Detached altruism and the bargain care industry: Commentary on Rosemarie Tong’s “International Migrant Eldercare Workers in Italy, Germany, and Sweden: A Feminist Critique of Eldercare Policy in the United States”

My humanity is fractured if I neglect to care for vulnerable others. Indeed, if we grasp Virginia Held’s care ethics, we acknowledge that all humans are interdependent and that the vulnerable among us deserve particularly conscientious consideration—some level of care. Accordingly, I agree with Rosemarie Tong when she proposes that those who dodge caring roles marginalize themselves from society. This marginalization can occur if I squirm out of attending to my ailing family members’ needs, or if I avoid (employment or volunteer) opportunities to care for those other than my family. It can also occur if I draw an arbitrary dichotomy between “work” and care, and devalue those in caring roles. Indeed, the United States’ (and other affluent countries’) social and economic trivialization of care workers has led us to demand “bargain care” from other nations. Therefore, when we hire nondomestic—or even domestic— care workers for ailing family members, we must consider two things: (1) the possibility that we may be neglecting personal duties to directly care; and that (2) we may be pulling the worker away from his or her own family in another country and depleting that locale of their caretakers.

Those who hire another to assist one’s ailing family member may posit that they are not abandoning care responsibilities. They are correct. Annexing a non-familial care worker does allow the financier to respond indirectly to the acute needs of their loved one. The hired care worker acts as a surrogate, providing care on behalf of the financier. Still, the purest interpretation of caring is intensely intimate. The ability to care is entwined with and dependent upon interpersonal relationships and an experiential awareness of needs. Biologically, humans and other animals first learn this sort of care within family units, to promote genetic survival. Care for one’s own—“kin altruism” (Singer 2011, 11)—is the first evolutionary layer of morality, the most primitive form of care in what becomes an “expanding circle” of moral concern: family, friends, neighbors, distant relatives, fellow citizens, humans generally, and finally, other species (31).

Some may view progress as the financial ability to subcontract our duty of care and make time for more marketable (or enjoyable) pursuits. Still, I wonder: if care for our own family is care at its most rudimentary evolutionary level, what does outsourcing such an intimate, fundamental responsibility mean? Is it possible to fragment humanity in such a way that direct concern for another’s well-being is the responsibility of some, but not of others? I do not have all the answers, and I am certain the particular ramifications will vary from person to person. In Tong’s view, such compartmentalization is not preferable: an ideal human being should conduct “roughly as much care work as market work.”(55). Surely the abdication of direct responsibility to our immediate circle must carry rippling consequences to the outer circles. I do speculate that removing such a foundational brick of altruism has the potential to weaken the entire structure of care responsibilities generally. If we can justify the once-removed responsibility of care for our immediate family, it seems to me that directly caring for (hungry, sick, economically or socially disadvantaged, etc.) “Others” is more easily defensible as “someone else’s” responsibility.

We permit our prosperity to become a barrier to basic experiential care. Economic affluence facilitates “detached altruism.” Whether intended or not, isn’t this what happens when we “throw money” at a charitable organization because doing so is more convenient than physically spending time with those in need (e.g., volunteering in a soup kitchen, at a nursing home, on a foreign aid trip)? Does caring then become less nuanced in terms of intimate concern for another, and instead more a matter of aloof practicalities? This is not to say that hiring (or being) a paid care worker—or making philanthropic donations—is morally suspect. My musings only question what tampering with the...