관계적 돌봄의 철학: ‘필요의 노동’을 넘어 ‘정치적 행위’로

Abstract

This article aims at reviewing the meaning of care at present, when socialization of care is being rapidly extended. As care activities have been traditionally conducted by women, feminists have focused on the issue of caring. Main concerns of discussions and debates on caring in feminist perspectives have included how fairly burdens of caring, which were unfairly imposed to women, should be shared and compensation for reproduction labor should be made. However, in the reality where high tech robots are introduced into the field of care, the approach to care as just an issue of necessary labor is limited to reveal social value of care. In order to overcome this limitation, it is necessary to pay attention on the argument by the feminist ethics of care considering the core of caring as humane practice responding to vulnerability. In the ethics of care understanding caring as relational value and practice, it is insisted that caring starts from concerns for vulnerability of a life which should depend on others. Caring without humane concerns is just ‘service’ or ‘management’ but it cannot be care of the genuine meaning of ‘care’. The reason is, even though machines might provide and manage services required for caring, we could not expected concerns, caring, responsibilities, mutual trust, and so on, which are required for care relations, from them. Therefore this article makes a suggestion that socialization of care should be oriented to organize the ‘relation of dependency’ between care-givers and care-receiver in order to make practice of caring as ethical and political activities to link human relations.