According to the philosopher Martin Heidegger, our very being-in-the-world, our being there or Da-sein as he called it, is characterized by care. It is not an occasional or episodic feature of our human being. Most of our care, of course, is devoted to ourselves: Da-sein, according to Heidegger, “is that being whose being is an issue for itself”. We look after our being in a myriad different ways as we pursue a multitude of goals, creating or running away from narratives of ourselves; and of course we also care for those close to us – lovers, friends, relationships and dependents. And we care for the things we like – our possessions – and the parts of the environment that impinge on us. This care can be self-centred, as it mainly is, or other-centred, where we forget ourselves in thinking of the needs of others.

I am not going to say anything about this everyday kind of caring, huge and hugely important though it is. I am going to focus on another, also very important but rather problematic, form of caring: paid, professional caring for people who are often super-ficially the least attractive or glamorous of our fellow creatures and who may make very great demands because they are ill, or are for some other reason unable to take care of themselves, such as having learning disability, or suffering from dementia, and whose behaviour may test the sympathy we feel, or most certainly should feel, for their suffering.