Thanks in part to the efforts of many care and relational ethicists, the needs of all human beings for the care of others have come to be much more frequently acknowledged in philosophical discussions about ethics, politics, and the nature of selfhood in recent years.Footnote 1 This change has helped put to rest atomistic illusions of people as fundamentally independent entities. These illusions do material harm by distorting understandings of ourselves and others, but also by providing ideological cover under which the immense amount of care labor necessary to sustain human life is pushed into the shadows and onto the backs of marginalized groups such as women at large and women of color as well as immigrant women most of all.Footnote 2
Yet despite the growth of attention within feminist theory to the myriad ways the need for care marks the human condition, a deficit of equal attention to a set of human needs of a different tenor tends to persist. The needs I have in mind are needs not for the care of others, but to care for them.Footnote 3 Having sufficient, meaningful opportunities to materially care for others in accordance with genuine needs and legitimate wants born of affective relationships on the part of the caregiver, and in keeping with genuine needs and legitimate wants to receive that care on the part of the intended recipient, as I intend to show, is a fundamental part of living a good human life for many people. It is thus an issue of justice.
Alerting us to ongoing failures in the world today, however, there are many who wrongfully find their opportunities to care for others in such ways truncated by oppressive, unjust, and dehumanizing social and political institutions. Such people include the many persons who are currently enduring slavery across the globe. They also include many people in the LGBTQIA+ community who are wrongfully prevented from freely expressing and enacting their love for each other in public life and via civil institutions. The same is true for many incarcerated individuals, whose abilities to interact with and support their loved ones in mutually wanted and needed ways are sharply curtailed, and for many immigrants in the contemporary US who lack the freedom to travel safely across borders to be with their loved ones and/or to facilitate the immigration of those loved ones to the country in which they reside with appropriate ease. A painful irony of present times is how global economic structures and political policies promote immigrant women and women of color undertaking poorly paid care work, often in the households of wealthy white families, at the expense of being able to sufficiently exercise a very precious form of human freedom: the “freedom to care” for their own children and loved ones in accordance with their own genuine needs and legitimate wants.Footnote 4 The fact that there are so many such people and groups for whom legitimate wants and genuine needs to materially care for beloved others, and to receive that care in turn, continue to be denied even a minimally sufficient degree of satisfaction is an egregious injustice of our times.
While I focus on this issue largely as it pertains to the institution of slavery below, one thing to be learned from all such instances of this specific form of injustice is that, in order to exercise opportunities to materially care for others as one both genuinely needs and legitimately wants, and as the recipients of that care likewise want and need in turn, one must first have such opportunities afforded to one or, at the very least, not have them systemically blocked. This is something that depends on the existence of at-least-minimally supportive social and political conditions. Accordingly, any just society, I argue, must ensure that none of its citizens are met with systemic conditions that grossly constrain their ability to materially care for others in accordance with their own genuine needs and legitimate wants when the intended recipients of that care both legitimately want and genuinely need to receive it.
Furthermore, it follows from the existence of genuine needs and legitimate wants to care for those one loves, as I contend in the last section of this paper, that providing material care to others can also be an act of self-care in those instances where one’s wellbeing is tied in positive and mutually uplifting ways to that of those for whom one so needs and wants to care, as it is in many loving and affectively caring relationships. Indeed, a life without sufficient, meaningful opportunities to materially demonstrate care for those one loves may well be a life in which one of the human needs most vital to many people’s wellbeing—the need to have a positive impact on the lives of those who matter most to us—goes painfully unanswered.Footnote 5 For although, as Margaret Walker (Reference Walker2007) writes, “[s]ometimes it is a privilege or a mercy to be exempted from responsibilities,” including responsibilities to materially care for others, “sometimes it shows you are nobody, or less of a somebody than someone else.” (106). Having sufficient, meaningful opportunities to care for others in this respect can matter profoundly to the richness of our entwined, relational lives.
There is a deep injustice in our world today in having the burden of material caregiving inequitably distributed across social identity groups. Such inequities, moreover, can make performing care work diminishing to the caregiver. At the same time, being denied sufficient, meaningful opportunities to materially care for others in accordance with legitimate wants and genuine needs often hurts both the would-be giver of that care and its intended recipient, albeit in different ways. It does so by undermining chosen and wanted relationships of affective love and care that are themselves a fundamental element in the fabric of both individual and communal wellbeing, and which often give rise to these very needs and wants to care materially for others. This form of harm is just as worthy of attention and redress as are the harms done through placing too much care labor on the shoulders of some persons and groups in contrast to others, yet it continues to receive less attention. The major aims of this paper are: to explain what constitutes a genuine need and a legitimate want to care for those one loves; to attend to the injustice done and dehumanization caused by the denial of sufficient opportunities to meaningfully satisfy these wants and needs; and, last but not least, to consider the role that satisfying such wants and needs to care for others can play in the practice of self-care.
1. Genuine needs and legitimate wants
Below, I offer an explanation of the terms “legitimate wants” and “genuine needs” employed above and in the arguments that follow. This explanation serves to highlight how genuine needs to care for those one loves can be intricately tied to legitimate wants to provide that same care, making these needs expressive of a very dear form of human freedom—the freedom to materially care for those one loves. This section also advances the argument that it is not just genuine needs, but also some wants—namely, legitimate ones—that have ethical and/or political weight.
