Human Dependency and Christian Ethics 9781107168893, 9781316717677, 9781316619773, 1107168899

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Half-title......Page 3
Series information......Page 5
Title page......Page 7
Copyright information......Page 8
Table of contents......Page 9
Acknowledgments......Page 11
Chapter 1 Human Dependency, Justice, and Christian Love......Page 15
Christian Love as Inclusive, Extravagant Care......Page 20
A Framework for Integration: Four Forms of Equality......Page 24
Care and the Exercise of Complex Moral Agency......Page 29
Snapshots of Moral Complexity in Caregiving Relations......Page 30
Unfolding the Argument......Page 35
Chapter 2 The Marginalization of Dependency and Care in Political Theory......Page 41
Enlightenment Social-Contract Theory......Page 43
Twentieth-Century Theories of Justice......Page 49
The Privatization of Care, Affect, and Dependency In Rawls......Page 52
Scarcity and the Inviolable Dignity of Embodied, Needy Persons......Page 61
Conclusion......Page 64
Chapter 3 Economics and the Erasure of the Care Economy......Page 66
The Stigmatization of Dependency......Page 67
Erasing the Domestic Economy from Economic Theory......Page 70
Gary Becker: Flat Moral Agency and Arbitrary Ends......Page 83
Valuing the Domestic Economy: Commodifying the Family?......Page 88
Implications for Christian Theologies of Love......Page 89
Chapter 4 Sacrificial Models of Christian Love: Distortions of Need, Nature, and Justice......Page 91
Characteristics of the Disinterested, Sacrificial Love Tradition......Page 94
Niebuhr’s Ethic of Sacrificial Love......Page 101
Three Core Problems with Niebuhr’s Account......Page 103
Contemporary Expressions of the Sacrificial Love Tradition......Page 111
What Ethic of Sacrifice Do We Need?......Page 120
Conclusion......Page 126
Chapter 5 Agape as Equal Regard: Importing Moral Boundaries into Christian Ethics......Page 128
Equal Regard or Universal Love: Agape as Inclusive and Disinterested......Page 129
Universal Moral Obligations, Individual Moral Agents, and the Disappearance of Dependency......Page 133
Equal Regard and Special Relations: A Dichotomous, Gendered Construct......Page 137
Special Relations as the Heart of Agape......Page 140
Thomistic Reclamations......Page 141
Vocation and the Discernment of Obligations......Page 143
Universalist Responses: Burdening the Individual......Page 146
A Parallel Debate: Justice and Care......Page 149
Moral Boundaries......Page 153
More Political Dimensions of Care......Page 157
Conclusion......Page 160
Chapter 6 Contemporary Retrievals of Thomistic Accounts of Love and Justice......Page 162
Framing Love Within Thomas’s Theology......Page 163
Creation and the Place of Human Persons......Page 164
Order and Natural Law......Page 165
Love and Its Formation Through Virtue......Page 167
The Thomistic Account of Love and Dependent Care Relations......Page 169
Inclusivity of the Thomistic Order of Love......Page 175
Nature and Evolutionary Biology......Page 180
Evolution, Ethics, and Theology: Three Approaches......Page 182
Natural Inclinations as a Source of Moral Guidance......Page 190
Conclusion......Page 198
Chapter 7 Elements of Justice for a Dependent Care Ethic......Page 200
Necessary Elements of Justice for a Dependent Care Ethic......Page 202
Catholic Social Thought......Page 209
Feminist Dependency-Based Accounts of Justice: Nussbaum And Kittay......Page 218
Critical Feminist Retrievals of Natural Law and Feminist Political Ethics of Care......Page 223
A Theological Approach: Imago Dei......Page 232
Approaches Within Feminist Political Theory......Page 233
Conclusion......Page 245
Select Bibliography......Page 247
Index......Page 255

Citation preview

i

HUMAN DEPENDENCY AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS

Dependency is a central aspect of human existence, as are dependent care relations: relations between caregivers and young children, persons with disabilities, or frail elderly persons. In this book, Sandra Sullivan-​ Dunbar argues that many prominent interpretations of Christian love either obscure dependency and care, or fail to adequately address injustice in the global social organization of care. Sullivan-​Dunbar engages a wide-​ranging interdisciplinary conversation among Christian ethics, economics, political theory, and care scholarship, drawing on the rich body of recent feminist work reintegrating dependency and care into the economic, political, and moral spheres. She identifies essential elements of a Christian ethic of love and justice for dependent care relations in a globalized care economy. She also suggests resources for such an ethic including Catholic social thought, feminist political ethics of care, disability and vulnerability studies, and Christian theological accounts of the divine-​human relation. Sandra Sullivan-Dunbar is Associate Professor of Christian Ethics at Loyola University Chicago, where she teaches feminist ethics, social ethics and sexual ethics. She holds a PhD in Religious Ethics from the University of Chicago, an MA in Ethics and Social Theory from the Graduate Theological Union, a Master of Divinity from the Jesuit School of Theology at Santa Clara University, and a Master of Public Policy from the University of California at Berkeley.

ii

iii

New Studies in Christian  Ethics General Editor Robin Gill Editorial Board Stephen R. L. Cl ark, Stanley Hauerwas, Robin W. Lovin Christian ethics has increasingly assumed a central place within academic theology. At the same time, the growing power and ambiguity of modern science and the rising dissatisfaction within the social sciences about claims to value neutrality have prompted renewed interest in ethics within the secular academic world. There is, therefore, a need for studies in Christian ethics that, as well as being concerned with the relevance of Christian ethics to the present-​day secular debate, are well informed about parallel discussions in recent philosophy, science, or social science. New Studies in Christian Ethics aims to provide books that do this at the highest intellectual level and demonstrate that Christian ethics can make a distinctive contribution to this debate –​either in moral substance or in terms of underlying moral justifications. Titles published in the series. 1.  Rights and Christian Ethics, Kieran Cronin 2.  Biblical Interpretation and Christian Ethics, Ian McDonald 3.  Power and Christian Ethics, James Mackey 4.  Plurality and Christian Ethics, Ian S. Markham 5.  Moral Action and Christian Ethics, Jean Porter 6.  Responsibility and Christian Ethics, William Schweiker 7.  Justice and Christian Ethics, E. Clinton Gardner 8.  Feminism and Christian Ethics, Susan Parsons 9.  Sex, Gender and Christian Ethics, Lisa Sowle Cahill 10.  The Environment and Christian Ethics, Michael Northcott 11.  Concepts of Person and Christian Ethics, Stanley Rudman 12.  Priorities and Christian Ethics, Garth Hallett 13.  Community, Liberalism and Christian Ethics, David Fergusson (continued after the index)

iv

v

HUMAN DEPENDENCY AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS S A N D R A S U L L I VA N -​D U N B A R Loyola University Chicago

vi

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 4843/​24, 2nd Floor, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, Delhi –​110002, India 79 Anson Road, #06-​04/​06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/​9781107168893 doi: 10.1017/​9781316717677 © Sandra Sullivan-​Dunbar 2017 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2017 Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books, Inc. A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Sullivan-Dunbar, Sandra, author. Title: Human dependency and Christian ethics / Sandra Sullivan-Dunbar. Description: Cambridge, United Kingdom; New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press, [2017] | Series: New studies in Christian ethics | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017034301 | ISBN 9781107168893 (hardback) | ISBN 9781316619773 (pbk.) Subjects: LCSH: Christian ethics. | Caring – Religious aspects – Christianity. | Helping behavior – Religious aspects – Christianity. Classification: LCC BJ1275.S855 2017 | DDC 241–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017034301 ISBN 978-​1-​107-​16889-​3 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-​party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

vii

Contents

Acknowledgments page ix 1

Human Dependency, Justice, and Christian Love

2

The Marginalization of Dependency and Care in Political Theory

27

3

Economics and the Erasure of the Care Economy

52

4

Sacrificial Models of Christian Love: Distortions of Need, Nature, and Justice

77

5

Agape as Equal Regard: Importing Moral Boundaries into Christian Ethics

114

6

Contemporary Retrievals of Thomistic Accounts of Love and Justice

148

7

Elements of Justice for a Dependent Care Ethic

186

8

Resources for a Conception of Justice Within a Dependent Care Ethic

195

Select Bibliography Index

1

233 241

vii

viii

ix

Acknowledgments

I could not have written this book without many kinds of support from many different institutions and people. It is delightful, and pleasantly surreal, to finally be able to commit my thanks to paper for publication. Some portions of this book began as parts of my dissertation. Though he may be as happy as I am that the work has evolved a great deal since that time, I am very grateful to my director, William Schweiker, who guided me through that process. As I have continued to shape the manuscript in the years since receiving my doctorate, I have often heard his voice in my head, offering feedback. Sometimes the voice has appeared when, after grappling with the material for some time, I saw a weakness he had pointed to long ago, and thought, “Oh, no wonder Bill thought this needed correction!” My education continues as I grow into my vocation, as does his influence. Many other academic mentors helped this book come to fruition. I am deeply grateful to Kathryn Tanner, who served on my dissertation committee, saw promise, and provided encouragement. Cristina Traina has been a mentor now for many years and has provided advice and support first in navigating my doctoral program and then through the process of bringing my book to publication. As Chair of the Theology Department at Loyola University Chicago, Susan Ross helped me to navigate my pretenure years; she was a dedicated advocate for junior faculty and provided a supportive ear. All three of these women provided invaluable affirmation and critical feedback on my work as well. My debt to them is immense and I will try to pay it forward. I’ve been fortunate to receive feedback, critique, and mentorship as well from members of the Society of Christian Ethics, including particularly Barbara Hilkert Andolsen, Mary Jo Iozzio, Julie Hanlon Rubio, Patti Jung, and several anonymous reviewers of conference presentations that have worked their way into this book. My friends and colleagues, Aana Vigen, Tisha Rajendra, and Devorah Schoenfeld, have commiserated, critiqued, and supported me in countless ix

x

x

Acknowledgments

ways. And indeed, I am grateful to my entire department. I am very lucky to have landed in an institution that feels like a true professional home and to teach Loyola students, who are hardworking, appreciative of their education, and deeply committed to social justice. I am happy to publicly thank the American Association of University Women, who awarded me an American Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for the academic year 2014–​2015. I am grateful for the support of Loyola University Chicago for granting me a semester’s research leave in 2011, followed by a subvented leave during my American Association of University Women (AAUW) fellowship year; without this support, completion of the book would have been difficult. I  am also grateful for financial support received during the early (dissertation) stage of writing, as a Fellow of the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago, and then as the recipient of a Dissertation Fellowship from the Louisville Institute. Mary Ellen O’Driscoll received many phone calls when I was not sure I would be finishing a book. She was quite sure I would be, and her certainty allowed me to keep at it. I treasure her friendship. This book reflects as well the academic formation I received at the Jesuit School of Theology at Santa Clara University; the Graduate Theological Union; and the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. My teaching, writing, and thinking are still influenced by faculty at these institutions, including particularly William O’Neill, S.J.; Karen Lebacqz; Martha Ellen Stortz; John Donahue, S.J.; Lee Friedman; and David Kirp. The book has been made much better by the very thoughtful feedback I  have received from the anonymous reviewers commissioned by Cambridge University Press. My editor at Cambridge, Beatrice Rehl, has been invaluable in helping me navigate the book review and production process for the first time. Sara Wilhelm Garbers has provided outstanding and detail-​oriented bibliographical and production assistance. I would be remiss, in a book on dependent care relations, if I did not acknowledge the deeply skilled and loving care my children received from others while I studied and wrote. I especially thank Sahana Ward, Joanna Spilioti, Catherine Scheib, Jayme Gualtier, and Sarah Hajduk Woltmann. I am grateful to my parents, Richard Sullivan and Judith Haines Sullivan, who provided the care that allowed me to grow into a parent, professor, and now writer of a book. They are my unfailing cheerleaders. They have provided support both emotional and financial, and thereby made my academic career possible.

newgenprepdf

xi

Acknowledgments

xi

Finally, and most pervasively, I am grateful to my husband, Don Dunbar, who made it possible for me to do this work while co-​parenting our two sons. He models for them deep paternal engagement in caregiving responsibility. And I am thankful as well to my boys, Ian and Cullen, without whom I would not likely be writing on this subject in this way. They are delightful human beings, patient with their academic mother, and I know they will work to make the world a place that is more hospitable to care and just to its caregivers.

xii

1

Ch apter  1

Human Dependency, Justice, and Christian Love

Dependency is a central aspect of human existence. We begin life ensconced within and dependent upon the body of another human person, using her body as a source of nutrients, oxygen, warmth, and space. When we emerge into the world as a separate body, we remain utterly dependent upon other human beings to feed us, to keep us warm, to hold us, to talk to and socialize us, to protect us from harm. We are bodily dependent again when we are sick, or when we are disabled, and if we live to old age, we are often dependent on others in the frailty of our final years. And at those points in our lives when we seem most autonomous, we nevertheless remain deeply dependent on others in countless ways that we often fail to acknowledge. Because dependency is central to human existence, so are relations of dependent care: relations between caregivers and small children, persons with disabilities (permanent or temporary), or frail elderly persons. In fact, such relations take up the bulk of human moral effort, and they are deeply complex. However, as feminist theorists in various fields have shown, much recent Western thought reflects a marginalization of human dependency and dependent care.1 In keeping with the modern valuation In economics, see, for example, Nancy Folbre, The Invisible Heart:  Economics and Family Values (New  York:  New Press, 2001), and Valuing Children:  Rethinking the Economics of the Family (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2008); in political science, Mona Harrington, Care and Equality:  Inventing a New Family Politics (New  York:  Routledge, 2000); among legal theorists, Martha Albertson Fineman, The Autonomy Myth:  A  Theory of Dependency (New  York:  New Press, 2004), and Joan C. Williams, Unbending Gender: Why Work and Family Conflict and What to Do About It (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2000); in political philosophy, Eva Feder Kittay, Love’s Labor:  Essays on Women, Equality and Dependency (New  York:  Routledge, 1999); Martha C. Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 2006); Joan C. Tronto, Moral Boundaries:  A  Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (New  York:  Routledge, 1993), and Caring Democracy:  Markets, Equality, and Justice (New  York:  New  York University Press, 2013); in sociology, Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, eds., Global Woman:  Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2002).

