Feminist Ethics Midterm Practice (3)

2024-2 Feminist Ethics

 

Segment 3

 

12. Explain the relationship between the ethical and epistemic risks of unreciprocated emotional caregiving.

According to Bartky, women’s unreciprocated caregiving may become both epistemically and ethically disempowering. The epistemic risk is that the woman accepts caretaker (man)’s view uncritically and have corresponding difficulty in the construction of the world according to herself. This is because supporting a person is to enter feelingly into that person’s world; to adopt a caring attitude toward another is to adopt their perspectives.

If a caregiver begins consistently to question the values and beliefs of the caretakers, her caregiving will suffer. She will encounter the following paradox: If she keeps her doubts to herself, she runs the risk of developing that sense of distance and alienation. If she expresses her doubts consistently, she will be seen as rejecting. Either way, her relationship will suffer. An “epistemic lean” is part of the caregiver’s job.

Also, there is another risk for her ethical life, where her virtues such as forgiveness lead her to moral blindness. To affirm a man's sense of reality is at the same time to affirm his values. Tenderness requires compassion and forgiveness, clearly virtues under some circumstances and certainly excellences in a caregiver.

Teresa was anti-Nazi and a devout Catholic, and she was even appalled by her husband (Nazi)'s work; nevertheless, she “stood behind her man.” Bartky suspects that many women have been morally silenced or morally compromised in virtue of providing emotional support with female tenderness. In the very nature of intimate caregiving, there is the danger of an "ethical lean" that may hinder the caregiver to keep faith with her own moral principles.

 

13. Bartky’s discussion of status accord and Bhandary’s discussion of care as recognition of status

Sociologist Kemper maintains that “a love relationship is one in which at least one actor gives extremely high status to another actor.” “Status accord” he defines as “the voluntary compliance with the needs, wishes or interests of the other.” Bartky identifies women's emotional caregiving with conferring status; gender functions as deference displays and the man thereby receives woman’s attention as a kind of entitlement. The consistent giving of what we don't get in return, i.e., unreciprocated emotional caregiving is a performative acknowledgement of male supremacy.

Similarly, Bhandary argues that receiving care is a form of 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 caregiving by others. 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, the affective components of care convey the caregiver’s respect caretakers as well as their social standing. Thus, deference intersects with care. Deference also intersects with subordination, so that to be a caregiver coincides with a subordinate social role in some societies.

 

14. The arrow of care map

The arrow of care map is a conceptual scaffold to track who receives care, and from whom, in ways that evaluate system-wide patterns and distributive inequalities. It requires an assessment of racialized distributions of caregiving, enabling us to ask questions: do people of color provide most of the care, and whose care needs are met at a high level?

Due to its mapping function, the arrow of care map has the abstract nature: it starts from concrete human beings and track data about care received and provided. This does not mean that the arrow of care map supposes a metaphysical view of the self as atomistic. The purpose of such a setting is practical one: tracking distributive injustice. Since the arrow of care map regards individual human beings as the basic units, it does not assume the legitimacy of the relations of care. In other word, it brackets people’s relationships, tracking instead quantities of hands-on caregiving in intensity and duration. Such an abstract nature makes it possible to identify unexplored social categories and patterns of care not captured in a society. To sum up: the map is a vital tool for care theory to identify unequal distributions of care given and received.

 

15. Explain living counterfactually.

Imagine a world in which people of color refuse to care for white people. Call this world W’. In this (logically) possible world, the normative intuition that we are entitled to the care we need would no longer be a care ethical foundation. Instead, they (especially white people) would have to meet their own care needs. W’ thus requires an explicit justification when one needs to care for others. This justification would likely be grounded in a variety of reciprocity.

This possible world does not entirely exclude asymmetric caregiving between white people and people of color. There are contexts in which such care is legitimate. People of color often experience negative repercussions when we withhold socially expected care. On top of that, a global withdrawal of racialized care might create economic hardships for people of color who are caregivers for white families in the short term.

In world W’, the selves of people who have received care without reciprocating it will be significantly modified. Those changes, in turn, would liberate women of color. “Living counterfactually” is a method to investigate obstacles to this ideal state of affairs.

Living counterfactually, as a minority woman, means asserting full claimant status in micro interactions in the workplace, and generally, in both private and impersonal spaces. When women of color live as full persons, which is to act on reasonable entitlements, we are living counterfactually, in ways that are not permitted, and also in ways that do not exist in a robust ontological sense based on the social meanings of our actions. We are living as if we are in a possible world, one that does not currently exist.

As a result, the subjectivities that supervene on the unjust caregiving arrangement become evident through their holders’ expressions of rogue emotions, violence in its many forms, microaggressions, and confusion. For women of color, then, to withdraw care and deference from impersonal others is to reveal how the social form depends on these hierarchies. A social form’s underlying social inequalities and sedimented hierarchies are revealed through overt violence as well as microaggressions which together betray “liberal” societies’ caregiving substructures.