1.1 Legitimate wants
There is much discussion in the literature on need about what constitutes a “need” vs. a mere “want.” Much of this debate is due to the notion that needs are uniquely able to give rise to ethical and political claims (e.g., Wiggins Reference Wiggins1987). For this reason, needs claims are carefully policed and monitored for authenticity, with the needs of some social groups garnering more recognition than those of others in accordance with systemic patterns of privilege and oppression. The later point is made in Joan Tronto’s Caring democracy (Reference Tronto2013) as well as in Asha Bhandary’s Freedom to care (2020) and “Freedom to care, for women of colour” (2025). In discussing this issue, Bhandary stresses that there may be as much risk to justice in overemphasizing the needs of some groups of people as there is in failing to adequately recognize and address the genuine needs of others. Speaking to this point, Bhandary asserts, “the intimate and familial relationships women of colour prioritize are challenged by societies where we are expected to attend and respond to the ‘needs’ white entitlement creates.” (2025, 119). Likewise, as Nancy Fraser (Reference Fraser1987) powerfully observes, “the interpretation of people’s needs is itself a political stake, sometimes the political stake.” (104).
As important as these conversations are in the pursuit of justice surrounding care, a possibility that often goes unconsidered is that some wants may also legitimately give rise to ethical and political demands. These wants are what, following Eva Kittay (Reference Kittay2019), I call “legitimate” ones. In Learning from my daughter, Kittay contends, and I agree, that caring for others in positions of dependency, in the ethical sense of the term “care,” means meeting not just their genuine needs but also their legitimate wants at least some of the time. Legitimate wants, according to Kittay, are wants that “the cared-for should be able to satisfy without harming others” and that are important to one’s wellbeing, although not as “urgent or pressing” as genuine needs (138). Speaking to the first point, “not all wants,” Kittay stresses, “or even felt needs when they are less than genuine needs, are compatible with living in a just and caring society.” (138).
While meeting not just the genuine needs but also the legitimate wants of others in relationships of dependency is part of what care as an ethical activity may at times require, especially when others cannot meet those needs or wants themselves, an ethical and political framework concerned with care and justice alike must guard against the risk of uplifting the wellbeing of any individual or group at the cost of damage to others. This is regardless of whether the interests at stake are categorized as needs or wants. There is certainly no injustice in ignoring illegitimate wants or even blocking their gratification when doing so is necessary to upholding the legitimate wants and genuine needs of others, including those of oneself and/or members of multiply marginalized groups.
Kittay’s focus is on the ethical importance of legitimate wants for care according to these criteria or for certain goods that only another’s care can bring. Yet I contend that there can also be legitimate wants to care on the part of would-be caregivers when judged by similar standards. When wanting to care for others is such that (1) it does not cause harm to others in the process of being gratified, (2) it is important to the wellbeing of the one doing the caring as well as the one being cared for, and, as a further stipulation of condition one, (3) the care one wants to give is also legitimately wanted and genuinely needed by its intended recipient, the want is a legitimate one that ought not be unduly blocked from enactment and may even be deserving of positive support.
Just as the frustration of our efforts to materially care for others can be a deep source of pain and suffering, succeeding in caring for others, when it is not a mere labor nor purely an obligation, but motivated by a genuine need and/or a legitimate want born of affective relational ties, can be an immense source of joy and make a profound contribution of one’s own sense of self-worth. In these respects, success in materially caring for others in accordance with one’s own genuine needs and legitimate wants can play a vital role in supporting one’s own wellbeing. At the same time, it is crucial that wants and needs to “care” not be supported where that purported care is in fact unwelcome, rendering it more akin to interference or harmful paternalism than care in the ethical sense, and delegitimating it simultaneously on both criteria 1 and 3 above. Care, as both a material and an ethical activity, must be received as such by those purportedly being cared for in order to be what it is. Acting against another person’s genuine needs and legitimate wants, or on mistaken ideas about them, causes others harm, not gain. This runs against the very point of care as Kittay aptly explains it—to benefit the cared-for (171). Sometimes, as Kittay notes, the positive reception of care is much delayed, but that care be received as care in some way, shape, or form, as Noddings and Kittay have both noted, is nonetheless a fundamental ingredient in its identity.Footnote 6 This positive reception prevents care-giving from harmfully infringing on the agency of others and aligns care with respect.Footnote 7
Indeed, what transpires under the guise of caring for others is not always benevolent or even innocuous. To take up an example from the work of Bhandary, when dog owners express care for the wants and needs of their pets in a way that obliterates concern for people they attack or other animals they harm, for instance, these investments in the welfare of some may perpetuate injustice by contributing to the physical and/or moral harm of others.Footnote 8 Likewise, when someone that a person or group wants to care for has repeatedly insisted that this attention is unwelcome, such as a recently divorced mother who does not want to be made the object of a neighbor’s charity on the presumption that she cannot get by on her own, the want to help may in fact be causing harm to another person’s sense of self-worth and to their public dignity, although it may still bespeak a real and pressing desire on the part of those seeking to provide assistance and may even be conflated with a genuine need by the one experiencing it. Unlike the wants and needs in this example, legitimate wants and genuine needs to care for others are not paternalistic or imposing upon other’s lives in ways that conflict with the interests of those they aim to support.
1.2 Genuine needs
Having explained the meaning of the term “legitimate want,” I now turn to the notion of “genuine need.” As Nancy Fraser (Reference Fraser1989) explains, “needs claims have a relational structure; implicitly or explicitly, they take the form ‘A needs X in order to Y’.” (293). Some “needs” are contingent on fleeting and trivial interests, such as the need for a spoon in order to stir a teaspoon of honey into a cup of tea or the need for a hammer in order to pound a nail into the deck one is adding to one’s already grand home. These are “needs” insofar as they are requisites to an end that is itself relatively easily and harmlessly undone, bypassed, or transformed. David Wiggins calls them “instrumental” for this reason (Reference Wiggins2005, 29–31). In contrast to such needs (which might be better described as wants—and, sometimes, illegitimate ones at that), genuine needs, as I use the term throughout this paper, are (1) not readily forsaken or substitutable, if they are indeed relinquishable at all, and (2) are things one cannot forego having satisfied without very serious harm to one’s wellbeing ensuing.
