Ecofeminist care-focused ethics hails back to the work of Carol Gilligan (1982); it often revolves around “the justice versus care debate” (see the section on care-focused approaches in the entry on  feminist ethics).  That debate was about two different perspectives: the “justice perspective” of canonical ethics, which emphasized individual rights and duties and appealed to universalizable rules (or principles), ascertainable through reason, for a morally assessment of human conduct; and the “care perspective”, which emphasizes such values as care and empathy that are neither reducible to individual rights or duties nor ascertained through appeal to ahistorical rules or principles.