1

1

2

2

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

of human equality, choice, and self-​governance, emphasis has turned to human autonomy, not human dependency. The human person has been envisioned as a fully mature individual able to freely contract with other fully mature individuals. This conceptual marginalization of dependency is reflected in many economic and social structures, so that dependents and their caregivers suffer injustice. Much dependent care is sequestered in the sharply privatized family, now seen as separate and qualitatively different from the economic and political sectors of human life. Care is provided with little political and economic support, and assigned to persons with less social power. In this book, I argue that much recent Christian ethics, like much modern and contemporary Western philosophy, social theory, and political theory, has failed to adequately address our human dependency. Similarly, dependent care relations have largely been marginalized and rendered problematic in recent understandings of Christian love. Equality is a crucial value, and Christian theology has long asserted the equality of all human persons before God –​offering a stronger basis for such equality than secular bases such as rationality and autonomy. Notions of equality have been responsible for many social developments that we hold dear, including the expansion of basic economic and political rights to propertyless men, women, and persons of color, and the abolition of many forms of slavery. The link between equality and autonomy is somewhat problematic, however, because our dependency is also part of the human condition. These two realities, dependency and equality, stand in a paradoxical tension, because when we are dependent on another, there are important ways in which we are not equal to that other, and many groups of persons have had their dependency exaggerated and enforced precisely to exclude them from equality and autonomy. But in creating more egalitarian social structures, we must continue to account for that dependency that is intrinsic to human life, or else we will undercut the very equality we seek. I argue, therefore, that we must acknowledge the centrality of dependency in our theological anthropologies, our understandings of Christian love, and our conceptions of the relation between Christian love and justice. In other words, Christian theological ethics must integrate human equality with human dependency. The marginalization of dependency within Christian ethics is an injustice to those who engage in the moral work of dependent care on a daily basis. It devalues their labor in moral terms and reinforces the political and economic devaluation of this work. But the marginalization of human dependency and relations of dependent care is also problematic

3

Human Dependency, Justice, and Christian Love

3

for the substance of Christian love theologies. These relations are a focal point for engaging a number of foundational issues in Christian ethics. First, questions about the role of nature  –​our human nature, and the natural world around us  –​are particularly relevant in light of dependent care relations. In terms of human nature, Christian theologians offer markedly different understandings of the moral status of our own natural inclinations and desires and our efforts to satisfy them. Are our natural inclinations a source of moral wisdom for human persons, as understood by Roman Catholic natural law theories drawing (in various ways) on the heritage of Thomas Aquinas? Or, is human nature so fallen that Christian love is defined by its radical difference from our “natural” way of loving, as for Anders Nygren or Soren Kierkegaard, for example? What are the implications of either stance for the love and devotion we may be inclined to shower on our dependents, whether they be our children, parents, or clients? Thinking in terms of dependent care relations also re-​centers inquiry from the goodness or selfishness of our own inclinations to the moral valence of the inclinations of others. After all, these relations are intended to support others in meeting basic biological needs and fulfilling basic biological inclinations –​most notably, the inclination to persist in being, to survive. The work of care also draws us into the gifts, conflicts, and tragedies of the natural world. Caregivers harness nature’s resources to promote the survival and flourishing of the objects of their care. They offer other living things, plants and animals, as food. They learn to facilitate the body’s own healing processes and to foster natural developmental pathways. They battle against viruses, injuries, and natural disasters. They shelter their dependents within homes built from organic and inorganic materials in the world around them. They make claims on moderately scarce natural resources available to meet basic human needs. As we shall see, many Christian ethicists take an overly simplified approach to the moral implications of natural processes. Consideration of dependent care relations calls for a nuanced consideration of the moral implications of our entrenchment in the natural world. The negotiation of natural scarcity raises a second arena within Christian ethics that takes on new dimensions in light of dependent care relations:  what is the relation between love and justice? Some Christian ethicists see justice as sharply distinct from Christian love. For these thinkers, justice seeks its own, and demands its desert through merit or contract. Love, in contrast, does not think of itself and rises far beyond the demands of justice in its self-​giving. Other Christian ethicists see justice

4

4

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

as a virtue of individual persons and do not give sufficient attention to the structures of injustice within which these virtuous individuals make their moral choices. Most contemporary Christian love theologians do not consider the relationship between love and distributive justice, although they may consider distributive justice separately from their discussions of love. From the perspective of dependent care relations, this omission is deeply problematic. Dependent caregivers do their work within unjust social, political, and economic structures, and their relative privilege or marginalization within these structures profoundly affects their capacity to meet their caring obligations. They require resources such as food, housing, health care, and labor time to provide this care. Justice helps to enable the love expressed through dependent care relations, and injustice can hinder such care or even make it impossible. In much recent Christian love ethics, the question of distributive justice has been subsumed under the question of “special relations,” or relations with kin, friends, colleagues, or other persons to whom we have a particular, intensive bond. As outlined by Gene Outka in his 1971 work, Agape:  An Ethical Analysis, “special relations” are constituted by preference, whereas agape is constituted by abstention from preference: we love someone regardless of whether they are attractive to us or can make a return on our love.2 The moral problem then becomes one of allocating our love among preferential and nonpreferential relations, with any decision to favor our preferential relations requiring a special form of moral justification outside of the scope of agape. Special relations are important, and yet they are also dangerous distractions from disinterested, universal agape. In other words, the distributive problem is seen solely in terms of the free choices of the individual as she allocates her moral energies among people she enjoys and people she does not. The problem of exclusion from care and community is not located within social and economic structures but is transferred to the will of the moral agent; it is not seen in terms of distribution of the concrete goods required to foster another human being’s survival and flourishing, nor is it understood in terms of the allocation of one’s limited time and energy among potential recipients of the labor of care. In this book, I challenge such a formulation and argue that a Christian theology of love adequate to encompass dependent care relations must understand love (particularly the element of care provision) as interdependent with justice. Gene Outka, Agape: An Ethical Analysis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972).

2

5

Human Dependency, Justice, and Christian Love

5

An analysis of Christian love in terms of dependency and care is made more urgent by the contemporary phenomenon of “global care chains.” This term, coined by Arlie Russell Hochschild, refers to “a series of personal links between people across the globe based on the paid or unpaid work of caring.”3 About half of the world’s 232 million international migrants are women, and of these, an increasing number are migrating on their own (not as a part of family units) in order to serve as child care workers, cleaners, home care aides, and health care workers, or in long-​term care, both in domestic and institutional settings.4 Many of these women leave behind their own children or elderly parents in the care of other family members, neighbors, or even orphanages. In other words, care-giving labor is effectively extracted from many less-​developed countries and imported to more-​developed countries, in what Hochschild has dubbed a “global heart transplant.”5 And some forms of needed care are simply not available at all: the migration of health care workers has significant detrimental impacts on a range of key health care indicators in sending countries, many of which have disproportionate health care needs.6 This phenomenon confounds the paradigm used in so many recent Christian love theologies that contrast universal, inclusive concern with particular loves or pit the distant stranger against concern for those near and dear to us. The globalization of the social organization of care means that the problem that vexed the moderns  –​the problem of our moral obligations to distant persons with whom we share humanity and interact in impersonal ways –​has turned in on itself, as that distant person may now be living in our home and changing our children’s diapers (or our own). We cannot discern the moral requirements of this situation in terms of abstract universals, but neither can we draw upon a communitarian focus on a shared vision of the good. This is because some participants in the relevant moral relationships will not be part of our community, but will be thousands of miles away, missing their mother, or caring for the children of our nanny or home health care worker. They will be living out ways of life that embody deep cultural, economic and political differences from our own, and yet are profoundly impacted by Arlie Russell Hochschild, “Global Care Chains and Emotional Surplus Value,” in eds. W. Hutton and A. Giddens, On the Edge: Living with Global Capitalism” (London: Jonathan Cape, 2000), 131. 4 Nicola Yeates, “Global Care Chains:  A  State-​of-​the-​Art Review and Future Directions in Care Transnationalization Research,” Global Networks 12, no. 1 (2012), 139. 5 Arlie Russell Hochschild, “Love and Gold,” in Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 22. 6 Lisa Eckenwiler, “Care-​ worker Migration, Global Health Equity, and Ethical Place-​ making,” Women’s Studies International Forum 47 (2014), 213–​222. 3

6

6

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

our own way of life. A contemporary Christian ethic of dependent care relations must include a conception of love that can encompass care, and must integrate Christian love with a conception of justice that is adequate to address this globalization of caregiving relations, this “global heart transplant.” There are multiple terms for (and some would say multiple forms of ) Christian love:  agape, eros, philia. In this book, I  focus primarily on aspects of love most often captured by the word “agape,” while recognizing that not every thinker means the same thing by this word. In general, though, agape connotes a steady other-​regard that often comes at some cost to the self and is open to inclusion of all human persons (even if the individual Christian cannot personally show love to all human persons). Caregiving involves such other-​regard and cost to the self, even when it is deeply rewarding. One of my primary concerns is the recognition of this sacrifice in caregiving relations, and the integration of justice with care such that this sacrifice, necessary to the continuation of human life itself, is not disproportionately assigned to certain groups to their severe detriment. I  am also concerned that care be recognized more fully as moral work. Put differently, I focus more on love as the sort of active benevolence highlighted in the parable of the Good Samaritan than on love as the spiritual communion highlighted in the Johannine literature. Dependent care is also frequently rewarding, and the love that emerges in dependent care relations can express the sort of deep, spiritual, affective, affirming, mutual, and erotic aspects that are highlighted by many Christian thinkers. I do not deny the importance of these dimensions of Christian love, but my primary focus is elsewhere. The justice I seek in dependent care relations can, in fact, make precisely this sort of rich, rewarding connection possible.

Christian Love as Inclusive, Extravagant Care I will not develop a comprehensive or systematic account of Christian love in this book. Rather, I affirm that any adequate account of Christian love must be able to incorporate relations of dependent care. This is true because of the centrality of such relations in human life, and because Jesus’s own account of Christian love, offered in the parable of the Good Samaritan, highlights caregiving. I will assess major schools of thought on Christian love, asking how well they can account for dependency and care. This will reveal certain characteristics that must be encompassed by any adequate account of Christian love, of justice, and of the relation between love and

7

Human Dependency, Justice, and Christian Love

7

justice if these accounts are to inform a Christian ethic of dependent care relations. The parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus’s own explication of the meaning of Christian neighbor-​love, would have been shocking to listeners in two primary respects.7 One shocking element involves the identity of both the man who fell among thieves and the one who helped him. We have no way of knowing who, exactly, the unfortunate man is; he is naked, which leaves him “without the signs of either nationality or social status.”8 In contrast, the identity of the helper is both known and thoroughly surprising  –​the one who helps is a Samaritan, a group viewed with great contempt among Palestinian Jews in Jesus’s time. This aspect of the parable lends itself to interpretations of Christian love that support inclusivity or universality, in the sense of unwillingness to exclude any human person, even a complete stranger or a member of a despised group. The Samaritan reaches out to one who is anonymous and could well be an enemy; Jesus’s hearers are invited to imagine the actions of their own enemy as a paradigm of neighbor-​love. The second shocking element of the parable is the sheer extravagance of the care bestowed by the Good Samaritan on the unfortunate traveler. Such intensive care, calling forth gifts of time, energy, and resources, attending to the very particular needs of the individual recipient, is most often exemplified in the arena dubbed “special relations” by many recent Christian ethicists, because these relations often demand such intensive care. That is, we generally bestow this kind of care on our children, parents, or friends. We might recall the oft-​noted transformation that Jesus makes to the question posed to him by his interlocutor. He is asked, “Who is my neighbor?” and he responds with the parable and a question: “Whom do you think proved neighbor to the man?” Jesus directs attention away from the object of love to the subject of love and the content of love –​in effect, he asks, what does it mean to prove neighbor? The answer is clear: attending to stark human need. Many recent treatments of Christian love focus primarily on the inclusive nature of love exemplified by the identities of the giver and the receiver in the Good Samaritan parable. Such an interpretive emphasis would seem to reflect certain characteristically modern (and profoundly important) preoccupations, including the problem of our moral obligations to persons outside of our direct circle of concern or those whom we will never See Luke 10:25–​37. John R. Donahue, S.J., The Gospel in Parable (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press: 1990), 130.

7 8

8

8

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

meet. However, an exclusive emphasis on the universalist dimension of agape renders problematic the second aspect of the parable, the intensity and extravagance of the Good Samaritan’s care, which reflects the love expressed within dependent care relations. As several commentators have noted, the Good Samaritan could not have offered such extravagant care to every person he encountered.9 I argue that an adequate Christian feminist conception of agape, one that encompasses relations of dependent care, must incorporate both the universally inclusive scope and the extravagant nature of the care offered by the Good Samaritan. All persons are entitled to necessary care, and the care required for human persons to survive is extravagant care. We are deeply needy. Therefore, to meet both the inclusivity and the extravagance of Christian neighbor-​love, agape must be not only a foundational question in personal ethics; it must also be a social ethic. Once we focus on fulfillment of human need, it becomes clear that no individual agent can love universally; meeting the universal needs of human beings for care requires a collective, social, political, and institutional approach. To the extent that agape is focused on providing the scarce resources of time, energy, and material goods necessary to give care to a dependent human being, it is enabled or obstructed by social, economic, and political institutions and policies governing the allocation of such resources. In this book, then, I will focus sharply on agape as a matter of social justice. This focus recognizes and honors the moral contributions of caregivers as the basic elements of a collective effort to ensure the dignity and well-​being of every human person, rather than casting these care relations as distractions from a universal love. In my focus on Christian love as action in response to need, reaching out inclusively to friends, strangers, and enemies, I highlight some particular concerns of recent Protestant love ethics. At the same time, I advocate a more Roman Catholic emphasis on the social nature of the human person and our existence in a prevoluntary web of communal relationships that, in part, define our particular moral obligations, and a Roman Catholic emphasis on the integration of love and justice. As we shall see, I argue that Gilbert Meilaender asserts that because of our inherent finitude and commitments to friends and family, a love like that shown by the Good Samaritan is “not a love fitted for society,” though this makes it no less required of us. Gilbert Meilaender, Friendship: A Study in Theological Ethics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), 34. Sally Purvis notes that the Good Samaritan would not have the resources to provide this extravagant love to every person he encounters. Sally B. Purvis, “Mothers, Neighbors and Strangers: Another Look at Agape,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 7, no. 1 (Spring 1991), 32n31.

9

9

Human Dependency, Justice, and Christian Love

9

a theology of love that addresses dependent care relations cannot denigrate nature to the degree that many Protestant love theologies have done, and yet it cannot rely uncritically on nature for moral wisdom to the degree that Roman Catholic love theologies have often done. In sum, my goals in this book are threefold. First, I set out to demonstrate an inadequacy in many recent accounts of Christian love: they do not adequately account for relations of dependent care. Second, I aim to reveal some of the theological distortions introduced by the theoretical avoidance of dependency. Third, I elucidate some necessary parameters for conceptions of love and of justice that would be adequate to underwrite a Christian ethic of dependent care relations. In pursuit of these goals, the book develops a critical dialogue between recent Christian theologies of love, feminist economics, feminist political theory, and feminist political ethics of care. For the latter, the qualifier “political” is crucial. Most feminist care thinkers have moved well beyond Carol Gilligan’s dyadic, gendered account of two internal, psychological moral orientations,10 to propose an integrated account of love and justice, one that should be instantiated in concrete social, political, and economic structures that organize care relations. This necessary movement has not yet occurred within Christian ethics. I wager that the dialogue between Christian ethics and these feminist disciplines can bring important insights to both conversations. Feminist political and economic theory helps to reveal systematic connections between the work of care and social and political structures, and thus between dependency and equality, love and justice, personal ethics and social ethics. At the same time, however, the question of the integration of equality and dependency may not be resolvable, at the most foundational level, within the parameters of secular feminist theory. In these secular feminist literatures, the integration of equality and dependency is treated as a political problem. But ultimately, the question of how we can be profoundly dependent creatures, and yet invested with a fundamental equality and dignity, is also a Christian theological question. Christian theology provides a way to affirm that we can, in fact, be dependent (on God and on each other) and equal (because loved and endowed with dignity by God) at the same time. The work of dependent care has primarily, though certainly not exclusively, accrued to women. Women are the primary caretakers of young Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice:  Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).

10

10

10

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

children and of aging parents; they represent the bulk of those who provide basic, bodily care (as opposed to highly specialized and technological care) in health care settings; and they are the majority of home health care workers aiding the disabled. Within the broad category of “women,” women of color, poor women, and immigrant women provide even more care and often under more exploitative conditions than do more privileged women. Accordingly, the critique of recent Christian love ethics that I  undertake here is a feminist critique, and I  strive for attentiveness to the many dynamics of marginalization and exploitation in dependent care relations, including dynamics of race, class, nationality, and immigration status.

A Framework for Integration: Four Forms of Equality As I  have framed my project as an integration of human equality and human dependency within Christian theologies of love and justice, let me say more about what I mean by “equality” and what I mean by “dependency.” Four interrelated notions of equality can be seen operating in the debate within Christian ethics, in Western political thought, and in recent feminist revisions to the Western political tradition. Often, these levels of equality are not clearly distinguished by classical or contemporary thinkers. On one level, we find assertions of a moral equality pertaining to all human persons. This equality may be grounded in different ways by different thinkers: in theological terms, because we are all equally created by God; in terms of human rationality, which can be grounded either theologically (as in Thomas Aquinas or, arguably, Immanuel Kant) or philosophically (certainly in Kant); or, in some recent thought, in other features of our humanity such as our relationality (Eva Feder Kittay)11 and our vulnerability (Martha Fineman).12 In contemporary discourse (including discourse about both Christian love and justice), the notion of moral equality is also frequently linked to the term “universal”: equality is something that each and every person possesses, based on some universal human characteristic, such as human rationality or relation to God. This moral equality grounds each person’s claim to the second and third sorts of equality. The second form is equality as autonomy. In much Western thought, “equality” has been conceived of largely as liberation Kittay, Love’s Labor, especially pages 23–​26, 68–​71. Martha Fineman, “The Vulnerable Subject and the Responsive State,” Emory Law Journal 60 (2011), 251–​75.