Although I agree with Kittay that legitimate wants, and not just genuine needs, can have ethical and political significance, I contend that the ethical and political weight of genuine needs is greater than that of legitimate wants to the extent that the degree of importance in meeting these needs to ensuring one’s basic welfare, let alone one’s flourishing, is greater and more resistant to transformation. To systemically block genuine needs to materially care for those one loves from being fulfilled on the part of certain people or groups, while leaving the same category of needs either unimpeded for others or supported in their pursuit of gratification, is thus, as I will go on to argue and illustrate below, both a deep form of injustice and a grave harm to those persons whose ability to care for others whose wellbeing matters dearly to them is so restricted.Footnote 9 So too is denying the reality of these needs in the first place, especially when that denial targets certain social groups and not others. This harm is redoubled in harm to those to whom this genuinely needed—and often also legitimately wanted—care is denied, and to the relational ties between these parties.
Genuine needs on the two criteria stipulated above include physiological needs such as the need for clean air to breathe and for sufficient water to drink. They also include, as many care and relational ethicists have shown, social and relational needs such as the need for the care of others in times of infancy and injury, while living with many forms of disability, and in the later stages of life. Less often recognized, however, is a fact I wish to highlight here: that such genuine needs can additionally include needs to have sufficient, meaningful opportunities to materially care for others according to one’s chosen relational investments and in accordance with the genuine needs and legitimate wants of those to whom that care is directed. While many genuine human needs arise independently of our affective investments of care, such as the need for food and shelter, others arise from these very investments themselves, making them “thick” and not “thin” to invoke Fraser’s terminology (1989, 292–93). For who and what we care about in an affective sense is unique to each of us; such relationships also change over the course of our lives and are influenced by social and cultural forces. As such, they give rise to needs that are not only “thick” in their specificity and distinctness, but that fall into the category of what Soran Reader calls “second-nature” needs, needs that arise as our lives take on a particular shape and form through our living them (Reference Reader2007b). Yet thick, second-nature needs are often just as genuine and non-instrumental as more widely recognized physiological ones insofar as they (1) bespeak morally pertinent interests unable to go unsatisfied without significant, if not vital harm, to one’s wellbeing ensuing and (2) are deeply entrenched in one’s life such that they cannot be easily undone or transformed, although they may not be utterly impervious to change.
In the case of genuine needs to materially care for those one loves, what Reader calls second-nature needs are in fact “second-person” ones in my terminology (see Wolfe Reference Wolfe2016, Reference Wolfe2017) insofar as they derive from the deep, intricate, and often singular ways in which one’s own wellbeing is tethered to that of others. For whom one experiences a genuine need and a legitimate want to care, as well as when, why, and in what respect one experiences such a need and want, is highly specific to the unique set of relationships in which each of us stands as well as to the intricate relationships of power, privilege, and oppression that mark each of our lives. And yet it matters not to the moral claim such needs and wants make that other people, existing in different relationships and relational dynamics, may not share it.
Through drawing on examples of the pervasive denial of genuine needs and legitimate wants to care for those one loves in the following section of this paper, I further advance the argument that having sufficient opportunities to materially fulfill genuine needs and legitimate wants to care for those one loves can be just as important to one’s wellbeing as is having other genuine needs and legitimate wants satisfied, such as the need for healthy food to eat or to receive loving care oneself. One reason this is so is because of how vital not just receiving but giving care is to keeping communities healthy and strong, and because of the role that caregiving can play in holding both the receiver and the giver of care in their personhood. In making this claim, however, it is also crucial to acknowledge the harm, as many feminists have rightfully pointed out, that frequently occurs when one is disproportionately tasked with giving care while not receiving adequate amounts of it, a situation of structural and relational injustice that can wear away at one’s sense of self-worth, self-respect, and equal human dignity, as well as deplete the resources one has for caring for those who matter most to them. Even when one has the luxury of caring directly for those one loves, and thus of enacting the labor of care together with the affect, care remains hard work: it is difficult, demanding, and depleting in many respects. For this reason, as Bhandary notes, while receiving care is always a good thing, giving care is not always so and can instead be a consequence of oppression as well as a source of disadvantage, exploitation, and abuse (2020, 43). Good and just care in society at large thus requires nested relationships in which the genuine needs and heightened vulnerabilities generated by doing care work are themselves met with support as well as equitable distributions of care labor (see Kittay Reference Kittay1999). Nonetheless, materially caring for beloved others remains a genuine need and a legitimate want for many and is adversely affected by forms of social and political injustice and oppression ongoing in the world today.
2. The injustice of being denied sufficient opportunities to care for those one loves
While “it is love that accounts for the value to us of life itself” (Frankfurt Reference Frankfurt2004, 40), with love come also the many great risks that have occupied generations of poets. One might recognize some of these risks by saying not only “how terrible it is to love something that death can touch” but also: how terrible—how compelling, and how wonderful, but also how terrible—it is to love someone whom one cannot protect … (Tessman Reference Tessman2015, 54–55)
Finding oneself unable to help those one loves in times when they are under severe duress may be one of the most painful experiences any human being can endure. It can occur in times of natural disasters or life-threatening accidents if one’s life is under threat simultaneously with that of beloved others less able to help themselves, such as young family members or aging parents. Yet it can also occur under social and political conditions geared toward the dehumanization of certain groups and toward the shattering of care communities as a means of that violence. When it does, it is, I contend, a profound form of injustice as well as a grave moral atrocity.
