In one way or another, I want to propose, a community worthy of the name is made of care. It’s possible to call a collection of people a community because they live in the same place, or because they interact with each other in some particular ways. We don’t seem to hesitate to use the term for online places and the people who habitually visit them. If that’s useful, and reflects some kind of actual practices, I wouldn’t want to take an excessively doctrinaire position and rule them out; I am a sufficiently good Wittgensteinian – ‘meaning is use’ – to go along with that.
But there are different uses of words, and different ways of valuing them. Here I want to put the view that the idea of a community takes on real value for the life and well-being of people when it is thought of, and practised, as care.
In a very real sense, there is nothing in human experience more natural, or more shared, or more basic, than care. Each of us is born into a relation of care, which frames the early years that largely form us as people. That is the simple foundation upon which the writers and thinkers of the ethics of care developed their ideas. In this sense care is as near a first principle of social life as it is possible to find. It doesn’t need to be explained: people of all walks of life and cultural backgrounds know what it means.
Still, it’s worth unpacking the idea, if only to see how rich it is. Here I’m drawing largely on the work of Virginia Held, who, more than two decades ago, brought together the widely varying themes of ethics of care into valuable focus. With her is Jean Tronto, who particularly explored the applications of these ideas to society, including community, as a whole.1
The ethics of care begins by observing that care is both a value and a practice. A value we can think of as a principle we tend to hold to, collectively, because experience has shown over time that it upholds the good in life. Love, respect, trust, consideration are all, from this perspective, values. Care finds a place among them, in those terms.
At the same time, care is a practice: it is something that we think and feel and do. It is a principle, a value, and in that sense it has a kind of abstract standing; but it is a value that is inherently put into practice, and becomes part of – perhaps the core of – the way we live our lives together. That is what makes care the ethics of care. Ethics, proposes Bernard Williams, is the answer to the old question, ‘How should we live?’2
The answer given by the women (predominantly women, some men) who developed the ethics of care is just that: first, we should live with care. And even though we have an shared sense of what care is, framed by intuition and experience, these writers have emphasised some particular features of it.
Care is attending in some way, and to some degree, to the needs of others. And those others are not an abstract collection, as we might say ‘society’, but particular others, real people, all different individuals, with their different lives and needs, with whom we ourselves are directly connected.
This kind of attending to is best described not as abstract ideas, such as rights or duties (the language of traditional ethics) but in very human and familiar terms. Held sees these as the qualities of sympathy, empathy, sensitivity, and responsiveness; Tronto as attentiveness, nurturing, and compassion. These are not to be passed over lightly: they are the best of us.
Along with these qualities, both writers highlight the idea of responsibility to attend to and to respond to others’ needs. I will have more to say about some of these qualities – empathy in particular – in a moment. But first I want to say more about this kind of responsibility.
Conditions of assistance
In a sense, the idea of responsibility is what makes care ethical: it is the ‘should’ in the answer to the first question of ethics, ‘how should we live?’ Living with others, as we all do, carries that responsibility: it is built into what relationships are, if they are to flourish; which means, bringing well-being to both carer and cared for.
There are obviously situations where providing care is a relatively uncomplicated demand for most people; for example, for young children, or for those who are very unwell, or for people with particular kinds of disabilities. That equates to the responsibility part of the qualities Held and Tronto are suggesting. But for many situations where care seems appropriate, even in some of these apparently uncomplicated situations, how care is offered – in what way, and with what intent – matters.
You may notice that I’ve used the word ‘offered’, rather than, say, ‘given’, or ‘provided’. There is an important principle behind this. It’s always worth considering, I think, that there are two actors, and two actions, in a relationship of care, particularly at the community level. Care is offered, and care is accepted. It’s never imposed, and the recipient is rarely passive, although that’s often the way, unthinkingly, the word is used.
Of course within the family, between parents and young children, care looks somewhat different from that. But even in families, as children grow up, the nature of care between children and parents increasingly takes on this two-fold character.
