“Moved by the Suffering of Others”: Using Aristotelian Theory to Think about Care

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to give a contemporary Aristotelian account of what care is—what good care entails—and to make suggestions for how care can best be delivered. Such an account is missing from Aristotle’s work because he only recognized dependency as something belonging to others—in particular those whose experiences he gave little weight to, such as women, slaves, servants, and those engaged in productive labor¹—and not something which all human beings encounter. Furthermore, Aristotle’s conception of masculine virtue acts as a barrier to the acknowledgment of the facts of human dependence. The magnanimous man, who is “a paragon of the virtues, dislikes any recognition of his need for aid from and consolation by others.”² Shared suffering must be avoided, according to Aristotle, because we should not want to see our friends in pain. In the Nicomachean Ethics (hereon NE) he argues, “we should call on our friends for help most of all when they are in a position to do us great service at the cost of little disturbance to themselves.”³ Yet caregiving usually requires a great deal of disturbance to the caregiver and seems to require the caregiver to share at least some of the cared for’s pain in order to attend to his or her needs adequately.