Curiosity Café: The Value of Care

We will be hosting our next Curiosity Café on Tuesday, April 30th from 6:00-8:30pm at the Madison Avenue Pub (14 Madison Ave, Toronto, ON M5R 2S1).

The topic of our next café is: The Value of Care

Throughout our lives, we encounter many instances of caring action. Whether it is a mother nursing her child to sleep, your friend lending an ear while you share your feelings, or even a stranger holding the door open for you, care might be our most basic way of relating to one another. Despite this, care is not always recognized as valuable, and can even be seen as contrary to our values of independence and autonomy. From philosophy to public health, however, care is of concern, and may offer moral and practical considerations for how we should treat one another. In this cafe, we will investigate questions like:

• How does care show up in your life?
• What is valuable and beneficial about care?
• What is the relationship between care and autonomy?
• When it comes to acting ethically, what role does care have?
• When does the presence of a caring attitude seem important?
• Are there cases where it is better to be uncaring?
• Who should we care for, and how far should our care go?

Through considering our overlapping and diverging experiences of care, we will think more closely about how care shows up in our lives, its benefits, what care might reveal about our ethical responsibility to others, and how far this responsibility could extend.

Please RSVP here! You might notice that there are now two different options for RSVP-ing for our Cafés on Eventbrite. We are changing the ways that you can support our organization by implementing optional “Pay-What-You-Can” tickets, in addition to the usual "Free Ticket" option. Both serve as an RSVP to our Café! We ask that you consider making a donation when you RSVP to help us make our work and growth as an organization possible.

For those of you who haven’t had the opportunity to join us at our Curiosity Cafés and are wondering what they’re all about: every two weeks, we invite members of our community to come out to the Madison Avenue Pub to engage in a collaborative exploration of our chosen topic. Through these events, we aim to build our community of people who like to think deeply about life’s big questions, and provide each other with some philosophical tools to dig deeper into whatever it is we are most curious about.

Some accessibility-related information* about our event and the venue:

• This event involves a verbal discussion, with a handout to guide the discussion
• There will be a large-print version of the handout available
• We ask the staff at the Maddy to turn off the speakers playing music in the room we are in. Unless we end up in their “VIP” room upstairs (very unlikely!), this keeps background noise to a minimum.
• There will be earplugs available to tamper background noise
• There are about five steps up to the entrance of the Madison, and another to get in the door. In order to get upstairs, where we sometimes hold our events, there is another set of stairs that are quite steep. While we hope to be in the downstairs room, we cannot guarantee this until closer to the event date.
• There are two single stall bathrooms located downstairs that we will have access to. The other bathrooms, located on the main and upper floor, are gendered.

*We recognize that this list provides a far-from comprehensive picture of accessibility-related concerns you might have. Please feel free to contact our Café Coordinator at [email protected], or the Madison Avenue Pub (416-927-1722) with any other questions or concerns you might have.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Madison Avenue Pub, 14 Madison Avenue, Toronto, Canada