11 12

11

Human Dependency, Justice, and Christian Love

11

from hierarchical power structures based on inherited status, and thus as the ability to make certain choices about the shape of one’s life, which, over several centuries, gradually became more widely available –​choices about marriage partner, economic vocation, and political leadership, for example. Notions of equality as autonomy have often been constructed through evasion of the implications of long periods of dependency that human persons experience on the way to partial autonomy, and sometimes after partial autonomy. Social contract thought, for example, posited the origins of political society in the free choice of already mature individuals capable of entering into agreements in their own self-​interest. For John Locke, the connection between freedom and equality was very explicit in his definition of the state of nature as a state of perfect freedom (of persons) to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man. A state also of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another.13

Even Hobbes, for whom the sole purpose of the social contract between equal persons in the state of nature was to exchange autonomy for total obedience to a sovereign in return for protection, had to understand persons as first equal and autonomous in order to make the contract.14 In sum, equality, universality, and autonomy are deeply linked concepts in much modern thought. The third kind of equality is a claim to the universal fulfillment of certain basic material and emotional needs, needs that are simply part of the human condition, needs that must be fulfilled in order for each of us to survive and enjoy a very basic level of well-​being. The third form of equality is instantiated through the fulfillment of these basic human needs. Thus this form of equality is one that responds to the dependency that I will discuss shortly. A complex relationship exists among these three forms of equality. The second and third types of equality –​equality as autonomy and equality as the right to have our basic needs met  –​stand in a relation of interdependence and tension with each other. Equality as the fulfillment of basic human needs is a practical prerequisite to our enjoyment of equality John Locke, “Second Treatise, or An Essay Concerning the True Original Extent and End of Civil Government, par. 4, in Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 287. 14 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Penguin Classics 1985 [1651]), 183–​217. 13

12

12

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

as autonomy; we cannot easily represent ourselves in the political sphere or make choices in the economic sphere if we are starving to death. At the same time, however, our very neediness seems a contradiction of our autonomy. Furthermore, because it is costly to provide for each and every person’s basic needs, the claim to this sort of equality encounters resistance, or it is simply ignored. This is particularly true when an individual requires significant resources of time, energy, and material goods to achieve basic well-​being, as in the case of young children or the severely disabled. Thus, the claim to equality at the level of basic human well-​ being must also be grounded in an account of the first kind of equality, our moral equality, in order to have any practical effect. If we are all equally possessed of a basic human dignity, of personhood, we can make claims on scarce communal resources necessary to provide for our basic well-​being. If we have no such basic dignity, it is easy to argue that fulfilling our needs places too great a burden on our family, community, and society. Likewise, claims to practical instantiation of the second form of equality –​the right to political, economic, and personal autonomy –​must also be grounded in a notion of our moral equality. Appeals to this moral equality have been instrumental in the expansion of rights to political and economic autonomy for women and people of color, for example. At the same time, some thinkers (Kant is a prime example) locate our moral equality precisely in our capacity for autonomy. This means that our claim to equality of basic need fulfillment is ultimately also grounded in our capacity for autonomy, yet this capacity, as we have seen, stands in tension with our neediness. A Christian ethic of dependent relations must find a way to integrate these first three forms of equality. This integration is a challenging task, because the first three forms of equality depend on one another in some respects and constrain one another in other respects. As we shall see in the coming chapters, disinterested and sacrificial accounts of Christian love tend to highlight equality as autonomy and moral equality, while failing to address equality of basic need fulfillment; recent reclamations of the Thomistic understanding of Christian love as an affective union do not adequately account for equality as autonomy; and secular feminist political ethics of care do not offer a robust grounding of our moral equality. A fourth form of equality –​equality of power –​is more ambiguous; it is worth striving toward, but is not fully achievable, and we must acknowledge its elusiveness to neutralize the negative impact of power differentials. This form of equality was of central importance to some Enlightenment

13

Human Dependency, Justice, and Christian Love

13

thinkers, who assumed it as a foundation of their theories, rather than casting it as a project or goal. For Thomas Hobbes, our rough equality of power was the reason the state of nature is also a state of unceasing war: no one is strong enough to decisively dominate anyone else; hence, persons must make an agreement to be dominated and protected by a single ruler. As we shall see, Hobbes needs to effectively erase childhood to tell this story about the origins of political authority. Rousseau emphasizes that persons in the state of nature are capable of self-​governance very early in life; parents spend very little time caring for their children.15 David Hume does not erase childhood to pretend that we are all naturally equal, but justice, which for him is based in utility, can only apply to rough equals. He explicitly excludes from the scope of justice creatures who are so much weaker that they are easily dominated.16 Equality of power is an important project and goal, to the extent it is achievable (and this extent is a complex and contested question). Many forms of dependent care seek, among other goals, to foster increased agency in the person cared for, and thus to equalize power as far as possible. In addition, because the social organization of care is a locus of inequality and exploitation, it is important to try to equalize power among persons holding different social positions with respect to responsibility for care. On the other hand, full equality of power is not possible, precisely because dependency is such a pervasive reality in human life. To the extent that inequalities of power are built into the human condition and inevitable, a Christian ethic should seek to neutralize their impact. Children, persons with disabilities, and the frail elderly are to be fully incorporated into the community and the scope of justice, even though they cannot negotiate from a place of equal power. With respect the different traditions of thought about love and care examined in this book, each emphasizes two of the first three forms of equality, while failing to address the importance, implications and challenges of the third form. Therefore, none manages to fully integrate the first three forms of equality. As we shall see, disinterested and sacrificial accounts of Christian love tend to highlight equality as autonomy and moral equality, while failing to address equality of basic need fulfillment; recent reclamations of the Thomistic understanding of Christian love as an Jean-​Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, tr. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1992 [1755]). 16 David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, in Hume:  Moral and Political Philosophy, ed. Henry D. Aiken (New York: Hafner Publishing Company, 1948 [1751]), 185–​201. 15

14

14

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

affective union do not adequately account for equality as autonomy; and secular feminist political ethics of care do not offer a robust grounding of our moral equality. What I mean by “dependency” also requires further elucidation. I will focus most sharply on dependency as the need for care and assistance from other persons to survive and achieve basic well-​being, and thus to achieve the third form of equality that I have discussed. Dependency can be very stark; an infant, for example, will die very quickly if a caregiver does not provide nutrition, hydration, shelter, and physical touch. At the same time, however, even mature, fully abled adults are still profoundly dependent. We are dependent, for example, on government institutions to ensure order and provide protection; on economic institutions to deliver those goods that we are not able to provide for ourselves in a modern, specialized, industrialized world; and on employers to give us a role in production within this highly developed economy. We are also dependent in ways that are not as clearly material. For example, we all need others for companionship and emotional support; children especially require strong, reliable affective bonds in order to survive and flourish. Those dependencies that are mediated through complex social and economic systems are instantiations of our more basic dependencies. Even if we buy frozen dinners at the grocery store, with money we earned working in a white-​collar profession, and cook them in the microwave, we are still dependent on others (our employer, the manufacturer of kitchen appliances, the grocery store shelf stocker and cashier, and the frozen food company) to meet our nutritional needs. But these complex forms of social interdependence are less visible as dependencies, and strategies to fill needs through the market are often considered more dignified than the more direct fulfillment of basic needs. I frequently emphasize those dependencies that require direct, hands-​on care from another human person, which are necessary for survival, and which a person simply cannot provide for herself (for example, because she is an infant or very ill), to demonstrate more clearly how dependency is often overlooked in Christian ethical theory. However, I  will attempt to reveal more complex interdependencies in arenas in which we often see ourselves as autonomous, for example, as we make consumer choices or decisions about employment. These latter choices, which involve a complex interplay of our dependence and autonomy, have come to be perceived as more purely autonomous as society has become more complex, while the conceptual realm of “dependency” has altered and been stigmatized.

15

Human Dependency, Justice, and Christian Love

15

Care and the Exercise of Complex Moral Agency In the coming chapters, we will see political theorists, economists, and theologians either failing to address dependency and care relations at all or describing these relations in extremely simplified terms. In contrast, I will argue that relations between caregivers and dependents involve complex and challenging moral dynamics. Caregiving calls upon the capacity for deep respect for the agency of dependents, combined with the ability to shape the thoughts and behaviors of others, patience and persistence, well-​ formed emotions, sophisticated psychological insight, physical stamina, language and communication skills, the capacity to quickly survey and assess complex situations, self-​knowledge, the capacity to ask for and to grant forgiveness, profound investment combined with a certain detachment from outcomes, humor, and the capacity for joy. When dependency and care are marginalized within a theory, the complexity of caregiving relations is also obscured, and the theory itself is distorted. Conversely, a desire for theoretical simplification is one reason why dependency is obscured in the first place. We need to confront the complexity, however, not only to have better theories, but to adequately support and value the real persons who wrestle with that complexity in their daily lived experience. The complexity of caregiving arises, in part, from the fact that dependents are also moral agents. Autonomy and dependency are not mutually exclusive. As Cristina Traina has pointed out, “from a very early age, children are always and already deeply morally implicated and engaged in the ambiguous world around them.”17 Just as there are no purely autonomous human beings –​our autonomy is always conditioned, shaped, and constrained –​so even in our most dependent phases of life, we find ways to express our desires and achieve our ends. Parenting in particular requires a difficult balance between respecting the desires and agency of dependent children, squelching those ends that threaten the child’s survival or harm to others, helping to shape our children’s sense of the good, engaging and shaping the social context that presents the moral challenges they must navigate, and knowing when to step back and allow children’s sense of moral autonomy to guide them without our interference. We can see similar dynamics occurring in relations between adults and their aging parents, whose own history of lived moral agency, including their history of caregiving, adds a dimension to the respect for agency due to any human Cristina Traina, “Children and Moral Agency,” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 29, no. 2 (2009), 20.

17

16

16

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

person –​and yet who may need redirection and encouragement in their own efforts at self-​care. In addition to obscuring the moral complexity of care, we will also see economists, political theorists, and theologians who seek to avoid engaging notions of the good, including the goods to be achieved for dependents through caregiving. These two avoidances –​of the moral complexity intrinsic to caregiving and of a conception of the good that caregiving seeks to further –​are deeply related. One cannot provide care to another human being without implicitly or explicitly adopting some ends, purposes, and goods to be instantiated through that care; and these goods may conflict in themselves, as may the conceptions of good held by the persons in the caregiving relationship. So far, I have been quite abstract in my discussion of love, justice, equality, and dependency. Here I offer a few vignettes, describing actual experiences of dependent care relations, chosen from various philosophical, sociological, and journalistic works. These vignettes offer snapshots of moral complexity that is not captured in most understandings of Christian love. Many more could be added, but perhaps these will begin to demonstrate some of what is at stake in this book.

Snapshots of Moral Complexity in Caregiving Relations In her groundbreaking book Maternal Thinking:  Toward a Politics of Peace, Sara Ruddick relates the story of a young, first-​time mother, who is driven to despair and mental confusion by extreme sleep deprivation. Her longed-​for and beloved infant daughter cries almost constantly (due, it is discovered later, to severe allergies), awakening the mother every hour or two for months. The father, while loving, is often absent due to work and school demands. One evening, driven beyond her own physical limits, the mother fantasizes about throwing her baby through the third-​story window of her bedroom. Horrified, she provides the baby with a bottle and barricades herself outside the nursery. Later, she takes the baby and rides the bus back and forth across the city all night long, to keep the baby safe –​from herself. She protects the baby from her own violent impulses by placing them both in the company of strangers.18 Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 65–​67, recounting from Julie Olsen Edwards, “Motheroath,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 12, no. 2 (Summer 1984), 25–​28.

18

17

Human Dependency, Justice, and Christian Love

17

In her essay “Homeplace: A Site of Resistance,” bell hooks argues that African American women have understood the deep importance of the task of “creating and sustaining a home environment,”19 and have shaped this task creatively despite the fact that sexist assumptions have assigned it to them. She describes “homeplace” as “the place where all that truly mattered in life took place –​the warmth and comfort of shelter, the feeding of our bodies, the nurturing of our souls. There we learned dignity, integrity of being; there we learned to have faith.”20 The work of constructing homeplace has a “radical political dimension.”21 Homeplace provides a shelter from a world of racial domination, a place in which Black human beings can be humanized in a world set on their dehumanization. When Black women of her mother’s generation came home after achingly long days serving in the homes of white families, and managed to offer some care to their own children, they understood this love as deeply political. The message of dignity they conveyed would empower their children to survive and resist an oppressive environment. hooks takes Frederick Douglass to task for failing to honor the efforts of his own slave mother, who walked twelve miles at night to hold him while he slept, and then returned to the fields by dawn, at risk of her own life. He barely remembers her, but hooks suggests that “the political choices of this black mother,” the caring and value that she communicated to him, fostered his abolitionist resistance later in life.22 Citing the need for Black women to describe their experience of motherhood on their own terms, Patricia Hill Collins offers five themes that can be discerned in this experience, expressed in flexible patterns as Black women negotiate and renegotiate their work in changing contexts. One of these, “socialization for survival,” Hill Collins describes in dual terms: Black mothers must train their daughters simultaneously to resist racist and sexist structures of oppression, and also to adapt to these structures enough to avoid being destroyed. Thus she describes mothers who begged their daughters not to risk participation in the civil rights movement, or who chastised their daughters for questioning the low pay and sexual harassment that accompanied domestic labor, the only employment option available to generations of Black women. Hill Collins also describes

bell hooks, “Homeplace:  A  Site of Resistance,” in Yearning:  Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990), 42. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., 44–​45. 19

18

18

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

traditional Black strategies of sustaining “woman-​centered networks of community-​based childcare.” These incorporate the common, informal practice of “othermothering,” in which grandmothers, aunts, and neighbors step in to offer nurturance, supervision, or even informal adoption to children whose caregivers are unavailable for various reasons, primarily related to the economic and political oppression experienced by Black communities.23 Drawing on her own experience as a personal care attendant, as well as ethnographic research with personal care workers and their disabled clients, Lynn May Rivas describes the perceived standard of quality for personal care work:  invisibility. For care recipients, truly excellent care happens when the caregiver is so unobtrusive and intuitive that the care is almost unnoticed. Such care allows the recipient of care to maximize his or her own sense of autonomy and independence. The caregiver becomes almost like an extension of the recipient’s body, and thus the caregiver’s agency and effort are assimilated to the agency and effort of the care receiver. The sense of independence is further accentuated when the care is paid care, perhaps because the payment stands in for acknowledgment of the caregivers’ own complex needs, desires, and labor. Increased independence and agency are understandable and worthy goals for persons with disabilities. Furthermore, historically, “care” for persons with disabilities in the United States has meant unwanted institutionalization, abuse, or infantilization. An emphasis on autonomy and agency helps correct understandings of persons with disabilities operative in this oppressive history. And yet invisibility for the caregiver is also problematic and dehumanizing. This invisibility is facilitated by, and increases, the marginalization of caregivers, a large proportion of whom are immigrants, persons of color, women, or all three of these.24 Roger Gottlieb opens up philosophical questions about care for his fourteen-​year-​old daughter Esther, who is developmentally delayed and has multiple disabilities. Clearly, Esther is a central priority in the life of Gottlieb and his wife:  together, they spend thousands of dollars on her care; spend fifteen to twenty hours per week on the phone with doctors, HMOs, teachers, and caregivers; and escort Esther to six or seven therapy and doctors’ appointments per week, some of them hours away from their Patricia Hill Collins, “Black Women and Motherhood,” in Black Feminist Thought:  Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd ed. (Routledge: New York, 2000), 173–​199. 24 Lynn May Rivas, “Invisible Labors:  Caring for the Independent Person,” in Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 70–​84. 23

