2024-2 Feminist Ethics
Bhandary, A. (2024). “Freedom to Care, for Women of Color”. In Bloomsbury Handbook of Care Ethics, ed. Matilda Carter. Bloomsbury Press.
1. Evaluating the system of care through critical liberalism
Mainstream political philosophy has been shaped by people who occupy a social position in which they receive care without being subjected to a concomitant [수반되는] expectation to provide hands-on care to others. A person’s location in the system of care is not merely another aspect of their location in extractive [뽑아내는] and exploitative systems of wealth acquisition. Instead, the system of care includes micro-units of care like nuclear families, extended families, and community-based networks of care, as well as large scale societal systems, which include broader dynamics and trends that cut across these units, with variables including gender, race, caste, sexuality, gender identity, and class. As empirical research about global care chains (Hochschild 2000) confirms, caregivers flow globally. Various forms of paid caregiving further debunk the myth that units like the family are self-contained [자족적인]. Moreover, when paid, relations of care are often racialized and/or patterned by caste. Systems of care (Bhandary 2020, 2021) are thus social structures that overlap with other varieties of oppression, with the division of labor, and with the bounds of belonging.
In the theories written by these political philosophers, the fact that they had received care was invisible, and therefore the social worlds they justified could not be criticized through the tools of their theories. Understood through the hermeneutical resources of these theories, care for white men was assumed to be appropriate, such that it did not warrant remark or justification. Consequently, material and emotional caregiving was not tracked as a burden of social cooperation. The corresponding model of rationality embedded in the mainstream philosophical tradition has been shaped by the ease with which these men accessed care, their lack of any felt debt to their caregivers, and their facility at grafting the substance of others onto themselves.
Feminist philosophers and care ethicists debunked the falsehoods embedded in the image of human life that had been dominant in political philosophy. Counteracting [대응하다] the ideological invisibility of care (Tronto 1993), care ethicists clarified the facts of care, its value, and its role in the gendering of [white] women in the second half of the twentieth century (Gilligan 1982, Ruddick 1989).
By “care ethics,” I mean the moral and political doctrine according to which care has prima facie priority in the competition among values governing human life. According to care ethics, the caring person is the ideal moral agent (Held 2006), and a caring society is the primary social ideal (Tronto 1993).
Related scholarship in care ethics made possible a critique of liberal political theory that reveals its lacunae [빈틈] (Kittay 1999).
My theory of liberal dependency care builds from selected premises in care ethics to develop a new liberalism, one that articulates how liberalism can, and must, address the facts of dependency care (Bhandary 2010, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2020, 2021b, 2022). I employ the term care theory for those political theories, including mine, which hold that the human need for care must be addressed, but which remain agnostic [불가지론의] or critical of several more robust tenets of care ethics (see Bhandary 2021a for this definition of care theory; see also 2022, 1–2). Thus, care theories are intellectually indebted to care ethics, while simultaneously disagreeing with care ethics about whether, and when, care has priority over other values in a normative theory governing social cooperation. Care theories, therefore, may evaluate the subject of care from an alternative framework, as do liberal theories of care (Bhandary 2020, Bhandary and Baehr 2021), Marxist theories of care (Bubeck 1995), and care theories framed by the capabilities approach (Engster 2007, Robeyns 2010).
| Care Ethics | Care Theory |
| 1. The human need for care must be addressed. 2. Traditional political theories have neglected the significance of care |
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| 1. care has prima facie priority in the competition among values governing human life 2. the caring person is the ideal moral agent 3. a caring society is the primary social ideal |
1. agnostic or critical of several more robust tenets of care ethics 2. asking whether and when, care has priority over other values in a normative theory governing soical cooperation 3. the subject of care can be addressed in several different frameworks: liberal theories, Marxist theories, and the capabilities approach. |
My approach to care theory is embedded in a critical liberalism that builds on my argument that care must be included in our theories of distributive justice, and which relies on minimal premises that derive from the logic of the Humean-Rawlsian circumstances of justice (Bhandary 2010, 2016, 2020). Thus justified, the theory of liberal dependency care (LDC) prioritizes the autonomy and freedom of the individual within the constraints required for fair social cooperation, where receiving material caregiving must be included as a benefit of social cooperation.
According to my critical liberalism, the philosophical doctrine of liberalism is conceptually distinct from the actual western societies where the doctrine has been developed. With social structures permeated by racism and gender oppression, these societies have never conformed to its ideals (Losurdo 2014, Mills 2017, Bhandary 2021a). Therefore, by advancing a new form of liberalism, I am not defending the actual societies where the liberal tradition originated. On the contrary, my critical liberalism requires radical departures from the habituation of privileged persons in status quo [현재의 상황, 현상] social forms. In addition, it subjects the content and implementation of laws and policies involving governmental intervention to nonideal theoretical standards of scrutiny, thereby identifying phenomena like racially differential enforcement of laws.
