The activities that constitute care are crucial for human life. We defined care in this way: Care is “a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our “world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web” (Fisher and Tronto, 1990, p. 40).
Several aspects of this definition of care are noteworthy: First, we describe care as a “species activity,” a philosophical term we use because it suggests that how people care for one another is one of the features that make people human. Second, we describe care as an action, as a practice, not as a set of principles or rules. Third, our notion of care contains a standard, but a flexible one: We care so that we can live in the world as well as possible. The understanding of what will be good care depends upon the way of life, the set of values and conditions, of the people engaged in the caring practice.
Furthermore, caring is a process that can occur in a variety of institutions and settings.
Care is found in the household, in services and goods sold in the market, in the workings of bureaucratic organizations in contemporary life. Care is not restricted to the traditional realm of mother’s work, to welfare agencies, or to hired domestic servants but is found in all of these realms. Indeed, concerns about care permeate our daily lives, the institutions in the modern marketplace, the corridors of government. Because we tend to follow the traditional division of the world into public and private spheres and to think of caring as an aspect of private life, care is usually associated with activities of the household. As a result, caring is greatly undervalued in our culture- in the assumption that caring is somehow “women’s work,” in perceptions of caring occupations, in the wages and salaries paid to workers engaged in provision of care, in the assumption that care is menial. One of the central tasks for people interested in care is to change the overall public value associated with care. When our public values and priorities reflect the role that care actually plays in our lives, our world will be organized quite differently.
An Ethic of Care on JSTOR
- Care work makes all other work possible.
- Putting care—not just care work, but care—at the center of our economy, our politics, is to orient ourselves around our interdependence.
- Care is an organizational structure needed to keep our nation running. It’s, by definition, infrastructure.
- Health is at the center of the human experience.
- We need a counterculture of care.
- I feel that that the fundamental property of humanness is to fill those spaces where humanity has been abandoned with love. Those who would change the system have to begin with love, and with the vision to build geographies of care built from that love.
- Reframing is self-care and social change.
- Those who are the most sensitive and traumatised and have not lost the ability to extend trust constitute an enormously rich and diverse repository of insights and hold many of the keys needed for co-creating ecologies of care.
- Create more anti-ableist spaces. Let’s act to hold ALL spaces accountable for providing care and access to disabled folks with all types of bodies and minds.
- We can start building more accessible, care-centered communities now. We can combat ableism now. We can lay the groundwork for a world that works better for all of us.
“Bread and roses” are what the humans involved in care—the patient and the clinician—want from healthcare.
Over this summer both of us read Rebecca Solnit’s latest book, Orwell’s Roses,1 which she was inspired to write when she discovered that George Orwell had not only written the bleakest and most powerful portrayals of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century,2 but had also planted rose bushes, costing him sixpence each from Woolworths. This apparent contradiction between the bleak worldview and the hopeful act of gardening, reminded Solnit of the political slogan “Bread and Roses” which seems to have emerged in the US around 1910 and was used by women campaigning for votes for women and for workers’ rights. Describing the power of the slogan, Solnit wrote:
“Bread fed the body, roses fed something subtler: not just hearts, but imaginations, psyches, senses, identities. It was a pretty slogan but a fierce argument that more than survival and bodily well-being were needed and were being demanded as a right. It was equally an argument against the idea that everything that human beings need can be reduced to quantifiable, tangible goods and conditions. Roses in these declarations stood for the way that human beings are complex, desires are irreducible, that what sustains us is often subtle and elusive.”
“Bread and roses” are what the humans involved in care—the patient and the clinician—want from healthcare. Bread is sustenance and therefore life; roses are courage and hope, curiosity and joy, and all that makes a life worth living. Bread is biology; roses are biography. Bread is transactional and technocratic; roses are relational. Bread is science; roses are care, kindness and love.
“Bread and roses” can also describe how healthcare can support care. With apologies to those who bake their own loaves, the parallel here is with the industrial production of bread, so that bread represents the bureaucratic processes that make healthcare efficient and safe, preventing waste and error through standardisation, regulation, and training. Baking bread is like the technologies and innovations that make unhurried conversations and continuity of care possible and feasible, that reduce diagnostic errors, and detect and correct harms early and reliably. Attending to the bread makes sure healthcare retains the potential to attend to the object of care, to the bodies and minds, the fears and feelings of individual patients, and to create the conditions for careful and kind care to emerge.
Roses represent what makes life worth living, all that is good in human relationships, and the stories we use to make sense of our desperate situations and of what is possible with treatment. Roses are what gives us comfort in the face of failure, pain, decay, and death, that is, in the face of living. Attending to roses brings the subject of care into sharp relief so that the scars of injustice, racism, inequity, and violence can be made visible alongside the scars of disease. Roses, like careful and kind care,3 speak of hope—our work of planting and creating conditions of light, soil, and water makes it possible that a flower will appear in the future. Just like roses, care cannot be summoned or coaxed, but must emerge from the right conditions.
