Care Ethics in Yet a Different Voice: Francophone Contributions (Ethics of Care) 9789042940833, 9789042940840, 9042940832

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Foreword
1. Introduction
PART I Rethinking Work, the Ordinary and Vulnerability
2. The Ethics of Care as a Politics of the Ordinary
3. The Ethics of Care: The Work of the Moral Imagination
4. The Work of Care: Beyond Femininity and the Maternal
5. The Banality of Vulnerability
6. Opening up Care?
7. Contemporary Moral Philosophy: Three Models of Vulnerability
8. Toward a Political Theory of Care: Understanding Care as “Services Provided”
PART II Care Ethics in Conversation
9. Care Between Dependence and Domination: The Appeal of Neo-Republican Theory for Envisioning a ‘Caring Society’
10. Needs, Capabilities and Care Ethics
11. Animal Ethics: Frontier of Justice or Frontier of Care Ethics?
12. Care Ethics and Disability Studies: A Common Political Project?
13. Across Boundaries: Rethinking the Ethics of Nanotechnologies in Light of Care
14. Feminism and Liberalism: At the Margins of the Enlightenment
15. Barefoot, Pregnant and in the Kitchen: Critical Reflections on the Domestic Through the Lens of Bare Life
INDEX
Ethics of Care

Citation preview

ETHICS

OF C ARE Care Ethics in yet a Different Voice: Francophone Contributions Sophie Bourgault and Frans Vosman (eds.)

VOLUME 10

Care Ethics in yet a Different Voice: Francophone Contributions

Ethics of Care Editorial Board Prof. dr. Helen Kohlen, Vallendar Prof. dr. Sandra Laugier, Paris I – Sorbonne Prof. dr. Frans Vosman, Utrecht, chief editor Advisory board Prof. dr. Andries Baart, Utrecht Prof. dr. Guillaume le Blanc, Paris Prof. dr. Sophie Bourgault, Ottawa Prof. dr. Fabienne Brugère, Paris Prof. dr. Elisabeth Conradi, Stuttgart Prof. dr. Chris Gastmans, Leuven Prof. dr. Per Nortvedt, Oslo Prof. dr.  Annelies van Heijst, Tilburg Prof. dr. Linus Vanlaere, Leuven Prof. dr. Marian Verkerk, Groningen

Cover from a painting by the German Jewish painter Felix Nussbaum (1904-1944). Site of the Museum of his work: http://www.osnabrueck.de/werkverzeichnis/. Nussbaum has—while firmly rooted in the European tradition of modern art— given the atrocities of Nazism a face. We honor his life and work by pointing at his artwork on the covers of this series Ethics of Care. Felix Nussbaum Werkverzeichnis nr. 410, Klagende Frauen, 1941 Oil on canvas, 100  ×  74 cm Private collection Foto © Felix-Nussbaum-Haus Osnabrück Permanent loan from the Niedersächsischen Sparkassenstiftung

Ethics of Care Volume 10

Care Ethics in yet a Different Voice: Francophone Contributions Sophie Bourgault and Frans Vosman (eds.)

PEETERS Leuven – Paris – Bristol, CT 2020

A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. ISBN 978-90-429-4083-3 eISBN 978-90-429-4084-0 D/2020/0602/5 © 2020 – Peeters, Bondgenotenlaan 153, B-3000 Leuven

Table of Contents

FOREWORD1 Fiona Robinson  1. Introduction Sophie Bourgault and Frans Vosman

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PART I RETHINKING WORK, THE ORDINARY AND VULNERABILITY   2. The Ethics of Care as a Politics of the Ordinary Sandra Laugier

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  3. The Ethics of Care: The Work of the Moral Imagination Claude Gautier

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  4. The Work of Care: Beyond Femininity and the Maternal Pascale Molinier

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  5. The Banality of Vulnerability Patricia Paperman

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  6. Opening up Care? Patricia Paperman and Pascale Molinier

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  7. Contemporary Moral Philosophy: Three Models of Vulnerability125 Estelle Ferrarese   8. Toward a Political Theory of Care: Understanding Care as ‘Services Provided’139 Naïma Hamrouni

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PART II CARE ETHICS IN CONVERSATION   9. Care Between Dependence and Domination: The Appeal of Neo-­Republican Theory for Envisioning a ‘Caring Society’ 163 Marie Garrau 10. Needs, Capabilities and Care Ethics Sophie Bourgault

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11. Animal Ethics: Frontier of Justice or Frontier of Care Ethics?225 Solange Chavel 12. Care Ethics and Disability Studies: a Common Political Project?233 Aurélie Damamme 13. Across Boundaries: Rethinking the Ethics of Nanotechnologies in Light of Care 253 Vanessa Nurock 14. Feminism and Liberalism: At the Margins of the Enlightenment271 Fabienne Brugère 15. Barefoot, Pregnant and in the Kitchen: Critical Reflections on the Domestic through the Lens of Bare Life 295 Monique Lanoix CONTRIBUTORS325 INDEX333

Foreword Fiona Robinson

As I read through the chapters in Sophie Bourgault and Frans Vosman’s superb new volume, I could not help feeling that they had done me a personal favour. The book contains fourteen key contributions from eminent care ethicists—most previously published in French— now translated into English and brought together in a single volume. For those of us—including Toronto-raised, Anglophone Canadians like me—whose French language skills do not extend to reading sophisticated works of philosophy and political theory, Care Ethics in Yet a Different Voice: Francophone Contributions is a veritable goldmine. Care ethics is most closely associated with feminist scholars from the United States—Sara Ruddick, Carol Gilligan, Nel Noddings, Virginia Held, and Joan Tronto. Defying simple description, the ethics of care refers to a mode of moral responsiveness based on connection and relationship. While sometimes misunderstood as ‘women’s morality’, given its philosophical association with mothers (Ruddick 1989) and as a moral voice ‘heard’ in women and girls (Gilligan 1982), it is now widely understood as a feminist ethic, insofar as it rejects the hierarchy imposed by the gender binary, and has important implications for how we think about democracy, and politics more generally (Held 2005; Tronto 1994, 2013). So influential has the work of these scholars been on the field that it is easy to miss the fact that care ethics has a life beyond America. But care ethics has travelled widely across disciplines, as well as geographical and national boundaries. This volume provides English-speaking students and scholars of care

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ethics with the opportunity to engage with the important and prolific work of French-speaking care ethicists. Notably, Care Ethics in yet a Different Voice brings us not simply the  work of scholars from a single country, but from members of La  Francophonie. Indeed, many of the contributors to this book— including eminent care scholars Patricia Paperman, Pascale Molinier, Sandra Laugier and Fabienne Brugère—are from France. But the book also includes chapters from emerging francophone scholars in Canada—Sophie Bourgault, Monique Lanoix and Naïma Hamrouni. The topics are wide ranging—from the liberal and neo-republican political theory of Brugère and Garrau, to the incisive critical feminist theory of Hamrouni and Lanoix, to the explorations of vulnerability by Paperman, Laugier and Ferrarese. Taken together, the chapters in this volume represent an important and distinctive contribution to theoretical research on the ethics of care. Despite our linguistic differences, there are a few reasons why I feel a strong affinity with the special ‘different voice’ of francophone care ethicists. First, as Bourgault and Vosman point out in their introduction, French care ethicists have been particularly challenged by misapprehension and criticism of their project—a problem I know well after researching and writing on care ethics for many decades. Certainly, all thinking on care ethics should be subject to criticism, since this is what can help it evolve for the better. But I believe that care ethics has been particularly vulnerable to ‘kneejerk’ responses which decry its alleged sentimentalism, essentialism and paternalism. Working to dispel these perceptions remains the ongoing task of care ethicists—and one to which Francophone scholars are making important contributions. Second, I share francophone care ethicists’ ongoing respect for the work of Carol Gilligan. I remember clearly the revelatory moment I had while reading In a Different Voice as a graduate student. After months of reading almost exclusively male analytical political philosophers writing about principles of distributive justice and duties beyond borders, I suddenly realized that there was another way to think about morality. While there are so many other care ethicists to



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whom I am indebted as a scholar, it is Gilligan’s work that continues to speak to me most strongly, perhaps especially in this time of political uncertainty around the world. It is a pleasure to see her ideas interpreted and analyzed so astutely by the scholars in this book. Finally, I am heartened by what Bourgault and Vosman describe in their introduction as the tendency among French-speaking care ethicists to foreground ‘attention’ as a key feature of care ethics. In her essay, ‘Against Dryness’, Iris Murdoch reminds us that Simone Weil said that morality ‘was a matter of attention, not will’. (Murdoch 1997: 293) The ‘loving attention’ described by Weil and Murdoch is not a romantic or sentimentalized love; it is the ability to really see another by directing a ‘just and loving gaze upon an individual reality’ (327). Over the years, I have come to realize just how central this idea is to morality, and to care ethics in particular. When Murdoch writes that ‘(w)e need a new vocabulary of attention’ (293) it seems that francophone care ethicists have taken up this call. How wonderful that this work will now be shared with a new audience. No doubt its influence will be large and lasting.

Literature Gilligan, C. (1982) In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Held, V. (2006) The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, Global. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Murdoch, I. (1997) ‘Against Dryness’ and ‘The Idea of Perfection’, in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature. London: Chatto & Windus. Ruddick, S. (1989) Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace. Boston: Beacon Press. Tronto, J. (1994) Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York: Routledge. Tronto, J. (2013) Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality, Justice. New York: NYU Press.

1. Introduction Sophie Bourgault and Frans Vosman1

In scholarship taking stock of care ethics’ development in the last four decades, it is not rare to find the literature organized into two generations (e.g. Hankivsky 2004; Garrau and LeGoff 2010; Mahon and Robinson 2011). The first generation is said to consist of authors like Sara Ruddick, Virginia Held and Nel Noddings, writers who penned very influential essays in the 1980s. This generation has been criticized (often quite incorrectly) for proposing an account of care that was too maternal, too dyadic and too closely aligned with a feminism of difference. Then, in the 1990s, a second generation of care theorists emerged (e.g. Joan Tronto, Selma Sevenhuijsen, Fiona Robinson)—a generation that, in the eyes of some, succeeded in avoiding the pitfalls of the first and convincingly made the case that care ethics was profoundly political. Our purpose here is not to assess the utility of this division into generations. We merely wish to note that in the care scholarship in the Frenchspeaking world, there has not been a “first generation”: care theorists went straight to the more explicitly ‘political’ phase. This was partially, no doubt, the result of the fact that first-generation authors like Ruddick and Noddings were not translated into French, whereas texts by authors like Joan Tronto, Annette Baier and Evelyn Nakano

  The editors wish to thank Eloi Paradis-Deschênes for his help with preparing the manuscript, as well as Madeleine Taylor for her excellent translation work. 1

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Glenn quickly were (Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice was first translated in French in 1986).2 Skipping over the so-called ‘maternal’ or differentialist phase (à la Nel Noddings)3 did not, however, save French-speaking scholars from being the object of heated criticisms, and of fairly bitter (and often poorly informed) depictions of care as a naïve sentimentalism or as a paternalist project. In fact, one could suggest that the history of the reception of care ethics in France was overall a much more troubled one than in countries like the United States, Britain or Canada. This is partially because care ethics not only rapidly became an object of academic discussion and research around 2005-20094, but also entered the scene of partisan politics and public debate. Unlike most countries around the world, France had care ethics hotly debated in news media and by political figures.5 In 2010, the first secretary of the French Parti Socialiste, Martine Aubry, made several important public statements to the effect that care could inform a new “projet de société”—indeed, that using a care approach to rethink politics, solidarity and institutions could constitute the basis of a new emancipatory project.6 A few of the reactions that followed from public intellectuals and politicians were quite scornful (Padis 2010): some denounced this ‘caring society’ as ‘nunucherie’ (silliness), as a project that was simply irreconcilable with the French republican model, and  as something that naively and dangerously called for a strong 2   It came out first under the title of Une si grande difference. In 2008, a revised edition was done, sporting the title of Une voix différente: pour une éthique du care. The removal of ‘si’ in the title is, naturally, worth noting here. 3   Nel Noddings has in recent years revised her dyadic account of care. See e.g. her contribution in Engster and Hamington 2015. 4   In addition to the publication of the important volume Le souci des autres edited by Patricia Paperman and Sandra Laugier (2005) and Fabienne Brugère’s Le Sexe de la sollicitude (2008), one could mention the numerous special issues published by academic journals during those years (e.g. Esprit (2006), La revue du MAUSS (2008), Multitudes (2009)). See also Molinier, Laugier and Paperman 2009. 5   A detailed account can be found in Padis 2010. 6   See e.g. Martine Aubry, ‘Le ‘care’, c’est une société d’émancipation’, Le Monde Magazine. 6 juin 2010.



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c­ ontrolling state.7 For the politician Manuel Valls, this care ideal very problematically depicted French citizens as ‘sick and in need of care’8 (some critics slipped too rapidly between ‘care’ and ‘cure’). For many scholars working on care in France, this public debate was compromised due to misunderstandings, prejudices, and masculinist, antifeminist posturing. Later, with hindsight, many described these excesses as emblematic of a generalized discomfort with feminism and as a testimony of all there might be to lose for the privileged, if care feminists did succeed in making the invaluable yet invisible care labour of so many a crucial matter for public debate. 9 One of the objectives of this anthology is to offer some critical reflection on this controversial reception history and to consider what might be behind these responses. Indeed, two of the authors in the first part of the volume offer reflections on the roots of academic (and public) resistance to a care ethics and politics—tying the latter not only to a (sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit) hostility to feminism but also to the way research production is organized and legitimized. While some readers might be tempted to think that this debate is part of the past now and that care ethics has finally acquired a fairly comfortable status within French-speaking academia, the resistance to care is—still—alive and well in some circles.10 Certainly populist leaders’ pushback against feminism around the world, and neoliberalism’s challenge to collective solidarities and socio-political institutions that could be said to be “caring”, are sufficient reasons to be wary of celebratory statements about care feminism’s victory in its battle for recognition or influence.   See Padis (2010), p. 120.   Indeed, Valls said that Aubry’s intention was truly mistaken and represented a regression for the left and for France. “The individual is neither sick nor in need of care”, he insisted. See Padis 2010, p. 122. (translation ours) 9   See Paperman and Laugier, preface to the second edition of Le souci des autres (2011). 10   Just consider the essay of Paolo Adorno Faut-il se soucier du care? (2015) But there are also grounds for optimism in the solid rebuttal offered by Marjolaine Deschênes and Alice Lancelle (2015). 7 8

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But our main intention is not to rail against the resistances care ethics has encountered—such debates, after all, are invigorating and the lifeblood of thought. It is rather to showcase the rich care scholarship that has come out of the French-speaking world (particularly France). Indeed, one of our key motives for putting together this volume is to offer readers without a command of the French language the opportunity to get a glimpse of the important francophone contributions to care scholarship. We say ‘glimpse’ because this anthology obviously cannot be said to be exhaustive, nor can it be said to represent adequately the variety of research done by care theorists in several French-speaking communities. This volume, for instance, unfortunately does not contain texts that speak to the somewhat distinctive “philosophie du soin” that has developed around philosophers like Frédéric Worms.11 Readers will undoubtedly lament several absences; they may also quibble with the limited geographical focus or with the selection of texts proposed. With regards to the latter, we ought to mention that this selection was unfortunately heavily informed by temporal, financial and health constraints with which we as editors both had to contend. Despite these significant limitations and constraints, we hope that this volume will help correct the unidirectionality in the exchanges between Francophone and Anglophone scholars working on care. We also hope that this anthology will only be the first of many more anthologies like this, since more indeed will be needed to truly capture the variety of francophone voices and some of the distinctive features of this scholarship. Naturally, the title of this book was chosen in order to capture our view that there are distinctive elements in the French-speaking care ethics community (just as there are in the German, Japanese or

 See e.g. Worms 2010 and 2012; Pierron 2010; Benaroyo, L., C.  Lefève, J.-C. Mino and F. Worms (2010). Moreover, this edited volume contains more work that is philosophical in nature and as such, less representative of the scholarship (slightly closer to the empirical realm) that is done by researchers like Delphine Moreau (see e.g. Moreau 2010), and Miriam Winance (see e.g. Damamme, Fillion and Winance 2015). 11



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I­talian care ethics communities).12 But this title is also meant as a tribute, a mark of gratitude, to Carol Gilligan. One of the striking elements of several—albeit not all—French-speaking care scholars is how deeply and continuously influenced they have been by Gilligan. (They have also been immensely influenced by Joan Tronto, but this could be said to apply to all care ethics communities around the world.) Many francophone authors have not only constantly returned to In a Different Voice and offered new readings of that crucial work; many have also continuously drawn on works like The Birth of ­Pleasure (2002) or The Deepening Darkness: Patriarchy, Resistance and Democracy’s Future (2009). One can witness the striking importance of ­Gilligan in Vanessa Nurock’s edited volume (2010) devoted entirely to the psychologist, and in several other volumes published in French over the years (e.g. Paperman and Laugier 2005/2011; Garrau and LeGoff 2010; see also the work of Perreault in Bourgault and P ­ erreault 2015). In the introduction to their ground-breaking volume Le souci des autres (2005), Paperman and Laugier explicitly noted that G ­ illigan was the main backdrop of all contributions and that their collection could even be regarded as a type of companion piece to Gilligan’s work. Another striking feature that can be observed in many francophone contributions in care studies has to do with the type or explicitness of their ideologico/political commitments. Indeed, many French-speaking scholars are very explicit in their positioning of care ethics as a project that belongs squarely on the left of the political spectrum. For Pascale Molinier and Sandra Laugier (2010), for instance, “care is truly a left-wing project”; and other authors (e.g. Fabienne Brugère) insist that care is a “societal project” in the strong sense of the term.13 But as readers of this volume will see for themselves, how this leftist commitment might be articulated in policies 12   For the German-speaking community, see the important volume by Elisabeth Conradi and Frans Vosman (2016). 13   E.g. read about Brugère’s desire to bring care into real-life politics in Brugère 2011.

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or in specific political principles varies greatly from author to author (whether ‘prescription’ ought to be part of the task of care theorists is itself a contested question). We also hope that readers of this volume will come to appreciate some of the rich conversations orchestrated by some French-speaking scholars over the years. Indeed, Part II of our volume includes several translations of texts that sought to place care ethics in dialogue with other literatures or sub-fields in political philosophy or sociology— there is a search for “allies” in several cases. Take, for instance, Marie Garrau’s dialogue between care ethics and contemporary neorepublican thought,14 and Vanessa Nurock’s discussion of nanoethics and care ethics. Given the very limited length at our disposal in this volume, we unfortunately were not able to capture all the fruitful comparative work or ‘conversations’ done over the years in the French-speaking community—for instance, explorations of resonances between the ethics of the gift and of care (e.g. Loute 2015); or those between Theodor Adorno and care ethics (e.g. Ferrarese 2018b).15 Readers of this anthology might also notice that French-speaking scholars have had recourse to authors that are not as commonly or heavily used in other care ethics communities. One of these authors is philosopher Paul Ricoeur, whose presence is clearly understandable given his prominence in Francophone scholarly circles (the same observation goes for Bourdieu).16 Appeals to the work of Michel ­Foucault have also peppered many of the writings of care theorists over the years; in fact, engagement with Foucault has been an ­important   Both Marie Garrau and Alice LeGoff have worked extensively on the resonances between these two bodies of literature. See Garrau and LeGoff 2009; 2010; 2012. 15   See also Ferrarese 2016 and 2018a for some of her contributions on marrying critical theory and feminist ethics. 16   On Ricoeur and care ethics, see e.g. the important special issue published by Marjolaine Deschênes in The Ethics Forum (2015); see also Gaudet 2015. Naturally this is not to claim that Ricoeur has not been used by care theorists elsewhere (think for instance of the work of Inge van Nistelrooij (2015); see also van Nistelrooij, Schaafsma & Tronto (2014)), but only to suggest that it has taken on more importance in French-speaking circles, early on. 14



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theme from the very beginning of care ethics’ introduction in France (see e.g. Mozère 2004).17 But it is not only French authors that have been a source of inspiration for French scholars: many have turned to Anglo-Saxon ones as well in order to bring care ethics into largely unchartered territory. One of the emblematic cases here is that of Sandra Laugier, who has in her work amply drawn upon authors like Wittgenstein18, Cavell and Diamond. Another Anglophone author that has occupied a fairly prominent place in many texts penned by Frenchspeaking scholars is Martha Nussbaum—although the reception has been quite varied. If some Francophone scholars readily think of her as a care theorist (she herself did not embrace the label), others employ some of her concepts (e.g. the notion of capabilities) all the while acknowledging the gulf between Nussbaum’s liberalism and some of the chief premises of care ethics. In this volume, readers will be offered several texts that speaks to this variety of readings.19 One final element that could be said to be particularly prominent in francophone care ethics scholarship is the extent to which the term attention occupies a pride of place in these writings. It is not without reason that Fabienne Brugère’s book L’éthique du care (written for the Que Sais-je? series published by the Presses Universitaires de France) has on its back cover the following subtitle (or rallying cry?): “Attention aux autres!”—or “Pay attention to others!” (the exclamation mark is Brugère’s). Sandra Laugier, in the introduction to her volume Tous Vulnérables, defines care ethics very succinctly as an “ethics of attention” (2012, p. 8), a claim also embraced by Bourgault (2016)20, as well as Marie Garrau, who in fact devoted an entire 17   See also the dialogue between Carol Gilligan and Michel Foucault orchestrated by Julie Perreault (2007); also Brugère 2014. 18   Another important care ethics scholar who has drawn on Wittgenstein is Layla Raïd. See e.g. Raïd 2016; also her contribution to Paperman and Laugier 2011. 19   On Arendt and care ethics, the reception has also been quite varied in Frenchspeaking care ethics circle. See e.g. Cloutier 2015; cf. Bourgault 2015. 20   For Laugier, one of the main sources of inspiration is Iris Murdoch; for Bourgault, it is Simone Weil. For a recent volume dedicated to Weil and care in France, see Dumont and Zaccai-Reyners 2018.

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volume to care and attention (2014). It is hence hardly surprising that the politician Martine Aubry should have described her “care society” as “une société de l’attention aux autres” (literally, a society of attention to others). In this volume, Solange Chavel will also insist that one of the chief contributions of a care approach (contra a justice approach) is that it reframes many questions of ethics in terms of attention. Obviously, the significance of attention—of noticing and attending to others’ needs—has been central to care ethics anglophone scholarship ever since Gilligan, Ruddick and Tronto posited attentiveness as one of the key ethical skills. But it could be said that in many francophone contributions written over the last two decades, the term ‘attention’ has moved more squarely to the forefront of several discussions. 21 It is always extremely hazardous to make general statements about very large and diverse bodies of literature (or about an entire linguistic community!). In highlighting certain tendencies in Francophone scholarship we do not wish to suggest that it is a self-contained, closed universe or a homogenous one. French-speaking scholarship on care theory has been characterized by constant conversation and collaboration with care theorists in both the anglophone academic communities and around the world (e.g. in Colombia, Argentina, Italy, Japan, etc).22 Our humble aim is thus to present to Englishspeaking readers a number of important authors whose work offers valuable contributions to the ethics and politics of care.

Overview of the book The first part of this volume comprises essays that return to some of the controversies and debates that have both plagued and positively nourished care ethics in France. For instance, in chapters three and four, readers will find reflections on the question of why is it so 21   Consider for instance the forthcoming volume on attention edited by Loute and Grandjean (2019). See also Sandra Laugier’s contribution in Yves Citton’s L’Economie de l’attention (2014). 22   See e.g. Arango, L. G. and P. Molinier 2011; Damamme, Hirata and Molinier 2017.



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hard—yet so necessary—to think of care work in tandem with care as a set of ethical dispositions. But the first part of the volume also offers a set of reflections on the concepts of vulnerability and of the ordinary—and in particular, on how these two can be ‘put to work’ for feminist and critical aims. In the chapter that opens up this anthology, Sandra Laugier presents the ethics of care as a “politics of the ordinary”.23 Here the distinctive nature of Laugier’s work (and of a fair amount of French care ethics scholarship that followed in her footsteps) comes to the fore: namely, its recourse to “ordinary language philosophy” or OLP (whose emblematic expressions Laugier finds in Wittgenstein, Austin and Cavell). Laugier argues that OLP, just like care ethics, can have great transformative power: it can force mainstream philosophy to interrogate its obsession with generalities and abstractions, and to recenter its attention on particulars and on the ordinary details of daily life. OLP and care ethics, moreover, assign a pride of place to everyday language and expressions, to the way we care about certain words and are concerned with what is important. In Laugier’s view, much is to be gained from this rehabilitation of the ordinary for feminists: for one thing, the long-standing disregard or scorn for ordinary life is closely linked to the long-standing contempt for intimate, domestic and female life. It is also linked to the pervasive (and gendered) hierarchies that inform the way we approach research and philosophy. Appealing to authors like Cavell but also Iris Murdoch, Sandra ­Laugier proposes to read care chiefly as a matter of attention, as a matter of perception. The following chapter by Claude Gautier is emblematic of the centrality of Carol Gilligan for francophone care scholars, and to their willingness to place Gilligan in conversations with some slightly unusual interlocutors—in this case, John Dewey.24 One of the chapter’s 23   Readers with a command of the French language might also wish to consult Gautier and Laugier’s L’ordinaire et Le politique (2006). 24   We say ‘unusual’ because Dewey’s work has not very often been appealed to in the work of Anglophone care theorists.

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aims is to show the interest of pragmatist philosophy for care ethics; a broader motive is to make a case for the centrality of the imagination25 and of narratives in moral reasoning. For Gautier, Dewey’s account of deliberation as a “dramatic rehearsal (in imagination) of various competing possible lines of actions” is particularly helpful for appreciating the significance and richness of the way Gilligan’s Amy approaches moral problems—e.g. her ambivalence and her resort to narrative to navigate various sets of considerations, claims and needs. Gilligan’s work allows Gautier to underscore how much importance our moral narratives ascribe to particulars, and to the ordinary condition of moral agents. The resonances between Laugier and Gautier’s work will be readily seen by readers. If Laugier frames the ethics of care as a “politics of the ordinary”, Gauthier similarly proposes to see the ethics of care as an “ordinary life ethics”—one that calls into question moral and political theories that rest on a model of the unemcumbered self or that do not ascribe sufficient significance to particulars. In order to put some critical distance between care and the maternal (which has nourished countless controversies and misunderstandings in the 1980s, as we noted above), Pascale Molinier’s chapter proposes to approach care work via five descriptions that are key to capture its multifaceted reality.26 Molinier first considers care as a kind of gentleness, an appropriate, tactful response to a particular situation and to specific needs—a response that rests on an ability to improvise and to adapt to circumstances. Secondly, Molinier describes care as a kind of invisible/discreet work—noting how typical it is for care recipients to assess the quality of care work based on its inconspicuousness (think of privileged employers’ perception of the ‘perfect housekeeper’ as quasi invisible). Building on Everett Hughes’ concept of ‘dirty work’, Molinier then considers care as a type of activity that we would like to avoid at all costs, one we promptly pass on to others (and whose existence we hope to forget). These ‘others’ present us 25  On the imagination see also Solange Chavel’s important contribution, Se mettre à la place d’autrui (2012). 26   Readers should also consult Molinier’s important Le travail du care (2013).



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with a paradox: while they attend to our filth and ‘dirt’ and typically do so with low pay, many still find immense satisfaction and value in their work. This fourth perspective on care (‘Care as invaluable work’) invites us then to consider the thorny issue of the recognition—social or financial—for work. Molinier, finally, turns to several narratives offered by care workers in order to indicate the impossibility of disentangling the emotional and the professional in these workers’ experience and stories. In chapter 5, readers will find the translation of a text by Patricia Paperman, whose original French title quickly became a sort of rallying cry for many care theorists: namely, ‘Les gens vulnérables n’ont rien d’exceptionnel’ (literally, ‘vulnerable people are not at all exceptional’). This text goes far beyond merely insisting upon the ‘banality’ or universality of vulnerability. One of the other chief goals of Paperman is to offer a critique of those who have sought to describe care ethics primarily as an ethics of solicitude or a feminist form of sentimentalism. She proposes, instead, to characterize care as a “response to relationships built around dependence” and wishes to place to the forefront the political dimension of care. This is certainly not to say that emotional dispositions or sensibility do not have an important role to play in care.27 Importantly, Paperman insists that only an account of care that considers simultaneously (no small feat) care as moral sensibility and as dependency work can allow us to properly tackle complex issues such as the invisibility and devalorization of care work, as well as the latter’s problematic organization along gender, class and racial lines. The challenge of considering care in a more holistic manner—a manner that attends simultaneously to the register of ethical dispositions and concrete work practices—is also at the heart of the following chapter by Patricia Paperman and Pascale Molinier. In the first part of the text, the authors reflect on the reasons why there has been such resistance to linking up sociological analysis of care work with more philosophical reflections on care ethics. They locate the roots   For an extensive treatment of the subject, see Paperman’s Care et sentiments (2013). 27

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of this resistance (and of our regrettable ‘division of academic labour’) partially in the generalized indifference of the privileged, as well as in the distinctively French public hostility to feminism (regarded at once as no longer needed and as a tiresome provocation) and to nonuniversalist categories. They also suggest that this resistance might have to do with the fact that the reality of care criss-crosses several geographical levels (local, national, transnational). Once again, despite the difficulty, the invitation is extended to all care theorists to challenge disciplinary boundaries and the fragmentation or hyperspecialisation of research. Amongst the main things to be gained from a more holistic approach to care according to the authors is a more nuanced relational account of responsibility and a more critical analysis of the power imbalances present within care practices. The next two chapters propose detailed reflections on the concept of vulnerability, which has been the object of immense scholarly attention in the last decade or so.28 In chapter 7, Estelle Ferrarese regroups many of these scholarly contributions into three distinct models (although all three, in her view, use the notion of vulnerability as a lever for theorizing an emancipatory politics). The main models of vulnerability that Ferrarese identifies in contemporary moral philosophy are, first, the account of vulnerability that understands it largely as a question of bodily exposure to injury (the chief representative of such an approach is Judith Butler). What flows from this model is a definition of ethical behavior as the avoidance of inflicting suffering on a body—we are, in short, presented with an ethics of nonviolence. In the second account of vulnerability (one Ferrarese associates in part with care theorists), vulnerability is used quasi interchangeably with dependency—dependency on the work of others. The moral injunction here is not to refrain from acting or i­nflicting harm (as in the Butlerian account) but the opposite: one must act, one 28  It would obviously be impossible to cite here the very numerous books and articles devoted to the subject. For the care ethics community and some recent contributions, see e.g. Hamrouni 2016; Berthelot-Raffard 2016; Ferrarese 2016; Garrau 2018. See also the special issue edited by Marie Gaille and Sandra Laugier (2011).



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must answer needs and pay attention to suffering. Finally, the third account is vulnerability understood as a kind of susceptibility to subordination/domination (e.g. in Philip Pettit), or as subordination to continency (e.g. in Martha Nussbaum’s account of fragility). Now, if from these three models of vulnerability flow three distinctive accounts of responsibility, Ferrarese nevertheless notes in closing that they all share a similar “manner of grasping the political”. The account of vulnerability offered by Naïma Hamrouni in the chapter that follows does not easily fit into any single one of the models described by Ferrarese; she presents a quite unique and original model of ordinary vulnerability. The main aim of Hamrouni is to bring out the full feminist, critical potential of care ethics, and part of what this requires, in her view, is that we envision the concept of care not only as about services offered to dependents (e.g. infants, the elderly) but also services to independents, who benefit immensely from the care work provided to them. The author insists that describing care in terms of “services” is politically significant, because it forces us to put squarely the issues of power relations, and the racialized and gendered division of labour at the heart of our discussion. In order to flesh out her account of care as ‘rendered services’, Hamrouni proposes a return to materialist feminism debates from the 1970s and 1980s, which underscored the material benefits men derived from the free services of women. However, we need to do much more than to appeal to economic considerations in order to change the gendered division of labour according to Hamrouni. We must also think seriously about the relationship between labour and democracy, as well as the profound cultural transformations needed in order to work our way to gender justice. And many of these cultural changes are tied to a better acknowledgment of our ordinary human vulnerability. Indeed, it is the ordinary vulnerable subject that ought to be at the heart of our discussions of the institutional and socio-political transformations required for feminist emancipation. The second part of this volume offers readers a collection of texts that orchestrate dialogues between care ethics and various literatures and

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subfields of the social sciences and humanities. For many of these contributors, the motive is not only to show the fruitful resonances between two bodies of literature placed in conversation; it is also, more broadly, to bring to the fore the political and critical character of care ethics. In chapter 8, Marie Garrau proposes to reflect on whether contemporary neorepublican thought might be a good ally for care ethicists as they seek to articulate a robust and detailed political theory. For Garrau, the chief interest of neorepublican writings lies in the way they forcefully bring to the forefront the issue of domination. Since many critics of care theory have faulted its authors for being insufficiently attentive to the risk of abuse, of domination and of paternalism within care relations and institutions, neorepublican writings à la Pettit might offer us some welcome tools to address these concerns. While Garrau insists that neorepublican thought can indeed help care theorists more readily address the ‘dark sides’ of care, she also underscores the limits of Pettitian theory. One of these limits is that neorepublican thought does not provide us with anything to defend the value, joys and ethico-political significance of care activities and of care relations. Put more simply, while authors like Pettit may attend quite well to the darker side of care, they insufficiently underscore its positive dimensions. Neorepublican writings might also unwittingly reinforce the gendered nature of care work distribution and its narrow confinement into the private realm. Garrau concludes that while a neorepublican society could be regarded as a prerequisite for a ‘caring society’, it is far from sufficient. The following chapter by Sophie Bourgault also partially situates itself in relation to the old charge of paternalism thrown at care ethicists, and in particular, the paternalism said to flow from the thorny question of needs-identification. Readers will recall that several care theorists, ever since Gilligan, have given pride of place to the concept of needs over that of rights, and have described the caring political/ethical subject as one that is concerned with identifying and responding to needs. Nevertheless, this embrace of an anthropology and a politics of needs has raised concerns about who should define



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needs (especially at the institutional-policy level), and about a possible ranking of needs’ and their universality. The chapter offers some modest reflections on these questions by turning to two authors who have proposed distinctive ways of approaching the issue of human needs: Nancy Fraser and Martha Nussbaum. One of the goals here is to assess the degree to which Fraser’s ‘politics of needs identification’ and Nussbaum’s capabilities approach sit comfortably with care ethics (more implicitly, then, the question is whether they could serve as ‘allies’). Bourgault underscores the distinctive positions of Nussbaum and Fraser on issues like the role of experts in needs-definition, the desirability of a socialist politics, as well the moral ‘thickness’ of their account of well-being/gender justice. Bourgault also suggests that several parts of Nussbaum (e.g. the individualism of her methodology) jar with many of the articulations of care ethics. But she also argues that positing too stark a dichotomy between capabilities and care (or capabilities and needs) might be misguided. Her chapter thus ends on an ambivalent note. In chapter 10, Solange Chavel continues the discussion of the resonances between Martha Nussbaum’s work and that of care ethicists, but this time by focusing on the question of animal ethics. These resonances include the fact that both Nussbaum and care ethicists share similar opponents (e.g. Peter Singer); both celebrate emotions in ethics; both emphasize our shared vulnerability or fragility; and finally, both invite us to attend closely to particulars. After having highlighted these shared elements, Chavel nevertheless seeks to explain why a care ethics approach is superior to the overly liberal approach of Nussbaum. This superiority is partially tied to the fact that the former approach best avoids “homogenizing” or confounding animals and humans (indeed, it remains slightly more cognizant of the diversity of lifeforms and experiences). Care ethics’ superiority is also tied to the fact that this feminist approach may be more apt at making more visible certain forms of animal suffering and at exposing oppressive political structures and practices. As such, one of Chavel’s objectives here is to insist on the radicalism of the political project animating much care scholarship.

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The chapter that follows also tackles the question of care’s political project, and it does so via an encounter between care scholarship and disability studies. Via a discussion of the work of Joan Tronto, Eva F.  ­Kittay and Jenny Morris, Aurélie Damamme shows that these two fields of research employ languages that “are more complimentary than conflicting”. She does not deny the existence of some differences: she acknowledges that for a while, disability scholarship was largely aiming at ensuring that care-receivers’ voices were heard loud and clear, whereas care ethicists paid greater attention to care-givers (and to creating more awareness about the invisibility, magnitude and worth of care activities). But she insists that it is still possible to see in these two fields of research a political project that is anchored around a common quest to shed light on power relations. Moreover, both disability studies and care ethics find common ground in their critical and similar re-­examination of the concept of autonomy and in their insistence on the need to consider a plurality of points of views and actors. Damamme’s chapter offers us also a sober reminder of the fraught nature of trying to assess or predict the (future) abilities of a child with disabilities, as well as a powerful invitation to heed more often to the knowledge acquired through lived, concrete experiences. Like other authors in this anthology (most notably Molinier and Paperman), Damamme insists on the need to put the knowledge acquired through care relationships at the forefront of our political discussions. Vanessa Nurock’s chapter offers readers a conversation between nanoethics and the ethics and politics of care: the goal here is not merely to show some of the resonances or shared characteristics between these two fields of research, but to disclose the substantive “synergy” that Nurock sees between the two. Building on Tronto’s wellknown discussion of care’s blurring of moral boundaries, Nurock argues that nanoethics also operates a threefold redrawing of boundaries: namely, those between designer and object; between the living and the artificial, and finally, between the interior and the exterior. However, while the particular boundaries concerned differ from one field to the other, nanoethics and care ethics nevertheless offer researchers similar insights. Indeed, they both underscore the ­limitations of approaching



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the world or our scientific and political pursuits chiefly in terms of security or influence/impact; they both invite us to see the blindspots of ethical reflection based solely on a universalist/general perspective. Finally, they both foreground the value of a relational viewpoint—a viewpoint that is always attentive to the crisscrossing or enmeshing of different registers and domains. The interest of Nurock’s chapter lies not only in the way it brings care ethics unto unchartered territory (i.e. nanoethics), but also the way it indicates the critical potential nested within the concept of care. The dialogue that Fabienne Brugère proposes in chapter 14 is one between feminism and liberal thought—or, more precisely, between various strands of feminism and liberalism. We know that much contemporary feminist writing has been devoted to showing the failings of the Enlightenment and of liberalism (particularly around their conceptions of reason and autonomy). However, Brugère is convinced that there can still be some fruitful alliances to be made between one strand of Enlightenment thought—namely, the ‘sentimental’ Scottish Enlightenment of the likes of Hume and Smith—and the feminism of contemporary theorists like Martha Nussbaum and Joan Tronto. The point of this text is not merely to ‘excavate’ from the history of ideas some past voices and texts that might enrich contemporary feminist struggles. It is also to see how feminist theory can enrich or renew contemporary liberalism. The latter can only renew itself, according to Brugère, if it succeeds in taking seriously the criticisms that have been voiced by feminists—and particularly, those concerning liberalism’s inadequate perspective on dependency and vulnerability, as well as its neglect of the emotions, of the imagination and of relationality in its account of the self. In a sense, then, Brugère is trying to create a more ‘caring liberalism’—one that could inform contemporary feminist politics. The concluding chapter, by Monique Lanoix, is also a search for some alliances between contemporary care feminism and certain strands of political theory.29 Lanoix finds this in a place many readers   See also Lanoix 2013, 2015.

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might think counter-intuitive at first: namely, in the thought of Giorgio Agamben. Lanoix highlights how Agamben’s notion of bare life can be a useful tool for care theorists to employ as they challenge mainstream political philosophy’s resistance to seeing ‘domestic’ matters such as care labour as relevant to the political realm. The concept of ‘bare life’ (which she understands as denoting the life and concerns of individuals who fall outside politics) allows us to appreciate how the domestic can be at once a space where some care activities are commodified and others resist commodification. It helps us to explain, at least in part, why care work continues to be considered low-skilled and low-waged labour. In the first part of her chapter, Lanoix briefly reviews the concept of bare life, and then considers the different facets of care work by turning to Annie Dussuet’s writings on domestic work in France (2017). Dussuet’s research brings to light the manner in which care work can be commodified in terms of service to others or to oneself; but there always remains a component of care work that is beyond commodification (an issue that Pascale Molinier’s work on nursing homes helps illuminate). For Lanoix, any effort to give significant political value to the activities that take place within the domestic sphere will fail unless there is an explicit recognition of the double subjugation that takes place within caregiving.

Literature Adorno, P. (2015) Faut-il se soucier du care? Editions de L’olivier. Arango, L. G. and P. Molinier (2011) El trabajo y la ética del cuidado. Medellín: La Carreta Social y Escuela de Estudios de Género, Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Benaroyo, L., C.  Lefève, J.-C.  Mino and F.  Worms (2010), La Philosophie du Soin, Paris  : PUF. Berthelot-Raffard, A. (2016) ‘Care et vulnérabilité dans la relation de soins’, Ethica, 20, 2, Fall 2016, 37-60. Bourgault, S. and J. Perreault eds (2015) Le care: éthique féministe actuelle, Montréal: Éditions du Remue-Ménage. Bourgault, S. (2015) ‘Le féminisme du care et la pensée politique d’Hannah Arendt. Une improbable amitié’, in Recherches Féministes. 28  :1. Bourgault, S. (2016) ‘Attentive listening and care in a neoliberal era: Weilian insights for hurried times’ Ethics and Politics, XVIII, 3: 311-77. Brugère, F. (2010) ‘L’éthique du care  : entre sollicitude et soin, dispositions et pratiques’, in L. Benaroyo et al., La philosophie du soin, Paris  : PUF.



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Brugère, F. (2011) ‘Archéologie d’une Mise en Orbite. Le Care Mis à Nu.’ Cités, vol. 47-48, no. 3, p. 319–324. Brugère, F. (2008) Le sexe de la sollicitude, Paris  : Seuil. Brugère, F. (2014/2011) L’éthique du care, Paris  : PUF. Chavel, S. (2012) Se mettre à la place d’autrui  : l’imagination morale et ses limites, Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Cloutier, S. (2015) ‘Care et souci du monde  : le jugement politique chez Joan Tronto et Hannah Arendt’, in Bourgault, S. and J. Perreault eds (2015) Le care: éthique féministe actuelle, Montréal: Éditions du Remue-Ménage. Conradi, E. and F.  Vosman eds. (2016) Praxis des Achtsamkeit. Schlüsselbegriffe der Care-Ethik, Frankfurt/New York: Campus Verlag. Damamme, A., H. Hirata and P. Molinier eds. (2017) Le travail entre public, privé et intime. Comparaisons et enjeux internationaux du “care”, Paris  : L’Harmattan. Damamme, E. Fillion and M. Winance eds. (2015), ‘Care et Handicap’ special issue. Alter—European Journal of Disability Research / Revue Européenne de Recherche sur le Handicap, vol. 9, N° 3, juillet/septembre 2015. Deschênes, M. and A.  Lancelle (2015) ‘Francesco Paolo Adorno,  Faut-il se soucier du care? Étude critique’, Les Ateliers de l’éthique/The Ethics Forum 10.3. Deschênes, M. ed. (2015) ‘Dossier  : Éthiques et philosophies politiques du care, du soin et de la sollicitude. Perspectives ricoeuriennes et féministes’, in Les Ateliers de l’éthique / The Ethics Forum, 10.3. Dumont, M. and N.  Zaccai-Reyners eds. (2018) Penser le soin avec Simone Weil. Paris  : PUF. Engster, D. and M. Hamington eds (2015) Care Ethics and Political Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ferrarese, E. (2016) ‘The Vulnerable and the Political: On the Seeming Impossibility of Thinking Vulnerability and the Political Together and Its Consequences’, Critical Horizons, 17:2, 224-239. Ferrarese, E. (2018a) ‘(Re)faire de la Théorie critique. Pour une (re)lecture féministe de l’École de Francfort.’ Cités, 73(1), 43-56. Ferrarese, E. (2018b) La Fragilité du Souci des Autres  : Adorno et le care. Lyon  : ENS Edition. Garrau, M. and A.  Le Goff (2009) ‘Vulnérabilité, non-domination et autonomie  : vers une critique du néorépublicanisme’, Astérion, no 6, March. Garrau, M. and A. Le Goff (2010) Care, justice et dépendance, Paris: PUF. Garrau, M. and A. Le Goff eds (2012) Politiser le care? Paris: Bord de l’eau. Garrau, M. (2014) Care et attention. Paris  : PUF. Garrau, M. (2018) Politiques de la vulnérabilité. Paris: CNRS. Gaudet, S. (2015) ‘La participation sociale entre le care et le don’, Le care: Éthique féministe actuelle, S. Bourgault and J. Perreault eds, Montréal: Éditions du RemueMénage. Gautier, C. and S. Laugier (2006). L’ordinaire et Le politique. Paris  : PUF. Gilligan, C. (1993 [1982]) In a Different Voice, Cambridge, Harvard University Press. Gilligan C. (2011) Joining the Resistance, Cambridge-Molden: Polity Press.

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Grandjean, N. and A.  Loute eds (2018) Valeurs de l’attention. Perspectives éthiques, politiques et épistémologiques. Septentrion. Hamrouni, N. (2016) ‘Ordinary Vulnerability, Institutional Androgyny and Gender Justice’, in Christine Straehle ed., Vulnerability, Autonomy, and Applied Ethics. New York: Routledge. p. 69-82. Hankivsky, O. Social Policy and the Ethic of Care, Vancouver: UBC Press. Lanoix, M. (2013) ‘Labor as Embodied Practice: The Lessons of Care Work.’ Hypatia, vol. 28, no. 1, pp. 85–100. Lanoix, M. (2015) ‘Who Cares? Care and the Ethical Self.’ Ateliers De L’éthique, vol. 10, no. 3, p. 49–65. Laugier, S. (2009) ‘Le sujet du care  : vulnérabilité et expression ordinaire’, dans ­Pascale Molinier, Sandra Laugier et Patricia Paperman, dir., Qu’est-ce que le care  ? Souci des autres, sensibilité, responsabilité, Paris: Payot. Laugier, S. and Molinier P. (2010) ‘Le care  : un modèle alternatif au discours de droite [entretien]’, Raison publique.fr, 15 mai, www.raison-publique.fr/article321.html. Laugier, S. ed. (2012) Tous vulnérables  ? Le care, les animaux, l’environnement, Paris: Payot. Laugier, S. and M. Gaille (2011) ‘Grammaires de la vulnérabilité’, Raison Publique, no. 14. Laugier, S. (2014) ‘L’éthique comme attention à ce qui compte’, in Y. Citton (ed.), L’économie de l’attention. Nouvel horizon du capitalisme?, La Découverte, Paris, 2014, p. 252-266. Loute A. (2015) «  La sagesse pratique face aux tensions des éthiques du care  », in Les ateliers de l’éthique / The Ethics Forum, vol. 10, n° 3, p. 13-28. Mahon, R. and Robinson F. eds. (2011) Feminist Ethics and Social Policy. Towards a New Global Political Economy of Care, Vancouver, UBC Press. Molinier, P., S. Laugier, and P. Paperman eds (2009) Qu’est-ce que le care  ? Souci des autres, sensibilité, responsabilité, Paris: Payot. Molinier, P. and S.  Laugier (2010) ‘Le care  : un modèle alternatif au discours de droite’, interview, Raison publique.fr, May 15th, . Molinier, P. (2013) Le travail du care. Paris  : La Dispute. Moreau, D. (2010) ‘Contraindre pour soigner? Le care à l’épreuve de la contrainte dans un service d’hospitalisation psychiatrique’, in Qu’est-ce qu’un bon patient? Qu’est-ce qu’un bon médecin? Paris, éd. Seli Arslan, 2010. Mozère, L. (2004) ‘Le «  souci de soi  » chez Foucault et le souci dans une éthique politique du care.’, Le Portique, Available online. Noddings, N. (1984) Caring. A Feminist Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press. Nurock, V. ed (2010) Carol Gilligan et l’éthique du care, Paris, PUF. Padis, M.-O. (2010) ‘La polémique du care. Un débat qui mérite mieux que des caricatures’, Esprit, vol. July, no. 7, pp. 119-129. Paperman, P. and S.  Laugier eds (2011). Le souci des autres. Éthique et politique du care, second edition, Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS.



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Paperman, P. (2013) Care et sentiments, Paris: PUF. Perreault, J. (2007) ‘L’expérience féminine et l’enjeu du pouvoir. De Carol Gilligan à Michel Foucault’, in S. Charles and P.-H. Tavoillot eds. Qu’est-ce qu’une société d’individus? Montréal: Liber, 2007. Pierron, J.-P. (2010) Vulnérabilité. Pour une philosophie du soin. Paris  : PUF. Raïd, L. (2011) ‘Baier et la critique du libéralisme moral’, in Paperman, P. and S. Laugier eds. Le souci des autres. Éthique et politique du care, second edition, Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS. Raïd, L. (2016) ‘Se voir de l’extérieur  : Wittgenstein et les regrets de la connaissance de soi.’ Raison publique, 20(1), 125-142. Robinson, F. (1999) Globalizing care: Ethics, Feminist theory, and International Relations, Boulder: Westview Press. Ruddick, S. (1989) Maternal Thinking. Toward a Politics of Peace, Boston: Beacon Press. Tronto J. (1993) Moral Boundaries. A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care, New York – London: Routledge. Tronto, J. (2013) Caring Democracy. New York, New York: University Press. van Nistelrooij, I. (2015/2014) Sacrifice. A care-ethical reappraisal of sacrifice and selfsacrifice. Leuven, Peeters. van Nistelrooij, I., Schaafsma, P. & Tronto J.C. (2014) ‘Ricoeur and the Ethics of Care’, in Med Health Care and Philos, 17: 485. Worms, F. (2010) Le moment du soin. A quoi tenons-nous? Paris  : PUF. Worms, F. (2012) Soin et politique, Paris  : PUF.

PART I Rethinking Work, the Ordinary and Vulnerability

2. The Ethics of Care as a Politics of the Ordinary Sandra Laugier

This paper sets out to strengthen a connection that, since the publication of my first writings on the concept of care (Laugier 2011a and Laugier 2013b) I have sought to establish between the ethics of care and my own philosophical background and ground—ordinary language philosophy as represented by Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell—and thus to find in ordinary language philosophy (OLP), often considered to be disconnected from gender issues (except through speech act theory), resources for a reformulation of what for me is at stake in feminism  : the inclusion and empowerment of women’s voices and expressiveness (and that means ALL women) and 1 attention to their experience. This has to be put in context. In my work on Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell I have tried to open new perspectives in France on the neglected theme of the ordinary; my project is to show the relevance of ordinary language philosophy for ethical and political issues by developing an ordinary conception of politics for thinking about civil disobedience and radical democracy (Ogien and Laugier 2014) and an ordinary conception of ethics for thinking about care and gender inequality. This systematic exploration of the (theoretical and practical) question of the ordinary is anchored in ordinary language 1   This text was first translated in English and published in New Literary History, vol.  46, no.  2, Spring 2015, pp.  217-240. It is reproduced here (with some slight modifications in the citing style) with the consent of John Hopkins University Press.

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philosophy, the “rough ground” of the uses and practices of language; it leads to further investigating the denial or undervaluation of the ordinary as a general phenomenon in contemporary thinking. My thesis is that the ordinary is variously denied, undervalued, or neglected (not seen, not taken into account) in theoretical thought. Such negligence (carelessness) has to do with contempt for ordinary life inasmuch as it is domestic and female, and it stems from a gendered hierarchy of the objects of intellectual research. One important result of ordinary language philosophy is to call our attention to human expressiveness, and I want to show that attention to expression is care about human expression as embodied in women’s voices. Making women’s voices heard is the first aim of feminism. Making the human voice heard is the aim of OLP. And it is also the starting point of the ethics of care. In my own work, I have tried to understand the ethics of care as a heterodox ethics, inspired in part by OLP, that allows us to re-center moral philosophy on ordinary language and expressiveness. The present paper aims, therefore, at presenting the ethics of care in light of the need for a transformation of ethics. This transformation is operated from the point of view of OLP, a philosophy that calls our attention to ordinary lives by attending to ordinary details of language and expression, as having moral weight and importance. As I show in the final part of the essay, it also gives us a fresh perspective on the significance of women’s voice in film. OLP is a basis for redefining ethics as attention to ordinary life and care for moral expressivity. This reframing of ethics and moral life has been proposed by Cora Diamond and by Stanley Cavell as a way of refocusing on ordinary lives. I will show the remarkable contribution made by the ethics of care to this transformation of ethics. By proposing to valorize moral values like caring, attention to others, and solicitude, the ethics of care has contributed to modifying a dominant conception of ethics and has profoundly changed the way we look at it. It has introduced ethical stakes into politics, weakening theories of justice by critiquing them. But, most significantly, it has given



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voice to the ordinary. The ethics of care draws our attention to the ordinary, to what we are unable to see, to what is right before our eyes and is for this very reason invisible to us. It is an ethics that gives voice and attention to humans who are undervalued precisely because they perform unnoticed, invisible tasks, and take care of basic needs. And, more often than not, these humans are women, often nonwhite women. Feminism is, at its core, about finding or claiming one’s voice. The “voice” Carol Gilligan discovers is the ordinary voice of women, and OLP contributes to turning our attention to them. ­Gilligan’s work has been undervalued within feminist theory for its alleged essentialism: its controversial claim that women share a «  different  » moral sensibility. Beyond this controversy, I want to emphasize the fact that her work marks most explicitly, and maybe for the first time, the necessity of bringing women’s voices into ordinary human conversation. “Bringing women’s voices into what was then called the human conversation, would change the voice of that conversation by giving voice to aspects of human experience that were for the most part unspoken or unseen.” (Gilligan 2010)

Ordinary ethics and the importance of what we care about Care is a fundamental aspect of human life and it consists, as Joan Tronto puts it, of “everything we do to continue, repair, and maintain ourselves so that we can live in the world as well as possible.” (Tronto and Fischer 1990, p. 41) Hence care corresponds to an ordinary reality: the fact that people look after one another, take care of one another, and thus are attentive to the functioning of the world, which depends on this kind of care. The ethics of care affirms the importance of care and attention given to others, in particular to those whose lives and wellbeing depend on particularized, continual, and daily attention: ordinary vulnerable others. This ethics is based on analysis of the historical conditions that have favored a division of moral labor such that activities of care have been socially and morally devalorized. The assignation of women to the domestic sphere has reinforced the exclusion of these activities and preoccupations from the moral domain and the public sphere,

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reducing them to private sentiments devoid of public moral and ­political import. The perspectives of care carry within them a fundamental claim about the importance of care for human life, the relations that organize it, and the social and moral position of caregivers. To recognize this means recognizing that dependence and vulnerability are aspects of a condition common to all, not just a special category of humans, “the vulnerable.” This sort of “ordinary realism” (in the sense of “realistic” proposed by Diamond (1991; see also Laugier 2013a) is absent from the majority of moral theories, which have a tendency to reduce the activities and preoccupations of care to a concern for victims and for the weak on the part of selfless mothers. Hence the importance of acknowledging the first tenet of the ethics of care: the human is vulnerable. So vulnerability defines ordinariness, and the development of the concept of vulnerability provides new resources for a reevaluation of the ordinary. OLP helps us connect the ethics of care to the idea of human vulnerability as it is developed in ethics inspired by Wittgenstein. Cavell, Diamond, and Veena Das connect the idea of the vulnerability of the human to the vulnerability of what I want to call our lifeform(s). Lebensformen in Wittgenstein, Cavell stresses, could be translated not by the phrase “forms of life,” but rather “lifeforms.” (Cavell 1979; Laugier 2006) For Cavell and Das, this idea of a life form is connected to Wittgenstein’s anthropological sensitivity or sensibility, to his attention to everyday language forms as being both obvious and strange, foreign. Michel Foucault recognized this kind of attention as crucial to the role of philosophy: “We have long known that the role of philosophy is not to discover what is hidden, but to render visible what precisely is visible—which is to say, to make appear what is so close, so immediate, so intimately linked to ourselves that, as a consequence, we do not perceive it.” (Foucault 2004, p. 540-541) If we define ethics by such immanent caring, it directs our attention to the moral capacities or competences of ordinary people. Attention to the everyday, to what Das calls the everyday life of the human, or what Cavell calls the ordinary other, is the first definition



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of caring. The definition of care by Joan Tronto and Berenice Fisher has to be taken seriously: “In the most general sense, care is a species of activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our world so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life sustaining web”. (Tronto and Fischer 1990, p. 40)

Reflection on care can be construed as a consequence of the turn in  moral thought illustrated by the work of Cora Diamond: against what Wittgenstein in the Blue Book called the “craving for generality,” it is the attempt to valorize, within morality, attention to the particular(s), to the ordinary details of human life, the aspects of life neglected by philosophy and by us. This descriptive aim transforms morality: care, like OLP, brings our attention back to the rough ground of the ordinary, to the level of everyday life. It is a practical response to specific needs, which are always those of singular others (whether close to us or not); it is work carried out just as much in the private sphere as in public; it a commitment not to treat anyone as negligible, and it is a sensibility to the details that matter in lived situations. By giving back a (different) voice to individual sensibility, to the intimate, one ensures the conversation/conservation (maintenance) of a human world. This is obvious in the contexts described in Das’ Life and Words, when violence or catastrophe destroys the everyday and the very sense of life (2006, p. 89; see also Lovell, Das, Pandolfo and Laugier 2013). Cavell refers to Das’s recognition that in the gender-determined division of the work of mourning the results of violence, the role of women is to attend, in a torn world, to the details of everyday life that allow a household to function, collecting supplies, cooking, washing and straightening up, seeing to children, and so on, that allow life to knit itself back into some viable rhythm, pair by pair. Part of her task is to make us ponder how it is that such evidently small things (whose bravery within tumultuous circumstances is, however, not small) are a match for the consequences of unspeakable horror, for which other necessaries are not substitutes. (Cavell, in Das 2006, xiii-xiv)

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The subject of care is affected, caught in a context of relations, in a form of life that is both social and biological. This idea of Lebensform is associated in Cavell and Das (2007) with attention to the ordinary form of life: to what Cavell calls “the uncanniness of the ordinary” and Das calls “the everyday life of the human.” The center of gravity of ethics shifts from the “just” to the “important.” Measuring the importance of care for human life means recognizing that dependence and precarity are not accidents that happen only to “others.” (Kittay and Feder 2002) Going against the grain of the ideal of autonomy that drives most moral theories, care reminds us that we need others in order to satisfy our needs. This often unpleasant reminder may well be at the source of the misrecognition of care, when it is reduced to a vacuous or condescending version of charity. “Recognizing the importance of care would thus allow us to revalue the contributions made to human societies by the outcasts, by women, by the humble people who work every day. Once we commit ourselves to remap the world so that their contributions count, then we are able to change the world.” (Tronto 2008) By bringing ethics back to the “rough ground of the ordinary,” to the level of everyday life, care aims at a practical response to specific needs, which are always those of singular ordinary others. The first point to be made here is that depicting our ordinary lives does not mean simply describing our practices. Ethics cannot be described by reference to our customs, and our practices cannot offer a foundation for ethics. Ethics is not empirical in this sense. This is connected with Diamond’s saying that our practices are exploratory and not merely given. Our practice is shaped by what we expect from ethics, and ethics is shaped both by what we do and by what we want or imagine, or inquire. There is, for Diamond, no subject matter specific to ethics. This might seem to make ethics more general. But the second point is just the opposite: Diamond’s aim, drawing on Wittgenstein, is to define an ethics of (attention to) the particular. And this is a perspective shared by the ethics of care: attention to ordinary life. Realism in ethics, on this view, consists in returning to ordinary language, in examining our words and paying attention to them, in taking care of



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them (taking care of our words and expressions, and of ordinary others). OLP teaches us that our ethical lives cannot be captured with a half-dozen words like “good,” “right,” “duty,” “fairness,” “justice,” and the like, but rather require exploration of the way our ethical preoccupations are embedded in our language and our life, in clusters of words that extend beyond our ethical vocabulary itself and sustain complex connections with a variety of institutions and practices. In order to describe ethical understanding we would have to describe all of this, all these particular uses of words, of which a general definition cannot be given. From OLP’s perspective, the elements of moral vocabulary have no meaning except within the context of our customs and form of life. In other words, they come to life against the background that “gives our words their meaning.” For Wittgenstein, meaning is not only determined by use or “context” (as many analyses of language have recognized), but is embedded in, and only perceptible against, the background of the practice of language. To redefine ethics by starting off from what is important means paying this “attention to particulars.” We can look to a whole cluster of terms, a language-game of the particular—attention, care, importance, what matters—that is common to OLP and the ethics of care. Our capacity for attention is the result of developing a perceptive capacity, the ability to see a detached detail or gesture against its background. This particularism of attention to detail is the source of the shift of perspective in moral philosophy: from the examination of general concepts and norms of moral choice to the examination of particular visions, of individual “configurations” of thought. The ethics of care merges with this sensitivity to words and the “realistic spirit” by drawing our attention to the place of ordinary words in the weave and details of our lives, and our relation to/distance from our words. In “Vision and Choice in Morality,” Iris Murdoch writes of the importance of attention. She describes differences in ethics as differences of Gestalt: “Here moral differences look less like differences of choice, and more like differences of vision.” (Murdoch 1997, p. 82; see also Laugier 2013b) Our concepts depend, for their very application, on our vision of what is important (what m ­ atters) to us. (Laugier 2011c,

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p. 5) Importance lies in details, and this particularism of attention to detail is another obvious feature of OLP that is also is central to the ethics of care. The kind of moral philosophy inspired by OLP displaces its very field of study, its point, from general principles to the examination of particular, individual visions, hence draws attention to neglected aspects of life, or to invisible human beings. As Iris Murdoch puts it: “When we apprehend and assess other people we do not consider only their solutions to specifiable practical problems, we consider something more elusive which may be called their total vision of life, as shown in their mode of speech or silence, their assessments of others, their conception of their own lives, what they think attractive or praiseworthy, what they think funny: in short the configurations of their thought which show continually in their reactions and conversation.” (Murdoch 1997, pp. 80-81) For Murdoch, this vision is not a theoretical point of view but rather a sensitivity to the texture of being. This texture is not a matter of moral choices, but of “what matters,” what counts. As Diamond writes: “The intelligent description of such things is part of the intelligent, the sharp-eyed, description of life, of what matters, makes differences, in human lives.” (Diamond 1991, p. 375) The meaning of OLP does indeed lie in the recognition that language is used, spoken, by a human voice, our singular expressiveness, permanently revealing, betraying ourselves. This sense of the life of language is what the later Wittgenstein means by our “form of life”: the practices in which language is caught and which collect around our words. This notion of human life is also connected to Wittgenstein’s idea of a form of life as lifeform (as a form taken by life). We can now see more clearly the contribution made by the ethics of care to transforming ethics into attention to the human lifeform. “To ask a question of the form ‘In what circumstances would you say…?’ is precisely Wittgenstein’s most obvious (ordinary language) procedure directed to and about us, about us as philosophers when we are, as we inevitably are, variously tempted to force our ordinary words to do what they will not do, disappointed by finitude.” (Cavell, preface to Das 2006)



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OLP, by relentlessly asking and examining “what we should say when,” challenges our modes of expression, our temptation to quit the ordinary. The uncanniness of the ordinary, for Cavell, is not resolved in the return to everyday life and words; the human is not a given to be “accepted”; it is defined by the permanent threat of denial of the human. Attention to the everyday, to what Das calls the everyday life of the human, is the first step in caring. Tronto’s and Fisher’s definition of care as a “life-sustaining web” (Tronto and Fisher 1990) has to be taken into account. Wittgenstein’s idea of a form of life/lifeform also defines a texture. “Texture” refers to an unstable reality that cannot be fixed by concepts, or by determinate particular objects, but only by the recognition of gestures, manners, and styles. A form of life can be grasped only by attention to textures or moral patterns, perceived as “morally expressive” in/on the background provided by a form of life. Our capacity for moral expression is rooted in a mutable form of life, vulnerable to our better and worse uses of language. The type of interest, the care that we have for others, the importance that we give them, does not exist except in the possibility of the display or revelation of the self in its moral expression.

From OLP to the politics of (ordinary) voice The idea of an ethics formulated in a different voice and expressed in women’s voices is 1) an ordinary conception of ethics, 2) an expressivist conception of ethics. This ethics is not founded on universal principles but rather starts from experiences of everyday life and the moral problems of real people in their ordinary lives. The starting point of my book Why We Need Ordinary Language Philosophy (1999; translated 2013) was the idea of a philosophy of language anchored neither in standard analytic philosophy nor in continental philosophy but rather in attention to uses of language, to language as it is used, as it is in circulation. This use of OLP can be termed realistic: it is an ordinary realism that construes language both as a human practice and as a tool for refining perception and depiction. In OLP, the ideas of adjustment, fitting, and the perception of

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differences and resemblances account for realist aspirations, but are inseparable from recognition of the fact that language is part of the world. The meaning of ordinary language philosophy does indeed lie in recognition that language is used and spoken by a human voice, filled with human breath. This sense of language is what the later Wittgenstein means by our “form of life”: the question is no longer, as in his early work, whether language is an image of reality, but of how we can “come back to earth” and to ordinary conditions of life. The notion of care is best expressed not in the form of a theory, but an activity: care as action (taking care, caring for) and as attention, concern (caring about). Care is an activity necessary to maintaining persons and connections; it is work carried out both in the private sphere and in the public sphere, and it is sensitivity to the “details” that count. Care is something concrete, embedded in the ordinary details of human life, and it ensures the maintenance, sustainability, and continuity of the human world. Such a definition of ethics, which may be called a paradigm shift, requires attention to and repossession of ordinary language, thus transforming the very notion of ethics, enhancing the question of human vulnerability, and connecting it to the vulnerability of language use. The perspective of the ethics of care, because it calls our attention to our general situation of dependence, is inseparably political and ethical; it develops an analysis of social relations organized around dependence and vulnerability—blind spots in the ethics of justice. Thus, care-based approaches target the theory of justice as it developed and took the dominant position in both political and moral thinking over the course of the second half of the last century. This is not only because, as the controversies between the partisans of care and those of justice illustrate, these approaches call into question the universality of Rawls’ conception of justice, but also because they transform the very nature of moral questioning and the concept of justice itself—expressing not merely a negative criticism of justice but rather the positive need for “more than justice.” (Tronto 2008) The question is no longer one of choosing between care and justice, but



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of understanding how one can draw on both dispositions. Again, ­Gilligan’s suggestions may be of use; and her recent writings may clear up some misunderstandings about her “essentialism” by showing that her main concern is in combining theories of justice and care rather than opposing them via a gender dichotomy. “The potential error in justice reasoning lies in its latent egocentrism, the tendency to confuse one’s perspective with an objective standpoint or truth, the temptation to define others in one’s own terms by putting oneself in their place. The potential error in care reasoning lies in the tendency to forget that one has terms, creating a tendency to enter into another’s perspective and to see oneself as “selfless,” by defining oneself in other’s terms.” (Gilligan 1995, p. 43) It is a matter, then, beyond the justice/care debate, of each individual finding his or her voice, and of hearing and expressing both the voice of justice and that of care, avoiding the following two distortions or deformations: “the equation of human with male, unjust in its omission of women; and the equation of care with self-sacrifice, uncaring in its failure to represent the activity and the agency of care.” (ibid, p. 43) Care then appears as one of the existent paths toward a genuine ethics, one that is concrete, attentive to actual practices and forms of life, and not only normative. It is not a matter of making justice and sensibility compatible, in a sort of moralistic half-measure, nor of introducing a dose of care into the theory of justice. Numerous works in ethics have convincingly argued in favor of this compatibility. It is instead a matter, more radically, of seeing sensibility as a necessary condition of justice. Tronto notes that the care /justice debate has been really “onesided,” as if it were always the burden of the ethics of care to prove that it is compatible with justice. One can integrate care into a general ethical and political approach that would not be reserved for women, but would be an aspiration for all, and would thus allow for an amelioration of the concept of justice. One can, as Nussbaum and Diamond have suggested, redefine care and justice by redefining ethics on the basis of the sensible and of moral perception, and here we need to give attention to the expressivity of women. The question

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becomes: how is the kind of new attention that care forces upon us to be separated from women’s point of view, and the mere fact that women’s voices have been deadened? The focus on moral notions such as duty or choice (a result of the influence of Kant and Rawls) leaves out the essential of ordinary moral questioning. As Diamond remarks, someone who is perfectly rigorous and moral may nevertheless have something petty or stingy about her, and this unlovable feature is something that could, instead of being considered a vague, non-ethical, psychological concept, form an integral part of moral reflection. Annette Baier suggests that we focus on a quality such as gentleness, which can only be treated in descriptive and normative terms and “resists analysis in terms of rules,” (Baier 1985, p. 219) since this quality is a response appropriate to the other, according to circumstance: it necessitates an experimental attitude, sensibility to the situation, and the ability to improvise, to “move on to something else” when faced with certain reactions. Baier, like Murdoch, criticizes the idea that moral philosophy can be reduced to questions of obligation and choice; the idea that since a moral problem can be formulated in these terms, it can also be treated thus. Perhaps the idea of women’s voices in ethics sounds controversial, but the fact that moral philosophy is about men’s voices may be less controversial. Baier takes up Ian Hacking’s observations on moral philosophy’s obsession with the model of game theory, calling it a masculine syndrome (“a big boy’s game, and a pretty silly one too”). Meanwhile, Tronto puts it beautifully in Moral Boundaries (1993): “Care requires justice, but it also requires that we think of justice in concrete cases and circumstances, not just as a general set of principles that are left to courts, politicians, or philosophers, to apply.” This transformation in ethics is possible because care is a practice, work, not “only” a moral feeling or disposition. Care is everywhere, and it is such a pervasive part of the human form of life that it is never seen for what it is: a range of activities by which we organize our world so that we can live in it as well as possible. When we get down to the ways in which we actually live our lives, care activities are central and ubiquitous. When we begin to take these activities



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seriously, “the world will look different if we place care, and its related values and concerns, closer to the center of human life.” (Tronto 2008) The ethics of care draws our attention to the ordinary, to what we are unable to see, though it is right before our eyes. Rather than claiming a “women’s ethics,” it claims to give voice to humans (mostly women, and people of color) who are undervalued precisely because they are assigned to activities that have been socially and morally devalorized, denied because we (men and women) do not want to see, acknowledge, what we depend on. Care is defined by attention to differences (see Wittgenstein: “I’ll teach you differences”). A main difficulty of the ethics of care, then, as a way of thinking about the world, is that “This caring attitude requires us to reconcile the universal needs for care with the circumstances of what seems to be the best form of care in every individual case” (Tronto). What is at stake here is the validity of general moral principles, and hence, the relationship of the general to the particular. What is the relevance, the importance, of the particular, of individual sensibility? What can the singular claim? The subject of care is a sensible, sensitive, receptive individual inasmuch as she is affected, is caught in a context of relations, in a social and biological form of life, in relations and hierarchies of power that pervade our lives—what Foucault defines in terms of a biopolitics. The (polemical) importance of the ethics of care is that, like OLP, it subverts well-established intellectual and social hierarchies and attracts attention to a number of phenomena that are overlooked because they are connected to the female. Carol Gilligan’s ethics of care, for example, takes as its starting point the idea that the (moral) sentiments and expressions of women are not inferior forms of morality, but are rather moral resources that have been ignored and, if taken into account, would allow for a profound renewal of moral and social thought. This will only become apparent if we see care not only as a sensibility or affectivity but as an ordinary practice, an ethics defined by the concrete work done for the most part by women, and neglected for that very reason. Only, then, if we see care as attention to the ordinary.

