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The crisis of Covid‐19 has forced us to notice two things: our human interdependence and American society's tolerance for what Nancy Krieger has called “inequalities embodied in health inequities,” reflected in data on Covid‐19 mortality and geographies. Care is integral to our recovery from this catastrophe and to the development of sustainable public health policies and practices that promote societal resilience and reduce the vulnerabilities of our citizens. Drawing on the insights of Joan Tronto and Eva Feder Kittay, we argue that the ethics of care offers a critical alternative to utilitarian and deontological approaches and provides a street‐ready framework for integration into public health deliberations to anchor public policy and investments concerning the recovery and future well‐being of America's citizens and society .

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This commentary responds to “Home Care in America: The Urgent Challenge of Putting Ethical Care into Practice,” by Coleman Solis and colleagues, in the May‐June 2023 issue of the Hastings Center Report. More specifically, we respond to the authors’ call for “inquiry into the nature, value, and practice” of home care. We argue that the most urgently needed normative reset for thinking about care work is the replacement of dominant individualistic thinking with systemic thinking. Deepening a focus on the social, economic, and historical forces that shape the state of contemporary care work will help bioethicists to argue more effectively for improvements to working conditions. In turn, better working conditions will ease the oppositional stance between caregivers and receivers that has been set up by the current system, enabling all parties involved to better pursue the feminist ethical ideal of care.

Care has become a popular topic of conversation in the context of Covid‐19. But what will it take for the value of care to be realized when the use of “care” in corporate slogans inspires cynicism or when conflicting appeals to care dilute the concept's meaning? In this brief essay, Hastings Center postdoctoral fellow Mercer Gary suggests that building helpfully on the current interest in care as an ethical value and a form of work requires strengthening the conditions that make care possible. Two projects on which Gary is collaborating at The Hastings Center concern supporting older adults in aging in place, with one demonstrating the necessity of stable housing and the other highlighting how the labor of informal care providers is often assumed, but not provided for, in aging‐in‐place initiatives.