Ethics of Care (Nicole Peterson)
In the ethics of care theory, the power of relationships in society is emphasized, with the traditional example being the relationship of the mother and child, where one party is the caregiver and the other is the care receiver (Sander-Staudt, 2011). The more well off party in the relationship, or the party that is able to care for others, has a duty to care for those who cannot care for themselves. In the case of the movie Crude, the Ecuadorian lawyer who takes the case, Pablo Fajaro, is acting in a very unselfish manner, treating the people who have been harmed as a result of the oil drilling as though they were all his family, which, under the Ethics of Care, is a ethically right thing to do (Crude, 2009). Because he is sacrificing many hours of his life to help 30,000 people, even though he does not know most of them, he is operating like a mother who is caring for her children by sacrificing herself for the well being of her child.
Under the tenants of Care ethics, the Chevron Company is acting in an unethical way. To fulfill their ethical responsibilities under the Ethics of Care, they should sacrifice some of their profits to care for those Ecuadorians who are suffering because of the work that they did, whether or not they have a legal obligation to do so. The ethics of care holds the ideal that people should sacrifice some of what they have to help those who are less fortunate, and the Chevron Company definitely qualifies as having enough to justify them being able to help the Ecuadorians clean up the rain forest that is their home, even if it was not truly their fault that the rainforest is in the condition that it is in (Sander-Staudt, 2011).
The Ethics of Care are also referred to as Feminist ethics, and are based on the loving relationship between a mother and her children, which is demonstrated beautifully in the movie, where a mother with cancer spends every last cent that she has to try and pay for...