We are All Some Father’s Child: Toward a Paternal Ethic of Care

By Erika Bachiochi​

Professor of Practice School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership-Arizona State University

14 July 2026

Beginning with Aristotle, and then through much of the Enlightenment period, moral and political philosophers have regarded the relatively independent male as normative, with the female as secondary, dependent, and therefore, subordinate in value to the male. But when we give pride of place, as care ethicists do, to the dependent and vulnerable and those who care for them, then the gestating and nursing maternal body is ascendant.

Fathers find a reason for their masculine body’s relative independence and strength in attentive service of the more vulnerable and those who first care for them. A normative ethic of paternal care calls upon men — as fully human, and therefore, like women, as rational, embodied persons with obligations that flow from their personal relations — to join together as equal partners, in prioritizing the nurturant care and agentic maturation of the vulnerable and dependent, first in families, but also in politics, economics and law.

But the necessary turn required of men in an ethic of care is not that they become “mothers,” even as both paternal and maternal care demand self-giving attention and love. The necessary turn is that men, as potential and actual fathers, are called to cultivate their distinctive, uniquely personal, embodied capacities for care, and that cultural institutions come to support that essential – paternal — caregiving work.

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