The testimonies of those who have experienced such assaults on the fabric of their relational lives, some examples of which I invoke below, bespeak this painful truth. In such events, not only is another’s suffering redoubled in suffering of one’s own insofar as one’s wellbeing is interlinked with that of others through chains of love and affective care, but one’s sense of self-worth and self-respect is potentially compromised and haunted by the ghost of one’s inability to help ever after. In her work on solitary confinement, Lisa Guenther goes so far as to describe this form of relational violence as “the worst form of torture and the principle upon which all more determinate forms of torture are based.” (2013, xv). Describing it as a form of torture is apt, for this kind of deprivation turns the relational nature of humanity against itself in order to inflict harm that undercuts the positive, life-enriching, and mutually affirming elements of relational life, much as other forms of torture turn the capacities for pleasure and pain of one’s own body against one.
I turn now to Orlando Patterson’s groundbreaking work, Slavery and social death (1982) to better bring the reality of genuine needs and legitimate wants to materially care for beloved others to light in the context of their frequent, harsh, and extreme denial under the institution of slavery. As Patterson concludes from a stunningly comprehensive engagement with slavery’s cross-cultural history, slavery’s most distinguishing feature may lie in its systemic endeavor to sever ties between people and their communities of birth as well as choice. First, as part of this process, slavery weaponizes what Patterson calls “natal alienation,” a procedure aimed at sundering the target’s ties of culture, place, and biological family. Many cultures, as Patterson explains, force those newly enslaved to reject their own kin both symbolically and practically, a deeply traumatic process for many. With the loss of such ties often comes the loss of social support and protection, if not also a sense of one’s very humanity, for in many cultures “humanness was defined in terms of belonging to a clan.” (47). “A slave,” in contrast, explains Patterson, “was a stranger in a strange land, unsupported by a chain of ancestors reaching back to the beginning of time.” (39). The procedure of natal alienation has the further implication of marking one’s children, grandchildren, and potentially all descendants out for this same form of dehumanization insofar as one so systemically severed from culture and community has no sanctioned culture or community to bequeath (10).
As both a continuation and expansion of the project of relational deprivation begun through natal alienation, the institution of slavery strives to cleave all ties between its targets and their chosen care communities, including mutually affirmed and desired intimate partnerships, self-sanctioned marriages and friendships, and those biological relationships one chooses to embrace. It is through such acts of community-breaking, acts that target cherished and desired connections of love, care, and sociality vital to a positive sense of self-worth, that the system of slavery reduces all approved human relationships available to those enslaved to one: the relationship of domination vis-à-vis the master. Indeed, slavery must decimate all positive forms of relational life to consolidate the power of the master and so solidify itself; slavery is thus fundamentally a system of dehumanization and domination effected through the violence of the attempted destitution of positive relational life. Natal alienation, together with the systemic effort to undermine all chosen relational connections later in life, hereby culminates in the atrociously dehumanizing experience Patterson names “social death”—the firmament of the slavery system.
It is in its assault on one’s ancestral, chosen, and desired relationships, moreover, that slavery endeavors to strip human beings of one of the most precious forms of freedom we can have: the freedom to materially care for beloved others in accordance with one’s own genuine needs and legitimate wants, as well as with the genuine needs and legitimate wants of those receiving that care in turn. One of the most devastating elements of slavery’s assault on relational life, as described by those who have endured it, is just such an undercutting of one’s ability to care. As a former American forced into slavery, Mr Reed, once stated:
The most barbarous thing I saw with these eyes—I lay on my bed and study about it now—I had a sister, my older sister, she was fooling with a clock and broke it, and my old master taken her and tied a rope around her neck—just enough to keep it from choking her—and tied her up in the back yard and whipped her I don’t know how long. There stood mother, there stood father, and there stood all the children and none could come to her rescue. (Rawick Reference Rawick1972, vol. 18, 44; quoted in Guenther Reference Guenther2013, xxii)Footnote 10
Guenther reads this example, together with others like it invoked in Patterson’s study, as “testifying to the importance of the power not only to help oneself but also to help and defend others,” noting, furthermore, that “[t]he social death of slavery blocks and even criminalizes slaves’ capacity to respond to the others who matter most to them.” (2013, xxiii).
What I would add to Guenther’s analysis is that helping others in accordance with relationships of love is not just a human power but can also be a genuine human need. This way of understanding it brings further light to both its ethical significance and the depth of the harm inflicted through its denial. Such a need announces a vital interest present on the part not only of the one in need of care but of the one who seeks to provide it, and can result in deep-reaching harm if systemically blocked from all legitimate expression. Many mutually enriching needs not just to be cared for by but to materially care for those one loves arise from the fabric of our relational lives and cannot be persistently flouted without serious harm to (a) the one with a genuine need, and often also the legitimate want, to materially care for another, (b) the intended recipients of that care, and, finally, (c) the affective relational ties that bind us to each other and hold us in our personhood in positive ways.
Other survivors of the slavery system offer similar remarks on the excruciating pain of being unable to extend material love and care to those to whom they most ardently desire to give it or to even live out their lives in proximity to their loved ones. Speaking to the deep atrocity of this later form of relational assault, Patterson remarks that “[n]othing comes across more dramatically from the hundreds of interviews with American ex-slaves than the fear of separation.” (6). As living in proximity to one’s loved ones is a condition of being able to materially care for them in most direct and embodied ways at all, to have an intimate partner, friend, or family member sold to another slaveowner is often to lose even the hope of being able to so care for them.
Percival Everett’s recent novel, James (Reference Everett2024), a retelling of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the runaway from slavery referred to as “Jim” in Twain’s original narrative, serves to further highlight this dimension of the relational harm inflicted under slavery. One question left unaddressed in Twain’s novel is the question of what motivates “Jim” to take the risks associated with running from his master, subjecting himself to the copious dangers to his life that come with the criminalization of this choice. Everett leans into the dilemma in a way that brings to light a painful irony, for it is the ominous threat of forced separation from his chosen family that Everett makes James’s motive. James learns, through snippets of conversation overheard and relayed by others, that Miss Watson intends to sell him to a slaveholder in New Orleans, far from his current home and loved ones. It is this knowledge, as Everett crafts the tale, that provokes him to flee in order to avoid suffering the fate of forced separation from those he loves most (32–35).
