Abstract

The ethics of care has always had an opposing theoretical model in Kant’s ethics. While Kant’s ethics seems to draw an image of the moral agent as independent, autonomous, and rational, the ethics of care insists on a characterisation of the person as vulnerable, interdependent, and relational, for whom the affective dimension plays a crucial role. On the contrary, my thesis is that the two theoretical proposals are not incompatible. I will provide three arguments for this thesis. First, I will analyse the possibility of interpreting the Kantian agent as a vulnerable, emotional and, at the same time, autonomous subject. Second, I will show how, for Kant, relations have normatively relevant weight within the agent’s deliberation. Finally, I intend to argue that Kant does not lose the particular in favour of techniques of abstraction and generalisation, but keeps it within the agent’s maxim and preserves it in the process of moral deliberation.