Virginia Held’s propose of defense of the prevalence of care on human rights

Abstract

Virginia Held proposes to us in her chapter “Care and Human Rights,” from the
Philosophical Foundation of Human Rights (2015), that we use the ethical perspective of care to think and effect the demands we choose to deal with the language of human rights, traditionally the issues of justice. While recognizing the importance of human rights in mobilizing forces at both the international and national levels, in terms of the enforcement of laws and policies addressing problems that seriously affect the populations of countries, Held highlights that thousands of people still escape this reach, including children, who die in alarming numbers due to malnutrition or treatable diseases. It also emphasizes that our conception of human rights is inherited from an individualistic and violent vision of the liberal tradition, in which the lonely
subject will confront the forces of the world alone, including nature and other people. An ethic of care, because of its characteristic of recognizing our necessary situation of vulnerability and interdependence, is proposed as a more efficient alternative, because it focuses on the relationship between caregiver and care, seeking to move away from traditional abstractions such as those it is understood to be the other ethical approaches like kantian and utilitarian, still tributaries of that liberal tradition.