Care and Caring Relationships: A Political Account

Should care be understood exclusively as the work done to meet the basic needs of dependents such as children or as a broader set of practices in which people in different kinds of relationships partake? If the latter, what makes care distinctive and distinct from other values, ideals, and practices? Despite the growing attention of political philosophy to issues of care, I argue that we still lack an account of care suitable to address these questions from a political perspective. One of the problems is that existing proposals are either too narrow, as they exclusively focus on dependency care, or too broad, such that they fail to capture the distinctiveness of care. In this article, I address this challenge by presenting an account of care that captures a wide-ranging set of politically relevant practices of care while at the same time making sense of its distinctiveness. What makes care distinctive, I argue, is that it takes place in the context of relationships of care characterized by specific attitudes.