Care ethics is a relational approach to moral education and learning to care is a critical educational aim. Research on care ethics in practice in educational settings has clarified what it means to care for students and has led to critiques that inform what care might look like in practice across differences, such as race, class, and gender. In light of these movements in care ethics, a current societal moral dilemma, the global teacher exodus, is examined as a failure to care for teachers so that they might care for students.

Categorization – assimilating objects to psychological equivalence classes – is a crucial cognitive capacity that has always enhanced vertebrate fitness. This chapter reviews from a primate perspective the state of knowledge in comparative categorization’s subdomains: prototypes, exemplars, rules, and abstractions. Primate studies have made a profound contribution to the prototype-exemplar debate – essentially resolving it. They have illuminated the evolutionary emergence of a cognitive capacity for category rules, illuminating also the emergence of humans’ explicit-declarative cognition. In this area, primates appear as a pivotal transitional form. In the literature on abstract concepts (e.g., Same-Different), primate studies highlight the differences in cognitive capacities across vertebrate lines. The review will demonstrate the crucial role of a fitness/ecological perspective in understanding categorization as an adaptive, information-processing capability. It will raise important questions about the similarity structure of natural (and unnatural) kinds and categories. It will show strong continuities between human and animal cognition, but important discontinuities as well. In all the subdomains, the primates have been extraordinary behavioral ambassadors to the broader field of categorization.

The ability to assess the intelligence of other species has been constrained because it is not always easy to communicate to other species what we require of them. Furthermore, we tend to define the tasks with procedures designed for us rather than for the species in question. The appropriate assessment of animal intelligence is important, however, because it has demonstrated that although the human capacity for intelligent behavior quantitatively surpasses that of other animals, qualitatively, it is not as different as we generally believe. Furthermore, the intelligent behavior of other species demonstrates that although language and culture contribute to human intelligence, they are clearly not necessary. Finally, although we attribute certain human behavior such as unskilled gambling and cognitive dissonance to our complex social environment, the fact that other species show very similar suboptimal behavior suggests that simpler underlying processes likely are responsible for those behaviors.