Care as a Concept-Mediated Relationship

Readers familiar with Nel Noddings will notice that my account of care has much in common with hers. I also agree with her on one basic point: care should be understood first as a relationship, not as an abstract rule and not as a virtue floating free of relationships. Even so, I want to say more about the inner structure of care, because that structure affects both the scope of care and the educational purpose of care education.

Early Noddings distinguishes between two forms of care: caring for and caring about. Caring for is thicker and more concrete. The care that parents give their children, or that partners give one another, belongs here. In many cases it rests on natural relations, such as kinship, though not always; it can also arise in relations built later, such as comradeship or friendship. Caring about, by contrast, is thinner and more fragile. It is often attached to social roles, public concern, or duties of service. It can still matter, but it often feels as though there is a layer left between the two sides, and that is why it does not always generate deep trust.[1]

I can explain the difference through one of my own experiences. Years ago, while travelling in Thailand, I joined a jungle adventure course that my adventure-loving wife had booked for us. Participants moved along simple cable routes between tall trees under the guidance of instructors. It was exciting, but I am mildly afraid of heights, so I could not enjoy it in quite the way other people did. When we reached a rapid-descent segment, the kind often featured in survival-adventure television shows, I felt that I really could not handle the speed. I asked the instructor whether he could lower me more slowly. He was a young man, and at first he looked surprised; perhaps, in his eyes, this was one of the most enjoyable parts of the course. But once he saw that I was serious, he helped me down carefully and then paid extra attention to me during the rest of the activity.

What kind of relation was that? By Noddings’s standards, it would be hard to say that the instructor and I had already entered into a full relation of caring for. We were strangers. The course leaders had also already told participants that they were entitled to make requests according to their own needs. So, on the surface, our interaction may seem to belong only to the level of caring about. Even so, I do not think that is a reason to deny its positive value. His concern helped me, and I experienced it as a real and beneficial form of care.

Noddings sometimes describes caring about and caring for as if they stand in sharp contrast. Dickens’s Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House is a familiar example: she pours her energy into caring about distant strangers while neglecting those closest to her. In a case like that, her concern for distant others becomes morally distorted because she has, in some degree, lost the ability to receive the people around her as full human beings rather than as background figures.[2] That is an important warning. But I still do not think the difference between the two should be treated as absolute.

My own inclination is to say that caring for can sometimes be understood as a fuller development of caring about rather than as a completely separate moral species. The key question is whether the relation begins to generate trust through action and response. In my own case, I did not expect the instructor’s concern to turn into any rich or lasting form of care. I certainly did not expect him to understand my fear in depth. Yet he did something important: he recognized that my fear was real for someone like me, and he adjusted his conduct accordingly.

For that reason, I describe care as a concept-mediated relationship. Full caring for appears when the carer can receive the other person as a whole individual rather than merely as the occupant of some role under a concept. That is not easy. It becomes relatively easier, I think, in at least two situations. The first is when a person has not yet been flattened into rigid, one-dimensional social roles and has previously lived within healthy relations of care. The Little Prince is a good image here. His care for the rose is simple, direct, and free of calculation. It is almost pre-social. The second situation is when one person has come to understand another person’s circumstances in sufficiently rich detail. That fuller form of care often appears in parent-child relations or in durable marriages. My relation with the Thai instructor belonged to neither category.

Even so, I still remember his help very clearly. We did not have time for extended conversation. In fact, I can no longer remember his face in detail. Yet I remember the structure of the relation. We both recognized that we stood in different positions with regard to fear. Neither of us needed to calculate the exact degree of difference. What mattered was that he was willing to widen the space within which my response could count as intelligible. If he had helped me only in a cold, mechanical way, simply because the job required it, I would not have understood his action as care. I would only have thought: he did his job. The difference lies in the mediating relation itself.

This is also why I do not want to oppose care as relationship to care as practice. If care is truly a relationship, it still has to be enacted. Caring about cannot remain empty speech. It must contribute, in however modest a way, to the strengthening of trust between the carer and the cared-for, and that trust has to become recognizable through action, response, and sometimes even through words.

At the same time, I do not want to define concern too thinly. If concern is treated merely as a simple role-based relation attached to a simple social norm, then it no longer matches what I mean by care. No real human relationship can be captured entirely by such a flat description. If my instructor had offered only a cold, role-driven assistance, I would not have regarded it as concern in the richer sense. I would only have registered an efficient service. What I am looking for instead is something grounded in second-person empathy.

Borrowing Stephen Darwall’s vocabulary, such a relation involves claims, reasons, and responsibilities.[3] Of course, our prior arrangement was not meaningless. The fact that I was a participant and he was an instructor gave me a legitimate starting point from which to make a request, just as a waiter has some reason to hear a diner’s request. But that starting point alone could not yet generate care. The decisive step was that he had to grasp my reason. He had to understand why I was asking. Only then could his role-based responsibility begin to acquire the content of care. In ordinary Chinese, we would call this a matter of “using one’s own heart to understand another’s.”

To be clear, I do not think he felt any deep sympathy for me. From the point of view of a young jungle-sports instructor, I probably looked timid and weak. But that is exactly the point. He did not need to feel as I felt. He only needed to recognize that such fear exists as a real possibility for some people. He had probably met travellers like me before. Experience had already taught him that this kind of response pattern exists, and that if he responded cooperatively he would usually receive a corresponding response in return. Once that pattern is reinforced, concern gradually becomes part of the content of professional responsibility itself.

That is one reason feedback loops matter so much in caring relations. In many cases, what looks like a caring act does not generate any clear feedback at all. The money one gives to a beggar on the street, or the donation one makes to an online fund-raising campaign on impulse, may certainly have some effect, but that effect is not normally returned to the giver in any visible way. Natural sympathy alone may therefore be insufficient. A reasonably reliable feedback loop matters because it helps us judge whether the relation is actually functioning as a caring relation. Concern without effective feedback should be treated with caution.[4]

Only once we see this can we understand another important feature of care: caring relations cannot generate fully impartial obligations. A carer cannot be expected to treat every possible object of care in exactly the same way, because care is limited by the conditions of relation itself. We can, of course, care for animals in distant places. But we can do so only if some effective line of relation can really be formed. This is not a declaration of human exceptionalism. It is a more practical claim: care becomes real when relation becomes effective.

Elephant Nature Park near Chiang Mai offers a good example. Each year it receives volunteers from around the world to help care for rescued elephants. I once visited there as a tourist. What impressed me was the way the park combined public education, limited tourism, and genuine welfare work. Visitors were not encouraged simply to consume the elephants as entertainment. Instead, they were told about the suffering the elephants had endured before rescue, shown how they were treated and cared for, and allowed limited interaction, such as washing them under supervision. Volunteers, by contrast, stayed much longer and built a more sustained relation. Experiences like this often make people more attentive to animal welfare afterwards. Stronger contact makes concern more concrete.

Still, not everyone who visits a place like that becomes an animal advocate. In my view, at least two qualities are needed if a person is to widen the range of care in a stable way. The first is a good will that genuinely wants to build healthy relations. The second is a capacity to revise one’s own concepts and views with a measure of freedom. It is to that second issue that I now turn.