Comparing Kant's 'Global Needs And Care'

Sarah Clark Miller, in “Global Needs and Care” presents the argument that Kant’s duty based ethics and Ruddick’s care based ethics are incomplete and that her cosmopolitan care based ethics provide better reasoning for the global responsibility to care for distant others. Her argument is that we are morally obligated to respond to fundamental needs and therefore, we have a duty to care. This idea of the duty to care brings us back to Kant’s ethics, which she says provides a moral foundation for the obligation to care but doesn’t portray the content of the duty and how it should be carried out. She criticizes Sarah Ruddick’s care based ethics by saying that it assumes that some people care but does not address why or whether it is important for everyone to care. Her view is a combination of the two and hopes to complete the story about the conclusive duty to care for distant others. Miller says that distance is not morally relevant and argues for “cosmopolitan care” which is a duty to care that can be global and concrete. She establishes that our mutual and inevitable interdependence gives rise to duty to care for the needs of others. Distance is not a morally relevant factor because “moral agents” are required to meet the needs of those they do not know no matter where they are in the world. If distance has no
Care practices are always different depending on where you are, so the global duty to care aims to respect and promote diversity in caring. This aspect of the approach focuses not only on fulfilling the needs of the distant other, but it also focuses on the understanding, respect and connection between people of different cultures. Finally, it requires moral agents to recognize and eliminate the circumstances of oppressive dependency that predictably generate needs and threaten well-being in certain