In my mind, to care means to focus on the interests of others instead of your own. To care about someone is to, at times, base your behavior on their needs and wants instead of your own. Nel Noddings talks about becoming "engrossed" in the other and notes that caring involves being present, reactive, and responsive to others. These words resonated with me because one of my biggest irritations is when someone is talking to me without really being "present" in the conversation. The reason this bothers me is because I feel like they don't care about what I'm saying.
An ethic of care is the use this caring mindset as a guide for one's life. It involves approaching people and situations with a consideration of their realities rather than only considering our own realities.
I think I and many others in our society operate in a mindset where we predominantly consider our own reality and experiences. This causes us to make snap judgments about others, their choices, their moralities, and how they came to be in the situations they are currently in. For instance, when we see a woman at the library who has five really loud, annoying children with her, we may wonder what nerve she has to bring them to a place where people are trying to study, or why doesn't she hire a babysitter, or why she had to have so many kids in the first place. If we adopted an ethic of caring, however, we would try to put ourselves in her shoes. We would consider the social, financial, and practical circumstances that may have led her to bring her children with her to the library that day and would realize that she might feel embarrassed, annoyed, and uncomfortable to be in that situation.
I hope to go into a career in politics, and in the political world it is very important to adopt an ethic of care and develop the skill of putting yourself in someone else's shoes. Many people who engage in the political sphere, whether by attending a big speech or rally or simply by writing to an elected official, do so because they are upset about something. As a politician, it is important to consider the realities of your constituents and try to understand what leads them to think and act the way they do. This is a struggle for elected officials, since they represent so many different people with drastically different backgrounds and points of view. Even if you ultimately disagree, I think what people value in a leader is his or her capacity for understanding and being able to express disagreements in the context of that mutual understanding. I think politicians who are called "phonies" and are accused of being in politics only for personal gain are the ones that lack an ethic of care.