19

Human Dependency, Justice, and Christian Love

19

house.25 Yet they face questions of scarcity of time, energy, and material and emotional resources, what Gottlieb describes as “triage” in the “emergency room of family life.”26 The intense demands of care for Esther have impeded opportunities for developing his marriage relationship, which seems “like one long exercise in collective medical management.”27 They detract from attention to the needs of Esther’s typically developing sister, not to mention the demands of professional lives or social activism and political engagement. The triage extends to the social level: certainly persons with disabilities are entitled to appropriate care, but how is this entitlement, demanding as it is, to be balanced with other social priorities? “Conventional ethical and religious platitudes about the ‘infinite worth of the soul’ … are not particularly helpful”28 in addressing such questions, Gottlieb argues. “There is simply too much infinite worth to go around.”29 In a New York Times cover story, Jason DeParle describes how, in response to the recession, many states have diverted funds from the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program to other state-​funded human service programs while making it more difficult to receive TANF benefits. While some former TANF recipients report that time limits and work requirements for benefits pushed them to obtain education and work experience, others have experienced barriers to employment, including mental health issues, disabilities in themselves or their children, or lack of childcare, and are now living without jobs or cash benefits. DeParle interviews poor single mothers struggling to meet the basic needs of their children with severely constrained financial resources. He comments, “They have sold food stamps, sold blood, skipped meals, shoplifted, doubled up with friends, scavenged trash bins for bottles and cans and returned to relationships with violent partners –​all with children in tow.”30 In the movie Maid in America, producer and director Anayansi Prado introduces us to three immigrant women engaged in various forms of domestic employment in Los Angeles. Judith, an undocumented Roger Gottlieb, “The Tasks of Embodied Love:  Moral Problems in Caring for Children with Disabilities,” Hypatia 17, no. 3 (Spring 2002), 226. 26 Ibid., 233. 27 Ibid., 228. 28 Ibid., 229. 29 Ibid., 231. 30 Jason DeParle, “Welfare Limits Left Poor Adrift as Recession Hit,” New  York Times, April 7, 2012, accessed at www.nytimes.com/2012/04/08/us/welfare-limits-left-poor-adrift-as-recession-hit .html?pagewanted=all. Similar stories of life in the wake of radical cutbacks in the economic “safety net” are fleshed out in Kathryn Edin and Luke Shaefer’s 2015 book, $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015). 25

20

20

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

Guatemalan mother of two, works cleaning houses, sending money home to her own family for food, clothing, and medicine. Her husband, a day laborer, is also undocumented. It is too risky for them to return home to visit their family. After delivering a third child in the United States, Judith returns to Guatemala, while her husband remains in the United States. Upon her return, her middle child does not remember her. As the movie closes, we see Judith curled up into bed with her two daughters in a home with dirt floors and cinderblock walls. Though the family has been able to build a kitchen with her remittances, and her mother has been provided with essential medicine, Judith declares that she would not go back to the United States to work again. The separation from her family has been too painful.31 These brief accounts of various relationships of dependent care raise some questions that are prominently treated in discussions of Christian love:  Is love about how we feel, or is it about what we do? Is sacrifice the ideal of Christian love, and does sacrifice amount to erasure of the self? Or should Christians seek appropriate affirmation and recognition of themselves in relations of care for others? Is love for our friends, kin, or community an expression of our own self-​love? Or is it the site of our greatest capacity for self-​sacrifice? Or are these two alternatives too sharply differentiated to capture the reality of our love relationships? Do we decide to love, or is love first of all an involuntary response to good perceived in another? In loving, do we recognize value or bestow it? The snapshots also raise new questions, or nuances of the above questions, that are not even possible to ask within the conceptual schemes within which most contemporary treatments of Christian love are couched. For example, when a neighbor takes on the duty of “othermothering” a child whose mother is working long hours, addicted, or incarcerated, is that othermother caring for Kierkegaard’s version of the “neighbor” –​any and every other human being, loved without regard for personal preference? Or is that child, a child who is one of “our children,” a member of a struggling and oppressed community, a “special relation”? Is love private, or is it political? Are these two categorizations mutually exclusive? Can love in the “homeplace” be political because it inhabits and requires a private space? If care is paid, can it still qualify as love? What is the relationship between remuneration that allows the caregiver to meet her own embodied physical needs, and the actions that caregiver takes to meet the embodied Maid in America, produced by Kevin Leadingham, produced and directed by Anayansi Prado. Impacto Films. Distributed by Women Make Movies, New York, New York, 2004.

31

21

Human Dependency, Justice, and Christian Love

21

physical needs of another? What does unconditional commitment and unlimited self-​gift mean in the context of embodied human existence in which resources of time, energy, and material necessities are not unlimited? What are the implications for theological anthropology of the moral heroism of caregivers who provide consistent care under impossibly oppressive circumstances? Notice that these more nuanced questions also raise issues about the relationship between love and justice. These snapshots of dependent care relations do not fit neatly into a schema where autonomous agents, the caregivers, can choose between demanding their own due and voluntarily sacrificing their due to give to others. Nor can these caregivers overcome, through refinement of the personal virtue of justice in themselves, the moral dilemmas they face in providing care to their dependents. Most of them are in no position to deliberate over the amount of love and care to bestow upon their nearest and dearest as opposed to strangers. These caregivers require significant improvements in social justice in order to provide appropriate love and care to their dependents. In the coming chapters, we will ask whether and how various understandings of Christian love can integrate and respond to these pictures of love in dependent care relations and of injustice in the social organization of care.

Unfolding the Argument Chapter  2 addresses the obfuscation of dependency and care in Enlightenment and contemporary political theory. I  begin by engaging the classical social contract political theories of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. These thinkers, whose primary theoretical opponents tried to ground political authority in relations of kinship and dependency rather than autonomy, responded by either erasing (Hobbes) or privatizing (Locke) dependency and caregiving relations. In each case, the avoidance of dependency leads to internal theoretical contradictions, but both these approaches to dependency continue to find expression in contemporary theories of justice. I  then engage the most influential twentieth century political theorist, John Rawls, who combines aspects of this social contract tradition (including its obfuscation of dependency) with strong Kantian commitments. Rawls provides a fruitful conversation partner for several reasons. He brings together a strong emphasis on moral equality (through his strong commitment to Kantian respect for persons), an emphasis on equality as autonomy (which, again following Kant, serves as the grounding

22

22

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

for moral equality in Rawls), and a commitment to equality of basic need fulfillment, through the incorporation of a social minimum to meet basic needs.32 Thus, Rawls would appear to offer the sort of integration of three forms of equality that I have argued any ethic of dependent care relations must accomplish. However, to accomplish this, he also relies upon the fourth form of equality, equality of power: he excludes the deeply and permanently dependent (specifically, those with profound physical or cognitive disabilities) from the scope of justice. Such exclusion is not an option for a Christian ethic that takes seriously the inclusivity of neighbor-​love commanded by Jesus. A Christian ethic must do some things differently to incorporate all persons. In particular, I begin to construct the argument that a Christian (and thus inclusive) ethic of dependent care relations must incorporate both a more fully articulated account of the human goods that both politics and caring relations seek, and a more complex account of moral motives than Rawls uses to generate his principles of justice. Throughout this analysis, I draw upon, deepen, and occasionally critique recent work on Rawls by feminist and disability theorists. In Chapter 3, I trace the deliberate exclusion of domestic and care work from the scope of the “economic” during the development of classical and neoclassical economics. This exclusion has resulted in enormous material injustice against unpaid caregivers on a global scale, injustice that should be of direct concern to Christian ethics. Beyond this, however, the exclusion of dependency and care from the realm of the economic required a highly reductionist and dualistic account of the motives involved in human economic activity, and thus leads to a distorted account of moral agency, one that cannot encompass the work of caregivers. Similarly, this exclusion of dependency and care allows economists to avoid any consideration of the goods sought through economics. I close this chapter with an analysis of the absurd implications that ensue when Gary Becker turns a theory that was built on the exclusion of the domestic sphere back onto the family. Constructively, this chapter argues that dependent care relations must be recognized as economic, to secure justice for caregivers; but the conception of economics incorporated into an ethic of dependent care relations cannot be the neoclassical version applied by Becker and others. It must be something closer to the “provisioning” conception adopted by feminist economists. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1999), 243–​45.

32

23

Human Dependency, Justice, and Christian Love

23

Taken together, Chapters 2 and 3 demonstrate the interconnectedness, on a theoretical level, of the avoidance of any account of the goods to be sought in politics and economics, reductionist and bifurcated accounts of human motives, and the obfuscation of dependency and caregiving. These structural characteristics reappear again in the next two chapters, in which I examine the sacrificial and equal-​regard traditions among Christian love theologies. Political theorists and economists avoid conceptions of the good to highlight and protect autonomy –​autonomous choice both grounds political authority and drives production and distribution in the market. In contrast, within these two theological traditions, pursuit of the good is framed as a matter of selfish grasping, something dangerous to true Christian love, which is seen as disinterested. As I shall argue, these theologies fall into incoherence once we ask about the place of relations of dependent care within them. Chapter  4 engages the sacrificial love tradition, particularly post-​ Enlightenment sacrificial love thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Niebuhr, Nygren, Ramsey, and, more recently, Timothy Jackson and Colin Grant. Though this tradition has been subject to wide and varied feminist critique, any ethic of dependent care relations must incorporate an element of sacrifice, precisely because dependency and the need for care are embedded so thoroughly in human existence. Sometimes we are called to respond with our labor, concern, and material resources to persons who cannot reciprocate fully, or at all. However, the thinkers listed above treat sacrifice not as the pervasive moral reality that it is, but as an ideal sharply opposed to the realities of our daily, embodied existence. In so doing, they marginalize caregivers and their moral labor. Relatedly, in this tradition, the positive moral work of helping life to flourish is ignored. Thus the tradition requires a deeper and more nuanced feminist critique. The sacrificial love tradition, and particularly Niebuhr, engages two foundational questions in Christian ethics that I have suggested must be addressed in any ethic of dependent care relations: the nature of our moral engagement with natural processes, which involve adaptation for survival and flourishing, cooperation, symbiosis, and competitive struggle; and the relation of love and justice. A dependent care ethic, I argue, must engage nature in a more complex way than simply idealizing transcendence of struggle and competition, and must incorporate a notion of justice that goes beyond Niebuhr’s balance of competing interests. Contemporary thinkers Jackson and Grant each attempt to reclaim the sacrificial love tradition in conversation with contemporary critiques by feminist political theorists of dependency and care (Jackson) or by critics of the sharply

24

24

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

separate autonomous self (Grant). These efforts are provocative, but ultimately cannot achieve their promise because both thinkers are so committed to showing the uniqueness and necessity of religious (specifically Christian) values in public life that they must marginalize widespread caregiving activity, activity that is not the exclusive purview of Christians. In fact, in marginalizing caregivers, these thinkers sideline an important resource for challenging the self-​interested, autonomous self and reclaiming the values they most want to promote. Christian sacrificial love theologies can engage productively with feminist political ethics of care, but this will require some fundamental modifications to the existing sacrificial tradition. I close the chapter with constructive insights about how sacrifice must be framed within a Christian ethic of dependent care relations. In Chapter  5, I  engage with Gene Outka’s influential conception of agape as “equal regard,” a regard for others that is not based on any particular characteristics that might render the object of love interesting or attractive to us. Because it is unrelated to the particularity of the other, agape is unalterable, claims Outka. He constructs his conception of agape by analyzing existing treatments of Christian love through the lens of a school of analytic philosophy that has been very effectively critiqued by feminist philosophers for obscuring dependency and caregiving relations. But this critique has not yet been applied to Outka himself. The fierce debate that Outka sparked over the relationship between agape as “equal regard” and so-​called “special relations” bore a striking resemblance to the debate over “justice” and “care” moral orientations sparked by Carol Gilligan within feminist ethics, but the latter conversation has progressed beyond its gendered beginnings and primary focus on the ethical orientation of the individual moral agent. Today feminist political theorists are producing important work theorizing the appropriate social structures to support caregiving relations, including the ways in which such structures must evolve in light of the globalization of the social organization of care. In contrast, the conversation in Christian ethics got stuck; it could not transcend the “moral boundaries” (Joan Tronto) that obscure care in the analytic philosophy on which Outka draws. Chapters 2 through 5 outline bodies of thought in which the modern emphasis on equality and autonomy have worked to obscure dependency and devalue caregiving. In Chapter  6, I  turn to contemporary reclamations of a premodern tradition: the Thomistic understanding of Christian love and its ordering. Stephen Pope, Jean Porter, and others have effectively articulated many of the strengths of this tradition: it offers a picture of finite human persons embedded in a web of social relations of giving

25

Human Dependency, Justice, and Christian Love

25

and receiving; it harnesses our natural inclinations to do more good for those most closely tied to us. To this, I add that the Thomistic tradition conceives of us as loving others as good for their own sakes, in a way that both calls out sacrifice from us and adds goodness to our own lives. The Thomistic virtue tradition offers better tools than either sacrificial or equal-​ regard theologies for describing and assessing the complex, nuanced moral agency exercised within particular dependent care relations. The Thomistic account of prudence, in particular, has parallels to many feminist accounts of good care as comprised of fine-​grained judgments, careful attention, and emotional sensitivity. Finally, the Thomistic tradition can draw upon a positive account of the goods that care relations seek to instantiate –​a rich account of what is due to vulnerable human beings. Things are more complicated, however, when we turn to the allocation of responsibility for care –​what Thomas labels the “order of love.” Here, some of the foundational assumptions of the Thomistic tradition, assumptions deeply intertwined with the European medieval social order and medieval scientific frameworks, must be challenged. The Thomistic order of love tradition is not sufficient, in a globalized context that is pervaded by exploitation, inequality, and staggering levels of unmet human need, to ground an ethic of love and inclusive justice for dependent care relations. Thus the retrievable aspects of the Thomistic tradition must be integrated with a conception of justice adequate to the contemporary context, in which care itself has become a global commodity. Otherwise, an ethic based in the Thomistic order of love will only reinforce exclusionary structures of injustice. Accordingly, in Chapter  7, drawing on discussions in previous chapters, I outline several characteristics needed in any conception of justice adequate to address the contemporary global social organization of care. Such a conception must articulate the prerequisites of human flourishing –​the human goods –​that caregiving relations should seek to fulfill. It is these prerequisites that must be distributed in such a way that all persons, including dependents and caregivers, can flourish. A conception of justice that can become part of a Christian ethic of dependent care relations must recognize care as economic. Because so much of the care economy exists outside the market, because care involves various complex local, national, and international relationships and practices, and because caregivers are so vulnerable to exploitation, this ethic of justice must articulate a juridical role for the state and for international regulatory and governing organizations. Finally, an account of justice adequate to a Christian ethic of dependent care relations must ensure that those engaged

26

26

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

in care processes can critically and continuously assess care practices and the allocation of responsibility for care. Such processes must amplify the voice of marginalized persons, who so often require the most care and/​or provide the most demanding care. Given these parameters, in my final chapter, I  explore resources that might contribute to such an account of justice, including Catholic social thought, feminist retrievals of Thomistic natural law ethics, secular feminist political ethics of care, and feminist dependency-​based theories of justice. Each of these resources has strengths and limitations for our purposes, but together they may provide the building blocks to move forward. Finally, I explore recent work in disability studies and feminist philosophy on vulnerability, to show that secular feminist philosophy encounters difficulty when trying to ground an inclusive ethic that acknowledges dependency. I suggest that the Christian theological tradition may offer resources for grounding our equality in dependency more effectively than secular feminist ethics can do. To illustrate this possibility, I turn to a final resource, Kathryn Tanner’s notion of “non-​contrastive transcendence” and its use to affirm a primordial equality based in our relationship to God.