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Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell propose a new species of realism, which we will call ordinary realism. This is a realism based not on a metaphysical link between language and reality, mind, and world, but on our attention (another ordinary sense of mind) to the practices and life of language, to language as it is used within a form of life, but also as it is used to create new forms of life. Ordinary realism construes language both as a human practice and as a precision tool for the description of what matters. Fundamental to this vision are the twin recognitions that language is used and spoken by human voices and that language is part of the world. For Austin and Cavell, language use is a search for the just perception of differences and resemblances, an effort to adjust or fit our expressions to the world and to our position within it. The question is no longer the “analytic” question of whether language is a right or wrong image of reality, but of the practices that collect around our words; practices in which language is at once caught and caught up. To say that language is not only a representation of the real but a part of the real is to say that language affects us, allows us to affect others, and constantly transforms our meanings. This is the fundamental idea in Cavell’s brilliant first book, Must We Mean What We Say? “Linguistic phenomenology” — the name Austin considered giving his philosophy — means paying attention to our words. In return, we get a “sharpened awareness” of words and what they are about. “When we examine what we should say when, what words we should use in what situations, we are looking again not merely at words (or “meanings” whatever they may be) but also at the realities we use the words to talk about: we are using a sharpened awareness of words to sharpen our perception of, though not as the final arbiter of, the phenomena.” (Austin 1962, p. 182) One essential connection between OLP and care hence lies in the idea of attention to importance: more precisely “the importance of importance.” (Cavell 1981) The conversion required to put aside competing ideas of the important, to destroy our ideas of the important, is the condition of possibility for women’s expression. The site for finding a voice, or voices, for women is attention to ordinary language.



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Attention to human voices and to ordinary life creates a paradigm shift in ethics that is deeply connected with attention to, and repossession of, ordinary language. Attention to the experiences of everyday life and to human textures and expressions makes sense only when women’s expressions are included, and this is the deepest critical feature of OLP, as well as the starting point of its feminist accomplishment. Knowing what we mean, meaning what we say is the core of OLP. But it means (at)tending to the ordinary world, and Cavell nicely defines that world, and the word: “To this extent, they had not known themselves, and not known the world. I mean, of course, the ordinary world. That may not be all there is, but it is important enough: morality is in that world, and so are force and love; so is art and a part of knowledge (the part which is about that world); and so is religion (wherever God is).” (Cavell 1969; see also Laugier 2011b) OLP is a minority current in the mainstream philosophy of language and even in the active and recognized field of pragmatics. The analytic philosophy that emerged from the “linguistic turn” and that is now a dominant strand linked to the cognitive sciences and the “philosophy of mind” is certainly fertile, but it has systematically neglected important and vibrant contemporary approaches to language that are irreducible to cognitivist or naturalistic models. Instead, these approaches are descriptive and attentive to everyday usages of language. OLP takes ordinary uses of language as the starting point for philosophical analysis because it considers this to be the necessary condition for avoiding the “scholastic illusion” denounced by Austin in the 1950s and later by Bourdieu, which consists in taking “the things of logic for the logic of things” and often leads to thought becoming sterile in a vain scholasticism that loses all connection to the problems posed in ordinary life. Thus, OLP is from the outset oriented toward social matters and attention to the unseen, to neglected reality. Its primary methodological ambition is a conceptual analysis that would make it possible to recognize the importance of context in the practice of language, thought, and perception—that is, in our different ways of engaging in the real—while at the same time defending

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a form of realism anchored in agents’ practices: their words, expressions, and thoughts. Thus OLP is the inspiration for today’s trend of “contextualism” in the philosophy of language and epistemology. Still, this development of contextualism or “relativism” has ignored some important aspects and potentialities of OLP: its ambition to describe, as precisely as possible, the cognitive, perceptual, linguistic, social, and moral dimensions of our usages and to analyze all forms of expression—not only descriptive and performative, but also emotive or passionate. In particular, the domain of the perlocutionary is a sort of “dark continent,” which, with the exceptions of Cavell and of Nancy Bauer and Alice Crary, has not been explored in philosophical literature. As Cavell has shown, the expressivity involved in the perlocutionary may well be connected to women. With the Austinian notion of linguistic phenomenology, OLP orients its reflection on language toward a type of adequacy that is no longer correspondence, but rather the adequacy of human adjustment. OLP does not encourage defining the meaning of a term as the set of situations where this term is appropriate or as a list of established uses, but rather advocates examining how meaning is made and improvised through its integration into practice and self-expressivity. OLP sees language as part of reality and as something that affects us, allows us to affect others, and constantly transforms our meaning. This is the main idea of Cavell’s Must We Mean What We Say? “The agreement we act upon Wittgenstein calls “agreement in judgments” (§242), and he speaks of our ability to use language as depending upon agreement in ‘forms of life’ (§241). But forms of life, he says, are exactly what have to be ‘accepted’; they are ‘given.’” (Cavell 1979, p.  30) That we agree in language means that language—our form of life—produces our understanding of one another. Words, says Austin, are “middle-sized dry goods,” typical of our ordinary objects, and we are in touch with them, so this tangible relation we have to our words is something that connects OLP and the general question of our sensibility to words. The agreement at the heart of linguistic phenomenology and OLP is not the correspondence between words and things but rather the



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agreement between ourselves, what we mean, and reality. This sharpened attention to use completes the political agreement, as Wittgenstein says, in language, which is not a consensus. My agreement or my belonging to this or that form of life, political or moral, is not given. The form of my acceptance, the limits and scales of our agreement, are not knowable a priori, no more than one can a priori know the scope of a word; and this is essential to the relevance of OLP for ethics. In this way, OLP arrives at two main lines of thought concerning gender, feminism, and the question of attention to women’s voices: first, women’s ordinary expressiveness and the ethics of care, which from the beginning has been a claim for the validity of women’s voices; that is, women’s “different voice” in ethics, which has been silenced or, more precisely, deadened or neglected, and not taken seriously as an ethical point of view. And second, attention as a moral value, beyond or before ethical concepts such as right, wrong, good. Attention is part of the meaning of care: one must pay attention to these details of life that we neglect (for example, who has cleaned and straightened the room in which we are standing?), and to questions we do not want to consider. To do this is to pursue the method of OLP, questioning what counts as important and examining ordinary, unseen details. Cavell’s major contribution on this point is to define our relations to our words and our expressions in terms of voice and claim. This is also one of Austin’s intuitions through to the end: we must not concern ourselves only with analysis of what we say, but with the we, the should, and the say. Must We Mean What We Say? was perhaps the first work to ask the question of the relevance of our ordinary statements in relation to ourselves, in various domains and by turning to unexpected resources (literature, art criticism, theater) that can also provide a space and time for women’s voices. The content (objective, semantic, or empirical) of propositions is no longer the question, nor is “nonsense” or “performativity,” but rather the fortunes and misfortunes of ordinary human vulnerable expression—the search for (or loss of) the right tone or right word. The feminist approach to ordinary language thus reiterates an essential and human difficulty in the question of voice and of

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our agreement in language: that is, the question of my capacity to speak, and thus, to conform to shared criteria; of, Cavell says,“ the claim to speak for ‘the group’—the question, namely, about how I could have been party to the establishing of criteria if I do not recognize that I have and do not know what they are…to emphasize that the claim is not that one can tell a priori who is implicated by me, because one point of the particular kind of investigation Wittgenstein calls grammatical is exactly to discover who.” (Cavell 1979, p. 22) That we agree in language is, for OLP, certainly not the end of the problem of skepticism, and conventionalism is not an answer to the questions asked here. Indeed, for Cavell it is crucial that Wittgenstein says that we agree in and not on language. This means that we are not agents of the agreement; that language precedes this agreement as much as it is produced by it; and that this circularity constitutes an irreducible element of skepticism. For Diamond, this is precisely Cavell’s contribution to unveiling a difficulty of philosophy, one that originated in the difficulty of reality. “Since we cannot assume that the words we are given have their meaning by nature, we are led to assume they take it from convention; and yet no current idea of ‘convention’ could seem to do the work that words do. We cannot have agreed beforehand to all that would be necessary.” (ibid, p. 31) To agree in language means that language—our form of life—produces our understanding just as much as it is the product of an agreement; that in this sense it is natural to us, and that the idea of convention is there to at once mimic and mask this necessity: “Underlying the tyranny of convention is the tyranny of nature.” Here again, Cavell’s critique of usual interpretations of “forms of life” through the formula “lifeforms” comes in; this emphasizes the form of life not only in its social dimension but also in its biological dimension. At the same time, one does not have a voice, one’s own voice, by nature: it must be found so as to speak in the name of others and to let others speak in one’s name. This is a central matter of feminism. For if others do not accept my words, I lose more than language: I lose my voice. “The alternative to speaking for myself ­representatively (for someone else’s consent) is not: speaking for



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myself privately. The alternative is having nothing to say, being voiceless, not even mute.” (ibid, p. 26) To not be public is not to be private: it is to be inexpressive. “Voiceless, not even mute.” This is the very difficulty of philosophy and of reality raised by OLP. The question of the universal voice is the question of the voice itself and its arrogation by men—an individual voice claiming to speak in the name of all others. It receives a response in Cavell’s A Pitch of Philosophy. Here Cavell criticizes the philosopher, most often a man, who claims to speak for all humans and, hence, to speak for women. The question is raised as early as Must We Mean What We Say?: “Who is to say whether a man speaks for all men? Why are we so bullied by such a question? Do we imagine that if it has a sound answer the answer must be obvious or immediate? But it is no easier to say who speaks for all men than it is to speak for all men. And why should that be easier than knowing whether a man speaks for me?” (Cavell 1969, XI) This disquiet is expressed constantly in Wittgenstein, and The Claim of Reason takes it to its limits. OLP’s discovery is that the human is constantly tempted, or threatened, by inexpressiveness. “So the fantasy of a private language, underlying the wish to deny the publicness of language, turns out, so far, to be a fantasy, or fear, either of inexpressiveness, one in which I am not merely unknown, but in which I am powerless to make myself known; or one in which what I express is beyond my control.” (Cavell 1979, p. 351) The question goes beyond including women in the community of speakers: it is the question of any human being able to bear “the (inevitable) extension of the voice, which will always escape me and will forever find its way back to me.” And thus, the difficulty of philosophy (skepticism) lies not in the inexpressible but in expression: “the terror of being expressive beyond our means.” (Cavell 1994, p. 126) OLP is in a way obsessed with the “unhappy” dimension of language, its failures—cases where our words fail, are inadequate, inexpressive, inarticulate—and with the vulnerability of voice (see Austin, followed by the sociologist Erving Goffman). This failure is an indissolubly aesthetic and moral problem: the difficulty, in women’s voice,

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of achieving rightness of tone, adequacy of expression, and self-­ confidence. For Wittgenstein, the importance of grammatical investigation is precisely that it “destroys everything great and interesting,” thus displacing our interests, our hierarchies; it is the condition of possibility for establishing a place for women’s expression in philosophy of language. Cavell aims at this, we shall see, in his work on film, Pursuits of Happiness and analogously in Contesting Tears. Here, the specific tone identified and expressed early on in Cavell’s reading of the later Wittgenstein may be seen, or heard, as a refusal of a kind of male assertiveness in finding the right words in favor of a more interrogative, or “minor” mode. Cavell achieves an alternative tonality of language that may be looked for in Wittgenstein, and which is one of the stakes of what we call ordinary language philosophy.

OLP as an ethics and aesthetics of expressivity Attention to ordinary expression and human voice and texture leads to re-considering the question of women’s expression, which has been stifled or neglected and which often finds its place in literature, film (and, more recently, TV shows). OLP develops itself as an ethics and an aesthetics. Once again, ordinary language is not to be envisioned as having only a descriptive, or even agentive function, but as a perceptual instrument that allows for subtlety and adjustment in perceptions and actions. I want to insist on Cavell’s contribution to the question of what it is to be a woman (see Moi 2005), to carry a woman’s voice with his elaboration of the concepts of expression and voice—concepts that are most crucial to Cavell’s development of OLP. The history of feminism begins precisely with the experience of inexpressivity, with which John Stuart Mill was concerned: situations in which one does not have a voice for making oneself understood because one has lost contact with one’s own experience. Cavell has been clearly sensitive to the feminist tone in Mill’s sentence: “Thus the mind itself is bowed to the yoke: even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; their human capacities are withered and starved: they become incapable of any strong wishes or native pleasures, and



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are generally without either opinions or feelings of home growth, or properly their own. Now is this, or is it not, the desirable condition of human nature?” (Mill 1985, III:6) This is a description that captures all those situations that involve a loss of experience, language, and concepts, and that can motivate a desire to come out of this situation of loss of voice, to take back possession of ordinary language, and to find a world that would be the adequate context for it. To regain our contact with experience and to find a voice for its expression: this is the definition of an ordinary ethics. Care, understood as attention and perception, is to be differentiated from a sort of suffocation of the self by affect or devotion. It confronts us with our own inabilities and inattentions, but above all, it shows us how these inattentions are then translated into a theory about what matters. “Where does our investigation get its importance from, since it seems to destroy everything interesting, all that is great and important? What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards [Luftgebäude]”. (Wittgenstein 1953, §118) Wittgenstein’s point is also that the importance of the grammatical investigation lies precisely in “destroying everything great and interesting,” displacing our interests, our hierarchies. Here the “fervor” identified and expressed early on in Cavell’s reading of Wittgenstein, its specificity, may be seen and heard as a refusal of a kind of male (or paternalistic) assertiveness in finding the right words, and the all-too-easy identification of the important with the masculine. The conversion required to put aside competing ideas of the important, to destroy our ideas of the important, is the condition of possibility for a place for women’s expression (accomplished with the emergence of women’s voice in conversation, which Cavell studied in Pursuits of Happiness and especially in his book on The Melodrama of the Unknown Woman, where he focuses on women’s expressivity). More deeply, Wittgenstein (as opposed perhaps to Austin) makes it possible to give up, or minimize the importance of, the heterosexual tone in language, and hence to pursue, in Cavell’s words, “philosophy’s aspiration to exchange intimacy without taking it personally.” (Cavell 1997, p.  158) On this question, Cavell writes, “I suppose that what I am

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expressing here is the fact that I am from time to time haunted—I rather take it for granted that this is quite generally true of male heterosexual philosophers—by the origins of philosophy in an environment of homosexual intimacy.” (ibid, p. 159) This is why, despite some heavy criticism from feminists, Cavell may be thought of as one of the main philosophers to give and enforce appropriate attention to women’s voices and styles. Cavell finds in his autobiographical works, A Pitch of Philosophy (1994) and Little Did I Know (2010a) a tonality of impersonal intimacy, thus achieving a non-heterosexual tonality of language that may be sought after in Wittgenstein and could be at stake in ordinary language philosophy. Attention to the ordinary voice makes OLP a liberating moment for women’s philosophical voices. Annette Baier, a defender of both empiricism and OLP, mentions in her great paper “What Do Women Want in a Moral Theory” that some moral Wittgensteinian philosophers should be called “honorary women.” Wittgenstein should similarly be acknowledged for “fathering” a long line of women OL philosophers: Anscombe, Murdoch, Foot, Diamond, Lovibond, 2 Walker, and others. A number of Cavell’s readers (Moi, Bauer, Das, Marrati) have noted the relevance of his classic work on film in particular—Hollywood remarriage comedies and melodrama—to what he calls the history of women, and to the place women have in the constitution of moral perfectionism. This relevance is grounded in a conception of voice, expression, and language as connected not only to ordinary use and forms of life, but to the essential vulnerability of meaning and expression. Cavell’s goal in his analyses of the women’s claims in film inherits OLP’s constant concern with felicitous and infelicitous expression and the vulnerability of speech. Cavell shows how film is the privileged medium for vulnerability and exposure, but also for

2   … and obviously the generation we as authors of these essays stand for, claiming to inherit OLP in a philosophical world transformed by feminist and gender studies



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empowerment and assertion, allowing the expressiveness of women and overcoming the constant threat of inexpressiveness. Comedies and melodrama are sites of what Cavell calls the talent of personal expressiveness. The first image to greet the reader opening Pursuits of Happiness is Cary Grant (in The Awful Truth) “looking directly to the world with as handsome a smile as Cary Grant has it in him to give.” Cavell continues, “This man, in words of Emerson’s, carries the holiday in his eye; he is fit to stand the gaze of millions.” (Cavell, 1981, p. 235) If this is the expression of the human as transfigured by film, what kind of expression is characteristic of woman? Cary Grant is “fit to stand the gaze of millions” because he is looking back, not “only” being looked at. To “stand the gaze” is to be able to acknowledge and bear expressivity, something men and women are— differently—capable of, except that it is not exactly a capability but rather a readiness, a capacity to attract attention and bear expression within our linguistic form of life. In this approach there are no univocal moral concepts that must be applied only to reality; rather, our moral concepts depend in their very application upon the narration or description we give of our existence, of what counts for us. This ability to perceive the importance of things, their place in our ordinary life, is not only “affective”: it is the ability for adequate expression (or, equally, for clumsy and awkward, failed expression). At the center of care is our ability for (our disposition to) moral expression, which, as Cavell and Charles Taylor have shown in various ways, is rooted in ordinary human and other life forms, in the (Wittgensteinian) sense of a simultaneously natural and social aggregate of forms of expression and connection to others. It is the form of life that determines the ethical structure of expression, and this expression, conversely, reworks life and gives it form. The relation to others, the type of interest and care we have for them, the importance we give them, take on their meaning within the context of a possible unveiling (voluntary or not) of oneself. Care is also specific attention to the invisible importance of things and moments: what Cavell calls “the essential dissimulation of importance,” which is part of what cinema educates us about. Cavell, in his

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work on film and in his autobiography, Little Did I Know (2010a), notes that the importance of film lies in its power to make what matters emerge: “to magnify the sensation and meaning of a moment.” Film cultivates in us a specific ability to see the importance of things and moments, and it emphasizes the covering over of importance in our ordinary life. For importance is essentially what can be missed and may remain unseen until later, or possibly, forever. The pedagogy of film is that while it amplifies the significance of moments, it also reveals the “inherent concealment of significance.” (see Laugier 2011b) “If it is part of the grain of film to magnify the feeling and meaning of a moment, it is equally part of it to counter this tendency, and instead to acknowledge the fateful fact of a human life that the significance of its moments is ordinarily not given with the moments as they are lived so that to determine the significant crossroads of a life may be the work of a lifetime.” (Cavell, 2010b, p. 6) The structure of expression articulates the concealment and revelation of importance, and such is the texture of life (our life form). This is the difficulty Cavell describes when he speaks of the temptation to inexpressiveness and isolation, and shows the essential vulnerability of human experience (another name for skepticism, expressed in the genre of the “Melodrama of the Unknown Woman”). Failure to pay attention to details, and to what is important in details, is, it turns out, as much a moral failure as a cognitive one. We discover importance not only through accurate and refined perception, but also through our failures to perceive: “a failure so to perceive, to persist in missing the subject, which may amount to missing the evanescence of the subject, is ascribable only to ourselves, to failures of our character; as if to fail to guess the unseen from the seen, to fail to trace the implications of things—that is to fail the perception that that there is something to be guessed and traced, right or wrong— requires that we persistently coarsen and stupefy ourselves.” (Cavell 2010b, p.  14) As Cavell says, “missing the evanescence of the subject,” failing to “guess the unseen from the seen,” is constitutive of our ordinary lives—and it is also the ordinary truth of skepticism. Acknowledging this consequence of skepticism, our own ­vulnerability,



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instead of “persistently stupefying ourselves” is a step toward genuine attention to ordinary life. Redefining morality on the basis of importance and the structural vulnerability of human experience may thus help in rethinking the theoretical stakes of care. The notion of care points to a specific blindness or “coarsening” in contemporary moral and political thought: blindness to the conditions of its own development within the human form of life. So the ethics of care joins OLP in a subversion of intellectual and ethical hierarchies. The perspective of care then leads us to explore the ways in which we—in practice and in theory—treat the demarcation between the spheres of personal relations (familial relations, but also love and friendship) and the socalled impersonal spheres of public relations, with their inevitable hierarchy: the political stakes of the ethics of care consist, again, in the ethical enablement of populations and categories that are assumed to be morally inferior. OLP could thus help us to go beyond the purely affective notion of care and, in the line of thought represented by Das and Nussbaum, to engage in reconceiving ethics not on the basis of grand principles, but rather on the basis of the fundamental needs of all humans, including women. The stakes of an ethics of care end up being epistemological by becoming political: an ethics of care seeks to highlight the connection between our lack of attention to neglected realities and the lack of theorization of these social realities, and in this way to understand why ethical—and often philosophical and political— thought is blind to certain ordinary realities: those connected with the domain of the private, the domestic, and the female. Thus, we find the continuation of OLP’s project in this renewed and deepened attention to what we depend on, to what makes ordinary life possible (what makes us ordinary). Neglecting the issue of care in ethics and politics amounts to ignoring the origin of what makes a moral society exist and endure: ignoring what makes our everyday lives, and ordinary language, possible, and alive. Cavell’s conception of “lifeform” is ultimately a contribution to the question of what it is to be a woman, with his development of

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the concepts of expression and voice, concepts that are, as I have tried to demonstrate, most crucial to his version of Wittgenstein’s and Austin’s ordinary language philosophy. This is obvious when one considers the place Cavell gives to Hollywood film in the creation of a woman’s voice and in the emergence of a generation of women: the films studied in Pursuits of Happiness were written, shot, and presented to the public at a historical moment (the 1930s-40s) when after some great historical female figures and notable gains culminating with the winning of the vote for women in 1920, it became obvious that women needed—still need—“more than rights” (as Annette Baier (1995) calls it: more than justice): actual equality of voice, which comes through a fuller expression; hence, conversational equality, absolute speech equality. Acknowledging this is a crucial part of what I see as Cavell’s relevance to feminism, as grounded on a conception of voice, expression, and in general, on a conception of language connected to ordinary use (see Laugier 2010) the essential vulnerability of meaning and expression, and the constant threat of inexpressiveness. So Cavell’s contribution to feminism, in his study of film during the early days of talking movies, is to show that what women want is not “only” equality as citizens, but equality of voice (which is claimed, but not always won, in the conversations and arguments in the movies he describes). The women/actresses in the films (Katharine Hepburn, Irene Dunne, Barbara Stanwyck, Ingrid Bergman, etc.) represent an extraordinary generation of women, capable of giving new expression to these claims and facing the symmetrical, extraordinary conversational talent of the males of that generation (Cary Grant being the first), which also says something about a transformation of the assertiveness of men. “In acknowledging the woman’s coming into her own powers by taking on the agency of her aunt’s voice, Gaslight asks us to ask: Who sings, the actor, the character? What is singing? What causes it?” (Cavell 1994, p. 13) So Cavell’s concept of the relevance of voice to the study of the specificity of women’s voice is obvious when one considers the place Cavell gives to Hollywood film in creating new women and the expressiveness of their claims to equality.



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“What is it about the conversation of just these films that makes it so perfectly satisfy the appetite of talking pictures? Evidently their conversation is the verbal medium in which, for example, questions of human creations and the absence of mothers and the battle between men and women for recognition of one another, and whatever matters turn out to entail these, are given expression.” (Cavell 1981, p.  18) The opera-like performance of Ingrid Bergman in the concluding scene of Gaslight, re-claiming her own voice, in search of expressiveness, is one of the most striking examples of this invention of women through voice. This scene is about the terror of absolute inexpressiveness and the symmetrical fear of absolute expressiveness, of total exposure: the polarization of inexpressiveness into two states of voicelessness, both also displayed in opera, and illustrating the relevance of OLP. Comedies and melodrama are hence locales for what Cavell beautifully calls (in reference to Bette Davis) the talent of personal expressiveness: expressivity through body and speech; what I earlier called texture. Is this capacity and texture, as the expression of self-reliance and assurance, reserved for men? All these women in Hollywood films are material proof that Cary Grant is not the only one “fit to stand the gaze of millions” anymore. Here we enter at last the territory of gendered moral expressivity. And here the question becomes that of sexual difference in expression, a difference that can legitimately emerge only with a liberation of the ordinary voice. The fact that this actual difference appears clearly and historically when a voice is claims equality for itself is something deeply pertinent, both and inseparably to feminism and to OLP. What is at stake is the ability for women to achieve expression and voice by entering ordinary conversation, escaping over-expressiveness and inexpressiveness: emerging as subjects of language. Cavell adds that “It is a democratic claim for personal freedom,” “something Davis shares with the greatest of the histrionic romantic stars.” (Cavell 1997, p. 128) Cavell thus shows film’s capacity to present us with the expressiveness of the unknown women. His account of meaning and expression deepens Wittgenstein’s and Austin’s attention to the powers and

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f­ailures of language. Cavell’s relevance for the discovery of women’s voice, his attention to women’s expressiveness and capacity to hold the high ground in a conversation or a fight, is based on a conception of voice inherited from Austin and Wittgenstein, and an inquiry into various ways to overcome voicelessness—the concrete meaning of the fantasy of private language criticized in Wittgenstein’s Investigations, as well as the outcome of Austin’s speech act theory. The question, again, is what the ordinary does to philosophy: it turns our attention to women. Attention to what we mean and what we say and “care for our words” defines OLP as a resource for feminist thinking.

Literature Austin, J.L. (1962) ‘A plea for excuses’, in Philosophical Papers, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Baier, A. (1985) Postures of the Mind: Essays on Mind and Morals, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Baier, A. (1995) ‘What do Women Want in a Moral Theory?’, in Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics, Cambridge, Mass.  : Harvard University Press. Cavell, S. (1969) Must We Mean What We Say? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cavell, S. (1979) The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy, New York: Oxford University Press. Cavell, S. (1981) Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Cavell, S. (1994) A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises, Cambridge, Harvard University Press. Cavell, S. (1997) Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Cavell, S. (2010a) Little Did I Know, Excerpts of Memory, Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press. Cavell, S. (2010b) ‘The Thought of Movies” in Themes Out of School, San Francisco: North Point Press. Das, V. (2006) Life and Words, Violence and the Descent into Ordinary, University of California Press. Diamond, C. (1991) The Realistic Spirit. Wittgenstein, Philosophy and the Mind, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Foucault, M. (2004 [1978]) ‘La philosophie analytique de la politique’ in Dits et écrits 3, Paris: Gallimard, 540-541. Gilligan, C. (1995) ‘Moral orientation and development’ in Held (ed.) Justice and Care, Boulder, Col: Westview Press. Gilligan, C. (2010) ‘In a Different Voice: Looking back to look forward,’ unpublished lecture, Paris.



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Kittay, E. and E. K. Feder (eds.) (2002), The Subject of Care. Feminist Perspectives on Dependency, NewYork Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield. Laugier, S. (2006) ‘Wittgenstein: Anthropology, Skepticism, and Politics’, in A. Norris ed., The Claim to Community: Essays on Stanley Cavell and Political Philosophy, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 19-38. Laugier, S. (2010) Le mythe de l’inexpressivité, Paris: Vrin. Laugier, S. (2011a [2005]), ‘Care et perception, l’éthique comme attention au particulier’, in P. Paperman and S. Laugier, Le souci des autres—éthique et politique du care, collection ‘Raisons Pratiques’, Editions de l’EHESS, Paris. Laugier, S. (2011b) ‘An introduction to Must We Mean What We Say?’ Critical Inquiry, 37, 4. Laugier, S. (2011c) ‘Matter and Mind: Cavell’s (Concept of) Importance’, Modern Language Notes, Vol.126, 5, pp. 994-1003. Laugier, S. (2013a) Why We Need Ordinary Language Philosophy, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Laugier, S. (2013b) ‘The Will to See: Ethics and Moral Perception of Sense’, trans. J. Chalier, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 34:2, 263–81. Lovell, Das, Pandolfo and Laugier (2013), Face aux désastres, Paris: Editions d’Ithaque. Moi, T. (2005) Sex, Gender, and the Body: The Student Edition of What Is a Woman? Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mill, J.S. (1985), On Liberty, ed. G. Himmelfarb, London: Penguin. Murdoch, I. (1997) ‘Vision and Choice in Morality  », in Iris Murdoch, Peter J. Conradi (eds.), Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, London, Chatto and Windus. Ogien, A. and S. Laugier (2014) Le principe démocratie, Paris, La découverte. Tronto, J. and B. Fisher (1990) ‘Toward a Feminist Theory of Caring’, in E. Abel and M. Nelson (eds.), Circles of Care, Albany: SUNY Press. Tronto, J. (1993) Moral Boundaries. A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care, New York, London: Routledge. Tronto, J. (2008) Un monde vulnérable, Paris: La découverte. Wittgenstein, L. (1953) Philosophical Investigations [Philosophische Untersuchungen] G. E. M. Anscombe, G. H. von Wright & R. Rhees (eds.), Oxford, Blackwell.

3. The Ethics of Care: The Work of the Moral Imagination Claude Gautier

The Moral Problem I would like to consider how, when we speak of the ethic of care, we also emphasise an aspect of moral experience which involves moral imagination. As Sandra Laugier has recently shown (Laugier 2010), we can say that the ethic of care involves a change of paradigm1. Traditionally, and despite sharp differences, the dominant contemporary moral philosophies in the United States and Britain share a quest for an irrecusable principle or system of rules that regulates human conduct. Such a quest presupposes many theoretical decisions about the nature of the relationships between reason and imagination, rationality and sensitivity. Moral philosophers since Kant have in large measure overlooked the importance of moral imagination. We can therefore examine the ethic of care from a position that recognises the importance of moral imagination insofar as experience is grounded in relationships and interaction processes. That is to say: we can trace connections between such an ethic and the descriptions of moral experience in pragmatist terms if we seriously take into account the fact that “to care” in its ethical aspects supposes the building of “a frame of relationships”. I would like to formulate an insight into that pragmatic dimension by returning to C. Gilligan’s classic opus, In a Different Voice (Gilligan

1

  A change that can be called a “particularist turn”.

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1982, 1993, 2003)2, in the knowledge that the same moral problem can in fact be dramatized in different ways or mapped using different images. For instance, in Chapter 2, she shows that Heinz’s dilemma may be connected with very different moral problems, because the imaginations involved in resolving it are partly shaped by differences of education and of situated practices. Thus, resolution implies differences that cannot be understood through the prism of gender. The cause must be sought on cultural and historical grounds insofar as these can considered to be social components of human growth. Consequently, Kohlberg’s error lies in the fact that he supposes that the different stages he distinguishes in the moral psychological development of young men’s lives—the only way to access moral maturity— apply to human growth in general. This is an example of gender bias. According to Gilligan, as I understand her, the different moral problems involved in Heinz’s dilemma must be understood as expressions of different moral experiences implying different skills, practices, imaginaries and justifications. First, I will examine several elements of Gilligan’s analysis of Heinz’s dilemma emphasising the relationship problem as a moral one. Second, I will try to perform this analysis in a pragmatist way. I will underline several conditions that are supposed to be operative in order to make moral deliberation alone possible; conditions that involve the activity of moral imagination3. Third, following S. Moller Okin, I will try to demonstrate that this kind of moral reasoning in the ethic of care supposes that the subjects are able to put themselves in each other’s place.

Relationship as Moral Experience Gilligan has proposed a comparison, and its background is the Kohlberg model, which distinguishes various stages in order to measure 2   Many of the criticisms which her position first elicited—especially on the matter of gender bias (“does a feminist ethic exist?” (Larrabee 1993)), have since then been overcome. 3   The following remarks are mainly based on Chapter 2 (Gilligan 2003, p. 24-63).



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moral development. Heinz’s dilemma enables us to underline the ways in which a conflict between moral norms can be overcome in adolescence. A man called Heinz debates whether or not he should steal a drug that he cannot afford to buy in order to save his wife’s life (Gilligan 2003, p.  25), the question being: “Should Heinz steal the drug?” (Gilligan 2003, p. 26). On one side of the dilemma, Jack, an eleven-year-old boy, gives a solution which involves rational and logical arguments; on the other, Amy, an eleven-year-old girl, gives a solution in the form of a narrative which at first seems to be far removed from rational and logical arguments. “Seeing in the dilemma not a math problem with humans but a narrative of relationships that extends over time” (Gilligan 2003, p. 28; my italics), Amy considers the value of the wife’s life in a context of relationships. Jack and Amy are thus asked many questions in order to explore the logic of resolving such a conflict of moral norms. Jack “assumes that anyone following reason would arrive at the same conclusion and thus that a judge would also consider stealing to be the right thing for Heinz to do” (Gilligan 2003, p. 26-27; my italics). Jack solves the dilemma impersonally through a comparison between a system of laws—you may not steal—and a system of moral norms—the priority of the value of life. Such a line of reasoning implies 1) that Jack is able to create a hierarchy between laws and moral values; 2) that such a hierarchy is shared by most people if they were to face such a dilemma. This position also implies a conception of the world as composed of atomistic individualities; that moral reasoning involves only impersonal subjects who are able to distance themselves from the particular circumstances of the case to be solved. If I try to try to give a description of the moral subject in that case, I would say that he is impersonal, exclusively oriented to logical arguments and uninterested, indifferent and apathetic. He looks like the “disencumbered man” that Michael Sandel has depicted, when speaking of the moral individual involved in J.  Rawls’s Theory of Justice (Sandel 1982, p. 168). This is a man without any qualities who is able to subject passions, sentiments, and, importantly, imagination to the control of reason. Finally, this is also an individual or a moral subject

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who is very close to the economic man of Rational Choice Theory. From a Kantian perspective, we can say that moral autonomy is exclusively predicated upon the disconnection between the pathological and the rational subject; that moral autonomy casts reason in the chief role of formulating and solving of moral problems. Gilligan has shown very clearly that the Kohlberg model of moral development is based on such a hypothesis, and that, on a philosophical level, the model of justice that legitimises it is paradigmatically illustrated by John Rawls’s Theory of Justice. In contrast, to resolve Heinz’s dilemma, Amy makes many assumptions that seem to defy the conventions of logic which Jack uses to deduce his own solution (which is confirmed by the very convergence in logic between the answer that she gives and the question that is posed). To quote Gilligan: “the world [Amy] knows is a different world from that refracted by Kohlberg’s construction of Heinz’s dilemma. Her world is a world of relationships and psychological truths where an awareness of the connection between people gives rise to a recognition of responsibility for one another, a perception of the need for response” (Gilligan 2003, p.  30; my italics). Amy is personally engaged through a process of communication— her position contrasts strongly with the kind of solipsism involved in Jack’s position. What we are looking for is not an argument that gives us objective reasons to break the law in the name of higher moral values. It is a scenario to imagine how it is possible to restore, to reshape a frame of relationships between several protagonists, a frame damaged by certain circumstances. The problem, therefore, is: how can we restore this frame which has been or will be broken, in this case specifically the one that Heinz’s dilemma dramatized? What makes Amy’s attitude different from Jack’s is the process by which moral subjects follow the pattern of the protagonists of the moral drama4, are concerned with it and, most of all, imagine new combinations of situations, new sets of relationships that provide new perspectives on overcoming the moral problem. 4

  Here: Heinz, his wife, the druggist and his wife, etc.



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This is one reason why the process of communication is so important. This process is one of the means with which Amy’s world of relationships can be partly reframed. What is important in this case is not the individual point of view that puts ego reasoning at a distance from others, from her or his passions, claiming a neutral position that is able to make exclusively logical and rational statements. It is not a matter of rationality versus sensitivity. In Amy’s world, as Gilligan has shown, moral characters, beliefs, and implied reasoning are inherently social, embodied, and historically situated. Jack’s position presupposes the ability to abstract the self from its social embodiment as if empirical circumstances could be set apart. What makes Amy’s position different then is that good moral reasoning supposes that the subject is psychologically aware of the connections that bind each protagonist of the moral drama. It is not possible to find a solution that does not try to take such boundaries into account, what C.  Gilligan calls “responsibility”. There is thus no moral answer which is not supported and guided by responsibility. To have a sense of responsibility not only creates a kind of space in which moral problems can be formulated, and moral conflicts can be solved; more radically, it also implies a way of reasoning which is not exclusively made up of rational arguments: a way of reasoning that mixes reason and imagination in a narrative—the narrative of a moral problem. Two kinds of moral deliberative process can be identified. One is based on an individualistic representation of the moral subject5; the other, on the contrary, supposes a situated and dependant subject6. In the former, the moral world is atomistic, composed of separated individuals, and moral arguments are mainly a priori; in the latter, the moral world is a network composed of interdependent subjects, and moral arguments are narratives. Thus, in moving from Jack’s position to Amy’s, the moral 5   Jack “see[s] the actors in the dilemma as opponents in a context of rights” (Gilligan 2003, p. 30). 6   Amy sees individuals as characters, as “members of a network of relationships on whose continuation they all depend” (Gilligan 2003, p. 30).

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paradigm changes: from the disencumbered subject without any human, historical, and psychological qualities, to the fabric of a moral subject who is concretely connected with others and whose relationships are essential to understanding, and if possible, resolving moral problems. In the former paradigm, reasoning is based on autonomy, and moral deliberations have to restore it; in the latter, reasoning is based on care as C.  Gilligan has stated: “Amy’s judgments contain the insights central to an ethic of care, just as Jack’s judgments reflect the logic of the justice approach” (Gilligan 2003, p. 30; my italics).

Moral Deliberation and the Role of Imagination My aim is now to show that moral deliberations are grounded in imagination in the ethic of care, that without imagination it is quite impossible to have a real and complete moral experience that can lead subjects to goodness and/or social justice. The way in which the example has so far been presented implies that the ethic of care favours an approach which devalues the role of reason by giving pride of place to the “particular”, to a consideration of the fabric of relationships, and to the supposition that moral agents are dependent beings who are concerned about the responsibility which engages them vis-à-vis their peers. I intend to demonstrate that this is not the case and that this “particularist” ethic of care—as outlined by C.  Gilligan—in fact entails a different understanding of the role of imagination in its relationships with reason. It could be said that the exercise of imagination is a necessary precondition for moral reasoning. The two paradigms identified above should not therefore be contrasted solely on the level of the reason/imagination dualism. They should also be distinguished according to the following criterion: rational individualism (the Rawlsian model of the theory of justice) seeks in the universal that which creates epistemological value and practices moral reasoning; the ethic of care, by contrast, takes the particular and the importance afforded to close relationships as its starting point for moral reasoning. On the one hand, the value of the moral position presupposes an ability to universalise the reasons given, and this work of universalisation can only occur if the moral



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subject is isolated and separated from everything which makes her or him exist as a concrete individual. On the other hand, the value of the moral position supposes attention to the particular, a way of describing the fabric of human relationships and everything which is important to the agents implicated in a moral problem. However, this attention, which is explicitly manifested in Amy’s narrative, can also be defined as a competence, as the exercise of an ability to see or a sensitivity to details which are important in posing the moral problem and in attempting to find a solution. For it to function, this competence or ability requires an exercise of the imagination. If this dimension of the problem is taken seriously, then it can be understood that the ethic of care is not situated entirely in sentiment, as is often said, but that it uses the sensitivity to details as the starting point of a possible moral reasoning. Far from being entirely a matter of sentiment, the ethic of care combines the work of imagination and the work of reason in a different way. It is now necessary to define this work of imagination more specifically in order to better situate the force of moral reasoning within the ethic of care. To do so, I will take J. Dewey’s remarks on the interpretation of the role of imagination and deliberation as my starting point. Two aspects must be distinguished in order to obtain an idea of the contribution that imagination can make to moral reasoning: 1) What is a moral deliberative process? And 2) how can such a process involve narratives as typical traits of the activity of moral imagination? In Human Nature and Conduct (1922) and How We Think (1910), Dewey offered many considerations that can help us to understand the moral deliberative process. If reflection is an activity and not something that accompanies activities, then thinking is what makes us capable of going forward; it is one of “the most natural things” (Dewey 1910, p. 200). In its very first phase7 and in a “problematic” or “perplexed” situation, this activity is temporarily disturbed by a tension that arises as it is confronted with the natural tendency to go on. This   Five phases are distinguished to describe the whole process of thinking activity (Dewey 1910, p. 200-206). 7

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t­ension occurs as “an idea” or “a suggestion” according to J.  Dewey (1910, p. 200-201). In other words, ideas or suggestions must be considered as substitutes for effective activity: “The idea of what to do when we find ourselves ‘in a hole’ is a substitute for direct action. It is a vicarious, anticipatory way of acting, a kind of dramatic rehearsal” (Dewey 1910, p. 200; my italics)8. Thinking or “deliberating” is thus a “way of acting” but in a very special mode that mainly involves imagination: “deliberation is a dramatic rehearsal (in imagination) of various competing possible lines of actions” (Dewey 1922, p. 132; my italics). What is “a dramatic rehearsal”? It is a phase of the deliberative process in which aspects of a situation are illuminated and opened up, and through which a new way of perceiving the situation becomes possible. It is distinct from a private soliloquy and, concretely, involves many considerations connected with different practical aspects of the problematic situation: material circumstances, ordinary moral and political priorities, the careers of the implicated protagonists, aspects of their characters, etc. The deliberating position is thus very far removed from the position of solipsism. “Dramatic rehearsal” not only involves the social dimension of the deliberative process which connects agents to each other; it also includes inventions, fictions9 that permit the subject to represent the action in an idea, to try it out in the imagination before it is tested in the real and historical world: “a vicarious, anticipatory way of acting” (Dewey 1922, p.  132; my italics). So the deliberative process needs imagination as something where the idealization of action, of moral action for instance, is possible. This dimension of imagination in general, and of moral imagi­nation in particular10, should therefore convince us that Dewey’s i­nterpretation   The example described in How We Think is that of a man who is walking and has to leap over a stream. 9   “Fiction” in that meaning is neither phantasy, no more abstraction fictitious cases as in casuistry. 10   In the very important chapter 16 “The nature of deliberation” J. Dewey demonstrates that we have to recognize “the natural empirical character of moral judgements and beliefs” (Dewey 1922, p. 132). 8



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of the deliberative process focuses on the distinguishing reason from imagination, and not on opposing it or substituting the former for the latter. What is decisive here, most of all, is that the activity of imagination is absolutely necessary to advance the process, because reflective thinking about a problematic situation always involves acts of searching and enquiring to find means to reduce the tension that results from it: “Deliberation is an experiment in finding out what the various lines of possible action are really like” (Dewey 1922, p. 132). There is, moreover, no reason to distinguish problematic situations in general from moral problematic situations in particular. This way of drawing possible connections between imagination and deliberation is, I believe, very important for providing an epistemological basis for Amy’s reasoning. We can conclude that during this phase of deliberation, the tendency to act is largely reconfigured for Amy as an idea that starts to operate as “a substitute for direct action” (Dewey 1910, p. 200). There is, of course, a major difference between deliberation and the calculation of advantages and disadvantages11, for instance. Calculation supposes a two-step process: calculation in order to act. In the deliberative process, on the contrary, we may suppose that the imaginative activity is part of the process, that is to say an impulse which drives the subject forward. In this case, “reasoning” means offering the moral subject different objects which imaginative activity may render present so that it becomes possible to react. Reasoning, once more, involves imagination which renders elements present and gives the objects, events, or past experiences intensity and vivacity, in short, the kind of colours and consistency that may move the agent to act. Consequently, it is wrong to separate reason and imagination, as happens in the paradigm that is stylized by Jack’s position. It is also incorrect to see Amy’s behaviour as a lack of development in moral maturity—as the Kohlberg model suggests. The process of the imaginative phase during which deliberation is the indirect mode of acting   In the utilitarianism paradigm, for example.

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enables Amy to confront—by the means of ideas—alternatives that sustain a tension as long as one of those imaginary possibilities has not been chosen or has not been embodied in real and concrete action: “The experiment is carried on by tentative rehearsals in thought which do not affect physical facts outside the body”12. This means that to escape the tension created by Heinz’s dilemma requires that Amy performs an objective survey of the circumstances, of the situations, and of the careers of protagonists, etc. All that is strongly indicated by her hesitations. From an epistemological point of view, these hesitations must be understood as a clear expression of the deliberative phase: “Some inhibition of direct action is necessary to condition hesitation and delay that is essential to thinking” (Dewey 1910, p.  201). A phase which belongs to ordinary moral experience, that is to say, in which a way is found by means of different scenarios and idealisations to guide current moral activities. “The word ‘problem’ often seems too elaborate and dignified to denote what happens in minor cases of reflection. But in every case where reflective ensues, there is a process of intellectualizing what at first is merely an emotional quality of the whole situation” (Dewey 1910, p. 201-202). This process of intellectualisation thus transforms what is first perceived as an “emotional quality” into an idea or a series of ideas. We will now observe this transformation more closely and look at what it means in the moral domain. As has been said, rehearsal and dramatisation are parts of that process. If we take into account the fact that, from a pragmatist point of view, knowledge originates in habits and impulses13, we can say that the process of transformation mentioned above—when the moral subject faces a troubled situation, as it does in Heinz’s dilemma— tends to change what seems to be wrong. But such changes in turn 12   “An act tried out in imagination is not final or fatal. It is retrievable” (Dewey 1922, p. 133). 13  See the beginning of Chap. 16 “The nature of deliberation” (Dewey 1922, p. 132).



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suppose, the constitution and use of different means in order to devise new sets of possibilities, and then to imagine how to return to the current flux of activity that was interrupted by the trouble. At first, imagination attempts to build a bridge across habits and impulses on the one hand, and suggestions and ideas14 on the other. This activity of reconstructing the connections between those two aspects is mainly situated in the “dramatic rehearsal”. And the deliberative process involved in Amy’s solution to Heinz’s dilemma can in fact be described in terms of “dramatic rehearsal”. Following S. Fesmire (2003), we can say that moral imagination can be compared, on that level, to a “scene” and that “to deliberate is to co-author a dramatic story with environing conditions in community with others.” (Fesmire 2003, p. 79-80)15 If we pay attention to Gilligan’s description of Amy’s behaviour, it becomes clear that Amy’s hesitations and narrative are evidence of her moral reasoning, which resembles an instance of storytelling during which moral solutions emerge. It thus becomes very clear that such reasoning blurs the distinction between “reason” and “sensitivity”, and proposes a progressive outcome in a way that takes into account moral subjects as concrete and ordinary characters embodied in social conditions; and that no solution can be found which is not connected with that frame of relationships. What is thus dramatised by and in the moral deliberative process are different scenarios that constitute those imaginary possibilities called moral experiments carried out in “tentative rehearsals” as J. Dewey says.   See the topical example, given by J. Dewey, of the hungry man (1922, p. 39). This example shows that “thought” which happens (“the ideal of food”) is not “a  pale bloodless abstraction, but is charged with the motor urgent force of habit” (1922, p. 39). 15   On this point, it would be interesting to trace back the origins of this comparison between imagination and the dramatic scene to D. Hume and A. Smith and, more generally, to the English Moral Sentimentalism tradition. For a paradigmatic example, see Hume (2014, Book I, Part IV, Sect. 6). “The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations” (Hume 2014, p. 165). On that matter, see also Gautier (2009). 14

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Moral Deliberation and the Relationships of Ordinary Life Once the narrative character of moral reasoning has been established from the perspective of the ethic of care, and once the importance of the activity of what can be called “moral imagination” has been accepted, one other thing still remains to be demonstrated before we can conclude this general study of the epistemology of care. What must be demonstrated is that these narrations propose narratives in which the reasoning moral subject puts her- or himself in a position to construct solutions and/or strives to put her- or himself in a position to construct solutions which take into account the importance of the particular and, above all, the importance of the ordinary condition of moral agents. What we now have to clarify is the meaning of this putting oneself in the place of or to be concerned for. Partly following Susan M. Okin’s arguments outlined in her seminal article (Okin 1989)16, I will now focus on what it means, from an epistemological point of view, “to be equally concerned for others”. It is well known that Okin in general has attempted to save Rawls’s Theory of Justice by showing that, despite the vocabulary of rational choice in which many of its formulations are cast, “at its center (though frequently obscured by Rawls himself) is a voice of responsibility, care, and concern for others” (Okin 1989, p. 230). Moreover, again according to Okin, if Kant’s very strong influence has led J.  Rawls to express his major positions in the language of rational choice, might it not be possible to understand and reconcile many other considerations on how people learn to be moral persons? She has then underlined many aspects that enable the reshaping of the outline of the moral subject as an “encumbered subject” with qualities like “care”, “responsiveness”, “sympathy”, etc (Rawls 1971, p. 72-74: 472). In fact, the tension between these two languages may be reduced by seriously taking into consideration the problem of education, which Kant neglects, or, more accurately, the problem of “how to learn to be a moral person?”. Where does a person’s “sense of justice”   For more details, see Gautier (2005).

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come from? And how does the individual subject become responsive to morality and justice in every ordinary attitude? What interests me in this topic is not really the attempt to rescue the Theory of Moral Justice from a feminist liberal point of view. Rather, it is the fact that in making the argument, Okin has stressed the tension between two positions and, ultimately between two conceptions of the moral subjects that are not far removed from the two positions schematised by Gilligan’s comment on Jack’s and Amy’s resolutions of Heinz’s dilemma. However, this re-reading is interesting also since it reveals another aspect of what could be called the pragmatist interpretation of the problem, if it is accepted that a “sense of justice” refers to the process of education and the forming of habits and dispositions, precisely those elements which—as has been seen in the preceding part of this study—enable imagination to construct narratives. As we know, J.  Rawls, in presenting his theory, emphasises the Kantian conception of autonomy and rationality, and stresses the strict separation of reason and feeling. Many conditions are involved in the formulation of moral principles. And, as S.M. Okin has asserted, these conditions are stylised in the language of rational choice. It is evident to Kant that feelings have no place in the foundations of morality (Kant 1996, part 2), and he thus contrasts reason and the realm of nature. Liberty and rationality belong to the former, feeling and imagination to the latter. Freedom is contrasted so sharply with the determinism of nature that individual subjects must be free and rational in order to discover moral principles and to perform moral actions that are exclusively in accordance with duty. These actions must be performed out of love, out of empathy or a propensity to sympathy. In a word, they must be done out of feeling. Motives of moral must be exclusively rational, guided only by “the thought of law”. As we know, according to Kant, “pathological feeling” precedes any thought of law. As a part of nature, which belongs to the order of contingency, and not to the order of autonomy and reason, feeling has no role to play in the formulating of moral principles. J.  Rawls has taken these conclusions for granted, and has the elaborated his

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own position, in which he conceives the position of deliberation using a language of rational choice. One problem remains, however: this kind of reasoning supposes that the moral subject is ontologically and not historically “moral”. S.M. Okin has vehemently contested this, and has asked: “how [do] people develop a sense of justice [?]” (Okin 1989, p. 235). J. Rawls, however, asserts that such acquiring a sense of justice is one of the major conditions that give a “well-ordered society” “stability” (Rawls 1971, p. 69: 453) and that this condition depends on the following fact: “Its members have a strong and normally desire to act as the principles of justice require” (Rawls 1971, p. 69: 453). The question therefore becomes: how can such a “desire” be effective? Where does it come from? To answer these questions is to consider the problem of education and of the psychological development of future moral subjects. On that point, J. Rawls quotes Kohlberg and asserts: “Concerning Kohlberg’s theory, I should add here that I believe the morality of association is parallel to his stages three to five […]” (1971, p.  70: 462). J.  Rawls more or less admits that moral development may be described in Kohlberg’s terms: different stages of a growth process that leads to moral maturity. But he also recognises the importance of “sentiments” (1971, p. 70: 462), “sympathy” (1971, p. 70: 462) and feeling for acquiring a “sense of justice” in moral education: “The parents, we may suppose, love the child and in time the child comes to love and to trust his parents” (1971, p. 70: 463). The family thus appears as the earliest school of moral development in Rawls’s theory. We have to acknowledge therefore that this moral development implies means that do not exclusively consist of rationality. Many considerations in Part III (1971, p. 65-70) deal with the problem of relationships in the family: for instance, how love and other similar sentiments might temporarily stand in for reason, etc. Many of the primary and necessary preconditions for learning how “to be concerned for” are therefore historically grounded in feeling and in types of experience through which moral capacities can grow. Parents, relatives and members of other societies are looked upon as “models” and their behaviours are imitated; they are used to imagine



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certain positions which allow the future moral subject to put her or himself in different roles in a drama. For this to work, very similar conditions and situations to those exemplified by Amy’s reasoning in Gilligan’s enquiry are required. It is thus by imitation, by putting oneself in another person’s place that we come to feel and thus know what we should or could do in problematic situations. This is part of what makes subjects able to feel and then to be aware of differences in other people’s conditions, and to take such differences into account to understand the context in which people do what they do. Without becoming acquainted with this through experience and feeling, it seems quite impossible to put oneself in a situation or context of action which is far removed from our ordinary experience. The moral development of the subject supposes a kind of empirical and experimental enquiry which implies various skills without which no one is able to imagine different moral cases. The capacity to undertake moral reasoning involves, at a historical level, experiences of relationships, and it is only from that background of experiences that an individual is capable of moral deliberations. To be moral, to be able to make rational statements in the “original position” (under the veil of ignorance) necessarily implies a historical process that renders individuals moral. What makes such experiences possible? What renders moral enquiries effective? First, it is not autonomous reason that is always separated from feeling in context, but, on the contrary, it is feelings and habits17 that affect the imagination, that make the moral subject capable of narrations which in turn enable young subjects to represent opportunities, to draw consequences in their imagination, to underline and compare—in a “dramatic rehearsal”—different aspects of moral issues. What is remarkable then is the importance of all these things that are not directly connected with reason alone, and that constitute the ordinary conditions of moral deliberations. 17   As has been seen, following J.  Dewey’s theory of knowledge, impulses and habits and not “sensations” stand at the very first phase of thought (Dewey 1922, p. 132).

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I think we can suggest a bridge here between Amy’s point of view and parts of these original conditions of moral experiences: the importance of particular details, of social conditions, and of relationships. On the one hand, those relationships and conditions are made up of private-sphere exchanges between members—from relatives to communities (Gauthier 2005, p. 137) and ultimately to public societies; on the other, these conditions and relationships are the fabric of the ordinary life that connects people to each other, for example, in difficult everyday situations. The importance of relationships must be underlined by characters who are aware of and who try to solve any moral situation. As has been mentioned above, the young moral subject gets by through imitation. Amy imagines various conditions and situations that make her aware of the importance of conditions and relationships, and that guide her in finding a solution that preserves the frame of the relationships of ordinary life. On the one hand, imagination is the instance of being moved by habits, feelings and sentiments, the only reality of the subject which stands in for reason. On the other hand, imagination and reasoning make a narrative process possible through which a solution can be imagined that takes into account the frame of ordinary relationships. That is, a narrative process that makes the moral subject aware and responsive. It is that very process that Amy gives us by relating her hesitations, by trying to put herself in another person’s place.

Conclusion: the ethic of care as an ordinary life ethics … Is it relevant to assert that the mature moral subject is always and already rational, autonomous, “disinterested” and “impartial”, as Rawls’s Theory does? Does it make epistemological sense to claim autonomy, impartiality and disinterest for the subject?18 Does moral deliberation imply disinterest [the paradigm of Justice Theory] or, on the   The following considerations are congruent with Jennifer Nedelsky’s analysis of “autonomy” in her seminal contribution (1989). 18



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contrary, is it possible to deliberate without the capacity to be concerned for others [the paradigm of Care Ethic]? The sense of justice is constituted, as was shown above, by experiences grounded in a very specific role-playing within the imagination that implies the importance of habits and feelings, the variety of sentiments, a sense of responsibility, and a desire for justice. The sense of justice is thus historically constituted in a growth process consisting of moral experiences (Nedelsky1989, p. 8), a process which I would like to call a moral enquiry. If a subject affectively experiences those difficult tensions and situations when she or he is young, imagination, reason and narration become parts of their adult moral situation, as Amy’s case shows. Moral experience implies an imagination, which in turn means that narration and dramatisation progressively shape a disposition to “be concerned with others” (Okin 1989, p.  246-247), which makes other experiences possible. All this leads the moral subject to “put her- or himself in another’s place” (Okin 1989, p. 247), etc. Is it relevant, therefore, to disconnect this process, which possibly makes the subject moral, from the ordinary situation that involves accomplished moral subjects who deliberate using the faculty of reason which is strictly and strongly separated from feeling? Is that separation so strong as allow the conclusion that moral experience and moral reasoning are based solely on the arguments of logic? What Amy’s position shows is the importance of relationships in ordinary life. This is an importance that should be recognized as a component of any moral experience. Far from attempting to perform moral reasoning through abstraction, we have to be aware of the fabric of ordinary situations that frames difficult moral problems and requires moral imagination to provide a resolution. The imagination is part of the ordinary moral drama and we have to re-examine it and the nature of its arguments. I am not asserting that Jack’s position is not part of the moral experience. But what Gilligan’s enquiry has undoubtedly demonstrated is that to hear the sound of a different voice in moral experience entails the recognition that the subject is not “disencumbered”, or without qualities, consisting of rational, impartial, and disinterested propensities.

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To give a complete description of moral experiences and of moral reasoning implies conceiving of a moral agent who mixes reason and imagination, who is embodied in social and ordinary relationships in which solving problems—moral problems—supposes a process of enquiry (a narrative) which strongly contrasts with the solipsistic conditions of rational deductions.

Literature Dewey, J. (1910) ‘How We Think’, in J.A. Boydston (ed) (1996), The Late Work of John Dewey, Charlottesville: InteLex Corporation. Dewey, J. (1922) ‘Human Nature and Conduct. An Introduction to Social Psychology’, in J.A. Boydston (ed) (1996), The Middle Work of John Dewey, Charlottesville: Intelex Corporation. Fesmire, S. (2003) John Dewey and Moral Imagination. Pragmatism in Ethics, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Gautier, C. (2005) ‘Care et justice au sein de la famille. A propos de la critique libérale de S.  Moller Okin’, in S.  Laugier and P.  Paperman (eds), Le souci des autres. Ethique et politique du care, Paris: EHESS. Gautier, C. (2009) ‘La construction de l’autonomie du sujet moral dans la Théorie des sentiments moraux’, in M.  Jouan and S.  Laugier (eds), Comment penser l’autonomie  ? Entre compétences et dépendances, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Gilligan, C. (1982 [1993, 2003]) In a Different Voice. Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London: Harvard University Press. Hume, D. (2014) A Treatise of Human Nature, D.F. Norton and M.J. Norton (eds), Oxford: Oxford University Press, The Clarendon Edition of the Works of David Hume. Kant, I. (1996) ‘The Metaphysics of Morals’, in M. Gregor (ed), Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Larrabee, M.J. ed (1993) An Ethic of Care. Feminist and Interdisciplinary perspectives, London, NY: Routledge. Laugier, S. (2010) ‘L’éthique d’Amy: le care comme changement de paradigme’, in V. Nurock (ed), Carol Gilligan: L’éthique du care, Paris: PUF, pp. 57-78. Nedelsky, J. (1989) ‘Reconceiving Autonomy: Sources, Thoughts and Possibilities’, Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, 1(1): 7-36. Okin, S.M. (1989) ‘Reason and Feeling in Thinking about Justice’, Ethics, 99(2): 229-249. Rawls, J. (1971) A Theory of Justice, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Sandel, M.J. (1982; 1998) Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press.

4. The Work of Care: Beyond Femininity and the Maternal Pascale Molinier

Although psychology has overall been less receptive to gender epistemologies than other social sciences, it has nevertheless given rise to one of the most influential North-American feminist theories. 1 Indeed, the ethics of care originated in the psychologist Carol Gilligan’s work on moral development (Gilligan 1982). In the 1970s, Gilligan identified an androcentric bias in Lawrence Kohlberg’s study of the moral development of children (Kohlberg had in fact only looked at boys). At the same time, she criticized the devaluing of women’s morality and modes of thinking among the most eminent psychologists. Based on studies conducted with both girls and adult women, Gilligan showed the existence of a different moral voice, one based on relational and contextual criteria rather than those of the law and impartiality, as was the case for the ethics of justice. Other feminist authors, specifically the political philosopher Joan Tronto (1993), have subsequently shown that this “different voice” could not be simply equated with the “female voice” (something that, it ought to be said, Gilligan herself never argued), but instead belonged to all those individuals whose moral experience was founded on activities consisting in taking care of others. The ethics of care takes into account “the fundamental vulnerability of people—of all people—to rethink the relationships of justice” (Paperman 2005, p. 295). 1   This article was originally published as: ‘Au-delà de la féminité et du maternel, le travail du care’, in Champ psychosomatique (2010). We wish to thank the journal for granting us the permission to republish here in English.

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What this means, then, is that the ethics of care does not derive only from women or from all women. Crucially, this denaturalizes the ‘different voice’ in two ways: firstly, by not locating its source in an alleged nature (women’s nature) but instead in an activity, i.e. in domestic work and care; secondly, by taking into account the social divisions within the category of women, who are not all concerned by care activities in the same way. The work of care, therefore, designates specialised activities revolving explicitly around caring for others, such as the work of nurses and care assistants. It also concerns the entire range of domestic work carried out in the family and delegated to nannies, babysitters and cleaners. More broadly, the work of care designates a dimension present in all service activities where serving means to attend to someone’s needs. According to Tronto, for the ethics of care to take on a universal scope, it must be de-gendered and/or de-maternalised, i.e., freed from the trap of sentimentalism and the so-called “feminine morality”. Hence, what was initially a critique of the ethics of justice has today become a more fundamental questioning of various theories about Women, Femininity and Maternity—the capital letters highlighting here the tendency, common among both psychologists and psychoanalysts, to identify women with the feminine, the very tendency that different gender theories have tried to criticize and deconstruct. To get a better grasp of what care means in terms of lived experience, of practical invention and moral improvisation on the unstable grounds of work and ordinary interactions, I would like to look at the work of care from five different perspectives or based on five descriptions: 1) care as gentleness; 2) care as a discreet know-how; 3) care as dirty work; 4) care as invaluable work and 5) care as an ethical narrative.

Care as gentleness In 1991, the French writer Hervé Guibert, who was suffering from AIDS, wrote in The Compassion Protocol: The other day, as I went into that café in the rue d’Alésia, where over the last ten years or so I’ve sometimes had a drink at the counter despite the cold, if not hostile, looks from the bartenders, I missed a step when pushing the door and found myself on my knees among



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the  seated c­ ustomers, incapable of picking myself up. That abrupt moment lasted an eternity: everyone was stupefied seeing this young man laid low, on his knees, apparently unhurt, but mysteriously paralysed. Not a word was uttered, and there was no need for me to ask for help, for one of the two bartenders I had always thought to be an enemy came up to me, seized me under the arms and put me on my feet again as if it were the most natural thing in the world. I avoided the diners’ eyes and the bartender behind the counter simply asked: ‘Coffee, monsieur?’ I felt deeply grateful towards those two young men I’d never liked and who I thought detested me, for having reacted so spontaneously and with such delicacy, without a single unnecessary word” (Guibert 1994, p. 4).

A man collapses and the waiters react appropriately to his needs, without him having to ask for help. This attention and concern are expressed in ordinary words and gestures that restore his shattered dignity or his sense of belonging to the world of Parisian bistros. Guibert repeatedly evokes the usually cold or hostile attitude of the waiters. Elsewhere in the book, he compares the overtly affectionate approach of Dr Chandi—who calls him, during one painful examination, “my poor boy…”—with the attitude of Dr Claudette Dumouchel, initially “a very unsympathetic person”, “a champion of the desensitization of the doctor-patient relationship”. Guibert is well aware of the defensive function of this relational distance: he believes that Claudette Dumouchel would “burst into tears at the drop of a hat, if she hadn’t armoured herself, once and for all, by assuming an apparent insensibility” (Guibert 1994, p. 20). Yet he also appreciates the “little gesture of the index finger, that had become familiar”, her grumbling or cracking a joke. It is this kind of attention that keeps him, a young man in an old man’s body, on the side of the living rather than on the side of the “young corpses with burning eyes” he sees at the Rothschild Hospital, who are made to feel the horror they provoke and the inevitable approach of death. What one might initially interpret as hostility, coldness or cynicism is redefined in terms of attention and mutual respect. Perhaps the stupefied customers were also worried about Guibert, but the fact is they did nothing. As an appropriate response to

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another person’s fragility, care is mobilised in situations that involve interactions and where the provider of care feels invested with a responsibility. To put this in Patricia Paperman’s terms, when the café waiter is faced with the client who has collapsed, he simply “cannot not do” what is needed (Paperman 2005). This responsibility is conferred on him by his work and work also provides the solution: “Coffee, monsieur?” This attitude, both attentive and detached, “just at the right moment”, reminds us of actions Annette Baier calls gentleness, which can only be dealt with in terms both descriptive and normative and which “resist tidy codifications” (Baier 1985, p. 214). Gentleness is an appropriate response to the other in specific circumstances; it requires an experimental attitude, a sensitivity to a particular situation and the ability to improvise, to “move on to something else” in response to certain reactions (Laugier 2005). The concept of gentleness undermines the association between femininity and care/love to include other agents (in this case, men) and a broader and more nuanced range of feelings such as generosity or tact. An exaggerated concern can be perceived as obtrusive— much like when an excessively eager and attentive person makes us wonder, ‘but what do they want from me’? The psychiatrist Helene Chaigneau also speaks about “intrusive gratifications” [gratifications indiscrètes] to describe this excessive attention that particular psychiatric patients can receive from caregivers.2 Such attention can be interpreted by the patients in a delusional register as threats or as ‘signs’ addressed to them, given that this attention is seemingly not distributed equally among all patients and as such, grants them a troubling “exceptionality” status. Care is by definition a gesture or a way of doing (or not doing) that adjusts itself to the recipient’s needs, including the need for distance or separation. It is characterised precisely by that art of adapting to a specific situation, which also relates to care’s invisibility or inconspicuous nature.   In an interview with Joséphine Nohra (published with the Editions Campagne Première). 2



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Care as tacit know-how When done properly, caring work is invisible. Its success depends largely on its inconspicuousness, on the deletion of its traces. Tacit (or discrete) forms of know-how are embodied in a psychological attitude often perceived by its recipients in terms of kindness, softness or empathy (qualities associated with femininity or maternity). Recipients are unaware of the cost incurred to the person who has delivered the care work, unaware also of the extent to which the caregiver had to anticipate their needs and respond to them without these needs having been explicitly expressed. For example, for a surgical nurse, “assisting the surgeon” means handing him instruments in such way as to minimize his fatigue or loss of concentration: by anticipating his needs, by offering him the right tool even before he asks for it. Likewise, an attentive secretary is able to screen bothersome calls and prepare the right files; she knows how to keep her boss’s “secrets” or cope with his moodiness when he is stressed by an important project or meeting. In all of the above situations, care designates a well-executed work, in the sense that it can never be reduced to mere technical expertise, but always involves a care “supplement” that makes the relationship of dependency tolerable and the service truly effective. The fact is, both the surgeon and the manager are dependent on the nurse and the secretary. Their autonomy is a fiction reliant on the support and anticipation provided. This highlights one of the complexities of taking care into account; the problem is situated at the intersection between relations of gender, class and race. Here men, the privileged classes and white people dominate and exploit those care workers below who are in their service, while being materially dependent on this work: the privileged’ s comfort and their effectiveness at work greatly depends on the quality of the care provided by others. One easily gets used to being served, no doubt because of the “primordial care” we received as children. We were all attended to without having to ask for it—by a mother, a sister, a grandmother, a servant (in nearly all cases women). There is a fantasy of a type of

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“care without a subject”, an inexhaustible care, a care requiring no gratitude. This is a fantasy brilliantly portrayed in Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, where the servants are magically reduced to their functional organ: an arm holding the candlestick, a hand pouring the water. This fantasy is critical to the “indifference of the privileged” described by Joan Tronto (1993). “I’ve hired the perfect housekeeper”, a female respondent told me during a survey I carried out among the French feminist employers of maids: “She is transparent, everything looks exactly like before.” This is a way of saying that after the cleaner has finished her job, all we can see is cleanliness, without any signs of her singular presence. “I want everything to be done just as I wish”, the respondent added, “but without having to ask” (Molinier 2009).