From the foundations of this critical liberalism, I advance intersectional liberalism, which evaluates the role of care in social practices in ways that are explicitly informed by the intersectional social position of a minority woman in the United States, thereby integrating care theory, liberalism, and women of color feminism(s).
Intersectional liberalism evaluates the justice of a society, where the subject of justice is the system of practices (Rawls 1958). To identify and evaluate caregiving arrangements within the system of practices, we need the arrow of care map (Bhandary 2017, 2020). The arrow of care map is a conceptual scaffold to track who receives care, and from whom, in ways that evaluate system-wide patterns of inequality. It dictates that patterns of giving and receiving care should be filtered using variables based on salient social groups, while its abstract nature leaves open that there may be unexplored social categories and patterns of care not captured by the dominant understandings of social groups in a society.
The flexibility of the arrow of care map enables ongoing evaluations about how new and emerging social groups become linked to structures of care exploitation. The assessment of racialized distributions of caregiving must include the questions:
(1) Do people of color provide disproportionate amounts of care?
(2a.) Which social groups have their needs met at the highest levels?
(2b.) Are these needs met within practices that are self-contained within the group?
(2c.) Alternatively, are the group’s needs for care met through structures and processes that exploit the caregiving of people who are construed as outsiders?
When evaluating patterns of care, the smallest unit of evaluation is the individual human being. However, the arrow of care map is not committed to a metaphysical view of the self as atomistic and fundamentally individuated from other human beings. The reason individual human beings are modeled as the smallest unit is that the project seeks to track distributive injustice. Indeed, the theory within which the arrow of care map is embedded is compatible with metaphysical views of the self that assert the ontological relationality of selves. Furthermore, it leaves entirely open that people may have conceptions of the self and of lives of value according to which they are deeply intertwined with other people, and it does not dictate self-understandings founded in “rational” and self-interested bargaining. Instead, it is a model designed for the purpose of identifying distributive imbalances. If we are to identify the gendered inequality and concomitant vulnerabilities women regularly experience in virtue of maternal [모계의] roles, we must be able to track the disadvantages women experience, even when individual women endorse the state of affairs.
When we track care in a way that does not already assume the legitimacy of existing relations of care, local patterns of caregiving and globalized care relations become evident. Tracking quantities of hands-on caregiving in intensity and duration, the map yields information about how care practices are arranged within and across societies. By bracketing the legitimacy of people’s actual relationships, it can yield data that has not already embedded the background inequalities informing those assignments of care into its notion of legitimate demands for care.
Understanding our care relations in this way is necessary for evaluating the justice of the system of practices. It brings into view the way that, for instance, in the United States—where emotional care, social cohesion, and material care are invisible and undervalued—these forms of labor are often assigned to the intersectional groups with the least social power, namely, women of color and people who are legally vulnerable without the security of citizenship status. The inclusion of caregiving practices in the evaluation of our systems of social organization thus unearths [파내다, 찾다] a form of labor that coincides with subordinate status in many social hierarchies. To identify the distributive inequalities in the system of caregiving is to reveal the de facto standing of members of different social groups. This is because, as I will argue in the next section, receiving care is a form of status recognition, conveying that the person who receives the care is worthy of attention. Minimal status recognition occurs when a claim to life receives uptake [활용, 흡수].
2. Receiving care is an act of minimal status recognition
By receiving care, a person is recognized as one who can claim the attention and care of others. A minimal form of status recognition is present when a person’s social standing is recognized as sufficient to impel [해야만 하게 하다] caregiving by others.
There are no guarantees that mothers (or other birthing persons) will receive the necessary support for good starting conditions for their children. The many cases of people who are deprived of the conditions for continued life, when persecuted [박해받다] in war, stranded [발이 묶이다] in liminal [경계의] refugee camps, or restricted and thwarted [좌절시키다] in a social form hostile to their existence, demonstrate that sustained status recognition is not guaranteed for every human.
The first instance of status recognition is conferred by the gestational [임신의] body who brings the child to life, and this form of recognition itself occurs within a social practice which confers the birthing person more or less status and agency. Therefore, to receive care is to have a place in a society, where that place is often created by one’s parents and informed by one’s mother’s standing in broader society or by the presence of a familial network. Clearly, that one’s life chances are informed by the wealth of one’s family and the social standing of one’s mother is inconsistent with egalitarianism’s normative aim to secure equal standing for all persons.
