workers providing care for minimal wages. And they do not deal with the judgments of groups who must rely on communal solidarity for survival. (..) Morality should not be limited to abstract rules. We should be able to give moral guidance concerning actual relations that are trusting, considerate, and caring and concerning those that are not.


//Virginia Held, 2005, The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political and Global