27

Ch apter  2

The Marginalization of Dependency and Care in Political Theory

In the previous chapter, I began to construct an argument that relations of care are profoundly morally complex, and that this complexity has not been visible in recent Christian love theologies, to the detriment of dependent persons, caregiving relations, and the love theologies themselves. In this chapter and the next, I tell a story about how this complexity came to be obscured in two disciplines, political theory and neoclassical economics, that shape contemporary thought, including Christian ethics, in some very fundamental ways. The transition to modernity in Western Europe involved a gradual reshaping of the relationship between three central areas of human relations:  kinship, economic, and political. In feudal Europe, the political, economic, and kinship arenas were more closely integrated, as political power was allocated largely along kinship lines, and economic production was tied more closely to the home. During the transition to modernity, these three basic arenas became more distinct and took on the form of the contemporary family, the market, and the nation-​state.1 At the same time, understandings of human equality and freedom deepened and were theorized in relation to these new developments. In this process of reshaping, the central fact of human dependency was obscured and devalued within political and economic theory; certain groups of persons were constructed as “dependent” in opposition to the normative construction of other groups as autonomous. In practice, responsibility for dependent care was assigned to groups with less social power:  women, and in the United States, particularly women marginalized by race, class, and citizenship status. For a classic account of this process from a feminist perspective, see Linda Nicholson, Gender and History: The Limits of Social Theory in the Age of the Family (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).

1

27

28

28

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

As I will show, the marginalization of dependency and care was accomplished by assigning them primarily to a private family sphere sharply divided from the public sphere of politics and economics. The political sphere was conceived as the realm of autonomous and equal men freely choosing to be governed. The realm of economics conceptually narrowed to the market sector, in which persons freely exchanged goods with one another on equal footing. In addition, for many Enlightenment thinkers, resistance to paternalism and hierarchy meant an avoidance of any notion of the good that economics or politics should seek, including the very basic good of fulfilling human needs and providing care. Increasingly, thinkers emphasized procedural accounts of the right in market exchange and political justice, in order to avoid judging the goodness of outcomes. In lived human experience, all of us simultaneously experience some degree of dependency and express some degree of agency. The degree of dependency and of agency varies according to the person and her stage of life. But not only do both these realities pervade our experience, they shape each other: we express our agency within boundaries set by our varied limits and dependencies. This means that in caregiving relationships, a caregiver must engage in a balance of determining the good for others and fostering agency. When we determine the good for others, this understanding of “good” must be objectively defensible; it should also be shaped through dialogue, attentive observation, negotiation, and prioritization with the care recipient about the content of care. Furthermore, whereas political and economic theory is frequently built on the assumption of predictable self-​interest, human relations are not so predictable, and less so the more intimate they are: they involve degrees of affection and commitment, degrees of self-​interest and other-​regard. Because dependency and agency are so deeply integrated in lived experience, the Enlightenment desire to highlight equality and autonomy instead of dependency demanded a radical simplification and separation of these elements. Thus, in our close look at political theory, economics, and some contemporary forms of theology, we will note patterns of bifurcation:  the bifurcation of love and justice, autonomy and dependency, public and private, self-​interest and other-​ regard, and good and right. But to acknowledge the centrality of care, we will need to wade back in to the complex intersections of all these bifurcated pairs; we must be ready to notice degrees and assess nuance. Within political theory, the early social-​ contract thinkers, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, constructed their theories as part of a debate against patriarchal accounts of political authority –​the notion that political power and paternal power are continuous with one another. As we shall

29

Marginalization of Dependency in Political Theory

29

see, as these thinkers constructed theories of political obligation based on equality, autonomy, and contract, they masked a central human reality: in many human relationships, one party simply has to determine what is good for the other party. This is clearly true of the relationship between parents and young children. And if some of us must determine what is good for others of us, then two things become very important: one, we must be able to rely on genuine other regard, grounded in duty or in affection (or, ideally, in both); and two, we must be able to make reasonable judgments about what is objectively good for the other. It may be the case that when we are relatively autonomous, we are the best judges of what is good for ourselves, and that our observable choices provide the best source of information about that good. This is the presumption upon which contemporary political and economic theories are built. However, when we care for dependents, a more objective account of the good for persons is needed, and our affections must be shaped to discern and choose what is good for those whose survival and flourishing is our responsibility. After reviewing relevant aspects of Hobbes and Locke, in conversation with some recent feminist critiques, I examine the treatment of dependency in the work of John Rawls, who shares, and further moralizes (through the influence of Immanuel Kant), their emphasis on equality. In this examination, I am influenced by, but also deepen, and contest in some particulars, existing feminist critiques by Susan Moller Okin, Eva Feder Kittay, and Martha Nussbaum. Rawls is a particularly fruitful interlocutor precisely because his theory is so morally ambitious, in terms of his emphasis on equality and on redistributing scarce resources. But he still falls short of a fully inclusive ethic, and it is important to understand how and why he falls short, as a Christian ethic of love and justice for dependent care relations must be fully inclusive.

Enlightenment Social-​Contract Theory The rise of social-​contract theory in Western Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reflected new ideals of human beings (or at least property-​owning males) as equal and autonomous. In various ways, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant each sought to challenge notions of political authority as grounded in the “natural” authority of fathers or kings. Unfortunately, however, these Enlightenment thinkers did not wrestle adequately with the existence of pervasive human dependency as they argued for political theories based on equality. In the two English thinkers in particular, we can see two routes taken with respect to dependency

30

30

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

and care that reappear in contemporary political theory: erasure and sharp privatization. Hobbes and Locke wrote in the context of English struggles between absolute monarchy and parliamentary monarchy during the period of the English Civil Wars and the Restoration, and in counterpoint to the patriarchal account of political authority, offered in its most radical and consistent form by Sir Robert Filmer.2 Though patriarchal notions of political authority –​that is, the idea that political rule and male familial headship were analogous and mutually supportive –​had a long history in Western political thought, Filmer moved from analogy to identity.3 According to Filmer, God had granted Adam absolute political authority in the Garden of Eden, and this authority had been passed down biologically from father to son, such that contemporary monarchs partook in the original grant of authority via “natural” lines of fatherhood and sonship. In other words, paternal and political forms of authority were identical in essence, based on natural kinship ties, and profoundly hierarchical. Hobbes and Locke each suggested, in contrast, that human beings are primordially free and equal to one another. Political authority emerged from consent among these equals. Particularly in the face of patriarchal analogies or equations between familial and political power, the social-​contract argument raised uncomfortable questions about family relations, including relations of care and dependency within families. If political hierarchy is not “natural” but grounded in the consent of the ruled, is the hierarchy of husband over wife, or of parent over child, also open to question? Where do young children fit into a state of nature populated by autonomous equals? After all, care for children necessarily entails determining what is good for them; at least to this extent, hierarchy and authority are inescapable elements of human social reality. Unfortunately, neither Hobbes nor Locke entered into the theoretical complexity, and upheaval of social norms, that would have been required to theorize equality in dependency in both the political and the familial spheres. Hobbes offered a radical reversal of Filmer: all forms of authority were indeed grounded in a single source, but that source was not the natural ties of generation, but the consent of the governed. Thus even relations between Sir Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 3 Gordon J. Schochet, The Authoritarian Family and Political Attitudes in 17th Century England: Patriarchalism in Political Thought (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1988). 2

31

Marginalization of Dependency in Political Theory

31

spouses, and between parents and children, were contractual. Children, and even infants, were understood to have contracted to obey their parents in return for their parents’ choice to nurture rather than abandon them.4 Textual ambiguities reveal that Hobbes recognized the obvious problems with the notion of consent from an infant, but he did not confront these problems.5 Thus, to evade arguments grounding political authority in the authority of fathers over children, Hobbes in effect banished dependency from his theory. The avoidance of dependency and care becomes intertwined, in Hobbes’s thought, with his assumption that human relations are based primarily on fear and domination, rather than on affection and other-​regard. For Hobbes, in the state of nature, all are roughly equal in physical power and in prudence, and as such, no one can automatically dominate another by force or wit (a problem, for Hobbes, since it leaves individuals in a state of perpetual war).6 This equality of power extends to women.7 Furthermore, original dominion over children belongs to the mother, since she has initial control over the infant and can decide whether to protect and nurture or abandon the child.8 However, Hobbes notes, once parents have entered into civil society, dominion over the child is determined by the sovereign, and that usually means that the man has authority over both wife and children. As Carole Pateman notes, there is no reason why a woman, free and equal to men in the state of nature, would consent to enter into a contract by which she and her children are ruled by a husband. Pateman hypothesizes that for Hobbes, authority in marriage is not the result of consent after all, but of war; specifically, men take advantage of the vulnerability and the “slight disadvantage” that women incur when they bear a child and determine to nurture the child; they conquer women and dominate them.9 Of course, this begs the question again: why would anyone choose

Hobbes, Leviathan, 253–​254. For a review of the different discussions of consent by children and infants in Hobbes, and an exploration of their problems and inconsistencies, see Peter O. King, “Thomas Hobbes’s Children,” in The Philosopher’s Child, ed. Susan M. Turner and Gareth B. Matthews (Rochester, NY:  University of Rochester Press, 1998), 65–​83. 6 Hobbes, Leviathan, 183–​185. 7 Ibid., 253. 8 Ibid. 9 Carole Pateman, “ ‘God Hath Ordained to Man a Helper’: Hobbes, Patriarchy, and Conjugal Right,” British Journal of Political Science 19, no. 4 (October 1989), 457. Pateman’s critique of Hobbes focuses on the desire of men for sexual domination of women; she gives less attention to the need for a political theory to determine who will take up the burden of care that is intrinsic to human life. 4 5

32

32

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

to render oneself vulnerable by nurturing a child? For Hobbes, the natural state of humankind is to be at war; we are selfish and fearful, ready not only to defend ourselves against aggression, but to engage in aggression to maintain or increase whatever security and material goods we already have.10 It is difficult to fit a tie of affection between parent and child into this picture, but ties of affection or duty seem necessary to explain a caregiver’s commitment to children. Hobbes casts the decision to nurture a child in terms of the desire to rule over another, but such a decision makes little sense if the resultant vulnerability invites domination over oneself and one’s child. Thus Hobbes extends the radical implications of his theory of equality to women, but retreats from these implications quickly, perhaps to avoid confronting gender roles in his own society, perhaps because he recognizes the implications of the very existence of dependent children for a theory grounding political authority in the fear-​based consent of relative equals ready to fight to the death for survival. Conventional family arrangements provide a place to store the realities of dependency and care, but his reliance on the sovereign’s dictates about family relations is theoretically weak. Both the notion of infants as contractor, and the view that fearful Hobbesian survivalists would invite domination by caring for vulnerable children emerge as ambiguities or contradictions in Hobbes’s thoroughly voluntarist account of the genesis of political authority. The only way to avoid these contradictions would be for Hobbes to wade into greater complexity in his analysis of human relations, acknowledging that alongside our equality we are also dependent upon one another, and admitting a complex range and interaction of motives within human relations. Our ties exist on a continuum from prevoluntary to freely chosen and spring from a complex mix of motives, including self-​interested choice, vulnerability, fear, duty, other-​regard, affection, and appreciation. The lesson we learn from Hobbes, then, and take into our analyses of economics and love theologies is that his radical simplification of human motives depends upon the obfuscation of dependent care relationships and their attendant complexities. Locke’s social-​contract theory initially seems more promising from the perspective of recognizing dependency and care. In contrast to Hobbes, Locke counters Filmer with the argument that political authority and paternal or parental authority were intrinsically different from each Hobbes, Leviathan, 185.

10

33

Marginalization of Dependency in Political Theory

33

other.11 Political authority is grounded in choice, and parental authority is grounded in children’s need for nurture and education. Children have a right to this nurturance; parents have a duty to provide for their children, as well as a natural affection that inclines them to do so. Locke also insists that children ultimately grow out of this need into free and equal persons.12 Though Locke presents these two stages in a very simple chronological fashion –​a child is first dependent, then free and autonomous and able to consent to be governed  –​this basic distinction helpfully complicates the relation between parents and offspring in a way that highlights both dependency and equality. Infants do not have to be seen as contractors, and yet they still possess a prospective equality. Throughout his Second Treatise, Locke’s descriptions of family relationships are clearly crafted to support his arguments against Filmer. He depicts marriage as a contract, implying that two persons enter into this institution voluntarily, to bear and raise children, who are best served by a long-​lasting commitment between the parents. He makes the surprising (for his time) suggestion that after the children are raised into independence, the mother and father might agree to divorce.13 This ability to enter and exit a marriage contract implies some degree of autonomy for women. As Mary Lyndon Shanley has shown, Royalist sympathizers often used indissoluble and hierarchical marriage as an analogy for the irrevocable divine right of monarchs. Locke further argues that since the “natural” authority over children so clearly rests in two persons, it cannot serve as a model for absolute political authority vested in a single male ruler.14 Thus, Locke’s depiction of contractual marriage, subject to dissolution by agreement, and his intimations of equality between husband and wife both in making this contract and in raising their children serve a rhetorical function in his argument for contractual politics.15 Unfortunately, however, and incongruously, Locke also makes clear at various points that he assumes a traditional family model with a male head and a subordinate female.16 Shortly after affirming women’s ability to enter contracts, Locke asserts that husband and wife “will unavoidably Locke, Second Treatise, 340–​341. Ibid., 326–​328. 13 Ibid., 337–​340. 14 Ibid., 321–​322. 15 Mary Lyndon Shanley, “Marriage Contract and Social Contract in Seventeenth-​Century English Political Thought,” Western Political Quarterly 32, no. 1 (March 1979), 79–​91. 16 For example, John Locke, First Treatise, or The False Principles and Foundation of Sir Robert Filmer and His Followers are Detected and Overthrown, par. 47–​48, in Two Treatises of Government, ed. Laslett, 191–​192. 11 12

34

34

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

sometimes have different wills,” and in such cases, rule “naturally falls to the man’s share, as the abler and stronger.”17 Nor does Locke conclude that women should share in political rule. Feminist critics have argued about whether Locke’s liberal theory contains the seeds of women’s equality, or whether Locke’s individualism, conception of reason, and theory of property necessarily exclude women from this equality.18 Some early second-​generation feminist retrievals of Locke tended to assume that once his sexism was revealed, it could easily be corrected by extending his conception of equality to women. Most of these feminists did not, however, fully address the problem of human dependency and its fate within Locke’s political theory. More recently, some have come to see that Locke’s theory presents more complex dilemmas for the cause of women’s equality.19 In addition, as Barbara Arneil points out, feminist critics have often equated “women” in Locke with the wives of citizens, ignoring the female servants and slaves for whom class or race, not gender, constituted the categories most decisively excluding them from equality.20 It may be that Locke’s early feminist interpreters could ignore dependency precisely because of these class divisions within Locke’s theory and social context:  the wife of a citizen would have others to help her with reproductive labor, so one could imagine her full participation in political and economic life without asking how dependency and care needs would be addressed. What is clear, however, is that dependency did remain in the private sphere in Locke’s theory, and “equality” extended only to propertied men. In sum, neither Hobbes nor Locke took the difficult route of examining complex interconnections between equality and dependency; neither considered what sort of arrangements would be necessary to ensure both Locke, Second Treatise, 339. Those who have seen promise for feminist ends in Locke’s work include Shanley, as well as Melissa Butler, “Early Liberal Roots of Feminism: John Locke’s Attack on Patriarchy,” in Feminist Interpretations of John Locke, eds. Nancy J. Hirschmann and Kirstie M. McClure (University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 91–​121. Those who find foundational problems in Locke’s theory that endanger feminist ends include Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981) 116–​127; Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988). 19 See, for example Mary Lyndon Shanley’s reflection on her “Marriage Contract and Social Contract” twenty-​eight years after its initial publication:  “things are not so simple. Feminist theorists have not resolved the deep issues concerning the gendered individual, the status of the child, inevitable dependencies not only between children and adults but also among adults, and the relationship between contract and human freedom that are embedded in Locke’s inconsistencies.” Mary Lyndon Shanley, “Afterword: Equality, Liberty, and Marriage Contracts,” in Hirschmann and McClure, 49. 20 Barbara Arneil, “Women as Wives, Servants and Slaves:  Rethinking the Public/​Private Divide,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 34, no. 1 (March 2001), 29–​54. 17 18

35

Marginalization of Dependency in Political Theory

35

that dependent human beings receive care, and that caregivers can engage the political sphere as equals. Perhaps this was too much to ask of them in their historical context, and given the context of their debate with Filmer. However, in contemporary political thought, we are left to contend with the legacy of this division of equality and dependency. More recent political thinkers have been able to build on the Enlightenment legacy, spinning out theoretical edifices that assume but ignore the domestic sphere, dependency, and the work of care. Dependency, in fact, is far less visible in the major twentieth-​century theories of justice than it was in seventeenth-​ century thought, when Filmer’s political theory, one thoroughly based on relations of hierarchy and dependency, served as the social-​contract thinkers’ primary rival in the contest to theorize political authority.

