Abstract
If care ethics is to represent a systematic alternative to traditionalist/rationalist approaches to morality, it must speak persuasively about political issues. Yet in that area it seems to have a disadvantage vis-à-vis rationalistic Kantian/Rawlsian political liberalism, because of the way we typically discuss political rights. Not just rationalist philosophers, but ordinary Americans think we have a fundamental right to various civil liberties: for example, free speech and freedom of religion. But any care ethics that is true to its original impulse will want to say that the emphasis on basic and independently intuited rights is mistaken, that we should think of political rights in terms that derive from ideas about human emotional connection, and this is not how most people in the USA today think of such matters. So the question is how or whether care ethics can persuade them and the body of political philosophers to think otherwise.