 Like Carol Gilligan, Noddings accepts that justice based approaches, which are supposed to be more masculine, are genuine alternatives to ethics of care.However, unlike Gilligan, Noddings' believes that caring, 'rooted in receptivity, relatedness, and responsiveness' is a more basic and preferable approach to ethics ("Caring" 1984, 2).The key to understanding Noddings' ethics of care is to understand her notion of caring and ethical caring in particular.