Twentieth-​Century Theories of Justice We can see analogues to and amalgamations of the erasure and privatization approaches to dependency operating in different schools of contemporary (particularly nonfeminist) political thought. Libertarian approaches, represented most clearly by Robert Nozick, reflect a Hobbesian erasure of dependency. The fact that Nozick draws most directly on Locke’s theory of property acquisition shows how effective was Locke’s privatization of care: it has now become erasure, for dependency has no role at all in Nozick’s world.21 Susan Moller Okin’s devastating critique shows that, when we attend to the reality of human reproduction, Nozick’s theory leads to “slavery, matriarchy and dystopia”: given the Lockean rules that Nozick sets out for the acquisition of property, women would own the children to whom they give birth.22 Nozick also argues that our particular gifts and talents belong to us in such a way that we have no obligation to share their fruits with those less or otherwise gifted.23 He does not reference the role of parents, teachers, and other caregivers in developing those gifts and talents. Nozick appears to have taken seriously and literally Hobbes’s suggestion that we think of persons “as if but even now sprung out of the earth, and suddenly (like Mushrooms) come to full maturity Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974). Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender and the Family (Basic Books, 1989), 79–​85. John Locke tries to demonstrate that parents do not own their children, despite the seeming implications of his theory, but his arguments are ineffective. Nozick himself points this out, but does not resolve the problem. See Locke, First Treatise, Books VI and IX; Second Treatise, paragraph 6; for Nozick’s discussion, see Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 287–​289. 23 Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 213–​231. 21

22

36

36

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

without all kind of engagement to each other,” where Hobbes himself was clearly aware of the counterfactual nature of this thought experiment.24 To seriously consider the realities of our beginnings harbored within the body of another, and of our deep connection and dependency on others early in life, would cause Nozick’s entire theory to collapse.25 Contemporary communitarian political thinkers give more attention to family relations and dependency, but construct them in varying degrees of opposition to the public sphere and to justice. For example, Michael Sandel describes the family as “an extreme case” of the sort of social groupings that possess “more or less clearly-​defined common identities and shared purposes,”26 and thus are not subject to the sorts of conflicts of interest over scarce resources that justice must address. Justice, according to Sandel, can only corrupt the generosity and supererogation that is characteristic of family relations. Not only is this a false and dangerous picture, it is also far too simple. Though family members may care deeply about one another, they nevertheless must negotiate over scarce resources and the distribution of burdens, including the burden of dependent care.27 Sandel is also vulnerable to a common critique of communitarian thought, that it leaves too little room for external assessment of the roles and values established through communal norms.28 This is particularly relevant for the roles and traditions that structure dependent care relations. The social organization of care is pervaded by dynamics of oppression and exploitation. If we are assessing twentieth century theories with an eye to discerning parameters for an adequate Christian ethic of dependent care relations, however, it is most instructive to look at John Rawls’s complex amalgamation of various strands of Enlightenment thought. Rawls is particularly interesting for this project because his theory addresses all three forms of equality that I  have suggested must be integrated for an adequate ethic of dependent care. He is profoundly concerned with our equality as Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, ed. Howard Warrender (Oxford, England:  The Clarendon Press, 1983), 117. 25 While most of the canonical political theorists have been subject to both feminist criticism and feminist retrieval and adaptation, there has been virtually no feminist retrieval of Nozick. His complete erasure of dependency appears to leave him with little to redeem from a feminist perspective, except that we might perhaps thank him for revealing the consequences of a political theory that evades the realities of human dependency so thoroughly. 26 Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 31. 27 Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family, 29–​31. 28 Michael Sandel, “The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self,” Political Theory 12, no. 1 (February 1984), 86. 24

37

Marginalization of Dependency in Political Theory

37

autonomy, and with our moral equality; a central problem, as we shall see, is that he equates these two forms of equality too absolutely. Rawls is also concerned to ensure equality of basic need fulfillment and places significant constraints on inequality beyond the level of basic need fulfillment. Finally, Rawls squarely confronts an important challenge in achieving equality of basic need fulfillment –​the fact of scarcity of resources to meet those needs. These commitments are reasons to appreciate Rawls’s efforts deeply, but the very precision and comprehensiveness of his theory enables us to discern certain foundational dilemmas with respect to the integration of equality and dependency, dilemmas that Rawls does not effectively resolve. As we shall see, when confronted by the tension between inclusive equality and scarcity of the resources necessary to embody this equality, Rawls resorts to exclusion from the scope of justice of those who will demand the most resources. He does so by recourse to the fourth form of equality, equality of power, whether in the form of physical strength and health or in the form of the cognitive powers needed for autonomous moral agency. This is not an acceptable option for a Christian ethic of dependent care relations, and so we must consider what a Christian ethic must do differently. Among other things, the tension between inclusivity and scarcity points to the need for an element of sacrifice in a theory of love and justice, as we will explore in Chapter 4, as well as a more fully specified account of the good, to enable better decisions about the best use of our limited resources. In addition, a Christian ethic of dependent care relations will need a different account of the grounding of moral equality and personhood, one that does not rest exclusively in autonomy. I point to this problem here and explore feminist and Christian theological approaches to personhood in Chapter 8. Furthermore, as several feminist thinkers have shown, the conceptual structure that Rawls uses to generate his principles of justice privatizes the family and care and excludes them from the scope of justice. This privatization is also, I argue, intimately intertwined with other aspects of Rawls’s theory that render it unable to encompass dependency and care, such as his separation of self-​interest from other-​regard in the conceptual structure that generates his principles of justice and his commitment to keep his account of the goods to be distributed as minimal as possible. Within dependent care relations, we must determine what is good for another human person, not just ourselves. To do this justly requires a defensible and reasoned account of what is good for all human persons, and for the specific human person for whom we are caring; it also requires the

38

38

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

caregiver to be motivated, by some combination of duty and affection, to remain firm in her commitment to achieving this good for her dependent. This, in turn, requires some account of love that exists in complex relationship with our cognitive capacities, so that our love can be directed toward a good discerned through practical reason; this love cannot be a privatized, predictable, and therefore highly simplified affection.

The Privatization of Care, Affect, and Dependency In Rawls Rawls brings together a social-​contract framework, in which autonomous and equal individuals jointly agree to principles of justice, with a Kantian insistence on fairness and the inviolability of each person. In the place of the “state of nature” of classical social-​contract theory, Rawls offers the “original position.” Free and equal persons consent to imagine themselves behind a “veil of ignorance,” in which they voluntarily “forget” their social and class position, their talents and level of intelligence, and their own conception of the good, their beliefs and values.29 They then negotiate principles of justice with each other. Rawls assumes that the negotiators take no interest in each other’s interests in order to simplify prediction of the principles of justice that would be generated in the original position. For example, how do we predict the balance of other-​regard across multiple objects of concern? How much will participants in the original position alter their self-​interested judgments about principles of justice to accommodate the projects of others for whom they care?30 Such affection will either be arbitrary, and thus unpredictable, or it will be calibrated to a reasoned account of goodness, which Rawls wants to avoid. Some early feminist critiques charged that Rawls conceives of persons as foundationally separate and egoistic and therefore makes no room for emotions or relationships of care. These critiques misconstrue Rawls; they miss his own clear emphasis that the depiction of the parties within the original position does not represent a metaphysical account of the person. To say that parties within the original position take no interest in each other’s interests is not to say that they are not deeply invested in the well-​being of others outside the original position.31 As Rawls notes, the original position taken together with the information restrictions of the veil of ignorance is Rawls, Theory, 136–​142. Ibid., 129. 31 See, for example, A. C. Baier, “The Need for More Than Justice,” in Justice and Care:  Essential Readings in Feminist Ethics, ed. Virginia Held (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995), 55. 29 30

39

Marginalization of Dependency in Political Theory

39

intended to model benevolence.32 Furthermore, as Susan Moller Okin and Martha Nussbaum each point out, Rawls understands full human moral development to require well-​developed moral sentiments, to be nurtured through love and care within the family.33 Thus Rawls does not erase care or emotion, but he does privatize caring relations and exclude them from the scope of justice. Children and spouses are not present in the original position, but are represented by “heads of households.”34 For purposes of generating the principles of justice, then, Rawls simply assumes that the family can be treated as a unit, and that the head of household will know and be concerned about the interests of everyone in the family, even while the same head is required to be unconcerned about the interests of other negotiators in the original position.35 As a number of thinkers, most famously Okin, have pointed out, by limiting the original position to heads of households, Rawls secures justice between families, but does not scrutinize relations within the family.36 Heads of household are not required to consider whether they might end up with an unjust allocation of the family’s material resources, whether they would risk impoverishment by divorce or abandonment by a spouse, or whether they would bear most of the burden of unpaid reproductive labor. Those Christian ethicists who mention Okin often express concern about her liberal individualism and desire to abolish gender.37 However, one does not have to embrace all aspects of Okin’s liberal approach to feminism to appreciate the gravity of what she uncovered: a comprehensive and immensely influential theory of justice that deliberately and completely removes family relations, including care, from consideration at its most foundational level. Rawls, Theory, 128. Susan Moller Okin, “Reason and Feeling in Thinking About Justice,” Ethics 99, no. 2 (January 1989), 237; Martha Nussbaum, “Rawls and Feminism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, ed. Samuel Freedman (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 488–​520. 34 Rawls, Theory, 128, 146. Rawls includes the “heads of households” stipulation to ensure that participants in the original position bring with them a concern for future generations, who cannot represent themselves. 35 Ibid., 129. 36 Jane English, “Justice Between Generations,” Philosophical Studies 31, no. 2 (February 1977), 91–​104; Deborah Kearns, “A Theory of Justice –​and Love: Rawls on the Family,” Politics: Australian Journal of Political Science 18, no. 2 (1983), 36–​42; Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family, 91–​93. 37 See, for example, Don Browning, “Feminism, Family, and Women’s Rights:  A  Hermeneutical Realist Perspective,” Zygon 38, no. 2 (June 2003), 9–​11; Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Begging to Differ,” Hastings Center Report 22, no. 1 (January–​February 1992), 47–​48; Brent Waters, The Family in Christian Social and Political Thought (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007), 78–​82. 32 33

40

40

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

Okin’s critique of the “heads of households” stipulation speaks to the concrete economic injustice, and the consequent vulnerability of caregivers and children, that occurs when the family is privatized and care is undervalued. Such injustice should of course be of direct interest to Christian ethicists, but this privatization of care is also interdependent with other foundational commitments within Rawls’s theory that prevent the integration of caregiving relations. At the most fundamental level, the privatization of care is necessitated by Rawls’s pressing concern to avoid imposing an overly prescriptive notion of the good on autonomous human persons. While Rawls recognizes that a theory of distributive justice requires some conception of the good –​otherwise, how would we know what to distribute? –​he attempts to render this conception as neutral as possible. Rather than distributing food, health care, movie tickets, or lava lamps, any of which might seem too prescriptive to him, Rawls puts forth a notion of “primary goods,” or goods which every rational person wants and can use, regardless of his life plan.38 These include rights, liberties, and opportunities; the social bases of self-​respect; and wealth and income. But ultimately, wealth and income are the only primary goods subject to measurable distribution. Rawls’s norm for redistribution turns on the difference principle, the stipulation that all increases in inequality must benefit the least well-​off members of society. Such a standard presupposes that we can measure well-​being clearly to identify the least well-​off. However, as Nussbaum notes, human beings experience different levels and types of neediness, both as a part of the normal life cycle (infants are needier than healthy adults) and as the result of diverse expressions of embodiment.39 Dependency and need are variable in a way that abstract “autonomy” is not, at least in the way that autonomy is constructed in Rawls’s theory. We cannot assume that the same amount of wealth and income will bring each person to the same level of well-​being. We are not equal in this way. A theory of justice must therefore be able to attend more closely to concrete circumstances and varied, qualitative dimensions of well-​being if it is to identify which persons need help to raise their level of well-​being. It must be able to assess outcomes, not simply procedures. This will require us to discuss and judge what outcomes are good for us as human beings, at least to some degree. Nussbaum argues that Rawls’s theory would better handle dependency and disability if we were to substitute her own list of Rawls, Theory, 54 Nussbaum, Frontiers, 113–​114, 144.

38 39

41

Marginalization of Dependency in Political Theory

41

central human capabilities in place of Rawls’s much thinner account of primary goods.40 But there is a deeper reason, one that Nussbaum does not emphasize, as to why Rawls’s reluctance to specify more precisely the nature of the good renders his theory unable to encompass dependency and care. Rawls’s original position involves the participation of autonomous human beings who can negotiate on their own behalf. But care for many dependents requires caregivers to assess and prescribe the good for their charges, at least to some degree. Parents must make ongoing decisions about what is good for their young children, frequently contradicting their children’s immediate desires, and gradually allowing for more input from the children as they mature. Something similar is true for caregivers of those with deep, particularly cognitive or linguistic, disabilities, and, in some cases, for caregivers of frail elderly persons. In short, many human relationships require elements of the sort of authoritative guidance on which Filmer wanted to build an entire political theory. We may wish to narrow the place for hierarchical authority as much as possible, and exercise it as justly as possible when it is necessary, but we also need to articulate how such authority can be exercised for the good of the dependent –​and that requires excellent practical reason about that good. The good cannot always be discerned simply by watching what autonomous actors choose for themselves, because we are not all autonomous enough to choose, or to choose well. This reasoning about the good of those in our care is necessarily pushed into the private sphere in Rawls’s theory, where he implicitly assumes that it will be conducted appropriately because relations will be pervaded by predictable, consistent affection and concern for the dependent. This presumed consistency is the flip side of the explicitly articulated premise that negotiators within the original position have no interests in each other’s interests; consistent disinterestedness is important to the predictable generation of principles of justice inside the original position, and consistent other-​regard is important for Rawls’s ability to ignore justice in those family relations that are not subject to negotiations. He evades the potential for exploitation and harm in a relationship characterized by power differentials. Furthermore, for this affection to allow for the sort of predictability Rawls wants in his theory, it must also be relatively simple to move from affection to discernment and promotion of the good of the other. But Ibid., 164–​168.

40

42

42

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

there is nothing simple about this process. Determining the good for dependents who are not fully capable of doing so for themselves is not simply a matter of feeling, but of thinking, and the required thinking is profoundly complex, as Sara Ruddick and others have shown. Such reasoning about another’s good can go wrong and should be subject to some level of communal scrutiny to prevent gross injustice and harm to the dependent. In addition, part of the thinking required by dependent care relations involves determining how to honor and cultivate whatever degree of autonomy the dependent has achieved or retained, while determining those areas in which the caregiver’s judgment must stand in for that of the dependent. This means that caregivers will not only think about what is good for the dependent, but dialogue and negotiate with the dependent, commensurate with the dependent’s level of autonomy. Even an infant’s cry is an expression of agency, and both the cry and the caregiver’s response can be seen as a process both of communication and negotiation. There is no bright line between persons who are autonomous and persons who are dependent, but Rawls’s theory depends on creating one. The experience of caregivers in fostering autonomy while responding to dependency will surely be relevant to political deliberations aiming to foster equality among citizens while recognizing the pervasive human reality of dependency and the need for care. There is continuity between interpersonal caregiving and the political, but this continuity is not simple and direct as Filmer depicted it; all along the way, it is infused with complex forms of discernment, expression, agency, and modulation of power differentials. We can again see the connection between a retreat from the good and oversimplified accounts of motives by looking at one well-​known interpretation of the role of empathy in Rawls’s theory. Okin has argued that the Rawlsian original position does not separate love or care from justice; in her interpretation, the original position actually demands a high degree of compassion and empathy of its participants (even though, as she acknowledges, Rawls is at best obscure on this point).41 Because negotiators do not know their own identifying characteristics, socioeconomic status, or conception of the good, they must imagine themselves in the place of every other member of society in case this is the person they turn out to be.42 Such a process would be almost impossibly detailed and complex. However, if we grant for the moment that Okin’s interpretation of Rawls is plausible, we might notice that we are dealing with two interpretive options that Okin, “Reason and Feeling,” 230. Ibid., 238.