Throughout his journey, James tarries with the question of what his freedom from the institution of slavery is actually good for if it doesn’t allow him to live together with those he loves and take part in the networks of care—both affective and material—that such a life entails: “What would freedom be,” he asks himself at one point, “without them?” (139). The irony of separating himself from his family to avoid a forced sundering of their ties leads to many moments in the book where James is literally and figuratively carried in circles, traveling down the river in the opposite direction of his seeming salvation on northern shores. The tension culminates in James’s bold decision to return to his master’s house with the intent of forcibly freeing his family from their white oppressors, whose freedom he comes to realize he could never succeed in buying as a Black man despite whatever success he might find in escaping alone (94).
Adding to the depth of the relational violence at the heart of the institution of slavery, it bears mentioning that many who endured slavery in the US saw their freedom not just to care for those they loved in life, but even in death, systemically attacked. Such was the experience of Frederick Douglass, who shares in his biographical writings that, in regard to his birth mother, “[h]e was not allowed to be present during her illness, at her death, or burial.” ([Reference Douglass1845] Reference Douglass1994, 16). Similar experiences affect the lives of many incarcerated individuals today, who cannot return home to be with their loved ones as they lie dying or attend memorial services afterwards.Footnote 11 The same is true for many immigrants who are prevented from safely and freely traveling across borders in such times of grief and hardship as well as those in the LGBTQIA+ community whose caring relationships are not recognized by hospital admittance policies, for instance, or in legal rights.Footnote 12
It is through such agonizing and dehumanizing attacks on relational life that slavery works to undermine a sense of personhood and of social worth at the very source from which both are born: relationships of caring for and being cared for by others in genuinely needed, legitimately wanted, and mutually affirming ways. To experience social death is to be forcibly prevented from materially caring for those one loves and to be unable to receive their care in turn. Patterson quotes Callicles in Plato’s Gorgias, who may have explained it best when he conjectured that what makes one a “slave” in this system of violence is that “when [one] is wronged and trampled upon, he is unable to help himself, or any other about whom he cares.” (Plato 1937, vol. 2, 543; quoted in Patterson Reference Patterson1982, 8 and Guenther Reference Guenther2013, xxii). Yet despite the systemic violence turned against them and the injustice it bespeaks in relationship to genuine needs to care for those one loves, it is crucial to also recognize that those in such situations nonetheless do often find powerful ways to sustain caring relationships of both the affective and material sort. As Guenther explains, and as Everett’s James narrates so powerfully, such resilient and subversive relationships of care are always also acts of resistance, formed and maintained in ways that defy systems geared towards the impoverishment of one’s chosen relational bonds and the dehumanization of those so impoverished through this assault on their relational lives (Guenther Reference Guenther2013, xxi).Footnote 13
2.1 Overturning Maslow’s hierarchy
One reason such assaults on relational life are so egregious is because of the vital importance of having sufficient, meaningful opportunities to gratify genuine needs and legitimate wants to care for others in many human lives. These needs are vital to human welfare insofar as they emerge from one of the keystones of personhood—being enfolded in positive, mutually affirmative relationships of care in both the affective and material sense. Whereas Maslow’s famed hierarchy of need (Reference Maslow1943) treats physiological needs for food, water, sleep, health, and more as the most fundamental of all human needs and leaves social needs (such as the need for love, respect, and esteem) for higher—and thus less pressing—levels of his pyramid, human needs to care for and to be cared for by others often trump physiological concerns. We see this in the fact that many people would opt to go to the aid of a friend or loved one in serious peril at the expense of a meal or a good night’s sleep, and often even at the risk of their own physical safety.
Kimberley Brownlee (Reference Brownlee2020b) makes a similar point about the shortcomings of Maslow’s pyramid. Whereas Maslow places our needs for love and belonging as well as our needs for esteem and respect on the third and fourth level of his pyramid respectively, Brownlee follows a growing number of neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers in moving social needs to the first order of necessity. As she explains, “We are so deeply social that meeting our social needs—for decent human contact, acceptance within a community, companionship, loving relations, and interdependent care—is more important than meeting almost every other need we have.”Footnote 14 Certainly, it seems, Mr Reed, in the moment described above, would have opted to swap food, water, shelter, or sleep for the opportunity to end his sister’s suffering if such a choice hadn’t been heinously stripped from him. In fact, if Patterson’s analysis is correct, the institution of slavery depends on the profundity of needs to materially care for, as well as to be cared by, those we love for its power, for it is in systemically working to deny these profound forms of need their satisfaction that it finds one of its most efficient tools of dehumanization and through which it issues one of its most violent assaults on human freedom.
To live decent, let alone flourishing, lives as the profoundly relational creatures we are, then, it is imperative that the social and political conditions of our shared world do not bar any human being from sufficient, meaningful, and legitimate opportunities to materially care for the wellbeing of those whose wellbeing matters to them, where that care is likewise genuinely needed and/or legitimately wanted by those to whom it is extended. This is because, as I have argued, amongst the most fundamental, vital, and genuine of human needs are just such needs to care for others who matter to us. These needs are so strong and can run so deep that, absent social and political conditions supportive of opportunities to satisfy them, it may not be possible for many people to live even minimally decent human lives.
