1) Mayeroff proposed distinguishing between caring for a person versus an idea, as there is a difference in balance between personal action/intellectual and emotional attachment. 2) For Mayeroff, caring involves commitment to another's growth and potential as well as the carer's knowledge, values, and traits like patience and sensitivity. 3) An ethics of care focuses on whole persons and relationships rather than rules, entailing ongoing responsiveness to each person's emotions and uniqueness.

1. Stephen A. Webb
Glasgow Caledonian University, Scotland

2. Mayeroff proposed that distinctions should be made
between caring for a person and caring for an idea. While
each may combine aspects of personal action and
intellectual and emotional attachment, there is a
difference of balance between the two which renders it
necessary to make a distinction.
There are common links insofar as the quality of 'caring' is
to be found in a commitment towards the protection,
growth and development or achievement of potential of
the other person. For Mayeroff, caring is also to be found
in the personal characteristics (intellectural and
emotional) of the person who cares: in the possession and
use of knowledge; in moral values (such as honesty); or in
personal traits. (such as patience and sensitivity)
(Mayeroff, On Caring, 1972, p.2-13)

3. Concepts of "care" and "caring" make naturalistic
assumptions about the nature of social relationships. The
idea is that human beings lead their lives and assess
themsleves in light of broadly ethical standards. This is
derived from existential phenomenology, which holds to
the view that human beings are essentially embodied
agents. This means that human experience is not merely a
representation of an objective world or a disinterested
contemplation of things, but entails an active encounter
with things that concern us. Caring persons are not merely
particular entities, located in a causally closed universe
and obeying its laws, but they have an engaged internal
relation to their world and others.

4. Critical question
Is caring a generalisable disposition? Or, are
some people more able to care or be more
caring than others? That is, do some people
have intrinsic dispositions that permit the act
of caring, in a way that other people don't
have? If so, how can we tell who has
predispositions to care and who does not?

5. The value of the caring relationship lies in its potential for
compassionate ethical reciprocity. It generates an understanding of
the value of ‘the other’, and ultimately, a structure of concern and
understanding between recipient and carer.
This kind of relationship occupies the central ground in social work
ethics and is a primary commitment. The primary sense of care is
found in the phrase “taking care”. Care should not be equated with
protection, as negative freedom, nor should care and protection be
coupled together – e.g. as in “need of care and protection” - in a
regulatory framework. Rather, the activity of caring “as concern” and
taking care occupies a definite ethical link between self and Other. As
Sevenhuijsen (2000) points out “care is a social activity in itself and …
caring activities and caring moral orientations are crucial for the
provision of basic needs. (2000, p.14)

6. In Britain one of the most prominent and persistent
research findings across the last four decades is that
clients really value the caring relationship of social work.
Practitioners frequently comment on how clients often
need a few gentle words of encouragement, reassurance
and someone to share their problems with. Personal
qualities of warmth, trust and support are crucial in this
respect. Bleach and Ryan (1995) point out that it is the
human interpersonal qualities, rather than technical skills
and competence that influence the degree of trust and
satisfaction between clients and social workers. Similarly,

7. Smith (2001) recognizes the important link
between ethics of care, inter-personal relations
and trust. She says that in social work “material
services will be accompanied by the need for
interpersonal help in the form of emotional
support, reassurance, understanding, comfort and
guidance. These situations call for people to give
something of themselves, to increase their
vulnerability and to risk a dismissive, insensitive,
and judgemental or ... uncaring response. In other
words, these situations create the conditions for
trust” (2001, p.300)

8. An important relationship exists between care and trust
Social workers frame relationships of trust by mutual proximity and
listening; finding answers and solutions to troublesome situations,
encouraging participation and responding to grievances through
supportive advocacy. This amounts to what Giddens calls a situation
of “active trust”. That is, trust that has to be energetically developed
handled and sustained. In the context of the caring relationship active
trust is geared towards evaluating the integrity of the social worker.
Integrity cannot be taken as given, it has to be worked at; this is
perhaps why clients value stability and reliability in their relations
with social workers.