Whereas receiving care at all denotes minimal status recognition, the type of care we receive, the control we have as we receive care, and the publicity of that care demonstrate varying degrees of status recognition. Care differs in both quality and the level of care one receives. In addition, and significantly for this account, the attitudina [태도의] and affective components of care convey the regard with which the caregiver holds the recipient [받는 사람] of care and the social standing of the recipient of care. Thus, deference [경의] intersects with care. Deference also intersects with subordination, so that to be a caregiver coincides with a subordinate social role in some societies.
If a care recipient has firm social standing, such as the nation-level standing of white men in public spaces and the standing men achieve within private families in patriarchy, then even a caregiver who affectively cares very little for that man but who is socially assigned as one who should provide care will nonetheless perform material caregiving (this term is from Brake 2017), or acts of caregiving. Moreover, material caregiving can give rise to affective caregiving [???]. In virtue of living in a society in which it is expected that they perform that care, the subjectivity of the caregiver may become shaped to include affectively caring for the well-being of the high-status individuals for whom they provide material caregiving. This type of shaping of subjectivity is more likely when a counter discourse is absent.
Societies structured by rigid guilds and castes, where identities were linked to forms of work, conferred social standing in explicitly hierarchical forms. The Enlightenment’s discourse of egalitarianism asserted the equal status of each individual, but it also displaced social structures in which kinship [친족, 혈연] legitimated claims to care (see also Arendt 2018). Consequently, an explicit and public commitment to the value of universal equality was accompanied by the loss of identity categories and the erosion of the kinship structures that had supplied care (see Tronto 1993, chapter 4). Losses in the social goods of care and belonging were collateral [부수적인] damage. Today, in the absence of new social structures to guide care, much care occurs in ways that are heavily shaped by capitalist social modes of organization. The result is that many societies that purport to be committed to universal and impartial ideas of moral obligation in fact revert [되돌아가다, 복귀하다] to status hierarchies, and race and gender have replaced other formal hierarchies and group-based identities. Thus, the social structures guiding the distribution of care remain obscure, and they have yet to be thoroughly subjected to the scrutiny that is required for transparency.
To have actual status rather than normative-theoretical but unrealized status, we need to be treated as someone who counts. The recognition of status as a claimant is demonstrated through visual markers, social interactions, and social policies. For instance, in Finland, which has robust social policies and low birth rates, the message that nearly every baby counts is materially conveyed by the State in the form of a gift that includes a snowsuit and diapers, which arrive in a cardboard box that can be made into a crib. Pregnant persons must have a prenatal exam in order to receive the box, which has been provided since 1938. This practice displays the way in which a general state policy to support children secures their status recognition, and how that recognition is relationally dependent on their birthing parent.
An alternative approach to securing the status recognition of individuals occurs within the unit of a community as a subgroup. So, for instance, societal subgroups convey which children are members of their group. In South Asian Bunt communities, children are embedded in relationships with relational names, where belonging within the community means that one will be well cared for. Some other South Asian communities, such as Brahmin Iyengar communities, have longstanding traditions of branding their members to indicate membership. In the US, although the needs for belonging and care have been underappreciated as matters of national concern, immigrant communities, neighborhoods, and families are examples of units of belonging within which care can take place in ways that are not dominated by market norms.
When caregiving is invisible, as it is in liberal social forms organized by a division between public and private spheres that naturalizes and minimizes the labor of care, caregivers are typically disadvantaged as measured by their share of the core primary goods. A vital step towards remedying the disadvantage is to identify care arrangements, thereby making them transparent. However, in the process of making our own practices transparent, we will find them deeply flawed, for as decades of feminist scholarship have shown, obfuscating [애매하게 만들다] norms make women’s work as caregiving invisible or, alternatively, justify it as natural. Because every existing society utilizes some set of practices to meet its care needs, liberal theorists of care should look to practices of care that exist, or that have existed in the past, in a wide range of societies. These arrangements cross public, private and commercial domains. For example, in the private sphere, gender norms assigning caregiving to girls and women serve as internal organizing principles within families, which then shape expectations about who will care for whom (Bartky 1990). Although gendered norms and arrangements are not always formalized in legal statutes or policies, they are nonetheless enforced using a variety of mechanisms, which include gender norm enforcement through teasing and social pressure, media depictions, and outright violence against people who seem to flout [어기다, 무시하다] care-related categories and tropes, such as people who are transgender.
The private nuclear family is a core caregiving institution in the United States (Fineman 2004), and the idea that women will supply care appears in many cultural narratives, norms and tropes (Meyers 2002). It is therefore unsurprising that literature about gendered inequality in marriage has dominated feminist discussions about care. However, we must go beyond the family and gender when we theorize about care. The concepts I have developed to theorize about care extend beyond assumptions that the family is the only source of care. In addition to the arrow of care map, already discussed as enabling a systems-level understanding of caregiving arrangements, customary care practices are a companion concept with which to identify public and private practices that secure care within a given social form (Bhandary 2021b).
