ABSTRACT
This chapter examines a range of philosophical and social-scientific issues that fall under the rubric of ‘care’. The theme of care raises questions about how the needs of people are defined, and how responsibility for meeting those needs is distributed between different social actors. Care is often thought of as a positive value that designates values of co-operation, sociability and collective responsibility. Thus, it is easily aligned on one side of a set of evaluative oppositions between individual and society, autonomy versus community, or rights and responsibilities. Care easily becomes associated with the latter terms in each of these pairs, but this tends to simplify what is in fact a much more complicated set of relationships. By keeping in mind the question ‘Who cares?’, this chapter will focus attention on the contested process of defining the nature and scope of needs, and of defining where obligations to meet needs should fall.