41 42

43

Marginalization of Dependency in Political Theory

43

represent two extremes:  either we must know nothing at all about each person’s identity and conception of the good to negotiate principles of justice, or we must know everything about everyone. Either we must have no sentiments at all, or we must enter into deep, particular, empathic identification with every single member of society. It must be all or nothing; there can be no in between, because degrees of attachment to specific persons, or of concern for their interests, cannot generate predictable principles of justice. Again, the way around the choice between these two extremes is to have recourse to a substantial, reasoned, defensible standard of the goods that justice seeks, something beyond the serial consideration (or erasure) of each and every individual’s preferences. Our theory must make room for the sort of empathic imagination, identification, and negotiation described by Okin, but this must not be a thought experiment; it need not, cannot, occur between every possible pair of persons. Rather, we must dive into the particularity and difference of actual relationships, without trying to simultaneously embrace and erase the impact of this particularity and difference. We need both the universal and the particular. We need an account of goods that we can agree that all caregiving relations should honor and promote –​both as a measuring stick to identify harm and neglect of dependents and as a guide for the positive distribution of goods to persons in caregiving relations. This account of central goods applies to all persons, and thus to all caregiving relations; it can be seen as the response to our dependency, which is universal, though it comes in varying degrees. And we need space for the expression of agency and autonomy within particular caregiving relationships, including the expression of particular needs, degrees of agency, resources, and preferences, to be discerned, expressed, and made subject to deliberation and negotiation. This Rawlsian separation between justice (understood in terms of self-​ interest) within the original position, and love (understood in terms of sentiments or regard for particular others) outside the original position/​ within families, is incapable of encompassing the wide range of human relationships in which love and justice interact in more complex ways. These may include all human relationships, but the intersection of love and justice is particularly salient within relations of dependent care. A return to the snapshots of care from the last chapter illustrates my point. Within the original position, where can we place, for example, bell hooks’s “homeplace,” and the mother whose love conveys a sense of dignity to her children that, when carried into the outside world, can subvert injustice at a foundational level? Can the fierce care intended to destabilize systemic oppression be reduced to the glue that securely packages a family unit

44

44

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

whose role is simply to receive its fair share of primary goods? Where do we place Lynne May Rivas, who cares for her clients with disabilities in such a way as to maximize their autonomy by rendering herself as invisible as possible? Can she then be modeled as the autonomous agent negotiating on behalf of her dependent? Neither does Rawls’s model have any place for relationships of love and care that are mediated within the market sphere by money, but may also involve deep attachment, such as relationships between home care workers and their clients. Rawls’s commitment to inclusion of all persons and to moral equality, the powerful redistributive implications of his theory, and his status as the most influential theorist of justice of the twentieth century all might lead us to ask whether his theory can be adapted to incorporate dependency and caring relations. Can we claim Rawls as a resource for the integration of equality and dependency? The preceding analysis suggests that any attempt to incorporate dependency into Rawlsian justice by attempting to find a place for particular relations of dependent care will conflict with the Rawlsian emphasis on simplicity and predictability. Relations imply dialogue, clarification, expression, negotiation, and an ongoing balance of interests, not simply pure self-​interest or pure benevolence. Rawls’s privatization of the family, then, does not simply reflect a naïve but easily corrected presumption that heads of households can adequately represent individual family members. Rather, the privatized family provides a convenient place to store the complexities of relations between persons who are unequal in power and autonomy and to avoid theorizing them. Some interlocutors have argued that the Rawlsian construct can be construed to include dependency already, by assimilating dependency to the individual, rather than theorizing a relationship between caregiver and dependent. If we assume that the parties know that they once were dependent, that they might be dependent now or at some point in the future, then they would take these considerations into account when choosing principles of justice. One could incorporate this knowledge of dependency and the need for care as part of the “general facts about human society” that Rawls indicates are known by the negotiators behind the veil of ignorance.43 This strategy attempts to get at dependency through self-​interest: as self-​interested, rational actors, we would want a theory of justice that ensures care for us in case we happen to be dependent now, or should we become so in the future. However, given that persons in the original Rawls, Theory, 119. Asha Bhandary suggests this route in “Dependency in Justice: Can Rawlsian Liberalism Accommodate Kittay’s Dependency Critique?” Hypatia 25, no. 1 (Winter 2010), 147–​148.

43

45

Marginalization of Dependency in Political Theory

45

position must have already reached the autonomous adulthood necessary to possess the moral powers and negotiate for one’s own interests, this approach implies that they are looking back on a period through which they have already emerged (childhood) for at least some of their consideration of dependency. It is not clear that retroactive self-​interest can foster consideration of such dependency. Relatedly, the construct of the original position, making room, as it does, only for self-​interest effectively prohibits the participants from considering themselves as fundamentally indebted and bearing a moral obligation to ensure care for others as they have received care. For Rawls, citizens have and accept a moral obligation to be fair. Nothing in his theory, however, suggests or even allows that they have a moral obligation to repay the debt of care that they have received. Approaching the problem of dependency through self-​interest starts at the wrong point, from the autonomous adult, not as we do chronologically, from the standpoint of neediness and indebtedness. Within the parameters of the original position, if someone feels so indebted, this would be assimilated to his or her personal conception of the good, a conception that is to be disregarded in the original position. Thus attempts to incorporate dependency into Rawlsian justice by incorporating relations of care fail because they foil Rawls’s efforts at predictability. Attempts to incorporate dependency by relocating the attendant complexities back inside the autonomous individual end up assimilating dependency to an assumption of primordial, individualized autonomy. Perhaps there is a third option: concern for dependency might be incorporated at a more foundational level of Rawls’s theory, in the portion of the theory that models fundamental moral concerns. Rather than trying to represent relationships of dependency and care inside the original position, we might specify that persons outside the original position commit to jointly responding to the overall burden of dependency and the need for care in human life. This commitment could be seen as a commitment to the right (justice to be negotiated within the original position) and to the good (because justice would provide to each person the central goods necessary for survival and basic flourishing fostered by care). Within the original position, they would develop principles of justice that ensure a sufficient overall level of care, ensure its proper valuation and fair distribution, and equalize the economic and political status of those who engage in the concrete activity of care for needy persons. With this solution, dependency is not framed as an incidental aspect of human lives best construed primarily as autonomous. Rather, dependency becomes a human reality

46

46

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

that is equally as foundational, from a moral perspective, as the need for fairness and the importance of autonomy (those realities encompassed in Rawls’s two moral powers). Eva Feder Kittay’s proposed revisions to Rawlsian justice are best interpreted in this light. Kittay works her way through the carefully articulated parameters that Rawls uses to determine who is included in his theory; their particular cognitive, moral, and physical capacities; the information they do and do not have; and what they are distributing. At each stage, Rawls presumes that subjects of justice are autonomous and capable of reciprocal cooperation; at each stage, Kittay suggests amendments that incorporate human dependency and the need for care. For example, she suggests that dependency be added to the Humean “circumstances of justice” that Rawls specifies are known by the negotiating parties.44 She adds a moral power, “the capacity to respond to vulnerability with care”;45 a primary good, the good of being able to receive needed care, and to give care without incurring undue sacrifice;46 and a third principle of justice, the “principle of doulia,” which states that “Just as we have required care to survive and thrive, so we need to provide conditions that allow others  –​including those who do the work of caring –​to receive the care they need to survive and thrive.”47 This principle of justice calls for public policies that equalize caregivers, who are engaged in giving that cannot be reciprocated directly by the dependent, in terms of their economic sustenance and their capacity for political engagement.48 We should note that Kittay’s principle, or any principles generated within the original position to distribute the overall burden of care in human life, cannot be as seemingly simple and straightforward as Rawls’s difference principle, which identifies the least advantaged according to a single, countable variable: wealth and income. Kittay’s principle of doulia will require thicker specification, since “the care they need to survive and thrive” will be different for different persons, and as Nussbaum has argued, is not subject to simple measurement in terms of wealth and income.49 Instead, to implement Kittay’s principle of doulia will require us to specify what it means for a person to survive and thrive. In short, it requires a basic account of the good. Kittay offers only a vague account of what this good might look like. Kittay, Love’s Labor, 83–​84. Ibid., 102. 46 Ibid., 103. 47 Ibid., 107 (italics in original). 48 Ibid., 106–​109. 49 Nussbaum, Frontiers, 114. 44 45

47

Marginalization of Dependency in Political Theory

47

Seeking a way to describe “something substantial about the treatment each one is warranted to receive,” she asserts that they are “due treatment compatible with or analogous to the treatment a mother renders to a child.”50 But this remains underspecified and obviously problematic, as mothers render widely different sorts of treatment to their children. Thus, once again, we see that we require a thicker notion of the good at which caregiving aims. This is a difficult task, one that will be fraught with conflict; Nussbaum has made it a center of her own life’s work, with her “capabilities approach,” and others have moved toward an account of universal human goods as well.51 I do not say that such a task is easy or that there are no dangers associated with it, but again, we must articulate some well-​reasoned and culturally sensitive account of central human goods in order to bring about social justice in dependent care relations. Such an account should be subject to ongoing discussion and revision, as Nussbaum argues, but surely in an environment where basic needs go unfulfilled for so many human persons, we ought to be taking steps toward agreement at a very basic level.

Scarcity and the Inviolable Dignity of Embodied, Needy Persons Rawls has a strong commitment to all three forms of equality that must be integrated to form a dependent care ethic, and yet he ends up excluding very dependent persons from the scope of justice. Rawls affirms a Kantian commitment to the inviolability of every human person, telling us on the first page of A Theory of Justice that “Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override.”52 Rawls’s theory of distributive justice also incorporates Hume’s “circumstances of justice,” including a recognition of moderate (not thoroughgoing) self-​interest and of material scarcity. However, Rawls’s recognition of scarcity strains against his Kantian commitment to universality, and the effects of this strain occur most clearly in his treatment of persons with disabilities. First, Rawls specifically defines the basis of equality or moral personhood as the possession of two “moral powers”: a capacity for a sense of Kittay, Love’s Labor, 68. Martha C. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 52 Rawls, Theory, 3. 50 51

48

48

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

justice and a capacity to develop a conception of the good.53 As he himself observes, these moral powers require important cognitive capacities, and not everyone will meet this standard for moral personhood.54 Rawls “take(s) it as obvious, and accepted as common sense, that we have a duty toward all human beings however severely handicapped.”55 However, he does not explain why we have such a duty, or whether it is a duty in justice. The duty is not grounded in the moral powers, but he does not offer an alternative ground. The exclusion of those who lack the cognitive prerequisites of moral personhood, as defined by Rawls, is based upon his deep Kantian commitment to autonomy as the basis for the special status of human persons as ends in themselves. Thus, to challenge Rawls on this exclusion requires that we develop a different grounding for moral equality and personhood. As it happens, with emerging attention to cognitive disability within disability studies, disability theology, and philosophy, there is now an active interdisciplinary conversation occurring around these issues, one that I take up in Chapter 8. As I will argue there, the inclusion of dependency into a theory of justice ultimately points toward an even more primordial, ontological dependency on the ground of our being, one that theologians are better prepared to address than secular philosophers. This more primordial dependency equalizes us in a more foundational and inclusive way than recourse to our autonomy and cognitive capacities. Second, Rawls explicitly excludes from the original position persons with “unusual and costly medical requirements,” out of concern that their demands on resources will impoverish the rest of society, and stipulates that the allocation of primary goods to this group would occur after the generation of the basic principles of justice, at a “legislative stage.”56 This specification reflects Rawls’s effort to escape the tension between his commitment to inclusion of all persons within the scope of justice and his recognition that we have scarce resources to distribute among persons.57 It appears to be a response to an early critique of Rawls by Kenneth Arrow, who charged that the “difference principle” could result in dramatic reductions in the well-​being of the most advantaged Ibid., 442. Ibid., 510. 55 John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 176n.59. 56 John Rawls, “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory,” Journal of Philosophy 77, no. 9 (September 1980), 546. For a description of the legislative stage, see Rawls, Theory, 171–​176. 57 Rawls maintained the exclusion through his final writings. See Rawls, Justice as Fairness, 168–​175. 53 54

49

Marginalization of Dependency in Political Theory

49

to obtain a tiny increase in the well-​being of the least advantaged. Arrow offered the example of an expensive medical procedure that would barely keep the least advantaged alive while impoverishing the rest of society.58 We might note that Rawls is hemmed in here by his use of the difference principle; were he working with a more fully specified and concrete account of the goods to be distributed justly, he would have more flexibility to limit goods allocated to a person who is barely alive, whose full flourishing is simply not possible anymore, and allocate them to others whose flourishing requires these resources.59 In retreating to a principle that measures persons along a spectrum, with respect to a single variable that defines level of “advantage,” Rawls loses this flexibility; he must provide whatever resources are necessary to ensure that the least advantaged receives some benefit from increased inequality. This gets expensive, and so he is forced to draw a line separating those who are included in the scope of justice from those who are not included. Some people fall above the cut-​off line, some fall below, and the “least advantaged,” who are protected by the difference principle, are pitted against the “noncontributors,” who are left completely out of the deliberations which produce the difference principle. There is, then, a connection in Rawls’s theory between abstract simplicity and exclusion. We must not, however, attempt to resolve the problem of inclusivity in the face of deep and varied neediness by avoiding the reality of material scarcity. Unfortunately, Nussbaum makes this error in her otherwise deeply insightful critique of Rawls with respect to inclusion of those with disabilities. Nussbaum repeatedly conflates Rawls’s emphasis on the capacity of citizens for reciprocal cooperation with Rawls’s adoption of Hume’s circumstances of justice. It is important to contest Nussbaum here, because Rawls’s adoption of the “circumstances of justice” is not a threat to a dependent care ethic. On the contrary, recognition of these circumstances is quite important. Hume defines the circumstances of justice as aspects of the human situation that make justice both necessary and possible. Among these, Hume highlights moderate scarcity of resources, and limited benevolence.60 Nussbaum implies that recognition of the circumstances of justice is intrinsically connected to a view of human persons as Kenneth Arrow, “Some Ordinalist-​Utilitarian Notes on Rawls’ Theory of Justice,” Journal of Philosophy 70, no 9 (May 1973), 251. 59 See a parallel point by Nussbaum in Frontiers, 88. 60 For Hume’s account of the “circumstances of justice,” see Book III, Part 2, Section 2, “Of the Origin of Justice and Property,” in his Treatise of Human Nature [in Hume, Moral and Political Philosophy, ed. Henry D. Aiken (New York: Hafner Publishing Company, 1948 [1739], 57–​69)]. 58

50

50

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

separate and competitive, rather than as intrinsically social and political.61 But these circumstances are, in fact, the circumstances we must navigate together as social, political animals. Hume’s conception of justice is utilitarian. For this reason, he specifies that parties to justice must be equal in power; it is not useful to incorporate those who cannot reciprocate or resist domination into the scope of justice.62 However, Hume’s notion of the circumstances of justice is separable from his notion of justice as utility. One can recognize these circumstances, particularly the circumstance of moderate scarcity, without postulating that justice can only occur between rough equals. Justice can, in fact, be described as the fair distribution of scarce resources among a group of people who are not all equal in powers. That is precisely the sort of justice that we need to be able to address dependency and care in human life. A  Christian ethic of dependent care relations cannot draw upon a utilitarian notion of justice, but it can and must engage the concrete human reality of moderate scarcity of resources necessary to promote human survival and flourishing.

