deja vu, hope i haven't asked it before

But don't the two people have virtues on account of, or by the very fact of, 'doing caring things' ? You can read off the virtues from their doing caring things. They don't need to have virtues in order to do caring things.

i'm confused about what you are saying, you seem to be contradicting yourself. P has V by the very fact of C but does not need to have V for C? that makes no sense to me @GeoffreyThomas

@confused can you make your question much clearer? I'm published in both virtue ethics and Confucianism and don't understand what you're asking that we can answer on an SE.

can you say what it is you don't understand @virmaior ? it's just a quotation, which i have then taken a phrase from, "caring as a moral virtue is relational", and asked if it it makes sense generalized, to other virtues. perhaps i'd be best set to delete my reasoning for why i might believe it?

ok, i assumed those terms were basic enough that everyone involved would understand what i meant, or at least what the quoted article meant. actually @virmaior Geoffrey Thomas certainly did seem to understand the question, just not my follow up comment.

@confused. On 'PVC', all I had in mind was this. Suppose you fall down in the street. I rush to help you. My action is one of care. You don't need to assume that I had the virtue of care as a trait or habit beforehand and that I acted from this. Maybe I had, maybe I hadn't. I might just spontaneously have acted; and if regularly I spontaneously acted in this way, towards you and others, you might ascribe the virtue of care to me. It's what I regularly do that makes me virtuous. It doesn't follow that I acted from virtue in the first place or subsequently.

@confused adding links to the bbc doesn't equate to providing definitions of how you use terms. If the definitions of terms in philosophy were intuitive, there would be much less need to do philosophy. / that Geoffrey Thomas (according to you) didn't understand your follow seems to indicate something was unclear in the exchange.

"care" as used in the care ethics literature does not generally mean concern for someone else and their interests. At a minimum, care as Gillingham and more thoroughly Noddings used it also greatly involves acting from emotions in response to others. Caring may not be relational in the sense used by Confucians, because relational for many Confucians does not mean "other-directed" but rather that there are not metaphysically independent humans.

i think you're just being difficult RE the bbc link. do all care ethics define care as an emotional response? i just used the dictionary definition mate @virmaior

i'm not sure what good providing definitions does when everyone is defining the term differently but arguably talking about the same thing. that's what i meant by definitions being intuitive @virmaior

btw thanks @virmaior you were right my own definition was poor! by using 'interests' instead of 'needs' :)

@confused providing definitions does great good because one of the very problems is that different people are using different definitions. Without your definitions, this makes it impossible to know what you mean.

The very paper you're reading is about the argument that people are talking about the same thing and the nature of definitions.

i'm not convinced @virmaior ... people think in imprecise but helpful ways, about philosophy too, especially for terms that have real life and emotional application!