9. The importance of trust in marking out reciprocity is indicative of
why people wish to be involved in decision-making. For Giddens,
this kind of trust helps initiate new forms of voluntary solidarity
in risk society. (1994, p.186)
Recurring face-to-face interaction that rests on trust is the basis
for the voluntary supporting insight to the human likeness of the
other. It has also been suggested that effective responses to fateful
moments is deeply embedded in an interpersonal face-to-face
context. To develop a caring relationship is to achieve a reciprocal
understanding and thus validation of the care that is done. It is
this recognition or understanding that consolidates sympathy
between carer and client and thereby moves beyond the rule-
based prescriptions of impersonal regulation, duties and
obligations. Caring is valued, as an important ethical practice in it
own right. (Harris, 2002)

10. I think it is inevitable that some relationships
between client and social worker rest on what
Richard Sennett (1980) calls "false love". That is,
an authority of paternalism which operates a
parade of benevolence existing only insofar as it's
in the interest of selfish motivations and
dominant vested interests, requiring passive
acquiescence on the part of clients as the price for
being cared for. Such a tendency, however, is not
representative of the majority of front-line
practice.

11. Gilligan (1982) identifies two frames as “the ethic of
justice” and “the ethic of care” that results in the division
of the moral field into the masculine and the feminine.
Her observation reads the masculine ethic according to a
deep “justice” orientation, and the feminine ethic
according to a deep “care” orientation. Gilligan’s ethics of
care emphasizes notions of attachment over equality,
relatedness over individuality, and commitment over
autonomy thus representing an important shift in the
language of morality, while remaining concerned with the
kinds of reciprocal relations featured significantly in social
work.

12. An ethic of care, contradicts the Kantian rule and
duty bound ethics of BASW and the GSCC Code of
Conduct. (Webb & McBeath, 1989) 'You can do your
duty, because you must do it' is how Kant formulated
the categorical imperative. The usual negative
corollary of this formula found in codified social work
morality is 'You cannot, because you should not.' An
ethics of care is quite different.

13. As Marilyn Friedman (1991) argues this involves a
fundamental commitment to persons [individually], often
at the expense of strict obedience to moral rules.
... the so-called ‘ethic of care’ stresses an ongoing
responsiveness. The ethic of care is about the nature of
relationships to particular persons grasped as such. The
key issue is the sensitivity and responsiveness to another
person’s emotional states, individuating differences,
specific uniqueness, and whole particularity. The ‘care’
orientation focuses on whole persons and de-emphasizes
adherence to moral rules. (1991, p.106)

14. We’ve seen how these form part of regulatory regimes that
normalise and exclude marginal populations. Few would be
naïve enough to deny that social work is inevitably caught up in
relations of power in such circumstances.
Social workers are given the capacity to act, as well as actually
acting as social workers due to several legitimating powers.
They are also involved in influencing, persuading and cajoling
their clients and colleagues of the validity of their judgement or
opinion. Thus, it’s important to recognise the centrality of
power relations in social work. The point is that an ethics of
care works against the grain of those modernist preoccupations
of legitimising unequal power relations and normative moral
rules.

15. For Fiona Williams the source of ethics of care rests on
meaningful and valued reciprocity. She points out “the
care relationship is often but not always an intimate one;
the intimate relationship is usually, but not always, a
relationship of care.” She goes on to say that the intimate
sphere covers relationships based upon family ties,
friendship, sexual relationships, as well as paid care
relationships. A number of significant changes occur in
the context of caring relationships in late modernity. To
paraphrase Williams they are less about duty and more
about mutually agreed commitment; they are less about
achieving status and more about negotiating an identity;
less about authority and more about consent;

16. It through the constitution of caring relations and
not caring actions that ethical commitment
becomes significant in front-line practice. The
former is synonymous with reciprocity by
entailing inter-subjective concern. Care implicitly
arises out of the same logic as a concern for things
and for other human beings. In caring relations
people reveal themselves, in their unfolding and
their becoming with others. (See Parton, 2003)

17. Sevenhuijsen (2000) contends that care should be
conceived as an inclusive democratic practice that
should be more centrally discussed in Third Way
politics. (pp.27-28). She concludes that “when
caring is acknowledged as a valuable social
activity in its own right, we can further our
sensitivity towards everyday forms of mutual
responsibility and their failures and successes.”
(ibid. p.30) This begs the question what is the
relation of ethics to experience in social work?
Could the latter, in some way, produce the
former?

18. If there was more caring and
deeper forms of caring
relationships would there be more
democracy and deeper democratic
forms?