Care as dirty work In care professions that involve contact with bodily fluids and mental pathologies, the dimension of dirty work3 is explicitly present, particularly in the work of nurses and care assistants (emptying bedpans, cleaning up vomit and excrements) or in the activities of violence management in psychiatry (Molinier and Gaignard 2007). There is a conceptual overlap between this dirty work and the work of care in terms of the relationship with the body and death. Taking care of others is not always pleasant. For example, it can be particularly unpleasant when, as a policeman or a caregiver, one must announce a death to a family. And indeed, it is not rare for people to vanish into thin air just when they should make this kind of announcement, leaving the difficult task to colleagues who are not prone to disappear so quickly. Still, someone has to do it, and it will be the person who cannot not do it. Most of the time, these people are neither more attentive than others, nor more indifferent or protected: they are simply present, in other words, unable to leave. There is nothing exceptional about the actors of care, as Patricia Paperman reminds us (2005): they are not heroes; they too are ambivalent and defensive, torn by the contradictions and conflicts between their own interests and those of others. 3

  As Everett Hughes has called it (1956).



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All dirty work, including care work, raises the question of what must be done and cannot be avoided without causing severe social disruptions. Such disruptions would be the inevitable results of the fact that we are all bodies (under this twofold condition: either alive or dead). Bodies cannot be left without food, unclothed or covered in excrement; corpses cannot be left to rot in the streets; our rubbish cannot keep on piling up indefinitely. Someone has to take care of it. In this sense, dirty work is what we would like to avoid, what we would rather not think about, but what, like care, is directly related to our vital needs. Hughes underscores repeatedly the dimension of forgetting in dirty work. Indeed, dirty work is delegated and then forgotten, just like we delegate care and then quickly forget about it. Segregation, social taboos and collective denial are all forms of propping up this psychological split and the function it plays in protecting our mental health.

Care as invaluable work When listening to care workers, what surprises many is the extent to which they remain invested in their work despite its poor social recognition. This, as long as the work remains meaningful to them (­Galerand and Kergoat 2008). In her text on “the paradoxical commitment of home help workers in repulsive situations”, Ghislaine Doniol (2009) has shown that some care support workers find situations of caring for very damaged people who live in stench and filth particularly valuable and meaningful, because they are aware of their own indispensability. Their work thus becomes, as Jean Oury put it (2008), invaluable. Care work is invaluable because it cannot be measured, especially not in terms of management practices: how could we measure a smile or someone’s presence? Its value is priceless, which raises the very complicated question of its remuneration: why is the most valuable work paid the least? In the eyes of care support workers, the meaning of their work can be more important than obtaining social recognition or gratitude (gratitude being highly unpredictable with these care recipients). This directly contradicts many of our assumptions regarding recognition being a key factor of work motivation.

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In reality, in order for work recognition to have a structuring value for the worker’s mental health, the work must first be meaningful and valuable to the person him or herself. The value of work—in the ethical and non-utilitarian sense of the term—is not chiefly attributed externally by others. It depends above all on what is important for ourselves, given our array of experiences that cannot be reduced to those of salaried work. At the same time, being recognized for work we despise or consider of poor quality can severely compromise our mental health. On the interpersonal level, it is admiration and mutual respect that seal the ethical dimension of recognition. At the same time, on the organisational level, work recognition is materially expressed through the allocation of the appropriate resources required for it to be done well, which entails a prior discussion with the people that carry it out (Molinier 2010a). Because this space of deliberation is largely missing from most organisations (Ribault 2010), the denial of recognition is a major form of suffering in work. It is typical not to be recognized for what one does, but the denial of recognition involves practices that attack the very meaning of work, for example by reducing it to the number of shirts ironed by a domestic worker (Ribault 2010). This “inhibited” care (“inhibited” given the ambivalent feelings raised by most care relationships), can deteriorate into an enjoyment of the power exercised over the care worker or into violence (given the current forms of work organisation, we should in fact be surprised this does not in fact happen more frequently).

Care as an ethical narrative I will continue this discussion by looking at the material gathered in a 2009 survey in Columbia that interviewed a group of maids who were members of an association of female heads of families (cabeza de familia). After the group had tried, for about an hour, to put into words their experience of caring for other people’s households, Miriam, a woman of about fifty and the mother of five children, begins her story in the following way: “My son has four children,” she says, “I mean… [she becomes more animated] I say four, but there are two of them, to



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be honest, the woman made those behind his back. I am telling you, there is no other explanation. Just take a look!” she insists, taking the group as her witnesses and pointing to her own face (Miriam’s face suggests she has mixed origins, black, Indian and white). “You see, the rest of our family, we are moreno! That’s what we are, and you see, one of those little girls is as black as coal. Well that’s just not possible, there’s no one like that in our family--and the other is the other way round, she is blonde with blue eyes, that’s not possible either! What a whore, she made those two behind his back…” Continuing her story, Miriam tells us that the daughter-in-law regularly asks her for help whenever the young couple struggles financially and cannot feed their children. We also learn that one of Miriam’s daughters, who has “done well for herself” refuses to give money to her mother, even though the latter still raises, alone and in great poverty, several other children, because the daughter thinks the mother will again use the money to help the “whore” her son has married. “Well ok,” Miriam says, “I think that Ana Mitchell and Dina Luz are not my son’s children, but they are just as hungry as the rest of them, so what am I to do?” (my emphasis). Although Miriam resorts to all kinds of insults to express her lack of respect for her daughter-in-law, she continues to help her. This is just as surprising to me as when another woman, Marlene (who had told us at length about the reasons for resenting her mother, who had given her up as a maid at the age of 12) ends up explaining that she has to hold down two different jobs, because she has to help her parents financially. To justify their actions, Marlene and Miriam speak of neither duty nor love; again, they simply cannot not do it. Neither of them presents their behaviour as a moral virtue, because they make it clear they could very well do without it. Feeding their granddaughters or elderly parents is an overwhelming preoccupation, because they are themselves poor and resentful. Even though in both cases the narrative of care is filled with resentment and invectives, when the moment comes of having to help, these emotions are not what matters. Marlene’s and Miriam’s feelings vis-à-vis those they take care of

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are highly ambivalent and yet they remain greatly involved with them. Miriam has to describe the entire family drama and its interconnecting relationships—the weak son, the supposedly unfaithful daughter-in-law, the angry sister, her own ambivalence and the grandchildren who are all equally hungry—for us to understand her torment. What is the place of salaried domestic work in her narrative? Even this type of work has become inaccessible to her, she observes, because she is considered too old by her employers. “A woman over thirty has no value in this country,” she says, in tears. Miriam’s story is not a digression outside the group’s theme. Speaking about the anxieties generated by salaried work (here, specifically, the difficulty of finding work), cannot be dissociated from the fears linked to domestic care. For Miriam or Marlene, there is always a risk that the priority needs of their relatives—starting with the need to not go hungry—will not be met. When we ask them about work, these isolated women express above all a fear provoked by their responsibility to their dependents: the fear of always having to look for work, resources and solutions, and the dread of not finding any. Similarly, at the beginning of the study, when we go around the table, other women introduce themselves by first speaking about the accidents that happened in their own homes while they were at work—one child fell from a second floor (without hurting himself), another burned his little siblings with a hot iron—before speaking about the contents of their work. The recurring interweaving of themes linked to salaried domestic work and those themes linked to housework, just like the comparison between family and professional relationships (the latter sometimes seeming less harsh and fairer than the former) challenges the idea that for these women there might be two psychologically separate, isolated or split fields: “work” and “personal life”.

Conclusion The interweaving of the affective and professional spheres among salaried domestic workers brings out the subjectivity of all female care providers. Similar expressions of the difficulties inherent to the



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c­ onfusion of registers and to human attachment can be found among secretaries (Pinto 1990), nursery assistants (Sadock 2003), nannies (Hochschild 2004) and nurses (Molinier 2010a). This suggests that we should not consider personal attachment as external to work, as a transgression or as an error in judgment, but as a genuine occupational hazard found in the majority of feminized care activities. In order to understand this interweaving between the affective and the professional, we must break away from the conventional theories that see love and work as two sufficiently distinct spheres to be studied separately by different disciplines (e.g. by psychoanalysis on the one hand and occupational psychology on the other). In addition, how do we de-gender care without losing sight of the fact that in reality it is women who carry out most of the care activities? The normative representations of femininity and maternity as self-giving constitute a heavy cultural burden that continues to silence the voices of some underprivileged women. Indeed, those women who are in a position to sing the praises of motherhood are those who enjoy economic security and care support, and whose everyday existence is not plagued by a constant fear of tomorrow. By modifying the terms of the debate, for example, by replacing “motherhood” with “domestic care work”, we can make space for a plurality of women’s experiences that would otherwise receive little attention in society and no positive political translation. More often than not, they face the additional burden of being the target of pejorative psychologizing representations, for example that which holds that single mothers are responsible for all the problems of youth (delinquency, drug abuse, lack of education, teenage pregnancies) and as such, that we ought to punish them (by withdrawing benefits and in France currently, with prison sentences). As Sandra Laugier underscores, given the still dominant conceptions of the moral subject (namely, the purely rational subject), the outlining of a new, sensitive subject is one of the chief stakes of thinking about the ethics of care (Laugier 2005). Instead of defining this sensitive subject on the basis of the binary of “femininity/sensitivity” versus (or as less than) “masculinity/rationality”, we ought to define

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it ethically by reference to “what matters”, what is “important” for particular subjects. Unless we examine the narratives of care and the intricate structures of their motivations, we cannot grasp the “life forms” of the providers of professional or domestic care. Paying attention to what matters transforms the stereotypical vision of care as an expression of feminine love (of mothers, families or even caregivers) or its stigmatising reversal into bad reputation (of single mothers or abusive caretakers). It also helps us examine particular moral visions, in which the concern for others is expressed in concrete and more or less pleasant activities that elicit feelings or affects that can be troublesome, contradictory, ambivalent or riddled with defensiveness. The care perspective therefore offers a new path for questioning certain psychologizing categories such as sacrificial mothers, omnipotent mothers, castrating mothers and so on. Care activities occupy a central place in our lives: we depended on them as children, we still rely on them, as adults, in many other respects (e.g. housekeeping) or think of child and elderly care that must be entrusted to others so that we can “go to work”. And we will undoubtedly depend on care activities at the end of our lives as well. Studying these foundations of everyday life, the conditions of maintaining bare life as well as the good life, enables us to extricate ourselves from the problematic theoretical and practical rifts—body/mind, private/public, love/work, etc.—that leave to the underprivileged what founds us as psychosocial beings and yet that we would rather forget as quickly as possible. Taking into account the speech of female care providers helps us distance ourselves from the external moral certainties that try to ground what is “good” and “bad” in a world of abstract ideas, without taking into consideration the highly complex moral visions of those women who make it possible for all these “philosophers” to “transform the world” without worrying about everyday hassles, about their bodies, their needs and their fragilities.4

4

  I would like to thank Lise Gaignard for her generous attention and comments.



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Literature Baier, A. (1985) Postures of the Mind, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Doniol, G. (2009) ‘L’engagement paradoxal des aides à domicile face aux situations repoussantes’, Travailler, 22: 27-42. Galerand, E. and D. Kergoat (2008) ‘Le potentiel subversif du rapport des femmes au travail’, Nouvelles Questions Féministes, 27(2): 67-82. Gilligan, C. (1982) In a Different Voice, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Gilligan, C. (2009) ‘Le care, éthique féminine ou éthique féministe?’, Multitudes, 37-38: 76-79. Guibert, H. (1993) The Compassion Protocol, London: Quartet Books. Hochschild, A. R. (2004) ‘Le nouvel or du monde’, Nouvelles Questions Féministes, 23(3): 59-74. Hughes, E. (1956) ‘Social Role and the Division of Labor’, The Midwest Sociologist, 18(2): 3-7. Laugier, S. (2005) ‘Care et perception, l’éthique comme attention au particulier’, in P. Paperman and S. Laugier (eds), Le Souci des Autres  : Éthique et politique du Care, Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 315-348. Molinier, P. (2009) ‘Des féministes et leurs femmes de ménage: entre réciprocité du care et souhait de dépersonnalisation’, Multitudes, 37-38: 173-181. Molinier, P. (2010a) ‘Désirs singuliers et concernement collectif: le care au travail’, in V. Nurock (ed), Carol Gilligan et l’éthique du care. Paris: PUF, 105-120. Molinier, P. (2010b) ‘Au-delà de la féminité et du maternel, le travail du care’, Champ psychosomatique, 2(58): 161-174. Molinier, P. and L. Gaignard (2007) ‘Comment désentraver les agités? Peurs et contraintes en psychiatrie’, Actes des savoirs, 3: 145-162. Oury, J. (2008) ‘Le travail est-il thérapeutique?’, Travailler, 19: 15-34. Paperman, P. (2005) ‘Les gens vulnérables n’ont rien d’exceptionnel’, in P. Paperman and S. Laugier (eds), Le Souci des Autres  : Éthique et politique du Care, Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 281-297. Pinto, J. (1990) ‘Une relation enchantée  : la secrétaire et son patron’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 84: 32-48. Ribault, T. (2010) ‘Aides à domicile: quelle professionnalisation?’, Paper presented at the conference O que é o “care”? Emoções, divisão sexual do trabalho, migrações internas e internacionais. August 2010, Brazil: University of São Paulo. Sadock, V. (2003) ‘L’enjolivement de la réalité, une défense féminine? Étude auprès des auxiliaires de puériculture’, Travailler, 10: 93-106. Tronto, J. (1993) Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care, New York: Routledge.

5. The Banality of Vulnerability Patricia Paperman

The significance assigned to feelings and attachments in close relationships by the ethics of care differs considerably from that assigned by an ethics of justice. The care perspective is inscribed within a larger undertaking to rehabilitate feelings and emotions within moral and social theory. Not surprisingly, misunderstandings surrounding this rehabilitation abound—testimonies of the recurrent exclusion of emotions and feelings that has prevailed in moral and social theory since the 18th Century. Interpreting care ethics as merely a sophisticated form of sentimentalism is one such misunderstanding, which the French translation of “care” as sollicitude (concern, solicitousness) does not help to dispel. In fact, this translation emphasizes only one aspect of care ethics: namely, the disposition to care for others’ wellbeing, to be sensitive towards others’ vulnerability and to show affective attachment to our loved-ones. It does not, however, capture the second aspect of care ethics, which is just as important: its practical and concrete dimension. Now, the ethical meaning and political significance of caring for others is considerably weakened, if one fails to consider actual professional activities that respond to individual needs. Both a verb and a noun, the English term ‘care’ does not dissociate the two aspects—disposition and activity, sensitivity and work—and is more suitable than the French term sollicitude. The word care’s imprecision is thus not a fault, nor an obstacle to its usage, but is rather an attribute for its fruitful use, since it leaves wide open the question of the precise articulation between sensibility and

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practical activity. And this is a decisive question for the call to justice that care, as a feminist perspective, wish to propose. This is what I would like to explore in the following article.

Connection or feelings This question builds on Carol Gilligan’s formulation of the ‘different voice’ hypothesis. The 1982 publication of her book In a Different Voice played a pivotal role in the development of the debate around theories of justice. The ‘different voice’ hypothesis questions the salience of the ethics of justice in the domain of moral development. Gilligan puts forward a major objection to Kohlberg’s perspective (1981/1984) according to which the highest degree of moral development follows abstract and impartial justice principles—a type of position that is analogous to the one embraced by Kant and Rawls. She demonstrates empirically that this is not always the case, and that particularly (albeit not exclusively) for women, other factors come in as equally important moral principles. This alternative way of defining and answering moral questions is characterised, amongst other things, by the wish to maintain a relationship when faced with conflicting interests and desires, a consideration for an individual’s particular situation, a commitment to answer concrete needs and a significance attached to feelings and emotions when approaching particular situations. For Gilligan, these considerations can inform how we define morality as well as the type of reasoning that is said to govern it; but they have no role to play in the moral development described by Kohlberg, except as expressions of a moral ‘deficiency’. The different voice hypothesis is thus, first of all, an answer to the ‘factual observation’ of women’s deficiency in Kohlberg’s moral development psychology. Gilligan’s hypothesis blames the theory itself for the deficiency, which cannot account for questions that do not ‘conform’ to the model. The possibility of actually listening to what women say, of hearing something in interviews other than the confirmation of ideas rooted in gender stereotypes, necessarily casts doubt on Kohlberg’s evidence from a moral standpoint and points to a remarkable discontinuity



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within the ‘ordinary’ experiences of women (although by no means only those of women). What is at stake here is not a complete challenge to an ethics of justice, but its recasting: The justice perspective, often equated with moral reasoning, is recast as one way of seeing moral problems and a care perspective is brought forward as an alternate vision or frame. The distinction between justice and care as alternative perspectives or moral orientations is based empirically on the observation that a shift in the focus of attention from concerns about justice to concerns about care changes the definition of what constitutes a moral problem, and leads the same situation to be seen in different ways. Theoretically, the distinction between justice and care cuts across the familiar divisions between thinking and feeling, egoism and altruism, theoretical and practical reasoning. It calls attention to the fact that all human relationships, public and private, can be characterized both in terms of equality and in terms of attachment, and that both inequality and detachment constitute grounds for moral concern. Since everyone is vulnerable both to oppression and to abandonment, two moral visions—one of justice and one of care—recur in human experience. The moral injunctions not to act unfairly toward others, and not to turn away from someone in need, capture these different concerns. (Gilligan 1987, p. 32)

It is this affirmation of the existence of two distinct moral orientations and the ever-present possibility of a movement between the two that gave rise to a debate with those who understand morality as an ethics of justice. Indeed, the empirical data provided by Gilligan challenge the claim that an ethics of justice encompasses the entire moral field. As Gilligan shows, the moral preoccupations, experiences and viewpoints of those interviewed cannot be captured solely in terms of justice. Her work emphasises the fact that these experiences and preoccupations in fact constitute a different moral orientation, endowed with a coherence that the language of care ethics helps to grasp. Using the vocabulary of ‘care’ enables us to understand and articulate this different voice. The answers to moral dilemmas that may have seemed incoherent or that remained inaudible in Kohlberg’s model thus gain both intelligibility and their rightful place within a context that had until then kept them in the dark.

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Gilligan wishes to reconstruct this coherence and this is precisely what constitutes the strength of her thesis: “psychologists and philosophers, aligning the self and morality with separation and autonomy—the ability to be self-governing—have associated care with self-sacrifice, or with feelings—a view at odds with the current position that care represents a way of knowing and a coherent moral perspective.” (Gilligan 1987, p. 41). Reducing care only to a range of positive feelings in fact indicates the difficulty of grasping both moral perspectives simultaneously—with each one privileging a particular perspective on the relationship between self and other. The justice perspective is built on the idea of a separate self, and evaluates the conflicting objectives between self and other in light of principles of equality and mutual respect. In the care ethics perspective, the dimensions of attachment and detachment are privileged, and here, the self and other are not represented as separate entities. Instead, the relationship itself constitutes the key element from which the moral agent perceives and responds to identified needs. Each one of these perspectives grasps the relation between self and other from a particular angle—as is the case in that ambiguous image of the twofaced vase, or the picture in which either a duck or a rabbit can be seen, two cases where it is difficult to see both images simultaneously. Focusing on one of these perspectives to the detriment of the other no doubt facilitates resolving a moral dilemma from the agent’s point of view because it simplifies the vision of the relation. But this ‘aid’ in decision-making does not result from the fact that the two perspectives are opposed to one another, and that each addresses different aspects of a same underlying reality or a single, unique moral truth. The difficulty in holding the two perspectives simultaneously is rather due to the fact that each perspective organizes our perception and understanding of the situation in terms that do not overlap. The view that reduces the ethics of care to the expression of ‘good’ feelings in fact corresponds to what can be grasped by a justice perspective when it takes into consideration only its own terms of reference: Within a justice construction, care becomes the mercy that tempers justice; or connotes the special obligations or supererogatory duties that



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arise in personal relationships; or signifies altruism freely chosen—a decision to modulate the strict demands of justice by considering equity or showing forgiveness; or characterizes a choice to sacrifice the claims of the self. All of these interpretations of care leave the basic assumptions of a justice framework intact: the division between the self and others, the logic of reciprocity or equal respect. (Gilligan 1987, p. 36)

The attachment/detachment dimension that organises our perception and moral understanding under a care perspective clearly suffers from a semantic or lexical deficit compared to the predominant justice perspective that has overshadowed it: “As a moral perspective, care is less well elaborated, and there is no ready vocabulary in moral theory to describe its terms.” (Gilligan, 1987, p. 36). The vocabulary of feelings is not in itself sufficient to express care ethics as a moral perspective, even if this vocabulary was one of the main tools used by Gilligan’s respondents, who could not express their moral orientation properly through the lexicon of justice. For example, detachment is considered the hallmark of mature moral thinking within a justice perspective, signifying the ability to judge dispassionately, to weigh evidence in an even-handed manner, balancing the claims of others and self. From a care perspective, detachment is the moral problem. (…) The difference between agreement and understanding captures the different logics of justice and care reasoning, one seeking grounds for agreement, one seeking grounds for understanding, one assuming separation and thus the need for some external structure of connection, one assuming connection and thus the potential for understanding. (Gilligan 1987, p. 43)

It is as if the justice perspective were holding feelings responsible for providing this external connecting structure between separate individuals. In the care ethics perspective, emotional engagements are inscribed within a different posture, one that seeks above all to maintain and preserve the connection between persons, who can at times have contradictory and conflicting needs. Understanding and responding to needs despite their conflicting character is anchored in a different way of resolving the ambivalence typical of human relationships. On this view, feelings are regarded as one inseparable ­element within

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a framework for understanding relationships. Extracting feelings from this framework would decontextualize them. The different voice hypothesis rehabilitates this framework—one that is organised around a attachment/detachment dimension—by reconstructing the coherence of elements that are disparate within the justice perspective. Indeed, from the latter perspective, human connections remain enigmatic, as if they were a puzzle to be ‘solved’ with segments added to connect different parts, but while lacking a proper grammar to grasp, in their immediacy, relationships. It would not be strange to see, in one of the main objections voiced against the ethics of care (i.e. the impossibility of extending concern for another beyond immediate loved-ones), traces of this incredulity vis-à-vis human interconnections and their significance. And here, clearly, the view that the ethics of care is appropriate only for a limited sphere of relationships—for the private sphere— comes to the forefront. This is a position that reinforces the misleading view that care ethics is a moral perspective that can be reduced to mere sentimentalism and to the private domain. This should hardly surprise us, for this, after all, is the only way in which the justice perspective can represent the importance of the ties that link us to others.

Indifference In his book The Ethics of Memory (2002), Avishaï Margalit avoids this sentimental vision of the ethics of care. He maintains that care is the paradigmatic example of ‘thick’ relationships, i.e. relationships with those with whom we share a significant history—in short, our loved ones. We worry about our loved ones and the groups to which we belong. But most of the time, Margalit insists, we are quite indifferent in our encounters; we do not care about others in the wider sense of their wellbeing; this is why we need morality. “We need morality to overcome our natural indifference to others. Indeed, we need morality not so much to counter evil as to counter indifference.” (Margalit 2002, p.  33) Morality guides the domain of our ‘thin’ or ‘narrow’ relationships in the sense that they only link us to others in the name of a common humanity, in contrast with ‘thick’ or ‘dense’ relationships, which in turn concern ethics.



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According to Margalit, even if an absence or lack of care seems to belong naturally to the moral domain, being concerned about others is not at the heart of the moral attitude, contrary to what feminist theorists of care ethics maintain. This asymmetry would have to do with the particularly demanding character of care ethics. Caring, he notes, is not a kind of diffuse and general goodwill that can be passed around to everyone, and it cannot be assimilated to a sort of natural sympathy either. What caring requires is an “unselfish heed to the particular needs and interests of others” (Margalit 2002, p. 33). Margalit specifies, however, that “the snag is not that it is hard to like people we don’t know: caring does not necessarily require liking. What we find hard is the attention that is implied by caring.” (Magalit 2002, p. 33) Care ethics cannot be identified with a feeling, no matter how honourable and important it is. According to Margalit, it is not on this register that we will discover why it is so difficult to worry about others (whether in general or on an individual basis), nor why care ethics matters for human life (something we best appreciate when a lack of care stimulates condemnation or compassion in us). The difficulty of extending care to others in general (those with whom we have only ‘thin’ relationships) constitutes one of the central objections to care ethics from an ethics of justice perspective. On that view, worrying about others would be appropriate for relationships with the people we are close to—a proximity that has typically been understood in the restrictive sense of relationships located in the private or domestic sphere (a sense Margalit does not adhere to). But this concerned attitude would not, it is claimed, suit relationships in the public domain. From an ethics of justice perspective, care ethics would thus be inappropriate and unsuitable for the exigencies of such ‘impersonal’ relationships. But is this objection truly relevant? In my opinion, this objection fails to address adequately the interrogations that research on care ethics has confronted an ethics of justice with. For the author of The Decent Society, it is precisely this characteristic of care ethics as demanding (demanding because concrete) that limits its possible extension, and not—as others have argued--the emotional engagement and the feelings that define it.

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The idea that being concerned about others is not a natural attitude towards those we are not close to seems to indicate a contrario that care ethics is necessarily fitting for ‘thick’ relationships. Concern for others would be the defining features of these thick relationships— particularly familial relationships. Margalit’s thesis is the following: we model the way we think about ‘thick’ relationships on family relationships. But can we not also be indifferent at times towards our kin? Is not such an indifference quite common? On Margalit’s terms, interacting with our loved ones with an overall kindness but without paying real attention to them could well be considered as an ethically (and morally) wrong indifference. Yet Margalit does not conclude from this empirically and conceptually provable possibility that care cannot be taken for granted in the framework of ‘thick’ relationships. If care is indeed this demanding attitude, the question that this raises and that is as relevant as that concerning care’s extension is the question of what sort of conditions might make it possible for us to respond to such a demandingness, first and foremost within ‘thick’ relationships. Surprisingly, this question is not taken up by the author of The Ethics of Memory (even though the exploration of an ethics of memory opens up other reflective paths). Another question that is contained within or presupposed by the first is what is the importance and nature of this demandingness. What happens exactly in ‘thick’ relationships (and their accompanying ethics) that makes them so important that their very absence is felt as a fatal attack on our morality? These questions are crucial in order to understand what is at stake in the ethics of care, whether we consider it an activity or occupation, a disposition, an ethics or a politics. They are, indeed, at the heart of the challenges and demands carried by ‘the different voice’. Even if care relationships are characteristic of relationships with loved ones, this does not mean that the closeness or ‘thickness’ of these relationships is the most appropriate trait to understand their importance. The ethics of care may not be an indicator of ‘thick’ relationships or of kin relationships (as Margalit argues), but rather the answer to the expectations that define dependency relationships. Thus, the main stake of care ethics is not the extension of care to



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others in general, but first and foremost, the recognition of the concrete reality of our dependence. It is on the basis of this characterization that the ethics of care can, in my view, be articulated coherently as a feminist perspective. A feminist care ethics perspective is original in that it does not dissociate the experience of responsibility towards vulnerable people from the debate on the moral and political implications of relationships tied to dependency. Grounded on the premise that the needs and suffering of vulnerable people cannot be left unanswered, care ethics attempts to elaborate a response that would be morally acceptable, and equally so from the recipient’s point of view. The latter ought to be included, no matter how vulnerable and dependent the concerned parties are (Kittay 2002; Nussbaum 2002). How does all this lead to the recognition of the injustice done to those who find themselves ‘naturally’ in a position of providing care and attention to those in need (Bubeck 2002)? The “different voice” thesis, brought to the forefront by Gilligan, seems to come up against this difficulty. For some critics, this thesis represents nothing more than the acceptance of a functional ‘virtue’ that serves men’s interests. Love, compassion, solicitude, caring for others maintain women in a subordinate position, locking them into a falsely virtuous circle. These feelings, it is argued, could not help in any way to criticize or challenge the existing system of oppression; they would rather turn against those who support their value. For these interpreters, such feelings would prevent us from discerning the exploitation inherent to this ‘compulsory service’. I would like to re-examine this question starting from a characterisation of care ethics as a response to relationships built around dependence. It seems to me that this characterisation in terms of dependence works better than the characterisation of care as an ethics of solicitude. Indeed, it could enable the public expression of questions whose moral and political scope is either denied or rendered invisible by a justice ethics that admittedly is concerned about others, but exclusively as equal and independent persons. I shall then conclude with a brief discussion of the tension between these two

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c­ haracterizations and the real difficulty of linking care as moral sensitivity with care as dependency work.

The crisis of care Recent developments in feminist research that take up care ethics often underscore the inadequacy of theories and concepts that boil down justice as a matter of regulating affairs between competent, healthy and equal adults. These theories, it is argued, reduce concern for others to something too obvious to address, ‘a family affair’, a sentimental story of attachment to loved ones, or a question of social policies that narrow down the services needed and the means of helping those in dependence. What unites these recent developments is the identification of dependence and vulnerability as central human characteristics and as heuristic means for appreciating and analysing the social, moral and political significance of what used to be pushed to the margins of mainstream ethico-political theory. And this in fact constitutes the crucial contribution made by care ethics to the intelligibility of the social world. This vulnerability is found within us all, as humans. We are born defenceless babies, and no baby has been raised without being taken care of. Babies are dependent on others for their survival and development into fully-fledged members of society. This dependence is neither contingent, nor accidental nor one-off. One can also underscore the dependence of fragile, sick, old or disabled adults, which is just as constraining and inevitable. In the impossible situation of fending for themselves on a daily basis, the latter need regular, continued and daily help. But dependence does not stop at those who are most obviously unable to survive on their own or live a respectable life without help. It is also present in various moments of our existence, in less acute forms, both unpredictable yet certain. According to Eva Feder Kittay (2005), dependence from the caregiver’s point of view is not to be confused with other kinds of dependence, where working for someone else results from the recipient’s enforcement power on the caregiver. A domestic helper’s care for his or her employer differs from that given by a caregiver to a vulnerable



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person, in that the former care is morally voluntary, whereas the latter is morally obligatory. The notion of dependency is used here as an attempt to discern the specific nature of care relationships, turning care into an unavoidable issue for moral thought. It only provides a rough sketch of what distinguishes care relationships from other kinds of dependency relationships that demand responsibility less directly, or that imply a power relationship. But its significance and utility is great in that it directs attention to whole hidden sections of society and does so independently from its weaknesses or the questions it elucidates without necessarily providing a full-fledged answer. Situations of dependency, especially when extreme, leave no ‘choice’ to respond or to prefer not to (to use Bartleby’s formulation). The cost of getting out, as Albert Hirschman puts it, is not comparable to leaving or ignoring another kind of activity. There is a high price to pay firstly for the person whose life depends on this care, which—as nurses know very well—is an extremely persuasive factor for not quitting. The possibility of leaving the circle of care entails not that one sees ‘a necessary response because need and suffering demands it’, but rather, that one sees ‘a response to be given that does not concern me’. In short, those who enter the circle of care do not leave it all that easily. The most effective solution is to avoid entering it in the first place. Now, those who do not enter do so at the detriment of the individuals who remain stuck in the circle of caregiving. The vulnerabilities and resulting dependency are not taken into account here as basic factors concerning each and everyone involved. They come to be treated as a matter reserved for certain types of people: ‘those in need’, and ‘those in positions of responsibility for others’ wellbeing’. This is perhaps one of the reasons why the term vulnerability cannot be invoked easily without flirting with a negative connotation and triggering the view that now we are dealing with a ‘contaminated’ question. But within the context of care ethics, the term ‘vulnerability’ is certainly not reducible to this widely accepted and narrow view; it rather encapsulates at once a shared quality, a manner of being touched, another dimension of sensibility, a human trait in all cases. I will come back to that below.

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Dependency work can be paid or unpaid, professional or not, and can thus contribute to the workings of shared human affairs without becoming visible, and without its usefulness and consequences being valued. The work is generally badly paid, exploited and devalued. Whether paid or not, care work is a role traditionally held by women, immigrants and poor people, with these three classifications often overlapping. Dependency characterises also the consequences of caregiving on the lives of caregivers. The notion of ‘derived’ or ‘secondary’ dependency (Kittay 2001) characterises caregivers’ situations. Absorbed by the demands of taking care of vulnerable people, caregivers are often unable to provide for their own daily needs without the help of others and without themselves become more vulnerable, as S.M. Okin (1989) reminds us: the built-up effects of vulnerability in caregivers, in turn, affects negatively those in their care. Being in a vulnerable and dependent situation is therefore neither a minor nor a marginal affair. If this is the case, why is the central importance of these traits and aspects of human existence ignored? When we objectivize care as a profession of dependency, we come up against the question of its invisibility. It is not easy to recognize that we all depend on someone at some point or another in our lives, and it is even harder to recognize when these services have been provided for in the domestic sphere (for here we can avoid to have to give any public account of the provenance, quality, abundance or distribution of these services). In societies that celebrate autonomy, dependency relationships risk being considered exceptional, marginal affairs, compared to social relationships based on the presupposed norms of independence and equality. What the care perspective aims to have us recognize is that these dependency relationships are not the negligible ‘accidents’ of social and political organising, but rather the conditions upon which all social relations within a society are based. They compose and shape the framework of actual lives. If they are not at the heart of most accounts of ‘social reality’, it is because these relationships are taken for granted, and are pushed aside socially and politically visible facts; they constitute the latter’s dark side, in short. By analysing care, the



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permanence and significance of caregiving professions—organised according to gender hierarchies, mostly in the domestic or private sphere—are brought to the forefront, instead of remaining in the shadow of the more reassuring image of a society made up of competent, equal, autonomous and healthy adults. Denying dependency with regards to caregivers is a consequence of the professions’ ‘privatization’: to put it simply, maintaining a divide between public and private allows one to avoid confronting the inevitability of dependency. The manner in which responsibility is tacitly assumed regarding dependent and vulnerable individuals is not such an easy matter nowadays. Caring for others can no longer be exclusively provided for in the domestic sphere. The traditional family framework is falling apart and does not provide the necessary continuity for dependent persons; women are often found in professions marked by uneven employment patterns and precarity, or begin professional careers which are no more than before designed with the demands of dependent persons in mind. The crisis of care concerns traditional caregivers who take on heavier duties due to lengthening life expectancies. It also pertains to the ever-harder conditions in which care activities are carried out, due to the social policies that frame them. The crisis equally includes a chronic lack of suppliers and an increase in demand, obviated by current female immigration patterns: women from Asia, Eastern Europe and Africa, who have come to fill the roles of ‘nannies and maids’, leaving other dependent persons including their own children back home without necessarily having someone to easily replace them. This immigration curbs the care deficit in rich countries, while increasing that deficit in poorer countries. As such, the crisis of care is no longer local, but global. The perspective of care ethics, by problematizing both the social and political arrangements which frame dependency work, is thus the very expression of this crisis. This articulation in terms of dependency sketches the contours of the program for what a sociological analysis from a care ethics perspective would look like. This analysis would give rise to a critical

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account of dependency work, which would highlight its unjust distribution, and highlight the feelings of injustice produced by this unequal distribution amongst real caregivers as well. Such issues do not often become public matters, despite being so significant for caregivers. Would the structure or practices of the workplace, the market or the legislature be the same if they had developed with the assumption that their participants had to accommodate to the needs of child-bearing, child-rearing, and the responsibilities of domestic life? Would policymaking or its outcomes be the same if those who engaged in them were persons who also had significant day-to-day responsibilities for caring for others, rather than being some of those least likely in the entire society to have such experience? (Okin 1991, p. 83)

When linking care ethics to dependency work, a fault line starts to appear along gender, class and race lines (Nakano-Glenn 1992; Roberts 2002; Tronto 1993). Indeed, the invisibilization, marginalisation and devaluation of care also occurs from the complex interlinking of these three types of power structures. The extent of the dependency towards caregivers becomes much more visible, much more evident, when one pays close attention to the social organization of care activities and of care work. Indeed, on the basis of such an analysis, it is possible to pinpoint the non-recognition (on both a political and public planes) of this generalised dependency, as well as the injustice towards those responsible for dependent persons.

‘Tie me up!’ With this move, however, the analysis seems at first glance to lose its intrinsic moral value, which made up the strength of the different voice’s claim. The objectification of care as dependency work reaches a sort of sociologism, reducing the importance of moral sensitivity in care, in the name of its social efficiency. Hence these two aspects of care seem to contradict each other, or at least to stand in tension. I believe that this tension gathers around three points. First of all, if considered as a sensitivity or disposition, the ethics of care broadens the notion of dependency to include relationships



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which do not at first sight seem vital in the way that extreme dependency situations do. This broader notion of dependency points towards people’s vulnerability, not only in the elementary sense of bodily weakness, but also in the sense of a readiness to being touched or affected by others, to maintaining contact. However, the point of such a broadening—which renders the reciprocity in asymmetry visible—raises serious difficulties related to feelings of injustice of real, not potential, caregivers. Furthermore, commitment to sensitivity, its orientation towards people’s individual needs, i.e. neither predictable nor plannable, seems to call for a ‘specialisation’ or suggest a concentration of skills regarding discernment of needs and appropriate responses. Issuing from a particular and privileged relationship, such specialization seems to exacerbate the difficulty of sharing responsibility of care giving. Caregiving cannot be reduced to a series of finite, discontinuous tasks and ends up pertaining to a unique and indivisible responsibility. Considered a disposition or sensitivity, caregiving seems to propitiate a spiral of concern—always answer the call!—without being able to stop it. Finally, the inclination to always being present also bears with it the risk of becoming intrusive from the recipient’s point of view. The question of respect for the dependent person (not the only question that these unchosen, asymmetrical relationships prompt) confronts the ethics of care with a serious difficulty, which the characterisation of dependence seems to avoid, if not resolve. An answer to this difficult issue has been sketched out by Tronto (1993). She insists on the recipients’ validation of the appropriate nature and quality of the received care. This validation intervenes as a necessary part of the process, its end point as well as its test. Yet this answer itself collides with equally serious difficulties since it can, for instance, lead to turning the caregiver’s invisibility (discretion) into a crucial condition for the relationships’ success. The justice claim contained in the care perspective would thus paradoxically be stopped by the very mark of its success (Kittay 2005; Molinier 2005). It seems that care ethics’ emphasis on disposition and sensibility

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r­ender it even more difficult to recognize the injustice inherent to social and political arrangements that draw caregivers into this spiral of concern. However, this would in a sense mean ignoring the implications or consequences attached to this disposition to discern others’ needs. Being attentive to others and their particular situations that call for a response (a reaction or consideration), builds a basic social link whose absence contrasts with the importance and specifically human meaning of this type of attention. The type of attention and way of caring anchor the value of this particularity into a familiar world, so that at least on that front the individual receives recognition, in Honneth’s sense of the term. But the constitution of the person that the ethics of care contributes towards is not the only important factor here; just as crucial is the guarantee of an anchor, a feeling of belonging, in the absence of which it would probably be difficult to elaborate what it means to make society. This way of creating ties with others as individuals, of maintaining relationships in case of conflicts of interest, make this orientation towards others the operator of a basic social link, an inclusion indeed. The care perspective links up vulnerability and dependency, vulnerability and sensitivity, as two sides of the same coin. Establishing a link implies the activity of the provider and the capacity to be affected by the other. The framework of care creates a type of primary link, which is inseparably social and moral. Indeed, the ethics of care claims the importance of these ties. This claim is the basis of a certitude, which allows for questioning the social and political arrangements of dependency work. The ethics of care responds to the denial of dependency by pointing out what is most important to us—namely, the value of our attachment to others: For even more of us, whether or not we like it and regardless of how we regard it, caregiving labor, for children and the aged, is the work we will do that creates the relationships, families, and communities within which our lives are made pleasurable and connected to something larger than ourselves. (West 2002, p. 89).

The real difficulty in linking care as sensitivity to care as an occupation does not lead to the conclusion that it is impossible. However, it is



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clear that dissociating the two sides of the ethics of care does not allow for the moral value of a perspective which presents itself as a resource to think ‘the need for more than justice’, to use Annette Baier’s terms (1987). Baier was obviously not inviting us to renounce justice by entitling her article in a way that argues for the importance of care ethics for rethinking justice. It is precisely because the ethics of care enables us to recognise the importance of human life and attachments, because it expresses an active form of concern for others, that it takes into account the elementary factor of all people’s vulnerability in order to rethink justice relations.

Literature Baier, A. (1987) ‘The Need for More than Justice’, in M.  Hanen and K.  Nielsen, Science, Morality and Feminist Theory, Calgary: University of Calgary Press. Boltanski, L. (2002) La souffrance à distance, Paris: Métailié. Bubeck, D.G. (2002) ‘Justice and the Labour of Care’, in E.F. Kittay and E.K. Feder (eds), The Subject of Care: Feminist perspectives on Dependency, Lanham, Oxford, Boulder, New-York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 160-185. Ehrenreich, B. and A.R. Hochschild eds (2002) Global Woman. Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy, New-York: Henry Holt and Company. Gilligan, C. (1982) In a Different Voice, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Gilligan, C. (1995) ‘Moral Orientation and Moral Development’, in H.  Virginia (ed), Justice and Care Essential Readings in Feminist Ethics, Boulder: Westview Press, 31-46. Hochschild, A. (1979) ‘Emotion Work, Feeling Rules and Social Structure’, American Journal of Sociology, 85: 551-575. Hochschild, A. (1983) The Managed Heart, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. Katz, J. (1999) How Emotions Work, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kittay, E. F. (2001) ‘A Feminist Public Ethic of Care Meets the New Communitarian Family Policy’, Ethics, 111: 523-547. Kittay, E. F. (2002) ‘When Caring is Just and Justice is Caring: Justice and Mental Retardation’, in E.F.  Kittay and E.K.  Feder (eds), The Subject of Care: Feminist Perspectives on Dependency, Lanham, Boulder, New-York, Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 257-276. Kittay, E. F., B.  Jennings and A.A.  Wasunna (2005) ‘Dependency, Difference and Global Ethic of Long-term Care’, The Journal of Political Philosophy, 13(4): 443-469. Kohlberg, L. (1981) Essays on Moral Development. Vol.1, The Philosophy of Moral Development. New York: Harper and Row. Kohlberg, L. (1984) The Psychology of Moral Development. Vol.2, New York: Harper and Row.

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Lutz, C.A. and L. Abu-Lughod eds (1999) Language and the Politics of Emotion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Margalit, A. (2002) Ethics of Memory, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London: Harvard University Press. Molinier, P. (2003) L’énigme de la femme active, Paris: Payot. Molinier, P. (2005) ‘Le care à l’épreuve du travail  : vulnérabilités croisées et savoirfaire discret’, in P. Paperman and S. Laugier (eds), Le souci des autres. Éthique et politique du care, Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS. Nakano-Glenn, E. (1992) ‘From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labour’, Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 18(1): 1-43. Nussbaum, M. (2002) ‘The Future of Feminist Liberalism’, in E.F.  Kittay and E.K.  Feder (eds), The Subject of Care: Feminist Perspectives on Dependency, Lanham, Boulder, New-York, Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 186-214. Okin, S.M. (1989) Justice, Gender, Family, New York: Basic Books. Okin, S.M. (1991) ‘Gender, the Public and the Private’, in D.  Held (ed), Political Theory Today, Cambridge: Polity Press, 67-90. Roberts, D.E. (2002) ‘Poverty, Race and the Distortion of Dependency: The Case of Kinship Care’, in E.F. Kittay and E.K. Feder (eds), The Subject of Care: Feminist Perspectives on Dependency, Lanham, Boulder, New-York, Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, pp. 277-293. Thévenot, L. (1995) ‘Emotions et évaluations dans les coordinations publiques’, in P.  Paperman and R.  Ogien (eds), La couleur des pensées, Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, 145-174. Tronto, J. (1993) Moral Boundaries. A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care, NewYork, London: Routledge. West, R. (2002) ‘The Right to Care’, in E.F. Kittay and E.K. Feder (eds), The Subject of Care: Feminist Perspectives on Dependency, Lanham, Boulder, New-York, Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 88-114.

6. Opening up Care? Patricia Paperman and Pascale Molinier

In June 2010, the ethics of care suddenly made an appearance on the French mediatic and political scene. Things began unfolding when former minister Martine Aubry invoked the idea of a “society of care”, in the hopes of reigniting debate within the Socialist Party (PS) and among the public more generally.1 The sarcastic and dismissive reactions expressed by certain journalists (“silliness”, “granny-care”, etc.) and the positions taken by both right-wing and left-wing politicians captured the media spotlight for some time.2 Perhaps it was because of this generally hostile tone that the PS Secretary decided to exclude the concept of care from her public interventions. Be as it may, it turns out that the French context is not conducive to a fruitful public debate on this question. It is difficult to think about the possible implications of the concept of care for social and political analysis when mere questions asked about the concept are derided as mere sentimentality, and the answers must constantly justify themselves in the mode of pro and against. Could care ethics be debated in France by resorting to a different vocabulary?   Martine Aubry MP, who has held a number of ministerial posts, was then the leader of the Socialist Party. 2   “La ‘société du care’ de Martine Aubry fait débat”, Le Monde, 14 April 2010. Retrieved on 14 February 2017. http://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2010/05/14/ la-societe-du-care-de-martine-aubry-fait-debat_1351784_823448.html. Also see Paperman and Laugier (2010). 1

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Nonetheless, it ought to be said that the ethics and politics of care have already sparked a debate somewhere else, namely in certain professional sectors (e.g. in healthcare, in the long-term care sector and, to a lesser degree, in social work), as well as in academia, where the reception was initially mixed, depending on the specific discipline and its relationship to ethics and feminism. Most often identified with discussions of theories of justice, the ethics of care is seen as a legitimate subject matter for philosophers, a suitable one for psychologists, but as an irritating or embarrassing one for the social sciences, which, at best, relegate it to the margins of scholarly debate.

Division of care labour, division of academic labour In the social sciences, it is thanks to discussions of the labour market and the division of labour (sociological topics par excellence) that knowledge about care developed. This knowledge was anchored in studies focusing on: the care professions; the transnational migration of female domestic workers and care workers; the organisation of care work in institutions and in the private realm following various types of dependency (i.e. the elderly, the disabled or the sick) encouraged by particular social policies; the economy of care; the development of and the “professionalization” of the “personal services” sector [services à la personne], to use the terms of the 2005 Borloo Plan and the National Agency for Personal Services [Agence Nationale des services à la personne]. But it is rarer to find studies that explicitly integrate into their problematization the normative and political questions opened up by the ethics of care—namely, questions about justice, citizenship, power relations, vulnerabilities and responsibilities.3 For example, the ethical concerns of care workers, particularly subaltern workers, are de facto absent from French sociological studies or they

3   Contrary to this tendency to separate work from ethics and politics, Caroline Ibos’ 2012 book Qui gardera nos enfants? [“Who will look after our children?”] brings globalised politics and ethics back into Parisian homes, through her ethnographic study of the work of Ivorian nannies (whom the author meets in a neighbourhood park) and their relations with their employers.



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are, at best, considered only within the confines of discussions of professional ‘values’. The division of academic labour therefore tends to create a dichotomy between the work of care and the ethics of care, even though the ethics of care truly cannot be dissociated from various practices and activities, which in turn cannot be rendered intelligible without first considering the attention that nourished the gesture or practice in the first place. The same division of academic labour that separates descriptive approaches from normative approaches, the subject of knowledge from its object, also fragments the analysis of care into a myriad of mini-debates and specialities, thereby concealing the larger organisation of the social process of care and the political dimension of the ethics of care. The fragmentation of care along social power relations is reinforced by the fragmentation of knowledge that undergirds it. Given the high status expert position sociology and economy occupy in society, this dissociation of ethics from work has very concrete implications for the organisation of care processes: namely, ethics continues to be seen as an intellectual endeavour disconnected from ordinary practices and needing to be imposed from above, through various forms of training designed for care workers or, in the worst cases, through a management that is suspicious of care and that is keen on the enforcement of “good practice”. Given these disciplinary and social barriers erected around the concept of care, one is compelled to ask questions concerning the reasons for such intense reticence, but also concerning the types of difficulties that the notion raises and that bring (even more) confusion into our conversations—whether those held amongst fans or critics of a more narrow disciplinary approach. Intellectuals and privileged classes are reluctant to imagine an ethics of care that would originate from the practices of people they see as subordinate and less educated than themselves, insofar as these social groups benefit from such work and from the care and attention it offers them, even more so because they are unaffected by its concrete irregularities and risks. This collective avoidance has been theorized and designated by Joan Tronto as “the indifference of the privileged”.

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­ oreover, this reluctance or resistance to care ethics also confronts us M with the fact that in the French public space, feminism continues to be seen as a provocation. In a country that believes that “women have already won it all”, it is not considered tasteful to underscore that women are still, in fact, largely the ones in charge of the concerns and tasks linked to care. Yet the reluctance also conveys the quasi-automatic rejection of any reference to an ethics that would criticize a universalist position, especially in matters of justice. This rejection is inherent to a conception of equality that is deeply entrenched in France, especially in French academia (see Paperman and Laugier 2011; Paperman and Molinier 2011/12) and that practically functions as a dogma of republican or mainstream feminism. This last observation is important, because it helps us better understand why the perspective of care, despite its central role in the lives of most women, does not only find allies among the latter, and still raises suspicion in academic feminism. This feminism admits that the work of care reveals social inequalities and relations of exploitation and domination found within the care professions. But the dimension of ethics inherent to work and to the political concept of care is cast aside.

The different levels of care In sociological approaches to the care professions and to the transnational migrations of care workers, this rejection of the ethical and political perspectives on care seems to be linked more specifically to a restricting of the social field to its structural and macro-level dimensions, which are seen as self-sufficient. Ethics is said to corrupt the autonomy of the social, which as such pays a high price. Nonetheless, this stubborn tendency to dissociate the work of care from its ethics could in fact be linked to a real difficulty inherent to the concept of care itself, a difficulty that the sociological perspective reveals more clearly than philosophy or psychology. From the point of view of sociology, discussions of care are necessarily located at different levels or registers, which range from interpersonal relationships to translational relations, and they use methods and forms of inquiry that are anchored in the habits of different disciplines and follow



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heterogeneous theoretical preferences. This raises a real challenge: how can these approaches to care be articulated cogently on different registers? Now, the relationships of care are certainly interpersonal, whether they fall under the category of salaried work or not. But they are equally part of a larger social process that includes different moral stages or situations and involves various protagonists (individuals, groups and institutions) whose relations are most often hierarchical. Analysing care as a process rather than simply as an inter-individual relationship or proximity work allows us to ask the question of how are responsibilities organised and distributed between the different phases of care. If we stick to this first description (i.e. care as a process), we already see the need to think about the connections between: what happens on the level of direct caregiving, how care needs are addressed on a larger (institutional, political) level and how we think about the ways of satisfying them. For example, Fiona Robinson (2011) and Fiona Williams (2011) have both emphasized how migration of care work contribute to reducing social welfare expenditures and have analysed the effects of welfare policies on the “choices” of women (who are expected to find solutions to the problems of domestic care) and on female employer- employee relationships. Here, the difficulty of considering the different layers of care together seems linked to the question of responsibilities rather than the problem of equality. In fact, the way the question of equality arises can more easily be examined through an analysis of responsibility.4 Tackling together properly the different levels of care cannot do without the idea of responsibility, if only to understand the distribution of care responsibilities. While “in any society, decisions about who cares for whom, how, and why, underpin the way the society or social system is organized,” (Tronto 2012, p.  309) this organisation 4   All the more so because making equality our point of departure seems to limit the discussion of care workers’ needs to the question of rights, without being able to address the reversibility of the care relation. They take care of others, but who takes care of them? See Molinier, P & Cepeda, MF (2012). “Comme un chien à carreau.” Des employées domestiques colombiennes entre care et justice’, Travailler, 28: 33-56.

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defines the framework (the limits, possibilities and impossibilities) that informs and inflects the practices and relations of care. The difficulty of connecting together the various levels of care is, to a large extent, tied to our reluctance to see this organisation of responsibilities as a relevant analytical framework to study various work and practices of care. This social and political distribution of responsibilities requires a moral conception of responsibility, as Joan Tronto (2012) has shown in her discussion of global justice.

Responsibility and global justice The ethics of care is linked to a thick conception of responsibility, something we typically associate with interpersonal relations and fail to recognize as relevant for relations between collective entities. Reflecting on the question of global justice (more specifically, what citizens of rich countries owe to those living in poorer countries), Joan Tronto argues that the specific relations of care constitute a strong basis for understanding what responsibility means at the global level. Relationships of care constitute a paradigmatic case of relationships that can create legitimate obligations. Indeed, they make it possible to appreciate the different claims of responsibility, to see the extent of the harm caused by irresponsibility and the way in which it affects different parties differently. Reformulated in this way, the partialist argument can be applied to the relations between collective entities such as nation states or companies, but also, on the transnational level, between rich and poor countries. The partialist thesis does not elude the fact that the collective responsibility for global justice includes the responsibility of individual citizens, i.e., of concrete people who are part of a larger whole. Tronto (1993) defends this conception of responsibility against substantive responsibility, in other words, against the idea that responsibility to others (particularly towards geographically or socially distant others) derives from essential traits of individuals or collectives—what we have in common with them—or from the formal properties of relationships (for example the statutes that define rights and obligations). According to her, such an understanding of r­esponsibility is



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one of the many obstacles to a global ethics. In contrast, she shows the strengths and potentials of an alternative conception of responsibility understood in relational terms. In the latter model, it is the relationship, the very fact of being in a relationship, that creates responsibility. Contrary to the substantive conception of responsibility, which sees the actor (an individual or a group) as the appropriate analytical unit, in the alternative model the appropriate unit is the relationship itself. The relationship creates a responsibility, it comprises the requirement of a response, not due to the shared traits of actors or the formal properties of the relationship, but because of common activities, past or present, that link the protagonists together in a relationship. However, it would be more precise to speak about relationships in the plural here, because relationships are always intertwined in a complex and fluctuating network, giving rise to tensions, conflicts and to the difficulties of assuming some of the responsibilities they generate. This relational conception of responsibilities is not characterised by a kind of naïve pacifism or by good intentions, but by the conflicts that must be untangled, clarified, resolved or tolerated as a dynamic contradiction. This is a far cry from a sentimental vision of care. Built on the work of three feminist philosophers (Soran Reader, Iris Marion Young and Margaret Urban Walker), an analysis of responsibility in relational terms enables us to place the question of power (i.e. its imbalances) and of the asymmetries of responsibility at the centre of our analysis. Once individual action (whether personal or collective) ceases to be the anchor point of analysis, it is possible to reconsider questions of power as inherent to the tensions and dynamics of the multiple relationships in which parties are inscribed, rather than as a moral fault attributable to an actor (who can be blamed or sanctioned, as is the case when responsibility is approached through a legal model). The relational model helps us identify displays of irresponsible action as a moral wrongdoing. It also helps us appreciate the seriousness of certain forms of irresponsibility, because this framework takes

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into account the consequences irresponsibility entails for the different protagonists in the relationship. This foregrounds the question of power imbalances, which becomes a crucial moral dimension in relationships of responsibility. For example, the transactions between a social worker and a “client”, who is not always “seeking” welfare, unfold in a relationship marked by an asymmetry of power, which constitutes “a serious moral dimension of the responsibility of the social worker.” (Tronto 2012, p. 308) The relational conception of responsibility presumes that relations are always already there: partial, strained, multiple, changing, conflicting, asymmetrical, moving constantly between different types of protagonists and at different levels. These characteristics should not be seen as an obstacle to thinking about responsibility and dealing with it, but, on the contrary, as the conditions under which the nature of responsibility can be properly understood. And care is at the heart of this understanding. Care relationships (in their infinite varieties) are susceptible to constant tensions and conflicts. Responsibilities are not always clearly established, or they are set out too firmly, but without the allocation of care responsibilities being taken up publicly or democratically as a question in the first place. Who takes care of whom, of what and how? If responsibility is best approached via a consideration of the particular relations that give rise to it, then partiality ought not be seen as an obstacle to a global ethics. After all, the latter is not an extension of responsibility to people who are distant or far away from us, with whom we have no direct and continuous relationships or whom we cannot know (i.e. future generations). Instead, a global ethics would to take seriously into account these various relationships and what connects individuals/peoples at a distance. This recognition of the importance of “strong but partial” connections is posited as the starting point for a more adequate appreciation of the difficulties raised by multiple responsibilities and as a basis for a better distribution of the responsibilities created by these (always) partial relations. In other words, the challenge is to recognize that there are relations that link us to others: to companies, states and others distant in space



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and time, whom we do not know but are related to, thanks to shared activities or to an interdependence that is most often asymmetrical. A case considered by Iris Young in her work (namely, that of students boycotting a licensed college wear because it was manufactured in an exploitative workshop), has led Tronto to think about the limits of a legal model of responsibility and to re-examine the relations between these students, the workshop management and the workers. For Tronto, fashion can be seen as a certain type of relationship, unless we wish to believe that our sartorial choices have no social meaning. We can extend the same argument to the case of radioactive waste (buried in distant villages in a distant land) and understand that this waste also creates relationships that we would prefer to know nothing about. How many Europeans worry, while eating a banana, about the social conditions under which it was grown and about the traditions of violence and exploitation that are part, for example, of the agricultural systems in South America? Of course, the consumer never wished for this violence to happen and is not primarily responsible for it. Nevertheless, he is implicated in it: the banana puts him de facto in a relationship with the living conditions of the agricultural workers who grew it. From this point of view, there is not much difference between the consumption of bananas and the consumption of cocaine.

The different voice: speaking the relational language It is precisely this difficulty to acknowledge relationships and to make an Other do so as well (by expressing and manifesting concern, for instance) that is at the heart of care ethics’ reflections on justice. Carol Gilligan (2013) argues that the main issue here is not of knowing why and how the capacities for concern about others and relationality are acquired, but rather of why and how they are lost. Following the work of the evolutionary anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Gilligan thinks that the capacity for attention and for attracting attention develop in all healthy human beings at an early stage. A baby who has the capacity to attract the empathy and attention of adults other than his mother improves his chances of survival. Now,

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according to Gilligan, it is patriarchy that is the source of our difficulty to relate and—especially for boys—to think of oneself in a relationship. That is so because the socialisation of men is completely focused on developing autonomy and on separating thought from emotions. As a result, little boys think, from very early on, that “care is about babies”—a view French journalists have reformulated as “care is for grannies”, rearticulating a regressive and infantile view into an anti-modern and conservative one. It turns out that for women who want to escape traditional female roles, they are also forced to favour autonomy and reason over emotions (the latter being associated to mere sentimentality). Women also come to devalue relationships that are seen as partial and hence as not meaningful or anecdotal, contrary to the principles and values based on universal abstractions. While the dissociation between the relational ego and the adult masculine ego is stronger in men, it is also more efficient and less conflictual than among women, who more often tend to occupy an in-between space.5 This is so both because girls are raised in increasingly similar ways to boys, aiming for the same careers and degrees, and because most adult women continue to have more care experiences than most men. Women are either required to speak the language of reason to account for experiences that draw on the relational register, in which case they cannot say what they have to say (this is what Gilligan calls “losing one’s voice”); or they do use the relational language and, as a result, are disqualified from the public and political space. Beyond social and political issues, the possibility of letting the “different voice” be heard in its own tone and language would therefore represent, if we follow Gilligan’s argument, a psychological conquest for humankind. Here, the psychological, social and political come together and every transformation affects all three dimensions in ways that are indissociable and intertwined. This is not to say, however, that in order to elucidate these dimensions, we do not sometimes require specific considerations and a­ nalysis.   Just like men, who, for one reason or another, have not experienced the dissociation of the “voice” from masculine identity. 5



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The psychological cannot be reduced to the social, and vice versa. However, the perspective of care instructs us to bring these different levels or dimensions into conversation, to identify their mutual connections, points of friction or contradictions in a more global approach. This approach must question the framework of relationships, the human capacities to create them or ignore them, relationships’ transformations and their effects on people and collectives.

From relationships to their commodification: emotional capitalism Arlie Hochschild’s contribution (2003) on commodification builds on her previous research on emotional work. She analyses the impediments to, and the transformations of relationships of care produced by the over-spilling of a market logic into the intimate sphere. For her, emotions are neither biologically innate nor solely constructed through psychosexual development; they are socially shaped through relationships. We act on our feelings and those of others according to “feeling rules”. We are expected to cry at a funeral or be happy at our wedding, for example, and these rules come to the forefront precisely when they are transgressed (e.g. when someone in a funeral procession bursts out laughing or when we hear the bride sobbing under her veil). In the service, sales or tourism sectors, the interactions aimed at shaping emotions are subject to prescriptions and to tightly controlled “communication scripts”, such as when sales assistants selling feminine lingerie are asked to discreetly shake the buyer’s hand when money is exchanged, or when telemarketers selling insurance policies are told to use their “smiling” voice. But Hochshild also draws our attention to what happens outside the professional sphere, in the intricate connections between the private sphere and the commercialisation of emotions. She insists that even in our private relationships, the ways of expressing concern for others and their wellbeing are transformed due to the cultural dominance of the market and the increasing segmentation and specialisation of so-called ‘personal’ services. Here, the example of dog-walkers in the urban sector is paradigmatic. We like having dogs for their tenderness and affection, but we do not have the time to take care of them, to satisfy their

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needs for movement, space and company. And so, we pay people who can take care of them instead of doing it ourselves. The result is that, on the one hand, our relationship with our dogs weakens—they are not as close to us—and yet intensifies at times that suit our own convenience. The life of these animals is therefore managed according to our own agendas, desires and availability; they are kept “at our service”. We could in fact replace the example of “dogs” with that of “children”, as Hochshild shows with regards to the outsourcing of birthdays to professional entertainers. Consider, also, the example of parents in rich countries who can purchase surrogacy and ‘readymade’ babies from women from poor countries. In our societies, all these practices are in reality quite trivial or trivialised and it is only by naming them, by putting them into a larger context of meaning or writing about them that they appear as disturbing and uncanny, as uncannily ordinary. (Laugier 2005) The concept of “emotional capitalism” is a powerful contribution to the sociological and political analysis of industrialized societies. Capitalism produces not only goods and services, but also emotions and forms of relationships where affectivity is closely intertwined with market logic. The market provides the categories that shape and express affectivity. We consume emotions and our emotions are consumed. Their commodification gives them a new form, which is also segmented and specialised. According to Hochschild (2003), emotional capitalism draws us into a culture of detachment, which interprets the transient nature of relationships and affects as the result of rational profit-and-loss calculation. Whatever economic recession strike us, she notes, market culture continues to be a major obstacle to the development of a caring society.

The relational approach and “standpoint theory” Developing the concept of care to its full potential requires us to rethink what connects and reconnects us to diverse others, whether they are individuals, groups, larger or smaller communities. This means that we must look at concrete relationships between persons and groups, instead of excluding these relationships as irrelevant in



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the name of analytical principles that favour social structures and the macro-sociological level of social domination forces. Relationships can be asymmetrical, unequal, unjust, mutually in conflict; they can involve different kinds and degrees of responsibilities and obligations, whose strength and intensity are different for the various parties involved. However, it is indispensable to start from partial relations (both those of individuals and collectives) and to push the relational account further. Here we are following in the footsteps of numerous feminist philosophers and sociologists who have demonstrated the existence of this particular blind-spot in the bulk of existing research: namely, a lack of attention to relationships, combined with an overlooking of gender in accounts of autonomy. (Friedman 2000; Hill Collins 2009) We must in other words integrate the subjective and moral dimensions, inherent to social relations, rather than expurgating them in order to satisfy the canon of scientific neutrality. Now, these dimensions cannot be standardised. Not everyone has the same subjective approach or the same moral view of situations; attention is partial, in the sense of emanating from one singular person towards another, from one group to another, in a way that is necessarily distinct from any other relationship between other people or groups. Integrating the care perspective therefore calls for “standpoint theory”. Standpoint theory has been developed by feminist thinkers such as Sandra Harding, Donna Haraway,  Maria Puig Della Casa or, in parallel, by ethnologists such as Jeanne Favret-Saada (1981) or Georges Devereux (1980). And indeed, it would seem difficult to analyse relationships from some lofty vantage point, without the author of the analysis situating themselves vis-à-vis this relationship. Trying to do without such “standpoint”, for instance by separating different spheres (work, family, citizenship) or by hyper-specializing the know-hows that pertain to them, renders invisible precisely what care seeks to highlight: the concrete conditions of knowledge-production, the materiality of the links between singular lives and larger social processes, the pragmatic and embodied dimension of ethics, as well as the ethical implications of social relations and of relations between states.

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It is rather easy to admit that depending on whether we belong to the camp of colonisers or of the colonised, our perspective on colonial relationships will not be the same; it will also be different if we are completely external to this relation. The degree of the researcher’s proximity to, or distance from, the object therefore cannot be avoided and exempted from our questioning or from the need to provide justifications for our bias in the choice of research objects or interpretations. However, for many social science and humanities researchers, “to objectify one’s standpoint” still most often boils down to announcing a few social parameters (woman, white, intellectual…). But taking the subjective and moral dimension of research into account must go further: it requires us to consider these dimensions’ effects, which can be deceiving or deforming, paralysing our thought or preventing it from seeing the subjective or moral positions of others. The care perspective therefore implies inventing another outlook on the relation between the “learned” subject and his or her “objects”. Phrased differently, it involves adopting a plural or democratic conception of knowledge, which eschews efforts to “objectify” people or relations, in order to include them as subjects and knowledge producers.

Opening up care What in part characterizes the inquiries opened up by an ethics and politics of care is that they encourage us to combine different disciplinary approaches and hence to dispute intra-disciplinary barriers or strictly disciplinary positions (as is the case in gender studies as well). The challenge lies in the way we understand our own position—as philosophers, sociologists, psychologists—and how the movement of exploration itself helps us, or prevents us from, freeing ourselves of the conventions that circumscribe disciplinary boundaries. The sciences (and in particular, the social and human sciences) do not evolve in a vacuum; they are the effects of social configurations. The problems raised by the frontiers between established disciplines is reflected in their application to the social and political issues tied to care. Compartmentalisation and specialisation, modelled on the development of science and engineering, are now the prevailing ­models to think about



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the compartmentalisation and specialisation of care “professions”. That care work should be professionalised, including the work of “family caregivers”, has now become a dogma on which the social recognition of people who provide care work depends. Various occupational, training or public policy “specialists” therefore amplify the tendency towards fragmentation inherent to emotional capitalism, whereas the care perspective highlights not technical or relational performance but rather “the importance of importance”. (Laugier 2005) What is important is not whether this or that gesture or attention is “professional” or not, but that someone has thought of doing what is necessary for someone else: changing their table napkin, filling up their water bottle… or doing nothing. The work of care, and this is a major challenge for all established knowledge, is at base not a specialised thing; not everyone can administer chemotherapy certainly, but everyone can show attention to a person suffering from cancer. In this sense, theoretical research in the field of the ethics and politics of care is intended for anyone ready to situate him or herself in the process of care and to think about their responsibilities. Translated by Kristina Valendinova

Literature Devereux, G. (1980) De l’angoisse à la méthode dans les sciences du comportement. Paris: Flammarion. Favret-Saada, J. & Contreras, J. (1981) Corps pour corps: enquête sur la sorcellerie dans le bocage. Paris: Gallimard. Friedman, M. (2000) ‘Feminism in Ethics’, in M.  Fricker & J.  Hornsby (eds). The Cambridge Companion to Feminism in Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gilligan, C. (2013) ‘Résister à l’injustice’, in P. Paperman & P. Molinier (eds). Contre l’indifférence des privilégiés. À quoi sert le care. Paris: Payot, Hill Collins, P. (2009) Black Feminist Thought. Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge. Hochschild, A. (2003) ‘Travail émotionnel, règles de sentiments et structure sociale’, Travailler, 9:19-49. Ibos, C. (2012) Qui gardera nos enfants? Paris, Flammarion. Laugier, S. (2005) ‘L’importance de l’importance. Expérience, pragmatisme, transcendantalisme’. Multitudes, 23: 153-167.

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Paperman, P. and S. Laugier (2010) ‘Politique du care contre société du soin’, Mediapart, 21 April 2010. Paperman, P. and S.  Laugier (2011) ‘Préface à la nouvelle édition’. Le Souci des autres. Éthique et politique du care, 2nd Edition. Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS (2011), p. 9-20; Paperman, P. and P. Molinier (2011/2), ‘L’éthique du care comme pensée de l’égalité’. Travail, genre et sociétés, 26: 189-193. Robinson, F. (2011), ‘Care Ethics and the Transnationalization of Care. Reflections on Autonomy, Hegemonic Masculinities, and Globalisation’, in R. Mahon, and F.  Robinson eds., Feminist Ethics and Social Policy. Vancouver, Toronto: UBC Press. Saada, J & J.  Contreras (1981). Corps pour corps: enquête sur la sorcellerie dans le bocage. Paris: Gallimard. Tronto, J. C. (2012) ‘Partiality Based on Relational Responsibilities: Another Approach to Global Ethics’, Ethics and Social Welfare, 6:3, 303-316. Williams, F. (2011) ‘Towards a Transnational Analysis of the Political Economy of Care’, in R. Mahon, and F. Robinson eds., Feminist Ethics and Social Policy. Vancouver, Toronto: UBC Press.

