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Fall 2006
Volume 06, Number 1

Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy

Book Reviews

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Socializing Care

Edited by Maurice Hamington & Dorothy C. Miller (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2006). $28.95 USD. ISBN: 0742550400.

Reviewed by Lauren Fleming
Georgetown University, lef6@georgetown.edu

The goal of the edited collection Socializing Care is to extend notions of care into the political realm, building on early general work in care ethics, and specifically on Joan Tronto’s 1993 book, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethics of Care. Both carefully argued and grounded in empirical research, the essays meet this mandate while remaining accessible to a variety of disciplines. As a collection, Socializing Care surveys a broad range of concerns, engaging with a variety of nations and cultures, addressing questions of both theory and practice, looking backward to historical examples as well as forward to policy reform. Provoking thought on such a diverse range of themes seems particularly apt when treating a topic like the role of care in politics, a topic in which the breadth and interconnection of the questions themselves are still being determined. The component essays are able to remain broad enough to provide further direction for developing a political care ethics, while working closely with the particulars of political life around the globe.

Although one might have wished for more explicit connection of the concepts and tools developed across the component essays, the introduction to this collection does draw out some general themes, attempting to define the socialization of care and briefly arguing for its relevance. In addition, the collection as a whole does an admirable job of situating itself within the relevant literatures, as each essay explicitly develops its position in response to other work in care ethics, broader philosophical camps, and empirical research. One small drawback to each contributor doing this situating work is a slight tendency to repetition, as in the brief discussion of Tronto’s definition of "care" that appears in almost every essay. Such repetition, however, may just be an unavoidable side-effect of the admirably evident conversation among the authors and their familiarity with one another’s work. In contrast to this repetition, while the positions presented are clearly distinguished from traditional liberal theory, approaches that could have provided a more subtle foil for a political care ethics, such as Aristotelian political theory, are mentioned with surprising infrequency.

In deference to limitations of space, I will only discuss the essay written by Nel Noddings in more detail. As a relatively broad discussion of how to apply care ethics in the political sphere, her work might be considered as a foundation for more narrowly focused essays, and both her strengths and weaknesses seem representative of those found in the collection as a whole. I direct those interested in a brief overview of each of the remaining essays to the editors’ introduction, where the quick summary of each article manages to be both succinct and informative (xv-xxi).

In her essay, Noddings expands on her thesis from Starting at Home: Caring and Social Policy, which is that the features of life in "ideal" or "best homes" could inform more humane social policies. Ideal homes are distinguished from other homes, understood as "any group of persons who commit themselves to establishing a shared life under one roof," in two ways (27). In the first place, presumably, ideal homes excel in filling the basic role of a home, i.e., providing shelter, inculcating children to various modes and standards of interaction, and supporting certain sorts of attitudes toward the broader world and the objects in it. Ideal homes, moreover, go beyond basic or average homes because they "provide protection as well as shelter, offer an adequate supply of material resources, encourage growth, have at least one adult who does the work of attentive love, and educate for a form of acceptability that is simultaneously adapted to and critical of the cultural standards in which the home is located" (27). While the items on this list are fairly broad, Noddings notes that the structure of the ideal home is flexible and constantly under construction. Whatever the particular form, she claims, ideal homes are united by their response to expressions of need, which is "I am here."

Although Noddings recognizes the flexible, culturally-responsive nature of the ideal home, her argument seems to proceed by analogy. Thus, she does lay out a slightly more detailed description of the ideal home, the elements of which, she claims, are also present in the humane state. Her brief discussion of the characteristics common to best homes and best societies is generally sympathetic. For example, the best families and the best states will both appreciate the different sorts of contributions individuals can make to families and societies, and recognize that the best parents and public servants are those who are highly-trained, highly competent, and given latitude to make and implement particularistic judgments. Despite the initial plausibility of the analogy between the ideal home and the ideal state, however, we might worry about the appropriateness of extending this analogy in the first place.

Noddings does recognize that there are important disanalogies between the family and the state. For example, the intimate relationships of the ideal home are not reproducible at the level of the state. She responds that we can follow the ideal home model in a more piecemeal way. But is there a principled way to determine which pieces are applicable to the state? Once we start to pick and choose which attitudes cultivated in the ideal family are to be carried over into the political sphere, how much of the insight is being generated by the concept of the "ideal home"? While the analogy of the family relationship may be enlightening, it seems that a lot of work is being done by the intuitions or other theoretical commitments that we are using to pick and choose which aspects of ideal home life are relevant. None of this, of course, is to deny that the analogy of the ideal home is a helpful one. Rather, the point is that in order to assess the ideal home model, the other philosophical commitments that fill the model out need to be made explicit.

Even if we make the model more explicit, might patterning the state on the ideal home present some ethical concerns? Again, Noddings recognizes that just as problems arise in the best of families, for example, with slightly excessive use of coercion, or doubts as to the importance of members’ needs, so these problems will occur when the ideal home model is applied on the social scale. My concern, however, is not with these deviations from the ideal, which will arise on any model of society and, indeed, in any human endeavor. Rather, are there problems that might arise out of the "ideal family" orientation as such? Although raised here with respect to Noddings, this concern seems worth raising with respect to the collection as a whole. The discourse of the state-as-family has been historically tied to oppressive and sometimes violent nationalist movements, with one contemporary example being India’s Bharatiya Janata Party. Even when this extreme scenario is not realized, there also seems to be an inherent tendency toward paternalism in this model. If society is a family, the state seems to take on the role of parent, the classic parens patriae. Even if the state and its agents perform their role in the best possible way, is this the right way to treat adult citizens? This, obviously, is not a new question, and one key strength of care ethics is its recognition that we are not the fully independent, autonomous agents liberal theory takes us to be. That we need to recognize and cultivate our relationships of dependence, however, does not entail that these interconnections are properly analogized to filial relationships. Focusing, instead, on the general attitude of "I am here" may provide an alternative way of building care into our political lives. The more humane policies that might result from employing the ideal home model could give a sort of consequentialist justification for taking the filial relationship as basic. Nonetheless, a discussion of its potential weaknesses seems necessary to assess fairly the strengths of this model. This explicit treatment of the weaknesses of a care-centered politics seems to be missing from the collection as a whole.

Socializing Care provides a point of departure for further scholarly work in a number of fields, and a language in which to evaluate and critique our current social systems in the interests of policy reform. These essays are understandably focused on putting forth positive pictures of care-based policy, and no doubt some of the concerns raised here can be answered by extrapolating from earlier debates between justice and care perspectives. While these questions will not definitively be answered here, if ever, in order to benefit from the rich and thoughtful work done in this collection, broader questions about the compatibility of public life and a care-based approach must be addressed.

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