The theory of liberal dependency care: a reply to my critics

ABSTRACT

This author’s reply addresses critiques by Daniel Engster, Kelly Gawel, and Andrea Westlund about my 2020 book, Freedom to Care: Liberalism, Dependency Care, and Culture. I begin with a statement of my commitment to liberalism. In section two, I defend the value of a distinction between conceptions of persons in the real world and in contract theory to track inequalities in care when indexed to legitimate needs. I argue, as well, that my variety of contract theory supplies the normative content needed to reject the subordination of women of color. Acknowledging the enduring danger of expressive subordination, I emphasize my theory’s compatibility with the full social inclusion of people with disabilities. Section three then defends liberal dependency care’s compatibility with radical critique and transformative change by emphasizing the abstract nature of its core theoretical module. Finally, in section four, I reaffirm conceptual distinctions between autonomy skills, care skills, and a sense of justice by explicating their theoretical roles. In that section, I also embrace Westlund’s insight that theorists of justice need to have skills enabling responsiveness to other perspectives. To this new requirement for actual theorists of justice, I further add that we must attain capacities to engage critically with our society’s norms. Thus, the final section of this article supplements the justificatory module of liberal dependency care, building from the necessary conditions specified as two-level contract theory toward an account of necessary and sufficient conditions for this liberalism’s justificatory module.

KEYWORDS:

• Liberalism
• contract theory
• care ethics
• disability
• feminism
• distributive justice
• race
• autonomy

Acknowledgments

In addition to my appreciation for Daniel Engster, Andrea Westlund, and Kelly Gawel’s thoughtful engagements with my work, I am hugely grateful to Amy Mullin for her editorial expertise. My thanks also go to Diana Tietjens Meyers and Tamara Metz for their valuable referee reports. These articles originated in an Author-Meets-Critics session in February 2020 at the Central American Philosophical Association meeting in Chicago, and I thank the program committee for organizing that session. Finally, I thank CRISPP’s editor, Richard Bellamy, for his support for this symposium.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For the original source of this usage of ‘grafting’ another onto oneself, see Frye (1983, p. 66), for whom it is part of arrogant perception. I employ it in Maria Lugones’ sense, who explains that she grew up in Argentina seeing people graft the substance of servants onto themselves (1987, p. 4).

2. For further elaboration, see the next section.

3. It is compatible with the idea of ‘global care chains’ (Hochschild, 2000).

4. For substantive assessments of the relationship between contract theory and racial and sexual domination, see (Mills 1997; Mills & Pateman 2007). Their accounts overlap with, but differ from mine, for which caregiving arrangements are the salient organizing principle.

5. The arrow of care map should be employed in what Nancy Fraser calls the ‘interpretive justification’ (Fraser, 1989, p. 312) of needs.

6. In the U.S., of course, gender is another significant sorting factor for caregivers. My theory is a framework with which to accurately capture the variability of caregiving arrangements across contexts and countries, with the concepts ‘customary care practices’ (116) and ‘the arrow of care map.’

7. Here I use ‘understandings’ in Walker’s (2007) sense.

8. Perhaps a sense of justice would simply arise from living in a just society. See Rawls (1999, Section 86). In the meantime, though, a sense of justice should be taught.

9. The content of this education should be inspired by Jose Medina’s account of metalucidity. According to Medina, ‘Meta-lucid subjects are those who are aware of the effects of oppression in our cognitive structures and of the limitations in the epistemic practices (of seeing, talking, hearing, reasoning, etc.) grounded in relations of oppression: for example, the invisibilization of certain phenomena, experiences, problems, and even entire subjectivities’ (Medina, 2013, p. 192).

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Asha Bhandary

Asha Bhandary is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa, USA. Her research develops a form of liberalism that addresses the human need for care and its implications for just social forms, with particular attention to race and gender. In addition to her monograph Freedom to Care: Liberalism, Dependency Care, and Culture (Routledge, 2020), she is co-editor of Caring for Liberalism: Dependency and Liberal Political Theory (Routledge, 2021). Her published work also includes articles in the Journal of Political Philosophy, Hypatia, Social Theory and Practice, Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, and the Journal of Philosophical Research.