3. Customary Care Practices
Whereas the presence of a caregiving arrangement is a universal feature of every human society, the arrangements themselves differ. I call the practices that secure care within a given social form customary care practices. Actual caregiving arrangements exist as combinations of numerous kinds of customary care practices (Bhandary 2021b). Customary care practices include principles specifying the people who are connected in the caring practices as well as the norms and values that shape their expectations and actual practices.
Customary care practices are comprised of:
(1) Unit-delineating principles. These principles are often implicit, and they specify which people are in the right kind of relationships with one another to count as fellow persons in a caring unit.
(2) Norms and values that shape expectations within the actual practice, thereby specifying the division of labor within that unit.
For instance, customary care practices include marital practices shaping entry conditions and the meaning of the family, such as arranged marriage or marriage based on romantic love, as well as conceptualizations of family units as nuclear families, extended families, chosen families, and other alternatives. Customary care practices also include explicitly designed institutions for care, such as daycare and elder-care institutions, in-home care, state-provided care, and communes. The implicit norms and values within these institutions will distribute how care is provided internally within these customary care practices, which is typically assigned by gender, birth order of children, or social vulnerability.
Including customary care practices in the subject of justice enables theorizing about micro-level practices of care in ways that make these practices’ functional role their most salient feature. For instance, a particular form of the family, such as a nuclear family, may be re-described as a customary care practice. Consequently, the concept of the customary care practice is a tool for cross-cultural theoretical work that gives us a way of talking about the broad range of existing and possible practices that serve the functional role of meeting care needs.
Many customary care practices rely on the appropriation of the labor and bodies of “outsiders.” Let us call them the appropriated. For example, when caregivers are not mothers, their labor may become invisible even while it remains essential to the functioning of society. Thus, their labor is appropriated even while they are excluded from social recognition. Their substance is grafted by their employers, for instance, and the care is received without identification. In cases where the employer characterizes the caregiver as a member of the family, the superficiality of that characterization can be revealed when the needs of the caregiver conflict with those of their employer.
4. Care work and the social ontology of “women of color”
In the United States, de facto entitlements to receive care are intimately linked to categories of race and ethnicity, both of which play important roles in an informally structured system of social inequality and role designations. As vital components of society’s system of practices, caregiving arrangements are shaped by norms, family and child-welfare law, and socialization practices that create the social ontological categories boy/girl, woman/man, designating a binary gender logic with corresponding roles in practices of caregiving. The system of care also creates a functional category for women of color, who do not share histories, but who are placed together in Western cognitive schemas as those who are not full claimants, and who are construed as ready to meet the needs of others.
When the “sight lines” (Walker 2007) of care responsibilities are not visible, social groups who can be made invisible are subsumed into the caregiving system as vessels [그릇] for the needs of others. In numerous “liberal” societies, including the United States and countries in Europe, this invisible group is women of color. As our labor is grafted [접목되다] onto the selves of others (Lugones 2003, Frye 1983), the energy we can devote to our most meaningful relationships is diminished.
Correspondingly, the intimate and familial relationships women of color prioritize are challenged by societies where we are expected to attend and respond to the “needs” white entitlement creates. What can tracking the sight lines of care in late capitalist and avowedly [공공연히] liberal societies like the US tell us about who counts? Undervalued labor that is feminized, such as daily acts of bodily repair and maintenance, is socially assigned to people of color, immigrants, and women of color. This labor is “justified” via a conceptual schema that places upon women of color a universal maternal social role, which correspondingly denies us social allowances for our own intimate relationships, thereby revealing the ideological function of this maternal trope.
Social arrangements are structured around expectations for care upon which group-based identities supervene, and which are continuous with histories of care labor. As these social arrangements interact with the social categories relevant to a particular society, a new social ontology emerges, according to which an individual’s position in the caregiving arrangement creates social expectations, and where these social positions are shaped by one’s place in the map of care, overlapping with, and adding to, known social categories, including gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality.
Our social positions in the map of care affect our social affordances, thereby shaping the terrain [지형] for agency. However, because social spaces are varied, and people’s facility in navigating them will depend on their autonomy skills, the aspects of their social positions that matter will also vary. Sometimes, they may not matter much at all, leaving instead individual subjectivity, commitments, and horizons of concern. It is therefore vital to maintain flexibility in the social ontology while including diagnostic techniques to identify what matters, where, and when.
Nonetheless, due to the strong connection between a social location as tender to others and nonwhite women’s social positions in the US, theorizing from and about this broader category is needed to unstitch [따내다] the connection between this group identity and being a resource for others. Consequently, theorizing about “women of color” as a social group that is contrastive [대조하는] with white women, where women of color are located in the system of care as receptacles [그릇, 용기] for the care needs of others, should contribute to the demise [종말, 죽음] of the ontological significance of “women of color” as a category.