In particular, it seems to me that, in a healthy relationship of care, those who accept care are always seen as having agency, and are treated with the respect which goes with it. Here is a personal story along those lines.
Some years ago I was walking with one of my daughters down an inner city street of shops and cafes. It was summer, and hot. My daughter was a young adult, not long out of school. As we walked along the sidewalk, she moved towards the road to an older woman who, I saw then, was sitting on the kerb, her feet in the gutter. Some parcels were lying in the road about her; she had evidently been shopping. She looked, I saw, and as my daughter had seen well before I had, hot and distressed.
My daughter sat down on the kerb next to her. As she told me later, she asked the women if she was all right and whether she needed anything. After exchanging a few words the woman said that she needed water. My daughter stood up, and told me she was going to buy a bottle. She returned and sat down again next to the woman, still on the kerb, and gave her the water. In a while she seemed a little more comfortable.
They talked. It emerged that the woman was walking back to her flat a few streets away. My daughter offered to go with her, and help with the parcels, but the woman said she could manage on her own.
My daughter helped her up, to sit, with her parcels, on a bus shelter seat near by. The woman smiled a little at her and said that she would be all right now.
After she had made sure that that really was how she felt, my daughter said goodbye to her and came back to me. We continued walking down the streets to do our own shopping. Looking back we saw that the woman was still sitting on the seat, in the shade.
Thinking about it later it seemed to me that there were some important aspects of care and assistance in this little interaction. For one thing, my daughter had seen that here was someone in trouble, and that care may be needed. That is very far from a given: people in trouble, particularly older people, can well be effectively invisible, or overlooked; and in fact many people were moving along the sidewalk without going to the woman’s assistance. I myself didn’t see her, or her distress, until my daughter moved over to her.
And my daughter had joined the woman where she was, rather than insisting on her coming up from the kerb, or in some other ways making a judgement about her place of seating or making her feel uncomfortable or inadequate about it. In the brief conversation that followed she made sure at every point that it was clear the woman was in charge, making her own decisions, and respected.
Although it might have been reasonable for my daughter to question whether it was wise for the woman to continue walking with her parcels, in that heat, she accepted that, after taking some water, that that was what the woman wanted. By walking back to me and continuing on our way, my daughter made it clear that she had confidence in the woman’s own assessment of her physical state and supported her decision about it.
Of course, it was always possible that the woman had in fact underestimated the care and support she still needed, but that would emerge; and if it did, then she would need to ask for help from the people around her; but she would do so as a principal agent, still in charge of her decision-making. It was a risk, but a controlled risk in that peopled place, and it preserved respect and agency.
Agency and care
Situations of care may not always take the precise form of this little story, but there is much in it that is characteristic of care, as I would see it. The idea of agency is central to it. Agency, James Griffin remarks, goes with our human standing as ‘self-deciders’, of being free to form our own conception of what constitutes a worthwhile life and of being able to pursue it. Agency, on this view, sits at the centre of human rights, the recognised rights that every person has simply by virtue of her humanity.3
In the context of community, however, I think the idea of agency goes beyond the recognition of it as a right. We start with the conviction that no one knows better than the person herself what is right for her. Everyone is respected first as a self-decider, not only because that is an abstract principle of right, but because it is probably the best way forward, for her and for those in relationships with her.
I say ‘probably’ because we accept that there are real cases of disability, or illness, or age, where others may have to become involved in making that decision, in the interests of care and well-being. But the principle of self-deciding should not easily be put aside. In a community, we hold to it for as long as we can, and even in more difficult conditions of distress continue to revert to it.
We make it clear throughout that the assistance we are offering is always conditional upon her willingness to accept it. If the path to well-being seems at some point, or for some period of time, to lie in handing over responsibility for action for her welfare to someone else, that is still a decision she makes, and which she can change at any time.
