You often hear clichés about the importance of home such as, "Home is our safest refuge," "Home, sweet, home," and the like. Unfortunately these sayings never fully capture what it is about our home that we most value. Home is a place out of the view of others where we can be ourselves, which we can be intimate with others, where, like few other environments, we can control, arrange, and master.

We get a glimpse of those cherished values when they are jeopardized. A remodeler decamps in the kitchen, a cleaning person invades the bedroom's crevices, and suddenly we are living in a glass house for others to see our true humanity—without masks or defenses, and perhaps with awkwardness about how to interact with these intruders. With these incursions, our comfort level in our home is set on edge.

Imagine if this occurred regularly. Worse yet, if it occurred when we were vulnerable and dependent and needed to have a relative stranger assist in activities that we once accomplished effortlessly and privately.

Over the past two years a team gathered at the Park Ridge Center investigated what it is that we value in our home and how it may be placed in jeopardy when home care is given. The team explicitly set aside standard tools for moral analysis such as autonomy and beneficence. They wanted to understand how the humanity of all those who participate in home care is promoted or imperceptibly eroded away.

For the person cared for, are there ways to protect and encourage the values that help them flourish, even in their diminishing capacity? Given the intimate setting and nature of the care, should the caregiver be treated as family, and if not, what are the boundaries? For the caregivers, what are the parameters of caregiving that will ensure respect for the care receiver's humanity, prevent coercion, and encourage fair treatment? As a profession largely composed of underpaid women, what should be their posture towards receiving gifts and alternative forms of compensation? And how far is it necessary for society to go in regulating the interactions between caregiver and receiver?

As baby boomers and their parents age and struggle to stay at home, a growing portion of the population will have an opportunity to experience first-hand what can go right or very wrong in home care. These issues will not create public controversy like life and death issues, transplantations, genetic medicine—the stable of bioethical concerns. Rather the significance of these mundane daily activities will likely go unnoticed and undiscussed, even though the quality of care can deeply affect a sense of self and well-being.

Before that point, perhaps it would be useful to take into account what kinds of actions and virtues will be necessary for ourselves and caregivers so that we can retain our integrity and humanity.