Radical Self-Care and the Need to Care for Others: On the Injustice of Being Denied Sufficient Opportunities to Care for Those One Loves

Abstract

As many care and relational ethicists have rightly contended, an ethical wrong and a form of social and political injustice occurs when genuine needs and legitimate wants for care go unfulfilled to a minimally satisfactory degree. Yet, as I argue here, injustice also occurs when groups and individuals are systematically prevented from fulfilling genuine needs and legitimate wants to care for those they love and as the subjects of their care genuinely need and legitimately want in turn. Being systematically and forcibly deprived of sufficient, meaningful opportunities to support the wellbeing of those one cares about is a form of cruel and degrading treatment unbecoming of a decent society and a grave injustice. At the same time that a radical practice of self-care demands critically scrutinizing one’s investments of care in an effort to undo those that are self-demeaning and that may themselves be the products of injustice and oppression, so too does it demand supporting the development and sufficient satisfaction of genuine needs and legitimate wants to care for others insofar as the satisfaction of these needs and wants can be just as vital to one’s own welfare as it is to that of those for whom one cares.