We’ll understand what’s going on if you try to create your own caring principle and share it with some one else.

We’ll see, I hope, that caring wipes away any of the qualities of another which are irrelevant to the caring feeling: color, size; age, race, social status, importance, nationality, etc.

Of course, one quality you have as a carer is important: you may not know how to care in some cases because you lack the means, because you are ignorant or don’t have the equipment.

And that last paragraph hides a huge amount of difficulties with this gEm view of ethics.

We admit we don’t know how people can assess their ability to care, for themselves or for others. We also believe that every other version of an ethical core has the same problem. We do believe that it serves the caring function to do a lot of admitting, which is part of our core of ethics: when you lack the ability to understand how to care, then admit it.

But how? How do we admit anything? And to whom?

Good God! What a question. I’ve lived my life in my country with all sorts of idealogues, especially capitalists and communists. Communists and capitalists dislike each other very much, up to the point of killing rather than caring. But despite their dislikes, they’re both alike on one thing: they’re very certain they’re right.

I say to a conservatives,

"Admit you don’t have any sound idea what we should do to help the criminals of this country."

"Help them!" he shouts, "They don’t deserve any help considering how they hurt us all."

And to the communists I say, "Admit you don’t have any sound idea how to form a classless state that will serve the real needs of the worker without forming a class of dictatorial overlords."

Imagine what it would be like if both of them admitted -- and what should I admit in posing my questions?

The great gift of modern science is not only the discoveries which open our eyes to new knowledge of the very large and the very small, but the admissions of what we still don’t know, how the brain works, what our minds are like, why we destroy so many species, why we kill and maim each other, or, on the positive side, what is joy.

Think of that! Poor old science, so knowledgeable, and still doesn’t know what joy is. Look at those pure mathematicians, so precise and eager to be error-less. They love "elegant" proofs. These are proofs that are beautifully complicated and give them joy. but they can’t define what "elegant" means. If you don’t know, you don’t belong.

Beethoven wrote his ninth symphony as an ode to joy. did he know what joy means? Are you having fun reading this?