Brownlee gives further voice to the depth of our needs to contribute to the wellbeing of those we care about when she writes:
[S]ustaining other people goes as much to the heart of what it means to be human as social access does. Being human means, first, having a deep interest in offering our care and company to others, usually to members of our own species, and notably to the people with whom we are already connected (if such people exist). Second, it means having a deep interest in others accepting our offer at least some of the time. As we mature, we develop a fundamental need to be needed, not just a wish to be wanted. (2020a, 16)
Yet Brownlee’s notion of a “need to be needed” is different from my notion of a need to care for those one loves, insofar as it suggests an underlying psychological motivation to hold a place of heightened significance in the life of at least some other person(s) at least some of the time. While this may indeed be a psychological need that most human beings have, and while being needed can certainly serve to remind us of our own value in times of doubt, it also suggests that some “needs to be needed” could harmfully seek to aggrandize the self in relationship to others, demeaning those they purport to care for in the process. Genuine needs to care for those one loves, in contrast, reflect, first and foremost, the importance to the quality of one’s own life in seeing beloved others cared for and supported. A genuine need to care for others is not fundamentally about needing or wanting the recipient of that care to need you, but about one’s own need to see them at least adequately cared for, while also often entailing a legitimate want to participate in providing that care as part of expressing one’s love.
Building a bridge to the paper’s final section, I end here by stressing that having sufficient opportunities to extend care to those one loves, in expression of one’s own relational agency and positive investments in the wellbeing of others as well as in accordance with the interests of those to whom that care is extended, is also vital to many people’s self-care. This is so, for one, because it is through our relationships to others that we so often come to understand and evaluate ourselves: our sense of self-respect, self-esteem, and even our basic sense of humanity is profoundly informed by the relationships through which we not only receive care from others but extend it to them. Caring not only for others, but caring for ourselves, then, means working to combat egregious forms of oppression, injustice, and dehumanization that unjustly strip some groups of genuinely needed and legitimately wanted opportunities to materially care for those they love.
3. Caring for others and caring for oneself
In turning to focus more explicitly on the implications of genuine needs and legitimate wants to care for others in relationship to the issue of self-care, it is crucial to stress that caring for someone, when understood as an affective attitude rather than just a material form of labor, can give their welfare a profound and unique degree of importance to one’s own wellbeing. This is because, as Harry Frankfurt notes, care—or at least, I would qualify Frankfurt’s point by adding, care of this sort—has the extraordinary power of making what one cares about matter to the one doing the caring: care, Frankfurt argues, always involves some degree of identification between oneself and the subject or object of one’s care such that what happens to the persons or things we care about also necessarily affects us (1998, 92). Hence, when one cares about someone or something, the harms and benefits that befall that person or thing redouble in related harms and benefits to oneself.
Care is a much-debated notion used in different ways across philosophical works. In “Love and justice” (Reference Gheaus2017), for instance, Anca Gheaus defines care in a way that strips it of the very quality Frankfurt makes central to it. Gheaus’s essay is one of a wider set of emerging works in feminist political theory, as is Brownlee’s, that seeks to address the ways in which having fair opportunities to contribute to the good of others is a component of justice. More specifically, Gheaus contends that not just receiving love but giving it “is constitutive of (even minimal) flourishing for the vast majority of people.” (739) Yet while this claim may initially seem quite similar to the thesis of my paper, Gheaus goes on to draw a distinction between love and care that reserves for love alone the very quality which defines “care” as explained by Frankfurt above.
It is uniquely in love, Gheaus contends, that “the lover’s own well-being is not independent from the well-being of the beloved” and thus, she goes on to argue, “if the beloved’s life goes badly for her, the lover’s life also goes worse.” (740). The basis of this tether between the welfare of the lover and their beloved, she argues, is that love “is motivated by the individuality of the beloved,” while care, as she understands it, is not necessarily so (739). Although “[c]aring for someone,” she contends, “is a disposition to benefit that person,” a caring disposition can arise from a sense of duty alone in a way that love cannot (740).
Care as a material form of labor can indeed follow from a sense of duty alone and be devoid of any positive affective bonds, just as it can arise from contractual obligations and come at the expense of attending to crucial elements of one’s own welfare even when positive affection is present. The later conflict is the frequent experience of many new parents who struggle night after night for sufficient sleep as they labor to care for the needs of infants who hardly ever sleep for the long stretches of time adults tend to require for their health. Yet in the case of genuine needs and legitimate wants to materially care for those one loves, the kind of care motivating such needs and wants is moved by a personal and affective attitude of investment in the welfare of the cared-for party. Furthermore, it is the kind of care that results in harm to oneself if it goes unfulfilled, for the motivation of this particular kind of care is in fact love itself as Gheaus understands the term. This quality is one of the chief reasons why having sufficient opportunities to materially care for others for whom one genuinely needs and legitimately wants to care, and who genuinely need and/or legitimately want to receive that care in turn, as well as exercising these opportunities at least some of the time, can be a crucial component of caring for oneself.
To better explain what I mean by “care” in this connection with love, it is helpful to invoke Eva Kittay’s notion of not just care simpliciter, but good care in “When caring is just and justice is caring” (Reference Kittay2001). As Kittay explains, and as the tension between Frankfurt and Gheaus’s use of the term reveals, care has many different faces. Yet while it can certainly be a form of labor as well as something one may have a duty to perform, Kittay clarifies that care can also be both an attitude and a virtue. Speaking to the distinction between the labor and the attitude of care, she writes: “As labor, [care] is the work of maintaining ourselves and others when we are in a condition of need.” In contrast, the attitude of care “denotes a positive, affective bond and investment in another’s well-being.” (560). Lastly, the virtue of care makes another’s end a part of one’s own good insofar as the caregiver “comes to view the interest of the charge as part of her own well-being.” (561–62).Footnote 15
Caring, when it denotes such an affective attitude and virtuous disposition in relationship to other subjects with interests of their own, produces ties to those same others through which one’s own wellbeing rises and falls in accordance with what befalls them: the kind of relationships that Frankfurt’s account of care captures. Such ties can generate profound forms of joy and enrichment in our lives, allowing for the gratification we take in other’s successes and for some of the deepest and most meaningful forms of connection we experience all told. At the same time, however, these ties produce vulnerabilities to being harmed ourselves through the harms that befall them. These same ties can thus be turned against both ourselves and those we care about in the service of oppression, dehumanization, and abuse.