So the idea of care, particularly in the setting of a community, is, I think, more nuanced than that of the positions of the (greatly respected) writers on the ethics of care. The word ‘ethics’, as we’ve said, goes with the question, ‘how should we live?’ The important word there is ‘should’, rather than ‘could’. ‘Should’ carries the idea of responsibility. It implies particular ways of thinking about other people, and of acting towards them. But that responsibility, I’m suggesting, is conditioned by respect for self-deciding, which, as my daughter found, is likely to have to be worked through face to face.
The ethics of care is always about particular persons and our actual relations to them. It is not a set of abstract principles that we apply intellectually like scientific laws. It is what matters to this person, here, now, with me, as she expresses it and as I understand it. I’ve come to think of this not so much as the ethics of care as conditions of assistance. Care is there, as the glue between people in a community, but always conditioned by the particular person: with her standing as a self-decider, with her relationship with me, and with others, in the offer of support, and with the way that it develops over time. Care is always provisional, evolving, and open to change; and, indeed, open to its being brought to an end by the person cared for. It is, in this way, simply very human.
Advocacy for care
There are far more people, and far more care needs, in modern communities than we might imagine. Much of it is simply out of sight, for good reasons. People in need of care, particularly acute, need, tend not to have the resources to bring their cases to the attention of those who are charged with their relief. Nor would they necessarily have detailed knowledge of the path to that relief — why, indeed, should they? These can be barriers which compromise the ability of anyone in need of care to be a self-decider, as we’ve proposed.
This leads to a view that perhaps there is a dimension of care in communities which, rather than attempting to directly provide care that appears to be needed, is directed more to supporting the process of self-deciding by those who see themselves as having that need. We can hold to a principle of self-deciding, but if in practice it proves often to be out of reach for those who need it, we would question its value.
This has been the focus on the modern movement of advocacy for health and social care. Although now found worldwide, it was developed notably in Scotland, as David Donnison has documented so well. Programs were developed there to train people in ways of supporting others in taking charge of the path to meeting their needs. Those with mental health, or disabled, needs were a particular focus.
The movement was notable in not seeking to provide assistance directly – the conventional path of social work – but to support the process of self-deciding. This had both immediate and longer term benefits: it helped to find the care that was needed now, but in the process strengthened the personal resources of self-deciding individuals for meeting their own needs as they might arise in the future.4
Capabilities and care
The idea of advocacy for social and health care points to a wider direction in the thinking about care in community. So far we’ve been considering personal or individual needs for care, and the responses we, as good community members, might have to them. But these needs arise within social structures which may materially contribute to their urgency. Challenging as these may be – they have to do, after all, with the kind of society we live in – they can’t be summarily ignored or put to one side. One way or the other, we need to recognise them, and together work with ways of improving them.
This can take us deep into the wilds of social theory. But a more practical and useful way of thinking about them is in the idea of capabilities. This is a framework that was developed primarily by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, as a practical way of thinking about human rights, and it is embedded in a number of agreed UN frameworks and practice.5
Capabilities, as Sen and Nussbaum conceived of them, are the opportunities and freedoms that all people should have to be and to do what is of value to them. In one sense, these represent a higher order of agency: true agency, it is argued, resides securing these capabilities, for everyone.
These take the form of a list of basic capabilities that everyone should have the freedom to choose and to enjoy, in order to live fulfilling lives, and in the way that is of value to them. The core capabilities include: life, health, and bodily integrity; being able to use the senses, to imagine, think, and reason in a truly human way; to be able to feel love, affection, and empathy for others; to be able to think critically about and plan one’s life; to be able to laugh and play; to be able to live with concern for the world of nature; and to engage effectively in the political and economic dimensions of the society of which one is a part.
It’s worth noting that the idea of human capabilities, as the core of human development, is defined in terms of the freedom to act in these ways – the freedom to make those choices, in the ways that each person decides is of value to her. That is what is at issue, whether or not the freedom to act is actually taken up. The choice must be there. This is the principle of self-deciding, of agency, taken far and wide.
