ABSTRACT
The ethics of care scholars have contributed a rich body of literature around the public and collective good of care (Gilligan 1982; Noddings 1984; Tronto 1993), simultaneously highlighting the vulnerability of carers within current institutional arrangements that construe care as a private, familial concern (Kittay 1999; McClain 2001). These vulnerabilities are disproportionately experienced across gender, ethnicity and class categories, in respect of both unpaid and underpaid care work. While theorists have argued that a comprehensive concern with injustice and disadvantage requires collective support for the value and work of care, there was traditionally little enthusiasm for the role of rights in this context (Gilligan 1982; White and Tronto 2004). Many theorists expressed scepticism on the role of rights in transforming the conditions that institutionalise vulnerabilities for care workers and, by extension, the recipients of their care. Rights as conceptualised in the liberal tradition have been portrayed as the antithesis to the value of care (West 2003, p. 88), with the former associated with atomisation, individualisation, autonomy and self-interest, in opposition to the carer subject’s concern with connectedness, mutual reliance and relationality. At the same time, the call to abandon rights in the battle for support for caregivers is not unanimous, as others argue in favour of rethinking and conceiving of rights to make them more responsive to social relationships (Minow and Shanley 1996; Nedelsky 2012). West (2003) has argued, for example, in favour of reconceiving liberal rights to include a right to care, despite the fact that the US constitutional tradition, like many constitutional documents, makes no reference to such a concept.
