Trying to define the nature of care when you are a health care professional inevitably means going back to the very source of your professional commitment. Caring, an essential form of responsibility for the other, is thus revealed as a way of behaving toward other people, as an active and concrete commitment testifying as much to the humanity of the one who gives it as to that of the one who receives it. Starting with the notion of the “phenomenology of human capacity,” Paul Ricœur thinks of independence in terms of capacity. He draws upon the work of the Indian economist Amartya Sen published in the 1980s on the notion of capabilities. This leads to conceiving disease or disability as a lack of “elementary” or “basic” capacity. According to Ricœur, this notion of capacity can only be understood by looking at its opposite: vulnerability. In this way, only a weakened frail person can be called upon to become independent. Thus the human being, and particularly the ill human being, must be looked upon as both vulnerable, and thus “suffering”, and capable, and thus “active.”