Of course one can always debate the details of this framework – whether other capabilities should be added or some of these omitted – but as they stand this list covers a lot of human ground. To be guided by them in community action one is not likely to go far wrong. In this sense advocacy may go well beyond the concerns of particular individual, although it may start there. Taking on together structural barriers to the free expression of these capabilities, for everyone in a community, may also be a central part of what care looks like even locally.
Empathy, care and attention
Michael Slote has written perceptively about empathy as the centre of all caring. However, he wants to limit empathy to personally feeling someone’s distress, to be distinguished from feeling for someone who is in distress, which he calls sympathy. I think he is right to see empathy as central to care, but I don’t think it’s necessary to limit its scope in this way.6
The central idea of its modern usage is ‘the ability to share someone else’s feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person’s situation’.7
‘Imagination’ seems to be an important word, with a quite different intent – wider and deeper – from feeling. Martha Nussbaum speaks of ‘imaginative empathy’, the ability to see the world from another person’s point of view, and to respect that view. The distress of others can certainly be one focus of imaginative empathy, and can lead to action to relieve that distress; which is where the ethics of care, and compassion, comes in.
But empathy is not only that. Nussbaum points out that it reaches into the way we relate to other people; particularly, we might say, as members of a community. It concerns all the ways we think about community, and about what it means to be a member of it.
It is, in fact, just the old ethical question, framed in community terms: how should I live – here, now, with these people who are living around and with me? It can even be said to extend to others whom I don’t know personally, who are living at a distance from me – which, Nussbaum proposes, concerns our lives and responsibilities as world citizens.8
In my experience, empathy is not simply an upsurge of emotion to help someone in clear distress and in need of support. It can take that form, and the emotions, and the actions which follow from them, are likely to be useful, particularly in clear community contexts. We have seen that in the Australian bushfires or floods of recent times — concrete actions of unstinting help within communities in support of those most affected. 9
But the empathy that I’m speaking of here, and which is the broader ground for the ethics of care and its actions, has more to do with a general orientation towards others. It doesn’t require an emergency to emerge: it’s there in the fabric of community, every day. You can call it an ethical orientation if you want to, but I would say it’s simply being a good human, as that idea would be recognised by most people.
At its centre is the idea of attention: taking the time to attend properly to others, just because they are there with you and because every person has intrinsic value and dignity — a famous old Kantian principle, as Christine Korsgaard has so well explained.10
Attention is the ground for caring actions, but it is in itself a demonstration of, and commitment to, care. Even if no concrete action comes out of it, it stands for our commitment to each other. If community has a real and accepted meaning, it must be, I think, something along those lines.
And this leads us to the idea of the processes of community, which is the topic of the next chapter.
1V Held, The ethics of care: personal, political, and global, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006. J C Tronto, Moral boundaries: A political argument for an ethic of care, Routledge, New York, 1993.
2 B Williams, Ethics and the limits of philosophy, Fontana & William Collins, London, 1985.
3J Griffin, On human rights, Oxford University Press, New York, 2008.
4 D Donnison, Speaking to power: advocacy for health and social care, The Policy Press, The University of Bristol, 2009.
5 M C Nussbaum, Creating capabilities: the human development approach, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 2011. A Sen, The idea of justice, Penguin Books, London, 2010
6 M Slote, The ethics of care and empathy, Routledge, Abingdon, 2007.
7 Cambridge Dictionary, https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/empathy.
8 M Nussbaum, Not for profit: why democracy needs the humanities, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 2010.
9 Australia Institute for Disaster Resilience, ‘Knowledge hub’, https://knowledge.aidr.org.au/resources/community-led-resilience-program/
10 C Korsgaard, Creating the kingdom of ends, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 1996.
This article is made available under a Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
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