Responding to the crisis of care | The BMJ
How to respond to this crisis of care?
Here, Orwell himself holds the clue. The discovery that Orwell had planted those roses led Solnit to reassess his novel 1984. Within all the greyness and cruelty and oppression, there is this great truth:
“What mattered were individual relationships, and that a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself.”2
All the joy, all the roses of health, even in these dire times, exist within relationships, between patients and professionals, and between healthcare colleagues; and in the sure knowledge that all these helpless gestures have value in themselves.
It turns out that the subversive, almost revolutionary thing to do within contemporary healthcare is to build, quietly and unobtrusively, these crucial relationships. We now know that continuity of care, within a unique dyad of patient and doctor, delays disease and prolongs lives5 and thereby supplies bread, but it does so by simultaneously giving us the roses of joy, trust, curiosity, care, kindness, and solidarity. A life worth living tends to last longer.
In fact, care, like love, is abundant and self-sustaining, a potential of everyone. Trained and celebrated, caring is a demanding human capability that swells with the satisfaction of having opted to run towards the pain, that replenishes with the smile and the gratitude with which we evaluate our effectiveness, that regenerates when the care, and love, returns to care givers when they, invariably, must become care receivers. Care, like roses, gives meaning to living. We must cultivate care.
In fighting our way out of this healthcare crisis, in working for careful and kind care for all, we must follow the suffragettes and demand “bread and roses.”
Responding to the crisis of care | The BMJ
‘The ethic of care, then, both elevates care to a central value in human life and recognizes that care requires a complicated process of judgment. People need to make moral judgments, political judgments, technical judgments, and psychological judgments in their everyday caring activities. Caring, then, is neither simple nor banal; it requires know-how and judgment, and to make such judgments as well as possible becomes the moral task of engaging in care. In general, care judgments require that those involved understand the complexity of the process in which they are enmeshed. Caring involves both rational explications of needs and sympathetic appreciation of emotions. It requires not an abstraction from the concrete case to a universal principle, but an explication of the “full story.” Yet, at the same time, those engaged in care practices need to be able to place some distance from their own version of what is happening and other perspectives.
An Ethic of Care on JSTOR
Care is not charity or kindness. Care is the deeply fraught, complex, abolitionist, political work of protecting one another and the planet, meeting everyone’s needs in balance with the collective good, and keeping our communities safe without the use of policing.
Freedom requires care because freedom is not just a right—it is also a responsibility. Freedom means getting to be our whole selves, in community with other whole selves, without any threat to or assault on our well-being. Freedom means an experience of daily life in which each of us is fully seen and affirmed, treated with unconditional dignity and care, and embraced as an invaluable person of immeasurable worth. Freedom, then, sets an incredibly high standard for community life. It requires that every member of the collective work toward the goals of protection, safety, and unconditional care for all people and for the natural world.
Are We Teaching Care or Control?
Educators must understand challenging behavior as a “collective public health reality.”
Are We Teaching Care or Control?
“An ethic of justice focuses on questions of fairness, equality, individual rights, abstract principles and the consistent application of them. An ethic of care focuses on attentiveness, trust, responsiveness to need, narrative nuance and cultivating caring relations.”
The Ethics of Care as Moral Theory | The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global | Oxford Academic
An ethic of justice focuses on questions of fairness, equality, individual rights, abstract principles, and the consistent application of them. An ethic of care focuses on attentiveness, trust, responsiveness to need, narrative nuance, and cultivating caring relations. Whereas an ethic of justice seeks a fair solution between competing individual interests and rights, an ethic of care sees the interests of carers and cared-for as importantly intertwined rather than as simply competing. Whereas justice protects equality and freedom, care fosters social bonds and cooperation.
