 Whether understood as an activity, relationship or disposition geared towards meeting needs, care has been attributed universal moral value. Many care ethicists were interested in the crucial role of care-giving for agency and for individual and species survival. First, without receiving care within relationships, infants are unlikely to survive, let alone thrive (Ruddick 1989). Moreover, care is necessary for the coming into existence of persons: it is only within relationships with good care-givers that children can acquire moral knowledge and dispositions and, ultimately, full agency (Held 1993). Similarly, some care ethicists argue that friendship is necessary for developing a rich sense of autonomy, since friends give us the most direct access to particular values and conceptions of the good (Friedman 1993) Second, as Eva Kittay argues, care has universal value because most individuals require it to different degrees at different moments throughout their lives beyond infancy or childhood: some of us only during illness and old age, while others—people who are chronically ill or disabled—more or less continuously (Kittay 1999).