An “Ideal” Home for Care: Nel Noddings,Thomas Hill Green,and an Ontological Support for a Phenomenology of Care

This paper is grounded in a deep appreciation of Nel Noddings’ “ethics of care” as an important contribution to moral philosophy and moral education. We seek to offer some philosophical reflections that have the potential to strengthen this important alternative to mainstream ethics and to how moral education might be conceived and practiced differently. After identifying some ambivalence in Noddings’ own position toward abstract philosophy, and despite the practical reasons for this that we share, we then find grounds for pressing in this speculative direction, some of which indeed accord with Noddings’ own statements and philosophical concerns. To show how such further philosophical reflection upon her relational morality could help, we focus on elaborating a perspective on ontological issues that we find in the work of Thomas Hill Green, a 19^th century idealist, and seek to show its compatibility with Noddings’ more pragmatic stance. A concluding point addresses, and dispels, a possible worry that the grand narrative structure of Green’s idealism might undercut Noddings’ aim of having an ethic that is melioristic and open.