To achieve the normative aim of freedom to care (Bhandary 2020), the relationship between the invisibility of care in theories of distributive justice and “women of color” as a social group must be analyzed. Because the longstanding invisibility of care work in societies enables the accretion of social inequality, a philosophical analysis of the relationship between varieties of inequality, practices of care, and social-group categories identifying the functional roles served by these social groups in our system of social organization is long overdue. Only once we have analyzed the relations that now exist may we transform them into egalitarian relations through durable change.
Although the histories, stereotypes, and norms applied to women in various nonwhite groups are highly differentiated, the social category “women of color,” defined to include the set of all nonwhite women, serves an important function in the context of the injustice of caregiving arrangements in white-dominated societies. It serves this important function as a concept in a theory of distributive justice, even when we recognize that “women of color” is not a description of shared history across identity groups and does not describe commonalities across experiences for many women who are included in the category. Instead, I define the term “woman of color” in relation to the structure of a society, which is analyzed in a theory of distributive justice as defining the parameters of the just distribution of benefits and burdens of social cooperation (see Lloyd 2004). On this view, distributive justice applies to the social entity defined by the Greek term oikos, which translates as the “economy” understood as the cooperative unit and arrangement within which human needs are met (Eichner 2021, 250).
In the absence of considered practices for care, women of color, as those who are disadvantaged in formal structures, occupy a social position that is not a full claimant position; instead, we are interacted with as substance to be used, appropriated, or grafted onto others. Therefore, when women of color act in accordance with our own priorities, these actions are often received with resistance and anger. Furthermore, when women of color prioritize the needs of our own families, asserting a domain for privacy, intimacy, and care against the societal presumption that our caregiving is the property of society and of impersonal others in society more broadly understood, we encounter additional resistance.
Elsewhere, I argue that acknowledging the social and relational nature of human beings leads to the following defeasible normative demands.
Each claimant should
(1) have access to their children,
(2) be able to maintain relationships with their elders, and
(3) be able to secure a domain for core interpersonal relationships with minimal interference.
Extrapolating [추정하다] from the relationships listed above results in a list of several freedoms. The first freedom, also serving as a normative criterion for a political theory, is freedom to care indexed to women of color. Let us call this nonideal theoretical principle of justice freedom to care for women of color. It means that women of color should have effective freedom to provide material and emotional caregiving for the people they care about. The assertion of this freedom is necessary because one of the ways individual human beings are denied full-claimant status is through deficits [부족] in this vital social good.
The effective recognition of status as a claimant occurs in degrees, and it occurs relationally. So, for instance, to evaluate whose children are recognized as worthy of care is to view the variegated phenomenon of status recognition. Because every person is someone’s child, the way the child’s normative claims receive uptake in society will be impacted by the mother’s location in the social practices. However, after the stage of dependency care, this status is not always closely linked to the mother’s standing. For instance, when a parent rejects the child, as in cases of homophobic parents of LGBTQIA+ children, the child must seek alternative sources of care, and there are established practices within queer communities that help to secure this care.
5. Freedom to care, for women of color
From these claims about the link between receiving care and status, differential status, and the way the social group “women of color” can serve as an all-purpose receptacle for the needs of others in a society where care needs are not met through visible and valued modes of cooperation, it follows that, for women of color, seizing the freedom to care for the people we care about is a radical act and a goal for a radically transformed, just society. My intersectional liberalism for a caring and just society places the autonomy of women of color at the center, with other changes to the social form driven by this goal.
Women of color are the social group supplying undervalued and invisible caregiving to impersonal others, often to the detriment of their own sphere of intimate others. For this reason, a theory beginning from the normative concerns and perspectives of this diverse social group will better promote justice than a theory beginning with the white cis man whose interests and perspectives masqueraded [가장하다] as neutral in these theories even while he was their normative subject. Moreover, because women of color are often denied the effective entitlements that should accompany full claimant status, my intersectional liberalism assesses personal autonomy in relation to our social affordances.
Living counterfactually
Women of color who claim the formal and informal entitlements standardly granted to others, and who go beyond that to occupy domains of intellectual authority, live counterfactually—we live in ways that are not licensed for us, acting as if affordances [행동유도성] were present when they are not there. Consequently, living autonomously, as a woman of color, is a radical act, one that summons [소환하다] the burdens that come from acting against affordances, where conflict with the social world makes its way into the body as stress.