In the instances considered above, it is, first, the ability to carry out the material labor of care that is under assault, while the personal investment in the welfare of others that Gheaus terms “love” and that Kittay’s second and third sense of “care” captures, persists throughout these onslaughts (although not necessarily without harm done). Hence, another way to conceptualize this unique form of violence is as that of a forced division between (1) the attitude and virtue of care and (2) care as a material act and form of labor. Care as an attitudinal and dispositional relationship to another person that tethers one’s own wellbeing to theirs persists, while care as the genuinely needed and legitimately wanted material practice of actively expressing that bond through supportive actions endorsed by the intended recipient is stymied.
The forms of enrichment one can experience through care as both an attitude and a virtue are some of the most meaningful in human life. Correlatively, the harms one can suffer as a function of this sort of caring relationship going unfulfilled in material acts that positively better the lives of those to whom such bonds tether one, as the testimonies invoked above serve to show, can also be amongst the deepest and most devastating. It is a grave injustice when such harm is forcibly inflicted on some people and groups in the service of oppression and dehumanization, denying genuine needs and legitimate wants to care for those that matter most to us material expression. In turn, fighting against this injustice and for opportunities to materially care for beloved others in accordance with the genuine needs and legitimate wants generated by the attitude and virtue of other-directed care can also be a radical form of self-care, as can nurturing mutually affirming relationships that give rise to such needs and wants in the first place.
3.1 Counterarguments and conclusions: radical self-care in the context of oppression
I have to learn to love myself before I can love you or accept your loving. You have to learn to love yourself before you can love me or accept my loving. Know we are worthy of touch before we can reach out for each other … And these are enormously difficult to accomplish in an environment that consistently encourages non-love and cover-up, an environment that warns us to be quiet about our need of each other, by defining our dissatisfactions as unanswerable and our necessities as unobtainable. (Lorde Reference Lorde1984, 175)
Today as in the past, many genuine needs and legitimate wants to care for those one loves, as I have written about elsewhere (Wolfe Reference Wolfe2023), continue to be stifled or concealed by, to quote Audre Lorde, “an environment that consistently encourages non-love and cover-up, an environment that warns us to be quiet about our need of each other, by defining our dissatisfactions as unanswerable and our necessities as unobtainable.” Such an environment, as Lorde’s own work stresses, is exemplified in heterosexism. It also lurks in the ways many cultures continue to reserve recognition of the heights of loving and caring relationships for biological, rather than chosen, families, and in institutional barriers that unjustly block some people from actively engaging in relationships of material care-giving that are genuinely needed and legitimately wanted by both the would-be caregivers and the recipients of that care alike. Such an environment demands that we strive, as part of a liberatory practice of self-care, to contest the denial of many such genuine needs and legitimate wants to care for others.
Lorde’s words might also apply, however, to the current environment of inequitable distribution of care labor in the US and around the globe today, which continues to fall disproportionately on the shoulders of women, and on the backs of women of color and immigrant women most of all. Disparities in performing the labor of care don’t just haunt women in their relationships with men but tend to track with relationships of privilege and oppression among social groups more broadly, such that people who are white are disproportionately on the receiving end of the care labor provided by women of color, and wealthy individuals in general of that provided by those in low-pay service roles. This aspect of the current environment surrounding the labor of care can make it challenging for many people to disentangle their own genuine and self-affirming needs to materially care for others, motivated by the attitude and virtue of care, from the weight of unjust social expectations for some groups to take on a disparate amount of care work.
Efforts to better attune ourselves to the reality of genuine needs and legitimate wants to care for others which positively couple our own interests with those of others we love, as well as to the difference between such needs and wants and harmful social impositions of caring labor, affection, and disposition alike that come wholly or primarily at one’s own expense or at that of other persons and groups, are thus equally necessary to a radical practice of self-care. For this, too, is a crucial part of the socially and personally transformative work of developing and maintaining positive, mutually beneficial relationships with others. Indeed, as Bhandary points out, the coupling that occurs between own’s own interests and those of the subject of one’s care, where care takes the form of both an attitude and a virtue and not only of labor, has been critiqued by some feminists as being “a core component of gendered subordination” and as reflecting “deformed desires that represent the internalization of a dominant patriarchal order.” (2020, 79). While Bhandary insists that there is nothing inherently self-diminishing about caring for others, and that doing so is often rightfully deserving of praise, the oppressive and unjust distributions of care work in the world today, she contends, can serve to deform other-directed attitudes and dispositions of care by rendering them self-demeaning (80). Likewise, having too much of the burden of materially caring for others to whom one does not have genuine needs and legitimate wants to care imposed on some racialized and gendered groups, with women of color chief amongst them, while others are exempted from that responsibility, has long been one of the chief impediments to the realization of the very precious freedom to care for those one loves for women of color (Bhandary Reference Bhandary and Carter2025, 120).
