Introduction

This collection of essays, and much recent work on the ethics of care, has sought to expand our understanding of care in terms of its transformative potential in both political and personal contexts. As is so often the case, it is the work of Joan Tronto that points us in this direction. Joan Tronto and Berenice Fisher define care as follows:

This definition asks us to consider the significance of care in the multiplicity of ways in which we seek to look after and improve (‘repair’) our interpersonal, social and physical environment. It names care as a necessity for us all, and it recognises that it is interdependence, not independence, that characterises the human condition. It is a way of thinking about care that has made possible critical scholarship and empirical work that applies new ethical perspectives on issues such as domestic violence (Held, 2010) and international relations (Robinson, 1999), as well as on the intimate personal relationships more usually considered as the domain of care.

But we continue to have a problem. The word ‘care’ is a loaded one and resistances to its use as well as scepticism about its value suggest that we need to be prepared to offer up more precise ways of understanding what we mean by care when we advocate the value of care thinking in different contexts. In this chapter I offer some pointers towards diversifying our understanding of what care is, what motivates and sustains care in different contexts and what this implies for an ethic of care that enhances social justice.

Origins

Much early work on care ethics (in particular that of Noddings, 1984) took the mother–child relationship as the quintessential care relationship. Noddings recognised the relationality of caring.