Because we are customarily denied latitude [자유] to act upon our commitments, when we seek to do so, we encounter interference in forms both overt and insidious [서서히 퍼지는]. Construed as a resource for others, we are expected to be available to them, rather than granted domains for privacy and sovereignty. In the US context, prioritizing our own families makes us unavailable to serve as nannies [유모] and in other readily appropriated labor roles. In the workplace, living counterfactually means we are unavailable for the mammified labor the organizations expect. The freedom to guide our lives to be available to the people we care about, so that our life energy can be a resource for them, is violently wrested from us, repeatedly, and through broader social systems. Respect for autonomy, then, can be understood as a second-personal attitude of respect for the authority of a person over her own life’s energy. Correspondingly, insisting that our families are a domain of negative liberty, or noninterference, is a radical assertion. Ultimately, because caregiving arrangements claim and appropriate the life energy of women of color, asserting one’s agency as a full claimant from this social position will diagnose the distributive patterns in the social form.
Social hierarchy and deference
We can now see the complementarity of the claims of this chapter. When existing social forms are evaluated through a lens that understands care to be a form of status recognition, it becomes clear that women of color asserting freedom to care for the people we care about is a radical act. The assignment of caregiving to people with less social power means that many needs for care are met, but that they are met in ways that are linked to relationships of hierarchy, entailing the appropriation of their labor.
6. Intersectional liberalism
For women of color to be liberated from the social role of universal caregiver, societies’ care needs must be met, and they must be met with systems that are transparent and fair. The invisibility of care results in intuitions that are linked to the ideological invisibility of care’s importance (Tronto 1993), and which also fail to identify how care is secured in existing societies.
Because care is the spine of culture (for this claim, see Bhandary 2020, 2021a), these intuitions about care are then connected to other deeply felt self-understandings and expectations for others. Consequently, the ways we are habituated in relation to care are connected to how we understand the world, our embodiment, and our social access to others for our needs and desires. It is unsurprising, then, that many of the people who assert a commitment to equality in a cool and calm moment will not sustain that commitment in their bodily habit and comportment [행동거지, 처신] when their needs for care are at stake. They may fail to sustain such a commitment due to a lack of self-knowledge that is linked to not understanding the forms of oppression that shape our social world, thereby failing to have what Jose Medina calls “meta-lucidity” (Medina 2013). They will not be aware of the many ways they assume care, attendance, and attention from women of color. However, if they pay attention to their “rogue [비정상적] emotions” (Bartky 1990), they may notice that they find it irksome when women of color are not available or accessible, physically, emotionally, and intellectually.
Consequently, a procedure that abstracts away from real relationships of care, thereby defamiliarizing our expectations of others, is a necessary element of avoiding the reification of those very hierarchies. The theory of liberal dependency care (LDC) defends a variety of constructivism that makes explicit the background distributive patterns of caregiving. Rendering these practices transparent will modify our intuitions as to what counts as a “reasonable” claim and way of life. LDC’s structure of justification consists of an abstract form of evaluation to assess what we would agree to if we did not know our social position in society, plus a requirement for autonomy skills in the real world. The first part is ① a modified version of John Rawls’s idea of hypothetical acceptability that embraces his earlier formulation of its subject of justice as the “system of practices” (Rawls 1958).25 LDC, like John Rawls’s account of liberalism, is a form of constructivism, and it also embraces an iterative [되풀이하는] process of justification, whereby the intuitions employed are reflexively assessed in light of the account of justice that results. However, although the model of the person in Rawls’s account of the original position [원초적 입장] is purportedly neutral, the way persons are understood in Rawls’s model conception is unwittingly informed by assumptions about what a reasonable life includes for privileged men in social forms where caring labor has been invisible (Bhandary 2020, chapter 4).
Theorizing from the perspective of a woman of color, ② I insist on the enduring need to prioritize autonomy in a society with just care practices, and to maintain a conceptual distinction between autonomy and care (Bhandary 2021b). For example, embedding a requirement of responsiveness to others, or of caring, into a conception of autonomy would inevitably translate into more epistemic leaning and deference from people of color. Therefore, if we are to understand the nature of a liberal society with just caregiving practices, we must begin with the autonomy of women of color, for doing so reveals the hidden nature of western “liberal” social forms and the determinate content embedded in abstract accounts of accountability, entitlements, needs, care, and equality. To diagnose caregiving injustice through the lens of a woman of color is to present new reasons in defense of a liberal constructivism. This constructivism must interrogate [추궁하다]
(1) the relational nature of entitlements,
(2) the distributive backdrop [배경] that shapes whether a claim is understood as a need or a preference, and
(3) how accountability can be evaded by perpetrators [가해자] of violence, particularly when the victim acts in ways that contravene assigned roles in dominant cultural constructions.
(1) 권리의 관계적 본질,
(2) 청구가 필요인지 선호로 이해되는지를 형성하는 분배적 배경,
(3) 특히 피해자가 지배적 문화 구성에서 부여된 역할을 위반하는 방식으로 행동할 때 폭력 가해자가 어떻게 책임을 회피할 수 있는지를.