7. Contemporary Moral Philosophy: Three ­Models of Vulnerability Estelle Ferrarese

Theories of recognition (Hegelian or otherwise); the ethics of care; certain neo-republican writings; Butler’s reflections on precarious lives; Nussbaum’s writings on the fragility of the good life: all these attest to the remarkably high interest in the theme of vulnerability—bodily and psychological—in contemporary moral philosophy. 1 All evoke the vulnerability of the human being, and indeed of the living being in general, as constitutive, primordial, common. This anthropology of vulnerability has probably been presented most radically, because most paradoxically, by Adriana Cavarero. Arguing that the only figure of invulnerability—invulnerable in the sense of being incapable of suffering and therefore no longer exposed to affront—to be found in recent history is the ‘musulman’ of the extermination camps, she concludes: “Invulnerability does not occur in nature; it has to be produced artificially.” (Cavarero 2007, p. 35) In this sense, these theories respond to the political urgency to counter the figure of the self-engendered and self-sufficient subject, down to its most recent incarnations. A proteiform idea of empowerment; theories of identity wagering on a high and mighty assertion of the subject; a paradigm, now flush right throughout the social 1   This chapter is a revised version of  : E. Ferrarese (2009) “Vivre à la merci. Les trois figures de la vulnérabilité dans les théories politiques contemporaines”, Multitudes, 37/38, 132-142. It was initially translated in English and published in E. Ferrarese (2018), Vulnerability and Critical Theory, Leiden/Boston: Brill.

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s­ciences, of the negotiation of life pathways and preferences: the decomposition of Marxist political subjectivity and the paradoxes of postmodern structures left the field open for the emergence of a subject that, while clearly unable to choose itself freely, can constitute itself as its own manager, ensuring, if not rationally, then at least cleverly, the arithmetic sum of its possibilities and its identity facets. The anthropology outlined by contemporary reflections on vulnerability is, however, radically antithetical to all this. Endorsing an anthropology of vulnerability presents no a priori problems with thinking of vulnerabilities as constructed en abyme. That is to say, some theorists posit a universally shared vulnerability that is doubled by a strong susceptibility to wrong. All contemporary theories of vulnerability uphold this conviction. All admit that our constitutive vulnerability materialises in differentiated vulnerable states, as, for example, in bodies that are more affectable because already affected and whose particularity results from a collective history (Michel 2016, p. 240-260), or because human institutions always protect, in their very arranging of circumstances, certain individuals while exposing others to different forms of events and wrongs. This takes place no matter which life or power of acting can be exploited or threatened, for example, by a system of reimbursement for medical care, by certain immigration policies or a dearth of access ramps to public buildings. Some theorists of vulnerability thus aim to forge typologies. For instance, in their Vulnerability: New Ethics and Feminist Philosophy, Catriona MacKenzie, Wendy Rogers and Susan Dodds (2014) distinguish three types of vulnerability: inherent vulnerability, which is “intrinsic to the human condition”; situational vulnerability, which is understood as “context specific,” and finally, pathogenic vulnerability, that tied to abuse, injustice, or oppression. (p. 7-9) Butler’s own proposal is to juxtapose precariousness, which refers to a shared and constitutive vulnerability, against precarity, understood as a politically produced condition to which some subjects are more exposed than others. The fact remains that the affirmation of the ontological—anthropological or constitutive—status of vulnerability presents problems of both a categorial and political nature: how can an ineradicable,

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u­ niversal phenomenon pertaining to human nature be a wellspring for critique or a medium of emancipation? How can the idea of a fundamental human vulnerability enable us to account for socially produced or configured vulnerabilities? How can we avoid reproducing the viewpoint of two parallel vulnerabilities that are closed in on themselves in their causal logic and their normative implications? How are we to avoid transforming vulnerability into yet another abstraction? Moreover, all the authors involved in the theoretical constellation mentioned above seek to tackle, sometimes within the same breath (and frequently in a polemical tone), vulnerability and power to act, vulnerability and autonomy, or vulnerability and activity. All emphasise the idea that vulnerability does not mean passivity, contrary to what the majority of social science researchers who draw on the category of risk tend to argue. But all simultaneously underscore that a large share of our capacities are deployed precisely against or on the basis of a vulnerability. For instance, distinguishing between four figures of capacity—speaking, acting, narrating and imputability—Paul Ricœur outlines four forms of vulnerability affecting the capacity to be autonomous, forms relative to speech, action, the capacity to conform to a symbolic order and the possibility to hold oneself as the author of one’s own acts. (Ricœur 1997, p. 166) Ricoeur also defines autonomy as the task engendered in each case by the trial of vulnerability. Autonomy and vulnerability thus mutually presuppose one another. This line of argument has been variously defended by theorists. Butler, for example, conceptualises an “enabling vulnerability” (Butler 1997, p.  2): the address of the other is what constitutes us as subjects; we come to being by means of a dependency on the other. Similarly, Erinn Gilson proposes a critique of various negative representations of vulnerability, and in particular, representations that associate it solely with powerlessness, weakness and a susceptibility to wrong. She endeavours to redefine it as a condition, an experience that is ambiguous and indeterminate, one that entails bearing an “openness to alteration.” Borrowing notably from Deleuze, she establishes vulnerability as “the necessary condition of creative, critical and novel becomings.” (Gilson 2014, p. 140)

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Rather than present it as an objective property, most philosophers of vulnerability thus conceive capacity as a potentially existing disposition among all human beings, whereupon the issue is one of mobilising, shaping or awakening it. This stance gives rise to a multilayered reflection on the complex relational, material and social conditions thanks to which human subjects can become autonomous As Jean-Louis Génard has suggested, it would seem that a disjunctive anthropology, founded in mutual exclusion and autonomy, is being superseded by a “conjunctive anthropology” (Génard 2009, p. 27-45), one that proposes a continuum between passivity and activity, between vulnerability and the power to act. Against the backdrop of that relative unity, it is possible to highlight three thematic poles that structure this increasing interest in the idea of vulnerability in moral philosophy, poles understood as constituted in a field of tensions and that never exist in pure form. Meanings overlap, they slide from one theoretical constellation to another and, conversely, no single model can contain the entirety of a theory. It nonetheless appears possible, in my view, to distinguish between: first, the model of an exposure to physical and moral injury; second, an account that associates the idea of vulnerability chiefly with the idea of dependency; and, lastly, a model that sees in vulnerability a synonym for the impropriety of self. In what follows, I endeavour to map these three theoretical positions, before analysing what unites them: namely, their manner of grasping the political. A first set of theories conceives of vulnerability as an exposure to the injuring of one’s physical or psychological integrity. Such an approach centres on the possibility of violation enacted on an entity that gets altered, mutilated by this violation; it alludes to an integrity that is handed over without control to the will of others, and even to the social structures and pathologies that give shape to the interaction. Vulnerability here is almost a synonym of destructibility. It presumes a strong distinction between vulnerability and dependency, the first referring to the idea of an indeterminacy, of opening onto the world, whereas dependency always happens to be at the threshold of subordination and therefore of determinacy. It is possible, incidentally, to

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conceive of phenomena and of strategies of transition to dependency that might permit one to escape vulnerability thus outlined (for example, by accepting protection from a mafia). Since the publication of Precarious Life, Butler’s reflection has centred on the violability and affectability of the body, following Cavarero and her discussion of the “irremediable exposure” of the vulnerable body to the “ontological crimes” of breaching physical integrity and of exposure to the violence that renders this body unrecognizable. According to Butler, corporeal integrity materialises only as an exposure to injury. Our bodies are tied to one another, ties that expose them to the risk of losing these very ties as much as to the wounds inflicted by others, to affront, to brutality, to the meting out of pain. Vulnerability is defined, then, by our bodies’ persistence and integrity being entrusted to the (good) will of others, by our lives and our capacities being in a state of absolute defencelessness faced with others’ power of acting (Butler 2004, p. 28-29). Though Butler tries also to uphold a more constructivist approach to vulnerability, according to which ‘precarity’ is not prior to its recognition and “specific lives cannot be apprehended as injured or lost if they are not first apprehended as living,” (Butler 2009, p. 1) she is unable to avoid the vocabulary, or perspective, of a body that precedes and is almost resistant, in its affectability, to its recognition and its constitution as a human body worthy or not of being loved and mourned. This model of exposure to injury is also the model to which contemporary theories of recognition subscribe, and that I have examined elsewhere at length (Ferrarese, 2018). For our present purposes here, it will suffice to note that these theories of recognition unambiguously outline a moral vulnerability conceived by homology with bodily vulnerability; just as the human body is open to physical injury at each instant, the psyche is constantly exposed to wrong and to moral injury, that is to say, to disrespect. Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth both describe a kind of vulnerability stemming from the fact that “unless the subject externalizes in interpersonal relations through language, he is unable to form that inner center that is his personal identity. This explains the almost constitutional insecurity

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and chronic fragility of personal identity.” (Habermas 1995, p. 199) Here again we come across the idea of an absence of protection. Habermas states, for example, that in order to constitute herself “the person is pushed ever further into an ever-denser network of reciprocal defencelessness.” (Habermas 1985, p. 123) With this model, the ethical attitude consists in abstaining from inflicting a lesion, correlative to the idea of a breach not to be inflicted on the integrity of something. As such, the anthropology of vulnerability in Butler’s work serves as a basis for an ethics of nonviolence. Just as with Levinas, the fact that others find themselves in a state of absolute nudity vis-à-vis my acts founds the ethical demand not to use my power. At issue here, notably, is to break with “postures of sovereignty and persecution,” (Butler 2009, p. 57) the former consisting in inflicting violence in order to ensure one’s own invulnerability, the latter, qua characteristic of subjects who define themselves as wounded and persecuted, in enabling forms of violence that are not acknowledged as such. More broadly, the ontology of the body described in Precarious Life or Frames of War serves in Butler as a “point of departure for a rethinking of responsibility.” (Butler 2009, p. 33) Obligations, she argues, attach to our constitutive vulnerability, in particular the obligation to work towards undoing the unequal distribution of exposure to violence: “It cannot be that the other is destructible and I am not, nor vice-versa.” (Butler 2009, p. 48) This ethical obligation to minimise precarity is one that imposes itself on us without our consent. Shared vulnerability even comes to be laid down as a base that holds, or ought to hold, people together, as founding a minimal imperative of solidarity, which arises when it evokes “our collective responsibility for the physical lives of one another.” (Butler 2009, p. 30) A second account of vulnerability can be distinguished, one that is closer to the idea of dependency. This account is present, notably, in theories of care, but it also threads its way through neo-republican theories. In the ethics of care, both concepts (i.e. vulnerability and dependency) tend to become confounded, as is illustrated in several passages in which there is an unmediated slippage from one to the

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other. Take the following sentence from Joan Tronto’s Moral Boundaries: “Throughout our lives, all of us go through varying degrees of dependence and independence, of autonomy and vulnerability.” (Tronto 1993, p. 135) The anthropology upheld by the ethics of care rests on the fact that all of us at some point in our lives find ourselves in an exacerbated situation of vulnerability, whether tied to childhood, old-age or illness. And in these situations, our life paths and even our most anodyne activities depend upon an invisible work of care carried out by others. Here, life (or the good life) in all points depends not on an abstention, but on an act that the person who is threatened cannot accomplish by herself. Survival, or the upkeep of a positive relation to self, depends upon the settling of a positive obligation, of carrying out an act, of administering care or performing daily gestures—the importance of which shows up when all these happen to be missing. Whence the cardinal importance of the motif of dependency, which Patricia Paperman construes as  “dependency toward care providers.” (Paperman 2005, p.  289) This expression makes it possible to conceive of the wrongs inflicted by the inaction of others rather than by their action, something that the metaphor of injury proscribes. The harmful event—the susceptibility to which the term vulnerability refers—is less the image of a blow struck than that of abandonment. The moral agent is above all an attentive and considerate agent: attentiveness, which refers to a capacity to perceive a need or a suffering, whether expressed or silent, glaring or minute, is central for theories of care. According to Tronto, its absence constitutes in itself a form of “moral failing.” (Tronto 1993, p.  127) Attention materialises in acts or in ways of doing (or of not doing) that befit the needs of the recipient—including needs for distance or aloofness—and that must be ‘fitting’, that must come at the right moment. Lastly, there exists a heterogeneous set of theories in which constitutive vulnerability is defined as a form of impropriety of self. We find this definition, for example, in the works of Martha Nussbaum, Philip Pettit and of Martha Fineman. In these authors, the fragility afflicting the human capacity to act is perceived as problematic when

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it falls under one of two different aspects: either vulnerability derives from a subordination to contingency, or it means susceptibility to subordination and domination. The first form is the one that occupies Nussbaum, who develops the idea of an exposure to fate, to ‘circumstances’, and who paints the picture of a blind and painful dependency on that which may come to pass. The only mastery thus left to the human being in some sense resides in the possibility of intensifying one’s own vulnerability: “By ascribing value to philia in a conception of the good life we make ourselves more vulnerable to loss.” (Nussbaum 2001, p. 361) Pettit, for his part, engages in a reflection on the latter form (i.e. exposure to subordination/domination), identifying vulnerability with the fact of having to live in a way that exposes us to ills that others are in a position to inflict arbitrarily upon us. Vulnerability is therefore the direct effect of domination and as such Pettit can make it the key concept of his republicanism, which is characterised by the conviction that a person is denied freedom when others have over her an arbitrary power of interference, whether they avail themselves of it or not. Freedom is understood here not as self-mastery, but as an absence of mastery by others. Warding off vulnerability thus entails ensuring the intersubjective and social conditions of non-domination. While Pettit focuses on the institutional and constitutional modalities of this non-domination, John Maynor, who in Pettit’s wake also endeavours to suture the theme of vulnerability to neo-republican thought, insists on the essential ‘reciprocal’ dimension of non-domination, on the way in which it translates into interpersonal relations. According to him, an obligation weighs upon each of us to concern ourselves with the interests of individuals upon whom our own actions may impact (Maynor 2003). Depending upon the philosophical model under consideration, the answer to the question of responsibility attribution differs. Notably, a fundamental difference exists between the model of exposure to injury and that of vulnerability as dependency: in the former case, causal responsibility coincides with the responsibility of an action, in the sense that it initially falls to the agent able to inflict the fatal

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violation to hold off acting upon it. The latter model provides us with considerations on special responsibilities that are inherent to the existence of specific personal relations, to our condition of being attached to others. The moral agent is here defined by her entanglement, which is constitutive. By setting out from this argument, the ethics of care deploys a conception of action as a response and, consequently, as springing from a relation rather than emanating from an ego. Responsibility, however, ultimately falls to the one who perceives the need, as is suggested by the aforementioned and central theme of attention to the other. This model of vulnerability thus becomes a site for reflecting upon a series of historical arrangements to which the problem of attributing that responsibility has given rise, arrangements that are vectors of domination. Highlighting multiple measures (ideological constructions, sedimentation of gender roles, biographical scripts, incorporation of social structures, phantasmagoria of romantic love, and so on) by which the attention to others has traditionally been imparted to feminine subjects, this set of theories makes clear that settling a moral obligation and subordination are frequently intimately linked. Lastly, for the model of the impropriety of self, avoiding some frightful event, explosion of fate, or play of the arbitrary, becomes the central focus of a questioning in which what is at stake is the existence of an obligation and its attributability, an obligation that is generally entrusted to an institutional third party. To the extent that invulnerability is never presented as an alternative (since all adopt the starting point of an anthropology of vulnerability), critical reflection first aims to discern the point at which vulnerability becomes morally problematic and a legitimate object of collective organisation. This is the meaning of Nussbaum’s elaboration, some years after The Fragility of Goodness, of a list of central capabilities that, explicitly associated with the idea of ‘threshold level’, make it possible to distinguish among the ‘circumstances’ with which human beings are confronted, in accordance with what is affected and with the intensity of that being affected. (Nussbaum 2000, p. 12) Once this limit or threshold is determined, two major types of obligations—which

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are attributed to institutions or to the political community broadly speaking—are established regarding vulnerability  thus understood: the issue is either to ensure collectively for each person the possibility to defend herself against a wrong, or else to avert the threat of exploitation by thwarting those who are in a position to take advantage of an existing vulnerability. Illustrating the first option, Fineman develops a theory of exposure to misfortune, disaster and violence by defending the principle of a ‘responsive state’. For her, it falls to institutions to guarantee the accumulation of resources of which individuals have need to cope with the social, material and practical consequences of the harmful events that may come about. Each person accumulates and squanders these resources over the course of her life to respond to the situations with which she is confronted. Fineman calls such resources ‘assets’. These assets are material, human (and thus capabilities), social (they coincide with a network of relations), ecological and existential (they refer to belief systems and to culture in the broad sense). On this view, moral obligation mainly weighs on the subject under threat, who is enjoined to get back up after being struck down, and secondarily on the state, which is obliged to ensure the distribution of these assets based on the principle of equal opportunity. (Fineman 2008; 2013, p. 13-28) Fineman’s model, according to which the only responsibility not incumbent upon the vulnerable person herself is the obligation that falls to institutions to equip her so that she can cope, privileges social adaptation over critique or over the transformation of existing structures and social relations. Besides, though Fineman takes into consideration inequalities of resources between individuals, she leaves inequalities in power in the shadows. Projecting a highly voluntarist conception of the social world, she also revives, by mobilising the idea of resilience, a quasiDarwinian understanding of the human being, defined by its capacity to go beyond itself thanks to the challenges with which it is confronted—a definition that contradicts the anthropology of vulnerability that she nonetheless claims to endorse. Pettit combines both possible responses to the impropriety of self. To recall: one consists in guaranteeing each person the possibility to

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defend herself against wrong; the other, in preventing the threat of exploitation. Conceiving non-domination as a form of power—a power to prevent certain wrongs from being done to us (Pettit 1997, p. 69)—he posits a collective obligation to ensure an ability to challenge every act of interference, that is to say, to institutionalize the possibility of challenging and overturning others’ choices and acts to the extent that they affect us. In the framework of the employeremployee relation, for example, vulnerability commands reinforcing employee protections, a reinforcement that consists in re-balancing an initially asymmetrical relation and rendering possible an increase in a worker’s power of acting, which is expressed in the mode of protest. All three approaches to vulnerability, each distinguishable owing to its specific set of normative implications, attribute a varying status to the body, without ever, however, establishing a strong boundary between psychological or moral vulnerability, on the one hand, and bodily vulnerability, on the other. In the case of vulnerability conceived as ‘exposure to injury’, notably as illustrated in theories of recognition, the homology established between bodily vulnerability and psychological vulnerability by no means prevents us from conceiving these different types of vulnerability as addressing each other and mutually enabling each other. Honneth thus considers violations perpetrated on bodily integrity, such as rape or torture, simultaneously as attempts at destroying psychological integrity. Butler, for her part, insists on the theme of the capacity to act, rather than on the idea of an already existing psychological integrity, one pre-existing the game of interaction that nonetheless ceaselessly modifies its field. But this capacity to act is precisely made possible by the vulnerable body: “the ‘coming-up-against’ is one modality that defines the body. And yet this obtrusive alterity against which the body finds itself can be, and often is, what animates responsiveness to that world.” (Butler 2009, p.  34) The ‘enabling’ vulnerability that she describes is twofold; exposure to the other is the mark, the other name of integrity, and responding to bodily vulnerability-integrity is an integrity-­vulnerability of the capacity to act. Each term is the matrix of the other. This

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construal, then, presumes an absolute transitivity between two manifestations of vulnerability. In theories of dependency, ‘bodily’ vulnerability and ‘moral’ vulnerability are placed along a continuum, one within which life, and thus the good life, hangs not upon an abstention, but on the realisation of an act. Tronto thus writes, rather strikingly: “we suggest that caring be viewed as a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web.” (Tronto 1993, p. 103) In addition, the ethics of care insists on the very material and bodily aspect of the moral act: care is defined simultaneously as an affect and as an activity. (Kittay 1999, p.  30; Tronto 1987, p.  644-662; Molinier 2013, p.  29-90) Care is almost never only an attitude; it almost always presupposes very concrete and often very hard work (hard especially because it entails caring for the most bodily needs of others). Molinier has notably highlighted the multiplicity of planes upon which the body imposes itself in the care relation: the weary bodies of c­ aregivers; the insistent or resistant, deficient, heavy or repugnant bodies of care receivers; and the sexualized bodies of the ones and the others (­Molinier 2013). From the care perspective, the moral relation is a particular relation between two (or multiple) bodies. Lastly, the model of the impropriety of self has vulnerability coincide with the threat weighing on the good or the ‘interests’ of the person. Among these ‘interests’ is the integrity of the body, which nonetheless is not attributed any particular status. According to Pettit, vulnerability means living in a way that exposes us to the ills that others are in a position to inflict upon us arbitrarily. This infliction covers a large range of behaviours, including, insofar as coercion against one’s will and manipulation are concerned, “coercion of the body, as in restraint or obstruction,” (Pettit 1997, p.  53) though Pettit does not back up this assertion. In Nussbaum, physical vulnerability is, in the light of Greek tragedies, interpreted in the less material and vaster terms of a powerlessness before the affronts of war, death, betrayal.

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While they differ on all other points, all three models of vulnerability share the fact that they never present bodily vulnerability as being of another order than moral or psychological vulnerability; each instance is only the manifestation of a broader exposure. By juxtaposing these three models we learn that wherever vulnerability is at issue, the body is always caught, upon close inspection, in a fabric of expectations that exceed it. And finally, there is another feature common to contemporary theories that conceive of vulnerability as a moral object and affirm its constitutive and shared character: namely, a distancing of the political, either through its forgetting or its strict limitation. Translated by Steven Corcoran

Literature Butler, J. (1997) Excitable Speech: A politics of Performative, New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (2004) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, New York: Verso. Butler, J. (2009) Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable, London: Verso. Cavarero, A. (2007) Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, New York: Columbia University Press. Cavarero, A. (2000) Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, New York: Routledge. Ferrarese, E. (2018) Vulnerability and Critical Theory, Leiden/Boston: Brill. Fineman, M. A. (2008) ‘The Vulnerable Subject: Anchoring Equality in the Human Condition’, Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, 20(1): 8-40. Fineman, M. A. and A. Grear (eds) (2013) Vulnerability. Reflections on a New Ethical Foundation for Law and Politics, Burlington: Ashgate. Génard, J.-L. (2009) ‘Une réflexion sur l’anthropologie de la fragilité, de la vulnérabilité, et de la souffrance’ in T. Perilleux and J. Cultiaux (eds), Destins politiques de la souffrance, Paris: Erès, 27-45. Gilson, E. (2014) The Ethics of Vulnerability: A Feminist Analysis of Social Life and Practice, New York, London: Routledge. Habermas, J. (1995) Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, Cambridge: MIT Press. Habermas, J. (1985) Philosophical-political Profiles, Cambridge: MIT Press. Kittay, E. F. (1999) Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency, New York  : Routledge. Mackenzie, C., W.  Rogers and S.  Dodds (eds) (2014) Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy, New York, Oxford University Press.

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Maynor, J. (2003) Republicanism in the Ancient World, Cambridge: Polity Press. Michel, N. (2016) ‘Accounts of Injury as Misappropriations of Race: Toward a Critical Black Politics of Vulnerability’ Critical Horizons, 17(2): 240-260. Molinier, P. (2013) Le travail du care, Paris  : La Dispute. Nussbaum, M. (2000) Women and Human Development, Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Paperman, P. (2005) ‘Les gens vulnérables n’ont rien d’exceptionnel’, in P. Paperman and S. Laugier (eds), Le souci des autres. Éthique et politique du care, Paris: Éditions EHESS, 281-298. Pettit, P. (1997) Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Gouvernment, New York: Oxford University Press. Ricoeur, P. (1997) ‘Autonomie et vulnérabilité’ in A. Garapon and D. Salas (eds), La justice et le mal, Paris: Odile Jacob, 165-177. Tronto, J. (1993) Moral Boundaries. A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care, NewYork & London: Routledge. Tronto, J. (1987) ‘Beyond Gender Differences to a Theory of Care’, Signs, 12 (4): 644-662.

8. Toward a Political Theory of Care: Understanding Care as “Services Provided” Naïma Hamrouni

While the concept of care has gained popularity in the past thirty years in fields of research as diverse as the psychology of moral development, ethics, economics and political theory, feminist thought has always, in one way or another, been fundamentally concerned with the undervaluation of women’s work and the role that such disregard has played in the reproduction of gender inequality. 1 Contending that “the personal is political” feminist thought has, among other things, demonstrated how gender inequality within the domestic sphere, including women’s assignment to duties involving the care of others, and inequality within in the realm of political and economic life, are mutually reinforced. From the maternal feminists of the early 20th century, who challenged the “family wage ideal” and claimed their own wages in exchange for housework provided for the family, to International Wages for Housework Campaign activists and materialists of the 1970s (who pointed to the domestic economy as one of main vehicles of women’s oppression), what we today call “care” was back then relatively broad in scope.2 It was not limited to care for dependents,   This text was originally published in Le care: Ethique féministe actuelle, S. Bourgault and J. Perreault eds. (2015). We thank les Éditions du Remue-Ménage for their permission to republish. 2   As Louise Toupin (1996) points out, the feminist demand for paid domestic labour, or paid care work more generally, has been on the table for more than a century. This strategy has been proposed in various forms by maternal suffragists at 1

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namely child care, but included both domestic and family services (housekeeping, meal preparation, washing, and beautifying the home environment), various services and forms of support provided to the husband (sexual and reproductive services, as well as emotional and moral support), and personal care (care of infants, young children, as well as the sick and the elderly experiencing a loss of autonomy). On the other hand, since the mid 1990s, the feminist political theory of care appears to have narrowed its focus, with more emphasis given to women as providers of health care (both within the family and the healthcare field), and to the injustices that result from this assignment of the role of primary caregiver to women. These more recent reflections, developed by egalitarian political thinkers such as Eva Feder Kittay (1999) and Mona Harrington (1999), are important in that they seek to provide an explanation, and adequately address the problems of pay inequality, of deinstitutionalization, of the non-recognition of informal caregiving work and of our failure to account for women’s informal work in the GDP. If, as these theorists claim, care was considered, as it ought to be, not only as a moral theory characterized by solicitude for others, but also as genuine work with an economic and social value, the cultural disregard of which care work has historically been the object could be problematized and eventually subverted. However, this limitation of the politics of care only to caregiving issues came at a price. As a result of this narrowed focus on gender inequalities associated with the gendered assignment of caregiving roles, two phenomena have slipped under the radar. First, these authors have inadvertently neglected to problematize the broader issue of the gendered division the beginning of the 20th century, such as Lily Braun, Käthe Schirmacher, Léonie Rouzade, Nelly Roussel, Ellen Key and Eleanor Rathbone (Toupin 1996). The proposal for the economic recognition of housewives required for some a salary, a permanent income, or an allowance limited to the period of so-called active maternity (recovery following childbirth, breastfeeding, etc.). This claim was echoed in the International Wages for Housework Campaign, which had its heyday in the early 1970s and whose theoretical underpinnings were supported by Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James in The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (1973).



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of labour, whereby women are not simply assigned to the care of children and other dependents in the family, but are also assigned to the role of service providers for “independent” wage earners both within the family and on the labour market: domestic, emotional and sexual services within the home and subordinate functions within the workforce. Secondly, the social and family policies that are generally advocated by these theorists, such as remuneration for care givers, or extended maternity leave (with no equivalent for men), could be said to have the counter-productive effect of fostering institutional conditions that encourage making women the main service providers to primary income earners. Recent studies in the social sciences have indeed shown that because women are still socially assigned to the role of primary caregiver within the family, they generally earn a lower income on the job market, remain overrepresented in the caring professions and in jobs that are more easily reconciled with family responsibilities, economic support measures for caregivers are much more likely to be taken by women (Bergmann 1998; Junter-Loiseau 1999). Rather than subverting the gendered division of labour, and easing women’s access to social roles that they now have the right to obtain, these measures have instead the effect of reinforcing such a division. Meanwhile men’s lives are improved, since men are liberated from the family responsibilities of caring for dependents (Silvera, Buseyne and al. 2004, p.  23). In other words, this proposed solution to the social assignment of women to caring roles in fact places women in a situation where they predominantly care for dependents within the home (from young children to the elderly experiencing a loss of autonomy), of providing more services to men within the home, and where they continue to occupy subordinate positions within the workforce. While a political theory of care has, since its first formulations in the 1990s, shed light on the value of care provided by women to dependents in the shadows of private life, care services provided to “independent” adults still make up the least visible component of care. I will propose, in what follows, that it is possible to reinvest a political theory of care of its full critical and feminist potential if we do not

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limit it to social issues surrounding care for dependents. Such a theory would offer us the necessary conceptual tools for addressing injustices pertaining to the larger and more complex phenomenon of the gendered division of labour. Thus, the term care ought not refer only to care of dependents. Similarly to the way the term has been employed by maternal and materialist feminists, the concept of care ought to include services provided by women to independent adults in both public and private spheres. This is what I argue in the first section, in order to show, subsequently, that the myth of independence subtending the dominant paradigms of political philosophy, since its early developments within contractualist theory, has contributed to rendering invisible the care provided to independent adults. In this regard, it may be useful to revisit the work of materialist feminists from the 1970s and 1980s, who have tended to focus their attention on domestic work and other services provided by women to men. However, even if a political theory of care benefits from drawing on the work of materialists, it outstrips it at the same time. Indeed, it is not simply a question of showing the material advantages offered to men and to other groups who have been liberated from the onus of care work, but also of illustrating the existential and political advantages attached to this exoneration. Historically, being relieved of the burden of care work has allowed dominant classes to avoid the reality of their own human vulnerability (the existential advantage) and to have enough free time to participate in politics and to shape social organization (the political advantage). This discussion will lead me to argue, lastly, that any proposed solution to the gendered division of labour must go beyond economic considerations. Equally crucial is examining the connection between the division of labour and democracy, as well as considering the cultural transformations necessary to restoring a positive value to human vulnerability.

Broadening the concept of care to include services provided to independents Amongst the political articulation of care ethics, it is in Joan Tronto’s influential Moral Boundaries (1993) that we find the earliest d­ efinition



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of care that is broad enough in scope to include care of independents. For Tronto, indeed, the field of care is so immense as to include not only care activities, but also care for the natural environment, for non-human animals and even for human-made spaces.3 The political philosopher initially formulated this broad definition of care together with Berenice Fisher (Tronto and Fisher 1990, p. 145), a definition that at once extends and breaks with earlier definitions proposed by maternal thinkers such as Nel Noddings (1984) and Sara Ruddick (1989), for whom care is a moral disposition of the parent attentive to the needs of her child. Tronto also parts ways with political philosophers such as Eva Feder Kittay (1999), who formulates care in terms of “dependency work” motivated out of love and who appeals only to the “inevitable dependencies”4 of certain especially vulnerable people, or of people with disabilities. With Fisher and Tronto, care is considered from a holistic point of view, and is defined as “a species of activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves and our environment, all of which we seek to weave in a complex, life-sustaining web” (1993, p. 103). According to this broad conception of care, all academic and medical staff, domestic and support workers, cooks, tailors, parents, and even ecologists, rank among care workers. Joan Tronto’s definition underscores the central role of care in human lives. However, what constitutes its primary appeal also proves to be its main weakness. By offering such an all-encompassing definition, Tronto ends up giving care a polished, embellished image, which obscures relations of domination that arise within the asymmetrical exchanges that characterize care. According to Tronto’s approach, we are all equally beneficiaries and purveyors of care. Reciprocity appears to be a given. Since the ugly side of care is veiled, we are precluded, to any practical end, from identifying its inegalitarian aspects. Such   On this subject, see Sandra Laugier (2012).   Kittay’s inevitable dependency refers to the condition of those who cannot survive without the daily assistance of others. 3 4

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a conceptualization unfortunately does not provide us with the necessary tools for addressing the problems of the division of labour or understanding its material consequences, or its impact on democratic participation. We do, however, find in Joan Tronto the insight that power relations are operative in situations in which care is provided to independents. In the first chapter of Moral Boundaries, the author aligns herself, in a footnote, with Marxism and with Max Weber’s notions of power, noting that her “notion is partly Marxian, that the powerful are members of the class that can command resources, and partly Weberian, that the powerful are those who occupy status positions and can command resources in society.” She also claims that “[…] in subsequent work [she is] likely to define ‘the powerful’ and ’the privileged’ in terms of their ability to command care” (Tronto 1993, p. 185). This seems to suggest that Tronto sought to show how power differentials between social groups are the product of an unjust division of labour according to which lesser classes provide the bulk of care to powerful classes, and support them as a matter of course, on a non-reciprocal basis. However, to the best of my knowledge, Tronto has never fully developed this idea in her later work. Her definition of care is one of these catch-all conceptualizations whose critical potential is, precisely for this reason, largely diluted. Giving to the concept of care its full critical scope certainly requires that it be capable of encompassing services to independents (as Tronto argues). Nonetheless, it should not be so broad as to refer to all services undistinguishably. I  propose, in the following section, that care should also refer to services to independents that involve a proximity to the body, those services provided in response to ordinary human vulnerability. Before proceeding, I would like to make a clarification regarding my use of the term “services” in order to speak about care—a usage that could be contested. Indeed, it could be argued that referring to “care” to denote services provided to independents, as I do, runs the risk of compromising its potential as a moral conceptual category. Indeed, while “care” is often an active response to a moral obligation



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(e.g. that of “protecting the most vulnerable”), the idea of “services provided” refers rather to activities that benefit people viewed as fully autonomous, who are not in any critical situation and who could very well have assumed these activities themselves. This employment of the word “care” to also designate these kinds of “services” one could provide for oneself, might here seem to be ethically irrelevant. And yet, that care services provided to independents might involve what is commonly referred to in moral philosophy as supererogatory acts (acts whose ethical substance is limited—that is to say, acts not carried out in response to a particular moral obligation) is precisely what makes the concept of “care” so interesting. It invites us to engage, alongside ethical or moral discussions about protecting the most vulnerable (the sick, disabled, elderly, infants), a discussion that is more explicitly political, one that targets power relations. One that is, in short, a discussion about the gendered and racialized division of labour. As such, I propose that our concept of care be broad enough to include services to independents. At the same time, however, it is not a question of incorporating all possible services into this definition, as Tronto does, but only those involving bodily proximity, that is to say, services provided only in response to ordinary, biologically grounded human vulnerability (i.e. domestic services, care and maintenance of the body, and sexual and reproductive services). I contend that it is this bodily proximity and its connection with nature and animality that is responsible for the widespread contempt for ordinary care, along with the desire of men (present throughout the history of the West) to rise above its imperatives.

Contempt for the body, contempt for care In her rich and remarkably well-researched book on human vulnerability, Nathalie Maillard (2011) draws on the work of Barry Hoffmaster to highlight what might explain the secular denial of vulnerability within moral and political philosophy. Not only has Western philosophy, ever since the Greeks constantly overlooked the material reality of the body and its afflictions, but vulnerability, the very antithesis of the “ethos of individualism” that characterizes our

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­ odern liberal societies, would undoubtedly deeply upset the normam tive ideal of self-sufficiency upheld by philosophers if it came to the forefront of our moral theories (Maillard 2011, p. 162).5 In Dependent Rational Animals (1999), communitarian philosopher Alasdair McIntyre attributes this neglect of vulnerability to a refusal to recognize the ills with which our bodies and minds may become afflicted, to a rejection of our groundedness in nature and to an outright denial of our animality. Perhaps this neglect also evinces a fear of our human finitude, heightened by the rise of a modern culture of individualism, which encourages a twofold denial of our shared need for care and of the vulnerability that makes care indispensable in our lives. A good number of thinkers have already suggested that vulnerability has been overlooked within the philosophical tradition out of disinterest in everything related to material nature and to the body. But such “disinterest” is not trivial—no disinterested scientific gaze is. To be disinterested in the body is a privilege historically reserved for intellectual, political and economic elites. In our societies, women, on whom care activities have traditionally fallen, have long taken an interest in the body, at least insofar as their daily occupations have confronted them with it and with ordinary human vulnerability (whether their own, that of their infants and their children, or that of men). In recent years, feminist economists have argued that the devaluation of care is owed mainly to its unproductivity, to the fact that care work does not produce tangible goods to be sold on the market, and that care maintains what already is and does not produce anything new. Others have insisted that care work’s devaluation has to do with care being the prerogative of women and thus deemed far less important. However, regardless of whether it is categorized as productive, or at least, considered part of economic activities (as was the case in ancient Greece, where domestic activities were part of the oeconomia) or classified as unproductive (as in modern Western societies under capitalism) care has always and invariably been devalued. Care has more or less always been attributed to women, and more 5

  Maillard refers here to Hoffmaster (2006).



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specifically, to the most subjugated groups of the female population, made doubly inferior owing to their race, nationality or class. However, this depreciation of care precedes its differentiated attribution, which is not itself the reason for such depreciation. It is because care has been an object of contempt, because it relates to vulnerable bodies, that care has been assigned to women—and not the other way around. And this division of labour is indeed an unjustified political injustice.6 That women have been given the gift of bringing children into the world, and of nurturing and protecting them, of having that particular experience of their own bodies, has only ever been a pretext used after the fact to justify the assignment of sex-differentiated areas of activity as an immutable necessity within the natural order of things. Redefining care as services provided to independents (services closely connected to the body), makes it a useful tool for highlighting the different power relations through which access to the illusion of independence is played out. This is a game whose outcome will determine who amongst us will be considered and treated as fully human, and who will be treated as mere care providers and second-class citizens.

The idea of the independent wage earner: more than just a myth In an article tracing the genealogy of the concept of dependence, political philosophers Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon (1994) remind us that before industrial capitalism came into full force in the 18th century, the individual who could claim independence was not the paid worker, but rather the landlord, who had sufficient means to enable himself to be relieved of the burden of work. Conversely, dependence characterized individuals forced to put their labour power in the service of another to ensure their livelihood. Only recently—that is, only after the market economy’s remarkable expansion—has there been a semantic shift in the concept of 6   I have developed this argument elsewhere, in an article dealing more specifically with Adam Smith’s idea of unproductive ​​ work and its implications for women (Hamrouni 2011).

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independence, which gradually came also to qualify wage earners under capitalist production and social organization. This semantic shift, which the authors describe as “ideological,” works to consolidate domination, by obscuring workers’ being made dependent on capitalists and by referring to what is effectively their exploitation as their “independence.” This ideology of independence obscures yet another relationship: the dependence of paid workers on the care provided by women and servants, in the shadows of the private life. One consequence of this redefinition was indeed to make women’s care work invisible. In the space of a few centuries, women went from having the status of “partners” (in pre-industrial times, when the family was still the main locus of the agrarian economy) to “dependents” indeed, “parasites” (Fraser and Gordon 1994, p. 318). This is also what economist and philosopher Adam Smith maintained when he wrote, in his major work An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations published in 1776, that unproductive workers, for example, domestic servants, menial servants or housewives, but also “the whole army and navy” depend upon productive individuals because they are “unproductive labourers. They are servants of the public and are maintained by a part of the annual produce of the industry of other people” (Smith 1909 [1776], p. 259). The author overlooked the crucial fact that productive workers also depend on the supposedly unproductive. In addition to raising the standard of living of their employers, the work of domestic servants also helped raise their employers’ social status. The care provided by wives not only made their lives sweeter, but directly ensured that they were pleasantly housed, well fed and maintained, cared for and comforted. More than that, it freed them from this tedious work that they would otherwise have had to do, and thus freed up their time to pursue more prestigious, or at the very least recognized, social functions.

Materialist feminism and the politics of care In her important work The Politics of Reality (1983), Marilyn Frye proposed with great straightforwardness a radically different interpretation to that of philosophers like Adam Smith. Frye examined the



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relationship between the productive and unproductive in terms of the former being parasitic on the latter (Frye 1982, p. 98–99). When it comes down to “services provided” by a class of women to a class of men on a non-reciprocal basis, oppression rests precisely, according to Frye, on the orchestration of men’s free access to services provided by women, including domestic, sexual, emotional services, services of comfort and support, of reassuring and flattering the ego. As she wrote, “it is, generally speaking, the strength, energy, inspiration and nurturance of women that keeps men going.” (Frye 1983, p. 98–99) French radical materialist feminists have also sought to make explicit the reproduction mechanisms of women’s oppression and articulate conditions for eradicating it, focussing on, as Frye does, a problematization of the asymmetry in the channeling of women’s labour to serve the interests of men (whether the labour taking place within the domestic sphere or the labour market in capitalist economies). In L’Ennemi principal (2013 [1970]), Christine Delphy discusses how, for example, the extraction of women’s labour by men, and the social organization of labour and of the family, sustains this asymmetrical relation, describing it as the “domestic exploitation” of women. Colette Guillaumin, in a similar vein, speaks of sexage, an expression she coined evoking the slavery and serfdom characteristic of the land economy, to designate the relation according to which the ruling class appropriates not only women’s labour power, but also their bodies and their sexuality, within the modern domestic economy (Guillaumin  1978, p.  10–18). These analyses are important because they rightly make visible the economy of quotidian care provided to independents. They reverse dependency roles, shattering the myth of self-reliance and unravelling the power relations this myth serves to disguise. Independence, therefore, is not just a myth or an illusion. Independence is the reified product of a power relationship, a social status. It is the social status enjoyed by those who receive services of care from others, and yet deny these services they benefit from and refuse their responsibility to provide services in return—all of this taking place within a social and institutional context that supports this denial.

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Though they spoke in terms of “domestic labour,” “reproductive labour” or “sex-affective production,” to refer to what is here labelled as “care,” materialist feminists have all similarly pointed to an exploitation of women’s care. By offering critiques of the political economy proposed by Karl Marx, who only seriously considered the value of the labour within the formal economic sphere, these feminists sought to highlight that reproductive labour (an informal economy anchored in the domestic sphere) necessarily supported production and that women, as a social class assigned to care, were doubly exploited. In the first place, their labour is exploited to the advantage of men within the family, relieving men from the responsibility to care for dependents while benefitting from the care services provided by women. Secondly, women’s labour is exploited to the advantage of capitalists in the market economy, as women ensure the production and education of a future workforce in the service of capital and see to its daily subsistence and its emotional comfort. According to the materialist perspective, the motivation for dominant classes to exploit women’s care is at base material. What distinguishes the analysis put forward here from these materialists’ analyses, is that it stresses that women, like other social categories assigned to the labour of care, are not assigned to care solely so that workers and capitalists are free to pursue material wealth. The motivation behind this particular form of exploitation is not strictly material, it is also political and existential. It is existential since the social status of independence allows those who are relieved of the duties of care to avoid all contact with fragile or ailing bodies, with the frail bodies of infants or of suffering elderly people: in short, all contact with the realities of birth and death, realities that would otherwise remind them of the disconcerting fragility of their own lives. What motivates this form of exploitation, secondly, is the political advantage it affords, since those who benefit from care and who are exempted from the responsibility of providing it in return, thus have spare time to participate in shaping the key institutions of society, in determining the rules governing them, in establishing the values ​​they promote, and developing the requisite knowledge to these



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ends. In other words, they are free to build the world in their image and according to their interests. Relieved of the burden of care, not only are they able to maintain this illusion of self-reliance and invulnerability, they also enjoy the political benefits of full citizenship.

Vulnerability, a positive feature of human existence These observations lead us to the following proposition: rather than thinking about the conditions under which the gendered division of labour could be abolished solely from an economic standpoint, it may be more fruitful to consider it on two other planes. On a first, political plane, we must rethink the conditions necessary for full citizenship and for parity of participation for all in democratic life—something that would undermine a division of labour according to gender. On a second, cultural plane, it seems of critical importance to rehabilitate human vulnerability and the body, consistently derided within our Western tradition. Human vulnerability is not just weakness, consternation, or some condition to overcome. This feature of human existence is also what makes us relational, interdependent beings. As American feminist and intellectual Charlotte Perkins Gilman so aptly put it at the beginning of the 20th century in Our Androcentric Culture, or The Man Made World, “The only time when we do recognize what we call ‘common humanity’ is in extreme cases, matters of life and death; when either man or woman is expected to behave as if they were also human creatures. Since the range of feeling and action proper to humanity, as such, is far wider than that proper to either sex, it seems at first somewhat remarkable that we have given it so little recognition” (Gilman 2009 [1911], p. 6). Gilman remarks here that only in these extreme situations do man and woman authorize themselves to act and feel according to their humanity, rather than as a function of the gender they have been socialized to perform. We can push this insight a little further. It is in these extreme situations that not only the walls between man and woman, but also the walls between their selves and nature, their selves and the other animals, are more likely to collapse—walls humans put up to distinguish themselves from all others and to gain

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a sense of superiority and mastery over them. In these extreme situations, there is a genuine risk of feeling just as vulnerable and fragile as those who are confined to these lower categories of humanity, of being just like them, and that the reasons many people rely on for justifying their claim to superiority (along with all the abuses perpetrated in its name) may suddenly appear arbitrary and illegitimate. But most times, when not confronted directly with life or death, people are willing to avoid, indeed willfully ignore, the experience of ordinary vulnerability. It is astonishing to see how difficult it seems to have been, even for care ethicists, to think of ordinary vulnerability as a fundamental human condition and therefore as normal and permanent, and not just as an unpleasant, fortunately transient, episode in a person’s life. More recently, of course, vulnerability has made its way into the field of moral and political philosophy. Several books and articles have been published on the topic (Fineman and Grear  2013, Fineman 2008, Mackenzie, Rogers and Dodds 2014, Maillard 2011, Paperman 2005, Pelluchon 2011, Tronto 1993) along with several special issues in journals (Revue du MAUSS 2012, No. 39, International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 2012, No. 2). However, while the idea of ordinary, ontological vulnerability is mentioned frequently enough, dependence is still largely referred to as a developmental phase (i.e. the universal dependency phase of infants), one that can be surpassed as they become more autonomous. It is also often thought of in terms of the risk, to humans in their fleshly condition, of losing their autonomy as the result of an accident, illness, or precarious socioeconomic condition. It should be mentioned that the etymology of vulnerability (from the Latin vulnus), immediately refers to injury, to the inherent human possibility of being injured, exploited or harmed (Rogers, Mackenzie and Dodds 2012, p. 19). Vulnerability, in all these recent works, still has a negative connotation. It is seen as a state that must be transcended, or at least mitigated by a social safety net put in place to temper its effects. In her most recent work, feminist jurist Martha Fineman has sought, in a novel way, to develop a model of the “vulnerable ­subject.”



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This model is presented as an alternative to the unrealistic and idealistic model of the independent subject that has been, to this day, central to the prevailing discussions on social justice and equality. According to Fineman, “vulnerability initially should be understood as arising from our embodiment, which carries with it the ever-present possibility of harm, injury, and misfortune from mildly adverse to catastrophically devastating events, whether accidental, intentional, or otherwise. Individuals can attempt to lessen the risk or mitigate the impact of such events, but they cannot eliminate their possibility. Understanding vulnerability begins with the realization that many such events are ultimately beyond human control” (Fineman  2008, p. 9). For Fineman, this risk is universal and constant. Nobody can ever seriously pretend to have dispensed with it. But the risk is also particular: no two people suffer alike, and social and institutional conditions, including the presence or absence of certain structures of redistribution of resources within a given society, will have different repercussions in each person’s life. Between her first major works deconstructing the myth of autonomy (Fineman 2004) and more recent ones on the vulnerable subject (2008), Fineman swapped the notion of dependence for that of vulnerability, judging vulnerability to be a richer and more fertile concept. But her thinking remained partly stuck in the negative register, preventing her from broaching vulnerability squarely as an ordinary (and not simply ontological) condition. For Fineman, the harsh reality of vulnerability must be accounted for socially through the creation of adequate public institutions, and the aim of health, education and social services ought precisely to be to mitigate vulnerability by giving each person the means of resilience (Fineman 2008, p. 13–14). The measures Fineman calls for are certainly justified. We must obviously defend institutional structures that guarantee adequate care for children, the sick, the disabled and the elderly, just as we must put mechanisms in place that counter the dependent social condition of care givers who, because the work they do is unpaid, too often still depend economically on a domestic partner and thus are more vulnerable to poverty, exploitation, abuse and

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violence. It should be noted, however, that Fineman’s “ontological vulnerability” only addresses exceptional and temporary situations of dependence: the risk of lapsing into physical dependence (caused by an illness or accident) or social dependence (because one’s work is precarious or undervalued). The way Fineman defines ontological vulnerability appears to be too close to the concept of dependence and therefore strikes me as inadequate. Ordinary vulnerability is not just a special kind of vulnerability characterizing a developmental phase or temporary deficiency. Ordinary vulnerability arises from the brute fact of our biological, embodied, temporally finite existence. It is not an indication of weakness or “dependence,” rather it is our common lot. We are beings who need, who are eminently relational, social and interdependent. Vulnerability is not the need for a special kind of care administered under specific circumstances, to restore or help someone develop their autonomy, without which someone’s life would be in peril. It requires an ongoing exchange of care, that is to say, of services that enable reproduction, the upkeep and development of daily life, the maintenance and beautification of the living environment. Seen in this light, vulnerability does not imply anything negative. Ordinary vulnerability is both universal, in the sense of being commonly shared—not an exceptional circumstance (Fineman already says that)—and permanent, in the sense of being an ongoing reality of daily life. The only difference between those who think of themselves as independent and others is the power disparity that enables the former group of people to delegate the daily labour of care to the latter, so they can persist in denying their ordinary vulnerability. It is important to point out, at this time, that it is not independence understood as personal autonomy (independence as the ability to choose free from coercion, to form and revise a life plan and follow through with it) that the political theory of care discussed here takes issue with. Independence, understood in this sense, has in fact always been crucially important in the history of feminist thought, as much for Mary Wollstonecraft as for Simone de Beauvoir or Harriet Taylor Mill. Instead, a political theory of care based on a broad conception



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of what care includes, and based on an appreciation of ordinary human vulnerability, challenges the myth of independence understood as self-sufficiency. In this myth, self-sufficiency implies the idea of a subject who is freed from the material constraints of human existence, absolved of his or her vital connections with others and for whom care is a mere caprice or voluntary engagement. In short, a self-sufficiency that corresponds to the idea of the “self-made man.” The concept of autonomy is therefore not at odds with the ordinary vulnerability inherent to human nature or with the interdependence that characterizes human relationships. On the contrary, human relations and the networks in which we are integrated and through which we evolve are instead conditions of possibility for personal autonomy: no human being can develop their capacity for autonomy without the presence, affection and continual support of others. Ordinary vulnerability is therefore compatible with promoting the ideal of personal autonomy. Accordingly, care feminism and philosophical liberalism need not be in opposition with one another. But the notion of ordinary vulnerability reminds us that this capacity for autonomy develops and maintains itself over time through positive relationships with others. This approach mobilizes the concept of “relational autonomy” (Mackenzie and Stoljar 2000), a concept developed precisely to demystify the norm of the self-sufficient subject.

Abolishing the gendered division of labour. Democracy and social transformation Since the invisibilisation of care is in part linked to a persistent disregard for ordinary human vulnerability, the social transformations required to reverse the situation will necessarily have to involve appreciating this ordinary vulnerability. In the feminist pacifist and ecological currents of the 1970s, several writers, each in their own way, have called for a reinstatement of the body in a Western culture that has traditionally scorned it and instead held the mind in highest regard, a disembodied mind. For example, Susan Griffin, in Woman and Nature (1978), suggests that such transformation should involve a recognition of the symbolic power of motherhood, long disregarded

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and equated with nature, precisely because it has been feared and envied. Similarly, care ethicist Sara Ruddick (2002) has more recently suggested that these transformations would require accepting a continuity between humanity and animality. A cultural shift of this magnitude would be accompanied by equally substantial institutional transformations. Political theories of care that are chiefly articulated around dependence, and that focus only on care provided by women, have proposed institutional reforms to foster social recognition of care provided by women in a family setting as well as in a context of deinstitutionalization. These reforms include measures to economically support caregivers. Nevertheless, as I pointed out in the introduction, such measures will not succeed in countering the gendered division of labour.7 These reformist strategies, just like those advocated for by certain Labour parties, entail trying to secure a few gains in the context of the status quo, rather than working to rebuild— upon a new foundation—our institutions  : their organization and their functioning, the values they embody and promote, the knowledge that informs them and the words we use to speak about them. In the same way that successive increases in wages for workers have only contributed to strengthening an economic system based on private ownership of the means of production, the modest gains made in recent years by proponents of a political theory of care do not challenge the unjust foundations of our society, nor do they propose specific social transformations required for eliminating gender inequalities. Real recognition of care calls for a radical transformation of society; it requires its true democratization. So long as women are assigned to an invisible and devalued care economy, their capacity to participate in redefining social institutions will be undermined and the institutional changes they are able to bring about will remain superficial. Conversely, so long as women remain hindered from 7   I have devoted an article to the question of the potentially counterproductive effects of compensation for caregivers and the arguments of feminist economists and political care theorists who defend this claim for compensation (Hamrouni 2014).



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p­ articipating in redefining societal institutions (especially the family and labour), along with their rules of operation and the values ​​they disseminate, women are at a high risk of disproportionately assuming care functions, both within the private and public spheres. Democracy, the cultural recognition of care and the abolishment of the gendered division of labour are all indissociable. The strategies to be mobilized must target these three key sites of gender inequality, rather than aim for an ex post redistribution of the productive surpluses of labour without radically questioning the unjust distribution of this labour, its definition criteria and its cultural valuation. Making visible the most “invisible” part of care, that is, care provided to “independents,” and placing our common vulnerability at the heart of political thought, may seem like a rather weak proposition faced with the systemic reproduction of gender inequality. It does, however, constitute a first step toward shedding light on the injustices inherent to the gendered division of labour and toward bringing about the social transformations required for freedom and equality.

Conclusion Since the formal barriers blocking women’s access to education, employment, income, and related powers and prerogatives have gradually been lifted, persistent gender inequalities, including those related to the division of labour, have become increasingly difficult to identify and dismantle. In the context of Western social democracies, where social programs have been created to mitigate dependencies, inequalities between men and women readily come off as the result of choices freely made by each person according to their own personal values. Meanwhile, the ambient political rhetoric makes it the responsibility of the individual to bear the cost of their own choices, and women who fail to take advantage of the new opportunities that in principle are afforded to them, are blamed for their unwillingness to succeed in the world, while the successes of exceptional women confirm the fallacious argument that gender equality is now a given, what French feminist Christine Delphy calls “l’égalité déjà-là” (2004).

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This ambient discourse, above all, ignores the institutional, cultural, normative and political background against which women here and elsewhere are compelled to make their choices, develop their preferences, and deal with various constraints on a daily basis. This institutional backdrop, for the time being, appears to close in on two options, which both reproduce the division of the labour of care between men and women, or among women: either shoulder the double working day, or delegate care activities to other women (usually immigrant and racialized women). This second option is indeed facilitated by the growing availability of cheap foreign labour in the context of neoliberal globalization. It is imperative, in the eyes of more and more feminists, that we consider alternative options. In this paper, I have argued that a political theory of care, when based on a broader understanding of the care and an appreciation of our ordinary human vulnerability, does offer such an alternative. It invites us to exercise our imagination in order to rethink the major social transformations required to bring about justice. Putting the ordinary vulnerable subject at the heart of our discussions about justice would require, among other things, that the definition of labour, along with its appreciation and its distribution become issues of justice and that the organization of labour, in both private and public institutions, be democratized. Translated by Madeleine Taylor.

Literature Bergmann, B. (1998) ‘Watch out for ‘Family Friendly’ Policies’, Dollars & Sense, 215: 10-11. Dalla Costa, M. and S. James (1973). Le pouvoir des femmes et la subversion sociale, Geneva: Éditions Adversaire. Delphy, C. (2007) Le mythe de l’égalité-déjà-là  : un poison!, Conference given on October 11th 2007, at UQAM, Montréal, Québec. Delphy, C. (2013) [1970] L’ennemi principal 1. Économie politique du patriarcat, Paris: Syllepse. England, P., M. Budig and N. Folbre (2002) ‘Wages of Virtue: The Relative Pay of Care Work’, Social Problems, 49(4): 455-473. Fineman, M. A. (2004) The Autonomy Myth: A Theory of Dependency, New York: The New York Press.



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Fineman, M. A. (2008) ‘The Vulnerable Subject: Anchoring Equality in the Human Condition’, Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, 20(1): 8-40. Fineman, M. A. and A. Grear eds (2013) Vulnerability. Reflections on a New Ethical Foundation for Law and Politics, Burlington: Ashgate. Fraser, N. and L. Gordon (1994) ‘A Genealogy of Dependency: Tracing a Keyword of the U.S. Welfare State’, Signs, 19(2): 309-336. Frye, M. (1983) The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory, New York: Crossing Press. Gilman, C. P. (2009) [1911]. Our Androcentric Culture, or the Man-Made World, Teddington: Echo Library. Guillaumin, C. (1978) ‘Pratique du pouvoir et idée de nature (1) L’appropriation des femmes’, Questions féministes, (2): 5-30. Griffin, S. (1978) Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her, New York: HarperCollins. Hamrouni, N. (2014) ‘Prise en charge familiale des personnes âgées. Soins, genre et pouvoir’, in C.  Bourgeois (eds), Les fausses bonnes idées pour les femmes. Sortir du capitalisme et du sexisme, Bruxelles: Université des femmes, coll. Pensées féministes. Hamrouni, N. (2011) ‘La non-reconnaissance du travail des femmes  : Smith n’est pas coupable’, Revue de philosophie économique, 12(1): 53-89. Harrington, M. (1999) Care and Equality. Inventing a New Family Politics, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Hoffmaster, B. (2006) ‘What Does Vulnerability Mean?’, Hastings Center Report, 36(2): 38-45. Junter-Loiseau, A. (1999) ‘La notion de conciliation professionnelle et familiale’, Les Cahiers du genre, (24): 73-98. Kittay, E. F. (1999) Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency, New York, Routledge. Laugier, S. (ed), (2012) Tous vulnérables? Le care, les animaux et l’environnement, Paris: Payot Rivages. MacIntyre, A. (1999) Dependent Rational Animals. Why Human Beings Need the Virtue, Chicago: Open Court. Mackenzie, C., W.  Rogers and S.  Dodds (eds) (2014) Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy, New York: Oxford University Press. Mackenzie, C. and N. Stoljar (eds) (2000) Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency, and the Social Self, New York: Oxford University Press. Maillard, N. (2011) La vulnérabilité: une nouvelle catégorie morale? Geneva: Labor / Fides. Noddings, N. (1984) Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, Berkeley: University of California Press. Paperman, P. (2005) ‘Les gens vulnérables n’ont rien d’exceptionnel’, in P. Paperman and S. Laugier (eds), Le souci des autres. Éthique et politique du care, Paris: Éditions EHESS, pp. 281-298. Pelluchon, C. (2011) Éléments pour une éthique de la vulnérabilité: Les hommes, les animaux, la nature, Paris: Cerf.

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Rogers, W., C. Mackenzie and S. Dodds (2012) ‘Why Bioethics Needs a Concept of Vulnerability’, International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, 5(2): 11-38. Ruddick, S. (1989) Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace, Boston: Beacon Press. Ruddick, S. (2002) ‘An Appreciation of Love’s Labor’, Hypatia, 17(3): 214-224. Silvera, R., N. Buseyne and V. Donlevy-Gomes (2004) Articuler vie professionnelle et vie personnelle: Les expériences des projets Equal français 2001-2004, Paris: Les cahiers Racines. Smith, A. (1909) [1776], An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, in C. J. Bullock (eds), New York: P.F. Collier & Son Corporation. Toupin, L. (1996) ‘Des ‘usages’ de la maternité en histoire du féminisme’, Recherches féministes, 9(2): 113-135. Tronto, J. and B. Fisher (1990) ‘Toward a Feminist Theory of Caring’, in E. K. Abel and M. K. Nelson (eds), Circles of Care, Albany: State University of New York Press, 35-62. Tronto, J. (1993) Moral Boundaries. A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care, NewYork-London: Routledge.

PART II Care Ethics in Conversation

9. Care Between Dependence and Domination: The Appeal of Neo-Republican Theory for Envisioning a ‘Caring Society’ Marie Garrau

Since its first formulations in the early ’80s (Gilligan 1982), the ethics of care has faced a paradox: on the one hand, its politicization would seem necessary if it is to overcome the status of private morality and feminine morality that it has been assigned to by its critics and also by some of its proponents.1 On the other hand, the ethics of care does not seem to be able to find in itself sufficient resources to formulate a comprehensive political theory, if what we mean by this is the formulation of a political ideal, along with its accompanying political institutions and the rules needed for its application in a given political society. Some might even wonder whether the obligation to respond to the vulnerability and needs of a concrete other (what seems to constitute the central maxim of a care ethics) is not completely at odds with its translation into the language of political theory. It is, after all, a language that has traditionally focused on rules for equitable co-operation between individuals with divergent interests—rules laid out in a sufficiently general way to justify their application.

1   This text was first published in Les ateliers de l’éthique / The Ethics Forum (vol. 4, no. 2, 2009). We wish to thank the journal for the permission to republish here, in English.

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A number of care theorists have worked hard to show that what appears to be an ethical and epistemological incompatibility between the perspectives of care and justice is in fact the result of an impoverished and stereotypical understanding of care. Joan C. Tronto, in particular, recommends leaving behind a romanticized view of care modelled after the dyadic relationship between mother and child, and instead, thinking about care as a complex and everpresent social practice characterized by its own ends—a practice that can be broken down into multiple phases involving different acts and social actors. In her book Moral Boundaries. A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (1993), Tronto offers a “holistic” definition of care, viewed as “a species of activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves and our environment, all of which we seek to weave in a complex, life-sustaining web” (1993, p. 103). She goes on to show that it is possible to analyze any process of care according to four phases (to care about, to take care of, to give care, and to receive care). Each one of these entails the exercise of specific moral virtues, namely, attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness (1993, p.  128). Tronto’s definition, which is both descriptive and normative, thus has a twofold aim: first, to propose a definition of care that makes visible the great significance of care activities for the maintenance of individual life and the reproduction of social life, and second, to formulate this definition in a way that captures the characteristic virtues of good care. In so doing, Tronto defends the idea that an ethic of care, far from being reducible to private or feminine morality, ought to be conceived as a public morality, laying out decisive values for the development and maintenance of a just political society. Tronto’s approach laid the foundation for a number of works that sought to further draw out what appeared in Moral Boundaries as a “politicization” of the ethics of care. These works have undeniable political significance, in both a heuristic and critical sense: on the one hand, they have helped to make care givers and care receivers visible



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as political actors with legitimate claims, and on the other, they have drawn attention to the symbolic and institutional mechanisms by which the voices of these actors and the objects of their demands are systematically marginalized and kept out of the public debate, while also being excluded from traditional moral theories. In so doing, these works have effectively contributed to deconstructing the problematic reading of care ethics as a feminine and private morality. Nevertheless, these works do not seem to have solved the problem of formulating a comprehensive political theory, since their claim about care ethics’ great political scope still suffers from a normative deficit. Indeed, there does not appear to exist any political theory of care in its own right, capable of justifying or recommending, on the basis of a motivating political ideal, a number of changes in the social and political organization. In order to tackle this very problem, we would like to consider below the benefits of a rapprochement between care ethics and neorepublican theories of non-domination. The hypothesis we will examine is whether the normative deficit affecting care ethics could be advantageously bridged by a rapprochement with the political theory developed by Philip Pettit (1997). In other words, the question we will be asking is whether the ideal of a “caring society” can be adequately understood within the neo-republican idiom of non-domination and upheld by proposed neo-republican institutions. We will proceed in five steps. After (1) reviewing some of the challenges involved in politicizing care and some of the limits of existing proposals in this area, we will (2) examine the meaning of the idea of a “caring society” and the paternalism objection it typically raises. Next, (3) we will attempt to show how a satisfactory response to this objection cannot be obtained without a discussion of the problem of domination in care relations. We will then (4) examine how the neo-republican ideal of non-domination is able to account for this risk in a substantial way and provide some compelling answers. This will lead us, in a final section, to (5) revisit the status of dependence in the theory of non-domination and show how a neo-republican society can be thought of as a prerequisite for bringing about a “caring society.”

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Politicizing care ethics? Challenges and limits of existing proposals “In the final analysis, successful advocacy of an ethic of care requires the exposition of a social and political theory that is compatible with the broadest levels of care. All moral theories fit better with some rather than other social and political institutions. Proponents of an ethic of care must specify which social and political institutions they understand to be the context for moral actors.” (Tronto 2005)

To understand the requirement here underscored by Tronto, we need to recall the dual diagnosis on which it rests: first, that care ethics is confined by its critics to a morality of intimate relations, where a commitment to the welfare of concrete others has meaning and reach only within the private sphere; second, this confinement of care values to the private sphere is reflected in and reinforced by the invisibilization of care activities and marginalization of those who carry out these activities in our societies. The force behind Tronto’s diagnosis lies in her view that moral arguments depend on a political context to be heard, and this context can function as a “boundary” preventing certain arguments from being audible (Tronto 1993, Ch. 1). Tronto thus highlights the link between a meta-ethical debate opposing an ethic of care to an ethic of justice on the one hand, and the sociopolitical conditions or context of this debate on the other: she contends that so long as the public sphere is dominated by values of autonomy and self-sufficiency, with an abstract understanding of reciprocity and a conception of individuals as discrete, self-interested actors, arguments advanced from a care perspective are bound to be systematically disqualified. The gendering of care ethics, along with its relegation to private life (here viewed as distinct and impervious to public life), ought therefore to be understood not only as symptoms but also as the vectors for this very disqualification. A conclusion readily follows from this: successful advocacy of care values cannot take place so long as the debate between care and justice takes the form of a straightforward conflict of norms, or even of a meta-ethical debate; what is needed is to transform the social and political context in which the debate takes place (1993, p. 100). Critical to the project, therefore, is exposing a social and political theory whose objective is



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to make visible the centrality and social significance of care activities, and also developing a political ideal and political institutions for implementing them most effectively. Work done in the field of care ethics since the publication of Moral Boundaries overwhelmingly focusses on the first part of the task identified by Tronto: namely, demonstrating the central role of care activities in the maintenance of individual life and in social reproduction. This research has given rise to debates about how best to define care, debates that gravitate around two main questions: (1)  should we favour a definition of care in terms of ethical dispositions or in terms of practices? (2) is care only found in face-to-face relationships, or is it capable of encompassing more complex relations, including institutional mediations, as well as those linking distant individuals with one another? Answering these questions is, of course, crucial to any political theory of care: this depends on our ability to think about care relations in a way that goes beyond dyadic or interpersonal relationships, and as such, on our ability to respond to the charge of parochialism (Tronto  1993). It also depends on identifying the parties involved in these care relations (more or less numerous according to how far the definition is extended), and therefore on the attractiveness of a moral and political ideal formulated on the basis of these relations. Finally, it depends on the possibility of reinterpreting in the language of care a range of institutions and social practices—from medicine and psychosocial support to education, social welfare, and even urban planning or protection of the environment.2   Care theory’s capacity to effect such reinterpretation depends on what definition of care we are working with and on how far it is extended. Two kinds of definitions of care can be distinguished schematically. Early definitions focus on care as a moral disposition and emphasize the virtues that moral subjects must cultivate in order to implement good care. These definitions are more prone to the objections of sentimentalism and parochialism often addressed to care ethics than are definitions that emphasize care as a social practice. With this second definition, care is described less as it relates to moral agents’ virtues or intentions than as it relates to the kinds of actions that are characterized by a common goal (in general the pursuit of the other’s well-being), which entail meeting the other’s needs and handling their vulnerability. Tronto’s definition belongs to this second set of definitions, although it is 2

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These debates have tended to relegate the constructive part of Tronto’s programme to the background, that is to say, the construction of a political theory that is consistent with the ends identified by care ethics as fundamental (on both an individual and social level).3 Tronto’s own work reflects a disproportion between the anaimportant to note that her definition attempts to articulate both social practices and moral dispositions, as the latter are means for distinguish good care from bad care. An additional distinction can also be made within this second set of definitions, between broad definitions, such as Tronto’s, which cover activities oriented toward preserving the human and non-human world; and restricted definitions in which the field of care is narrowed—either by placing the face-to-face relationship at the centre of care activities (Bubeck 1995) or by redefining its goal so as to account exclusively for actions that are oriented toward other human beings. On this point see Engster (2005, p. 55–56). 3   At the normative level, however, two main trends can be identified. The first, illustrated by Tronto’s guidelines at the end of Moral Boundaries and in the work of Selma Sevenhuijsen (1998), seeks to establish the contours of a democratic citizenship based in values of care, in the hopes of bringing about a “caring society.” Our hypothesis falls within this first trend, in which the connection between care theory and the theory of non-domination can prove fruitful, both from the point of view of care ethics and that of neo-republican theory. A second trend, which we will not be discussing here, has been most widely developed by Martha C. Nussbaum (2006) and Eva F. Kittay (1999). It takes the form of an attempt to navigate between the ethics of care and the liberal theory of justice in its Rawlsian formulation, and to deepen the latter by complementing it with the central insights and values of care ethics. This is done in order to better account for problems related to human dependence and to ways of addressing it. For Kittay, this deepening work begins with a critique of the Rawlsian conception of the original position as involving partners who are equal and fully cooperative members of society throughout their lives. This conception does not account for the inevitable periods of dependence in all human lives, nor for the unequal sharing of the costs and benefits of social co-operation, as it relates to the dependency worker’s position. This criticism leads Kittay to make the capacity to meet the need of others a moral power of an importance comparable to the two generated by Rawls, and to assign to care the status of a primary good. She introduces a new form of social co-operation, the doulia—in some cultures, the name for a person assigned to the care of a mother who has just given birth—as well as a third principle of justice which she calls “the principle of social responsibility for care,” which she understands as follows: “To each according to his or her need for care, from each according to his or her capacity to care, and such support from social institutions as to make available resources and opportunities to those providing care, so that all will be adequately attended in relations that are sustaining” (Kittay 1999,



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lytic and deconstructive dimensions of care ethics on one hand, and its constructive or positive dimension on the other: only the last few pages of her book are devoted to sketching a society based on values of care. For Tronto, this society would be a liberal society, which respects, according to the requirements of a well-understood ethic of care, the separateness and distinctness of individuals; it would be a democratic society which would guarantee the equal participation of citizens in public debates and give them the task of determining what needs to be given priority and in what way; finally, it would be a “caring society” in the sense that the citizens who form it would recognize and put into practice the characteristic values of good care. There is no indication, however, of how this caring society could be instituted. In a similar way, attempts to demonstrate the political expediency of an ethic of care have usually resulted more modestly in a statement of concrete political proposals, mainly in the areas of education (Noddings  2002; Nussbaum  2006) and dependency work (Clement 1996; Kittay 1999; Harrington 1999; Nussbaum 2006), both traditionally considered as feminine areas of public policy… In this way, quite ironically, care theories appear to reproduce, just as they are attempting to demonstrate the relativity of, the gender boundaries that have contributed to such persistent systematic disqualification of their moral point of view.

p. 100–112; p. 133 for a definition of the doulia principle). Nussbaum offers somewhat of a similar critique of the Rawlsian conception of the individual and underscores its narrow rationalism. However, Nussbaum departs more radically from Rawlsian contractualism with her political response to the problems of vulnerability and dependency. Replacing the list of primary goods with a list of basic human capabilities deduced from the idea of human dignity and justified by the idea of an overlapping consensus, Nussbaum proposes upholding and guaranteeing these capabilities equally for all as the basis of a just society. Dependent persons and dependency workers fail to be protected by a principle of justice that gives care the status of a fundamental individual and social good, though they are taken into account insofar as none of the basic capabilities, including those of care workers, can be ensured or maintained without a distribution of care that suitably meets the specific needs of individuals. See especially Nussbaum (2006, p. 155–221).

