When Kindness Feels Heavy: Why Care Needs Justice

Dick Gariepy | Big Thinky Ouchey

Gratitude fills me for their kindness; grief follows when the bill for others’ crimes arrives in their name

The Irony of Needing What I Preach.

I am a life coach who talks a lot about the importance of care. My philosophy is grounded in care ethics the idea that caring for one another, attending to relationships and needs, is a fundamental moral principle. This perspective was famously articulated by psychologist Carol Gilligan, who showed that paying attention to specific people and contexts caring is an alternative, but equally valid way to approach moral problems, alongside the usual focus on rules and rights.

In her research, Gilligan argued that ethics isn’t just about abstract justice; it’s also about our responsibilities to care for the real, flesh-and-blood people in our lives. I’ve built my career and values around this truth. Yet here’s the twist: for someone who preaches care, I’m terrible at receiving it. Unapologetically honest, I encourage clients to let others help them, but when I’m the one in need, I freeze. It’s a deadpan kind of irony that the universe seems to love. I know in my head that we are all interdependent, as Joan Tronto (a political theorist of care) reminds us: all human beings both give and need care, being receivers as well as givers.

In theory, I celebrate this mutual care. In practice, accepting help makes my stomach do weird flips. I feel exposed, like I’m suddenly on the wrong end of a life lesson I usually teach. A personal experience of profound kindness brought this irony into sharp focus and taught me why care alone, without justice, can feel so heavy.

Sheltered by Strangers: Mike and Roddy.

In the fall of 2024, I hit one of those life crises you don’t see coming. I won’t go into the full trauma resume, but suffice to say I found myself homeless and emotionally wrecked. After living in a tent in queens park Toronto, enter two strangers Mike and Roddy who barely knew me but took me in when I had nowhere safe to go. This wasn’t a simple offering of a couch; it was as if I’d been scooped up out of a storm by pure chance. One day I was alone on the brink of despair, the next I was sitting in Mike and Roddy’s apartment, warm food in hand, and a room all to myself. They asked for nothing in return. They insisted it was no burden. In their eyes I saw genuine concern, not pity. Their home became a refuge I desperately needed. I remember lying awake in my bed overwhelmed. The gratitude I felt was immense. Their care saved me from a situation that could have ended very badly. Carol Gilligan’s ethic of care was alive in that room: they responded to my particular, real needs out of empathy and human connection, not because of any rulebook. In that moment, the moral importance of care was not abstract at all; it was a warm blanket, a locked door, a feeling of being worth helping. Moral philosophers talk about an “injunction to care” the duty to relieve real, recognizable trouble in front of us and Mike and Roddy lived that value fully. So why did I also feel so uneasy? Alongside relief, a quiet guilt tugged at me. I was a care receiver, utterly dependent, and I hated that feeling. I kept thinking: Why did it have to be these two kind souls picking up the pieces of my broken night? Where were the institutions or systems that should have prevented this? The crisis I was in wasn’t just bad luck, it had roots in some larger injustices and failures (the details could fill another post). The people or organizations responsible for my harm were nowhere to be found. Instead, two generous individuals who had no part in causing my pain carried that cost. I felt grateful, but also terribly unfair. Their personal lives were now impacted by my emergency, and that didn’t sit right with me. This was my first visceral lesson that receiving care can be complicated. I learned that I’m more comfortable being the helper, the life coach with answers, than the person with tear-streaked cheeks accepting a midnight ride and a spare bed. Joan Tronto’s words later echoed in my mind: we must realize we are as much care receivers as caregivers.

In a political culture that prizes independence, acknowledging our need for care is hard but Tronto says recognizing our mutual dependence can actually be a source of strength.

Lying on that bed, though, I just felt the vulnerability of it. I trusted Mike and Roddy, but I didn’t trust that the world would ever repay them for what they did. I fell asleep wondering how I would ever pay this debt of kindness forward, and why the debt existed at all.

The Moral of Care: A Beautiful Imperative

These experiences pushed me to reflect on the ethics of care I hold so dear. Care ethics, as Carol Gilligan and others describe it, centers morality on empathy, compassion, and the nuances of human relationships.

Gilligan’s research revealed that many of us (of all genders) solve moral dilemmas not by coldly calculating rights and duties, but by caring about who might be hurt and how we can help.

