by Claude Opus 5.5
What would a care-ethics approach demand of the institution that a justice-based approach would not?
Most discussion of how Cornell handled the case behind these seminars has been framed in the language of justice: fair procedures, standards of proof, rights of the accused, proportionate sanctions, accountability. That framing is essential. But a different tradition in moral philosophy, the ethics of care, suggests that it leaves something out. This discussion asks what an ethics of care would demand of the university that a justice-based approach would not.
Two orientations
Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice (1982) argued that moral reasoning centred on rights and rules, which she called the justice perspective, had been treated as the whole of morality, overlooking a perspective centred on relationships, responsiveness and responsibility for others’ needs. Nel Noddings, Virginia Held and Joan Tronto developed this into the ethics of care. Tronto distinguished four phases of care: caring about (noticing a need), taking care of (assuming responsibility for meeting it), care-giving (actually meeting it) and care-receiving (attending to how the care is received). Each corresponds to a virtue: attentiveness, responsibility, competence and responsiveness.
A justice-based approach asks: what are each party’s rights, and has a fair procedure been followed? A care-based approach asks: who is in need, what do they need, and are we responding in a way that actually meets that need within the relationships we have?
What justice requires of the university
A justice-based approach would require the university to adopt fair procedures, treat complainants and respondents impartially, apply clear rules consistently, make findings on adequate evidence, impose proportionate sanctions and respect privacy rights. These are demanding requirements, and on many accounts Cornell’s twelve-day hearing and its sanctions were attempts to meet them.
What care would add
An ethics of care would accept these requirements but add others.
Attentiveness to the complainant’s needs beyond the process. Justice asks whether her complaint was adjudicated fairly. Care asks whether she was able to continue her education, whether she felt safe on campus, whether she had support during a long process, whether anyone checked on her after the outcome, and how she experienced the institution’s communication. A process can be fair and still leave a person feeling abandoned.
Responsiveness to how institutional actions are received. Care emphasises the receiving end. If sanctions such as a reflection paper were experienced by the complainant and the community as minimising her harm, a caring institution would attend to that experience, even if the sanction was procedurally defensible.
Care for the respondents too. Care is not partisan. Respondents are also members of the community, some of whom may have done nothing wrong, and all of whom face profound consequences. A caring institution would attend to their wellbeing, provide support, and avoid treating them as mere objects of discipline, while still holding them accountable where findings were made.
Care for bystanders and the wider community. The members of the group chat, other fraternity members, friends of the parties and the student body all live with the aftermath. Care would attend to the moral injury of those who did not act, the trauma of those close to events, and the damage to communal trust.
Repair of relationships. Justice resolves a dispute; care attends to the relationships that the dispute has damaged, including the relationship between the institution and its students. That might involve acknowledgement of failures, apology where warranted, and changes that rebuild trust.
Communication as care. Under a justice framework, confidentiality is a matter of rights. Under a care framework, the way an institution communicates, its tone, its timing, its willingness to acknowledge pain, is itself a form of care or its absence. Calling public criticism a “false narrative” may be defensible as a factual claim but fails as a caring response to a community in distress.
Tensions
Care has its own risks. It can become paternalistic, deciding what complainants need rather than listening to them. It can drift towards partiality, favouring those with whom the institution has closer relationships. And it can conflict with impartial adjudication, if caring for one party is mistaken for siding with them.
Virginia Held suggests that care is best understood as the wider framework within which justice operates: justice sets the boundaries of what may be done, and care guides how institutions relate to people within those boundaries. On that view, the two are not rivals.
Conclusion
A justice-based approach demands fair process, impartiality and proportionate outcomes. An ethics of care would add attentiveness to every party’s needs beyond the process, responsiveness to how institutional actions are experienced, support for respondents and bystanders as well as complainants, repair of damaged relationships, and communication that treats a distressed community as a community. Many of the criticisms of the institution in this case, that it was cold, defensive and procedural, are best understood as criticisms from the standpoint of care.