These are very different emphases in what morality should consider. Yet both deal with what seems of great moral importance. This has led many to explore how they might be combined in a satisfactory morality. One can persuasively argue, for instance, that justice is needed in such contexts of care as the family, to protect against violence and the unfair division of labor or treatment of children. One can also persuasively argue that care is needed in such contexts of justice as the streets and the courts, where persons should be treated humanely, and in the way education and health and welfare should be dealt with as social responsibilities. The implication may be that justice and care should not be separated into different “ethics,” that, in Sara Ruddick’s proposed approach, “justice is always seen in tandem with care.”20
The Ethics of Care – Google Books
An extended effort to integrate care and justice is offered by Diemut Bubeck. She makes clear that she “endorses the ethic of care as a system of concepts, values, and ideas, arising from the practice of care as an organic part of this practice and responding to its material requirements, notably the meeting of needs.” Yet her primary interest is in understanding the exploitation of women, which she sees as tied to the way women do most of the unpaid work of caring. She argues that such principles as equality in care and the minimization of harm are tacitly, if not explicitly, embedded in the practice of care, as carers whose capacities and time for engaging in caring labor are limited must decide how to respond to various others in need of being cared for. She writes that “far from being extraneous impositions … considerations of justice arise from within the practice of care itself and therefore are an important part of the ethic of care, properly understood.”22 The ethics of care must thus also concern itself with the justice (or lack of it) of the ways the tasks of caring are distributed in society. Traditionally, women have been expected to do most of the caring work that needs to be done; the sexual division of labor exploits women by extracting unpaid care labor from them, making women less able than men to engage in paid work. “Femininity” constructs women as carers, contributing to the constraints by which women are pressed into accepting the sexual division of labor. An ethic of care that extols caring but that fails to be concerned with how the burdens of caring are distributed contributes to the exploitation of women, and of the minority groups whose members perform much of the paid but ill-paid work of caring in affluent households, in day care centers, hospitals, nursing homes, and the like.
The Ethics of Care as Moral Theory | The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global | Oxford Academic
This whole IDEA…that you are an independent subject navigating the world, SEPARATE from everyone else around you… is a complete, delusion. You are one person… that’s part of an intricate web of relationships ALL AROUND you, that MAKE your existence even possible. Your family, your friends, your coworkers, your community, everyone that maintains society…Virginia Held says the only reason anyone could POSSIBLY THINK that they’re actually independent is BECAUSE of this network of people that take care of the things you take for granted that ALLOW you to CONTINUE in this delusion.
Episode #168 – Introduction to an Ethics of Care — Philosophize This!
Episode #168 -Transcript — Philosophize This!
Joan Tronto writes that implicit within ALL care dynamics is the reality of vulnerability and inequality. Whenever there’s a situation where there is one person being cared for…and another person that’s providing care…that INSTANTLY creates a power discrepancy. Even in situations where neither party RECOGNIZES the vulnerability!
The truth about navigating REAL LIFE as a human being…is that inequalities and power dynamics exist in practically EVERY SITUATION that we FIND ourselves in. And WHENEVER there’s a discrepancy in power…it creates the potential for ABUSE. Joan Tronto writes that we have to remain vigilant ABOUT that possibility and to understand that people are not “interchangeable” as she says, in these caregiving situations. You can’t just ASSUME you know what’s best for someone without even LISTENING to them.
And REMEMBER what Carol Gilligan said before…that an ethics of care is grounded in voice and relationships, in the importance of everyone having a voice, being listened to carefully and heard with respect.
Episode #168 – Introduction to an Ethics of Care — Philosophize This!
Episode #168 -Transcript — Philosophize This!
The philosophers Joan Tronto and Berenice Fisher lay out five key elements of care…virtues to be developed if you wanted to APPLY an ethics of care to things in your life. Think of this as a sort of HOW TO manual for moral maturity UNDER an ethics of care. These virtues IN ORDER are:
Episode #168 – Introduction to an Ethics of Care — Philosophize This!
- Attentiveness
- Responsibility
- Competence
- Responsiveness
- Plurality
Episode #168 -Transcript — Philosophize This!
So to an ethics of care…the subject NAVIGATING these moral dilemmas is NOT independent…but instead someone who needs to RECOGNIZE their INTERDEPENDENCE on the world around them… and someone who should consider themselves and their decisions as a PART of that narrative of relationships that extends over time. Every moral decision that we MAKE is going to be in CONSIDERATION of these relationships that make our lives possible. As Carol Gilligan says an ethics of care is: “An ethic grounded in voice and relationships, in the importance of everyone having a voice, being listened to carefully and heard with respect.”
Episode #168 – Introduction to an Ethics of Care — Philosophize This!
Episode #168 -Transcript — Philosophize This!
Sally Weintrobe writes deeply about what she calls the ‘culture of uncare’. She argues it is a design feature of neoliberalism, where economic growth is privileged above all else, yet is dependent on disconnected thinking & the deliberate unseeing of hidden interconnections & relationships. The culture of uncare, Weintrobe writes, relies on a failure of imagination to envisage any other way to be.
A world that is on the precipice is going to need people who have learned to pay attention to the complex, nuanced relationships around them; people who know & care for place, allowing them to think deeply about it. We are going to need people with the imagination to see ways of being in the world beyond economic gain. In many ways, this is a form of literacy & we need to get as worked up about it as we do about how well kids perform on reading tests.
This is the year we must put care at the heart of education – Bevan Holloway
Let's organize our lives around love and care Let's write each other letters and call it prayer Let's congregate in the place that isn't anywhere At the temple of broken dreams --Temple of Broken Dreams by Ezra Furman
Further reading,
