  The care ethics approach raises the question of whether and, if so, how women-as-care-givers have distinct virtues. Feminists as a whole have long distanced themselves from the idea that women have any particular essence, choosing instead to see femininity and its accompanying virtues as social constructs, dispositions that result from culture and conditioning, certainly not biological givens. So for care ethicists to champion the virtues that have inculcated femininity seems also to champion a patriarchal system that relegates one gender to the role of caretaker. The care ethicists’ answer to this problem has largely been to flip the hierarchy, to claim that the work of the household is more meaningful and sustaining than the work of the polis. But critics, such as Drucilla Cornell, Mary Dietz, and Chantal Mouffe, argue that such a revaluation keeps intact the dichotomy between the private and the public and the old association of women’s work with childcare. (Butler and Scott 1992; Phillips and NetLibrary Inc 1998, pp. 386–389)