 

16. How does Haslanger differentiate between structures and systems?

System	Structure
(1) A set of things working together in a way that forms a whole (2) Historically particular, concrete, dynamic processes (3) A collection of objects with certain relations (4) Any system is dynamic and changes over time	(1) The networks of relations that hold between parts (2) The abstract form of a system, highlighting the interrelationships among the objects, and ignoring any features of them that do not affect how they relate to other objects in the system
(1) An extended family: a system of people with blood and marital relationships (2) A chess configuration: a system of pieces under spatial and 'possible move' relationship (3) Social system is a complex system	(1) A particular system instantiates a more general structure shared by other systems (2) Individuals in the system are considered as the positions, places, or nodes within the structure (3) Ignoring the particular individuals that occupy the places, and focusing on the relationships that hold between places (4) Social structures are networks of social relations that are constituted through practices, and practices are learned patterns of behavior that draw on social meanings to enable us to coordinate around the production, management, disposal of things of (positive or negative) value.

System is again divided into two kinds: simple and complex ones. A simple system (very roughly) is one in which the behaviors of the whole can be explained by reference a sequence of regular operations on its parts. Complex systems, in contrast, are not straightforwardly decomposable into independent parts, and they are self-organizing and stable due to feedback loops.

Structural injustice occurs when the practices that create the structure – the network of positions and relations – (a) distort our understanding of what is valuable, or (b) organize us in ways that are unjust/harmful/wrong, e.g., by distributing resources unjustly or violating the principles of democratic equality. Systemic injustice occurs when an unjust structure is maintained in a complex system that its self-reinforcing, adaptive, and creates subjects whose identity is shaped to conform to it.

 

17. Why does Brake think we should treat all care as work?

Brake claims that we should see unpaid material and emotional caregiving as work. Attitudinal caring is not only compatible with work but it can be manipulated to exploit workers. Caregiving is (among other things) work, and work which is disproportionately extracted from women, and the state can address this by treating it like work. For Brake, the fact that caring relationships are valuable does not entail that imbalanced caring relationships cannot also be disempowering, or even damaging. In paid contexts, emotional labor is recognized as work. Once we see that emotional labor is a type of work, we can see that this work can be exploited and that caring attitudes can be used to extract it. The traditionalist objection is that women’s emotional labor and care are reciprocated economically – men provide economic support in return for emotional support and caring labor. This can be seen as a specialized division of labor. This objection, however, does not take into account that the majority of married women also work outside the home. More importantly, women’s emotional labor disempowers women: such labor risks a loss of self. What they are taking is work – unpaid work, and work not even recognized as work. The solution, then, is to address this exploitation by recognizing and valuing care as work.

 

18. What are some problems with relying on intuitions for interpersonal ethical reasoning?

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, when relations of care are stake. Therefore, to arrive at a sense of justice in a world with distributive injustice, a method for thinking abstractly about distributions of care is needed.

The “theory of liberal dependency care” (LDC)’s structure of justification consists of (1) an abstract form of evaluation to assess what we would agree to if we did not know our social position in society, and (2) a requirement for autonomy skills in the real world. The first aspect, this abstract module, is a version of the Rawlsian idea of hypothetical acceptability that embraces his earlier formulation of its subject of justice as the “system of practices.”

Constructivism embraces an iterative 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 is purportedly neutral, the way persons are understood is in fact informed by assumptions about what a reasonable life includes in social forms where caring labor has been invisible.

Without experience in a fully just world to serve as the fount of intuitions, thought experiments, hypotheticals, and counterfactuals are needed to refine the intuitions that are to serve as inputs into this device. In addition, living counterfactually serves as a lived method of diagnosing the basic structure’s incompatibility with the autonomy and freedom of members of subordinated groups. Living counterfactually supplies necessary insights to guide the intuitions needed to understand how racialized patterns of caregiving pervade the bodies and expectations of white people. The autonomy of women of color thus exerts pressure against the social forms that are premised on our appropriation.

 

Reading Lists

Bartky, S. L. (1990) Feeding Egos and Tending Wounds: Deference and Disaffection in Women's Emotional Labor. in: Femininity and Domination, Routledge.

Bhandary, Asha Leena (2022). Caring for Whom? Racial Practices of Care and Liberal Constructivism. Philosophies 7 (4):78.

Bhandary, A. (2024). “Freedom to Care, for Women of Color”. In Bloomsbury Handbook of Care Ethics, ed. Matilda Carter. Bloomsbury Press.

Brake, Elizabeth (2020) "Care as Work. The Exploitation of Caring Attitudes and Emotional Labor." Caring for Liberalism. Routledge.

Haslanger S. Systemic and Structural Injustice: Is There a Difference? Philosophy. 2023;98(1):1-27.