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It is possible to explain this discrepancy within care ethics by appealing to their contextualist moral epistemologies and their critical methodologies. While some theorists allow that the general ethical requirement of care can be formulated as a universal principle, they generally admit that it remains difficult to determine care needs a priori and the modalities of adequate care in the form of universalizable rules and principles, since good care is precisely that which meets the specific needs of a concrete other. From this point of view, the normative deficit or discrepancy described above could be said to exist only from the viewpoint of existing normative political theories. However, this hypothesis is not satisfactory for at least two reasons. The first is that the contextualism argument runs the risk of recurrently backfiring against care ethics and of being interpreted as evincing a genuine inability to formulate political principles capable of overcoming once and for all the objections of parochialism and paternalism that continue to plague it. The second reason is that the theoretical writings mentioned do, in fact, seek to formulate a political norm, by appealing to the idea of a “caring society.” Two questions arise then if we wish to take seriously this normative horizon of a “caring society” to which care theorists refer: first, what is a caring society and how is its normative extension justified? Also, given what conditions and according to which modalities can such an ideal be implemented?

The Ideal of a ‘Caring Society’ and the Paternalism Objection The term “caring society,” while frequently used by care theorists to refer to a political goal to be reached, lacks some precision and is liable to being interpreted in different ways. It can refer, in a strong and not very realistic sense, to the idea of a society in which all social activities are care activities, which, if we retain Tronto’s definition, would lead to a problematic denial of the existence of other social activities characterized by other ends such as the exercise of power, or activities of production, creation, or the pursuit of pleasure. But it can also refer, in a weaker sense, to three other distinct requirements that deserve to be taken seriously. (1) Firstly, a “caring society” might be a society in



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which meeting the care needs of its citizens would be among its priority political objectives, meaning that every citizen could be considered a care receiver and in turn, that care receivers would be considered as full citizens with a status ensuring that their needs are taken into account. (2) Secondly, a society could be described as “caring” to the extent that care activities are carried out under optimal conditions, that is to say, under conditions of equitable distribution, so that care givers would also be considered full citizens with a status that gives them recognition and protections equal to those enjoyed by other citizens. (3) Third, a “caring society” could mean a society in which the values of ​​ care identified by Tronto would constitute (not necessarily exclusive) evaluation criteria for social and political practices and institutions, a prism through which it would be possible to reinterpret relations among citizens on the one hand, and those between citizens and governing institutions on the other.4 Returning to Tronto’s diagnosis, we can hypothesize that these three requirements, corresponding to the three meanings of the idea of a “caring society” are interconnected through multiple reciprocal links. For example, one can argue that only in a society where the third requirement is fulfilled can the first one also be fulfilled, since only a society that is attentive to formulating the care needs of its citizens could hope to respond to them adequately. But conversely, one could argue that only on the condition of prioritizing care activities, both in the narrow sense of dependency work and in the broader sense of activities undertaken to maintain our world, can the third requirement be realized. Lastly, we may also be inclined to think that the first requirement, namely that of adequately responding to the care needs of citizens, is contingent upon meeting the second requirement, which involves giving caregivers full recognition. Ultimately, we may be inclined to agree that any genuinely “caring society” would be a society in which these three requirements are jointly realized. At this point, however, we ought to consider an objection that will allow us to broach neo-republican theory as a possible avenue for 4

  On care as an element of political judgment, see Sevenhuijsen (1998).

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bringing about a “caring society.” This objection is as follows: if we rethink social values and practices in light of the values of care in order to make meeting the care needs of citizens a political priority, does this not run the risk of leading to the establishment of a paternalistic state, which, in the name of the welfare of those it governs, treats them as passive recipients of goods to be distributed, or as fragile individuals who must above all be protected, possibly also from themselves? In other words, does not the attempt to politicize the ethics of care, by making its ends a political ideal and its values the normative criteria for good political institutions, run the risk of denying citizens their autonomy and of justifying forms of state intervention that fail to account for their expressed wills or declared interests? Clearly this paternalism objection takes it as self-evident that politicizing care is a question of transposing the model of a relationship between care giver and care receiver directly onto the political relationship between the governing and the governed. As such, it puts forth a double over-simplification: first, it reduces politicization to a matter of transposing this relational structure to another register, and, second, it reduces all care relations to dyadic relations. We may begin to answer this objection by pointing out that these are arbitrary over-simplifications: as we have tried to show above, politicization covers a plurality of requirements, which may be pursued together or not, but which, taken together, refer to a society’s ability to create conditions for good care practices and to implement the values of care, rather than to the idea that the governing bodies themselves should be “caring” toward citizens. Moreover, as Tronto has shown, care itself cannot be reduced to the direct relationship between care giver and care receiver (a phase of care she identifies as the act of care-giving), therefore we need not assume that politicization involves a generalized application of this relational model. These remarks, however, do not constitute a complete answer to the paternalism objection, which remains tenacious for three reasons. The first is that, despite Tronto’s work and the fruitfulness of her holistic definition, care activities routinely remain associated, in social representations but also within the existing scholarship, with what is just



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one element of Tronto’s proposed definition, namely, “care-giving” or the concrete act of taking care, which often takes the form of an asymmetrical relationship of dependency. The second is that it is precisely in response to the moral dilemmas arising within relationships of dependency that the ethics of care was first developed; often accompanied by a virulent critique of the paradigm of the autonomous subject, it takes as its starting points human vulnerability and the dependency relations in which we find ourselves. (Tronto 1993, p. 134–135; Code 1991, Fineman 2004, p. 31–54).5 The third, which we will address a bit later, is that an analysis of these dependency relationships, both from the point of view of caregivers and that of care receivers, brings to light the very real risk of domination in all care relationships (­Kittay  1999, p.  33–37; 40–42). In view of these three reasons, no convincing answer to the paternalism objection should be content simply to point out that politicizing care does not refer to what this objection presupposes, or that care involves complex social activities that cannot be reduced to care activities in the context of dependency relations. It must first take seriously the problem that appears as the main motive of the paternalism objection, namely, the potential for domination within care relations, and then show how this risk can be minimized, if not eradicated. Care theorists have most often opted to respond to the paternalism objection at the ethical level, the aim being to specify the terms of a successful “rather than distorted” care relationship (Clement  1996) and to identify the kinds of attitudes required from each party in the relationship. An early strategy consisted in revisiting the relationship 5   According to some care theorists, the modern ideal of autonomy is grounded on a collective denial of the prevalence of relations of dependency, not only in periods of childhood, old age, or in illness, but more extensively throughout our lives. As Tronto writes, “caring is by its very nature a challenge to the notion that individuals are entirely autonomous and self-supporting. To be in situation where one needs care is to be in a position of some vulnerability” (1993, p. 134). A bit further down, she adds, “Vulnerability has serious moral consequences. Vulnerability belies the myth that we are always autonomous, and potentially equal, citizens (1993, p. 135).

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between vulnerability and autonomy in care ethics in order to argue that properly understood, a caring relation not only requires presuming the care receiver’s autonomy, but also the intention to promote their autonomy. In this vein, it has been argued that (1) care theory’s critique is primarily directed at an ideology of autonomy rather than at the concept of autonomy, liable to receive many different interpretations (Code 1991, Clement 1996), and that (2) because it departs from the fact of vulnerability as a feature of the human condition and has dependency relationships at its core, care ethics is consistent with a relational conception of autonomy (Mackenzie & Stoljar  2000). The latter argument insists on: (a) at the descriptive level, the importance of care relationships in the development of autonomy as a moral capacity (Clement 1996) and (b) at the normative level, the separateness of persons, or their singularity (Clement  1996, Nussbaum  1999; 2000; 2006). Care theorists who have gone down this route have thus sought to defend a theoretical stance that combines a relational social ontology, underscoring the intersubjective ground of moral capabilities, with an ethical individualism that recognizes the singular individual as the end in moral action.6 It is not therefore a question of determining which, the individual or the relation, should be given priority, rather it is one of knowing which kinds of relations promote an individual’s well-being, with autonomy understood as an element of this well-being.

6   This alliance is clearly made in Nussbaum, in an article on feminist critiques of liberal individualism, which she devotes a significant portion of to the so-called dependency critique found in care theory (Nussbaum 1999). This article importantly clarifies a distinction between arguments made from the standpoint of social ontology and from a normative standpoint, sometimes conflated in care theorists’ criticisms of the liberal concept of autonomy. Nussbaum demonstrates how recognizing the facilitating or constitutive role of interpersonal relations in the development of autonomy does not necessarily beget the idea occasionally arrived at (Noddings 1984) that care ethics claims the primacy of the relation, possibly at the expense of the individual’s welfare and interests. Such a view, according to Nussbaum, runs the risk of depriving care theorists of norms according to which they can offer a critique of oppressive care relations.



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However, this first strategy quickly runs up against two problems: first, it does not clarify what it means in practice for a care giver to aim for a dependent care receiver’s autonomy, and second, this strategy cannot answer the objection that certain situations exclude, a priori, the care receiver’s autonomy as something obtainable, or even the very possibility of encouraging it (Kittay 1999; Pattaroni 2005). This is why a second strategy, one focused on the care giver’s responsiveness to the receiver’s needs, and which makes this responsiveness an essential element in a good care relationship, seems more appropriate (Tronto 1993, p. 135–136). Making the caregiver’s responsiveness, rather than the care receiver’s presumed autonomy, a safeguard against asymmetrical relations transforming into relations of domination, appears a priori to allow for the possibility of accounting for a wider range of care relations, particularly those in which care r­ eceivers prove to be acutely dependent.7 This strategy is not however absolved of difficulties. Its main difficulty has to do with a crucial question Tronto leaves open: how do we ensure that a caregiver will indeed be responsive to and heed the receiver’s (possibly dissonant or dissident) voice? Can we be satisfied to rely so heavily on the caregiver’s good will, on the bond she shares with the receiver, or on the care worker’s professional conscience? Here we see what these two strategies have in common: in exclusively appealing to the moral character of care relations and of the parties involved, they draw a dividing line between good and bad care, where bad care involves an exertion of domination. But if good care depends solely on the caregiver’s attitude, then it is not certain that either of these two approaches are able to adequately respond to 7   Or it turns out to be a “moral load,” to quote Kittay (1999), as in the case of a person who is absolutely incapable of attending to their needs without another who takes care of them. A great many care relations, which Kittay categorizes as extended care, are in fact not relations of extreme dependency. With these kinds of relations, the first strategy, which does not break with the liberal idea that a being’s dignity is a function of its apparent or presumed autonomy, may be appropriate. However, as Kittay points out with reference to her daughter Sesha, who has a severe mental disability, this strategy is a stalemate in cases of extreme dependency.

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the paternalism objection. Indeed, this objection is not simply tied to the view that care relationships are primarily oriented toward vulnerable and dependent people. It mainly issues from the concern that recasting situations of dependency as care relations may end up justifying relations of domination and compromise the care receiver’s own voice and interests. In other words, the paternalism objection does not necessarily call into question the possibility of good care, but it does bring the question of how to guard against relations of bad care to the forefront; so much so that, by relying on this normative distinction between good and bad care, we partly miss the problem it raises. This problem cannot be solved, nor the paternalism objection definitively dismissed, if the risk of domination in care relations is not taken seriously.

The Risk of Domination in Care Relations That care relations go hand in hand with the risk of domination is first and foremost connected to the fact that these relations are structurally characterized by more or less significant imbalances of power.8 This is a more obvious feature of any direct relation of care bonding between a care giver and a care receiver, where the imbalance of power tends to be greater the more dependent the latter is on the former. As Kittay (1999, p. 34) points out, “the dependency worker is well situated to abuse the vulnerable charge.” Given his or her position, the dependency worker has the power to affect their charge’s well-being, actions and expectations, all the more so to the extent that (1) the worker is alone in handling the other’s care, (2) his or her role confers on him or her the function and status of the one who 8   In cases where one is caring in the extended sense for someone who initially is not unable to independently care for their own needs, one would think that the activities connected with caring still establish a relation of dependency. Thus, according to Tronto, any employee who relies on their secretary is dependent on them and becomes vulnerable to their actions (1993, p.  134). These cases indeed count as dependency relations, even if they are temporary and very localized. On this view, dependence, understood as an asymmetry of power, appears to be a constant in care relations, whichever definition, broad or restricted, we choose.



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protects, (3) the care receiver expresses with difficulty what his or her own interests and needs are. Thus, a care relationship, which presents itself as a response to the vulnerability of another in need, may become the site of heightened vulnerability, insofar as the care receiver is directly exposed to the caregiver’s actions. The irony here is that the very thing which should elicit in a care giver a moral obligation to meet the other’s needs—i.e. the care receiver’s vulnerability—also proves to be a condition for the very exercise of domination…9 On this point, it is indeed important to distinguish, just as Kittay does, between inequalities of power and exertions of domination (1999, p.  33) and to emphasize that while care relations are indeed relations of dependency, they are by no means necessarily relations of domination.10 That said, it is equally important to emphasize that care relations provide a favourable context for the exertion of domination, and that, empirically speaking, there is no contradiction between care relations and soft forms of domination: domination can be exercised “in the name of” the interests of the care receiver, and indeed care workers are compelled to act according to these interests; meanwhile, care receivers may accept having their own interests dictated to them, if they believe, owing to their dependent situation, that they are not ultimately in the best position to know what these interests are. Paradoxically, the risk of domination in care relations also arises if one considers not just the position of care receivers, but also that of the care workers entrusted with caring for their needs. Several care theorists have indeed pointed out that far from simply being in a position of potential dominance, care workers are also themselves exposed to a compound risk of three forms of domination. The first is a psychological form of domination. Paradoxically exerted by the   For a defence of the position that others’ vulnerability to our actions is the foundation of our moral obligations to them, see Goodin 1983. 10   According to Kittay, this shift occurs when a care worker’s actions become “illegitimate,” a term she uses to indicate that the care receiver’s interests are no longer being considered, which approaches Pettit’s concept of arbitrary interference as an element of domination. We will come back to this point in the next section. 9

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care receiver, it exploits a moral responsibility generally associated with care activities, a responsibility that weighs heavier the more a care receiver’s dependence has to do with needs considered to be vital, or if the care worker is alone in caring for them. As Bubeck (2003) and Kittay (1999) have shown, care relations can be the locus of such a reversal inasmuch as, for example, in order to be properly done, the care work demands constant availability, or significant physical and psychological investment on the part a care worker, who must continually open up to others and remain attentive to their needs. This continual state of openness, combined with the concrete tasks of meeting the care receiver’s needs and the moral obligation to consider how these needs are expressed, constitute the burdens associated with care work. This moral load can indeed be an additional risk factor for domination by a caregiver, if it increases the likelihood of care workers failing to adopt the moral attitudes ideally required by their work.11 Additionally, the specific burdens of care work also make the one who does the work vulnerable, since as Kittay puts it, “the charge can exert a certain tyranny” by exploiting the caregiver’s moral commitment or concern, for example, by manufacturing new needs. In this configuration, domination is captured by the fact that the care worker’s own interests are denied, and the care worker is all the more vulnerable if he or she cannot simply decide to put an end to this care relationship. To this first form of vulnerability, a second may be added, which also involves a specific risk of domination. This risk arises in situations where care workers are themselves dependent on a third party whose economic 11   Scholarship devoted to the caring professions has stressed the difficult conditions for accessing this attitude of openness, as well as its fragility and its ambivalence. According to Pascale Molinier (2003), the attitudes required by care work are not without their own psychological conflicts and require one to work on oneself, something that the discourse of moral dispositions has a tendency to minimize. Molinier insists on the fact that nothing is less natural, in the context of care work, than not treating the one assigned to our care as an object and to resist the dangers of control or cruelty… Therefore care work requires not only a certain kind of learning in order to run smoothly, but also permanent collective support and social recognition.



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support is necessary both for them to be able to meet their own needs and also indirectly to maintain care relations with those whose care they are responsible for. This third party is typically a spouse who economically supports the other spouse caring for their dependents in the home. However, insofar as care work, if paid, is often among the lowest-paid work, it can also describe a situation of remunerated care work done by a relative, by the state, or via relatively informal social networks (Kittay 1999, p. 40–42). These “secondary” or “derived dependencies” make the care worker vulnerable to the one on whom they depend, exposing them to a risk of domination made greater the more demanding the care work, and the more dependent the care receiver. The problematic nature of this “derived dependency” has its condition of possibility in what constitutes a third form of domination to which care workers may be exposed—one that is more a matter of structural social domination. Analyses of the social conditions of care work, both paid and unpaid, have shown that the marginalization of care activities corresponds to a non-recognition of the workers themselves. This is reflected both in the unequal distribution of care activities according to gender, but also according to class and race (Glenn  2000); it is also reflected in the low social status of care workers and in their poor remuneration, if the work is indeed remunerated. It would be correct to say from this point of view that the ethics of care is an ethic of the dominated (Dorlin 2005), not in the sense that care ethics is bound to transpose a subordinate social position into an ethic so as to justify it a posteriori, but rather in the sense that those who engage in the kind of work on the basis of which care ethics was developed occupy a position overpowered by societal organization. As Tronto has shown, neither social representations, nor political values, ​​nor a social division of labour allow for the voices of care workers and those they care for to be heard in the public arena. Added to these obstacles is the fact that it can prove difficult for care workers to exit the relationships on which the welfare and sometimes the lives of other individuals depend, and consequently poor access to means of collective action involving a suspension of work (Tronto 1993; Clement, 1996).

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Care relations thus appear as a complex node of dependency relations, binding not just care workers and care receivers, although these relations are at the heart of the issue. These dependency relations are found between receivers and care workers, between care workers, social actors, and social institutions indirectly involved in the care relationship—and all these go hand in hand with the possibility of forms of domination. This is why it might be possible to label these different groups of care receivers and care workers, using Pettit’s term, as “vulnerability classes”—namely, social groups composed of individuals who are vulnerable to particular forms of domination given a particular social position (Pettit 2004 p. 162).12 Care relations would thus on this count have a “dark side,” which no appeal to the moral dispositions of those who engage in them could succeed in dispelling. What this pervasive risk of domination in care relations suggests is that we should reflect upon their political dimension—which entails reflecting upon the distribution of power in care relations, but also more broadly, upon the positions of the moral actors in these relations within our social matrix more generally.

The Ideal of Non-Domination: A Resource for Responding to the Vulnerability of Care Receivers and Care Givers? Can neo-republican theory adequately capture the political dimension of care relations and answer the problems these relations pose? At first blush, we may be inclined to answer in the affirmative, corroborating Pettit’s thesis according to which the idea of non-domination federates a significant set of claims generally thought of as heterogeneous (Pettit  2004, p.  24, 174–193). If indeed caregivers and care receivers can be regarded as “vulnerability classes,” we can readily see non-domination as an appealing ideal from the latter’s point   This does not imply that we should think of the classes of care receivers and caregivers as uniform groups in terms of degree of vulnerability or according to other variables. Pettit also points out that an individual may belong to one or more vulnerability classes according to their position in the social structure and that vulnerability depends on different social factors, which may be economic, legal, or cultural, to name a few. (Pettit 2004, p. 162–163) 12



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of view. Furthermore, if we accept the premise that what distinguishes bad care from good care lies precisely in whether a care relation veers toward a relation of domination (or not), the ideal of non-domination also appears to offer care ethics an apt political solution for successfully ensuring satisfying care relations on a social scale. Further still, we might wonder if a neo-republican society, in which everyone enjoys the protection of non-domination, is not indeed a precondition for bringing about a “caring society.” The answer to this question requires us to revisit Pettit’s definition of the ideal of non-domination and to subject it to the following questions. First, do the forms of domination addressed by Pettit’s ideal correspond to the forms of domination discussed above, to which those engaged in care relations are exposed? Second, if it turns out that the ideal of non-domination is useful for thinking about problems affecting relations of dependency, how would we go about putting it to use in this context? The first question is an analytical question that appeals to Pettit’s definition of non-domination and its relevance for thinking about problems that arise within care relations. Petit defines domination as follows: “One agent dominates the other if and only if they have a certain power over that other, in particular a power of interference on an arbitrary basis. They have sway over the other and the sway is arbitrary” (Pettit 1997, p. 52). He specifies that the dominating agent may be an individual or a collective, whereas the dominated agent is ultimately the individual, even in cases where domination is exerted over an individual as someone belonging to a particular social group, as is the case with vulnerability classes (2004, p. 162). Pettit goes on to point out that: (1) interference worsens the affected party’s situation and has to be minimally intentional in character (as negligence may arise); (2) it may affect the range of options available to the dominated person, their expectations with regard to those options, or the results of pursuing those options; (3) ultimately interference is arbitrary in the sense that “it is chosen or not chosen at the agent’s pleasure. And in particular […] that it is chosen or rejected without reference to the interests, or opinions, of those affected.” (1997, p.  55). Pettit gives a number of examples of domination, among

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which the “slave-holder” figures, but also “the husband who can beat his wife […] to the mild censure of his neighbours,” “the employer who can fire his employees […] and hardly suffer embarrassment for doing so” (1997, p. 57). These examples are important in that they show the ways in which domination can occur, according to Pettit, “even in rule-governed societies” (1997, p.  57). They help us to understand the ways in which the conditions of domination are not only legal and political, but also social and cultural. Indeed, what is significant about this definition of domination is how it differs from what Pettit regards as the political evil par excellence according to the liberal tradition, namely interference. Domination covers two kinds of situations that the liberal focus on the problem of interference does not allow us to qualify as problematic, namely, cases where interference is demonstrated but not arbitrary, and cases where interference could be exerted on an arbitrary basis. In the course of presenting this distinction, Pettit introduces his paradigm case of domination, the kindly slave master (1997 p. 31-35). A master could very well not interfere with the slave’s actions and may even consider the slave’s interests. But the master could at any moment, with impunity, take to interfering with the slave. In this respect, the master exerts domination, which, as Pettit summarizes, is bound up with the “permanent possibility of interference on an arbitrary basis” (1997, p. 67). The effect on the dominated individual is that they live with the uncertainty of not knowing if, when, how or why interference will occur or not. These few points already demonstrate the appeal of Pettit’s analysis for thinking about the risks inherent to care relationships. A care worker could indeed be thought of as an avatar of Pettit’s non-interfering slave master, insofar as nothing—if not their own will—prevents them from abusing the power afforded them by their position within the asymmetrical care relation. Here indeed, the care worker can, as we have seen, interfere with the choices of the person in their care, diminish their available options, alter their expectations, intervene on the outcome of actions undertaken, and even affect their wellbeing. This is why non-domination, which Pettit also defines as



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“the  social status of being relatively proof against arbitrary interference by others and being able to enjoy a sense of security and stand among them […] a condition under which a person is more or less immune, and more or less saliently immune, to interference on an arbitrary basis” (1997, p. vii), is appealing from the point of care receivers. It would be wrong for us to stop there, however, for two reasons: the first is that non-domination also appears to be a desirable status for care workers as well, and the second is that ensuring such a status to care receivers would appear to hinge on ensuring it to care workers. Here care relations afford us an opportunity to illustrate Pettit’s thesis according to which “our fortunes in the non-domination stakes are intimately interconnected” (1997, p.  125), meaning that nondomination is a “common good” which cannot be achieved for one individual without also being achieved for others. How then do we secure non-domination for care receivers? Pettit outlines two political strategies for realizing non-domination on a social scale (1997, p. 67-68) that may provide an answer to this question: the strategy of reciprocal power, to make the resources of dominator and dominated more equal and the strategy of constitutional provision, which consists in introducing a constitutional authority, an elective agent, which may deprive other parties of the power of arbitrary interference. These two paradigmatic orientations could be transposed to care relations: here what would matter would be to protect the care receiver from the arbitrary interference of the care worker, either by identifying measures to reestablish a balance of power or by replacing this dual relationship with a tri- or multipartite relationship in which each party is a possible mediator. It seems at first glance as though the second strategy would prove more feasible, since in the context of dependency relations, balancing power amongst actors appears to be a utopian idea. It does, however, stand to reason that the mere granting of a decent legal and economic status to care receivers (as called for by disability advocacy organizations, for example) could have an appreciable effect on care relationships. Likewise, we can imagine how cultural representations

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aimed at combatting an idea of care recipients simply as passive recipients of third-party aid might also help to minimize the degrading treatment they are sometimes subjected to. The second strategy, however, of introducing a third party with recognized authority into the asymmetrical relation, appears more convincing. This third party may take different forms depending on the relation’s initial configuration: it may be a paid care worker in cases where care work is assumed by an unpaid family member; or a family member in cases where most of the care work is assumed by an employee; or even the head of department in cases where care work is carried out in a professional care unit, etc. It is worthwhile to mention here that the doula model on which Kittay bases her new model of social co-operation, is close to this ternary relationship and shares a twofold advantage found within it. First, it would reduce the care receiver’s vulnerability, which is in part a function of the “monopoly” enjoyed by the care giver (Goodin 1995), by providing plural possible interlocutors. But more significantly, it would reduce the burden of care work in cases where it is assumed by a single individual, by allowing the latter to share the load of moral responsibility connected to the work. This last remark might make us wonder whether the best way to guarantee the non-domination of care receivers would not simply be to guarantee it to care workers. It has been demonstrated that care workers are also potential victims of interpersonal and social forms of domination, owing to their economic dependence on third parties, the low social recognition associated with their work, and the expansion of organized labour practices they regard as contradictory with their work’s purpose. This exposure to domination places them in psychological and moral dilemmas that affect their caring actions and increase the vulnerability of those they care for. As Selma Sevenhuijsen points out (1998, Chapter 1), we will not understand the cases of abuse that take place in care relations if we simply criminalize the care worker’s ostensible malice, irresponsibility, or negligence—in other words, if the abuse is reduced to an individual’s moral failings. Only an appreciation of the realities of care work, of its specific burdens, and of the contradictory demands which care workers continually find themselves facing



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(the main one being to care for the other’s welfare without thinking of one’s own) can allow us to understand the ways in which care activities can become the site of domination, and determine ways to avoid this. Here again, Pettit’s analysis proves useful. In addition to his two major strategies mentioned above, Pettit proposes two general constraints to reduce arbitrariness: filters and sanctions. As the name indicates, sanctions consist in attaching a significant cost to the perpetration of arbitrary interference. Where these concern care work, they would consist in penalizing legally, economically, or symbolically any care worker who exercises domination over their charge. It should be noted here in passing that such a system of control implies, once again, that we eschew, as far as possible, care relations consisting only of two agents, of care receiver and care worker. The problem with sanctions, however, is that insofar as they function as threats, they can stifle the care worker in many respects: psychologically, they can dissuade the care worker from adopting the responsive attitude required by their work; practically, they can stifle a care worker from making decisions required by the situation, decisions that sometimes need to be made urgently, without consulting the care receiver or even against their expressed wishes—which itself raises the question of the inevitability of Pettitian domination in care relations (we will return to this below). Hence, Pettit’s second kind of constraint against domination, namely filters, appears preferable. Filters are constraints on actions conceived to avoid and prevent arbitrary interference. Their purpose is to operate upstream of actions and guide them, for example by determining a priori what ought to be done and what not to do, and by laying out appropriate procedures for action, etc. For our purposes, effective filters would, for example, regulate care activities, by determining good care according to the circumstances in which the care work is carried out, and ensure that caregivers enjoy working conditions that allow them to achieve the ends associated with their work. Thus, securing beforehand the material, social, and symbolic conditions necessary for good care practices would protect care receivers against the kinds of domination that may arise in care relationships, and care workers against the derived forms of

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domination to which they are exposed as actors with a low social status.

Dependency Status in Neo-Republicanism: Toward a ‘Caring ­Society’? As Pettit’s remarks remain fairly general and do not explicitly address care relations, it is not immediately obvious how we would go about concretely guaranteeing a status of non-domination to care receivers and care workers. What is at stake for us here is simply to show that neo-republican concepts can help us to recast the problems that care receivers and care workers face in their relations and activities, and to develop practical guidelines for responding to them. Especially relevant for our purposes are the concepts of domination and non-domination, Pettit’s two strategies for responding to domination, and his conception of filters. In a recent article, however, Marilyn Friedman argues that Pettit’s neo-republicanism, although attractive to feminism on the face of it, is particularly ill-suited to thinking about care relationships (Friedman 2008). Her argument proceeds in two stages: first, she shows that Pettit’s concept of domination is too broad and would lead us to identify any dependency relation as a relation of domination (2008, p. 250–252). This leads her to posit that the ideal of non-domination is not only inaccessible to care receivers, but also implicitly aims at overcoming all situations of dependency, thus overlooking their particular moral character (2008, p. 252–254). Finally, she insists that neo-republicanism would reproduce the liberal pitfall that care theorists have so often underscored, since it too presupposes the model of the independent and rational individual (2008, p. 255). Friedman supports the gist of her argument with two main elements: the first is Pettit’s definition of domination, in which he makes “the capacity to interfere on an arbitrary basis” the condition of domination. According to Friedman, the problem with this definition is its focus on the capacity to interfere, rather than on the actual interference, with the result that any asymmetry of power, defined precisely by the fact that one member in the relation has such a capacity, is identified as a relation of domination. From this point of



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view, care relations would always and necessarily be relations of domination…13 It does not seem that Pettit would accept this logic, however, and in his discussion of the case of children, we may glean an indirect answer to Friedman’s objection. Pettit wholly recognizes that children depend upon their parents, who are, furthermore, in keeping with the inherent aim of this filial relationship, entitled to subject their children to what he calls, “the disciplines inherent, as any parent knows, in education and development” (1997, p. 120). Not only does children’s dependency not present a problem in itself, Pettit appears to recognize that the kinds of relationships it begets, usually care relationships, at the very least have instrumental value in children becoming citizens. At the same time, Pettit also recognizes that children’s dependence makes them especially vulnerable to domination, which is why it is important to guarantee children the same degree of non-domination as adults. This does not mean that it is necessary, as Friedman assumes, to deprive parents of their capacity to intervene, only to deprive them of their capacity to intervene arbitrarily. By focusing her argument on a capacity to interfere instead of on arbitrary interference, Friedman in fact bypasses this very distinction and therefore tends to interpret the notion of capacity as a personal power, a mere aptitude. This is what allows her to conclude that the only way to prevent domination is to prevent action altogether. What distinguishes a capacity to interfere from a capacity to interfere arbitrarily is that the latter is less a function of the dominant person’s de facto power than it is of a lack of socially and politically constituted protections for the potentially dominated person. Pettit does in fact make the distinction between dependence and domination: in the case of dependence, the dependent person enjoys a number of protections, the purpose of which is to prevent arbitrary interference. This does not, of course, prevent the person on whom they 13   Curiously enough, what Pettit believes to be the strength of the neo-republican definition of liberty—its focus on possible interference as opposed to actual interference—Friedman rejects as both unrealistic and dangerous, as it is liable to result in an inordinate extension in the forms of control exerted over individuals.

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depend from having the capacity to interfere and to actually use this capacity. Coming back to the case of children, we can surmise that they do in fact have a certain number of protections against the arbitrary power of their parents, since we find examples of these protections in the rights of the child or in the existence of a public system of child protection, concerned as much with prevention as with penalization. This brings us to the second main point in Friedman’s argument: does neo-republicanism in fact aim to overcome dependence and deny that ethically sound relations can develop in the context of dependency relations? To defend this idea, Friedman quotes a passage from Republicanism in which Pettit describes the condition of being dominated by comparing it to that of someone “dependent” or “indebted,” and then a second passage in which he describes the free individual as “a somebody” as opposed to “a nobody.” She deduces therefrom that “Pettit links the condition of the dominated to that of being a dependent, and links dependency, in turn, to that of being a debtor, a nobody, someone who is powerless […]” (2008, p. 255), before concluding that therefore, Pettit fails to grasp the essential role of dependent relationships in human life and even evinces a distaste for dependency. Friedman’s argument appears to be based on an ambiguity in the term “dependence,” which, in her defence, is not really clarified by Pettit. This ambiguity stems from the fact that dependence may either designate a situation that is favourable to domination—this appears to be the case with Pettit—or a situation that is induced through domination. The child, or any other care receiver, is dependent in the first sense of the term to the extent that they are subject to external interference, but they are not necessarily subject to domination where there are social and political safeguards against the risk of arbitrary interference. The slave, conversely, is dependent in the second sense of the term because their social and political status implies that they are subject arbitrarily to the will of their master. It is this kind of dependence, coextensive with the possibility of arbitrary interference, which for Pettit is equivalent to a situation of powerlessness and social inexistence. But this equivalence does not



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mean that he regards dependence in the first sense of the term in this way, as his remarks about children testify to. Here it may be useful to recall that for Pettit, non-domination is also a social, or one could say, relational, good. Unlike liberal freedom, which represents freedom “of the heath,” neo-republican freedom represents freedom “of the city,” in the concrete presence of others (1997, p.  67). Consequently, neo-republican freedom does not abstract people from the relations in which they are concretely engaged, nor does it appear to be incompatible a priori with dependencies, or forms of attachment. Rather, it seeks to promote social and political conditions for emotionally and morally satisfying relationships.14 Pettit recognizes precisely that if we were to guard against domination and undertake to overcome it as far as possible, we would never succeed in definitively eliminating the risk: just like the concomitant fact of human vulnerability, the risk is inherent in interdependent relations. It is true, however, that care relations can serve as limit cases for neo-republicanism, especially as the dependence becomes more marked. This is because, contra Friedman, it is not always clear to what extent the care giver’s actions are arbitrary or not within these relations, depending, that is, on the state of the care receiver. As we have seen, Pettit defines an arbitrary will as a will that is subject only to the agent’s arbitrium. Thus, when the agent’s will is impeded by the fact that another agent has certain protections, it is no longer arbitrary. Pettit supplements this first definition with a second, centered around the act rather than the will engendering it, which by its nature is not all that accessible. An act is arbitrary if it does not consider the interests of the agent whom it affects. Pettit also specifies that the proper criterion for taking another’s interests into account is not their consent to the act, but the act’s contestability (1997, p. 61–63). We can see how such a criterion could prove difficult to apply in relations of extreme 14   On this point, see Pettit’s discussion on the compatibility between the ideal of non-domination and personal trust in neo-republican society. Here Pettit stresses that non-domination as a political ideal does not mean the elimination of all risk or vulnerability, only a significant reduction of their probability (Pettit 1997, p. 355–362).

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d­ ependency. Someone with a severe mental disability, for example, or an advanced neurodegenerative condition, does not have the capacity, or the demonstrated ability, to express their interests or explicitly contest the decisions affecting them. The criterion of contestability is therefore ill suited to these cases since it is too stringent. The problematic consequence is that with these kinds of cases, the distinction between dependence and domination again collapses: if indeed the act is not contested nor contestable, are we not then dealing with a typical case of domination? We may attempt to answer this question by arguing that contestability differs in kind depending on whether contesting the act is possible or impossible. If, as in the case of the slave, it is politically and socially impossible, in other words, if the act may be contested but this contestation will not be deemed to be deserving of consideration, we are in fact dealing with a case of domination. This is not necessarily the case if contestability is impossible because of the physical limitations of an agent who is legitimately in a position to contest (as in the case of an extremely dependent person). This distinction is far from being purely rhetorical, since contestations are not without their effects on the agent to whom they are or should be addressed. In the case of the slave, the response is likely to be indifference or contempt. In the case of the extremely dependent care receiver, the response to the absence of contestation ought to be heightened vigilance on the part of the caregiver, with full attention given to deciphering the signs they may potentially make. Non-domination in this case is thus once again a function of the dependent person’s social and political status, a status, Pettit insists, that should be understood relationally, such that it finds its counterpart in the attitudes of the people who surround us. Cases of extreme dependency are also, paradigmatically, cases in which “the virtue of others represents an indispensable element in the set of safeguards that protects a person from domination” (1997, p.  64). In writing this, Pettit is not saying that the virtue of others is itself sufficient to protect care receivers, in contrast to the ethical approaches of care theorists examined above. Instead he is pointing out that virtue is the



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intersubjective refection of, and the necessary complement to, a social and political status. Non-domination is therefore also a political virtue, cultivated and reinforced within existing institutions. That is why arguably, within the framework of non-domination, it is no doubt possible to address situations of extreme dependency: it would require introducing a stronger status for extremely dependent persons, which would not simply entail special rights, but also the existence of structures for supporting these individuals with all the attention and vigilance required, sustained within a public culture that is sensitized to these kinds of situations.

Conclusion As it stands, the ideal of non-domination proves a fertile resource for thinking about and guarding against the risks inherent to care relations, given that they are relations of dependency. Guaranteeing nondomination to care receivers and care workers is an ideal that does not contradict care ethics’ central insights. On the contrary, it provides care ethics with a way of responding convincingly to the paternalism objection by showing that its intuitions are not just politically relevant, but ought to be taken seriously at a political level. All the more so since, as we have just seen, non-domination cannot be reduced to an individual status, but supposes, in order to be realized, a civic virtue that cannot be maintained without a public culture of non-domination (1997, p. 68). This brings us to the final question: does a neo-republican society amount to a “caring society” capable of addressing problems of domination? If we resume the three meanings of “caring society” identified above, the answer appears to be the following: a neo-republican society is a necessary condition, though not a sufficient one, for bringing about a caring society. In other words, there remains a gap between these two normative ideals, that in closing I will attempt to clarify. Certainly, in a neo-republican society, neither care receivers nor care workers would be subject to the different forms of domination to which those involved in care relations are exposed. This requires that care receivers be recognized as full citizens, regardless of the nature

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of their dependency. Similarly, care workers would be granted the social recognition, economic compensation, and working conditions that would permit them to carry out their work without incurring domination, and subsequently without incurring an additional risk to their charge, who is vulnerable to their actions. Achieving such a result, however, requires that questions concerning care—what it consists of, who gives it and who receives it, according to what arrangements, in what context, and for what purposes—be placed at the centre of our public debates. In light of the theory of non-domination, care’s accession to a central place in public debates is necessary insofar as non-domination depends on a public culture of awareness of the risks nested within care relations. It can also be justified within a normative framework, on the basis that care receivers and caregivers are especially vulnerable to domination in light of their responsibility and the conditions for its proper exercise. Here, however, the theory of non-domination appears to present a limit: when it comes to justifying care as a central theme in public debate, one wonders if the only possible justification, or even the most relevant justification, consists in pointing to the connection between care relations and domination. The theory of non-domination is indeed only able to provide us with an indirect justification for the central role of care activities in our individual and collective lives, via a demonstration of the risk of domination within care relations. This risk, which is the dark side of the business of care, is a genuine risk. However, bringing care into the public debate from this neo-republican angle may result in minimizing what care theorists have rightly and continually emphasized, namely, that the lives of each and every one of us, not to mention any possibility whatsoever of social co-operation, are fundamentally dependent upon relations of care. Pettit would surely not deny this point, which does not appear contradictory to the objectives of non-domination. It is true, however, and here is where Friedman’s objections become more relevant, that Pettit’s theory tends to minimize this point or rather, it  unknowingly presupposes it. Presupposing the existence of care activities, and therefore also of unidentified care receivers and care



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­ orkers, has significant consequences: it excludes from the public w debate questions of who should be involved in care and how; it unknowingly legitimizes keeping care activities within the private sphere and upholding their gendered distribution. Or, said otherwise, it allows us to be blind to the fact that this distribution is also the effect of a more insidious and massive form of domination than those that occur within direct care relations. In short, we have reason to fear that non-domination will only lead us half way—certainly giving us a basis for counteracting direct forms of domination that affect care receivers and care workers, but without the resources we need for questioning the very construction of these social categories. The non-negligible result might be to guarantee these social groups important protections, but without challenging the negative representations of care activities—a key factor in care’s marginalization and unequal distribution. In order to challenge these negative representations, care needs to be discussed and defined in the public sphere not only as a locus of possible domination, but as a fundamental and positive aspect of individual and collective life. Only on the condition of fostering such recognition in the public sphere, which in our estimation involves thinking about the social category of vulnerability in broader terms than does Pettit,15 can a neo-republican society be said to be a “caring society.” Translated by Madeleine Taylor.

  In Pettit, vulnerability is considered mainly as an effect of domination or as an opportunity for domination. In other words, Pettit is primarily concerned with vulnerability’s political implications. This political perspective is, in our view, the strength in Pettit’s approach. However, the experience of vulnerability warrants the kinds of existential articulations found in care ethics, according to which vulnerability is part of the human condition and bound up with the embodiment, temporality, and relationality of human existence. From a normative standpoint, this broader conception of vulnerability could inspire us to articulate the idiom of non-domination with the language of needs, capabilities or recognition. On these matters, see Garrau (2018). 15

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Literature Bubeck, D. (1995) Care, Gender and Justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clement, G. (1996) Care, Autonomy and Justice. Feminism and the Ethic of Care, Boulder: Westview Press. Code, L. (1991) ‘Second Persons’, in What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge, New York: Cornell University Press. Dorlin, E. (2005) ‘Dark Care: de la servitude à la sollicitude’, in S.  Laugier and P. Paperman (eds), Le souci des autres. Éthique et politique du care, Paris: Édition de L’EHESS, 87-97. Engster, D. (2005) ‘Rethinking Care Theory: The Practice of Caring and The Obligation to Care’, Hypatia, 20(3): 50-74. Fineman, M.A. (2004) The Autonomy Myth: A Theory of Dependency, New York: The New York Press. Friedman, M. (2008) ‘Pettit’s Civic Republicanism and Male Domination’, in C. Laborde and J. Maynor, Republicanism and Political Theory, London: Blackwell, 246-268. Garrau, M. (2018) Politiques de la vulnérabilité, Paris: CNRS Editions. Gilligan, C. (1982) In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Glenn, E.N. (2000) ‘Creating a Caring Community’, Contemporary Sociology, 29(1): 84-94. Goodin, R. (1983) Protecting the Vulnerable. A Reanalysis of our Social Responsibilities, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Harrington, M. (1999) Care and Equality, New York: Knopf. Kittay, E.F. (1999) Love’s Labor. Essays on Women, Equality and Dependency, New York: Routledge. Kittay, E.F. (2005) ‘At the Margins of Moral Personhood’, Ethics, 116: 100-131. Mackenzie, C. and N.  Stoljar (2000) Relational Autonomy. Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency and the Social Self, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Molinier, P. (2003) L’énigme de la femme active, Paris: Payot. Noddings, N. (1984) Caring: a Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, Berkeley: University of California Press. Noddings, N. (1992) Starting at Home. Caring and Social Policy, Berkeley: University of California Press. Nussbaum, M.C. (1999) ‘The Feminist Critique of Liberalism’, in Sex and Social Justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 55-80. Nussbaum, M.C. (2006) Frontiers of Justice. Disability, Nationality and Species Membership, Cambridge, Harvard University Press. Pattaroni, L. (2005) ‘Le care est-il institutionnalisable  ? Quand la politique du care émousse son éthique’, in S. Laugier and P. Paperman, Le souci des autres. Éthique et politique du care, Paris: Édition de L’EHESS, 177-200. Pettit, P. (1997) Republicanism. A Theory of Freedom and Government, New York: Oxford University Press.



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Sevenhuijsen, S. (1998) Citizenship and the Ethics of Care. Feminist Considerations on Justice, Morality and Politics, London: Routledge. Tronto, J. (1993) Moral Boundaries. A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care, New York: Routledge. Tronto, J. (2005) ‘Au-delà d’une différence de genre. Vers une théorie du care’, in S. Laugier and P. Paperman (eds), Le souci des autres. Éthique et politique du care, Paris: Édition de L’EHESS, 25-49.

10. Needs, Capabilities and Care Ethics Sophie Bourgault

Introduction The ethics of care has, from the very beginning, placed the notion of needs at the heart of its perspective on things moral and political.1 Indeed, what Gilligan’s In a Different Voice underscored is that “the different voice” was not primarily interested in the question of ‘what is right?’, but rather, gave pride of place, in moral dilemmas, to the question ‘how should I respond?’—‘how should I respond to the needs of others’? Since Gilligan, numerous authors have also insisted on the importance of an anthropology of needs for good moral reasoning and politics. Nel Noddings (1984), Sara Ruddick (1989), Joan Tronto (1993), Selma Sevenhuijsen (2003), Sandra Laugier (2010), Elisabeth Conradi (2001)—to name but a few— have all defined ‘care’ largely in terms of attentiveness and responses to needs. Noddings explicitly claims that care theory’s main point of reference is “needs rather than rights” (2010, 180), and Tronto insists that one of the key shifts in perspective called for by the ethics of care is to consider human nature and sociopolitical questions chiefly in terms of needs rather than interests. (1993, 164) Sarah Miller is thus right to conclude: “talk of need features prominently in the care ethics discourse. 1   This text was first translated in German and published in E. Conradi & F. Vosman (eds.) Praxis des Achtsamkeit. Schlüsselbegriffe der Care-Ethik, Frankfurt/New York: Campus Verlag (2016). We thank the editors for the permission to republish here in English.

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More so than any other philosophical perspective, care ethics investigates the subject matter of need in conjunction with both nurturing responsiveness to and responsibility for needs.” (Miller 2005, p. 141; my italics) One cannot overstate the significance of care ethics’ preferring a grammar of needs over one of rights.2 After all, modern political philosophy has, on the whole, generally preferred theorizing rights rather than needs. Despite Arendt’s famous claim that questions of needs and their satisfaction have spoiled the public sphere in the last century, few political philosophers and political scientists have sought to offer a full-fledged theory that would be anchored in the idea of needs. In the field of international development, the notion of “basic needs” did, however, have a brief moment of glory. For a few years in the late 1970s, the Basic Needs Approach (BNA) was one of the dominant perspectives on human development (Sen 1987; Baybrook 1987; Wiggins 1987; Reader 2006).3 But that moment was shortlived: the language of (basic) needs was soon eclipsed by the language of capabilities, largely in the wake of the work done by economist Amartya Sen and philosopher Martha Nussbaum—who are both convinced that thinking justice and well-being in terms of capabilities (instead of needs) is by far preferable. In the pages that follow, we will consider some of their arguments for the superiority of employing the concept of capabilities over that of needs. Most pertinent here will be Nussbaum’s claim that the capabilities approach (CA) is the best available approach to human development because it is best equipped to deal with what she considers to be the key problem for gender equality, namely care. (Nussbaum 2000, p.  244; cf. 2003, p. 36)

  But this is obviously not to suggest that care theorists have discarded rights—it is certainly not the case. Yet, many care theorists have insisted on the desirability of defending rights starting from an anthropology of need. 3   The BNA was not simply a commodity-focused approach (of the type Sen and Nussbaum would reject); in some versions at least, it proposed a fairly sophisticated vision of well-being. For a recent attempt to revive the BNA, see Reader 2006. 2



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Unsurprisingly then, many scholars working on care ethics have turned to Nussbaum’s work—and not simply to her work on capabilities, but also to her numerous writings on the emotions and social democracy (Tronto 1993; Kittay and Feder 2003; Engster 2005; Garrau and LeGoff 2010; Brugère 2013).4 The main goal of this chapter will be to introduce readers to the work of Martha Nussbaum on capabilities, to consider a few of its controversial aspects and to underscore the pertinence of the CA for care ethics. Our discussion will be in part informed by the following questions: Is the CA fully compatible with the relational ontology that is at the heart of an ethics of care? Is Nussbaum’s universal account at odds with the ethics of care’s emphasis on particulars? Is the CA too heavily steeped in the liberal gospel of choice and of rights to be a “good friend” of care ethics? If the answer is no, should care ethics set aside the controversial language of needs and wholeheartedly embrace that of capabilities instead? Alternately, it might be that care ethics does not have to choose between the language of needs and the language of capabilities—as we will briefly suggest in our conclusion. After considering the important contribution made by Nussbaum, we will turn to the work of Nancy Fraser. Fraser is most well known for her life-long efforts to come up with a robust socialist and feminist critical theory (1997)—one that would be able to address simultaneously demands for recognition and for redistribution. Our discussion of Fraser in this chapter, however, will be more specifically concerned with the articles she penned in the 1980s, in which she argued for a “politics of need interpretation”—one that sought to recast the academic debates concerning needs as discourses about needs (rather then need satisfaction). It is this “politics of need interpretation” that has found its way into the work of several care ethicists in North American and European circles (Sevenhuijsen 1998; Williams 2010; Mahon and Robinson 2011; Tronto 2013; Conradi 2015). We will thus, in the second section of this chapter, provide readers with an   Nussbaum herself has explicitly gestured towards care ethics; see especially Nussbaum 2006. 4

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overview of Fraser’s approach, highlight its relevance for care ethics and briefly compare it with Nussbaum’s CA. There are numerous good reasons for considering Fraser and Nussbaum in tandem: both have been significant sources of inspiration for many care theorists (not surprisingly given these two philosophers’ deep concern for gender justice and social welfare) and, quite interestingly for our purposes here, both have articulated their accounts of justice partially in reaction to the work of Sen (see particularly Nussbaum 2000; Fraser 1997). While Nussbaum has always been quite sympathetic to Sen’s work, she is nevertheless as concerned as Fraser is with showing the limits of Sen’s account of well-being for dealing with gender injustice and for setting up non-oppressive care practices.

Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach: a few concepts and controversies If Nussbaum has repeatedly claimed that she came to her theory of capabilities largely ‘on her own’ (i.e. through her work on Aristotle and social democracy; Nussbaum 2000, p. 70), there is no doubt that her sustained conversations with Amartya Sen deeply influenced her work—if at the very least by way of opposition. It is thus worth considering Sen’s work briefly here, for while it is well-known that Nussbaum’s work on the capabilities and disability is largely a critique of Rawls, many readers forget that her work is also a critique of Sen. It was in his 1979 Tanner lectures, “Equality of What?” that Sen first invoked the term ‘capability’, a term which he then linked up to a detailed approach to well-being in his influential Development as Freedom (1999). As he repeatedly insisted, this was ‘all’ he sought to offer: an approach, a “general framework”—and not a theory of justice (Sen 1984; 1989). Sen’s defense of a CA largely came through a critique of alternative approaches to development and poverty (particularly approaches that attached great significance to means, commodities and income). But most important amongst his targets was Rawls’ theory of justice and more specifically, its analysis of primary goods—which Sen considered insufficiently attentive to “the diversity of human beings” (1979, p. 215; cf. Nussbaum 2000: p. 68-69).



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What Sen called for was a new normative framework that would give pride of place not only to this diversity but more importantly, to individual freedom (Sen 1989, p.  18-19). For him, it was urgent to stop thinking about poverty chiefly or exclusively in terms of limited income, calorie-intake or commodities. What truly defines poverty, in his view, is the curbing of someone’s options and opportunities, the curbing of someone’s freedoms to do or to be certain things if the person values these things. Poverty is, then, above all a question of limited capabilities. Sen believes that approaching well-being and development in terms of capabilities rather than needs is better largely because it attaches great importance to freedom. While in his 1987 Tanner lectures Sen suggested that the CA could be seen as an “improved” needs approach, he nevertheless levelled numerous charges against the Basic Needs Approach:5 the BNA has an unclear normative/ philosophical foundation; it overstates the importance of commodities; and more interestingly for our purposes here, its notion of “needs” is passive and condescending. Sen writes: “’Needs’ is a more passive concept than ‘capability’, and it is arguable that the perspective of positive freedom links naturally with capabilities (what can the person do?) rather than with the fulfillment of their needs (what can be done for the person?)” (Sen 1984, p. 514; cited in Alkire 2005). For Sen, then, the language of needs has too many associations with notions of passivity, dependency, vulnerability; it has a ‘smell’ of paternalism. But what an ethics of care would probably interject here is that instead of putting aside the concept of need to embrace another that does not have these associations, one ought rather to interrogate the connections people make between needs-claim and passivity, vulnerability and humiliation.6 Also, instead of regarding needs as “exceptional” and the purview of the ill, the elderly or children, many care theorists have argued that we ought to see them as 5   The main representatives of this approach then were Paul Streeten, Frances Stewart and Mahbub ul Haq. 6   See O’Neill’s eloquent discussion of this in Reader 2005.

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constitutive of human existence as such, and hence, not in the least shameful. Patricia Paperman rightly insisted that “les gens vulnérables n’ont rien d’exceptionnels” (vulnerable people are not at all exceptionnal).7  Like Sen, Martha Nussbaum is deeply committed to individual freedom and thinks that the language of capabilities has greater purchase than that of needs.8 Also like Sen, Nussbaum is interested in proposing an account of well-being that puts emphasis on the quality of life and the availability of meaningful life options (rather than merely on commodities or means).9 But Nussbaum has taken the CA a step further, turning it into a theory of justice (if an “incomplete” one, she says (Nussbaum 2000, p.  75)10, with basic principles that should inform all constitutions around the world. Her account is, indeed, explicitly universalistic. (Nussbaum, p.  105) Let us take a closer look at how her account of the CA unfolds in Women and Human Development and what sort reception it has received. We will then briefly consider its various affinities and differences with an ethics of care. For Nussbaum, there is no doubt that the chief question to ask when assessing societies for how they fare on dignity and social justice, is the following: “what is this human being actually able to do or be?” What does this particular woman have in terms of opportunities or substantial freedoms? Can she actually decide to go to university if this is what she values? As we emphasize here, Nussbaum’s key unit of analysis is the individual: her CA explicitly calls for a society where each person is treated as an end, as a being worthy of dignity. (Nussbaum 2000, p.  74) The specific capabilities that Nussbaum  Or, as Reader and Brock have nicely put: “to be is to have needs” (2004, p. 265). 8   And more purchase than the idea of rights as well. For his position on the difference between rights and capabilities, see e.g. Sen 2005. 9   Much of Nussbaum’s work on capabilities (2000; 2003a; 2006) is concerned with showing the limits of resource-based and utilitarian approaches to international development. 10   Nussbaum (2000, p. 75) is ready to speak of a threshold level of capability, but many economic questions related to redistribution, public planning, private vs. public poverty, are brushed aside (which is a limit of her CA). 7



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defends are valued in and of themselves and for each man and woman taken separately; they are not valued for the sake of what they mean or entail for families or communities (even if they can certainly benefit collectivities). Only the individual has moral standing in her theory—not relationships, not families, not nations, etc. (Nussbaum 2000, p.  251) It is in fact precisely because families can sometimes compromise the development of capabilities in individual women that Nussbaum makes the individual the locus of her account and regards her CA as particularly helpful for thinking about care work. After all, “organic” conceptions of the family have too often been invoked in order to justify the neglect or sacrifice women’s very own needs and capabilities. Nussbaum writes: “an emphasis on individual rights and entitlements, far from removing opportunities for love and care, would seem essential in order to promote more fruitful and less exploitative styles of caring.” (Nussbaum 2000, p. 247) Central to Nussbaum’s account (and to her conviction that her CA is compatible with pluralism) is the distinction she makes between capabilities and functionings: that is, between the opportunities one has to achieve certain beings and doings (capabilities) and the actual achievements or realizations of these beings and doings (functionings).11 Examples of functioning could include: to be adequately nourished; to vote in an election, to travel to a foreign country, etc. Capabilities, on the other hand, would entail: to have a real opportunity to vote if one wants to and values voting (without fear of consequences, or moral pressure); to have a real opportunity to travel if one wants to, etc. As we have underscored here, of supreme importance for Nussbaum is the idea of having a choice, of selecting freely what one wishes to pursue and become. “The notion of freedom to choose is thus built into the notion of capability”. (Nussbaum 2011, p. 25) Nussbaum appeals to Sen’s discussion of starvation to mark the difference between functioning and capability and to explain why choice (more then, say, quantitative markers) is key for comparative assessments of well-being: “a person who is starving and a person who   For Sen’s own distinction, see 2009, p. 225-241.

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is fasting have the same type of functioning where nutrition is concerned, but they do not have the same capability, because the person who fasts is able not to fast, and the starving person has no choice.” (Nussbaum 2011, p. 25) While governments should be concerned with both functionings and capabilities, Nussbaum nevertheless argues that we should never make specific functionings the actual goal of public policy; this would violate people’s ability to exercise their practical reason (which is crucial for Nussbaum; see 2000, p. 82 and 92) and it would compromise pluralism. Numerous and real opportunities must be there—but “[c]itizens must be left free to determine their own course”. (2000, p. 87-88) Such a great emphasis being placed on individual choice and on using the individual as the basic unit of analysis is certainly not surprising given Nussbaum’s unwavering commitment to liberalism, if an amended liberalism, as Fabienne Brugère (2013) has correctly noted. But all this does raise some complex questions about the CA’s approach compatibility with care ethics. Now, part of what makes Nussbaum’s work so interesting and controversial is the fact that she is willing—unlike Sen12—to put forward a list of capabilities that all governments ought to follow as basic political principles. While the list is specific, the capabilities are nevertheless formulated in such a general way that this would allow each nation-state to implement things in a distinct manner.13 Her list includes the following: 1) Life; 2) Bodily Health; 3) Bodily integrity (one should be free from domestic violence and sexual assault); 4) Senses, Imagination and Thought; 5) Emotions (this includes: “to love those who love and care for us, to grieve at their absence”); 6) Practical Reason (“being able to form a conception of the good and to engage in critical reflection about the planning of one’s life”); 7) Affiliation (“Being able to live with and toward others, to ­recognize and show concern for other   This is the chief difference between Sen and Nussbaum. Other differences include: Sen does not ground his approach in an Aristotelian or Marxian perspective; he does not make a distinction between basic, internal and combined capabilities; he attaches less importance to emotions and imagination. (Nussbaum 2000, p. 13-14) 13  The point would be to use this list for “persuasion”, not implementation. (Nussbaum 2003c, p. 43) 12



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human beings, to engage in various forms of social interaction; to be able to imagine the situation of another and to have compassion for that situation”); 8) Other Species (“Being able to live with concern for and in relation to animals, plants and the world of nature.”); 9) Play; 10) Control over One’s Political and Material Environment (see ­Nussbaum 2000, p. 78-80; cf. 2011, p. 33-34). Note that there is not one specific capability labelled “care” in this list. Care simply cannot be considered a ‘separate’ thing according to Nussbaum, and this is in fact one of the chief reasons why she regards her CA as having the most purchase for thinking about gender justice. As she explains in her 2003 Tanner Lectures: Thinking well about care means thinking about a wide range of capabilities on the side of both the cared-for and the caregiver. […] good care constitutes a valuable form of attachment. Good care also supports the capability of the cared-for for practical reason and choice; it encourages affiliations of many other sorts, including social and political affiliations where appropriate. […] (Nussbaum 2003b, p. 451; my italics)

Care might not be a separate item on Nussbaum’s list, but it could be seen as everywhere on the list. In Women and Human Development, Nussbaum frequently emphasizes the fact that far too much of the caregiving work is still done by women around the world and sometimes by exceedingly young women. A good theory of justice thus has to take seriously these grave inequalities in the amount of care work that is shouldered by different individuals (and in the different degrees of dependencies, as she emphasizes in Frontiers of Justice). Acknowledging her debts to care theorist Eva F.  Kittay, Nussbaum repeatedly insists that a good theory of justice must pay equal amounts of attention to caregivers and to care-recipients: “any real society is a caregiving and care-receiving society, and must therefore discover ways of coping with these facts of human neediness and dependency that are compatible with the self-respect of the recipients and do not exploit the caregivers.” (Nussbaum 2003c, p. 51) Now, a few more important things about this list must be flagged here. First, Nussbaum presents her list as the result of extensive processes of cross-cultural discussion, where the voices of women from

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different cultural, religious, economic and political backgrounds were considered (although she admits that her research began with her own account of what she takes to be central goods).14 Nussbaum truly believes that what her CA offers is a universalist account of what constitutes a dignified life, one that is (as we noted above) respectful of individual freedom and of pluralism. It is respectful of pluralism first, because her CA does not specify outcomes (or functionnings) but only specifies opportunities; and second, because her list is only intended for “persuasion” purposes—she does not propose that any country be forced or coerced to implement any given measures (and implementation will be done in different ways from country to country). Nussbaum also insists that her list is a “freestanding” one; it is not tied to any particular metaphysics or teleology. (2000, p. 76-77) And last but not least, Nussbaum repeatedly underscores the fact that her list is “open-ended and humble; it can always be contested and remade”. (2000, p. 77; 2003c, p. 42). Now, the reason Nussbaum is so insistent on the open-ended nature of her list is that the mere act of list-making has been widely attacked by her critics. Naturally it has not been the only controversial thing: many critics have claimed, for instance, that her capability approach is too Western (and hence colonizing) and that it is excessively liberal (Jaggar 2006; Dean 2009). Some have also argued that, for a theory concerned with the very real affairs of poverty and development, it is an overly abstract work of philosophy that has limited practical relevance for the daily lives of women. Nussbaum has clearly taken most of these accusations to heart—witness the amount of time she spends on dealing with the charges and the frequent comments she makes about her modesty and humility. (Nussbaum 2000, p. 10-11; p. 298-303) But let us consider a bit more closely the criticisms of her work that are, to varying degrees, tied to the act of “list-making” —that is, 14   Thus, Nussbaum acknowledges that her list is not based on an aggregation of all women’s preferences. She openly admits that she refuses to give due respect to all human desires and preferences—‘corrupt’ and ‘mistaken’ ones can be disregarded. (2000, p. 111-166)



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of putting forward a list of specific capabilities that are said to be universally valuable. As Claassen (2011) has argued, the criticisms in question are tied to two slightly different concerns—a democratic one and an epistemic one (see also Jaggar 2006; Nelson 2008). The epistemic concern about the act of list-making is born out of a conviction that a philosopher’s knowledge will always be partial and situated, and thus, that it is highly problematic for Nussbaum to think that she could play the role of objective “philosopher-queen” here. (Jaggar 2006) For the second type of concern: some have argued that despite the consideration she gave to the voices of different women around the world, Nussbaum’s method of proceeding for building her list and her conviction that her list could serve as the basis for constitutional principles both greatly compromise formal democratic processes. In the eyes of some, public reasoning and public deliberation is far too important to sacrifice, even in the name of social justice or poverty alleviation. According to Jaggar (2006, p.  319-320), there is something not only anti-egalitarian but even “covertly authoritarian” about Nussbaum’s way of building a list starting from (her own) intuitions and understanding of a substantive good. Tronto (2010) has also raised questions about the undemocratic nature of Nussbaum’s list. Note here that it is precisely in light of similar concerns for the undemocratic nature of list-making that Sen has consistently refused to propose a particular list of capabilities, despite Nussbaum’s insistent effort to convince him otherwise. The reasons she recently invoked to try to convince him include the following: hers is a very abstract and open-ended list; the list only specifies capabilities—and as such, it leaves completely open the question of whether a particular person will in fact decide to take up a particular opportunity; and finally, the list is consistent with democratic principles, most notably individual freedom. (2003, p. 42-47) The controversy around Nussbaum’s list-making is relevant for us here because care ethics itself has struggled with the complex question of needs-identification almost from the beginning, when some of care ethics’ earliest critics raised concerns about the risks of paternalism. For some of these critics, the mere talk of phrasing a moral

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and political theory in terms of “needs” and “responding to needs” with attention and love was in itself quite problematic (and add to this the fact that care ethics gave a pride of place to vulnerability and dependence). Worried critics objected: who, exactly, was going to define those needs? It is partially in light of this concern that various theorists have emphasized that the identification of needs necessarily has to involve the care-recipients; European scholars like Sevenhuijsen (2003), Conradi (2001) and Heier (2015) have also insisted on the great importance of proper, attentive listening and of a strong communicative ethics (see also Bourgault 2015). Many care theorists have argued that—pace Nussbaum—their work would not seek to propose a specific or universal list of needs, for such a list would violate one of the chief principles of care ethics: namely, the need to care for particulars. (Recall that care ethics was in large part born out of a desire to criticize universalistic and neo-kantian accounts of morality and of politics.) If scholars like Tronto (1993) have acknowledged the universality of neediness, they have nevertheless insisted that caring needs are not to be specified and ought to be considered always within the context of particular situations and with regards to particular individuals. Now, over the years, a few scholars working on care have argued that more has to be said about what an ethics of care entails in terms of specific political institutions, social programs or public policies. But it could be that spelling this out might force care scholars to make fairly bold, universalistic or specific statements regarding human needs. Marie Garrau (2009) is one of the scholars who has lamented the fact that the ethics of care seems to have difficulty coming up with “une théorie politique compréhensive” (by ‘comprehensive’ she means at once a political and normative ideal but also detailed reflection on institutions and rules. Garrau and LeGoff (2010) have both suggested that Nussbaum’s capabilities approach could partially help care ethics answer this challenge.15 But if care ethics is to have a serious or sustained encounter with the CA, it will first have to spell out   And so might neorepublican thought in their view.

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at length what one should do with list-making.16 So far, few scholars of care have ventured into list-making; most have, in fact, expressed serious concerns about Nussbaum’s willingness to come up with a list of specific and universal capabilities. Notice for instance the slightly hesitant way Tronto tackles the complex issue of needs identification in her article “Creating Caring Institutions”: Needs, which are much more contested and unclear conceptually, raise many questions. Who should determine the needs of those who ‘need’ care? On one level, we expect people to be able to determine their own needs. On a second level, though, professional expertise may be necessary to make certain determinations of needs… Who then should be entrusted with such determinations? ‘Impartial’ observers? Philosophers, such as Martha Nussbaum […] who believe they have a better account of basic needs? [...] A number of feminist authors have supported some version of a ‘communicative ethics’ to guarantee that such needs interpretations will go on well […] Nevertheless, even such a commitment is no guarantee that the process will be workable. (Tronto 2010, p. 163-164, my emphasis)

Like many other theorists of care, Tronto has tried to propose an account of care that would be eminently democratic and respectful of both care-recipient and care-givers. While one might be a bit perplexed by the ambiguous answer Tronto offers us on the question of needs identification, we can certainly appreciate her desire to bring our attention to what is problematic in Nussbaum: her insufficiently politicized account of needs identification and interpretation. And it is certainly here that the work of Nancy Fraser is most relevant, as we will see shortly. Even if some critics of Nussbaum have faulted her for the illiberal nature of her list-making, others have—somewhat paradoxically— argued that she is far too committed a liberal to be considered the friend of feminists or of scholars truly devoted to remedying economic injustices. There is no doubt that Nussbaum is strongly committed to liberalism (2000, p.  244; 2003a, p.  194); as we saw above, that 16   In light of the ‘problem’ posed by list-making, we might want to consider the possibility that Sen’s model would be more harmonious with care ethics than Nussbaum’s. Casalini (2014) gestures in that direction.

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c­ ommitment is evident in her frequent insistence on the significance of personal choice17 and of making the individual the only unit of analysis. But one could soften the edges of Nussbaum’s liberal individualism by drawing readers’ attention to the great importance she attaches to affiliation in her work. Indeed, the two most important capabilities in her view are practical reason and affiliation—they “stand out as of special importance, since they both organize and suffuse all the others, making their pursuit truly human.” (2000, p. 82) Moreover, as we saw above, several of her capabilities have fairly strong relational aspects to them and the words ‘care’ ‘love’, compassion do pepper her list. Nussbaum considers it mildly baffling to hear people claim that individual rights might clash in important ways with a serious commitment to love and care: “an emphasis on individual rights and entitlements, far from removing opportunities for love and care, would seem essential in order to promote more fruitful and less exploitative styles of caring.” (2000, p. 247) The view that Nussbaum’s work is excessively individualistic thus needs to be looked at a little more closely. In a fairly recent review article on capabilities (2005), Ingrid Robeyns argues that critics of the CA ought to be clear on what they mean exactly by “individualism” when they decry its excessive individualism—do they mean an excessive ontological individualism or an excessive ethical individualism? In her view, it is absolutely correct to suggest that the CA celebrates the latter, but not the former. Robeyns insists that the CA’s ontology does recognize the numerous and meaningful connections between human beings; and it does give some consideration to the view that we are socially embedded creatures. While there is no doubt that the CA makes room for affiliation and celebrates the goods that are love and care for others, it remains true that its key point of departure (and its great ‘end’ too) is always the individual. And the question of whether a care ethics can convincingly be rephrased into a capability approach will depend on whether having   This is one of the things she shares with Sen, who writes “Being able to reason and choose is a significant aspect of human life.” (Sen 2009, p. 18) 17



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the (autonomous) individual as the point of departure (rather than relationships) is too jarring with most of the principles that are celebrated by an ethics of care. Hartley Dean (2009, p. 268-69) is of the view that it is no minor difference that the ethics of care takes connection and interdependence as its point of departure whereas Nussbaum’s CA opts for disconnection. For him, the strong relational ontology that one finds in most accounts of care ethics does jar quite violently with Nussbaum’s work. For Dean, it would thus be far better for feminist theorists to embrace a “politics of need interpretation” of the type Fraser proposes. Let us turn, then, to her work to see what it entails.

