Cultivating Practical Caring

Abstract

The concept ‘practical caring’ intimates two interrelated ideas: caring and practicality. Of course, one can argue that caring in itself is some kind of doing action and therefore does not require any affirmation of its practical nature, as doing implies some sort of practical action. However, to accentuate the nature of the particular type of caring discussed in this chapter, it seems apposite to refer to the concept of ‘practical caring’. The point about such a kind of caring is that the effects of caring in this manner has some relation to the effects it engenders. In Nel Noddings’s (1984) seminal work, Caring: A feminine approach to ethics and moral education, she describes the concept ‘caring’ as a state of consciousness of a carer constituted by engrossment (an open receptivity) and motivational displacement or concern towards the cared-for. Extending the latter view, and in recognition of Carol Gilligan’s (1982) notion of inclusive caring, Noddings (1992: 21) posits that, in addition to caring being reasonable in the sense that it emphasises an individual attribute of a carer, it also recognises the mutual part played by the cared-for in ‘an ethic of relation’. Put differently, caring –