Even when people disproportionately burdened with care labor do succeed in cleanly decoupling their own genuine needs and legitimate wants to care for others from unjust social burdens imposed on them, this environment of chronic injustice concerning care work makes it difficult for many to reduce the amount of care-giving labor they perform. As Bhandary writes, “In the world as it is today, the people who are coded as part of the group of people who should be caregivers are expected to be other-directed and caring in their attitudes, attention, and action. When members of this group do not comply with this expectation, they may be met with anger, hostility, and other penalties in all spheres of life.” (2020, 180). Elizabeth Brake (Reference Brake, Brownlee, Jenkins and Neal2022) speaks to this point as it concerns emotional care work in particular when she notes that “[w]omen’s performance of emotional [caretaking] labour can manifest a genuine, and valuable, attitude of care. But performance of emotional labour in public settings can also be motivated by fear, because non-conformity with gendered expectations of emotional labour can meet with aggression.” (222)
In drawing heightened attention to genuine needs and legitimate wants to materially care for those one loves and to the harm that can be done to the would-be caregiver as well as the intended recipient of that care when opportunities to gratify such needs and wants are systemically stifled, it is hence crucial to always also keep these current injustices concerning care at large in mind. Efforts to rectify injustices in opportunities to care for chosen others, such as I have argued follow from even the most basic commitment to human welfare, must accordingly go hand-in-hand with those that promote just redistributions of care work all told, as well as transformations in the cultural and social norms surrounding both the attitude and the virtue of care. For while having sufficient, meaningful opportunities to materially care for those one loves can be vital to one’s own wellbeing as well as to that of beloved others, having outsized expectations to do the work of care, or even uphold the affective attitude and disposition that gives rise to genuine needs and legitimate wants to care for others in the first place while others shirk these kinds of relationships, can turn these otherwise valuable connections into sources of depletion. Indeed, care belongs to an odd class of goods in human life of which too much can in fact be a bad thing (Brake Reference Brake2023, 466).
In a climate of disparity in social expectations surrounding caring and in privileges to exempt oneself from the labor of care and the disposition toward it, we must always also be vigilant, Brake argues, in resisting conceiving or treating any person or group—including ourselves—as a mere resource for the support of another person or group’s wellbeing (2023, 472). I agree with Brake about how important this resistance is. Yet I believe it is something that can and should be practiced while also recognizing and embracing the vital importance to many people’s own self-care of having sufficient, meaningful opportunities to materially care for those they love in accordance with genuine needs and legitimate wants of their own and those of the intended recipients. In fact, being reduced to nay more than a prop for the material wellbeing of others can serve to counteract success in caring for those to whom one stands in mutually loving relationships. Although there certainly are exceptions, such as the example above of sacrificing one’s own much-needed rest to care for an infant in the dead of the night, there are also many situations in which caring for those one loves and who love you in turn demands attending to a bi-directional confluence of interests: serving oneself last at the family dinner table night after night in deference to one’s own child’s or partner’s hunger, for instance, however well-intentioned it might be, can be painful and frustrating to those same family members when relationships of caring affection and virtue are mutual, just as it can potentially be demeaning to you.
Audre Lorde turns attention, in the epigraph above, towards the importance of learning to love oneself in an environment with characteristics hostile to the honoring of our love for each other: “I have to learn to love myself before I can love you or accept your loving. You have to learn to love yourself before you can love me or accept my loving,” she proclaims (175). Learning to love oneself can serve to mitigate against the violence of denying our genuine needs and legitimate wants for each other. Yet, equally importantly, it can also better attune us to those genuine needs and legitimate wants that are squarely our own. Such a practice of self-love may even be a condition, as Lorde implies, of truly loving others from a place of authenticity and with respect for their full selves as much as our own.
What might be required to better come to love ourselves in the environment of injustice in the distribution of care work and the denial of just opportunities to materially care for those one loves described above? While I can only begin to explore an answer to this question with these closing words, I suggest that we might look to the wisdom of Lorde herself in recognizing the importance of defying social expectations regarding what one’s relationships with others ought to be like, especially when such defiance honors one’s authentic self, celebrates and furthers positive, mutually affirming relationships, and refuses to rest satisfied in enduring joyless or self-diminishing ones. Self-love may also take the form of resisting the severance of those relationships that matter most to us, raising us up in all our authenticity together with those for whom we continue to care, or developing newly caring relationships in resistance to conditions of relational injustice and oppression.
I end in noting, lastly, that the presence of genuine needs and legitimate wants to care for those one loves in human life makes critically investigating who and what we care about and asking why we care as we do crucial ethical and political gestures in a radical practice of self-care. For some investments in caring for others—in all three senses invoked above—can indeed be self-harming, while others might contribute to the racist dehumanization of certain identity groups, perpetuate sexism, and more. This is in part because our own abilities to recognize, as well as our genuine needs and legitimate wants to respond to, the genuine needs and legitimate wants of others are inevitably inflected by systems of power. Critically interrogating our investments in caring for others in an unjust, sexist, and racist world—especially those that reach to the very core of our sense of self and thus may usher in tremendous, even life-shattering, forms of harm if left unsatisfied—has the potential to produce deep disorientation in one’s life. Such disorientation comes with pain and often the shaking, if not the very undoing, of one’s existing relationships, causing immense uncertainty. Yet it can also usher in liberating forms of self-transformation and provoke mutually beneficial alterations in relationships. Invoking a phrase introduced by Annette Baier (Reference Baier1982), we might dub this critical interrogation “caring about caring” itself. I close in noting that caring about caring itself, by being willing to critically interrogate these investments and take steps to begin to transform them when they fail to truly promote one’s own good as well as that of others, is amongst the most urgent ethical and political responsibilities of our times, marked as they are by the forms of injustice concerning care itself so many feminist and anti-racist thinkers have worked tirelessly to identify and continue to fight to transform.
Katharine Wolfe is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at St Lawrence University and holds a Ph.D. from Stony Brook University. Her work focuses on relational approaches to social, ethical, and political issues informed by feminist philosophy, and often engages with both the continental and analytic traditions. She has published in journals such as International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, Environmental Ethics, Feminist Philosophical Quarterly, Southern Journal of Philosophy, and more. She also works in public philosophy.
