Care, Contract, Relativism and Absolutism: The Second Set of Theories

Beyond the famous three lies a second set of theories, and they are where the interesting questions in this paper increasingly come from.

Duty, outcome and character do not exhaust moral philosophy. Four further positions appear regularly in GS Paper IV, usually in the questions that separate a good answer from a routine one. Two of them — care and contract — supply grounds for obligation that the classical three neglect. The other two — relativism and absolutism — are not really theories of what to do so much as claims about how far moral judgement can travel across cultures. Each is worth holding in mind as a distinct instrument rather than a slogan.

Care ethics

Developed largely through the work of Carol Gilligan and Nel Noddings, care ethics begins from relationship and responsiveness rather than from abstract rules. Morality, on this view, is not primarily about applying principles impartially but about attending to particular people who depend on you. Gilligan’s contribution was to argue that the reasoning she observed in women — framing dilemmas in terms of responsibility to specific persons rather than the ranking of competing rights — had been treated as immature when it was simply different, and that a complete account of morality needed both voices.

Its administrative relevance is immediate. It is the theory behind treating the widow at the counter as a person with a situation rather than a file with a defect, and it supplies the vocabulary for compassion without sentimentality. Its risk is equally clear, and you should name it: care attends to the person in front of you, and the person in front of you is not always the person with the strongest claim. An officer who is moved only by those he meets will systematically underserve those who cannot reach his office — which is precisely why care must be disciplined by impartiality rather than substituted for it.

Contractualism

Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau ground obligation in agreement: rules are binding because reasonable people would consent to them. For a civil servant this yields the most useful single idea in the syllabus — public office is a trust conferred by consent, so its powers must answer to those who conferred them. It also gives you a test for any rule that is easy to apply and hard to evade: could this be justified to the person it burdens?

The modern development is Rawls, who asks what principles we would choose behind a veil of ignorance — not knowing which position in society we would occupy. That device is worth deploying in answers on welfare and affirmative action, because it converts a debate about sympathy into a question about fairness that a sceptic must also answer. Its weakness is abstraction: real societies do not begin from consent, and the people most burdened by a rule are usually those who had least part in framing it. Contractualism tells you what a defensible rule looks like; it does not tell you what to do at a counter on a Tuesday afternoon.

Relativism, and its limits

Relativism holds that moral standards are products of culture and cannot be judged from outside. It carries a genuine insight — humility about one’s own conventions, and caution about imposing them on communities whose reasons one has not troubled to learn — but it collapses if taken whole. If every practice is valid within its own culture, then untouchability, child marriage and sati were valid in theirs, and reform becomes unintelligible. Worse, the position disarms the reformer from within the culture as much as the critic from outside it, since the reformer too is judging her own society by a standard it does not yet accept. Indian constitutional morality exists precisely to overrule that conclusion.

Moral absolutism

The opposite pole: moral absolutism holds that some acts are wrong always and everywhere, whatever the circumstances or consequences. Torture and genocide are the standard examples, and the position has real force — a society that admits exceptions to such prohibitions soon finds the exceptions expanding, because each exception is argued from the last. Its difficulty is the hard case where two absolutes collide and something must give, and its temptation is that absolutism about small things is a cheap substitute for judgement about large ones.

Two cases where these theories pull apart

Consider a scholarship disbursement. Applications closed on the thirtieth; a student submits on the second of the following month, having buried her father in the interval, and the sanction has not yet been released. Care ethics answers instantly: here is a person in distress with a genuine reason, and responsiveness is what morality asks of you. Contractualism answers just as instantly, and in the opposite direction: the deadline was published, other students who also had reasons complied with it, and a rule relaxed for the applicant who is present cannot be justified to the applicant who stayed away because she believed the notice.

The resolution is not to pick a side but to change the level at which you act. Grant the relaxation if — and only if — you can state a criterion that would cover every comparable case, record it, and apply it to anyone who comes forward on the same facts. That converts an act of favour into an act of policy, which is what an officer is entitled to make. Now take the second collision. A caste panchayat directs a social boycott of a family. The relativist counsels deference to community norms; the absolutist sees the dignity of the person violated and treats the matter as closed. Here the absolutist is right, and the reason is constitutional rather than merely philosophical: the state has already chosen its floor, and an officer is not free to relitigate it in the field.

Where the balance sits

The workable position, and the one most defensible in an answer, is a floor of absolutes with contextual judgement above it. A small number of prohibitions hold regardless of culture or calculation — the dignity of the person, the prohibition on cruelty — while everything above that floor is settled by weighing duty, outcome, relationship and character in the particular case. This is not a fudge. It is the structure the Constitution itself adopts, fixing certain rights beyond majority revision while leaving most of public life to be argued out.

In a 250-word answer, resist the urge to parade all four. Pick the two that actually bite on the facts, state each in a clause, show where they diverge, and then say which you follow and why. An answer that says “care ethics suggests leniency, but contractual fairness to other applicants requires a stated criterion, so I would frame one and apply it publicly” has done more work in a single sentence than a paragraph of definitions ever will.