Nancy Fraser and the “politics of need interpretation” “the interpretation of people’s needs is itself a political stake, indeed sometimes the political stake.” Fraser 1989b, p. 145

Fraser’s well-known article “Talking about needs” (1989a) begins with the observation that needs-talk has been on the rise—a remarkable historical trend in her view. After all, up until roughly the 1950s/1960s, most questions pertaining to bodily needs, public housing and childcare were considered to be chiefly “private” issues, issues that were not considered worthy of being placed at the heart of public debates. For Fraser, there are obvious, intimate connections between this fairly recent politicization of bodily/‘domestic’ needs and the increasingly blurred lines between the private, political and economic spheres. While at first glance one might think that this is all necessarily good news for feminists, Fraser asks us to look a little more closely at these trends. After all, “needs-talk is neither inherently emancipatory nor inherently repressive. Rather, it is multivalent and contested.” (Fraser 1989a, p. 313; my italics) Fraser certainly welcomes the broadening of the category “political” that the recent politicization of needs has led to; but she is gravely concerned about the way certain discourses about needs might work against feminist interests. Shedding light on the highly contested nature of need interpretation is urgent according to Fraser because for far too long, p­ hilosophers of

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needs have simply taken as ‘given’ the identification and interpretation of people’s needs; and they have given insufficient attention to the question of who interprets the needs of particular groups and from what position of power and authority. Contrary to the likes of BNA scholar David Baybrooke (1987), Fraser is ultimately fairly uninterested in the question of the satisfaction of needs; what she calls our attention to is the very concrete political implications that flow from the way different institutions and groups (all occupying different positions of power and equipped with distinct amounts of cultural capital) interpret people’s needs. To illustrate her claims, Fraser (1997) draws in part on a comparative study of American social-welfare programs: a comparison between programs that are aimed primarily at men (unemployment assistance) with those that are primarily aimed at women/single-mothers (food stamps, public housing). What she indicates is that whereas male recipients are most typically portrayed as rights-bearing beneficiaries who are in need of well-earned and temporary benefits, female recipients are primarily regarded as vulnerable, dependent clients in need of therapy and “public charity”. (1989b, p. 153) What is most problematic according to Fraser is that too often, this very contestable interpretation of the needs and identities of poor single-mothers is presented to the aid-recipients (and often to the general population) as an objective one—an interpretation based on “facts” and thus, as not really subject to contestation or reinterpretation. But fortunately, politics is always about rival interpretations of people’s needs according to Fraser. And hence, the particularly questionable interpretation of women’s needs just mentioned cannot easily (or forever) claim hegemonic status in “the social”.18 Feminist activists can—and should—contest the identities and norms contained within particular welfare policies and institutions. Phrased differently: if needs often get politicized and interpreted “from above” (by policy-makers for instance), they can also get politicized and interpreted “from below”. In “Women, Welfare and the Politics of   Fraser (1989, p. 160) partially builds on Arendt’s account of ‘the social’, but also takes distance from it. 18



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Need Interpretation” (1989b), Fraser distinguishes between three competing ways of speaking of people’s needs: 1) expert needs discourses (say, those of welfare administrators); 2) oppositional movement needs discourse (feminist, race and working-class activists for instance); 3) and last but not least, “reprivatization” discourses (those promoted by groups and institutions that are convinced that we should push back certain politicized needs to their former domestic or economic domains). What this typology of discourses alerts us to is not only the varied places from which reinterpretation or contestability can come, but quite importantly for feminist scholars of care, it reminds us of the great fragility of the gains made by women over the last decades, regarding the politicization of childcare needs for instance. Indeed, while a few important issues related to care have (finally) been accepted as genuinely political ones, what Fraser’s work suggests is that we simply cannot take for granted that they will remain accepted as political. And as Tronto rightly emphasizes in Caring Democracy (2013), neoliberalism constitutes an added reason to worry about the reprivatization of certain needs. Now, Fraser is convinced that her ‘politics of need interpretation’ is the one that is best equipped to understand and deal with these challenges. It is a sufficiently fine approach that allows us to consider at once both the antiwelfarist defenders of privatization and the heavily gendered and antiparticipatory practices of the welfare system (think of the gendered expert discourse about welfare programs described above). Note that for Fraser, it is important for feminists to avoid “both the Scylla of private patriarchy and the Charybdis of public patriarchy”—or to phrase things differently, feminists should be wary of both reprivatisation discourses and expert needs discourses. And where they should place a bit more of their trust is in the third type of discourse: oppositional needs movements. (Fraser, 1989b, p. 158) Indeed, it is largely (albeit not exclusively) with the oppositional discourses of social movements that she most closely associates the dialogical and highly participatory ethic of solidarity that she invites feminists to embrace. It is this dialogical and participatory ethic that she considers to be most emancipatory—both from the point of view

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of cultural injustice and economic injustice.19 Most significantly for our purposes, Fraser claimed (in 1986 at least) that this ethic of solidarity is different from and superior to an ethic of care. In a paper entitled “Toward a Discourse Ethic of Solidarity” (which mostly consists of a commentary on Seyla Benhabib’s work),20 Fraser explains why, considered ‘from the point of view of politics’,21 her ethic of solidarity is more desirable than an ethic of care, in part because care ethics is excessively tied down to love and to “private, non-institutional norms and feelings” (1986, p.  427). For Fraser, an ethics of care cannot reach out widely enough—the ‘concrete other’ of care ethics is excessively particularized, individualized, and it is excessively based on the pre-politicized experiences of some women in her view. In this piece, Fraser draws a fairly sharp contrast between this and her own view of the concrete Other—a collective concrete other, one that can reach out to more than only women as a sub-group. Her conception of the ‘concrete other’ would stand somewhere in between the universalism of some liberal or neo-Kantian moral theories and the particularism of care ethics. She writes: this standpoint would require one to relate to people as members of collectivities or social groups with specific cultures, histories, social practices, values, habits, forms of life, vocabularies of self-interpretation and narrative traditions. Here one would abstract both from unique individuality and from universal humanity to focalize the intermediate zone of group identity. […] The norms governing these interactions would be neither norms of intimacy such as love and care, nor those of formal institutions such as rights and entitlements. (Fraser 1986, p. 428; my italics)

In short, in 1986 Fraser seems to have thought that care ethics was too closely tied to a fairly restricted group differentiation (here the   For more on her analysis of injustices (and how they often clash), see Fraser 1997 (ch.1). 20   Note, however, that we need not see a sharp contrast between her work and Benhabib’s. Witness, for instance, the work of Elisabeth Conradi (2015), which draws on both Fraser and Benhabib. 21   This is important because the subtext here is that considered solely as a moral perspective, the ethics of care might be equally desirable as an ethic of solidarity. 19



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group being, obviously, women).22 What she also considered problematic in Gilligan’s care ethics and, more implicitly, in that of Benhabib, was its overly acquiescent and trusting posture, and thus, its limited ability to face the real struggles and political battles entailed in need interpretation.23 (We know that Fraser embraces a view of politics that gives a pride of place to struggle and to an agonistic posture. Whether care ethics is easily reconcilable with this agonism is an open, and interesting, question.) Now, there are good reasons to think that Fraser would not offer a similar, overly simplistic, description of care ethics in 2015 (it is important to keep in mind that the critique of care we just considered is based on the (fairly small) scholarship written prior to 1986). Since then, most care theorists have gone well beyond ‘norms of intimacy’ and have proposed a much more political and critical account of care (think of the work of Held, Molinier, Laugier, Robinson, Conradi, Walker, Heier, Hamrouni). The fact that Fraser briefly suggested in 1986 that there was an important difference between her dialogical and participatory ethic of solidarity and the perspective of care ethics has obviously not stopped care theorists from finding great inspiration in her work. To name but a few, Joan Tronto, Rianne Mahon & Fiona Robinson, Fiona Williams, Elisabeth Conradi, Vivianne Bozalek and Selma Sevenhuijsen have all (briefly in some cases) gestured to Fraser’s politics of need interpretation. For many, Fraser’s work is particularly helpful for drawing our attention to the highly gendered and complex political stakes involved in needs identification. More specifically, for some, what Fraser’s politics of need interpretation invites us to do is to give more importance to the voices of oppositional movements— which is often the voice of care-recipients.24 When one adds Fraser’s   Readers familiar with Fraser will recall that she has expressed great sympathy for the destabilization of group identity in her “From Redistribution to Recognition?” (p. 27) 23   For Dean (2009, p. 274-275), the CA has a much less contestatory (and thus weaker) understanding of the public sphere than Fraser’s. 24   For a critique of the idea of turning Fraser’s “politics of needs interpretation” into a “politics of care interpretation”, see Shildrick and Mykitiuk (2005). 22

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insights to those of care ethics, one ends up displacing the authority of the Nussbaums of the world. Consider, for instance, the sort of insight Sevenhuijsen (2003) draws out of her mixture of Fraser and care ethics: from a politics of need interpretation, she suggests, “people themselves (can) have knowledge about their own subjectivity; in principle they are competent to express who they are and what they need. It takes seriously people’s stories about what they need to live well. In the ethics of care the crucial moral situations are those in which needs are interpreted.” (Sevenhuijsen 2003, p. 60, 138-139) For Sevenhuijsen, we always, necessarily need a public and radically democratic debate about needs: they should never be presumed. This is a point reiterated by Tronto in Caring Democracy, where she insists that for care to be democratic, one cannot ever presuppose that care professionals might know more about what constitutes ‘good care’ than mere care-recipients. (2013, p.  9-10) In short, for the likes of Fraser, Tronto and Sevenhuijsen, it seems that at the end of the day, the role of “experts” like Nussbaum should be a fairly limited one when the time comes to identify/interpret care needs. As we have intimated here, there is an important difference between the CA of Nussbaum and Fraser’s politics of need interpretation—namely, their distinctive views regarding the role of ‘experts’ in needs-definition. We would now like to consider whether there are other important differences between the CA and Fraser’s ‘politics of need interpretation’, and whether, at the end of the day, one of these two approaches could be said to be more compatible with care ethics. In her well-known piece “From Redistribution to Recognition”, Fraser suggests that one should see her work as an alternative to various theories of (distributive) justice, including the CA of Amartya Sen. In her view, Sen’s theory cannot satisfactorily account for demands for recognition. (See Fraser 1997, p.  13; Young 1990; Robeyns 2003)25 Robeyns has argued that Fraser’s charge can hardly be taken seriously given the importance Sen attaches to individuals   We emphasize ‘satisfactorily’ because, as Fraser acknowledges, her depiction of Sen is oversimplified (see p. 33). 25



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having real opportunities to be the person they want to be and to do the things they want to do, and to the way cultural and social norms might affect all this.26 More importantly for our purposes here, Robeyns (2003) argues that the CA is superior to Fraser’s theory because the CA is in a better position to give us a robust and broad normative framework to analyze various ethical problems and “develop policies and politics to deal with them”.27 Implicitly at least, Robeyns claims then that there is an unsatisfying amount of (moral) relativism in Fraser’s work.28 Because Fraser draws her readers’ attention to the great variety of needs interpretation and because she explicitly espouses a deconstructionist posture, it might be tempting to take Robeyn’s charge seriously. But we should look a little more closely at Fraser’s work: for she does, after all, explicitly claim that her “politics of need interpretation” does not preclude judgement between better or worse interpretations.(Fraser 1989a, p. 311-312) More specifically, Fraser believes that we ought to assess various needs interpretations on the basis of both procedural considerations (is democracy served here?) and consequentialist ones (is equality being served here?). This invitation to privilege both considerations is hardly surprising given how insistent she is, in Justice Interruptus, on the importance of taking seriously both cultural and economic injustices. But if the claim that there is moral relativism in Fraser is unconvincing, there might still be something to Robeyns’ claim that there is a “thicker” normative account in the CA—at least, in that proposed by Nussbaum. As we saw above, Nussbaum is interested in tying her account of capabilities and care to a fairly substantive account of what it means to be “human”. If this account is free of 26   “In the capability approach, preference formation, socialization, subtle forms of discrimination and the impact of social and moral norms are not taken for granted or assumed away, but analyzed up front. For example, women should not feel more social or moral pressure than men to prioritize their families over other activities…” (Robeyns 2003, p. 547) 27   Other reasons for CA’s superiority include that it can better deal with disability. (Robeyns 2003, p. 548-549) 28   For Nussbaum on relativism, see 2000, p. 48-49.

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metaphysical and teleological baggage (as we saw, Nussbaum repeatedly insists that hers is a “free-standing” conception of well-being), it is nevertheless anchored in fairly ‘thick’ normative claims—which is not surprising given the numerous years Nussbaum spent discussing Aristotle’s conception of the good. At the end of the day, it might be reasonable to suggest that there is a lot more Aristotle to Nussbaum’s account of the capabilities than there is of Marx or of Marxism (especially when we put Nussbaum’s CA next to Fraser’s work).29 This brings us to yet another difference between Fraser and Nussbaum—namely, the fact that Fraser takes a much more critical posture vis-à-vis capitalism than Nussbaum does (or at least, Fraser is more explicit in her criticisms of market capitalism and neoliberalism). Indeed, Fraser is unequivocally calling for a socialist redistributive economics. But one ought to be careful: embracing a “sociopolitics of socialist feminism” (Fraser 1997, p.  29) cannot be quickly equated with a blanket endorsement of welfare programs. Her work on the US social-welfare system made that point clear enough (in her view, it is not necessarily the case that all feminists should oppose all social-welfare cuts; see Fraser 1989a, p. 311-312). And it is important to keep this in mind as we contrast the radical nature of her commitment to a feminist socialism. Nevertheless, when one puts Fraser’s robust commitments side by side with Nussbaum’s more hesitant endorsement of particular economic and redistribution schemes, there is a noticeable and meaningful difference; we are invited to take a different (economic) route to social justice. While some of Nussbaum’s capabilities and functionings do seem to call for important social welfare programs and redistributive measures, she most often argues that these will be decided upon by particular nation-states. Recall that her list is meant for ‘persuasion’ only; not for implementation. What we might suggest, then, is that when care theorists reflect on whether it would be most helpful to take the route of capabilities or the route suggested by Fraser, they ought to give serious consideration to the   But see Nussbaum 2000, p. 13 and p. 71-74. On Fraser’s feminism, needs and Marxism, see Wicki (2015). 29



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type of ideologico-political commitments that undergird each approach to gender justice. If some French theorists of care have not hesitated to claim explicitly that “le care est bien une idée de gauche” (Molinier and Laugier 2010), many North American theorists have been a bit more hesitant to do so. Now, if Fraser seems to lean slightly more toward the left than Nussbaum and if Nussbaum does embrace a thicker moral conception of well-being and justice, both authors do, at the end of the day, offer us a rich blend of normative/ethical argument and empirically based, engaged and practice-oriented analysis. (Fraser 1989, p. 6; Nussbaum 2000) And this, undoubtedly, is one of the many reasons why both of their work has been appreciated by theorists of care—who tend to agree with Tronto (1993) that there should not be an ethics of care without a politics. If Nussbaum has little patience for deconstruction (e.g. Nussbaum 2000, p.  11) and would not want to be labelled an “academic radical” (a label with which Fraser is perfectly comfortable), she is as convinced as Fraser is that philosophy ought to be politically committed. But that commitment is anchored differently and has a different ‘reach’: we saw above that for Nussbaum, it is the individual that is the chief unit of analysis and that it is individual freedom (individual choice) that is one of the great aims of the CA. With Fraser, the individual seems to take a backseat; it is groups—a great variety of groups—that take center-stage; and the gospel of (individual) freedom gets replaced with the gospel of (collective) solidarity.

Needs or capabilities: A badly posed question? In a slightly surprising passage of her article “Capabilities as fundamental entitlements”, Nussbaum argues that one of the numerous reasons why we should embrace the language of capabilities is that it is not associated by most people with the (rich) Western world.30 As she often made clear in her work, rights do play and should continue 30   Nussbaum does not, however, think it is entirely fair to suggest that the notion of individual rights can only be found in the Western tradition. She thinks rights language does have resonances in various historical and religious traditions (2003, p. 39).

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to play very important functions in public discourse and she certainly wants to hold onto them in her work on gender justice. But she admits that subsuming rights discourse under the category of capabilities might be better for convincing people all over the world that the CA is not a Western, colonizing gesture. She writes: the language of capabilities has one further advantage over the language of rights: it is not strongly linked to one particular cultural and historical tradition, as the language of rights is believed to be…. When we speak simply of what people are actually able to do and to be, we do not […] give the appearance of privileging a Western idea. Ideas of activity and ability are everywhere, and there is no culture in which people do not ask themselves what they are able to do and what opportunities they have for functioning. (Nussbaum 2003, p. 39)

One could say that it is partially for strategic, rhetorical reason that Nussbaum espouses the term ‘capability’. Recall that Sen also made a slightly similar claim about the language of needs: that the language of needs has to be eschewed because of its poor ‘marketing’ potential—because the term ‘needs’ is too heavily steeped in passivity, vulnerability and paternalism. Quite surprisingly, Fraser has expressed comparable concerns about the language of needs in her work and has admitted that rights discourse might, at the end of the day, be preferable because it is less paternalistic: “Like many radical critics of existing social-welfare programs I am committed to opposing the forms of paternalism that arise when needs claims are divorced from rights claims. And unlike some communitarian, socialist and feminist critics, I do not believe that rights-talk is inherently individualistic, bourgeois-liberal [...].” (Fraser 1989, p. 313) While Fraser did not cite particular feminists here, it could be that she had some feminist theorists of care in mind. After all, a few of them (especially in the 1980s) have expressed concerns about the limits and pitfalls of rights discourse, as they sought to critically assess the “justice paradigm”. But the view that care theorists have rejected rights en masse is, of course, completely incorrect: what they have tried to show is not why needs discourse should replace rights discourse, but rather, why starting from an anthropology of needs might



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offer a more robust political theory. Quite telling is the fact that for all their great disagreements, Tronto and Noddings have both insisted that rights must be part of any good account of an ethics and a politics of care. In Caring Democracy, Tronto makes a strong case for three important ‘rights to care’—which would include not only the right to receive adequate care throughout one’s life but also (and perhaps what is most critical to appreciate the contribution made by care ethics over the last two decades) the right to care. Indeed, Tronto invites her readers to understand a truly caring democracy as one where “everyone is entitled to participate in relationships of care that give meaning to their lives.” (Tronto 2013, p. 153-54) As such, the question of whether we should choose a framework of needs or rights could be said to be partially moot—although we do think that care ethics’ efforts to force a philosophical reconsideration of the old (and tiresome) associations between needs, humiliation and passivity is an exceedingly important one. Note that Nussbaum herself certainly does not shy away from embracing the terms ‘neediness’ or vulnerability (her earlier work on Greek thought and the fragility of goodness certainly contains a fine account of vulnerability). Significantly for our purposes here, Nussbaum (implicitly at least) argues that there is no great chasm between capabilities and needs. In “The Future of Feminist Liberalism”, she underscores repeatedly the fact that we ought to look at the human being as at once “capable and needy”. (2003a, 194; my italics) What might this suggest for care ethics’ future relationship with the CA and the politics of need interpretation? Earlier, we noted that Fraser and Nussbaum seem at times to pull us in slightly different directions (e.g. one towards solidarity; the other towards individual autonomy); we also noted that they have a different perspective on the respective roles that experts/philosophers and the demos should play in the identification and interpretation of needs. Should care ethicists, then, not take a clear position on which of the two authors offer ‘the best’ account of politics and of care? While we think that Fraser and Nussbaum can take us in divergent ideological directions, at the end of the day the question of whether needs or

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capabilities would have the best theoretical purchase can only be answered with this (unsatisfying) response: “it depends”. It depends—as Fraser so correctly insisted—on the way the needs and capabilities are interpreted. If “needs-talk” is not “inherently emancipatory nor inherently repressive” as Fraser noted, the same can be said about capabilities.

Literature Alkire, S. (2005) ‘Needs and Capabilities’, The Philosophy of Need. New York: Cambridge University Press. Baybrooke, D. (1987) Meeting Needs. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bourgault, S. (2015) ‘Repenser la ‘voix’, repenser le silence  : l’apport du care’, in S. Bourgault and J. Perreault, Le care  : Éthique féministe actuelle, Montréal: RemueMénage, 163-188. Brock, G. and S. Reader (2004) ‘Needs, Moral Demands and Moral Theory’. Utilitas, 16(3): 251-266. Brugère, F. (2013) ‘Martha Nussbaum ou la démocratie des capabilités’, published on laviedesidees.fr (March 19th). Brunella, C. (2014) ‘Etica della cura, disability studies e approccio delle capacità’, downloaded from: formazionelavoro.regione.emilia-romagna.it (September 10th, 2015) Claassen, R. (2011) ‘Making Capability Lists: Philosophy versus Democracy’, Political Studies. 59: 491-508. Conradi, E. (2001) Take Care: Grundlagen einer Ethik der Achtsamkeit, Frankfurt am Main: Campus. Conradi, E. (2015) ‘Redoing Care: Societal Transformation through Critical Practice’, Ethics and Social Welfare, 9(2): 113–129. Dean, H. (2009) ‘Critiquing capabilities: The distractions of a beguiling concept’, Critical Social Policy, 29: 261. Fraser, N. (1986) ‘Toward a Discourse Ethic of Solidarity’, Praxis International, 5(4): 425-429. Fraser, N. (1989a) ‘Talking about Needs: Interpretive Contests as Political Conflicts in Welfare-State Societies’, Ethics, 99(2): 291-313. Fraser, N. (1989b) Unruly Practices. Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory, Cambridge: Polity Press. Fraser, N. (1997) Justice Interruptus. Critical Reflections on the ‘Postsocialist’ Condition, New York: Routledge. Garrau, M. and A. Le Goff (2010) Care, Justice, Dépendance. Introduction aux théories du care. Paris  : PUF. Hamrouni, N. (2015) ‘Dépendance, services publics, care et discours familialiste  : Une critique du modèle d’égalité des sexes d’Eva F. Kittay’, Recherches féministes, 28(1): 61-77.



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Heier, J. (2015) ‘Disabling Constraints on Democratic Participation: Challenges for a Political Theory of Care’, Ethics and Social Welfare, 9(2): 201-208. Jaggar, A.M. (2006) ‘Reasoning About Well-Being: Nussbaum’s Methods of Justifying the Capabilities’, Journal of Political Philosophy. 14(5): 301-322. Laugier, S. et P. Paperman eds (2011) Le souci des autres. Éthique et politique du care, Paris: Editions de l’EHESS. Mahon, R. and F. Robinson (2011) Feminist Ethics and Social Policy: Towards a New Global Political Economy of Care, Vancouver: UBC Press. Miller, S. (2005) ‘Need, Care and Obligation’, in S.  Reader ed, The Philosophy of Need, New York: Cambridge University Press. Molinier, P., S. Laugier and P. Paperman (2009) Qu’est-ce que le care? Souci des autres, sensibilité, responsabilité. Paris: Payot. Molinier, P. et S. Laugier (2010) ‘Le care  : un modèle alternatif au discours de droite’, published online, Raison publique.fr, May 15th, . Nelson, E. (2008) ‘From Primary Goods to Capabilities’, Political Theory, 36(1): 93-122. Noddings, N. (2010) The Maternal Factor. Two Paths to Morality, Berkeley: University of California Press. Nussbaum, M. (1992) ‘Human functioning and social justice. In defense of Aristotelian essentialism’, Political Theory, 20(2): 202–246. Nussbaum, M. (2000) Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nussbaum, M. (2003a) ‘The future of feminist liberalism’, in E. F.  Kittay and E. K. Feder (eds), The Subject of Care: Feminist Perspectives on Dependency, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Nussbaum, M. (2003b) Beyond the Social Contract: Toward Global Justice. Tanner Lectures on Human Values. S.415-507. Nussbaum, M. (2003c), ‘Capabilities as Fundamental Entitlements: Sen and Social Justice’, Feminist Economics, 9(2-3): 33-59. Nussbaum, M. (2006) Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Nussbaum, M. (2011) Creating Capabilities. The Human Development Approach. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Olthuis, G., H. Kohlen and J. Heier (2014) Moral Boundaries Redrawn. Ethics of Care Series, 3, Leuven: Peeters. Reader, S. ed (2005) The Philosophy of Need. New York: Cambridge University Press. Robeyns, I. (2003a) ‘Is Nancy Fraser’s Critique of Distributive Justice Justified?’, Constellations, 10(4): 538-553. Robeyns, I. (2003b) ‘Sen’s Capability Approach and Gender Inequality: Selecting Relevant Capabilities’, Feminist Economics, 9(2-3): 61–92. Robeyns, I. (2005) ‘The Capability Approach: A Theoretical Survey’, Journal of Human Development, 6(1): 93–114. Ruddick, S. (1989) Maternal Thinking. Towards a Politics of Peace. Boston: Beacon Press.

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Sen, A. (1980) ‘Equality of What?’, in M. McMurrin (ed), Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sen, A. (1984) Resources, values and development, Oxford: Harvard University Press. Sen, A. (1999) Development as Freedom, New York: Knopf. Sen, A. (2004b) ‘Capabilities, Lists and Public Reasons: Continuing the Conversation’, Feminist Economics, 10(3): 77–80. Sen, A. (2005) ‘Human Rights and Capabilities’, Journal of Human Development, 6(2): 151–66. Sen, A. (2009) The Idea of Justice, London: Allen Lane. Sevenhuijsen, S. (2003) Citizenship and the Ethics of Care: Feminist Considerations on Justice, Morality and Politics. New York: Routledge. Shildrick, M. and R. Mykitiuk eds (2005) Ethics of the Body: Postconventional Challenges, Cambridge: MIT Press. Tronto, J. C. (1993) Moral Boundaries. A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. NewYork: Routledge. Tronto, J. C. (2010) ‘Creating Caring Institutions: Politics, Plurality, and Purpose’, Ethics and Social Welfare, 4(2): 158-171. Tronto, J. C. (2013) Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality and Justice. New York: New York University Press. Wicki, M. (1995) ‘Braucht es einen feministischen Katalog der Grundbedürfnisse?: Über Bedürfnisinterpretation, Machtteilhabe und eine neue Zeitökonomie’, Rote Revue: Zeitschrift für Politik, Wirtschaft und Kultur, 73, 4, S.7-16. Wiggins, D. (1987) Needs, Values, Truth. Essays in the Philosophy of Value, London: Basil Blackwell. Williams, F. (2010) ‘Claiming and Framing in the Making of Care Policies: the Recognition and Redistribution of Care’, Paper presented to the 5TH International Carers Conference: New Frontiers in Caring: 2010 and Beyond, 8–11 July 2010 (Leeds).

11. Animal Ethics: Frontier of Justice or Frontier of Care Ethics? Solange Chavel

Animal ethics is in many ways a fitting field of application for the theory of care.1 While a care approach emphasizes our emotional connections with animals, while at the same time refusing to base this moral relationship on certain shared characteristics many have sought to identify between humans and animals, care theorists further demonstrate the richness of an approach that has already made its mark in the fields of interpersonal ethics and politics. At the heart of any analysis deployed from the point of view of care is the insight that attending to the individual is always a crucial component of morality. For our present purposes, this means attending to individual forms of animal life in all their irreducibility and singularity. One objective of this chapter will be to consider the following question: what is the difference, morally speaking, between approaching questions concerning animals from a justice perspective as opposed to a care perspective? Care theorists’ opposition to leading philosophers in the field of animal ethics, such as Peter Singer and Tom Regan, primarily has to do with a fundamental question about the basis of our relationship to animals. The disagreement, therefore, is not so much with the conclusions reached by these authors, but rather has to do with the way 1   This text was originally published in Tous vulnérables? Le care, les animaux, l’environnement, Paris  : Payot, 2012. We wish to thank Payot for the permission to republish in English here.

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they frame the question about our moral relationship to animals. To sum up this disagreement in two key terms: care theorists reject what they consider a twofold manoeuver (even if it may appear contradictory) of distancing and homogenization. Distancing, because with Regan and Singer, our moral relationship to animals depends, from the outset, on placing any sense of community we have with animals (or any emotional bond we share with them) at a distance. This sense of community is, to be sure, sentiment-laden and as such, is thought to be distortive of any rigorous thought or argumentation. But homogenization also, because this moral relationship to animals is established on the basis of similar moral criteria found in animals and humans: the utilitarian argument (just like rights-based approaches) is essentially an argument about consistency, or rather, a certain way of construing a requirement for consistency in our reasoning. The argument generally proceeds thusly: if we have a certain type of moral relationship to other humans because they possess a certain quality and it can be shown that animals also have this quality, it follows, for the sake of consistency, that we ought also to establish the same kind of moral relationship to animals. We ought to treat what is similar in relevant respects in similar ways. All of the argumentative legwork hence consists in showing animals’ morally relevant likenesses to humans: a capacity for suffering and enjoyment, “the ability to have interests” for Peter Singer, or else a very basic form of rationality and agency that Tom Regan identifies as the quality of being a “subject-of-a-life.” The specific nature of a care approach to animal ethics could almost entirely be captured in two features opposite to remoteness and homogeneity: a close focus on our connections with animals, and the noticing that any moral relations we actually have with animals always involve the recognition of animal lives in their individuality (instead of a broader search for likenesses to human beings). The concept of “attention” encapsulates these two aspects. Our moral relationship to animals is grounded in attending to particular living creatures.

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To complete this brief overview of what a care approach as it applies to animal ethics entails, it is also important to note its conscious and exhibited political radicalism: the care approach is also a critical exercise in exposing a political structure and social practices that systematically render invisible certain forms of animal suffering that we as a society nevertheless organize. In brief, care ethics as it applies to animals is about going “beyond compassion,” to borrow Josephine Donovan and Carol Adams’ expression: “The care theory we advocate goes beyond compassion to include caring enough to find out who is causing the harm and stopping it.” (Donovan and Adams 2007, p.  14). We can see here that critically and morally attending to political structures are one and the same action. “Beyond compassion” is precisely the maxim Martha Nussbaum uses in her writing on animals (Nussbaum 2006). This expression is certainly not the only trait Nussbaum shares with care theorists on animal ethics. Several points in common would indeed indicate, on the face of it at least, a rapprochement between Nussbaum and proponents of a care approach on the subject of animals: 1) Firstly, both have the same theoretical opponents. Just like care theorists, Nussbaum points to the limits of an approach like Singer’s or Regan’s, and does so for similar reasons; 2) Next, Nussbaum also gives significant weight to the emotions, whereas Regan and Singer explicitly obviate them from the outset; 3) Thirdly, Nussbaum also stresses, drawing on an idea in ancient philosophy of the kind of community that humans may form with other living beings, a community founded primarily on a shared fundamental condition of having a physical body and hence of experiencing vulnerabilities, limitations and mortality; 4) Finally, in acknowledging this living community, Nussbaum also attaches considerable importance to attending to the particularities of various life forms, eschewing on principle a homogenizing attitude that in her view is insufficiently attentive to the diversity of forms that the flourishing of living beings may take.

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As the above list shows, both Martha Nussbaum’s and care theorists’ approaches have a few far-reaching points in common in their respective approaches to animals. But they also diverge considerably insofar as for Nussbaum, animal ethics is conceived of as a frontier of justice. Indeed, Nussbaum’s writing on animals is part of an overall approach consisting in an internal critique of the Rawlsian theory of social justice. That is, she takes up the main principles laid out in A Theory of Justice, proposing we extend their scope. Thus, the general approach of Frontiers of Justice, a book in which animals figure greatly, consists in adopting the broad strokes of the Rawlsian approach to political justice and advocating for its extension to subjects left to the margins: the disabled, non-citizens and animals. Nussbaum’s criticisms of Regan and Singer positively yield a theory of animal capabilities. While it is necessary to go “beyond compassion” according to Nussbaum, this does not mean adopting a care approach, but instead entails formulating our relationship to animals from a justice perspective that uses the same terms and the same expressions found in her own theory of justice that employs the conceptual tool of capabilities. Save for these important resemblances, the approaches of Nussbaum and of care theorists to questions concerning animals also diverge significantly. The question arises as to what to make of this situation. I will now offer two possible readings of the difference, which I hope will bring the radicalness of the care approach to the fore. A first possible reading downplays this apparent divergence. It consists in stating that despite appearances to the contrary, there is no contradiction between the two approaches, only a difference of intent, since each approach is subtended by a different goal. Proponents of the care approach are primarily concerned with properly grounding their ethical discussions concerning animals in their relations with humans, unlike both the utilitarian and entitlements-based approaches. Nussbaum also opposes these traditional approaches, while evidently agreeing with the care approach on grounding an ethic in our relationships with animals: relationships we are factually engaged in with other life forms that are both emotional and practical. Nussbaum, however, resorts

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to formulations in terms of justice to develop her theory of animal capabilities because she is concerned with the political applications of her approach. Her aim is to couch animal interests in a way that translates into the public political space and can be applied ­judicially. Even if, as I will clarify in more detail in a moment, this reading of Nussbaum’s approach vis-à-vis the care approach is, in my opinion, not the most insightful, it is helpful for pointing out an important difference between Nussbaum’s list of capabilities and the animal capacities Tom Regan enumerates. Both lists play a fundamentally different role within their respective arguments. Regan inventories certain animal capacities in order to justify the very idea of ​​equal moral treatment of the animals that possess them. For Nussbaum, it is not a question of finding in her list of capabilities so many reasons to guarantee rights; on the contrary, it is about underscoring the range of considerations that ought to be afforded to animals. I believe, however, that a second interpretation according to the frontier of justice/frontier of care distinction is more accurate and by contrast, more powerfully shows the radical nature of the care approach. To demonstrate this difference of approach, I would like to revisit one of Nussbaum’s proposals. As I mentioned earlier, Nussbaum maintains that the proper attitude toward animals is to go beyond the duties of compassion and humanity expounded by Rawls in his Theory of Justice. The best way to go about doing this, in her view, is to develop a capabilities approach where animals are concerned. In her view, the principle is the same as with political justice for human beings: each animal ought to be guaranteed a minimum set of certain basic capabilities, similar to the ten basic human capabilities that Nussbaum lists in several of her political writings (not dying prematurely, being able to participate in community life, having opportunities to exercise one’s emotional and physical functions, and so forth). Accordingly, Nussbaum produces a similar list of capabilities, one adapted to non-human animals. But the issue of possible conflicts between these different capabilities—as indeed in the case of human beings—quickly surfaces, because it is emphasized that they

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are incommensurable goods, meaning a profusion of one cannot make up for the loss of another. For example, a conflict might arise between a tiger’s capability of exercising its hunting skills, and the gazelle’s capability to live a life that is not prematurely shortened. Nussbaum sees this problem as calling for external arbitration to address certain cases (as practiced in many zoos), for example, giving tigers large balls on a rope to play with. What is noteworthy here, for my purposes, is the line of reasoning employed: Nussbaum attempts to bring her justice approach to bear on various situations as consistently as possible, even if this involves some rather drastic interventions in the lives of animals in order to establish just relations, or even where this admits of forms of “arbitration” whose very idea seems at times a little absurd. In so doing, it seems to me that the philosophical approach Nussbaum takes is actually not so different from the one exemplified by Singer or Regan after all; even while our moral relationship to animals is grounded differently with Nussbaum than with Regan or Singer, Nussbaum’s capabilities, once established, are pursued for the sake of logical consistency, leading us to revise certain relationships that exist between animals or intervene radically in their lives to arbitrate conflicts between various capabilities. Despite its attention to particular forms of life and flourishing of different animal species, the capabilities approach reintroduces a homogenizing posture that is partially at odds with some of the most fundamental characteristics of Nussbaum’s approach to moral reflection. A few of Cora Diamond’s remarks, often seized upon by both care and animal ethicists, can help to clarify this criticism. What Diamond finds especially objectionable with what she calls the ReganSinger approach is its misplaced commitment to determining “reasons” for a moral distinction, or absence thereof, between humans and animals.2 This search for “reasons” is also a way of thinking that 2  See Cary Wolfe, “Exposures”, in S.  Cavell, C.  Diamond, I.  Hacking and J. McDowell (2008) who in this vein groups Nussbaum, Singer and Regan together in opposition to approaches that draw on Wittgenstein such as Cora Diamond’s, or even Jacques Derrida’s in L’animal que donc je suis (2006).

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the question of what the correct moral relationship to animals is can be resolved “empirically,” by gathering relevant facts, or by making new discoveries about the cognitive and affective capacities of the various species. Nussbaum’s capabilities approach indeed also sets out to find an empirical form of the “correct” moral criterion. In other words, what is missing in Nussbaum’s analysis on this point is Diamond’s fine insight that our moral relationship to animals is not grounded primarily in empirically verifiable biological distinctions, but above all, in the practices that go along with the very learning of the designations “human being” and “animal.” For Diamond, the human/animal distinction is morally significant regardless of any naturalistic biological criteria we happen to discover. The concept of the human being that we employ in our ethical discussions is not a biological concept and the debate about animal rights ought to grant this. Diamond notes that our moral relationship to other human beings can be gleaned in practices such as giving someone a name, or in the fact that an exchange of glances expresses recognition of the other’s humanity or conversely denies it, and so forth (Diamond 1978). This obviously does not mean that Diamond thinks that there are no moral relationships to be had outside of the circle of humanity. To the contrary, it means that our expressions about our moral relationship to animals must acknowledge the fact that the human/animal distinction, in many respects, is something wholly other than biological. It is therefore not only by paying attention to biological life forms that we will find the answer to the question of our ethical relationship to animals: the attention must be directed elsewhere as well, to our language use and practices that are “human” or “animal.” It appears that Nussbaum, for all that distinguishes her from Singer or Regan, adopts the same basic methodological presupposition: that it is a naturalistic attention to the various forms of life which alone should guide us in the formulation of our moral relationship to animals. Unlike Diamond, Nussbaum does not consider that there may be something morally significant in our purely conceptual differences between humans and animals, or between various kinds of animals.

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In no way does Diamond claim to provide an answer to the questions opened up by animal ethics. But her reflections do draw attention to certain unwittingly biased ways of asking the question. Moreover, the comparison with Nussbaum shows in a nutshell the kind of attention that the ethics of care as it applies to animals places at the heart of its approach: not just naturalistic attention, but attention to our everyday practices that are already inherently moral. Here also is where care’s political radicalism comes to light, in contrast with Nussbaum’s approach. For Nussbaum, animal ethics represents a frontier of justice since it calls for an extension of the existing principles of liberal political justice. But it does not call for any deeper critical understanding. Conversely, care theorists pursue a more radical project of critical theory, one carried out with the explicit aim of exposing an oppressive structure. Translated by Madeleine Taylor.

Literature Cavell, S., C. Diamond, I. Hacking and J. McDowell (2008) Philosophy and Animal Life, New York: Columbia University Press. Derrida, J. (2006) L’animal que donc je suis, Paris: Galilée. Donovan, J. and C. J. Adams eds (2007) The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics: A Reader, New York: Columbia University Press. Nussbaum, M. (2006) Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership Cambridge: The Belknap Press, Harvard University Press. Diamond, C. (1978) ‘Eating Meat and Eating People’, Philosophy, 53(206): 465–479.

12. Care Ethics and Disability Studies: A Common Political Project? Aurélie Damamme

The concern to recognize the right to expression and to full social and political participation of people with disabilities has become more apparent, as is evidenced in the title of the 2005 Disability Act in France,1 as well as in the adoption of laws that give greater consideration to the rights of service users, such as the one in 2002 which brought reforms to French medico-social institutions.2 Transformation in ways of defining disability in France, which increasingly recognize the societal construction of disability, would seem to reflect a wider paradigm shift brought about by researchers in the field of disability studies3, an academic field spearheaded by members of the disability rights movement themselves, and one that has gained   I.e. the Loi pour l’égalité des chances et des droits, la participation et la citoyenneté des personnes handicapées (enacted on February  11, 2005), or Act for Equal Rights and Opportunities, Participation and Citizenship of Persons with Disabilities. 2   This chapter was originally published in Politiser le care? (Paris, Bord de l’eau, 2012), A. LeGoff and M. Garrau eds. We wish to thank the publisher for the permission to republish here in English. 3   Despite having gained relatively little ground in French academia, this approach has influenced new understandings of disability at an international level, as evidenced by the International Classification on Functioning, Disability and Health, adopted in 2001 by the WHO. For a more detailed presentation of this trend, see especially, G.L. Albrecht, J.-F. Ravaud and H.-J. Stiker (2001) “L’émergence des disability studies: état des lieux et perspectives”, in Sciences sociales et santé, 19(4): 43–78 and C. Thomas (2007) Sociologies of Disability and Illness: Contested Ideas in Disability Studies and Medical Sociology, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 1

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ground primarily in Western English-speaking countries. Even if the 2005 French Disability Act only partially espouses the new international societal approach to disability, the shift in perspectives it represents is nevertheless significant. In view of the different relationships between families, care recipients and care professionals, we will consider below various ways of understanding the power dynamics within care practices involving people with disabilities. Drawing on the work of proponents of both disability studies and the ethics of care4, we will consider how both fields marry their accounts of care work to a particular political project. Disability studies authors focus on bringing the points of view of people with disabilities to bear on anything involving the creation of policies and programmes specifically related to people with disabilities, as reflected in the motto, “nothing about us without us.” Proponents of care ethics, on the other hand, emphasize the importance of recognizing the magnitude and value of activities whose purpose is the upkeep and maintenance of life within our social and political institutions. While these two approaches are indeed distinct, some of their proponents evince a common concern to take stock of power relations in concrete situations. Putting each actor’s role in the caring/helping relationship in perspective has led these authors to revisit the concept of autonomy in a way that does not elude the tension between emancipatory projects and an eventual need for protection. Using as a basis the work of several authors, who are often themselves quite critical of their own field of research (whether disability studies or care ethics scholarship), our goal here is to reflect on the social and political conditions for a true appreciation of the situations of people affected by disability.

The process of care and power relations The demand for greater autonomy in different areas of life is upheld by various associations and groups of people with disabilities and their 4   The authors I draw on in this discussion are also specifically feminist authors, which is reflected, among other things, in their shared sensitivity to the importance of personal experience.

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representatives (Barral, Paterson, Stiker and Chauvière 2002). These demands are generally supported by arguments built around the recognition of their rights. Although this mobilization has not in France given rise to a field comparable to the one observed in English-­speaking countries, it nevertheless invites us to view these demands from the perspective of a “disability movement and disability studies [which] in the public space have called for these people’s ‘empowerment’ (their ability to have control over their own lives), the recognition of their expertise concerning their own condition, and the recognition of their desire to be involved with the decisions that affect them.” (Ravaud and Ville 2010, p. 217) Requiring that we heed the voices of people with disabilities thus leads to a more general reflection on the place ­occupied by each actor involved in care practices. The care ethics approach put forward by Evelyn Nakano Glenn (2000, p. 84–94) is useful for empirically grasping these care practices in action, in all their diversity and ambiguity. Her approach underscores three main characteristics of care: 1) Everyone needs care, not just the elderly, children, or people with disabilities. Independent adults can, however, preserve their sense of independence if they have sufficient economic or social resources; they can “order” the care of others, and need not rely on family and/or charity; 2) Care is seen as creating a relationship. As Evelyn Nakano Glenn explains, quoting Sara Ruddick: “[caring] work is constituted in and through the relationship with those who give and receive care,” (Glenn 2010, p. 87) the emphasis here being on this relation’s interdependence rather than on the power that the caregiver may wield in the relationship. The care receiver also has an agency in the relationship. 3) The definition of care as a practice recognizes that care can be organized in a myriad of ways. Thus, care is both particular and universal. That is, what constitutes the best or most appropriate care will always be culturally and socially informed and therefore varies (hence the importance of drawing on a diversity of perspectives on

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care practices). At the same time, care is a universal component of human life. These three aspects make it necessary to analyze care as a process so as to make visible the various phases or steps that can be taken in different ways and that determine the type of care actually received. This understanding of care as a process is borrowed from Joan Tronto (1993), who identifies the different phases of care while associating them with various moral dispositions. Indeed, if we define care, as Joan Tronto does, as a set of activities that sees to the maintenance and upkeep of life, these activities cannot meaningfully be thought of as separate from the dispositions that motivate people to act. Noting a need to be met (caring about), determining how to respond to that need (taking care of), directly responding or providing care (care giving), and receiving it (care receiving), make up the four key elements in this process, which are often dissociated and fragmented on the basis of a hierarchy of social positions in the division of labour. But they can also, and preferably, be integrated within a set of activities whose carrying out is not directly or entirely associated with a hierarchical division of labour. (Tronto 2009b) Identifying the key aspects or phases of care and the ways in which they are organized, accomplished and conceived of, allows us to better understand what makes care coherent as an overall process, and what makes a delivery of care successful overall from the point of view of its receivers. This approach may also constitute an evaluation criterion to gauge the quality of care and is generally structured to accommodate a plurality of points of view. Starting out from the reality of multiple care actors and from the various activities and dispositions expected of them, this perspective can further help us underscore the power relations operative in the way care is organized. Indeed, we maintain, with Joan Tronto (2002), that while care is an objective that is widely shared, its plan may differ greatly depending on the situations and actors involved, and the practice of care cannot be abstracted from the social, political and moral conditions that inform and organize it. Thus, the care of children is an example of

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something widely accepted as central in our contemporary society, even though the ways of providing that care depend on a number of economic, cultural and social parameters, which often give rise to tensions between the different actors involved. This is also what was shown in a study we conducted with parents of children diagnosed as autistic.5 This research set out to analyze the configurations of care arrangements for a person said to be disabled, in order to analyze the social and moral division of labour. It also looked at changes in the relations between the different actors, in view of how the roles of “service user” (usager) and of beneficiary (bénéficiaire) are construed in the legislation of 2002 “for the renewal of social and medico-social action” concerning medico-social establishments, and in the 2005 act on disability. The varying accounts of care such as they play out in different milieus (families, medico-social institutions, hospitals, associations of persons with disabilities) often come into conflict amid discussions about the possible ways of organizing the care of the person identified as the recipient. This is because the organization of labour is conditioned by our definitions of what counts as care, and therefore of what is considered necessary to ensure someone’s well-being. Power relations are found to operate between care professionals and laypeople but also along lines of gender, class or race, in the process of evaluating the fitness of the respective plans envisaged for the person. The balance between concern for their children’s protection and, simultaneously, their empowerment, is indeed always delicate, as the accounts of parents of children diagnosed as autistic indicate to a high degree. For instance, a mother who is closely involved in her daughter’s treatment at a facility located several hundred kilometers from her home explained how she is ever reluctant to bring up with the psychiatrist what appeared to

5   The results of this research are detailed in the article, “Enjeux de compétence dans le travail du care. Rôle et place des parents dans la prise en charge d’enfants diagnostiqués comme autistes”, in C. Felix and J. Tardif eds (2009) Actes éducatifs de soin, entre éthique et gouvernance / Actes du colloque international, Nice: Editions Revel, published on http://revel.unice.fr/symposia/actedusoin/

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her to be an overly strong prescribed dose of medication, for fear that her daughter would subsequently have an episode that could contradict his opinion. Her approach to well-being as a relative notion, as something subject to conflict or, at the very least, to power relations, appears particularly challenging when applied to the field of disability. Finkelstein was one of the first disability studies author to criticize the prevalence of an expertise on disability that is largely monopolized by professionals and that has the effect of “potential and real control over the life of a disabled individual;” meanwhile the growth of professional ‘expertise’ in this field has meant that these professionals have had an almost absolute “monopoly in defining and articulating the problems of disability to the public at large.” (Finkelstein 1980, p. 1)

What is meant by “autonomy”? Disability studies has provided important tools for grasping the institutional and social obstacles to recognizing the autonomy of disabled persons (Albrecht, Ravaud and Stiker 2001, p.  43-78). Indeed, the paradigm of the social model of disability (one that the founders of disability studies have championed) breaks the causal chain established by the medical model, according to which it is the impairment itself which causes exclusion. The social model effects a shift by underscoring the need to question our current forms of economic, social and political organization insofar as they function to maintain the exclusion of certain individuals. Disability is thus redefined as “all the things that impose restrictions on disabled people; ranging from individual prejudice to institutional discrimination, from inaccessible public buildings to unusable transport systems, from segregated education to excluding work arrangements … the consequences of this failure do not simply and randomly fall on individuals but systematically upon disabled people as a group who experience this failure as discrimination institutionalized throughout society.” (Oliver 1996, p. 33) This shift in perspective also involves redefining autonomy according to two new perspectives: first, that of the point of view of a certain universality of the experience of disability, according to which

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able-bodied persons may be described as NYD (Not Yet Disabled) or TAB (Temporary Able Bodied). (Albrecht, Ravaud and Stiker 2001) The contribution of experiences of people with disabilities is in this light crucial for society as a whole. (Gill 1998, p. 6-14) Secondly, this insight subsequently leads to a nuancing of our notion of vulnerability and enables us to avoid an exceedingly quick “categorization” into vulnerable groups (of the kind that arises both in discourse and public policy). Since autonomy does not only characterize non-disabled people, thinking about what is involved in the demands for autonomy voiced by people considered as dependents also forces us to re-examine the boundary between autonomy and dependence. Here is where the link between the perspective of care ethics and the research on the production of disability within the field of disability studies becomes more apparent. Care ethics provides a rich framework for discussing the concept of autonomy in view of the various kinds of assistance and support entailed in these situations of dependency. In her critical examination of the nature of autonomy, Joan Tronto invites us to shift our attention to the social, economic and political conditions that inform or conversely challenge our very notion of autonomy. (Tronto 1993) Vulnerability and dependence are not just special circumstances and setbacks visited upon other people, whoever they are; rather they are characteristic of each person’s condition, even if the better off in society enjoy the option to mobilize their resources and power to mitigate its effects or mask its full extent. It is not a matter, therefore, of denying the important differences among various dependency situations, but rather, of appreciating that they partake of the same logic or problem of how to organize the labour of care such that receivers can lead relatively autonomous lives. Consequently, the differences among dependency situations are not only differences of degree on a continuum ranging from fullblown autonomy to reduced or partial autonomy, but also differences in the organization of labour involved in care. This critical interrogation of the reification of a dependent status is part of a larger discussion of the variability in the status of caregivers and receivers over time and according to the particular types of

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interactions. Starting from the point of view of care receivers, disability studies scholars seek to underscore the fact that care receivers appear often only in the recesses or margins of the discussion. This scholarship has severely criticized the undue emphasis many health scholars put on caregiving conditions, leaving those who receive the care in the shadows of the debate. This issue of insufficient consideration given to the “recipient” in these studies is evinced in at least two ways. The first has to do with the playback effect of studies that focus on the work involved in caregiving and the responsibilities placed on caregivers. Putting the spotlight on certain forms of action and on the actors who provide the care sometimes has the effect, as Jenny Morris observes, of elevating these care providers to the stature of heroic figures. (Morris 2001, p. 1-16) What is a cause for concern in this heroization is the way it depicts certain care situations in terms of fixed and definitive identities assigned to both care giver and care receiver. To use Jenny Morris’s example, children of parents with disabilities are often seen exclusively as caregivers; what gets overlooked here are the various forms of care they themselves may receive from their parents. While the goal of many studies on care is to examine the kinds of work and the moral dispositions involved in care giving, the emphasis placed on situations where the person who receives care is in a position of total dependence only serves to reinforce this opposition between caregiver and receiver. Lois Keith and Jenny Morris point specifically to the real danger that comes with seeing an inability to perform certain daily tasks as naturally implying a broader inability to take on a range of other responsibilities and to provide love. (Keith and Morris 1996) This emphasis on figures such as “young carers” can thus be understood in terms of a more general difficulty in our society in thinking in terms of relational interdependence. “The presupposition of the family” is brought to light in situations that are seen as a reversal in the “order of things” that is largely untenable. What Jenny Morris wishes to stress here is the responsibility of a society to provide assistance to people in vulnerable situations without always assuming a necessary involvement of the family. (Lenoir 2003; Damamme 2011)

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At first glance, then, because disability studies focus so heavily on care receivers, they do not appear to share the same concerns animating care ethics scholarship, which tends to focus on the social and political conditions of caregiving. Nonetheless, reconciling these two bodies of literature may in fact be possible if we consider more closely the accounts of authors like disability theorist and activist Jenny Morris and those from the perspective of care like Joan Tronto and Eva Feder Kittay. Tronto maintains, in Moral Boundaries (1993) and elsewhere, that attention to the ways in which care is received is crucial to the overall process. She argues, moreover, that people’s rights ought to guarantee that the needs of care receivers are fully considered and that they address any abuse that may result from power relations within care practices. Tronto readily underscores the problems of paternalism/ maternalism inherent in care, since one of the strongest coercive influences in the care relation is this positional asymmetry involved in providing a person with the care they are not (always) able to effect themselves. The potential for abuses of power in such situations shows up in the various accounts given by parents of children diagnosed as autistic (Damamme 2009); this was also highlighted in one of our previous studies which focused on primary caregivers. (Damamme and Paperman 2009, p. 133-155) This potential for abuse is obviously heightened in cases where receivers are unable to communicate their needs. In her own work, Eva Feder Kittay raises the issue of an appropriate spokesperson for people who are unable to convey their needs and preferences. Cases of acute cognitive disability thus make the ethical issue of speaking on behalf of another relevant in the context of disability studies. One of disability studies’ driving concerns is to attend to the testimony of experience of people with disabilities, who have long been silenced by the fact that others came to define their problems and solutions for them. The complex matter of speaking on behalf of others, which necessarily arises as a subject of debate in all reflection on social emancipation, here surfaces yet again. Eva Feder Kittay also develops an entire discussion around the importance of thinking about the kind of recognition the person receiving care is given. As she recounts in “The Personal is

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­ hilosophical is Political,” which appeared in a volume on the chalP lenges cognitive disability poses for moral philosophy,6 her own care for her daughter Sesha (who has a severe cognitive disability) is conditioned by the recognition she receives of her moral personhood (or not). To put it another way, taking care of her daughter also involves working to ensure that people like her daughter are given full recognition in society (and the recognition of the moral personhood of severely disabled people is an ongoing debate among animal rights activists, for Peter Singer especially). By engaging in this battle for recognition, Kittay thus looks at caregiving on a social and political scale, in a way that goes beyond the straightforward one-on-one ­relationship. While vulnerability is common to all human beings, and while this prompts us to reconsider our ideas about autonomy and the moral, social and political conditions under which it can be best realized, there are nevertheless many situations of acute vulnerability. Eva Feder Kittay and Jenny Morris are two authors from separate disciplines who certainly agree on this point. Indeed, the criticisms that certain disability studies scholars advance vis-à-vis other authors in the field enable us to re-examine these demands for autonomy in the socio-political context of the 1960s and 1970s. They also allow us to consider various other arguments being proposed in our time that go beyond these original claims. If disability studies authors and proponents of care ethics share a common political project, it is indeed in this deliberation over the conditions of a successful articulation between empowerment and protection. For instance, Jenny Morris (2001) considers the way in which freedom from situations involving domination is foremost where it concerns the theorization of disability. She notes that if autonomy of thought and action were of such central value in the early writings of disability theory, this is because the field draws on a history of treatment of disability and dependence that scarcely   A volume she co-edited with Licia Carlson. See E.F. Kittay and L. Carlson (2010) Cognitive Disability and its Challenge to Moral Philosophy, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. 6

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includes the voices of the people concerned. But the new approach to disability, that looks critically at the nature of limitations, helped her to find self-esteem and to gain better control over key aspects of her life (she refers, for instance, to the significance of having found freedom of choice in her access to support services and care). After underscoring this, she in turn underscores the major risk of overlooking power relations that may yet persist, where care is not only about logistics but also includes, for instance, care of the body. Jenny Morris points to the pernicious effects of no longer considering the lived experience of disability-related challenges out of a desire to avoid suggesting that the lives of people with disabilities, insofar as they are fraught with hardships, are somehow less worth living. This criticism, directed at a few disability studies authors, is part of Morris’s trajectory as an activist and theorist who, having succeeded in finding a “voice,” takes it upon herself, on behalf of this voice which she wants to convey as faithfully as possible, to criticize what she sees as a danger of failing to grasp certain social and moral issues. She calls attention to the importance of empirically and analytically accounting for the fact that not all situations of limitation of one’s functions require the same kind of assistance; it is not the same thing to depend on a mechanic to repair your car as it is to depend on someone for your personal hygiene. This substantiates her argument that someone’s high exposure to the caregiver’s actions must also be included in the various narratives. (Morris 2001) Furthermore, referring more specifically to the experience of disability, she underscores the fact that silencing one’s own experience has the adverse effect of contributing to a new homogenization of the figure of the disabled individual portrayed as a young, male experience, someone “in a chair,” who manages his own life independently despite everything. In particular, she targets a certain popular image of the disabled person, depicted solely in terms of his uniquely masterful way of navigating situations and relationships. Morris reminds readers that the profile of someone with a disability is often very different: the largest group of disabled people have cognitive impairments, and where it concerns physical impairments, the most likely

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figure is that of a woman over the age of 60, whose condition was brought on by an illness affecting more than a single function (both motor and cognitive generally). Her conclusion is similar to Susan Wendell’s, who criticizes the limited degree to which disability studies has attended to the experiences of women, pointing to the male bias in the standard model of disability. (Wendell 1996) The fact that most research in the field is devoted to motor disabilities makes our study on the characterization of autism and on the connections between autism and cognitive disability in some situations all the weightier. Despite the importance of a field like disability studies, much work remains to be done specifically on cognitive disability as related to someone’s ability to deliberate. Cognitive disability raises the question (though not overreachingly and definitively as it may have been the case back when mental disability justified often abusive decision-making practices on behalf of other people)7 about the appropriateness of spokespersons. While the disability movement has succeeded in making speaking for someone else highly suspect where it concerns non-cognitive disabilities, it nevertheless appears necessary in some situations—with all the complexity that this raises.

Care and knowledge The genuine risks that come with assigning a spokesperson do not eradicate the need that may arise to consult people (e.g. caregivers, whether family members or professionals), as alternate sources of knowledge about specific people with a cognitive disability. As Eva Feder Kittay points out (2010), it is also the knowledge she acquired from her daughter over the long term of their relationship which led her to advance other types of arguments about the moral personhood of people said to have a “severe” mental disability (terms that are themselves matters of debate). She explains how she learned a great deal about her daughter’s abilities (and about those of the others with whom her daughter lives in the care centre) in the context of their 7

  See notably Carlson (2001).

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concrete, lived relations. This acquired knowledge reflects the kinds of accounts that primary care providers give about the family members they care for, especially when these loved ones encounter significant difficulties expressing themselves. A treatment history drawn up by the father of a child diagnosed as autistic also proved to be a valuable source of information about his child’s reactions, both to medications and at specific places and times, over more than thirty years of care. Even if this type of parental report is not intended as a substitute for all the research efforts to facilitate the expression of the particular preferences of people receiving care (something energetically championed within the disability movement), it can prove of vital importance where individuals have difficulty making their voices heard. Her acquired knowledge also led Eva Feder Kittay to make the case about ​​needing to recognize the extent of our ignorance in matters of evaluating certain abilities (Kittay 2010) so as to not limit what is achievable. This reflection also sheds light on our empirical work regarding the difficulties in defining adequate care. Our survey of parents of children diagnosed as autistic indeed revealed the tensions surrounding what constitutes adequate care, especially owing to disputes over how to address autism. (Dammame 2009) The accounts of some parents who explain how their children have acquired skills (e.g. the ability to read or write) that were considered unachievable at the time of their diagnosis testify to this difficulty in accurately assessing present and future abilities. These kinds of evaluations are, moreover, constantly requested of health professionals, who are made to deliver prognoses of a child’s abilities and disabilities in the midst of wide-ranging uncertainty. (Paillet 2007; Eideliman 2008) Thus, several disability studies and care scholars agree that relationships between caregiver and receiver are not without ambiguities and that these relationships are often the site of complex power dynamics (particularly along gender, class and racial lines). Moreover, the political thought that informs these two approaches also have their points of convergence, particularly with respect to contesting the more problematic power relations operative in our social and political organizations.

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Thoughts on the conditions of a democratic politics of care The presupposition of the family operates differently depending on the various categories or types of vulnerability at stake, and the particular care regimes concerned. (Jenson 1997, p. 182–187; Damamme and Paperman 2009) It is, nevertheless, present in all care configurations and demonstrates that care is widely presumed to be, first and foremost, the responsibility of the family. As our survey of parents of children with autism has shown, the difficulties in managing everyday life are compounded by the helplessness many express as the result of a sense of abandonment. Life can prove very difficult indeed for these parents, not only because of the challenges their children face, but also because of what, until very recently, they have tended to experience as an absence of general concern for their situation. Their situation underscores the persistent view of care as something belonging chiefly to the private sphere. (Paperman 2005; Tronto 1993) Although society’s limited familiarity with people who do not exhibit the expected behaviours is often very painful for these parents, they also recognize that it is their very experience of what is unfamiliar to most people that has allowed them to gain another perspective on these issues. The question of what constitutes adequate care is informed by the knowledge we have about the person as a singular individual, as well as by existing interpretive models. That being said, as the volume edited by Eva Feder Kittay and Licia Carlson shows us (2010), the history of the definition of “mental retardation” in the United States (though the situation in France is broadly similar8) should still today make us cautious indeed in our certainty about what people said to be mentally disabled are capable of or not. Furthermore, the attribution of lesser cognitive abilities (to certain groups of people) has long been a means of domination and oppression: this is true for Afro-Americans (Collins 2008, p.  135175), women (Carlson 2001, p.  124–146) and more generally, for individuals considered to be deviant.   On this point, see N.  Diederich (2004) Les naufragés de l’intelligence. Paroles et trajectoires de personnes désignées comme «  handicapées mentales  », Paris: La Découverte. 8

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This is why it is so important to place the knowledge we gain through relations that have as their key objective the care and maintenance of life at the forefront of our philosophical and political discussions. Even if they come with the risk of maternalism/paternalism (which must be countered), these relations are where we gain a better understanding of the needs of the receiver. Thus, following Eva Feder Kittay (2010), we can consider that knowledge gained about the care receiver should also aim for the care receiver’s recognition: without recognizing and valuing dependent people (like her daughter Sesha) as individuals,” as individuals, caregiving is made that much more difficult for family and loved ones. Indeed, Kittay insists that insofar as the purpose of care is to help the person to whom we provide care to live the best possible life, this ultimately depends largely on the society in which the person develops and matures, and on the minimum of respect they are owed as a human being. As Tronto and many disability theorists have argued, society bears a strong responsibility in the production of disability and dependency. It follows, therefore, that significant political changes are necessary and not just changes at the interpersonal level. Such a politics of care, however, must be grounded in the moral dispositions cultivated in one’s experience as a caregiver and as a care receiver. Here, the experiential approach of feminism (Thomas 1999) takes on a new significance: in the same way that the ethics of care seeks to render visible and underscore the value of human experiences that entail giving attention and assistance, the disability studies movement seeks to bring the experiences of women with disabilities to bear in the feminist movement. In this vein, Anita Silvers’ critique of how the feminist movement has upheld the functional capacities and social roles characteristic of “normal” women, making them a standard of femininity, are especially important for understanding the mechanisms of invisibility experienced by women with disabilities. (Silvers 2000, p. 331) Moreover, many critical disability studies scholars find agreement with care theorists such as Tronto who, while stressing our common human condition of vulnerability, goes further in examining the differential treatment that this vulnerability elicits from the perspective

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of gender (among other perspectives). While we all to some extent receive care from others, we are not all cared for in the same way and by no means equally. Following their line of argument, only certain people with disabilities enjoy the ability to maintain their care’s invisibility by turning it, for example, into a straightforward provision of services. For this reason, Jenny Morris calls for a conception of vulnerability that can account for the specificities of each situation, such as disability. In short, recognizing our common vulnerability must not obscure the fact that some people, in virtue of their bodies (and impairments) are at greater risk than others of having their human rights violated. Indeed, this vulnerability to being denied a decent quality of life is not distributed equally: it is heightened for certain people. Here we should note that Jenny Morris (2001) distances herself from the position of one of the leading authors in the field of disability studies in Great Britain, Tom Shakespeare, who contends that “disabled people’s limitations are not qualitatively different than those of other human beings” (Shakespeare 2000, p. 77); conversely, she stresses the importance of distinguishing various degrees of dependency on others. Indeed, Morris insists that certain kinds of assistance carry with them the risk of abuse, and not always of the same nature. She appeals to Julia Twigg’s example of elderly people who are assisted with bathing (Twigg 2000) in order to ground the distinction between a need for assistance that is intimate in nature and the kind of assistance that is more technical. Morris also draws attention to the social barriers many women with disabilities face due to the fact that the sexual division of labour and its associated responsibilities tend to be overlooked. She explains that whereas “disabled women want personal assistance which enables them to look after children, run a home, look after parents or others … the disabled people’s movement has tended to focus on personal assistance which enables paid employment and other activities outside the home.” (Morris 1996, p. 10) The need for support and assistance is scarcely discussed in terms of its ability to enable those receiving assistance to in turn care for other people, whether children or parents who may themselves be in a vulnerable situation. This discussion of the failure to sufficiently acknowledge the

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caregiving done by people with disabilities within the disability movement echoes Tronto’s arguments for a truly democratic politics of care: “The legitimacy of the ethics of care will depend on the satisfactory character of the social and political theory of which it forms part.” Thus, “care, as a political concept, forces us to recognize how it characterizes power relations in our society—and in particular the question of who is taking care of whom?” and indicates, “(…) the way in which gender, race and class relations intersect with the conditions under which it is provided”. (Tronto 1993)

Conclusion Disability Studies have clearly contributed to a better understanding and appreciation of the claims of care receivers. Feminist writers like Jenny Morris and Carol Thomas have contributed to complexifying the figure of the care receiver, which had undergone a simplistic homogenization as a result of the strategic aims embraced by the disability movement in its early days. Morris and Thomas’ research certainly captures Tronto’s reflection on the hierarchy in the positions of giver and receiver; it has underscored, after all, the problems with viewing women with disabilities exclusively as receivers. As such, the two languages or grammars deployed by several authors within each of these fields would appear to be more complementary than conflicting. Each definitely serves to corroborate the importance of seeing care as a process and of drawing on the different points of view of the various actors who occupy distinct positions in this process. The political project that flows from this therefore leads to the recognition of a plurality of points of view, with all the tensions and conflicts that this recognition might raise. As Tronto forcefully insists in the last chapter of Moral Boundaries, this political vision “does not require that conflict be eliminated or that pluralistic groups be merged into a unity,” (Tronto 1993, p. 219) but rather that we reflect on the conditions for a suitable balance between caregivers and receivers. (Tronto 1993, p.  223) One possible route is pooling and comparing different actors’ knowledge about disability since, as Henri-Jacques Stiker points out (2009), there is a substantial k­ nowledge differential

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between the various individuals concerned with disability (people with disabilities, their families and care professionals) and the rest of the population. Translated by Madeleine Taylor.

