Caring about Deliberation, Deliberating about Care

Abstract

If care matters, how we talk about care matters—and we should care about how such talk takes place. Dialogue about institutional and informal practices of care is widely recognized as an important part of shaping such practices and holding them to account. But what kinds of dialogue and what kind of work should they do? This article considers the relationship between theoretical accounts of deliberation (especially in recent literature on deliberative democracy) and ways care is conceived and provided. I argue that models of deliberation have tended to be couched in overly rationalistic and idealized terms, making it hard to relate them to the messy and compromised circumstances of real-life deliberation about what matters. These problems are echoed when we find rigid distinctions between ‘care’ and ‘justice’. I argue that both dichotomies (between care and justice and between reason-based and other forms of contributions to deliberation) are inherently problematic and unhelpful to the cause of thinking through better ways of realizing care relations. A brief case study of ethics workshops involving academics, social care practitioners, caregivers and care receivers is used to explore the practical dynamics of deliberation about care and consider how close we might come to achieving genuine parity between the participants in such settings.

Keywords:

• deliberation
• democracy
• equality
• ethics of care
• inclusion
• justice
• participation

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for very helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this article to participants at the conference ‘Deliberation and Transformation: Challenges through the Ethics of Care’ in Stuttgart, October 2013 and to two anonymous reviewers for this journal.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This example is used because of my direct experience of the workshops in action. While a fuller study of academically informed ‘real-life’ deliberative practice involving practitioners, service users and carers is beyond the scope of this article, it is important to note related discussions in the literature. See, amongst a growing field of relevant examples directly applying deliberative theory to different social issues and arenas: Abelson et al. (2003, 2013) on deliberation's potential roles in the health sector and bioethics (distinct of course, but with significant areas of resonance with our own context here); Barnes (2002) on disabled people's participation in deliberative processes at local government level; Doherty (2013) on challenges surrounding processing the results of deliberation in public forums; Martin (2012) on a forum, in some ways analogous to the one discussed here, designed to inform public service provision; and Paasche (2010) on the involvement of homeless people in the formation of homelessness-related policy.