Abstract:Western traditional theories of justice have raised two major criticisms against feminist care ethics. First, care ethics emphasizes the particular, interpersonal caring relationships between specific individuals, thereby neglecting the importance of justice that is based on universal principles and the requirement of impartiality. Second, care ethics places excessive weight on emotion and sentiment, which, according to its critics, is prone to generating moral bias and impairing the rational judgment of moral agents, consequently leading to overall systemic injustice. However, these criticisms presuppose an either/or relationship between caring emotions and the demands of justice, framing them as mutually exclusive alternatives and thus ignoring the inherent conflicts and complexities that characterize our actual ethical lives. In response, care ethics can argue that care ethics and justice ethics are not fundamentally opposed to each other; rather, they are complementary. The core moral emotions upon which care ethics relies and which it champions—such as empathy, attentiveness, and responsiveness—already implicitly contain within themselves the normative demands of justice. For genuine care requires a fair distribution of attention and a just response to the needs of others. Moreover, in contrast to justice ethics, which emphasizes universality and impartiality, care ethics adopts a non-uniform, context-sensitive approach that values giving differentiated, concrete care according to specific circumstances and individual needs. Instead of applying a homogenized standard, it tailors its moral responses to particular situations and relationships. In this way, care ethics can actually better realize individual justice, precisely because it attends to the concrete particularities and differential needs that abstract universal principles tend to overlook or fail to adequately address.