Caring and the Law (original) (raw)
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Care: actors, relationships, contexts
Care' (or 'caring') is one of the contested concepts in the study of gender and social politics. As a concept and activity, care covers a number of different relations, actors, and institutional settings, and crosses conventional boundaries. It can pertain to family analysis, but also to labour market and welfare state analysis, to concepts and practices of work and citizenship, to issues of social inclusion and exclusion, and so forth.
The Heart of Justice: Care Ethics and Political Theory, by Daniel Engster
European Journal of Philosophy, 2010
In this unusually wide-ranging book, Daniel Engster offers a theory of politics that takes care as a central value. This is the most fully developed application of an ethics of care to politics to date. The ethics of care, a type of moral reasoning which pays particular attention to needs, relationships and dependency, has evolved, over the past three decades, into a range of closely connected, but far from systematized, theories. Theories of care have mostly, but not exclusively, been concerned with ethical rather than political issues. Several authors writing on care have sketched fundamental principles of caring social practices and institutions and many have employed reasoning in terms of care in order to support various welfare policies. None has, however-to my knowledge-provided a systematic and fairly comprehensive account of what a caring society and caring politics should look like. Engster's book fills this gap.
From Care Ethics to Care Politics. Toward a Political Notion of Care
2016
This thesis is an investigation into the notion of care and what role it can play for developing a concept of the political based on care. It is a systematic attempt to lay a foundation and sketch out the premises and ramifications in which a full-fledged philosophical theory of a politics of care may be grounded. In chapter I, the thesis traces the etymological and historical development of the notion of care showing that care has always been an important ingredient to philosophical thought, although not entering mainstream philosophical theories. Furthermore, in chapter I, it is argued that care is an essential ingredient to human life. Chapter II investigates the notion of care in relation to ethics and how a comprehensive ethics of care may look. It discusses the roots of care ethics, its theoretical and ontological foundations as well as guiding principles that are important in order to develop care into an ethical theory on par with utilitarianism, deontology and justice theor...
Critical Social Policy, 2000
In his book The Third Way Anthony Giddens develops the outlines of a new normative framework for New Labour and sketches ensuing policy proposals. Based on his diagnosis of current socio-political problems, Giddens proposes a new relation between rights and obligations and elaborates on this for issues of welfare and family politics. This article critically investigates his normative framework, and argues that a considerable part of the ideas on a third way in politics could be better grounded and refined by taking care into account. It spells out what the consequences would be of taking the ethic of care as a normative guideline for the new programmatic ideas and compares the British discussion with recent policy proposals in the Netherlands. It is argued that care should be seen as a democratic practice, and that democratic citizenship supposes that everybody would be guaranteed equal access to the giving and receiving of care.
2015
I focus on unpaid direct care, a form of dependency work which has too long been treated as a private matter rather than a public concern. I include unpaid medical caregiving as well as the more general considerations of caregiving for dependent children and elderly or disabled persons. Persons who do this work are generally picked out by their relationship with the dependent individual, e.g. family and close friends, rather than by the professional descriptions that accompany paid work. I elaborate on the lives of unpaid caregivers and briefly show why they are unjust rather than merely unfortunate. There are at least three reasons: the division of labor is unjust, the nature of dependency work creates vulnerabilities for caregivers, and unpaid caregivers are disadvantaged in the world of paid work. Obligations to mitigate these facts are ultimately based on the truth that all members of society at some point in their lives benefit from caregiving and that noncaregivers benefit unfairly from the heavy distribution of dependency work to a small number of certain kinds of individuals. Feminist philosophers have long argued for recognition of these facts, and I draw together the work of major theorists on these claims. However, we must go further than arguing for the moral basis of society’s obligations to those who render care. We must also ask which agents of justice are responsible for remedying this state of affairs, and how. I propose a distributed scheme of obligation in which members of society and the state, as arbiter of social responsibility, share responsibility for the remedy. I consider an obvious objection to this scheme, that such obligations to care for caregivers may be just but are too expensive to be fulfilled, and offer several replies.
Relationship-based social policy: personal and policy constructions of `care
Critical Social Policy, 2002
This article stems from a constructionist understanding of community care, drawing on the work of Bytheway and Johnson on the social construction of community care and Heaton's Foucauldian analysis of the visibility of the informal carer. The article develops an understanding of how care is represented in contemporary social policy and what appears to be missing from such constructions. This builds on the work of Lloyd who identifies a lack of consideration of the multidimensional aspects of care in policy. The Department of Health's National Strategy for Carers is problematized, and issues of what is and is not visible in this policy are discussed in the light of research into care relationships by the authors. We argue that, while emotional labour and the relational component of informal care are highly salient in the constructed accounts of both carers and cared-for people, they are invisible in the National Strategy.