Literature Albrecht, G. L., J.-F. Ravaud and H.-J. Stiker (2001) ‘L’émergence des disability studies  : état des lieux et perspectives’, Sciences sociales et santé, 19(4): 43-78. Barral, C., F. Paterson, H.-J. Stiker and M. Chauvière (2002) L’institution du handicap. Rôle des associations XIX-XXème, Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Carlson, L. (2001) ‘Cognitive Ableism and Disability Studies: Feminist Reflections on the History of Mental Retardation’, Hypatia, 4: 124-146. Collins, P.H. (2008) ‘La construction sociale de la pensée féministe noire’, in E. Dorlin (ed), Black Feminism. Anthologie du féminisme africain-américain, Paris: Harmattan, 135-175. Damamme, A. (2011) ‘El cuidado en las familias: perspectiva temporal versus radiografía’, in P.  Molinier and L.G.  Arango (eds), El trabajo y la Etica del cuidado, Bogota: Université Nationale de Colombie. Damamme, A. (2009) ‘Enjeux de compétence dans le travail du care. Rôle et place des parents dans la prise en charge d’enfants diagnostiqués comme autistes’, in C.  Felix et J.  Tardif (eds), Actes éducatifs de soin, entre éthique et gouvernance / Actes du colloque international, Nice: Editions Revel, published on http://revel. unice.fr/symposia/actedusoin/ Damamme, A. and P. Paperman (2009) ‘Care domestique  : délimitations et transformations’, in P. Molinier, P. Paperman and S. Laugier (eds), Qu’est-ce que le care? Souci des autres, sensibilité, responsabilité, Paris: Payot, 133-155 Diederich, N. (2004) Les naufragés de l’intelligence. Paroles et trajectoires de personnes désignées comme «  handicapées mentales  », Paris: La Découverte. Eideliman, J.-S. (2008) “Spécialistes par obligation”—Des parents face au handicap mental—Théories diagnostiques et arrangements pratiques, Thèse de doctorat en sociologie, École Normale Supérieure de Cachan. Finkelstein, V. (1980) Attitudes and Disabled People: Issues for Discussion. New York: World Rehabilitation Fund. Gill, C. (1998) ‘Disability studies: looking at the FAQ’s (frequently asked questions)’, Alert, 9: 6-14. Glenn, E.N. (2000) ‘Creating a Caring Society’, Contemporary Sociology, 29: 84-94. Jenson, J. (1997) ‘Who Cares? Gender And Welfare Regimes’, Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, 4(2): 182–187. Keith, L. and J.  Morris (1996) ‘Easy targets: A disability rights perspective on the “children as carers” debate’, in J. Morris (ed), Encounters with Strangers: Feminism and Disability, London: the Women’s Press, 89-115.

care ethics and disability studies: a common politcal project? 251 Kittay, E.F. (2010) ‘The Personal is Philosophical is Political: A Philosopher and Mother of a Cognitively Disabled Person Sends Notes from the Battlefield’, in E.F. Kittay and L. Carlson (eds), Cognitive disability and its challenge to moral philosophy, Malden and Oxford: Willey Blackwell, 393-414. Kittay, E.F. and L.  Carlson eds (2010) Cognitive disability and its challenge to moral philosophy, Malden and Oxford: Willey Blackwell. Lenoir, R. (2003) Généalogie de la morale familiale, Paris: Editions du Seuil.
 Morris, J. (1993) ‘Feminism and disability’, Feminist Review, 43: 57-70. Morris, J. ed (1996) Encounters with Strangers: Feminism and Disability, London: the Women’s Press. Morris, J. (2001) ‘Impairment and Disability: Constructing an Ethics of Care That Promotes Human Rights’, Hypatia, 4: 1-16. Oliver, M. (1990) The Politics of Disablement, London: The Macmillan Press. Oliver. M. (1996) Understanding Disability: from Theory to Practice, London: The Macmillan Press. Paillet, A. (2007) Sauver la vie, donner la mort  : une sociologie de l’éthique en réanimation néonatale, Paris: La Dispute. Paperman, P. (2005) ‘Les gens vulnérables n’ont rien d’exceptionnel’, in P. Paperman and S. Laugier (eds), Le Souci des autres. Éthique et politique du care, Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, pp. 281-298. Ravaud, J.-F. and I. Ville (2010) ‘Handicap’, in D. Fassin and B. Hauray, Santé publique, l’état des savoirs, La découverte, 209-222. Sevenhuijsen, S. (1998) Citizenship and the Ethics of Care. Feminist Considerations on Justice, Morality and Politics, London and New York: Routledge. Shakespeare, T. (2000) Help, Birmingham: Venture Press. Silvers, A. (1998) ‘Disability’, in A. Jagger and I.M. Young (eds), A Companion to feminist philosophy, Oxford: Blackwell. Stiker, H.-J. (2009) Les métamorphoses du handicap de 1970 à nos jours, Grenoble: Presses universitaires de Grenoble. Thomas, C. (1999) Female Forms. Experiencing and Understanding Disability, Buckingham: Open University Press. Thomas, C. (2007) Sociologies of Disability and Illness. Contested Ideas in Disability Studies and Medical Sociology, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Tronto, J. (1993) Moral Boundaries. A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care, New York and London: Routledge. Tronto, J. (2009a) Un monde vulnérable, Paris: La Découverte. Tronto, J. (2009b) ‘Care démocratique et démocratie du care’, in P. Molinier, P. Paperman and S. Laugier (eds), Qu’est-ce que le care? Souci des autres, sensibilité, responsabilité, Paris: Payot. pp. 35-55. Tronto, J. (2002) ‘The Value Of Care’, Boston Review, 27(1): 16-17. Twigg, J. (2000) Bathing—The Body and Community Care, London: Routledge. Wendell, S. (1996) The Rejected Body. Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability, London: Routledge.

13. Across Boundaries: Rethinking the Ethics of Nanotechnologies in Light of Care Vanessa Nurock

One of the distinctive features of nanotechnologies programs is an express commitment to “accompanying” them with reflection in the humanities and social sciences. 1 Within the hoped-for contributions of the humanities and social sciences, ethical reflection is often considered, at least officially, as particularly essential, so much so that the term “nanoethics” was coined and a journal specifically devoted to the ethical issues raised by nanotechnology was launched in 2008 by Springer. The meaning, however, of the term “nanoethics” is for a number of reasons far from self-evident, owing especially to the intrinsic difficulty in defining the nano field itself, and in determining how ethics can be articulated to nanotechnologies. The prevailing approach so far has been to consider the concept of nanoethics in a very broad sense, not restricted to philosophical ethics, and as basically synonymous with ELSI approaches (Ethical, Legal and Social Impacts). It is the underside of this dominant outlook that I aim to explore in what follows, anchoring my approach in the ethics and politics of care. In so doing, I wish to argue that the politics of care can offer a critical approach to nanoethics by helping 1   This article was first published within the pages of the journal Ethica. Revue interdisciplinaire de recherche en éthique (vol.  22, no.  2, 2019). We wish to thank Ethica for the permission to publish here an English version of the article.

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us to highlight the inadequacies of standard, dominant approaches and by shedding new light on the displacement of boundaries effected by nanotechnologies.

Nanotechnologies: the quest for a definition Nanotechnosciences: between cutting edge and déjà vu If the concept of “nanoethics” is difficult to define, this is undoubtedly at least in part connected to the many difficulties we encounter in defining nanotechnologies themselves. Acknowledging this up front is essential for grasping the inherent difficulties not only in defining nanoethics, but also with respect to possible interpretations of nanoethics itself. The most common way of defining nanotechnologies, as found, for example, in the reports of the National Nanotechnology Initiative, is in terms of their scale of one billionth of a metre, in the range of 10-9 to 10-7 m, i.e., between 1 nm and 100 nm (or between 0.001 and 0.1 micrometres). Nanometric objects are the smallest objects ever consciously manipulated by humans. Put another way, nanometric objects are the elementary building blocks of the physical world, if one opts for a bottom-up approach. Yet this definition according to scale, straightforward as it may seem, is already problematic in itself for at least two reasons. First, nanotechnologies are characterized by their activity of modifying matter by manipulating atoms one by one.2 Secondly, because of the diversity on the nanoscale, the same particle may be developed in different forms and in relation to various elements, such that it will come to be characterized by different properties.3 Essentially, the nanoscale is characterized by an appearance of new properties, behaviours or functions not found on a larger scale. To put it differently, it is not only a question of a quantitative change, but also of a q­ ualitative 2   In 1989, IBM scientists achieved the techno-scientific (and public relations) feat of writing the company’s logo by using a new kind of microscope to position 35 individual xenon atoms. 3   Silver nanoparticles, for example, may have antibacterial properties.



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change. The nanoscale thus allows for unprecedented miniaturization, which occasions groundbreaking applications. For example, it becomes possible to install devices in the human body that can get at or target heretofore inaccessible cells or organisms. Should we therefore define nanotechnologies according to their scientific dimensions—and speak instead of nanoscience? Here again the question is far from settled. The danger of shifting gears in this way is doing so claims to distinguish entirely between an object’s design on the one hand and its use(s) on the other, as though these two aspects could be considered independently. Perhaps it is fitting here to speak of “nanotechnoscience” and play up the commingling within the nano field of science and technology, without, of course, at the same time eclipsing the plurality of the disciplines involved. Far from clarifying a definition of such technologies, the very question of this definition becomes even more complex if we consider a third characteristic: nanotechnologies are enabling. Not only do they make it possible to develop new devices, as indicated above. They also allow us to update, to go beyond, to “accelerate” old sciences or technologies by operating on a new scale, one on which properties are transformed, with the result that they are neither quite the same, nor are they something else altogether. Moreover, historically, certain properties of the nanoscale have been harnessed since antiquity, even if it was not known at the time how to explain them. The most classic example in this regard is the Lycurgus Cup, which takes on a different colour depending on the kind of lighting and its position relative to the light source. Nano-Anticipation One essential feature of nanotechnologies is their enmeshment with the imaginary, to say nothing of the mythological. But do nanoscientists really believe in their myths or are these instead a political construct? The godfathers of nanotechnology form a peculiar trio, consisting first of physicist Richard Feynman whose 1959 lecture titled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” is considered to have spurred the field. Next was engineer Eric Drexler, who, convinced that ­certain

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fictions can be self-fulfilling, depicted, halfway between science and imagination, in his book Engines of Creation, an uncertain future in which self-replicating assemblers have consumed all resources to the point of leaving behind only a mass of gray goo. Finally, the third instigator of the field was Bill Clinton for having launched the National Nanotechnology Initiative in 2000. The first of this trio gave nanos their scientific basis, the second established the connection between science and fiction via anticipation of something taken on as almost already here, while the third grounded the nano field in politics, but also laid the foundation for a public funding policy. This foundational diversity adds yet another element of complexity when attempting to define nanotechnologies. Is establishing a definition, however, possible or even desirable? Is nanotechnology mainly a buzzword? If nanotechnologies navigate between an economy of promises and an economy of panic, does this not make facts and passions difficult to discern? A compelling position advanced by Berube (2006) focusses instead on the rational hope that nanotechnology gives rise to. These rational promises from a scientific point of view, however, must also be reasonable from an ethical and political perspective… At the same time, this proposal to focus on rational hope rather than on “nano-hype,” as opposed to (in both cases) panic or phobia of nanotechnologies, is liable to pass over an essential characteristic of the latter: their embeddedness in the logic of a “risk society,” which insists on the importance of being able to foresee (and prevent) the consequences of manufactured risks that have come to replace natural risks. I would like to advance the hypothesis that this risk-wary view of the world has strongly influenced the way in which the ethics of nanotechnologies is construed by government programmes, as well as according to long-prevailing trends in the academic field. Impasses of the ELSI approach Among these trends, the approach known as ELSI (which I will hereafter refer to by this acronym) is paradigmatic: it articulates the ethical, legal and social aspects of nanotechnologies together with the



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question of impacts (ELSI indeed stands for Ethical, Legal and Social Impacts). Three main elements characterize the ELSI approach. First, because of its focus on the issue of impacts, ELSI is based in a linear, causal model for assessing the consequences of nanotechnologies. This way of construing an ethics is imbued with a particular ontological and temporal conception, both of what nanoethics ought to do and the moment at which nanoethics should be developed: nanotechnologies are both ontologically and chronologically prior and, in this sense, serve as first principles. Once nanotechnologies are established as a given, then, and only then, we can develop an ethics, configured as an ethics of nanotechnologies, which bears upon a preexisting object. Secondly, because it is involved in coordinating between the ethical, the legal and the social, ELSI is shot through with the question of social acceptance. As such, it is mainly a question of assessing what the “public” is likely to de facto accept, today, here and now,4 and not what we ought morally to accept. ELSI, therefore, does not so much aspire to acceptability, understood as what ought to be accepted, as it seeks to demonstrate acceptance, understood as what is already accepted or on the verge of being accepted since it can be made acceptable (Nurock and Panissal 2016). ELSI proceeds primarily from the descriptive rather than from the normative, while on the other hand, it takes on the form of an irrational conviction of the order of faith, rather than argumentation capable of producing persuasion, to use the classical terms of Plato’s Gorgias.5 This situation becomes all the more paradoxical when we note that this acceptance “here and now” very often concerns futuristic speculations, as Nordmann (2007) has pointed out. Such a paradoxical relationship between the normative and the descriptive on the one hand, and the present and the   Here we have a paradox of sorts, since social acceptability circumscribes a current state of affairs (what the public accepts today) about technology to come in the future. Compounding this is the fact that the question of social acceptability is often inseparable from communication techniques that aim to garner acceptance for new technologies (without inquiring as to whether or not we ought to accept them). 5   For further exploration of this point, see Nurock and Panissal (2016) 4

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future of the other, commits ELSI from the very outset to the terms of a paradox. Table 1.  Moral acceptability or social acceptance? (From Nurock and Panissal 2016) Acceptability

Acceptance

What people should accept

What people are ready to accept

Normative

Descriptive

Process

State of affairs

Active

Passive

Conviction

Persuasion

Rational (may include emotions)

Irrational

Moral

Social

This dual conception of nanoethics is, thirdly, closely bound up with the concept of “responsibility.” The imperative of responsibility is based, quite patently, on previous “cases,” which often serve as a societal frame of reference for nanotechnologies: GMOs and mad cow disease on a global scale, or the asbestos and tainted blood scandals in France and other countries. The responsibility at issue is at least threefold. It is certainly, firstly, a responsibility mandated to politicians, secondly, one which rests with scientists and industry, but ultimately also, thirdly, a responsibility of our current generation concerning future generations. Moreover, this concept of responsibility, particularly in the light of the idea of “responsible innovation,” a leitmotif of many European action programmes, very palpably echoes our consideration of impacts. Yet this conception of ethics as ELSI also admits of several shortcomings, likely rendering it lacking in important respects. First, the very characterization of ELSI as ethics poses a problem: its descriptive dimension clearly limits its scope given that ethics, if we consider its basis in philosophy, is intrinsically normative: we cannot be content merely to describe what is already deemed acceptable. This bottomup approach focuses on the consequences of nanotechnologies in the



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form of a “code of conduct” or even a “toolbox,” the explicit goal of which is often to formulate a roadmap for good governance—but for what? And for whom? These questions, indeed, often go unasked. ELSI appears to regard ethics as a form of cost/benefit evaluation without always specifying the terms and worldviews that underpin this evaluation. The concept of “responsible innovation” is hence very difficult to peg down and seems to constitute a vague appeal for vigilance, even a buzzword that resonates with another buzzword, that of “public engagement.”6

Rethinking the boundaries of nanotechnologies in light of care I would like, at this juncture, to call attention to the fact that the foregoing points of discussion are inseparable from the perspective of a risk society that underpins ELSI. As Tronto (2012, p. 8) has herself pointed out, the approach according to a risk society “debates the ‘unintended consequences’” of social action from a “‘God’s-eye view’ looking down on society; its normative implications are assumed without being explicitly formulated or explicitly argued.”7 Owing in particular to their involvement in the NBIC convergence (nanotechnologies, biotechnologies, information technologies and cognitive science) nanotechnologies are, by definition, unpredictable. Furthermore, as Jean-Pierre Dupuy (2007) has pointed out, unpredictability is part of their metaphysical project, understood in the Popperian sense as a theoretical framework for non-falsifiable research which limits and orients the questions being asked. While anxiety born of unpredictability is one of the driving elements of a risk society and of the need for prevention, the fact that 6   As B.  Bensaude-Vincent (2013b) has aptly shown, the association between these buzzwords is so close as to render them almost interchangeable even while we would not expect them, at first blush, to refer exactly to the same thing. Interestingly, it can be pointed out, along with B. Bensaude-Vincent, that these two expressions (“responsible innovation” and “public engagement”) form an inseparable trio with the environment, which appears, furthermore, to be one of the two key components of responsible innovation. 7   Translation is our own.

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unpredictability is part of nanotechnologies’ metaphysical program introduces a different problem, that of insufficient control, since control over impacts is by no means given at the outset. It therefore consists in a problem which thinking in terms of risks is not indeed likely to address adequately. I would like to argue in what follows that the concept of “care,” as developed by Carol Gilligan and Joan Tronto, among others, introduces elements for reflection that offer new insight on some of the ethical and political difficulties that arise with nanotechnologies. Before I do this, I will endeavour to show that the difficulties we encounter in defining nanotechnologies in general, and nanoethics in particular, stem not only from the difficulties we encounter in attempting to characterize the object—although I do not deny that they stem from these in part. I think these difficulties also arise from the fact that reflection on nanotechnologies is not exercised within the categories that we are in the habit of mobilizing, and that the very phenomenon of nanotechnologies even subverts them. Challenging boundaries with the politics of care Generally speaking, care is characterized by its relational dimension. In its political formulation, care is broadly defined as “a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible.” (Fischer and Tronto 1990, p. 40). It is all at once a feeling, an action, and a whole complex, diverse set of practices, and is apprehended, perhaps first and foremost, in its process, its embodied activity. Care, therefore, encompasses all at once a kind of concern (to care about), assuming responsibility for care (to care for), care giving and care receiving. All this raises questions not only about the competence of care givers but also about the responsiveness of care receivers, as the process of care is by no means unidirectional. This point immediately involves a certain conception of political responsibility, understood in light of the ways people take care of each other and also care for the political structure through which they are connected—this last aspect has been coined by Joan Tronto as “caring with”.



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A second essential component of care that is pertinent to our discussion of nanotechnologies is the emphasis placed in accounts of the politics of care on considering a threefold shifting of boundaries (e.g. Tronto  1993): 1) the boundary between morality and politics; 2) the boundary between reason and emotions, and; 3) the boundary between private and public. More specifically, Tronto explicates these boundaries in the following way. First, the boundary between morality and politics constitutes a barrier to understanding the central role our sense of morality plays in our political concepts and vice versa. Transcending this boundary enables us to avoid reducing the political domain to one of defence or of self-serving expansion, in other words, to a neo-Hobbesian conception of the state based on security. Secondly, the boundary between reason and emotion requires that moral judgment be made from a universal, distant, unfeeling and disinterested point of view. Such a presupposition renders suspicious the very suggestion of a particularistic ethic, one which considers situated experiences in lieu of advancing an abstract, universal theory. Thirdly, the boundary between private and public systematically relegates to the private sphere a broad range of activities relating to care. In so doing, a part of our “living together” is clearly cut off from itself and care activities wind up degraded, if not invisible, within society. I suggest that thinking ethically about nanotechnologies requires a similar threefold shift. The idea that nanotechnologies recast certain conventional distinctions and concepts is certainly not new. Pointing out this blurring of boundaries, however, is only a first step. A second step might be to suggest that this distinctive feature about nanotechnologies, together with any uneasiness we may well feel regarding them, are jointly rooted in the way nanotechnologies disrupt our conventional categories. I will attempt to show that they do just this by effecting the same subversive movement as that generated by care. I propose to reconsider the following three major boundaries: 1) the boundary between object and designer; 2) the boundary between the living organism and the artifact and; 3) the boundary between interior and exterior.

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Table 2.  Which boundaries might we reconsider? Care

Nanoethics

Boundary between politics and morality

Boundary between designer and object

Boundary between reason and emotions

Boundary between the living and the artificial

Boundary between private and public

Boundary between interior and exterior

The boundary between designer and object The boundary between designer and object is a common theme that runs through thought about technology, governed by the ideal of a designer’s control over his object and the fear of the object escaping his control—as depicted, for example, in the myth of Frankenstein. It places the centre of gravity of the relation between object and designer with the designer himself. This anthropocentric approach accordingly focusses on the designer’s intended consequences and on impacts—which eventually consist in consequences that were neither intended nor anticipated—something we find with ELSI-ethics on one hand, but also in the manner in which we seek to regain control over these impacts on the other—a major consideration in the approach known as responsible innovation. The technical object is hence confined to its instrumental quality. We could, however, refute this conception of the technological object by pointing out that, far from merely being passively shaped by their designers, certain objects transform our world and actively shape it themselves. It is probably needless for me to develop this any further, since today nobody could reasonably deny the profound transformations within societies in habitual contact with, for example, information technology and mobile technologies (cell phones, etc.). As regards nanotechnological objects in particular, this ideal of control is of little significance in view of the particular reality of the program of which these objects are a part. Indeed, according to Dupuy



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(2007), the NBIC (Nano-Bio-Info-Cognition) program is inextricably linked to a form of unpredictability and advent of new technologies that, by definition, are beyond our control. A well-known model of this fascination with the uncontrollable is indeed the narrative of Drexler’s self-replicating universal assemblers. Moreover, there are certain nanoparticles that, once introduced into their usage environments, almost always exhibit properties that differ from those expressly intended by their designers (Lowry et al., 2012), such that toxicologists now distinguish between the synthetic identity and biological (in vivo) identity of one and the same nano-object (Fadeel et al., 2013). Moreover, the nanotechnological world is not simply a reduction of our everyday sensory world. As we have seen, nanotechnological objects may indeed exhibit special characteristics that are harnessed precisely for specific purposes—such as their ability to pass through certain physical barriers or to exhibit “targeted” action. There are thus two aspects under which nanotechnological objects occasion the need to rethink the boundary between designer and object: first, as technological objects, they cannot simply be reduced to their instrumental capacities, and second, owing to their existence on the nanoscale, they are likely to behave in unpredictable ways. Thus, in the same way that care indicates that we rethink the boundary between politics and morality, and challenges the exclusivity of the concepts of security and interests, nanoethics may well compel us to rethink the boundary between designer and object, something the philosophy of science and technology, especially pace Simondon, already does. They may also prompt us to question the exclusivity of the concepts of impact and control in order to establish an ethics and politics of nanotechnology. This entails not only not a decentering in epistemological terms, but also in ethical and political terms. The boundary between the natural and the artificial The boundary between the natural and the artificial is also challenged by nanotechnological objects, in the immediate wake of what I have just discussed. As Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent (2013a) has pointed out, nanotechnological objects are often designed to

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s­elf-assemble and exhibit properties that are not always predictable in every detail. Moreover, once they are designed, these objects can behave according to natural processes, even if according to their own specific nature. This was shown to be the case, for example, with the well-known “molecular motors,” more specifically, the case of mounting an analogon of the flagellum E.  Coli nanomotor at the LAAS discussed by Guchet (2008), which relied on the mechanisms of protein self-assembly. As Xavier Guchet affirms, (2008, p. 23; translation ours): “No longer can we claim any distinction between operating technical objects and triggering natural processes. The presence and operations of these devices, though manufactured by us humans, ultimately become indistinguishable from the presence and operations of natural processes.” By harnessing certain of these objects’ properties in this way, designers thereby enter into cooperation with these objects. Moreover, as Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent (2013a) has pointed out, the model of the “slave-” object, in its most classical sense of complete servitude to its master—which relates to the ideal of control discussed in the previous section—is thereby entirely called into question. She proposes that we regard such objects as “partners” in their own right and argues that they should be considered as part of our household (oikos), not unlike our pets. This comparison with pets, in my opinion, has the disadvantage that it cannot entirely account for the in-between condition of nanotechnological objects and consigns them to the category of living beings. For this reason, the subtler term of an “animated instrument,” which Aristotle put forward in his Politics (1252a)—a term he uses to describe the slave, in order to convey that the slave is located halfway between the citizen and the animal— could serve as a heuristic, underscoring the nanotechnological instrument’s very distinctive place within the political system. This boundary shift demonstrates indeed how difficult it is to characterize nanotechnological objects in a general way, according to the classical categories not only of the living and the artificial, but also of the physical and the biological. For this reason, it is necessary to



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be especially heedful of the fact that the ethical import of nanotechnological objects lies perhaps not so much with their specific s­ tructure or scale as with their relational capacity. These objects behave differently in different environments and we will not harness the same properties in each one. For example, a carbon nano-object is capable of exhibiting radically different properties depending on its allotropic form—graphite, graphene, a single or multiwalled nanotube, or nanodiamond; even though all these objects are made up of the same carbon atoms, they differ in the way these atoms are bonded together and in the way they interact with their environment. Consequently, in the same way that care ethics challenges the boundary between reason and emotion and consequently dispels our suspicions concerning a particularistic ethics, reflection on nanotechnologies tests the boundary between the living and the artificial in a way that should urge us to take seriously the need to avoid establishing an “applied” nanoethics in which universal maxims are imposed upon technological objects. Moreover, given the importance of process in the constitution of nanotechnological objects, the ethical moment cannot be conceived in hindsight, i.e., grappling only with impacts once the object is constituted. Ethical discussions must account for the specificities of these various relations and adjust themselves to the processes involved. Our discussions must be “madeto-measure,” even if they do not necessarily address the objects on a case-by-case basis. The boundary between interior and exterior Not only is the boundary between interior and exterior called into question by technological objects, but this defiance of boundaries is precisely one of the distinguishing features of nanotechnological objects. Owing to their specific properties, nanotechnological objects are capable of crossing certain barriers (cutaneous or haematoencephalic) or of integrating perfectly with the structure into which they are introduced, such as to become virtually undetectable. Toxicologically, it is known, for example, that nanoparticles and nanomaterials may sometimes pass from the outer environment to

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inside the body, whether we mean them to or not, through the respiratory system, the mouth or the skin, which may indeed engender serious problems, as in the case, for example, of carbon nanotubes which have been shown to be especially toxic (Helland et al., 2007). It also appears that carbon nanotubes may damage mitochondrial DNA (Zheng et al., 2007). Moreover, the industrial use of certain nanoparticles raises issues concerning their spread in the natural environment: silver nanoparticles used in the textile industry to “sanitize” certain fabrics, for example, may leach out into the water when these fabrics are laundered. Sunscreens that contain nanomaterials may also penetrate the skin barrier. Other nanotechnological objects defy the boundary between the interior and exterior: this is especially the case with implants of multiple applications, whose extreme miniaturization can be considered as a form of invisibility. Without going as far as invoking the ideal of control and manipulation, one can nevertheless argue that since the integrity of the interior becomes impossible to safeguard, the boundary between interior and exterior is effectively called into question. Since both inside and outside become permeable, reclaiming the interior or the private in the interest of individual integrity may prove helpful for establishing limits to such permeability. Just like the three musketeers, who were in fact (almost) four, it could also be said that nanotechnologies bring about a fourth shift, even if this shift is not one of boundaries. In a certain way, the nano field recasts our notions of temporality8 and predetermination as part of a logic of anticipation undertaken as self-fulfilling: it is as though the past is not past since nanotechnologies were already there and as if the future were already here since it is announced even though it is not predictable.

Conclusions and prospects The three boundaries redrawn in light of nanoethical reflection and those called into question by the politics of care have very similar 8

  See Mody, C. C. M. (2004).



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characteristics, which appear to me to evince a synergy between the two rather than a mere coincidence. So much so that nanoethics converges with three fundamental propositions of the politics of care: 1) Thinking solely in terms of security, of “risk society,” of interests or of impacts is not entirely satisfactory; 2) Adopting a universal point of view in ethics is not sufficient; 3) The permeability of inner and outer may well lead to a revalorization of interiority in the political domain and to focus on a relational ontology. Table 3.  How to rethink the boundaries? Care

Nanoethics

General ­Characteristic

Boundary between politics and morality

Boundary between designer and object

Thinking in terms of security or impacts is insufficient

Boundary between reason and emotions

Boundary between the Universal point of living and the artificial view is insufficient

Boundary between private and public

Boundary between interior and exterior

Permeability of inner and outer, relational perspective

The politics of care thus enables us not only to draw attention to the displacement of boundaries necessarily effected by nanoethics, but also to open up the discussion beyond our ideas about impacts and the need for control, inseparably bound up with a fascination with the unpredictable, which, as we have seen, underpin ELSI. A nanoethics based on care is characterized by three essential attributes. First, its discussion is not limited to impacts but considers processes and design as essential. Second, its ethical reflection is not limited to a general or universal point of view. Third, it constitutes a reflection that pays far greater attention to the relational and to the crossing between different levels or environments. Though much remains to be done in order to flesh

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out more extensively such a nanoethics enlightened by the ethics of care, hopefully the preceding discussion, as a first step, has offered some broad guidelines for pointing the way forward. Translated by Madeleine Taylor.

Acknowledgments Most of the ideas developed in this article were presented at the ANR  Nano2’s concluding colloquium titled “La Nanomédecine, enjeux philosophiques” held at Paris1-Sorbonne on October 18, 2013 and at the CIRCEM seminar at the University of Ottawa on February 27, 2018. The author wishes to thank the participants at these events for their helpful and constructive comments and questions.

Literature Bensaude-Vincent, B. (2013a) ‘The Politics of Buzzwords at the Interface of Technoscience, Market and Society: The Case of Public Engagement in Science,’ Public Understanding of Science Vol. 23, No. 3, pp. 238–253 Bensaude-Vincent, B. (2013b) ‘Decentering Nanoethics Toward Objects’, Etica & Politica/Ethics & Politics, XV, 2013, 1, pp. 310–320 Berube, D.  Nano-Hype: The Truth behind the Nanotechnology Buzz, Amherst, NY, Prometheus Books, 2006 Dupuy, J-P (2007) ‘Some Pitfalls in the Philosophical Foundations of Nanoethics’, Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 32 (3), 237-61 Fadeel, B. et al. (2013) Bridge over troubled waters: understanding the synthetic and biological identities of engineered nanomaterials.  Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Nanomedicine and Nanobiotechnology Fischer, B. & J. Tronto (1990) ‘Toward a Feminist Theory of Caring’, in Circles of care, Abel & Nelson (dir) Albany, Suny Press, 36–54. Guchet, X. (2008) ‘Nature et artifice dans les nanotechnologies’, in Bensaude-­ Vincent B., R. Larrère, V. Nurock, Nanobio-éthique, Vuibert, 2008, p. 19-32 Helland, A. et al, (2007) ‘Reviewing the Environmental and Human Health Knowledge Base of Carbon Nanotubes’. Environmental Health Perspectives  115, n.  8, p. 1125-1131. Lowry et al. (2012) Transformations of Nanomaterials in the Environment. Environmental Science and Technology, vol. 46, p. 6893–6899 Mody, C. C. M. (2004) ‘Small, but Determined: Technological Determinism in Nanoscience,’ Hyle—International Journal for Philosophy of Chemistry, Vol.  10, No. 2, pp. 99–128.



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Nordmann, A. (2007) ‘If and then: a critique of speculative nanoethics’, ­Nanoethics, 1, p. 31-46. Nurock, V. & Panissal N. (2017) ‘Teaching a care approach to Nanotechnologies’ in From Nanotechnologies to Emerging Technologies: Towards a Global Responsibility, Bowman et al. D. M. (eds.) AKA Verlag, 2016, p. 125-137. Tronto, J. (2012), Le risque ou le Care?, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France. Tronto, J. (2013) Moral Boundaries. A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York: Routledge. Zheng, L. et al (2007) ‘Cardiovascular Effects of Pulmonary Exposure to Single-Wall Carbon Nanotubes’, Environmental Health Perspectives 115 (3): 377–382.

14. Feminism and Liberalism: At the Margins of the Enlightenment Fabienne Brugère

The liberal championing of the public space and of autonomy has proceeded to the exclusion of women from the sphere of political competency. 1 Relegated to the private sphere, reduced to a minority, the voice of women is conspicuously absent from our Enlightenment ideals. Certain feminist themes, however, based in a renewed appreciation of the role of care, have recently enabled this voice to be heard. They have also facilitated the discovery of an alternate Enlightenment, one more attuned to the realities of dependency and vulnerability. The Enlightenment has often been considered as the cradle of both feminism and liberalism insofar as its proponents upheld equal rights, the value of individual autonomy, and the possibility of freedom through the market. This widely received thesis, however, sometimes runs counter to another prominent thesis: namely, that feminism is primarily rooted in an approach that is critical of liberalism. Some questions worth considering are the following: are there any feminisms that abide points of correspondence with certain forms of liberalism, and ought we to consider the Enlightenment as a turning point or an essential moment? Also, is there a new relevance of the Enlightenment to be gleaned in feminism? 1   This text was originally published as “Le féminisme et le libéralisme. En marge des Lumières”, in Esprit, August-Sept. 2009. We thank the journal for their permission to republish in English in this volume.

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Though the term “liberalism” was coined at beginning the nineteenth century, its usage can be traced back to the seventeenth century, and progressively more often in the eighteenth century, which saw the emergence of a type of doctrine advocating a number of political and economic freedoms. If feminism bears a family resemblance to liberalism, this is because it finds its anchor in a current of thought whose fundamental insights arose during the Enlightenment. While in French, the term féminisme is found as early as 1837 in Fournier, denoting a doctrine that proposes to extend the role of women in society, it is also possible to go further back in time and trace a genealogy wherein the emergence of feminism is partly tied to the Enlightenment. Condorcet’s essay titled On the Admission of Women to the Rights of Citizenship (2010), published in 1790, Article I of Olympe de Gouges’s Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen (2003), published in 1791, and Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women (2010), which appeared in 1792, all proclaim the equality of men and women, the necessity of not excluding women from public life, and as such, of granting them the status of citizens of the Republic. And yet, feminist writings have highlighted a current of the Enlightenment that represents the very opposite of these claims, which sought to undercut a number of prejudices underlying the idea of women’s inferiority. We know that one preoccupation of the Enlightenment was to think about feminine difference, always more or less characterized by inferiority, and to attempt to construe women as naturally or morally assigned to the social roles of wife or mother (Crampe-Casnabet 1991 and Brugère 2007). Book V of Rousseau’s Emile (2003), Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (2006, second part)2 constitute documents that go completely against Rousseau’s own conception of equal citizenship or Kant’s non-gendered definition of an autonomous being. We also know that physicians of the Enlightenment sought to determine a feminine nature,   And also Kant’s Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1965, section 3). 2

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incommensurable with men’s, according to necessities of the species and the laws of reproduction (Steinberg 2001; Laqueur 1992). How, then, can feminism and liberalism both be thought to be informed by eighteenth-century developments? Answering this question satisfactorily will require us to define liberalism, or rather, liberalisms3 as well as feminism or, better put, feminisms.

A liberal women’s liberation? We can, on the one hand, identify the project of political liberalism as one that promotes a spirit of tolerance, that proposes a defense of the exercise of individual rights, but also, in a very significant way, as emanating from the Enlightenment, the struggle against all forms of superstition and fanaticism. In short, liberalism can be defined, on the one hand, by its rejection of all forms of subjection, as a denunciation of authoritarianism and arbitrariness, and as the project of establishing a new legitimacy of political power. This genealogy of political liberalism points to some salient features characterizing the spirit of political liberalism in our modern democracies: an affirmation of the autonomous or independent individual who bears rights such as freedom and equality; political institutions (executive, legislative, and legal) that privilege a balance of powers; and a separation of decision-making spheres. At stake in all this is the prospect of a common good to be sustained through individualism as well as an ideal of justice (understood chiefly here as neutrality, impartiality). To this must be added the great, urgent concern raised by many to prevent abuses of power, to see to it that, as Montesquieu so aptly wrote in The Spirit of the Laws: “So that one cannot abuse power, power must check power by the arrangement of things” (1989, p. 155). On the other hand, this political liberalism is also associated with an economic liberalism, deployed through a recognition of the individual: no longer the autonomous individual, but rather the c­ alculating 3  In the Dictionnaire européen des Lumières (Delon 1997). Didier Deleule, in “Libéralisme” (1997), traces the contours of the political and economic liberalisms emerging in the eighteenth century.

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individual/entrepreneur, who acts according to self-interest, and whose actions take on a corresponding form of practical rationality. The individual, at the forefront in our social ontology, embodies an initiative and a certain taste for enterprise which, having its source in selfinterest and setting up for its end the maximum satisfaction of this same interest, promotes, in the complex play of social relations thus initiated, what is commonly referred to as the general utility. As with political liberalism, at least in the spirit of Hume or Smith, the function of the state in this economic liberalism is to guarantee this disposition to individual expression, considered here as natural. Beyond a balance of powers and the separateness of the different domains of civic life, economic liberalism seeks to limit the power of the state to interfere in the sphere of economic exchange, which must be guaranteed, and reserve it primarily, as with Smith (2000, Book IV, Chapter 9), to three essential functions: national defense, “an exact administration of justice,” and the provision and maintenance of public institutions. The genesis of economic liberalism represents a similar independence of the economic sphere. In order to constitute itself as an autonomous sector, separate from the sphere of human affairs, the economy obviously had to sever itself from the political. But at the same time—and far less obviously—the economy also thereby liberated itself from the dictates of morality and all manner of rigid social codification. At stake, therefore, in this individualistic conception of society is no longer so much an emphasis on the moral value of autonomy as it is a recognition of the individual as a bearer of interests, indeed a bargainer. With economic liberalism, the value of utility becomes decisive. While political liberalism addresses relations between subjects, economic liberalism intensifies the relations of subjects to objects, since things enter into mercantile relationships and their value is fixed according to the relation of utility that individuals directly entertain with them. Moreover, despite their doctrinal differences, political liberalism and economic liberalism have succeeded in operating conjointly. In the words of Wendy Brown: “In the history of political thought, while

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individual liberty remains a touchstone, liberalism signifies an order in which the state exists to secure the freedom of individuals on a formally egalitarian basis. A liberal political order is therefore also compatible with a liberal economic politics.” (2005). At the same time, women were presumed to have no place within in this arrangement, as they could not be said to be fully characterized by freedom, either politically or economically. Today, however, according to Wendy Brown’s extremely judicious analysis of current liberalism, this coexistence of the two types of liberalisms is threatened by a new kind of liberalism, neoliberalism. The latter “refers to liberalism’s economic variant” but, she insists, the “neo in neoliberalism…” grounds liberalism’s “principles on a significantly different analytic basis from those set forth by Adam Smith.” (Brown 2005) While political liberalism and its values ​​have come under severe criticism on charges of being socially inefficient, overly abstract, and for its formalization of rights, economic liberalism appears to have endured and even transformed itself over time. Wendy Brown shows how neoliberalism’s interpellation of the selfinterested subject or homo œconomicus has made it possible to construct a figure of the liberal individual as someone governable in a political capacity, by the state. The governable individual here is individualistic in a different sense than the one wrought by political liberalism; this individual is more fundamentally connected or dependent (through property or interest, as defined in classical economic liberalism). What is new here is that this network of relationships makes an individual governable. Governmentality itself and all dimensions of human life are shaped by market rationality. (Brown 2005, p. 40) Profitability becomes both an anthropological and political enterprise, since any human or institutional action is conceived as the rational action of an entrepreneur, on the basis of a calculated utility, interest, or satisfaction. All human subjects implicated in the practice are thereby guided, in this political programme, in the service of an all-encompassing economic rationality. At least three liberalisms, therefore, can be identified here, one of which, the first, is in danger of disappearing, since its ideals are based

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on a conception of the autonomous and disconnected rather than immediately related subject. Three liberalisms—but how many feminisms? How ought we to define feminism and on the basis of which feminism ought we to theorize it? How is the equality between men and women entwined within the complex theoretical node of the Enlightenment? How were women possibly to aspire to political rights or economic involvement equal to men’s during the Enlightenment if the latter appears to want to construct the female sex as the determined, dependent, and inferior sex—one distinguished from the stateliness and independence associated with holding public office? In this sense, do women not represent a wedge in this connection between Enlightenment and liberalism? We might say that the idea of feminism ​​ first appeared even before the Enlightenment texts I mentioned above: for instance, in the seventeenth-century writings of Poulain de La Barre (1984), a proponent of Cartesian mind-body dualism who saw men and women as equal in terms of their intellectual capacities, and hence opened up the possibility of educating both women and men in various realms of knowledge. We know, moreover, that feminism saw enormous developments in the twentieth century as a political struggle (albeit not one whose objective is the rise to political power). It is a struggle that took place in support of the cause of women, one that sought to establish equality between men and women, an equality compromised in reality by male domination (understood as the rule of a system that privileges values considered as masculine rather than the straightforward rule of men). As feminism came to establish itself as a legitimate political struggle, it also evolved to become plural: different struggles are now borne by a universalist feminism (a struggle on behalf of the rights-bearing subject, as distinct from a gendered subject) and by a differentialist feminism (anchored in the view that since humanity is unavoidably divided into two fairly stable entities, we need to give account of the value of traditionally and characteristically feminine contributions, long kept invisible). Feminism is both practical and theoretical. It has been deployed variously in both the writings and actions of historic female figures, and thus it is difficult to describe it

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in a uniform way4, and to chart it comprehensively in its evolution. But in very general terms, we might say that feminism posits that there exists a problem where women are concerned, and that defining the problem entails responding to the question: what is it to be a woman? This, in turn, leads us to the further question: whence women’s submission? In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir posed these questions in these very terms, which she answered with the following proposition: woman must be able, just like man, to experience the freedom to transcend herself in a project, which means to come out of domination and devise unprecedented solutions with all the risks involved in such a relation to the real. Curiously, in The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir’s thought runs across traditionally liberal values: independence, autonomy, freedom, and equality. Does feminism, therefore, as soon as it takes the form of a women’s liberation movement, not represent a struggle on behalf of the values ​​of political liberalism? In short, can a common political horizon shared by both feminism and liberalism be deciphered here? Of course, upon closer examination, Beauvoir’s feminism is not a form of liberalism, even if it shares with political liberalism certain moral values ​​that give meaning and substance to the human condition. Beauvoir’s feminism eschews being a form of liberalism because of her insistence on the concrete or situational, what today we often refer to as context. Freedom is never given, especially for women, since they are subjected subjects, inessential because constituted by the demands of their situation—namely, to be dominated. Women live out a peculiar kind of drama owing to the irreconcilable nature of being a subject that surpasses itself toward freedom and owing to their factical femininity marked by male dominance: Now, what peculiarly signalizes the situation for woman is that she—a free and autonomous being like all human creatures—nevertheless finds herself living in a world where men compel her to assume the status of   For a study of the discontinuities in feminism throughout history, see Joan W. Scott (1996). 4

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the Other. […] The drama of woman lies in this conflict between the fundamental aspirations of every subject (ego)—who always regards the self as the essential—and the compulsions of a situation in which she is the inessential. How can a human being in woman’s situation attain fulfilment? What roads are open to her? Which are blocked? How can independence be recovered in a state of dependency? (Beauvoir 1980).

This last question turns out to be fundamental, as it demonstrates the divergence between Beauvoir’s insights and liberalism: independence, understood as a political good obtainable by women, is neither an immediately available value, nor a directive that woman is able to carry out unimpeded, since she is excluded from the social criteria that equip an independent individual. Political liberalism, on the other hand, seizes upon independence as a value characteristic of all humanity. Against political liberalism, it is necessary to point out women’s exclusion from this paradigm of humanity (and at various times in history, the exclusion of Jews, people of colour, etc.) and to think about the dependence and servitude (which institutes the difference) associated with femininity (as constituted within a system of male domination) in order to be free of it. So, what kind of interplay is there be gleaned between feminism and the values of ​​ political liberalism? Have feminisms employed and should they appeal to these values (autonomy, freedom, equality) that rest at the very foundation of our liberal democracies? Can these feminisms reinvest new meaning to the Enlightenment? Moreover, should feminism today avail itself of liberalism’s tools, often disavowed as instruments of the bourgeoise, which has long benefited from the assignment of women to the private and domestic domains? Perhaps. In this vein, one philosopher of the American left Wendy Brown’s own nostalgic and melancholic remarks come to mind. In a fairly recent collection of essays, she candidly writes: In this guilt, anxiety, and defensiveness over the loss of liberal democracy, we would feel compelled to defend basic principles of liberalism or simply defend liberalism as a whole in a liberal way, that is, we would give up being critical of liberalism and, in doing so, give up being left. (Brown 2005, p. 50)

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In this era of neoliberalism, which successfully subsists alongside neoconservatism, can the liberal-democratic values ​​of independence, freedom, and equality not serve as a recourse, even if new principles of governance have completely turned their back on these principles? Is political feminism, from this point of view, able to re-engage to some extent with this political liberalism in order to further pursue women’s liberation, a goal that long remains to be reached? Or, on the contrary, does this constitute an impossible alliance, fatally compromised by many great Enlightenment thinkers’ positions on women, progressive thinkers who, while upholding equality, nevertheless instituted a feminine difference that goes as far as to conceive of marriage as a contract of submission, as with Kant (2005)? Can this “male” Enlightenment be meaningful for feminist politics?

An impossible alliance: feminist critiques of liberalism Arguably, feminism’s dubiety on the matter of political liberalism, its ambiguities, the areas that remain incomplete, issue from a paradox rooted at the heart of feminism: namely, that it is both a political movement for women’s liberation (a production of practices) and a body of discourse, knowledge, and reflections on women which also constitutes them as women. On the one hand, feminist theorists have criticized liberalism as a pernicious political system that, while ­invoking human freedom, has continued to subjugate women to the benefit of men. On the other hand, numerous women’s liberation movements, especially today in non-Western, often undemocratic countries, typically invoke the language of political liberalism to substantiate women’s equality. American philosopher Martha Nussbaum points to this paradox in her article titled “The Feminist Critique of Liberalism”. (Nussbaum 1999) In India, Sudan, and Bangladesh, various struggles against oppressive religious traditions, female genital mutilation, or the authority of fathers, husbands, and brothers, are couched in the language of rights, of the autonomy of the person, of dignity, and respect for women. These concepts, which originate with a liberal tradition vested with Kantian morality, are employed in order to

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advance a radical critique of society, as though employing them was also to define and prescribe what is crucial for women’s quality of life. If many feminists in countries that flout women’s right to freedom and equality marshal the ideals of political liberalism or of our liberal democracies to fight and to criticize those highly patriarchal societies, why then are so many feminist theories having their origins in Europe and North America so stringent concerning any liberal project? What is it that feminist theories take to task with liberalism, whose political and economic aspects, moreover, they often conflate?

Liberalism promotes an individualist ideology The ideological individualism of liberalism is well known. Louis Dumont’s masterful analyses in Homo aequalis (1977) and Essays on Individualism (1986) have shown, via an intellectual history of Europe, particularly France, Germany, and England, how representations that value the individual and neglect or subordinate the social whole gradually came to be formed. Louis Dumont outlines an “anthropology of modernity”. He distinguishes two meanings of the word “individual” in relation to the word “man”: the individual as a particular, empirical man, a sample of the human species as found in all societies, and the individual as value-bearing, independently moral, autonomous being (Dumont 1986, 16). It is this latter definition of the individual that we encounter in our modern ideology. Unlike holist societies, in certain parts of India for example, characterized by submission to a hierarchical caste system granted as a supreme value, in modern Western societies, this supreme value is the individual human being: “If the whole of humanity is deemed present in each man, then each man should be free and all men are equal” (Dumont 1980, 11). Every man is autonomous, which means effectively that he carries in himself all the qualities that define man apart from his various relations. This tradition of liberal thought elevates an ​​ untethered or separate individual, at the origin of his acts and responsible for his actions, and also an abstract individual, who acts independently of social contingencies. Let us say, then, that the liberal individual, structured around the value of autonomy, is a fiction that at the same time stands as an

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injunction to being. It is a way of guaranteeing, across our singular existences, moral values and a rights-bearing subject, unconstrained by the social order. This political individual, however, coexists alongside the economic individual, a worker or owner (Locke), or a bearer of interests (Smith), such that the autonomous individual now becomes an entrepreneur, guided by a calculating rationality serving his own benefit. On the obverse side of this structure of the individual is an independent, unattached individual, who can enter into political association as an equal member. There remains, however, the undersurface of this structure of the individual: such an individual gives to this political association the best of himself. He is a productive individual, perpetually mobilized and driven, silent on matters pertaining to the private sphere, forgetful of the intimate and of his own life’s accidents. It is precisely this figure of the liberal individual that feminists have criticized, the individual in whom there coexists the moral value of autonomy, whose most developed idea finds its source in Kant (i.e. consider all human beings as ends in themselves), and the value of utility (the self-interested, individual, at distance from others because preoccupied with his self, property and personal qualities). Indeed, let us resume the question raised earlier in light of Simone de Beauvoir on the subject of women’s concrete dependency. How can the liberal tradition account for dependency if it presumes independence to be self-evident? The liberal tradition overlooks the particular fate of women throughout history (just as it forgets the particular fate of all subjugated people: people of colour, others excluded from economic participation, and so forth). Dependency is either forgotten about or it is viewed negatively, as a lack. This critique of liberalism is considerably widespread, levelled in various appreciably disparate works of political philosophy to demonstrate liberalism’s downfall in its overly abstract and impersonal conception of justice. This conception indeed ended up backfiring, to the extent that it excluded all those who, while subject to supposedly liberal democracies, still lacked political representation in the current system. In Frontiers of Justice (2006), Martha Nussbaum shows just how radical this great oblivion concerning dependency is in political

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l­iberalism (and in particular, in Locke, Kant, and Rawls): women have indeed scarcely benefited within the liberal tradition from the principle of the moral equality of persons (this all-important autonomy). In the remark at § 46 of the Doctrine of Right, Kant goes so far as to identify those to be excluded from honourable humanity with his cutting distinction between active and passive citizens. The former are free subjects, ends in themselves who are not to be treated as means, as they are not things that can be acquired. The latter are characterized by their dependence or their condition of being a minority: women, immigrants, anyone who cannot be self-sufficient by his or her own activity. Passive citizens are dependent beings, therefore too vulnerable, manipulable and, as such, dangerous. They do not qualify as moral and political subjects. Does the liberal principle of autonomy, then, on which this individualist ideology is anchored, not seem ultimately to constitute an acceptance of the exclusion of all dependent beings, including women? From the point of view of many feminists, therefore, this characterization of the individual, principled as it may be, serves only those privileged individuals who are disposed to align such principles with an exercise of self-interest and rational conduct in market-driven society that can only prosper. The passion in pursuing such interest indeed becomes this special, deliberated kind of passion (Hirschman 1977), which in turn orders life and rationalizes conduct through actions that become predictable, unlike the far less predictable empathic motivations, considered as heavily tainted by emotional bias. Feminists have ardently taken to task the anthropological and economic impact of liberal individualism, its presumption of the discreteness of individuals, a concept through which achievement has come to be associated with masculinity within the context of a strict separation between the public and private spheres. More precisely, this figure of the liberal individual is deployed according to the objectives of the public sphere, established by and for men, whereas relations of love and care are confined to the private sphere of the family, largely assigned to women who thus remain outside of the social playing field and of political institutions. Susan Moller Okin (1989), who

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is heavily influenced by John Rawls and agrees with many of the principles of political liberalism outlined in A Theory of Justice, nevertheless criticizes Rawls for considering the family unit as natural society. Against Rawls, it must be contended that the private in fact is political and that the family must be thought of as a social space that is far from self-evident: the family cannot be likened to a natural society, a vestige of monarchical times, with a head of the family as the sole depositary of a just authority. Why does Rawls, when defining the conditions or the circumstances of justice, which makes his context both subjective and objective, imagine his counterparts as heads of families who “have a desire to further the well-being of at least their more immediate descendants”? (Rawls 1999, p.  111) Does he truly believe that the family is naturally governed by the order of love and authority, and is outside the purview of any political and social regulation? Feminist critics have been especially vocal and resolutely modern on this point, debunking a number of naturalistic illusions about the family, describing the family instead as a political space that ought to promote the equality of men and women, criticizing any form of natural authority embedded in our gender markings, and maintaining an openness to different family structures and kinds of human interdependence.

A too abstract ideal of equality The perspective of autonomy points to a certain vision of the person that promotes, on the side of a feminism based in liberal values, an ideal of gender equality. For feminists such as legal scholar Catherine MacKinnon, however, this ideal remains far too abstract even if in Europe and North America, “it has gotten women some access to employment and education, public pursuits, including academic, professional, and blue-collar work, the military, and more than nominal access to athletics.” (MacKinnon 1987, p. 35) But this liberal ideal inherited from the Kantian Aufklärung, while appearing to have a stake in the pursuit of equality of the sexes, is incapable of addressing the very foundations of gender difference and of male supremacy in the domain of public life.

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More precisely, liberal values pose ​​ a specific problem where gender relations are concerned, as demonstrated in what MacKinnon calls the “difference approach.” This approach is based on doctrinal gender differences, which can only limit gender equality. There is necessarily a tension between the concept of equality, which presupposes sameness, and the concept of sex, which presupposes difference: According to the approach to sex equality that has dominated politics, law, and social perception, equality is an equivalence, not a distinction, and sex is a distinction. The legal mandate of equal treatment—which is both a systemic norm and a specific legal doctrine—becomes a matter of treating likes alike and unlikes unlike; and the sexes are defined as such by their mutual unlikeness. Put another way, gender is socially constructed as difference epistemologically; sex discrimination law bounds gender equality by difference doctrinally. A built-in tension exists between this concept of equality, which presupposes sameness, and this concept of sex, which presupposes difference. Sex equality thus becomes a contradiction in terms, something of an oxymoron, which may suggest why we are having such a difficult time getting it. (MacKinnon 1987, p. 32-33)

Feminists who are caught in this tension are constrained by this contradiction and compelled to choose between the injunction to “be identical to men” (gender neutrality and the rule of formal equality), or the philosophical affirmation of sex as difference (since women are in fact different from men, then why not be different, why not also be different from men in legal terms, with special protections). In either case, the problem lies in our obsession with the “difference approach” or with the problem of identity and difference, even if this liberal brand of feminism has succeeded in getting our societies to be concerned with women’s equal opportunity and treatment and in making substantial gains in this regard relative to men. At the same time, whether universalist or differentialist, these feminisms remain saturated with a liberal idealism which, on the one hand, fails to take into account the full extent of inequalities for lack of appreciation of the concrete, and on the other hand, remains a political and social system built for men: most criteria for sports are based on men’s physiology, while men’s needs define health or car

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insurance, etc. The liberal feminist approach can only ever be unsatisfactory and incomplete because it leaves aside what is crucial: the entrenched hierarchy of power between men and women. MacKinnon’s “dominance approach,” conversely, is based on the conviction that it is better to fight inequalities (these real and imagined differences between men and women) than to claim equality of the sexes. The difference between the sexes remains a socially situated subjection of women. The social inferiority of women as a gender is reflected in the fact that many of the violent abuses they suffer (e.g. rape, prostitution, pornography) are relatively rarely inflicted upon men. The dominance approach is hence a feminist approach that is not abstract, that does not, like the difference approach, adopt the point of view of view male supremacy, and which fights the sex discrimination inherent in what MacKinnon calls “matters of empirical fit,” (1987, p.  42) namely, “matters of accurately shaping legal rules (implicitly modelled on a standard set by men) to the world as it is” (1987, p. 43) with all its relations of domination based on gender. Finally, any feminist resumption of liberalism (in the interest of an ideal of justice) can only garner insufficient or partial results. Only by leaving aside questions of moral value can ​​ the project of equality begin to take form: “In this shift of paradigms, equality propositions become no longer propositions of good and evil, but of power and powerlessness.” (MacKinnon 1987, p. 44) This critique of liberalism, which at the same time acknowledges the impact of liberalism on feminist movements, is appreciably robust. It underscores the concrete givenness of being positioned according to gender within an arena of power. Moreover, it proceeds from situations of inequality and experiences of injustice and discrimination, rather than abstractly invoking an ideal of equality or justice. In this sense, it is part of a movement away from the spirit of political liberalism that grew out of the Enlightenment. It can, moreover, in its connection to the modernity of the Enlightenment, call forth what Jonathan Israel (here following Margaret Jacob) terms a “radical Enlightenment” (Jacob 2003; Israël 2001): radical thinkers at the margins of dominant discourse who have at various times, in view of

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universal characterizations of humanity, exposed and denounced the particular customs women specifically are subject to, such as chastity or marriage. It demands of us, therefore, that we examine situations of inequality that affect the lives of women alongside an ongoing development of ideals of liberation for human kind.

Feminism’s impact on liberalism: toward an alternative ­Enlightenment? Feminism can enter into dialogue with liberalism only if liberalism is able to renew itself in light of the criticisms advanced by contemporary feminists, which requires that it accept to recognize ideas more radical than its own, more denunciatory of discriminatory experiences that indeed date as far back as the Enlightenment. Let us, therefore, turn now to the question of how liberalism as a doctrine stands to benefit from feminism, how feminism can transform it, or more precisely, how feminism can reinvigorate political liberalism and its values in ​​ our current age of neoliberalism. One of the most impactful criticisms addressed to liberalism, as has become widely known today, concerns its inability to construe dependency as positive or indeed as denotive of dignity. Indeed, liberalism has been so closely structured around an unswerving cult of the independent and productive individual that it has scarcely been moved to consider the various forms of dependency or vulnerability (vital: beginning and end of life/social: precarity, exclusion/environmental: natural disasters, large-scale pollution). As Richard Sennett aptly put it in his book Respect: “The dignity of dependence never appeared to liberalism as a worthy political project.” (2003, p. 125) We could also mention Frontiers of Justice by Martha Nussbaum, who, despite her admiration in other respects for the idea of social justice developed as by John Rawls, criticizes his liberal conception of justice as too abstract, made rigid by the political tradition of the social contract that conceives of individuals as naturally “free, equal and independent.” (Nussbaum 2006, p. 28-34) Granted, political liberalism constitutes a body of doctrine concerned with the commonalities in all human beings against all forms of subordination and

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subjection. However, it has remained silent on many concrete givens at an individual level, to the point, today, of jeopardizing its own conception of social justice: “Such theories make no place for those who, for long stretches of a life, or even the whole of a life, are markedly unequal to others in their productive contribution or who live in a condition of asymmetrical dependency.” (Nussbaum 2006, p. 33) Different feminist currents have amply criticized liberalism’s blindness to dependency, vulnerabilities, and the inequalities generated therefrom, not, however, with a view to abandoning any reference to liberalism, but rather to transforming the market society and its values, to interrogating the ideas that inform the doctrine of liberalism. I will consider two examples of prospects for said evolution of liberalism within a feminist framework that aspire to make room for the kinds of dependencies, injustices and inequalities that define the current condition of women.

Dignity in dependency It is markedly apparent throughout the history of ideas that liberalism regards humans as rational beings (who behave rationally in accordance with their autonomy or interests, and on a basis of either selfsufficiency or self-enterprise). The human being is thus conceived, in liberal discourse and scholarship, as a rational agent who maintains a sufficient distance from anything that introduces an element of instability or uncertainty, essentially from any motive rooted in emotion or imagination. Assessments of liberalism as being cold or dry often cite liberalism’s difficulty in breaking away from a formal approach in the face of the concretely real, and a difficulty in reckoning with human emotions, imagination, dreams, and so forth. American feminists especially, notably Annette Baier, have sought to show how the body of doctrine constituted by liberal ideas has become impoverished and oversimplified by a narrow conception of human reason, associated with this myth of independence, a myth that has long served a traditionally male way of life and that is heavily invested in a strategic approach within the social sphere. As Baier discusses extensively throughout her work, philosophers such as

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Hume and Smith, leading figures of the body of doctrine of liberalism and of the Scottish Enlightenment, for their part advanced sentimentalist models of man that in many respects break with this narrowly construed rationality. To re-read their works, to grasp the alternate use they make of the questions of sentiment, imagination, and identity, is to draw from the philosophical tradition in a way that joins up with contemporary feminist discourse—as a means to question the omnipotence of reason, to offer a critical reading of personal identity and to propose a relational and concrete account of the self. The liberal ideas of thinkers like Hume or Smith thus bear upon a philosophical focus on the emotions, imagination, of a relational self, and of an idea of the human being that necessarily includes a person’s dependencies. It is possible we have progressively reconstructed the history of liberalism in an ideological bent. Hume’s account of the individual, for instance, his proposal of a skeptical becoming of reason, is also a project demystifying reason. Baier, in The Commons of the Mind, identifies in this project the following theoretical stakes: dispensing with the logical account of reason in favour of an openness of reason to cultural and social forms of reflection and deliberation, that necessarily blur any strict division between pure thought, formally given with each individual regardless of context, and a range of social and cultural practices. (Baier 1997, Lecture one) This extension of the forms of rationality, especially prevalent with Hume (in the Essays) and also with Shaftesbury (who discusses conversation, the “beauties of the human soul,” the cultivated or polite man, etc.) testifies to dialogical rational practices that philosophy must consider. At stake, therefore, is the development of “a social conception of reason” with the following consequence: the relative integration of some women within a wider conception of reason that accounts for other practices of the mind than those focused on by traditional philosophy. By drawing from the history of philosophy, therefore, feminism can play the tradition of the Scottish Enlightenment and its skeptical underpinnings against the Aufklärung, imbued with a moral definition of the person that winds up excluding women and their multiple dependencies

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from the concept as soon as is applied to an empirical world governed by legal apparatus in which does not make women out to be full subjects. This opening of reason to social practices has, on the one hand, afforded a critique of reason construed as pure thought, devoid of any embeddedness in a social fabric; on the other hand, reason, being thereby “cracked,” anything but impervious to society and culture, becomes inclusive and dialogical: open to society such as it is, attentive to the judgments and words of others, to the experiences they express, including those of women scholars. By challenging the traditional preoccupation with rationality, found to be overly centered on the autonomous individual, in the aim of bringing to the fore our relational practices, such philosophical contributions demonstrate that the individual is in fact always already social, situated, emotionally charged5, always already in relation with others, be they male or female. Dependencies characterize all of our existences; they weave the very possibility of our practices. Do these works of the Scottish Enlightenment circumscribe a kind of feminism without being considered as such? From the perspective of their theories, the dependent beings that were women in the eighteenth century are not discriminated against nor considered as minors. Plainly, it remains for liberalism to go back on its history and reconsider its origins and uncover the dignity and value of our dependencies as argued since the 18th century by minority or more marginal Enlightenment voices.

The model of care Readily apparent in the social practices of our liberal and ostensibly democratic societies is that everything that does not uphold the individual as self-enterprising is forgotten, looked down upon, made 5   Here I am referring to Hume’s well-known assertion in A Treatise of Human Nature, Book  II, “We speak not strictly and philosophically when we talk of the combat of reason and passions. Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and never only pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” (2004, p. 415).

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invisible, and assigned to those found to be disqualified or subjugated within the liberal paradigm of humanity: women, people of colour, the poor. Eminently central to these practices, however, is care, both a practice and a situated disposition; care, accordingly, is the focus of an entire body of feminist scholarship. Care encompasses dispositions and activities, everything we do to support, maintain and repair our “world” so that we can live in it as well as possible.6 Re-evaluating care, largely considered (both morally and socially) as the purview of women, enables us to come to a different understanding of the status of women today and to propose more egalitarian approaches to the functioning of market economies, which might better address the well-being of all. It forces us to appreciate the value of services provided to individuals, and to come up with a new definition of the individual (no longer characterized by a (fictitious) autonomy, but by the reality of his or her vulnerabilities, more or less pronounced). Liberal societies face a number of challenges tied to care: problems connected with the beginning and end of life, or the inevitable expansion of care professions, weigh upon feminist theory and feminist struggles. On the one hand, feminists are concerned with stopping the exploitation of what is, more often than not, women’s work and work assigned to the less privileged (within a social setting where care is poorly remunerated and looked down upon). On the other, feminists wish to bring about a recognition of the fact that we are all, at least at one time or another in our lives, dependent and vulnerable. They also wish to underscore ways in which the production of a liberal and masculine ideology may have us believe so readily in the self-evidence of the autonomous individual, as if autonomy has not always been the result, the accomplishment of a complex play of factors that engages zones of dependency. The work of Joan Tronto, especially in Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care, is structured around the premise   This robust definition of care is formulated by Joan C. Tronto in Moral Boundaries (1993, p. 103). 6

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that our liberal societies cannot in fact be said to be democratic insofar as care is forgotten about, while indeed caregiving and the labour of care props up and maintains society. Our societies could in fact make their way to becoming fully democratic, maintains Tronto, if care were valued as central to our existence as a society and as a primary value in our democracies, instead of being considered a globalized commodity or a simple service activity. This entails a social commitment to supporting the provision of care, which in turn involves a change in our representations and ideology. Following Tronto’s and others’ analyses of the role of care in society, it remains for us to consider ourselves as vulnerable, and to rethink the human position as one of vulnerability, if we are to be able to conceive of the lives of the most vulnerable in society as relatable to our own. It remains for us to consider the commonness of a heightened vulnerability that we all find ourselves in or will experience at one time or another in our lives (to varying degrees, certainly). At the same time, we can thereby dispense with the notion that personal autonomy, success by any means, can serve as a basis for solving the problems our societies face today. Perhaps, therefore, if we elevated the standing of care in our societies, establishing it instead as a crucial value, we could transform liberalism the better to bear upon the concrete, and move toward a liberalism that is sensitive to others in their concrete humanness, in the materiality of their existences (bodily, vital, emotional, and social), and even, moreover, temper the neutral or impersonal ideal of justice often adopted by liberal theorists with care ethics’ insights. Drawing upon care ethics is a way of giving ourselves the means to recognize situations of injustice, discrimination and abuse within the market economy. It is also to (re)connect with the many feminist struggles dating back as early as the eighteenth century, albeit at the margins of the Enlightenment—part of what today is referred to as the “radical Enlightenment” (namely, its more skeptical and sentimentalist voices). Translated by Madeleine Taylor.

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Literature Baier, A. (1997) The Commons of the Mind, Chicago: Open Court. Beauvoir, S. (1980) The Second Sex, H. M. Parshley (ed), New York: Vintage Books. Brown, W. (2005) ‘End of Liberal Democracy’, in Edgework. Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Brugère, F. (2007) ‘Les femmes, la philosophie et l’art de la conversation’, in C.  Secrétan, T.  Dagron and L.  Bove (eds), Qu’est-ce que les Lumières «  radicales  »  ?, Paris  : Éditions Amsterdam. Condorcet, M. (2010) Sur l’admission des femmes au droit de cité, J.-M. Tremblay (ed), Chicoutimi: Les classiques des sciences sociales. Crampe-Casnabet, D. (1991) ‘Saisie dans les œuvres philosophiques’, in D. Georges and M. Perrot (eds), Histoire des femmes en occident. Paris: Plon. Deleule. D. (1997) ‘Libéralisme’, in M. Delon (ed), Dictionnaire européen des Lumières, Paris: Puf. Dumont, L. (1986) Essays on Individualism, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Dumont, L. (1980) Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dumont, L. (1977) Homo Aequalis, Paris: Gallimard. Gouges, O. (2003) Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne, Paris: Mille et une nuits. Hirschman, A. (1977) The Passions and the Interests, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hume, D. (2004) A Treatise of Human Nature, E.  Mossner (ed), London: Penguin Classics. Israël, J. (2001) Radical Enlightenment, New York: Oxford University Press. Jacob, M. (2003) The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans, Greensboro: The Temple Publishers. Kant, E. (2006) Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, R. Louden and B. Robert (eds), Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press. Kant, E. (1965) Of the Distinction of the Beautiful and Sublime, J. T. Goldthwait (ed), Berkeley: University of California Press. La Barre, F. P. (1984) De l’égalité des deux sexes, Paris: Fayard. Laqueur, T. (1992) La fabrique du sexe, Paris: Gallimard. MacKinnon, C. (1987) Feminism Unmodified, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Montesquieu, C. (1989) The Spirit of the Laws, A. M. Cohler, C. Basia and S. Harold (eds), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nussbaum, M.C. (2006) Frontiers of Justice. Disability, Nationality and Species Membership, Cambridge, Harvard University Press. Nussbaum, M.C. (1999) Sex and Social Justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Okin, S. M. (1989) Justice, Gender and the Family, New York: Basic Books. Rawls, J. (1999) A Theory of Justice, Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Rousseau, J.-J. (2003) Émile, Or, Treatise on Education, Amherst: Prometheus Books.

feminism and liberalism: at the margins of the enlightenment 293 Scott, J. W. (1996) Feminism and History, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sennett, R. (2003) Respect in a World of Inequality, New York: W. W. Norton & Co. Smith, A. (2000) The Wealth of Nations, E. Cannan (ed), New York: Modern Library. Steinberg, S. (1992) ‘L’inégalité entre les sexes et l’égalité entre les hommes. Le tournant des Lumières’, Esprit, 273: 23-39. Tronto, J. (1993) Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care, New York: Routledge. Wollstonecraft, M. (2010) A Vindication of the Rights of Women, S. Rowbotham (ed), London, New-York: Verso.

15. Barefoot, Pregnant and in the Kitchen: Critical Reflections on the Domestic Through the Lens of Bare Life Monique Lanoix

Giorgio Agamben’s political writings centre on sovereignty and sovereign power and his focus on power makes his work appealing to feminist inquiry. In his discussions of power, Agamben makes use of the Aristotelian understanding of life: zoē and bios. Zoē is non-­individuated life, life in general, whereas bios refers to the life of an individual or a group. From these two categories of life, Agamben proposes to further nuance sovereign power as the power to produce bare life. Bare life is not equivalent to zoē, rather, bare life is depleted life, life pushed to the brink of existence. Importantly, bare life plays a crucial role in modern politics. According to Agamben, “[i]n Western politics, bare life has the peculiar privilege of being that whose exclusion founds the city of men” (1998, p.  7). If the political is founded on bare life, it necessarily extrudes bare life from political life. Importantly, one of Agamben’s claims is that bare life is the included exclusion: that which must be assimilated while at the same time left out. It appears as if the domestic could also be thought of in this manner since the political necessarily relies upon but excludes the domestic. As the quote above attests, Agamben’s focus is on ‘the city of men’ and his work has rightly been criticized for ignoring how oppression and power are not experienced in the same manner by individuals who are situated at the intersection of gendered, racialized, ableist and/or classist systems of oppression (Deutscher 2012; Miller 2016;

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Overboe 2007; Ziarek 2008). Thus, it would seem as if interpreting the domestic as the included exclusion is at best limited or at worst a dubious application of Agamben’s thought as it expands Agamben’s project beyond its intended purpose. Nevertheless, I believe that the concept of bare life can still be of use to feminist care theorists, in particular when the question of care work is examined. More specifically, I argue that it can offer a more thorough understanding of the tensions inherent to making the domestic activities of caregiving relevant to the political sphere as it helps to highlight how market forces act to push care work into a liminal space between the private and public spheres. My concerns are related to those expressed in more recent articles by Frans Vosman and Alistair Niemeijer (2017) and Vosman (2017), who argue that care theorists need to take into account late modern circumstances in order to fully grapple with the increased precarity of workers. I show that the notion of bare life can help to understand why care work resists an easy assimilation into any political framework, even that of a democratic ethics of care, such as Joan Tronto’s (2013). In the first part of the paper, I review briefly the concept of bare life and I examine the power and the possible resulting violence that can take place in the domestic sphere. I make the case that, if this power is an example of sovereign power, it is also a type of power that is not evenly applied to everyone in the domestic sphere. This makes it difficult to view the domestic sphere as a type of included exclusion. In the second part, I explore the dimensions of caregiving using Annie Dussuet’s investigation of domestic work in France (2017). Her research brings to light the manner in which care work can be commodified in terms of service; yet, as she discusses, there remains a component of care work that is beyond commodification. In order to delve into this further, I make use of Pascale Molinier’s analysis of paid care work in the context of French nursing homes (2013). Commodification and market pressures transform the space where caregiving takes place into a liminal zone at the border of the private and public spheres. Care workers are located outside the political sphere since their work pertains to matters of the private; however, they



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retain a tenuous relationship with that realm as their work is structured by market forces. I show that the realm of the domestic, as a subset of the private sphere, is transformed into a biopolitical space where those requiring care and care workers become bare life. The consequence is that care workers are doubly oppressed: first because their work is located at the threshold of the public-private and, second, because of the way in which care work is commodified. I conclude that efforts to give political value to the caregiving activities that take place within the domestic sphere will fail until there is an explicit recognition of this double subjugation. Put differently, rereading the domestic with Agamben helps to highlight how marketpower infiltrates the domestic and how it further marginalizes care work and immobilizes it at the border of the public-private.

