What is Care?

Current day thinking on social care is framed by the neoliberal political and economic ideologies that emerged over the course of the 1980s and 1990s. Based around principles of economy, efficiency and effectiveness, these commodified care and took it into the marketplace. At another level, neoliberal ideology, emphasising as it does qualities of autonomy, competition and independence, failed to adequately recognise the relational dimensions of care within which dependency is often central.

There is a well-developed body of philosophical literature on care, which is not recognisable in either the Feeley Review or in the Scottish Government’s current proposals. In particular, the focus on rights, which is at the heart of and which seeks to furnish the proposals with some theoretical ballast, offers an inadequate paradigm within which to locate care, a point this paper returns to. The failure to engage with some of these deeper philosophical debates is likely to limit the range of possibilities that a National Care Service might offer. The intention of this paper is to outline some philosophical perspectives on care, with a Scottish flavour.