She showed that this “care perspective” worrying about real people in concrete situations is not a lesser way to think about ethics, but a different voice that had been undervalued. In fact, Gilligan suggested that the moral imperative could be seen as a call to care: a responsibility to pay attention to actual suffering and respond to it.

I see so much truth in that. When Mike and Roddy opened their home to me, they were living out that moral imperative of care. They saw a person in distress and chose to alleviate actual trouble in front of them, real and tangible. In my lowest moments, it wasn’t talk of rights or justice that saved me, it was the hand on my shoulder, the warm meal. Care, in those moments, was everything. It was immediate and humanizing. Relational ethics, the idea that what’s morally right can depend on understanding someone’s specific context and needs was not just theory, it was what kept me alive and hopeful. As a life coach and as an advocate of care ethics, I often highlight how care involves listening, empathy, and responding to individuals uniquely. Care is inherently personal. It’s also powerful: it can transform someone’s day, even their life. My own life is proof of that. I am alive and moving forward in large part because of caring people who took my problems as their own. That’s why I continue to champion care as a core value. However, my up-close encounter with being cared for also exposed a crucial limitation. Care ethics, beautifully, asks Who is hurting and how can I help? but it doesn’t fully answer Why was this person left hurting so badly in the first place? Who else should have helped? The moral beauty of care can’t by itself fix the structures that let people fall into crisis. Gilligan once noted that ultimately we might seek a harmony of care and justice.

At the time, I didn’t grasp what that meant. Now, living through these events, I do. I understand that care is essential, but not sufficient. For care to feel right and not heavy with guilt, it needs to function within a framework of justice.

Care is Political: Learning from Joan Tronto.

This is where Joan Tronto provides some guidance. Tronto insists that care is not just personal, it’s political. In her view, caring is an active practice that society should recognize and structure, not leave only to private virtue. She breaks down the process of care into phases: first, caring about noticing and recognizing that someone has a need; second, taking care of assuming responsibility to address that need; third, care-giving the concrete work of meeting the need; and finally, care-receiving the response of the person (or people or creature) who was cared for.

When I first read about these phases, I glossed over that last one: receiving care. After all, I saw myself as the caregiver type. But lying on my new bed in a strangers home, I came face to face with the care-receiving phase. My reactions, gratitudes, guilt, relief, discomfort were part of the care process. Tronto’s framework says that how the receiver responds should inform the caregivers and the process; it’s a feedback loop.

In a healthy care process, if the receiver is distraught or feeling burdened by the help, that signals something’s not ideal. Tronto also talks about what she calls “caring with,” which she later added as a fifth phase of care. Caring with is about solidarity and trust, about caring together at the community or societal level.

It’s essentially the idea that caring shouldn’t just happen in isolated, private bubbles; it should be a collective responsibility. In a caring society, people support each other with mutual trust that everyone will do their part when they can. Tronto argues that we need to think of democracy itself as a system for distributing caring responsibilities fairly.

That means things like healthcare, social support, and justice systems are all part of “caring with” the population, so that the task of caring doesn’t fall only on the kind hearts of random individuals. When I consider my experiences through Tronto’s lens, I see clearly what was missing: the “caring with” part the solidarity, the broader support. Mike, and Roddy acted out of personal responsibility and compassion. They went through the first three phases: they noticed my need, took it upon themselves to help, and gave direct care. And I, the receiver, certainly responded with gratitude, yes, but also with signals of distress (however subtle) that this arrangement, while lifesaving, wasn’t wholly okay. The final phase, caring-with, would mean we were not alone in that caring. It would mean having a community or system in place that shares the load maybe a state fund for people in crisis, maybe an employer taking responsibility for the harm they caused, maybe just more friends and neighbours in a position to contribute so no single person feels the full weight. Caring-with means building trust that if you fall, you won’t take down your rescuer with you. It’s the solidarity piece that was absent. The result? my rescuers spent time, money, and emotional energy; and I ended up with as much guilt as gratitude. Tronto’s political ethics of care has taught me that who cares and how is a matter of justice. In our society, care often gets relegated to private life usually on the shoulders of women or the nearest willing person while our public systems pretend everyone is perfectly independent. My crisis laid that fiction bare. By treating care as purely personal, the system happily let two strangers bear what should have been a shared social burden. The care I received was heartfelt and genuine, but it was also a kind of indictment of the powers that shirked their duty. Care is political, whether we acknowledge it or not. The absence of institutional help was a political failure, one that made personal care the last resort.