Sacred Man – Domesticated Woman Michel Foucault introduces the notion of biopower in The History of Sexuality, volume 1, where he puts forward that there was shift that occurred in the seventeenth century and that power was significantly transformed at that time. He explains that “power over life evolved in two basic forms,” which were not antithetical but two poles of a single development (1978, p.  139). One pole was concerned with disciplining bodies and the other the species body, or population, related to questions that touch upon births, lifespans and mortality (1978, p. 139). Biopower has proven to be a useful conceptual tool to critically examine the ways in which states and institutions regulate bodies and ways of life. If Agamben is indebted to Foucault’s notion of biopower, he insists that “[t]he Foucauldian thesis will have to be corrected or, at least, completed […]” (1998, 9). For Agamben, biopower has its inception in early Roman law, and not the seventeenth century as Foucault proposes.1 In the writings of Festus, Agamben uncovers the notion of sacred man, a being who is outside the law but still within the law. This being cannot be sacrificed but he   Agamben discusses Foucault in context of the Nazi death camps and the Muselmann in Remnants of Auschwitz (2002, 82-86). 1

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can be killed without crime.2 The important point here is that Agamben uses the concept of sacred man to show that the formation of a state, or the establishment of a sovereign in Western politics, rests on a foundational element that is at the same time excluded from the state. Sovereign power both creates and is established through sacred man. The upshot is that for Agamben, politics needs to exclude a certain type of life in order to function. He puts forward that “[t]he fundamental categorical pair of Western Politics is not that of friend/ enemy but that of bare life/political existence, zoē/bios, exclusion/ inclusion” (1998, p.  8). In Western politics, “[b]are life remains included in politics in the form of an exception, that is, as something that is included solely through an exclusion” (1998, p.  11). This is inherent to Western politics and can resurface at any time and any place with incredible virulence. According to Agamben, the Nazi death camps best illustrate how sovereign power is exercised through bare life. “The camp is the space of this absolute impossibility of deciding between fact and law, rule and application, exception and rule, which nevertheless incessantly decides between them.” (1998, p.  173) Later he clarifies that what confronts the guard or the camp official is not an extrajuridical fact […] (1998, p.  173-174); rather, “every gesture, every event in the camp, from the most ordinary to the most exceptional, enacts the decision on bare life by which the German biopolitical body is made actual” (1998, p. 174). These citations indicate two points that need to be underscored at this time. The first is that the exception becomes the new state of affairs. As Johanna Oksala explains, if “the state of exception was initially meant to be a provisional measure, it has become a lasting characteristic of government” (2010, p.  32-33). Agamben writes that “[t]he camp is the space that is opened up when the state of exception begins to become the rule. In the camp, the 2   Some theorists contest Agamben’s interpretation of Roman law. For example, Thomas Lemke, A Zone of Indistinction: A Critique of Giorgio Agamben’s Concept of Biopolitics. Outline, 2005, 1, pp. 3-13.



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state of exception, which was essentially a temporary suspension of the rule of law on the basis of a factual state of danger, is now given a permanent spatial arrangement, which as such nevertheless remains outside the normal order” (1998, p. 168-169). The second point is that in the state of exception, the camps are the location where the Jews, as the figure of sacred man, can be murdered, while their extermination is not taken to be murder by the Nazi state. Decisively, the Nazi state, in order to be a state, relies on this power to exterminate. Although this last point is crucial for Agamben’s discussion of the modern state, whether or not sacred man needs to be exterminated is not the most salient point for Agamben nor for my discussion. Rather, it is the fact that Western politics creates and relies upon these zones of indistinction where law and sacred man overlap. To further support this point, Agamben gives other examples such as that of Guantánamo Bay, and of the waiting rooms at airports, where refugees or foreigners must wait. These are zones where bare life and juridical rule coincide and the prisoners or the refugee or traveller embody bare life (1998, p.  174). The waiting rooms of international airports may be taken to be benign spaces; if they appear to be a safe haven, they are nonetheless zones where the individual who does not meet the criteria for leaving is forever trapped or expelled.3 If travellers, even those without proper paperwork, are not exterminated, it is nonetheless the case that their lives are circumscribed and their freedom curtailed by the force of law. The zone of indistinction is where power is absolute and where sovereignty is established; and this is where sacred man is situated, as a refugee or a traveller. The refugee or the traveller embodies the laws of international travel, and the conditions under which she or he can successfully enter a country legally. In this sense, sovereign power relies on those travelling while potentially excluding them if they do not satisfy the required entry conditions. 3   Edward Snowden is an example. These zones can be zones of violence as the case of Robert Dziekanski was tasered in the waiting room of the Vancouver airport in Canada in 2007 (CBC, 2019).

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It might seem as if zoē, life generally understood, is at the origin of sacred man; however, this is not the case, rather power and sovereignty produce bare life. Bare life is a politically marginal existence, and, because of this marginalization, it can be readily eliminated. In Homo Sacer (1998), Agamben also illustrates this radical marginalization through the example of a person in a vegetative coma, Karen Quinlan, who also represents bare life. Although Quinlan did not die as the result of the withdrawal of life-support, she was the first case in the U.S. where legal battles occurred over whether or not life-support should be discontinued for someone in a persistent vegetative coma.4 She was bare life, and her body represented the battleground of the law, medicine and life. A more recent example of that is Terri Schiavo, who had been in a vegetative state for many years. She was kept alive through artificial nutrition by means of a tube feeding system. Her husband petitioned the Florida courts to have her tube removed. After much media coverage, extensive judicial deliberation and petitions (2003-2005) from her parents against her husband’s request, Michael Schiavo eventually won and Teri Schiavo’s tube was removed in March 2005; she passed away a few weeks later as a result.5 These types of cases are significant for Agamben as they illustrate how bare life is generated by the law. A decision to discontinue life-support or tube feeding in Schiavo’s case implied that such a life was not worth living. In the language of living wills, it means that the person’s quality of life has been largely reduced and this quality has no hope of improvement; consequently, discontinuing treatment is taken to be preferable to living such a life. For Agamben, “[i]f euthanasia lends itself to this exchange, it is because in euthanasia one man finds himself in the position to separate zoē and bios in another man, and to isolate in him something like a bare life that may be killed” (1998, p. 142). Such bare life, in this case the body of the person in a persistent vegetative coma, 4   In the U.S. the Karen Quinlan case was a landmark case in the right to die battle (Robert D. McFadden, 1985). 5   This case garnered considerable media attention in the U.S.  It was a court battle and even involved the governor of the state of Florida. For retrospective on this case, see Clyde Haberman (2014).



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is at the margins of society and yet remains within it, as the individual in persistent vegetative coma is under medical treatment. A person who is in a coma and on life-support is considered living and yet a decision made by herself in a prior living will or by other individuals can terminate her life. Here, bare life does not lead to torture or extermination, but, rather, over determination by the law. It is important to clarify that in the case of removing life-support, the person is not actively killed; rather, the decision is to let nature or the disease runs its course as the support that is keeping her alive is removed. It is framed as a patient’s right to refuse treatment. With recent changes in many countries concerning the legality of medically assisted death, the decision now also lies with the person herself while remaining a matter of law.6 In the case of medically assisted death, the physician assists the patient, who is conscious, in actively terminating her life. The production of bare life in these medical instances is not quite similar to that of the Jews in concentration camps. The Jews were exterminated. Whereas in the case of either removing life support of a person in a persistent vegetative state or of medically assisted death, the act is undertaken with the patient’s presumed will, in the first case, and with their explicit accord, in the second. This is an important nuance to make as it implies that in such cases, sovereign power is not external to the individual whose life will be terminated as it was in the case of the Jews in the Nazi death camps. Agamben writes that “...the fact that the sovereignty of the living man over his own life has its immediate counterpart in the determination of a threshold beyond which life ceases to have any juridical value and can, therefore, be killed without the commission of a homicide” (1998, p. 139). Regardless of where the person is involved in the decision over life, for Agamben, it is still a “life that is devoid of value” (1998, p. 139). What is essential is the ­determination of a threshold beyond which life has no value. In the case of euthanasia, the decision 6   The recent law in Canada (bill C 14) stipulates under which conditions a person who is terminally ill can apply for medically assisted death. This request could be denied (Parliament of Canada, 2016).

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over bare life is displaced to an arena where the sovereign and the physician seem to exchange roles (1998, p. 143). If the camps are the most extreme and murderous representation of a space where the law and absolute power coincide, the person in a vegetative coma and the traveller caught in a no-zone of international travel are also embodied examples of this complete concurrence of law and absolute power. Significantly for my purposes, the previous discussion indicates that, as Agamben notes, “[b]are life is no longer confined to a particular place or a definite category. It now dwells in the biological body of every living being” (1998, p.  140). Because bare life resides in every living human, it can be found in all the spheres of life; that is, not only the political or social spheres of life but also the private and the domestic spheres. In many feminist discussions of the domestic and private spheres, the domestic is equated with the private. In Pateman’s words, the public is the “economy/state” and the “private is the domestic, conjugal and intimate life” (1989, p. 5). Historically in Western societies, it is the space that women could only inhabit as they were denied a political presence. In many critical feminist discussions of the private/ public dichotomy, the domestic is discussed under the umbrella term of the private. For example, in her book, Gender Justice and the Family (1987), Susan Moller Okin writes about challenging the public/ domestic dichotomy where she explains that such a challenge “does not necessarily mean denying the usefulness of a concept of privacy and the value of privacy itself in human life” (1987, p.  127). Her point is to highlight the dynamics of power that happen in the domestic and personal lives of citizens (1987, p. 128). For a theorist such as Moller Okin, there is no need to separate the domestic from the broader realm of the private or personal in order for her to make her argument that the practices of family life are not just. The lack of distinction between the private and the domestic is not problematic in other more recent analyses of the public-private such as those of care theorists (for example, Tronto 2013). As the quote from Moller Okin makes clear, that is not to say that feminist theorists do not nuance their understanding of the private



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in order to capture the dynamics of power, powerlessness and possible violence inherent in this sphere. Put differently, the private and the activities that take place there have historically and often remain beyond the scope of the law as these activities are concerned with the individual himself.7 In fact, feminist theorists are fully aware of the tensions that arise from the power of the husband or father and the resulting violence against the wife or mother and/or children that occurs in the private sphere. This abuse, as it is located within the private, eludes the law. For example, Frances Olsen explains the limits of the law when it comes to interfering with a man’s private life or domain. She states (1993), [f]eminist lawyers have objected to the withdrawal of the law from the so-called domestic sphere on the basis that the withdrawal left women unprotected from abuse and gave the ideological message that domestic life was less important than commercial life or other aspects of society governed by law. It should no longer be overlooked that while police and district attorneys have tended to treat the matter as private when a husband beats his wife, and to suggest that they should let the couple work out their differences, police and district attorneys have always treated it as public when the wife shoots the husband, never seeing that as one way for the couple to work out their differences.

Not only is the private sphere a place where injustice reigns, it is also where the law fails to protect women. Of note in Olsen’s statement is the double standard to which women are subjected. This stems in part from the assumption that the private is man’s unquestioned domain. Her statement also illustrates how the private when shielded from state or legal interference makes the home a dangerous place for women, even if it is their apparent queendom. If many theorists do not have theoretical reason to make the conceptual distinction between the private and the domestic as their discussions center on the role of the domestic within a political theory, this is not the case for my analysis. By drawing a distinction   I use a male pronoun deliberately as the law, in the instance I am discussing, is concerned with men. 7

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between the private and the domestic, I can more clearly highlight the manner in which the private and the domestic come into conflict. There are two reasons for doing this. The first is to emphasize how the private can be used as a screen for acts of abuse. I recognize that the private affords a certain freedom from state control. For example, Iris Marion Young perceives this as having an emancipatory potential. She explains that the private should be understood as an aspect of an individual’s “life and activity that any person has a right to exclude others from. The private in this sense is not what public institutions exclude, but what the individual chooses to withdraw from public view” (Young 1990, p. 119-120). This emancipatory goal would be possible, according to Young, if the hierarchical order of the public over the private where erased. However, as Ruth Lister observes, this understanding of the private nevertheless leaves open the question as to “which individuals have the power to make their decisions stick” (1997, p. 121). In fact, as Olsen’s remarks illustrate, some individuals, men, have more power to shield their actions from public view and prosecution. Thus, my point in separating the private from the domestic is to highlight the power dynamics that shroud the domestic. The second is to underscore the domestic as a specific area of human activity, where the activities of caregiving take place. As Dussuet clarifies in her genealogy of domestic work in France, in the 1970’s, feminists asserted that the activities that are performed for others in the home constitute domestic labour. This became an impetus to study women’s situation in relation to work more generally and allowed for a specific field of research to open up (2017, p. 104). In my discussion, the domestic sphere is the place where the activities of care, whether directed to others or to oneself, take place. It is the zone of labour where the tasks of feeding, rearing children, cleaning and taking care of others and oneself are performed. If it is included within the private, it is nevertheless a space where work takes place and where sanctioned abuse can also take place. It is the location of social reproduction, the space par excellence of animal laborans as it is utilized by Hannah Arendt in her writings.



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Recalling that bare life is present within each human being and can resurface at any time and any place, to use Agamben’s phrase, it is worth exploring whether sovereign power and the law coincide within the domestic sphere to produce bare life. This will be examined in what follows along two lines of inquiry. First, I will discuss whether the domestic should be considered as the excluded inclusion and, second, whether bare life can be produced within the domestic. As I suggested earlier, it appears as if there are parallels between the exclusion of the domestic, as the political relies upon it, and that of the inevitability of its exclusion, since the political must exclude the domestic in order for it to be established as a separate sphere of action. Put differently, the political involves excision of a type of life: women and the activities they perform in the household must be excluded from the political. Needless to say, the many feminist theorists who have examined the role of the domestic-private sphere have written extensively on this topic. Regardless of the political traditions and ideological commitments they are wedded to, there is overwhelming agreement among feminists. Namely, they have argued and continue to argue that the political relies on the domestic sphere and on the activities of caregiving that take place within that sphere. Moreover, they have claimed that the domestic serves as the opposition to which the political defines itself; it is a sphere of action taken to be natural and thereby excluded from the realm of the political. Nonetheless, as these feminists point out, this reliance on the domestic sphere is never sufficiently acknowledged nor given any political currency.8 I agree with this very broad feminist consensus: the domestic is marginalized yet vital to political society. Nevertheless, I do not believe 8   This implies that reproductive labour, from the activities of self-care to those involving caring for others, is labour that is needed and yet has no place within the sphere of legitimate activities that are assumed by the citizen. From an historical perspective, this is the point made by Moira Gatens in her critique of Rousseau. Carole Pateman’s discussion of the public-private dichotomy in liberal theory is crucial and touches on these concerns. Susan Moller Okin makes compelling arguments for the failure of Rawls’ theory to address issues of the family. Eva Feder Kittay’s dependency critique of Rawls is also noteworthy.

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that the domestic can be thought of as the included exclusion in the Agambian sense. Crucially, this is not to claim that the domestic is free of biopolitical power. Rather, in order to explore how the activities that take place in the domestic sphere are circumscribed, I put forward that it is more fruitful to think of the domestic sphere as a space of biopolitical power. Historically, the power that women were subjected to in the household was the power of the husband, which had been framed as stemming from nature. However, the power dynamics in the home have changed in the 20th century. More specifically, caregiving, which is my focus, is now subjected to the power of market forces. Increasingly in Western countries, care work is bought by individuals who can afford to delegate caregiving and performed for pay by individuals who are very often socially and economically disadvantaged. It is in this sense that I put forward that caregiving is shaped by biopolitical power, a claim I will explain and backup further in the next section. Before proceeding to my argument, however, a few clarifications are needed. First, one might quibble with the desirability of trying to flesh out a feminist reading of Agamben. As part of her inquiry on reproductivity, Agamben and sexual difference, Penelope Deutscher discusses at length whether such a feminist interpretation is possible or whether it might not be more fruitful and convincing to explore the omissions of gender in Agamben’s work. This latter option is what she undertakes in her critical examination of women and reproductive life (2012, p. 65). One of the reasons for Deutscher’s position is that she (like Agamben readers such as Catherine Mills (2006)) believe that a feminist reading would be taking homo sacer outside of Agamben’s project. As Mills acknowledges, Agamben appears to relegate race and gender to the level of the ontic, and “if this is the case, then it is difficult to see how the formulation of biopolitical sovereignty and the production of bare life can be used as a critical diagnostic in analyses of power and subjectivity” (2006, p.  136). For Deutscher, another way of engaging more fruitfully with Agamben’s work would be to look at the various feminist responses to his work, for example highlighting concerns tied to race and gender that would then enrich Agamben’s project; this is the perspective taken by Ziarek (2008),



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for  example. Another fruitful possibility, according to Deutscher, would be to use the concepts derived from his work in order to explore questions that are relevant to a feminist perspective (2012, p. 63). My essay is written in the spirit of this last option, which is to take Agamben’s conceptualisation of bare life and biopolitical space and apply it to the domestic sphere. Second, an understanding of power dynamics in the domestic is in order. Agamben explains that the “right over life and death” is not sovereign power but “the unconditional authority [postestà] of the pater over his sons” (1998, 87). Of note is Deutscher’s attention to this discussion in Homo Sacer of the pater familias’s power to kill (2012, p. 88-89). Deutscher remarks that Agamben appears to recognize how sexual difference can have an impact on a person’s exposure to death. She explains, that for Agamben, “the son and the citizen are exposed to possible death through the power over them of the father or sovereign, but that this exposure is different to that of the wife and daughter to possible death at the hands of the household head” (2012, p.  59-60). Undeniably, for Agamben the father’s rule over the wife is different from his rule over the son. Although Agamben does not expand on this, it can be surmised that because the son will enter the political sphere, already he is destined to a life outside the home; this is not the case for the wife or daughter. The latter will forever be located within the domestic. If the power of the father/ husband can move from the home and eventually to the political, the power over the wife and daughter remains in the realm of the home. It can be agreed that the power of the father/husband is a type of sovereign power. However, in the case of the rule over the wife, power does not coincide with the law that operates in the political sphere. As the earlier quote from Olsen reveals, the power of the husband is not subject to this law. The husband is the ultimate ruler over his wife since this is the natural order. This has been strong tenant of Western societies, both historically and more recently. For example, in Canada, marital rape was only recognized as rape in 1983; the case of Canada is not atypical of Western societies. This reveals how the law was unable to reach into the domestic until the

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late 20th century. The myth of the husband’s marital right over his wife’s body is powerful and this is a myth that still lingers today.9 As I discuss later, in order to fully grasp why this is the case, it is essential to examine the role women occupy in the early theories of the social contract.10 If the wife can be raped, abused and even killed, it would seem that such a life is an illustration of sovereign power in the sense Agamben intends it. However, if the power of the husband produces bare life, this is not the case of everyone in the household. Put differently, the power of the husband may well be absolute, and beyond the reach of the law in the case of his wife; however, the power of the father over his sons is limited. Agamben asserts that the sovereign power of the father may be absolute. If this was the state of affairs in Roman law which Agamben discusses (1998, p. 89), it was no longer the case for early contract theorists. In order to draw attention to the way in which bare life is produced in and by the political, Agamben has to turn toward ancient Roman law. Although Agamben does not ignore social contract theorists, his focus is on the power of the Leviathan and, centrally, “the capacity of the subjects’ bodies to be killed [which] forms the new political body of the West” (1998, p.  125). 9   In their discussion of a recent verdict concerning rape within marriage, Jennifer Koshan, Melanie Randall and Elizabeth Sheehy explain that “[s]ince 1983, it has been a crime in Canada to sexually assault one’s spouse. Yet marital rape too often remains effectively decriminalized, as shown in a recent Ontario decision. In R. v. H.E., an Ottawa man was acquitted of sexually assaulting his wife. Justice Robert J.  Smith found that “the accused probably had sex with his wife on many occasions without her specific consent, as both he and she believed that he had the right to do so.” With respect to the incident that led to criminal charges, however, the complainant testified she had told the accused to stop several times, and the judge found her to be credible. It is difficult to see how the accused could have honestly believed that his wife was consenting in these circumstances. It appears the accused was acquitted because he did not understand the law of consent, despite the fact that ignorance of the law is no defence.” (2017). 10   Ziarek explains the silence of Agamben in relation to sexual political violence as the result of his analysis of bare life which is “always defined in relation to death and not sexual violation” (2008, p. 93). However, my analysis centers on violence in the domestic realm, which is not to be confused with political violence; this latter type of violence is often used toward genocidal ends.



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However, if the power within the domestic is to be analysed by taking gender into account, the manner in which the household is constituted needs to be critically examined. For this, ancient Roman law is not appropriate; rather, it is early social contract theory.

The domestic and early social contract theories For early social contract theorists, the union of a wife and husband must have a social and political raison d’être, which is reproduction. Particular rights and powers will stem from this goal: the male as father will have certain duties and as husband and head of the household certain powers. In early social contract theories, the power of the husband over his wife is taken to be the result of the natural hierarchy of males over females. It is assumed to be the natural order of things. I am ready to grant that within early social contract frameworks, the wives could be reduced to bare life in their roles as wives. However, as I will now explain, the domestic is not clearly a zone where all life could be reduced to bare life.11 If this is the case, then it is difficult to argue that the domestic should be understood as the excluded inclusion. The sons, for example, have a privileged status as men and future citizens.12 The sons and daughters, although the situation of the daughters is more tenuous, cannot be reduced to bare life unconditionally. Some theorists, notably John Locke, explicitly recognize that children are owed duties by their parents (II section 58). In the Two Treatises, he states, “[t]he Power, then, that Parents have over their Children, arises from that Duty which is incumbent on them, to take care of the Off-Spring, during the imperfect state of Childhood” (II, 58; italics in original). It makes sense that the power of the male head of the household, the father, would be limited because it makes it possible to have future generations. Although Locke discusses p­ aternal   Although I do not discuss servants and slaves in this section, I want to make clear that they were also under the power of the master of the household. For a discussion of slaves and bare life, see Ziarek (2008). 12   I recognize that in early social contract theories, not all men have equal status. However, to make my argument I focus on the class of privileged men, who are the focus of Locke’s discussion. 11

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power, this power is not completely in alignment with the law that is at work in the political sphere. The power of the father results from a natural law and it is subjected to some political limits. This is ­especially true in the case of the sons, since they are to maintain the continuation of society and are indispensable actors in the social contract. Therefore, if the power of the husband/father appears absolute, it is not so in the case of sons. In order to shore up this claim, I turn to Carole Pateman’s critical analysis of early social contract theories where her analysis is focused on women and reproduction. For Pateman, early social contract is not so much a social contract as a sexual contract. In The Sexual Contract, Pateman describes the power of the husband not as paternal but as conjugal (1988, p. 93). This is coherent with the ultimate goal of the marriage bond, which is reproduction. It is essential to recognize that as a conjugal right, the power of the husband is even more removed from the law of the political sphere; it is solidly engrained in the household. If Locke sees the union of the wife and husband as the first society (II section 77), the husband remains the ruler. For example, if there is disagreement between the husband and wife, the husband prevails according to Locke (II section 82). Nevertheless, it is the case for Pateman that “[w]hen a woman becomes a ‘wife’ her husband gains right of sexual access to her body (once called ‘conjugal rights’ in legal language) and to her labour as a housewife” (1988, p. 115). If Locke appears more lenient in his understanding of the power of the husband over his wife, this is not the case for Rousseau. Pateman writes that for Rousseau, “[t]o be a good husband and citizen a man must have a good, that is to say, obedient wife, who upholds order in the sphere that is the natural foundation of civil life” (1988, p. 98). Women need to be controlled and, thus, subject to their husbands. By looking at the various versions of the social contract, and crucially, at the contribution of Freud’s account of women and sexuality, Pateman builds her argument that the original contract is a fraternal pact […]. The individuals who enter the contract are brothers (sons of a father) who transform themselves into a civil fraternity by contracting together. They are bound together



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[…] through their common interest in upholding the civil laws that secure their freedom. But they also have another fraternal bond constituted by the forgotten dimension of the original contract. They also have a common interest as men in upholding the terms of the sexual contract, in insuring that the law of the male sex-right remains operative (1988, p. 102-103; italics in original).

If the domestic sphere is located outside of the political, and the power of the husband/father is not absolute, then what is the status of the domestic? In her analysis of the fundamental repression of sexual difference in modern political thought, Adriana Cavarero makes the case that social contract theory offered a new radical paradigm in claiming that individuals were equal. She points out that even though human kind was seen as composed of men and women, this did not translate into different rights and powers. In fact, modern political theoreticians “simply fail to see women. Their mind’s eye sees in the state of nature (and hence in the social contract and the political society that results from it) only men, while women are a sort of ‘background’, an appendix of mothers and wives, vaguely perceived in the distance and not further explored” (1992, p. 31; italics in original). Importantly, she also notes that “[t]he theoretical and logical structure that marks the modern state was born specifically as a decisive rejection of Aristotelian political doctrine” (1992, p. 31). However, the Aristotelian distinction between the sphere of politics and the sphere of home remained untouched (1992, p. 31). I put forward that in modern thinking, the domestic remains essentially ignored and this explains, in part, why domestic abuse has been and continues to elude the law. Instead of looking at the domestic as the excluded inclusion, I propose to frame the domestic sphere as a biopolitical space where sovereign power is at work; however, this power is not only patriarchal power. In her book, The Limits of Bodily Integrity, Ruth A. Miller makes the case that “[t]he woman citizen thus in turn becomes both biopolitical subject and biopolitical setting, with all that each of these roles imply.” (2007 p. 30; italics in original). By comparing the laws regulating abortion, adultery and rape, Miller concludes that “…the womb,

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rather than Agamben’s camp, is the most effective example of Foucault’s biopolitical space” (2007, p.  173). My point in gesturing to Miller is to highlight how biopower is not only exercised on women as subjects but also on women as a site of reproductive activity. I agree with Miller’s broad conclusion in that is shows that reproduction is a space where biopower is present. However, in my discussion, I interpret the activities of reproduction to mean all activities that sustain life and, in my analysis, caregiving is included as an activity of reproduction. Framed in this manner, the domestic sphere is a site of biopower. In the following analysis of caregiving, I examine the way in which the market also acts as sovereign power that shapes the activities of caregiving. Significantly, care theorists and care ethicists have called for better recognition of the value of care work, and for better remuneration of care workers. However, it is essential to examine carefully how the power dynamics of the market will permeate care work. I am not only putting forward that caregiving and care workers are devalued; I am also asserting that work taking place in the domestic is situated at a problematic threshold of the publicdomestic. I turn to my argument next.

Market power in the domestic The realm of the household is obviously not free of power. There is the power of the husband, as discussed earlier, but the women in the household can also exert power. Historically, at least in the upper classes, the wife and her daughters were not always the ones who were primarily responsible for all the caregiving in the household. In many privileged households, there were servants as well as slaves who performed such work. Power was and, still is, distributed unevenly; and there is hierarchy that is operative within the home. If slavery has been abolished, many individuals labour under conditions of servitude in the recently instituted market regime of care. In order to defend my claim that market power is a biopolitical power that shapes caregiving, I will in what follows make use of Dussuet’s analysis of the division of labour in the domestic realm in contemporary French society. In addition, Molinier’s study of paid caregivers



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in institutions will shed light on the coping mechanisms utilized by paid caregivers in nursing homes. Finally, I will set up a brief conversation between Dussuet and Molinier and the work of Elsa Dorlin on servitude. In their analysis of the research performed on housework, Nancy Rollins Ahlander and Kathleeen Slaugh Bahr (1995) deplore the fact that much of the research done on the topic of household chores has not explicitly recognized the moral dimensions of household work. For these authors, the moral dimensions stem from the familial context in which it is performed. As they remark, when the discourse on household chores has included a moral element it is in the context of the fair distribution of tasks (1995, p. 54). This is also what Dussuet (2017) finds in her article that examines the research spanning many decades on work in the home. According to Dussuet, the 70’s represented a time when domestic work as bona fide work came to the attention of Marxist feminists, and it contributed to the politicisation of household. The 1980’s was a time when attention was directed to the impact of the double work load faced by working women and research on housework was focused on the question of the equitable distribution of household tasks. Dussuet explains that in the 1980’s, research compared the performance of the activities of caregiving in the home to the performance of the tasks related to a job outside the home. In particular, Dussuet notes that the studies found that time was managed in very dissimilar ways in both settings. In work outside the home, the tasks were usually performed within a linear timeframe, whereas, the activities of caregiving were not linear and required the permanent availability of the caregiver. In addition, women in the home often juggled many tasks at once (2017, p. 104-105). In looking at these studies, Dussuet’s goal is to understand the feminist responses to the consequences of caregiving on women’s workforce participation, which could lead to some type of compensation based on the hours spent on caregiving. As she explains, later studies focused on attempting to find an objective criterion for distinguishing work in the domestic sphere from other activities taking place in the home and the comparison

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proposed by researchers was one based on the market. For example, if a product or service could be bought on the market, and it was similar to what was produced at home, then the work involved in producing this service or product at home could be labelled domestic work (2017, p.  106). In later research, this criterion continued be used to distinguish domestic work from ‘free time’ giving an apparent objectivity to the assessment of the work involved in caregiving. Importantly, Dussuet’s article reveals that caregiving does not fit well into a model of productive work: it is not linear and may not produce a tangible end-product. In addition, she observes that as long as the time spent performing household chores remains in the domain of the private, a direct comparison with workforce hours is not possible (2017, p. 106). The implication is that the problem of the equitable distribution of household chores is perceived as a family matter and hence, the subtext here is that the (implicit) solution is that housework should remain a private matter to be managed by families (2017, p. 107). This shows, in my view, how care work seems to stubbornly resist any relocation beyond the private. Returning to Ahlander and Bahr’s discussion of the moral dimensions of housework, their suggestion is that the activities in the home should be understood not as tasks to be distributed but, rather, as shared participation in family life (1995, p. 65). This highlights the importance of a dimension inherent in the performance of household chores: care or attention to. Dussuet’s research makes clear that the work done in the home by women for their families is framed as a service rendered (2017, p. 107), which the women say they are doing out of love. Given the regime of care in the home, Dussuet states that it becomes impossible to distinguish maternal chores, washing one’s baby, from domestic ones, washing one’s clothes (2017, p. 109). For Dussuet, this implies that domestic work can be analysed as care work (2017, p. 109). In addition, when the activities of care are performed in the home by family members, they are performed, at least in part, under the logic of the gift (2017, p.  109). Consequently, domestic tasks are regulated by a different normative framework than those of work performed in the public sphere (2017, p. 110). Importantly, this



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is not taken into consideration when care is framed solely as a service to be delivered to another person. Dussuet rightly worries that the commodification of care work will make the logic of the gift even more invisible. There have been important transformations since the 1990’s, and one of these is the commodification of care work. If the work performed in the home had been ignored as an issue of public concern, Dussuet explains that the French state is now, rather paradoxically, interested in the work of caregiving. In part, this shift comes from a motivation on the part of the French state to create more jobs. France is also facing an increasing older demographic and wants to encourage older persons to stay in their homes, and this goal can be more readily attained through policies that remunerate care work. Therefore, caregiving services that relate to individuals, more specifically to the help required to perform the activities of daily living, such as help with food preparation, or with dressing, can now become salaried tasks. The move toward the commodification of care is also present in other industrialized nations of course, due in part to the increasing work force participation of women as well as the increasing number of older persons who require assistance for the performance of the daily activities of life. Notably, the development of these new services blurs the boundaries of domestic work as Dussuet recognizes (2017, p. 108). Dussuet acknowledges that research on paid care work has documented the precarity of this work, which is gendered, and I would add racialized. She also acknowledges that the conceptual analyses of care, which came from American feminists in the 80’s and 90’s, have facilitated the exploration and the understanding of the different facets of care work. It is also important to note that if caregiving comprises chores that are directed towards others, there are also care activities that are directed at oneself. Dussuet’s concern is that care theorists have focused their analyses primarily on other-directed care. In other words, Dussuet charges that care theory is developed solely through the perspective of caregiving as work to be done in the service of another. If this focus narrows the broader study of care, the

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attention to other-directed care does not hamper my analysis. In fact, it helps to highlight some of the tensions that marketization brings about. As I discuss more fully below, when other-directed care becomes a job to be performed by the clock, the relational aspect of the activity can be seriously undermined or eradicated; in addition, caregiving changes from an activity that could be multi-tasked to one that is similar to assembly-line work. This leaves care workers in a precarious position because, firstly, part of their work, which has communicative components, is effectively erased. Secondly, because the logic of efficiency structures their caregiving. I want to take up Dussuet’s finding that caregiving activities operate in part under a logic that is distinct from the logic of the market. First, it is essential to acknowledge that such care work is often taken at face value as “drudgery, to be avoided if possible” (Ahlander and Baher 1995, p.  54). Feminist theorists, for example Virginia Held, have made the case that action within the domestic sphere is not merely instinctual. Held puts forward that the realm of domesticity comprises all the characteristics of political action as ethical and volitional dimensions are present. Care work comprises emotional labour and this not only adds an ethical dimension to the performance of care work, it also makes care work a satisfying activity (Lanoix 2013). Although there can be great satisfaction in the performance of care work, there is, nonetheless, what Molinier calls ‘le sale boulot’ or drudgery in the performance of caregiving. For Dussuet, the drudgery can be overcome by the constitutive component of ‘caring for’ connected to an attitude of care or love for whom one is performing the tasks. If these elements can be negotiated within the family, when caregiving enters the realm of the market, the ‘caring for’ becomes an attitude that is difficult to conjure up as familial ties, even broadly construed, are absent. This is where Molinier’s study of paid caregivers in nursing homes in France is relevant. Through interviews, she examines how nurse’s aides or personal care workers cope with the tedium and even disgust of some care tasks. It is important to state that, in nursing homes, care aids are the lowest on the hierarchy. They attend to bodily needs, such as feeding the person who requires



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care or cleaning them. Molinier finds that these workers relate to the person they are assisting as if they were someone in their own family (2013, p.  117-123). By relating to a difficult older woman with dementia as if that person was their own mother or grandmother, or by recasting the care they are giving as the care they would want their own relative to get, the performance of tedious work is transcended by the goal of attending someone for whom they care. To link this to Dussuet’s findings, these caregivers are re-introducing a logic of the gift, broadly construed, into the work they are performing. Both Dussuet’s and Molinier’s studies highlight the importance of bonds within the care relation. If Molinier’s subjects are able to re-introduce this bond and the relational aspect of care, it is with great effort on their part and often against institutional policy, which often stresses the importance of professional detachment (Lanoix 2013). In addition, because it can hamper efficiency, the relational aspects of care must be expunged when care work is commodified as it may slow the performance of the work. This is especially the case when caregiving is primarily constructed along an economy of attending to bodily needs, and the person requiring care is framed as an object of care. Under such conditions, caregiving becomes care by the clock and not according to needs (Lanoix 2013). Furthermore, the care relationship is mainly constructed along the lines of a service to be delivered at a specific time to a particular object of care, instead of a human being requiring assistance. Under such dynamics, care work readily becomes servitude. In order to flesh this out, a look back into the past practices of care is in order. In her text “Dark Care”, Dorlin (2005) examines the evolution of care work in the American household. Using an intersectional analysis of care work, Dorlin shows that within the household, not all women performed the same chores nor did they receive the same benefits, whether material or symbolic (2005, p. 89). Dorlin writes that at the end of the 19th century in the U.S.A., domesticity was an extension of slavery (2005, p.  90). For example, during the first half of the 20th century, many middle-class American households employed women to take care of household chores. These women

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were primarily working-class women of colour. For Dorlin, the racial stereotypes relating to care workers were and are still articulated around a racist assumption that such women are naturally predisposed to care (2005, p. 94). Such assumptions make it easy to keep caregiving work at a low remuneration, since it is within the natural capacities of these women to perform caregiving activities; it does not imply any professional training and can remain at low-pay status. Framed in this manner, care work risks becoming servitude instead of paid service. In addition, the abuse that was often levelled at domestic workers was taken to be the prerogative of the matron in charge of her household. The parallel between the power of the father over his wife and that of matron over the domestic worker must be mentioned here. Just as the private can shield the abuse of the husband over his wife, it also can do the same in the case of the abuse of domestic workers and this abuse still occurs today (see Hilgers 2019). If care workers can be dominated by individuals in the household, as I discuss next, marketization also act as a dominating force. Dussuet examines closely how the marketization of care has evacuated the relational aspects of care. She puts forward that this love or attitude of care toward the other has no place in the commodified version of care. I have also discussed how commodification structures caregiving as an endeavour that produces an end-result, such as a clean and well-fed body (see Lanoix 2011). Put differently, paid care work has the goal of producing measurable results and when caregiving is structured along those lines, the communicative aspects of care are all but erased. Nevertheless, caregivers attempt to bridge this care gap as Molinier’s study confirms and these workers perform work in manner that is supererogatory. Dussuet also discusses this aspect of caregiving: often paid caregivers perform a “sur travail” or work beyond what they are paid to do and this is never translated into proper remuneration (2017, p.  114). I would add into an explicit recognition of the relational aspects of caregiving as a valued and essential aspect of this type of work. Paid caregiving by its very nature is in an uneasy location: by virtue of its goals, it pertains to realm of the domestic. Moreover,



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caregiving, as the subject of state policies as well as marketization, is linked to the public sphere. However, caregiving cannot be easily assimilated into the public sphere as it takes place in the home, or in the case of nursing homes, in a home-like setting. The work p­erformed by paid caregivers is in a no man’s land: it is domestic work, yet it is performed for pay. As I discuss below, it is in a liminal space between the private and public spheres. The capitalist framework under which paid caregiving operates also places care workers in a tenuous relationship to their work. They operate in a grey zone. Their work is commodified according to a productive framework, specifically, the production of ‘acceptable’ bodies. However, this manner of framing care work leaves behind the communicative elements inherent to care work and it erases the constitutive element of the gift that is found when care is provided by family caregivers in the home. These two constitutive elements cannot find a place within the current logic of marketized caregiving. As Molinier’s study highlights, caregivers might try to recapture these aspects, but it is a challenge they cannot always meet. Paid care work, as it is structured in late capitalist societies, oppresses care workers in at least two ways. First, as I have just discussed, care workers perform work that is not regulated in a way to allow for the performance of such work within a structure that is distinctive to care work. The paradigm of the gift, which is the manner in which care operates in the domestic sphere, at least ideally, cannot be transposed to paid care work, especially in late capitalist market economies.13 For example, in a gift economy, care would need to be structured in ways that go against the goals of commodified care, which is care by the clock. This way of structuring care, necessarily objectifies the care receiver and the caregiver is portrayed as someone who only needs to attend to an object of care (Lanoix 2009). Therefore, when the communicative aspects are erased, the caregiver is reduced to a cog in a production line.   I recognize that caregiving in the home can be less than adequate. However, I wish to emphasize how the logic of the gift is present in the care of loved ones. 13

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Second, care work is not perceived as a profession but, rather, as a type of paid activity requiring little or no training, save for attending to the bodily needs of care receivers in a safe and secure manner. When the communicative aspects of care are extruded from the care relationship, the worker becomes a type of automaton. Because of the ways in which caregiving work is circumscribed, the caregiver does not attend to the individual requiring care as human being in need, but rather, attends to her as the embodiment of bare life: that is, as a being practically devoid of any status, located at the margins of society. If this means that the care receiver is marginalized, it also implies that the care worker, as a worker attending to devalued subjects, will have a lesser status. Even if they retain some basic rights, the upshot is that both caregiver and care receiver will be located outside the mainstream of society, in a liminal space as marginal beings, and this marginalization will be lived in specific ways by each of them. Finally, the marketization of care and the manner it is regulated by the state reveals how the power of the market and the law coincide. Here the production of bare life comes from the easy coincidence of the law and the market: the needs of those requiring assistance are framed in a way that such needs can be readily measured and caregiving is regulated according to strict attention to measurable outcomes. I put forward that the space of caregiving, encompassing care worker and care receiver, is a zone of bare life. The activities of care do not have political value. The subject of these activities, the persons requiring assistance are framed as life wanting as it is through their needs that the state will primarily relate to such individuals. The satisfaction of those identified physical needs is also the way in which the market and the state will engage with caregivers. Because the state and the market address caregivers14 and care receivers through their physical needs and their needs only, the 14   The way commercial care chains make money is not only to sell good care but also to show the settings in which this care takes place. See, for example, how Chartwell Retirement Residences advertise their services (https://chartwell.com/).



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individuals in the care relationship are reduced to life wanting. It is in this manner that the space of caregiving becomes the location of biopower, of bare life.

Conclusion When Agamben discusses the political meaning of the people, he asserts that what “we call people is not a unitary subject but an oscillation between two opposite poles” (2000, p. 31). He adds, “on the one hand, the People as a whole and an integral body politic and, on the other hand, the people as a subset and as fragmentary multiplicity of needy and excluded bodies” (2000, p.  31; italics in original). Although he explicitly recognizes that some bodies are needy and may be excluded from the political body, he does not really engage with this idea to any great extent. As Oksala clarifies, Agamben wants to show that our conception of the political is not constituted solely by the idea of a community inclusive of beings capable of morality, self-reflexivity and speech, but by the exclusion of life that is not worthy of politics (2010, p. 35). The possibility of exclusion is always present. If citizens are comprised of bios and zoē, bare life lurks in each citizen throughout the phases of infancy into old age. The infant and the older citizen who are no longer active citizens each embodies zoē absolutely. Domestic and reproductive activities, such as the activities of self-care and care for others, are present throughout the life of the citizen. Zoē can be managed by the citizen as adult, but usually at a price. For example, a parent with a dependent child must manage work and home; if that labour can be contracted out to a paid worker, then the parent retains her status as a full participant in society. Within such a construct, if bare life denotes the life of individuals who fall outside the paradigm of the citizen, it means that the activities of labour, those activities of care for those who cannot care for themselves, will necessarily be devalued. This is currently the case for care labour, whether paid or unpaid; such labour does not have import in the political realm, and when it enters the market, it is typically poorly remunerated and insecure work.

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Bodily needs are situated outside of the political: they are private or personal needs. This gives caregiving a tenuous status. If the marketisation of caregiving appears to be a solution to remedy its devalued status and make it politically relevant, this effort can only fail. The answer does not lie primarily in better remuneration or training of workers, even if this is a necessity. Rather, it demands the explicit recognition of the way in which the state and the market converge. This is of crucial import for care theorists if caregiving is to gain political currency. In my analysis, bare life is not produced by a violent act. It is life classified as wanting, at the outskirts of life having significant political import. The consequences, however, can be violent. From the marginalization of care workers, to the violence that occurs in the home, the domestic realm is both relied upon, and excluded, as a significant component of human life. Agamben is certainly correct when he states that “[i]n Western politics, bare life has the peculiar privilege of being that whose exclusion founds the city of men” (1998, 7; my italics). As I have shown, this is much truer than what he, perhaps, may have meant.

Literature Agamben, G. (1998) D.  Heller-Roazen (trans.), Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare life, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Agamben, G. (2000) V. Binetti and C. Casarino (trans.) Means without End, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Agamben, G. (2002) Remnants of Auschwitz, D. Heller-Roazen (trans.), New York: Zone Books. Ahlander, N.R. and K. S. Bahr (1995) ‘Beyond Drudgery, Power and Equity: Toward an Expanded Discourse on the Moral Dimensions of Housework in Families,’ Journal of Marriage and the Family, 57: 54-68. Arendt, H. (1989) The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cavarero, A. (1992) ‘Equality and Sexual Difference: Amnesia in Political Thought’, in G.  Bock and S.  James (eds.) Beyond Equality and Difference Citizenship, Feminist Politics and Female Subjectivity, New York: Routledge. Deutscher, P. (2012) ‘Sacred Fecundity: Agamben, Sexual Difference and Reproductive Life,’ Telos, 161: 51-78. Dorlin, E. (2005) ‘Dark care: de la servitude à la sollicitude’ in P.  Paperman and S. Laugier (eds.), Le souci des autres  : Éthique et politique du care, Paris  : Éditions EHESS, pp. 87-97.



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Dussuet, A. (2017) ‘Le travail domestique: une construction théorique féministe interrompue,’ Recherches Féministes, 10 (2)  : 101-117. Foucault, M. (1978) The History of Sexuality, volume 1, R. Hurley (trans.), New York: Pantheon Books. Haberman, C. (2014, April 20) ‘From Private Ordeal to National Fight: The Case of Terri Schiavo,’ New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/21/us/from-private-ordeal-to-national-fight-thecase-of-terri-schiavo.html Hilgers, L. (2019) ‘Out of the Shadows’, New York Times Magazine, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/02/21/magazine/national-domestic-workers-alliance.html Howse, L. (2019, January 10) ‘Reporter who Covered Robert Dziekanski’s Death Says there Is More to the Story than Four Bad Apple Cops’, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Jennifer K.J., Randall, M. and E. Sheehy. (2017, October 27) ‘Marital rape myths have no place in Canadian Law’, Globe and Mail https://www.theglobeandmail.com/ opinion/marital-rape-myths-have-no-place-in-canadian-law/article36749822/ Lanoix, M. (2009) ‘A Body No Longer of One’s Own’ in S. Campbell, L. Meynell and S. Sherwin (eds.), Agency and Embodiment, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 164-183. Lanoix, M. (2011) ‘Assembly Line Care: Paid Ancillary Care in post-Fordist Economies,’ Work: A Journal of Prevention, Assessment and Rehabilitation, special issue on care labour, 40 (1): 41-50. Lanoix, M. (2013) ‘Caring for Money: Communicative and Strategic Action in Ancillary Care,’ International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, special issue on Aging and Long-Term Care, 6 (2): 94-117. Lemke, T. (2005) ‘A Zone of Indistinction: A Critique of Giorgio Agamben’s Concept of Biopolitics’, Outline, 1: 3-13. Lister, R. (1997) Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives, second edition, New York: New York University Press. Locke, J. (1963) P. Laslett (ed.) Two Treatises of Government, New York: Cambridge University Press. McFadden, R. D. (1985, June 12) ‘Karen Ann Quinlan, 31 Dies: Focus of ’76 Right to Die Case,’ New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1985/06/12/nyregion/karen-ann-quinlan-31-dies-focus-of76-right-to-die-case.html Miller, R. A. (2007) The Limits of Bodily Integrity: Abortion, Adultery, and Rape Legislation in Comparative Perspective. Ashgate. 2007 Mills, C. (2008) The Philosophy of Agamben. Stocksfield, TN.: Acumen Publishing Limited. Molinier, P. (2013) Le travail du care. Paris: La Dispute. Okin, S.M. (1989) Justice, Gender and the Family. New York: Basic Books. Oksala, J. (2010) ‘Violence and the Biopolitics of Modernity’. Foucault Studies, 10: 23-43.

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Olsen, F. (1993) ‘Constitutional Law: Feminist Critiques of the Public/Private Distinction’, Constitutional Commentary, 337. Overboe, J. (2007) ‘Disability and Genetics: Affirming Bare Life (the State of Exception),’ The Canadian Review of Sociology, 44(2): 219-235 Parliament of Canada (2016) Bill-C-14 http://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/42-1/bill/C-14/royal-assent Pateman, C. (1988) The Sexual Contract, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Pateman. C. (1989) This Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism and Political Theory, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Vosman, F. (2017) ‘Care Ethics and the Political,’ paper presented at the Canadian Political Science Association Annual Conference, Toronto, Canada. Vosman, F. and A. Niemeijer (2017) ‘Rethinking Critical Reflection on Care: Late Modern Uncertainty and the Implication for Care Ethics,’ Medicine Health Care and Philosophy, 20: 465-476. Young, I.M. (1990) Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ziarek, P, E. (2008) ‘Bare Life on Strike: Notes on the Biopolitics of Race and Gender,’ South Atlantic Quarterly, 107 (1): 89-105.

CONTRIBUTORS Sophie Bourgault is associate professor of political theory at the ­University of Ottawa (Canada). Current research interests gravitate around the ethics/politics of care and of hospitality, the political thought of Simone Weil and contemporary feminist theory. She has published her work in journals such as the International Journal of Care and Caring, Ethics & Politics, the European Journal of Women’s Studies, and Frontiers. She is the co-editor of Emotions and Care: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (with E. Pulcini; Italian version Cura ed emozioni (Il Mulino, 2018), as well as the co-editor of Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies (Hackett, 2018). She has also published the volume Le  care:  Éthique féministe actuelle (2015; with J.  Perreault), and coedited a special issue on gender, work and justice (Politique et Sociétés 2016). She is a Research Director at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Citizenship and Minorities (CIRCEM) at the University of Ottawa, and the President of the American Simone Weil Society. Fabienne Brugère is Professor of Philosophy of Art at the University Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis. She is a director of the philosophy research team LLCP (Laboratoire des logiques contemporaines de la philosophie). She is the editor of the «  Diagnostics  » series published by Bord de l’eau (with Guillaume le Blanc) and the «  Perspectives du care  » series by ENS Publishing (with Claude Gautier). Brugère is also a member of the editorial board of the journal Esprit. She was an invited professor at the Universities of Hamburg, München and Laval. Her main research interests are the philosophy of art, as well as ethical and political philosophy. She has published many books  : Le sexe de la sollicitude (Seuil, 2008); Philosophie de l’art (PUF, 2010); L’éthique du care (PUF, 2011; translated in Japanese and English); Faut-il se révolter  ? (Bayard, 2012); Dictionnaire politique à l’usage des gouvernés (Bayard, 2012; with Guillaume le Blanc); La politique de l’individu (Seuil/La République des idées; translated in Japanese).

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She  has directed or co-directed books on Spinoza, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, liberalism and the work of art. With Guillaume le Blanc, she has recently published La fin de l’hospitalité, Flammarion (2017). Solange Chavel has written extensively on the subject of care ethics. Her main research focuses on the role of the imagination and on normative issues related to migration and borders in a pluri-disciplinary perspective. Chavel is the author of Se mettre à la place d’autrui  : l’imagination morale et ses limites (Presses Universitaires de France, 2012). She has also published several book chapters and articles, notably  : ‘Perfectionnisme et capabilités’ in S. Laugier ed., La Voix et la vertu (2010); ‘Fiction, droit et espace public’, in Catherine Grall (ed.) Imaginaires juridiques et poétiques littéraires (2013); ‘Le migrant et la frontière. Terrains de l’affrontement moral’, in Estelle Ferrarese (ed.), Qu’est-ce que lutter pour la reconnaissance  ? (2013), as well as ‘De la migration à la mobilité  : comment aller au-delà du nationalisme méthodologique?’ (in Raisons Politiques, 2014). Aurélie Damamme is a sociologist. She teaches Sociology and Gender Studies at Paris VIII University and is a member of Centre de Recherches sociologiques et politiques de Paris- Genre Travail Mobilité (­CRESPPA-GTM, CNRS). She has co-published with Emmanuelle Fillion and Myriam Winance two issues of the Journal ALTER—European Journal of Disability Research / Revue Européenne de Recherche sur le Handicap (Care and Disability. 1st Part: Stakes and ambiguities of caring (2015) and 2nd part: Historical Variations and International Perspectives (2016). With Helena Hirata and Pascale Molinier, she has co-directed a book on carework in different countries (Colombia, Argentina, Lebanon, France), Le travail entre public, privé et intime. Comparaisons et enjeux internationaux du “care” (L’Harmattan, 2017). Her current research work focuses on care, gender and disability. She has participated in comparative research on care work of families in France and Japan and she is actually coordinating a network of young researchers from France and Greece about care and disability funded by the Caisse Nationale de Solidarité et d’Autonomie (CNSA).



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Estelle Ferrarese is a full-professor of moral and political philosophy at Picardie-Jules-Verne University (France). She has been a Visiting Professor at the New School for Social Research in New York, an Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation fellow at the Humboldt Universität in Berlin, and a research fellow at the Marc Bloch FrancoGerman Center of Social Science Research, in Berlin. Her books include  : Vulnerability and Critical Theory, Brill, 2018; The Politics of Vulnerability (ed.), Routledge, 2017  ; La Fragilité du souci des autres. Adorno et le care, Lyon, Editions de l’ENS, 2018; Ethique et politique de l’espace public. Habermas et la discussion, Paris, Vrin, 2015  ; Qu’estce que lutter pour la reconnaissance  ? Lormont, Editions Le Bord de l’Eau, 2013. She is also the author of numerous articles on critical theory, deliberative democracy, and vulnerability as a political category. Marie Garrau is Associate Professor of Social and Political Philosophy at the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and member of the ISJPS (Institut des Sciences Juridique et Philosophique de la Sorbonne). Her current research focuses on vulnerability as a political category, the social processes that increase it and those that obscure its perception and recognition. In this perspective she pays particular attention to the relations between vulnerability and domination. She has published several books and articles on contemporary conceptions of vulnerability and autonomy, care ethics, neorepublicanism and feminist theory, among which: Politiques de la vulnérabilité (Paris, CNRS Editions, 2018);  Care et  attention  (Paris, PUF, 2014);  Care, justice et dépendance. Une introduction aux théories du care (Paris, PUF, 2010, avec A. Le Goff). She has also co-directed books on contemporary conceptions of freedom, care ethics and theories of recognition.  Claude Gautier is Professor of Moral & Political Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon. He is director of the Social Sciences research Laboratory TRIANGLE [Action, Discours, Pensée Politique et Économique] UMR-CNRS 5206. He is the editor of the

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“Pespectives du care” series published by ENS-Éditions (with Fabienne Brugère). Claude Gautier is also member of the Editorial Board of the Journal Archives de Philosophie; of the electronic Journal Philosophical Enquiries—Revue des philosophies anglophones; of the electronic Journal Pragmata, EHESS-Editions. He was an invited professor at the Universities of Roma III & the Sapienza. His main research issues deal with pragmatism, neo-pragmatism, epistemology of Social Sciences, history of modern and contemporary empiricisms. Main publications: David Hume et les savoirs de l’histoire (Vrin, 2005); Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society. Nature, histoire et civilisation (PUF, 2011); La force du social. Enquête philosophique sur la sociologie des pratiques de Pierre Bourdieu (Cerf, 2012); Voir et connaître la société. Essai sur le regard à distance dans les Lumières écossaises (EnsÉditions; forthcoming 2019). Naïma Hamrouni is professor of political philosophy and applied ethics at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières (Canada) and specializes in the field of feminist intersectional ethics. Her current work aims at offering an understanding of the diverse forms of epistemic oppression experienced in institutional contexts by women with mental health difficulties, abused children, and people in situation of disability. In the past few years, she directed, with Chantal Maillé, the best-selling book Le sujet du féminisme est-il blanc? (Remueménage, 2015). She directed, with Sophie Bourgault, a special issue on «Work, gender and social justice» for the journal Politique et sociétés (2016) and, with Diane Lamoureux, a special issue on «Women, feminism and philosophy» for the journal Recherches féministes (2019). Her research has been published in several books, such as Vulnerability, Autonomy, and Applied Ethics (Routledge, 2016), Le care, éthique féministe actuelle (Remue-ménage, 2015), and in different journals, such as World Political Science (2017), Philosophiques (2017), Politiques et Sociétés (2016) and Recherches féministes (2015). Monique Lanoix is associate professor in the faculty of philosophy at St. Paul University (Canada) and she is co-director of the Center for



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Research in Public Ethics and Governance. She has published on care work in Hypatia and the International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics. She is co-editing a book on Aging in an Aging Society: Critical Reflections with Iva Apostolova (forthcoming September 2019). She has also written on disability and her chapter on dance and Parkin­ son’s disease is forthcoming in the book The Aging/Disability Nexus in 2020 (UBC Press). She has also published, ‘No longer Home Alone? Home-Care and the Canada Health Act’ in the journal Health Care Analysis. She is currently a co-investigator in a major international project examining age-friendly initiatives in various communities. Sandra Laugier is a Philosophy professor at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris, France) and a Senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. She has extensively published on ordinary language philosophy (Wittgenstein, Austin), moral philosophy (moral perfectionism, the ethics of care), American philosophy (Cavell, Thoreau, Emerson), popular culture notably TV series), gender studies, democracy and civil disobedience. Her recent publications include  : Formes de vie with E.  Ferrarese (Editions CNRS, 2018). Chapters in Qu’est-ce que la gauche  ? (Fayard, 2017), ‘Le nouvel âge de la désobéissance civile’, Les grandes idées politiques (Collection sciences humaines, 2017), ‘Un scepticisme de l’ordinaire», in J.Ch. Darmon, Ph. Desan, G. Paganini (eds), Scepticisme et pensée morale (Hermann, 2017), ‘The Vulnerability of Reality—Austin, Normativity, and Excuses’, in Interpreting Austin (Cambridge University Press, 2017), ‘Désobéissance civile et démocratie radicale’, in P. Troude-Chastenet, Penser et panser la démocratie (Garnier, 2017). ‘Le care et le débat care/justice  », in S.  Richardot and S.  Rozier (eds.) Les savoirs de sciences humaines et sociales en débat (Controverses et polémiques Septentrion, 2018). Pascale Molinier is a professor of social psychology at the University of Paris 13. She is the editor of the journal Les Cahiers du genre and a member of the editorial committee of the Nouvelle Revue de Psychosociologie. She is a member of the UTRPP (Transversal Research Unit in Psychogenesis and Psychopathology) where she is responsible for the

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theme “Working and caring today: varieties of clinical devices”.  Her research focuses on the relationships between gender, work and subjectivities from a psychodynamic perspective, the epistemology of gender and sexualities, the ethics of care and intersectionality. She has been a visiting professor in Colombia, Brazil and Argentina. She published numerous articles and books, including Le travail du care (La Dispute, 2013) and Le care monde (2018, ENS Editions).  Vanessa Nurock is associate professor in Political Science and Ethics at Université Paris 8 and member of the Research Team LEGS. Initially trained in philosophy and cognitive science, her research stands at the interface between ethics, politics and science. More specifically, her work deals with bioethics understood as two complementary issues—the biological constraints of our moral valuation, and our moral valuation of biology. Her books and articles address issues concerning justice, the ethics and politics of care, as well as bioethics and the ethics of artificial intelligence. Her books include Sommes-nous naturellement moraux? (PUF 2012) and Rawls, pour une démocratie juste (Michalon 2008). She has also co-edited books on topics such as nanotechnologies and bio technologies (Bionano-éthique: Regards critiques sur les nanotechnologies, 2008 coedited with B. Bensaude-Vincent and R. Larrère) and on Carol Gilligan’s care approach (Carol Gilligan et l’éthique du care, PUF, collection Débats Philosophiques, 2010). She has also revised the translation of Carol Gilligan’s books in French. Patricia Paperman is a sociologist. She taught Sociology and Gender Studies at Paris VIII University and is a member of Laboratoire d’études de genre et sexualité (LEGS/CNRS). Together with Sandra Laugier and Pascale Molinier, she has published several books since 2005 to make care ethics known in France and to promote research in this field: Qu’est-ce que le care?, Payot, 2009; also, with Sandra Laugier (ed.) Le souci des autres. Ethique et Politique du care, Collection Raisons Pratiques, Editions de l’EHESS, 2005, 2011. Other publications deal with epistemological issues and feminist ethics of care— e.g. Care et sentiments (PUF, 2013). Her current research work focuses



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on emotions, disability and feminist disability studies. She recently conducted fieldwork in a women’s prison and is writing a book about gender and punishment. Fiona Robinson is Professor of Political Science at Carleton University; her research and teaching focus on ethics and gender in International Relations. She is the author of The Ethics of Care: A Feminist Approach to Human Security (Temple University Press, 2011), Globalizing Care: Ethics, Feminist Theory and International Relations (Westview Press, 1999), and co-editor, with Rianne Mahon, of Feminist Ethics and Social Politics: Towards a New Global Political Economy of Care (University of British Columbia Press, 2011). She is currently working on a SSHRC-funded project on ethics and Canada’s feminist foreign policy narrative. Frans Vosman is professor of ethics at Tilburg University, the Netherlands. His main research interest is the political character of care ethics, qualitative empirical research from a care ethical perspective and the contributions from ‘fellow travelers’ in critical sociology, political theory and parts of philosophy like political phenomenology and feminist theory. In recent years he has published several articles and book chapters (in Dutch, German and English) on the state of the art in care ethics, on precarity and on the necessity for care ethics to regain its critical edge. Recent publications include ‘The moral relevance of lived experience’ in Theological ethics and moral value phenomena (Routledge, 2018), as well as ‘Digging into care practices: the confrontation of care ethics with qualitative empirical and theoretical developments in the Low Countries, 2007–17’, International Journal of Care and Caring (with G. Timmerman and A. Baart, 2018).

INDEX

Adam, C.  227 Ahlander, R. N.  313-314, 316 Agamben, G.  22, 295-302, 305-308, 312, 321 Anscombe, G. E. M.  50 Arendt, H.  11, 198, 212, 304 Aristotle  200, 218, 264 Aubry, M.  6-7, 12, 109 Austin, J.L.  29, 42-45, 47, 49, 54-56 Baier, A.  5, 40, 50, 54, 80, 107, 287, 288 Bahr, S.  313-314 Bauer, N.  44, 50 Bergman, I.  54-55 Berthelot-Raffard, A.  16 Berube, D.  256 Bensaude-Vincent, B.  259, 263-264 Bourdieu, P.  10, 43 Bourgault, S.  2, 3, 9, 11, 18-19, 208 Brown, W.  274-275, 278 Brugère, F.  2, 6, 9, 11, 21, 204 Bubeck, D.  178 Butler, J.  16, 125-127, 129-130, 135 Carlson, L.  244, 246 Casa, D. P. M.  121 Cavarero, A.  125, 129, 311 Cavell, S.  11, 13, 29-30, 32-34, 36-37, 42-56, 230

Chaigneau, H.  80 Chavel, S.  12, 14, 19 Clinton, B.  256 Cocteau, J.  82 Conradi, E.  197, 214-215, 222 Crary, A.  44 Damamme, A.  8, 12, 20 Das, V.  32-34, 37, 50, 53 De Beauvoir, S.  154, 277, 281 Deleuze, G.  127 Delphy, C.  149, 157 Devereux, G.  121 Deutscher, P.  306-307 Deschênes, M.  7, 10 Dewey, J.  13, 14, 65-69, 73 Diamond, C.  11, 30, 32-34, 36, 39-40, 46, 50, 230-232 Dodds, S.  126 Doniol, G.  83 Donovan, J.  227 Dorlin, E.  313, 317-318 Drexler, E.  255 Dussuet, A.  22, 296, 304, 312-318 Dumont, L.  280 Dupuy, J-P.  259, 262 Favret-Saada, J.  121 Ferrarese, E.  2, 10, 16-17, 326 Fesmire, S.  69

334

index

Feynman, R.  255 Fineman, M.  131, 134, 152-154,173 Finkelstein, V.  238 Fisher, B.  33, 37, 143 Foot, P.  50 Foucault, M.  10-11, 32, 41, 297, 312 Fraser, N.  19, 147-148, 199-200, 209, 211-222 Friedman, M.  186-189, 192 Frye, M.  148, 149 Garrau, M.  2, 10-11, 16, 18, 193, 199, 208 Gautier, C.  13, 14 Gilman, P. C.  151 Gilligan, C.  1-3, 6, 9, 11-14, 18, 31, 39, 41, 59-64, 69, 71, 73, 75, 77, 92-95, 99, 117-118, 197, 215, 260 Gilson, E.  127 Génard, J-L 128 Glenn, N. E.  5, 104, 235 Goffman, E.  47 Gordon, L.  147-148 Grant, C.  51, 54-55 Griffin, S.  155 Guibert, H.  78-79 Guillaumin. C.  149 Habermas, J.  129-130 Hacking, I.  40, 230 Hamrouni, N.  2, 16, 17, 147, 156, 215 Haraway, D.  121 Harding, S.  121 Harrington, M.  140, 169 Held, V.  1, 5, 215, 316 Hirschman, A.  101 Hochschild, A. R.  119-120 Hoffmaster, B.  145-146 Honneth, A.  106, 129, 135 Hrdy, B. S.  117 Hughes, E.  14, 82-83 Hume, D.  21, 69, 274, 288-289 Israel, J.  285

Jacob, M.  285 Kant, I.  40, 59, 62, 70-71, 92, 272, 279, 281-283 Keith, L.  240 Kittay, E.F.  100, 140, 143, 168-169, 175-178, 184, 205, 241-242, 244247, 305 Kohlberg, L.  60, 62, 67, 72, 77, 92-93 Lancelle, A.  7 Lanoix, M.  2, 21-22, 318 Laugier S.  2, 6-7, 9, 11-14, 16, 32-33, 43, 52, 54, 59, 87, 109, 112, 123, 143, 197, 215, 219 LeGoff, A.  9-10, 208 Lister, R.  304 Locke, J.  281-282, 309-310 Loute, A.  10, 12 Lovibond, S.  50 MacKenzie, C.  126, 155 MacKinnon, C.  283-285 Maillard, N.  145-146 Margalit, A.  96-98 Marrati, P. Marx, K.  126, 144, 150, 204, 218 Maynor, J.  132 McIntyre, A.  146 Mill, S. J.  48-49 Mill, T. H.  154 Miller, A. R.  311 Miller, S.  197-198, 311-312 Moi, T.  48 Molinier, P.  2, 6, 9, 12, 14-15, 20, 22, 82, 112-113, 136, 178, 215, 219, 296, 312-313, 316-319 Montesquieu, C.  273 Moreau, D.  8 Morris, J.  20, 240, 241-243, 248-249 Murdoch, I.  3, 11, 13, 35-36, 40, 50 Niemeijer, A.  296 Noddings, N.  1, 5, 6, 143, 197, 221



index

Nordmann, A.  257 Nurock, V.  9-10, 20-21, 257 Nussbaum, M.  11, 17, 19, 21, 39, 53, 125, 131-133, 136, 168-169, 174, 198-200, 202-211, 216-221, 227-232, 279, 281, 286-287 Olsen, F.  303-304, 307 Okin, M.S.  60, 70, 71, 72, 75, 102, 104, 282, 302, 305 Oksala, J.  298, 321 Oury, J.  83 Paperman, P.  2, 6, 7, 9, 11, 15, 20, 77, 80, 82, 131, 202 Pateman, C.  302, 305, 310 Perreault, J.  11 Pettit, P.  17, 18, 131-132, 134, 136, 165, 177, 180-183, 185-190, 192-193 Raïd, L.  11 Rawls, J.  38, 40, 61-62, 64, 70-72, 74, 92, 168-169, 200, 228-229, 282-283, 286, 305 Regan, T.  225-231 Ricoeur, P.  10, 127 Robinson, F.  5, 113, 199, 215 Rogers, W.  126 Rousseau, J. J.  272, 305, 310 Ruddick, S.  1, 5, 12, 143, 156, 197, 235 Sandel, M.  61 Sen, A.  198, 200-204, 207, 209, 210, 216, 220

335

Sennett, R.  286 Sevenhuijsen, S.  5, 168, 171, 184, 197, 208, 215, 216 Shakespeare, T.  248 Silver, A.  247, 254 Singer, P.  19, 225-228, 230-231, 242 Smith, A.  20, 69, 147-148, 274-275, 281, 288 Taylor, C.  51 Thomas, C.  233, 249 Tronto, J.  5, 9-10, 12, 20-21, 31, 33-34, 37-41, 77-78, 82, 105, 111, 113-114, 116-117, 131, 136, 142-145, 164, 166173, 175-176, 179, 197, 207-209, 213, 215-216, 219, 221, 236, 239, 241, 247, 249, 259-261, 290-291, 296, 302 Twigg, J.  248 Valls, M.  7 Vosman, F.  2, 3, 296 Walker, M.  50, 215 Weil, S.  3, 11 Wendell, S.  244 Williams, F.  113, 215 Winance, M.  8 Wittgenstein, L.  13, 29, 32-38, 41-42, 44-50, 54-56, 230 Wollstonecraft, M.  154, 272 Worms, F.  8 Young, M. I.  117, 304 Ziarek, P. E.  306, 308-309

Ethics of Care

1. C. Leget, C. Gastmans, M. Verkerk (eds.), Care, Compassion and Recognition: An Ethical Discussion, 2011, IV-250 p. 2. A. van Heijst, Professional Loving Care. An Ethical View of the Healthcare Sector, 2011, VI-212 p. 3. G. Olthuis, H. Kohlen, J. Heier (eds.), Moral Boundaries Redrawn. The Significance of Joan Tronto’s Argument for Political Theory, Professional Ethics, and Care as Practice, 2014, IV-232 p. 4. I. van Nistelrooij, Sacrifice. A Care-Ethical Reappraisal of S­ acrifice and Self-Sacrifice, 2015, X-302 p. 5. R.J. Lynch, Care: An Analysis, 2016, X-305 p. 6. S. Bourgault, E. Pulcini (eds.), Emotions and Care: Inter­ disciplinary Perspectives, 2018, VI-262 p. 7. F. Brugère, Care Ethics, The Introduction of Care as Political Category. With a Preface by Joan Tronto, 2019, VI-101 p. 8. F. Vosman, A. Baart, J. Hoffman (eds.), The Ethics of Care: The State of the Art, forthcoming 9. F. Vosman, P. Nortvedt (eds.), Care Ethics and Phenomenology: a Contested Kinship, forthcoming

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