I have taken a few steps toward explicating each of these three components, thereby demarcating the outlines of a care theory of justice that begins from the social understandings of a woman of color. These are the beginnings of the theory that I call intersectional liberalism.
In Freedom to Care, my defense of autonomy skills is the second part of two level contract theory, identifying that real people need autonomy skills if theorists are to be able to know what people care about. These conditions were necessary, but not sufficient, and I did not offer a full account of the requirements for a theorist of justice there. Instead, I wrote that “my focus is not to identify criteria for the theorist; that is a separate project for social epistemology” (Bhandary 2020, 97). Since then, I have added a form of dialogical responsiveness as a requirement for the theorist. This requirement embraces Andrea Westlund’s proposed amendment to my theory, which states that theorists of justice need to have skills with a “dialogical or relational structure, and include skills involved in theorists’ responsiveness to other perspectives, as well” (Westlund 2021).
Many of the existing systems of practices that appear to meet the care needs of their members rely on a public understanding that “justifies” the arrangement by, either, conceptualizing the members of some group as naturally caring such that they simply want to care for others, or denying them full claimant status. For example, a system of practices may rely on the falsehoods embedded in the mammy stereotype, or on the social role of the daughter-in-law as caregiver to the family. In these cases, the black woman in the US or the Indian daughter-in-law in a patriarchal schema are expected to meet others’ care needs, where demands for their caregiving are not limited by their own health needs, well-being, or choices.
In the theory of liberal dependency care, the needs of caregivers and people in social groups who are assumed to be caregivers take center stage. The demand to receive care, and the demand to provide it, are too often coded into social-class, caste, race, and gender groups. Maintaining a steady supply of caregivers has involved naturalizing women as caring, the overt coercion [강제] and violence of domestic abuse, as well as moral pressure such as shaming people who do not want to provide care.
It is for these reasons that liberal dependency care holds that an ideal that specifies a threshold of care received cannot be asserted without simultaneously asserting conditions of freedom for caregivers. I characterize the agents of construction in the original position as self-interested in order to prevent absorbing the life energy of some people into the schema as a whole at the most foundational level of theory. If individuals are not recognized as distinct at that level, we cannot discern when interests should be combined. When contract theory advances a construction of persons to achieve certain pragmatic ends, as I do in liberal dependency care, that construction is not a description of real people.
Of course, real world forms of ‘cooperation’ to secure care have often included prescriptive socialization, so that what seems (to some) to be a cooperative schema also includes a variety of coercive measures, including outright violence, microaggressions, and status hierarchies. Our cooperative schemas have typically relied on some subset of the community displacing their own needs in favor of the needs of others. Consequently, it is essential to determine who incurs responsibility for meeting care needs.
Rejecting the subsumption of some individuals into the cooperative schema as a whole, my theory of distributive justice establishes, at the abstract level of theory design, that each person counts as one full claimant, thereby providing conceptual and practical resources for identifying the exploitation of individual caregivers. To this foundation, I add a device for evaluating systemic patterns in care. A theory that begins with the claim that we should each receive the care we need, while neither acknowledging the possibility of scarcity of care provision, nor tracking inequalities in care received across populations, fails to yield adequate antiracist conceptual resources. In the absence of a requirement for transparency of caregiving arrangements, and a flexible concept that can be used to track a variety of characteristics, we will not be able to find out whether some racial groups’ needs are assessed as legitimate more often than those of others, nor will we be able to assess whether there are vast racial inequalities in the population of caregivers. Therefore, we need resources at the level of theory to identify who is receiving care, and how much, and to critically assess the legitimacy of needs. For example, liberal dependency care’s evaluation of care provision at the level of system-wide patterns allows us to ask whether the needs for survival and flourishing of a white child with significant disabilities are met more often than the needs of a black or brown child with the same disabilities.
My view is that a just society can have many forms, and that there will be a wide array of social practices that are compatible with a society that is just with respect to care. We must imaginatively evaluate caregiving arrangements in ways that do not assume the immutability of capitalism or of our particular gendered and racialized constructions of care. The arrow of care map creates conceptual space for imagining a range of practices that could be compatible with a just society, to be evaluated by three metrics:
(1) how well they respect the autonomy of individuals,
(2) how fairly the work of providing care is distributed, and
(3) how fully the society meets its members’ legitimate needs for care (Bhandary 2020, 160).
Along with the need to modify and design caregiving practices, an ameliorative virtue is needed to continually adjust away from the injustices in the current, nonideal world. This ameliorative virtue, interpersonal reciprocity, is needed to rectify [바로잡다] the care based social position women of color occupy.