Why Justice Matters (Even to a Care Ethicist).

After a lot of soul-searching, I’ve arrived at this conviction: care, by itself, cannot replace justice. We need both the gentle hands and the strong frameworks. One without the other and something vital goes wrong. Ethicist Virginia Held puts it this way: historically, there has been care without much justice (think of a traditional family a mother’s love keeping things going even if her rights were limited).

But there can be no true justice without care.

If no one ever cared for the young, the sick, the vulnerable, we wouldn’t even have persons capable of participating in a just society. Care is the bedrock of the most fundamental value, Held argues because it’s what literally keeps people alive to demand justice in the first place. Yet, as Held and others also note, an ethics of care on its own doesn’t answer everything about fairness. Care is often particular, flowing along the lines of personal relationships. Without principles of justice, care can become uneven or partial it might lack guidance on who gets cared for and who is left out. My own case was a perfect example: I was lucky to have been on that rooftop patio at the same time that Roddy was when we met for the first time and i told him my situation, and it was one in a million that Roddy was the kind of person to respond with care and not pity like most did. Not everyone is so lucky. Relying purely on individual goodwill is a recipe for inconsistency; some people have lots of support, others have none. Justice is supposed to even out those gaps, to ensure everyone is owed some basic care as a matter of rights or social obligation. I came to see that my discomfort in receiving help was partly because I knew it was discretionary, a favour, a stroke of luck not something I could count on. If I could trust that I deserved help and it would be there as a matter of course (say, through a just system), I might not have felt so guilty receiving it. Let me put it in simpler terms, almost like what I’d tell a client struggling with similar issues:

Care without justice is like balancing the world on your friends’ shoulders. Sure, they might carry you for a while out of love, but it’s not fair and it’s not sustainable. You, the cared-for, may end up feeling indebted, guilty, or ashamed, because deep down you sense that the help you got was more than what anyone should have to give alone. As one analysis puts it, care without a backdrop of justice can end up partial and unguided; it depends on who happens to notice and be willing.

It leaves holes through which people can fall.

Justice without care, on the other hand, would be like a cold policy that treats everyone equally but with no personal touch. Needs might be met on paper, yet you could still feel invisible or like just a number. A perfectly just distribution of resources is pointless if it doesn’t actually care about the human experience. Without care, systems become impersonal, maybe even inhumane. And as Held reminds us, a society that values justice but not care would be one that forgets how we all start out helpless and needing love would undermine its own foundation.

For a healthy society (and a healthy soul), care and justice must work in tandem. Care gives justice a human face; justice gives care a solid backbone. In my life, care kept me afloat; justice would have prevented me from drowning in the first place (or at least thrown a bigger lifeboat).

Toward Caring with Justice.

I remain a devotee of care. I don’t think I will ever stop believing in the power of a compassionate gesture, a listening ear, or a hot meal given freely. These seemingly small acts hold the world together. But I am no longer content to celebrate care in isolation. I am also an advocate of justice, the kind that would ensure the cost of caring for people in crisis doesn’t ruin the caregiver or weigh down the cared-for with gratitude and guilt. Justice, to me, means the burden of repair is fairly distributed. It means the institutions that cause harm or have the resources to help actually step up, so that individual kindness isn’t the only line of defence. After all I’ve been through, I have a new vision of what true support looks like. It’s me, accepting help with open arms and no knot in my stomach, because I know it’s coming from a place of both love and fairness. It’s Mike and Roddy being just two of many offering a hand, rather than the only ones. In a phrase, it’s what Joan Tronto calls “caring with” caring together, grounded in solidarity and trust that we’re all looking out for each other.

I am unapologetically honest about this now: receiving care is still hard for me, but it’s easier when I feel it’s not highlighting some injustice. When care comes with a side of justice when I feel I deserve this help and it’s not disproportionately costing someone else I can embrace it wholeheartedly. That’s the world I want to help create: one where no one has to choose between suffering alone or accepting kindness that secretly hurts, one where we can trust care without any guilt. In the end, care and justice are not opposites; they’re partners. Care without justice left me uplifted but uneasy, cradled but also let down. Care with justice, though that’s a warmth I could rest in peacefully, knowing no one is unfairly drained and no one is left behind. And that is what I would call a truly moral, and caring, world.

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Thick Thought Thumper of the week ----> Nothing to Give

Care Needs Justice