The paper argues that care ethics should be subsumed under virtue ethics by construing care as an important virtue. Doing so allows us to achieve two desirable goals. First, we preserve what is important about care ethics (for example, its insistence on particularity, partiality, emotional engagement, and the importance of care to our moral lives). Second, we avoid two important objections to care ethics, namely, that it neglects justice, and that it contains no mechanism by which care can be regulated so as not to be become morally corrupt.The issue of the status of care ethics (CE) as a moral theory is still unresolved. If, as has been argued, CE cannot, and should not, constitute a comprehensive moral theory, and if care cannot be the sole foundation of such a theory, the question of the status of CE becomes a pressing one, especially given the plausibility of the idea that caring does constitute an important and essential component of moral thinking, attitude, and behavior. Furthermore, the answers given to solve this issue are inadequate. For instance, the suggestion that CE has its own moral domain to operate in (for example, friendship), while, say, an ethics of justice has another (public policy), seems to encounter difficulties when we realize that in the former domain justice is required.
