Four ways to care

[firecat]

This is a really good post: "Reflections on Caring, or Things to Think About Along the Freeway" by Lisa Freitag, who sees a lot of billboards with phrases such as "saving lives" and "we care" on them, and has smart opinions about them.

http://laurietobyedison.com/discuss/?p=8938

in order to make sense of care, of this recognition and meeting of needs, Joan Tronto, a political science professor at the University of Minnesota, has proposed a new way of breaking down the process of meeting needs into stages, or phases, of action. This framework can be used to analyze all types of caring, from feeding the hungry to cleaning up the environment, but it applies particularly well to the conglomerate of actions we call medical care. These levels help understand who in medicine is actually doing the caring, what that care entails, and why that care is undertaken.

The framework, from Tronto's book called Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care, has four parts:

Caring about ("Right away, we can spot a problem in the medical system. We depend on people to recognize their own need and present themselves to a hospital or clinic to get help. Those who cannot do this are overlooked from the outset.")
Caring for
Caregiving
Care receiving

Comments

[amethystfirefly]

This gave me quite a o.o this morning, seeing as I went to school with a Lisa Freitag. ^^

(Not this one, though. XD)