7. Interpersonal reciprocity
The underlying social inequalities that shape relationships of caregiving and care receiving in existing Western, “liberal” societies make it the case that a social norm of interpersonal reciprocity is needed to unsettle, and thereby avoid perpetuating, these harms (Bhandary 2021b, 152–153). Interpersonal reciprocity is an active disposition towards the person from whom one receives care, but its target is not limited to that person. In particular, when people are embedded within a close-knit [긴밀히 맺어진] community, interpersonal reciprocity includes long-term overlapping relationships such that people take on responsibility for the community.
When a person develops an understanding of the value of interpersonal reciprocity, that person develops a disposition to contribute as a response to receiving generosity and care from others. The person with interpersonal reciprocity thinks, “How can I return the care that was shown to me?” Its structure is like a virtue, in that the person has a disposition to respond in a certain way. Practices that cultivate interpersonal reciprocity have the value of preventing the formation of a subjectivity that is shaped by entitlement, for these practices prevent people from experiencing the world as one that is simply oriented towards them. Interpersonal reciprocity is also a regulative ideal for individual behavior. A person who is cared for by others seeks to return care to the people who have rendered it to them; they also consider caregiving to be a broader responsibility to their community, rather than a universal and impartial responsibility.
The virtue of interpersonal reciprocity is one vital component of a social system that achieves and maintains fair caregiving arrangements. However, community-based interpersonal reciprocity might not be accessible in highly globalized social forms responding to capitalist economies. The geographic mobility in these social forms present challenges for delimiting the scope of a community or keeping extended family members in close geographic proximity. Moreover, the idea that caregiving should take place in the context of other forms of work is also more difficult to apply to these economies, when caregiving is one of few in-person interactions in these economies. In Western, “liberal” societies with capitalist economies, many goods are produced far from the people who use them. When our lives occur among mass-produced goods that travel great distances, it is more challenging to find a way to make reciprocity personal. In contrast, the land-based systems Kim Anderson describes for native communities in Canada had systems of care labor that were thoroughly intertwined with other forms of work within smaller communities. For these reasons, a customary care practice that is shaped by the value of interpersonal reciprocity may be difficult to achieve in a social form like the mainstream United States. Despite these difficulties, diasporic conceptions of community and global remittances demonstrate the agentic responses people have to maintain ties with the people they care about.
When people learn the value of interpersonal reciprocity, one of the things they learn is what they should not do—they should not receive care and generosity from others without reciprocating in some way. Consequently, a person who has this value can avoid damaging others through his entitlement.
8. Conclusion
I have argued that to be a member of a society, a person must receive care, and these acts partially constitute the recipient’s status recognition as a claimant. Human beings do not arrive in the world already counting as persons. Instead, we become members of the society, recognized as such, through a range of social practices. When children are presented as well groomed [잘 차려입은], for instance, it asserts to the broader social world that they count, and that someone, often a parent, grandparent, or member of a community or kinship group, is asserting their value as one who matters. In this way, and in others, social practices indicate membership in ways that signify overall social belonging or specific subgroup belonging.
A person’s status may vary as indexed to family, community, or nation. Crucially, it is not the case that subordinate national status is merely compounded at the family and community levels. Instead, a person who is devalued in nation-level value systems can have their status, and thus, sense of self-worth, reasserted at the family and/or community level. Immigrant communities, for instance, are often sources of robust material caregiving, affective care, and narratives of worth for their members. LGBTQIA+ spaces are also locations for care and status recognition for their members, who are too often devalued in the broader society or cast out of their family of origin. Therefore, community, family, and nation are independent domains within which a person can have the status to impel care. For each of them, belonging is a condition for receiving care, and it is also reasserted through that care. Belonging and social hierarchy are embedded in the micro-practices of care that I have defined as customary care practices.
One’s status as worthy of care is doubly relational. For adults, the relata are the individual and a family, community, country, or world. However, for a person arriving in the world, the status the broader social world confers on their birthing parent greatly affects the life of the child, and the experiences of the gestating [임신한] mother that predate [~보다 먼저오다] the existence of the child also influence the child’s life. Furthermore, a parent’s ability to provide care is dependent on their own social status.Unqualifiedly high status is affirmed globally, such as the status of straight, white, affluent [부유한], men, and is also embedded in philosophical theories in the form of the universal status of a full claimant. Clearly, though, philosophical theories of care and justice should not assume that everyone has this de facto standing.
While the project of arriving at just practices of care is an ongoing and perpetual task, one with practical and philosophical implications, the task for the “unjust meantime” (Jaggar 2019) is to continually correct away from the hierarchical and racialized structures that inform our systems of care. Interpersonal reciprocity can guard against the worst forms of exploitation, and thus it is an essential stopgap [임시방편] for liberal egalitarian, and just, systems of care. For these reasons, interpersonal reciprocity is vital to intersectional liberalism.