Introduction & The "6-Pack of Care"
I am so glad to be with you all, and I am so sorry that I can't be with you all in person because I know I would be scribbling mightily and my brain would be exploding, just as it did when I read the 6-Pack of Care.
As someone who's been writing about care in the context of gender equity and in the context of human values since 2015, suddenly I looked at this, and I saw Joan Tronto's wonderful ethics of care applied not just sort of from the local to the community and even to the global, but to a civic system that must be relational but is not necessarily human, even as it expands what we think of as human.
That was revelatory. Because in the end, I believe that these principles of care have to inform our democracy, our notion of what capitalism is, our notion of what we are, and to see it all in a 6-Pack was just an extraordinary moment.
Redefining Maslow & "Sapiens Integra"
The place where I am in my own writing and thinking about care, is how care gives us a different understanding of human nature.
Elizabeth Garlow and I wrote an article called "A Worldview of Care and a New Economics," which we published in Daedalus in January of 2025 as part of an edited volume on the social science of caregiving. And in that article, we essentially said that Maslow got it wrong with his hierarchy of needs.
Now, I understand I'm operating with a very simplified notion of Maslow, but it is the pyramid that most people know, in which you start with basic physical needs, and about halfway up there's love and belonging, and at the top there's self-actualisation, which most of us understand as a highly individualist concept.
Elizabeth and I argue: No, that's wrong. Actually, this is not a hierarchy; self-actualisation and love and belonging should be parallel needs of equal strength.
If you think about care, you understand that most human beings, if they're fortunate, their first experience in life is connection — connection to the biological parent, connection to whoever is caring for them.
At the same time, from the moment they're born, they start the process of development, which is a process of separation.
And you need both. You need connection and separation. You need an individual identity — I'm a lawyer and a professor and many other things — and a relational identity: I'm a mother, daughter, sister, wife. And both of those are important.
You need independence — again, we think of human development that way — and interdependence.
We cannot grow, and this is where your Kami concept is so powerful, we cannot grow if we are not connected to others. And finally, then, yes, absolutely we need self-actualisation, and that can be defined in many different ways, but at the same time, we need belonging.
If you look at that concept of human nature, then you suddenly see care and competition, which is really sort of a non-capitalist system, and a capitalist system, side-by-side. And again, the 6-Pack and the idea of the Kami as informing AI, but also I think human existence in a very profound way, opens the door; it goes alongside, accompanies the way I've been thinking, and Elizabeth and others have been thinking about care.
Now, I should have named our concept of a human being. Hilary Cottam and I first named her sapiens integra; Elizabeth and I built on that original concept, as Hilary has in her own work. She can be a her or a him, a non-binary, any combination, but that human being is sapiens integra. And integra, of course, means whole. So she is somebody who needs and values connection as much as separation, belonging as much as self-actualisation.
The Worldview and Ethos of Care
If you start with sapiens integra, and then you look at this idea of a Kami, it fits perfectly with our first proposition of what we call a worldview of care. And we say that strong connections are essential to human health and well-being; disconnection and misconnection can be fatal. And we say that's the first proposition of a worldview of care. And that's a relational perspective.
What the 6-Pack of Care is doing, what the idea of the Kami is doing, which is a spirit, but it's not a spirit that comes from outside; it is, at least in my understanding, my relationship to the beauty of my garden, or to the place I live, or within my family. It is a spirit that is born of relationship with one another, but equally importantly with place, with inanimate beings.
I think, when we then apply that to machines, and think that we can teach them, or program them — program doesn't ever quite work for me, but if we can enable them to be relational in that way, that's a whole different way of thinking about AI.
So, when we think about a relational perspective, and then the ethics of care that you apply in your 6-Pack, it is to me grounded in an ethos of care.
Ethics are the principles, but the ethos is the spirit, the character, that which we are grounded in and informs us.
That ethos is the spirit of healthy connection to one another, healthy connection to our environment, either place or all the way out to the planet, and really healthy connection to that which transcends us: the divine, nature, beauty, love, however you think about it, but that sense that we are but a piece and a porous part of something much, much larger.
Horizontal Relationships & The Gardener Analogy
That ethos of care interestingly then, again deeply relational, connects to your emphasis on the horizontal rather than the vertical. And here again I got very excited because I've studied networks for 30 years. I have a horizontal view of the world rather than vertical — it's the web rather than the ladder, to borrow Carol Gilligan's seminal work.
That's where you change the idea of the gardener. Because you start by saying, well, you know, we could be the gardener that programs AI; AI could be the gardener that cultivates us, we hope that's not where we go. But your notion, the Kami notion, is a different one; it's horizontal, because we shape one another. So the gardener and the garden are in reciprocal relationship.
That is actually a beautiful way of thinking about gardening. I think about Capability Brown in Britain and letting the garden be itself, and letting it shape the gardener as much as the gardener is shaping it.
So I find that to be a very powerful principle in AI and AI governance that comes from that deeper ethos of care.
The Convergence of Care and AI
I so wish that I could be hearing all of you and engaging exactly in the relational way that I am talking about.
To me, the convergence of care and AI, of care and Civic AI, and the ethos of care, the ethics of care applied to how we want to think about Civic AI, is that this is capturing the full spectrum of human experience, which has to be both individualist and competitive.
I always say as women, through women's liberation, we have spent a lot of time not wanting to be defined only by relationships, but we must also be defined by relationships.
And as we look at this tool that so many people are seeing in terms of transactions and empowerment and power, we need to think of it much more, again, in relation to us, and how can we shape that, how can we do that at local levels and then locally tied together in networks.
I think there's a convergence there between care, which is deeply, deeply human, and AI, which is machine, and yet through these principles and through this ethos, we can find a bridge that holds enormous potential for family, for community, for friendship, for different concepts really even of states and nations and planet.