Conclusion In this chapter, I  have attempted to show how dependency became obscured in the early development of social-​contract thought. I  have also shown that the erasure or privatization of dependency required simplification and bifurcation of the complex motives that exist within human relationships, and particularly within relations of care. Through a close look at John Rawls, I  have argued that this complexity cannot be admitted for theoretical consideration without also developing a more complex understanding of autonomy, an autonomy that exists in and through our dependency. Furthermore, a theory of justice that acknowledges dependency and addresses care relations must incorporate an account of those human goods that are sought by caring relations, that is to say, some account of the goods needed for survival and basic human flourishing. My close examination of Rawls has tried to express appreciation for his attempt to integrate equality as autonomy, moral equality, and the distribution of goods needed to achieve equality of basic need fulfillment, all while acknowledging that human beings attempt to foster such equality in Nussbaum, Frontiers, 86. Hume, Enquiry, 185–​201.

61 62

51

Marginalization of Dependency in Political Theory

51

the face of a moderate scarcity of resources. For human societies to achieve an equality that also confronts human dependency is a challenging task, and if we do not confront that challenge directly, the most marginalized among us will be forced to respond to dependency as best they can, with too little social support, and at great personal cost. But largely because of Rawls’s deep prioritization of autonomy as rational self-​direction, he is unable to integrate the most deeply needy into this integrated equality. A Christian ethic of dependent care relations must do better.

52

Ch apter  3

Economics and the Erasure of the Care Economy

Today, economics is perhaps the most hegemonic discipline among all the social sciences. Recent philosophical work uncovering the social construction of knowledge has found more of a foothold in other social sciences than in economics. Yet contemporary economics, and particularly the dominant neoclassical school of economic analysis, needs deconstructing; it occludes dependency and care.1 Scholarship in feminist economics traces the history of the deliberate exclusion of the domestic economy from the scope of economic analysis. In addition to the concrete economic injustice this imposes on those doing unpaid or underpaid labor within the context of a money economy, this exclusion allows theorists to avoid complexities and ambiguities of motivation and interest that are part of the lived experience of the domestic sphere. It thereby introduces distortions into our accounts of moral agency. Justice for caregivers, and justice in families, requires a theory of moral agency that more closely approaches the actual complexity of family and caregiving relations. Furthermore, domestic labor, particularly caregiving, is intrinsically teleological: its purpose is to help human beings survive and flourish. The meaning of flourishing may be subject to widely differing interpretations; the conditions for survival are less variable. But caregivers are clearly orienting their activity toward ends or goods, and an economic theory that is built on an avoidance of any objective account of the goods to be sought by economic activity –​that is, neoclassical economics –​will necessarily produce distorted analyses of caregiving.

For reasons of space, I focus primarily on Adam Smith and on the neoclassical school of economics that emerged as dominant by the late twentieth century. I do not give attention to Marxist or institutionalist schools of economics. It is the neoclassical or marginalist school that shows clear conceptual parallels to certain trends in late twentieth century Christian love ethics, and that has most influenced the economic policies of nations and international development organizations.

1

52

53

Economics and the Erasure of the Care Economy

53

The Stigmatization of Dependency Before launching into the development of economic theory, however, it is worth pausing to explore the conceptual devaluation of dependency that has accompanied the theoretical evolution of the discipline, as well as some of the concrete economic injustices that are currently experienced by caregivers as a result. Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon trace the genealogy of the word “dependency” in the English language, showing that the connotations of this word altered during the transition to industrial and then commercial society.2 In preindustrial English society, dependency was acknowledged as a universal condition; while women and children, for example, were certainly dependent on husbands and fathers, the husbands and fathers were also dependent on others in the economic and political ladder, and their interdependence with wives and children was also acknowledged. Dependency was the norm, and no cause for stigma; society was a complex system of dependencies.3 Furthermore, the word “dependency” referred to a social relation rather than a state of an individual; the notion of psychological dependence did not exist.4 The word “independence” was rarely used in preindustrial times, and when it first emerged, applied to groups (such as an independent church) rather than to individuals. When it did begin to be used more regularly, it often signaled a perceived social problem, such as a person who was too mobile, for example, free of the ordered local structures of social existence.5 In other words, “independence,” not “dependence,” was problematic prior to the rise of industrialization in England. With the advent of industrialization and wage labor, a new form of dependency  –​dependency on employers for wages  –​emerged. At first, such dependence was derided as “wage slavery.” Independence now developed positive connotations, but the term “independent” designated a propertied man who did not have to engage in wage labor. With time, however, the dependence inherent in wage work was obscured, and wage labor came to be seen as the prerequisite for independence.6 Dependence was now ascribed to certain groups, and in particular was seen as more Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon, “A Genealogy of ‘Dependency’: Tracing a Keyword of the U.S. Welfare State,” in Fraser, Justice Interruptus:  Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997), 121–​149. 3 Ibid., 124. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., 126. 6 Ibid., 128. 2

54

54

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

“natural” to women and people of color. The notion of “psychological” dependency emerged and was assigned to paupers, who were thus seen as responsible for their own lack of independence.7 The fact of dependency as a universal aspect of the human condition was obscured, and those categorized as dependent were stigmatized. Meanwhile, economic developments left caregivers more and more vulnerable. With increased industrialization and commercialization, work moved outside the home, making it harder to combine the production of material goods with reproductive labor, or “the array of activities and relationships involved in maintaining people both on a daily basis and inter-​generationally,”8 activities such as housework, food preparation, caring for the sick, and providing emotional and material care to children.9 Dependent care became more demanding, as children spent more years being educated and fewer contributing to the productive activities of the household. At the other end of the life cycle, life spans increased, and many older persons were unable to take part in the more physically demanding work of an industrial economy. Thus the overall burden of dependent care increased. The work of care has largely been allocated to women, and women with greater privilege have often been able to shift this labor to women marginalized by race, class, nationality, or citizenship status. Evelyn Nakano Glenn has demonstrated the striking degree to which care in the United States and its predecessor colonies was provided through slavery or indentured servitude.10 After emancipation, domestic labor was one of the only sources of employment for African American women up until the middle of the twentieth century.11 Glenn also demonstrates that in the United States, husbands retained their common-​law right to a woman’s unpaid domestic services, even after the advent of statutes promoting greater equality with respect to property and salaried work.12 Ibid. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, “From Servitude to Service Work:  Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor,” Signs 18, no. 1 (Autumn, 1992), 1. 9 For a classic account of this process in England and France between 1700 and 1950, see Louise A. Tilly and Joan W. Scott, Women, Work and Family (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1978). Pat Hudson and W. R. Lee caution that these dynamics are complex; they vary based on geographic region, industry, and stage of technology. See Pat Hudson and W. R. Lee, “Chapter One: Women’s Work and the Family Economy in Historical Perspective,” Women’s Work and the Family Economy in Historical Perspective (Manchester, UK, and New York: Manchester University Press, 1990), 2–​47. 10 Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Forced to Care: Coercion and Caregiving in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 7. 11 For an extensive account of these realities in the lives of African American women, see Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985). 12 Glenn, Forced to Care, 95–​106. 7 8

55

Economics and the Erasure of the Care Economy

55

As the wage economy expanded, persons who could earn sufficient wages could purchase substitutes in the market for many of the care needs that were previously fulfilled through patriarchal kinship structures or through the preindustrial family. However, those who could not earn a wage –​children, the elderly, the sick and disabled, and their caregivers –​ had neither those status-​based structures to support them nor the ability to pay someone to meet their care needs. Paradoxically, as dependent care became more burdensome, it also began to be conceptualized as a noneconomic activity. Common-​law rulings referenced the home as the realm of altruism. They defined the marital relation as a matter of love defined in opposition to financial gain, particularly for wives: courts regularly nullified agreements made by husbands to financially support wives in return for care. But the economic value of care was implicitly recognized if a husband suffered a loss: if a third party rendered the wife unable to provide care, the third party was held liable for financial damages to the husband.13 In the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, Western European countries and then the United States constructed welfare states to support dependent persons and their caregivers, in light of increasing care burdens and weakened “status-​based” mechanisms for providing care. However, particularly in the United States, these programs are far more generous to the aged than to caregivers of children, and program structures and benefits have been deeply affected by discriminatory ideologies of race, gender, marital, and immigration status.14 Those programs that exist have generally been underfunded and reached only a portion of the needy population.15 To a far greater extent than in northwestern Europe, the history of “relief ” or “welfare” for the poor in the United States has been pervaded by deep concern about whether the recipients of assistance are “deserving” or “undeserving.”16 “Welfare spending” is widely reviled because it is seen to Ibid., 94, citing Katherine Silbaugh, “Turning Labor into Love:  Housework and the Law,” Northwestern University Law Review 91 (1996), 26. 14 For histories of social policy in the United States that take account of such realities, see Michael B. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America (New York: Basic Books, 1986); Mimi Abramowitz, Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the Present (Boston: South End Press, 1988); and Linda Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890–​1935 (New  York:  Free Press, 1994). For an account that acknowledges a wide range of variables affecting the development of programs of social provision in the United States, but stresses the role of women’s civic organizations engaging the political process to successfully advocate for mothers’ pensions, see Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 15 See especially Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled. 16 For an interesting analysis of the reasons for this discrepancy, see Fraser and Gordon, “A Genealogy of ‘Dependency,’ ” 131. For a detailed account of how the notion of “desert” played out in the 13

56

56

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

encourage “dependency” ’; the fact that all members of society are dependent in varied ways is thereby obscured from view.

Erasing the Domestic Economy from Economic Theory These trends have been reinforced by developments within economic theory. As noted, prior to modernity, the kinship, economic, and political spheres of life were more fully integrated. A  great deal of economic activity was centered around the home. Thus, in the centuries prior to the Industrial Revolution, “oeconomics” was precisely the study of household management and stewardship. Just seven years prior to Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, James Steuart defined “political oeconomy” in this way: Oeconomy, in general, is the art of providing for all the wants of a family, with prudence and frugality. If any thing necessary or useful be found wanting, if anything provided be lost or misapplied, if any servant, any animal, be supernumery or useless, if anyone sick or infirm be neglected, we immediately perceive a want of oeconomy. The object of it, in a private family, is therefore to provide for the nourishment, the other wants, and the employment of every individual. In the first place, for the master, who is the head, and who directs the whole; next for the children, who interest him above all other things; and last for the servants, who being useful to the head, and essential to the well-​being of the family, have therefore a title to become an object of the master’s care and concern. The whole oeconomy must be directed by the head, who is both lord and steward of the family… . What oeconomy is in a family, political oeconomy is in a state… . The principle object of this science is to secure a certain fund of subsistence for all the inhabitants, to obviate every circumstance which may render it precarious; to provide every thing necessary for supplying the wants of the society, and to employ the inhabitants (supposing them to be free men) in such a manner as naturally to create the reciprocal relations and dependencies between them, so as to make their several interests lead them to supply one another with their reciprocal wants.17

The context here is clearly hierarchical and patriarchal. Wives are not even mentioned. Nevertheless, this understanding of “oeconomy” incorporates concern for the work done within the household, for “provisioning,” and development of programs for social provision in the United States, see Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers. 17 Sir James Steuart, An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy: Being an Essay on the Science of Domestic Policy in Free Nations. In Which are Particularly Considered Population, Agriculture, Trade, Industry, Money, Vol. 1 (Dublin, 1770) 1–​3. catalog.hathitrust.org/​Record/​008598761.

57

Economics and the Erasure of the Care Economy

57

for subsistence, concerns that feminist economists have suggested that we reclaim.18 These concerns are central to the work of dependent care and are partially occluded within classical political economy, including Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, and others. They are almost totally obscured within the marginalist economic theory that began to develop in the late nineteenth century and now reigns as the mainstream school of economic analysis, known today as “neoclassical economics.” Smith’s Wealth of Nations, which did not so much as mention Steuart,19 built an economic theory to suit a newly emerging, more impersonal commercial world as well as new forms of industrial production. While his contributions in theorizing these new economic processes were of enormous importance, he did not inquire into the relationship between these concerns and those activities encompassed in older forms of “oeconomy.” Smith was primarily interested in the causes of economic growth, among which was the division of labor he saw in early “manufactories” in his home city, Glasgow.20 This interest drove his distinction between “productive” and “unproductive” labor. Productive labor was aimed at capital accumulation, which increased the productivity of future labor.21 Though Smith thought that other forms of work, including his own profession as a “man of letters,” had value, it was not “productive” in the sense that labor could be “stored” in a manufactured product that could be used to make later human labor more productive. Unproductive labor might help someone subsist, but it did not drive future production: “A man grows rich by employing a multitude of manufacturers: He grows poor, by maintaining a multitude of menial servants.”22 Smith thus considered economic productivity primarily in terms of increasing material goods, not services, or the everyday work of sustaining life. There is an exception to this tendency: Smith describes “the acquired and useful abilities of all the inhabitants or members of the society” as a part of “fixed capital.”23 Education and apprenticeship, the labor of Julie A. Nelson, “The Study of Choice or the Study of Provisioning? Gender and the Definition of Economics,” in Beyond Economic Man: Feminist Theory and Economics, eds. Marianne A. Ferber and Julie A. Nelson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 23–​36. 19 Keith Tribe, Land, Labour, and Economic Discourse (London:  Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1978), 82. 20 E. K. Hunt, History of Economic Thought:  A  Critical Perspective, updated 2nd edition (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe Inc., 2002), 44. 21 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Vol. I, eds. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner (Oxford, UK:  Oxford University Press, 1976; reprint Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1981), 330. 22 Ibid. 23 Smith, Wealth of Nations, Vol. I, 282. 18

58

58

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

teachers and masters, result in “a capital fixed and realized, as it were, in (the) person.”24 It would have been consistent for Smith to encompass the work of bearing and raising children under this aspect of productive labor, but he did not do so.25 Smith also emphasized specialization via the division of labor and impersonal market exchange guided by moderate self-​interest. In the absence of any attempt at integration with older conceptions of economics, or even acknowledgment of the domestic economy, these foci gravitate against any recognition of the economic importance of caregiving. Even if Smith had recognized that child-​rearing contributes to later economic growth by forming tomorrow’s labor force, the actual processes of caregiving are not subject to the division of labor or ongoing improvements in efficiency and thus productivity. It is the nature of caregiving to require intensive, ongoing, direct contact with the care recipients.26 In many cases, caregivers are not fungible; certainly a child will not thrive if her caregivers regularly disappear, to be replaced by others. Domestic workers are generalists by necessity. And care that is offered to frail elderly persons or severely disabled persons will not culminate in increased manufacturing productivity later. Domestic labor does not involve much trade and generally involves a complex mixture of motives, only one of which may be self-​interest.27 Nancy Folbre and Heidi Hartmann suggest that Smith’s almost exclusive focus on production and market exchange was driven, in part, by the difficulty of navigating these complexities and ambiguities. It is much easier to analyze patterns of production and exchange if those patterns are governed by a relatively simple and consistent motive, as patterns of impersonal exchange with distant persons are likely to be.28 Still, caregiving represents a sort of work that is utterly essential to both the meaning and the survival of human life. This work could be ignored only because Smith and other classical theorists presumed that these embodied needs would be met by a segment of the population that was assumed “naturally” to be suited for and to desire caregiving work: women. Ibid. Michèle A. Pujol, Feminism and Anti-​Feminism in Early Economic Thought (Aldershot, UK: Edward Elgar Press, 1992), 18. 26 Susan Donath, “The Other Economy:  Suggestions for a Distinctively Feminist Economics,” Feminist Economics 6, no. 1 (2000), 115–​123. 27 Jean Gardiner, Gender, Care, and Economics (London: Macmillan Press, 1997), 23. 28 Nancy Folbre and Heidi Hartmann, “The Rhetoric of Self-​Interest:  Ideology and Gender in Economic Theory,” in The Consequences of Economic Rhetoric, eds. Arjo Klamer, Donald N. McCloskey, and Robert M. Solow (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 198, n.2. 24 25

59

Economics and the Erasure of the Care Economy

59

Smith clearly assumed a patriarchal family structure, with a wife at home caring for children.29 Other classical economists who built on Smith’s insights, including Ricardo, Malthus, and James Mill, either fail to mention women and the domestic economy at all (Ricardo), mention the domestic economy only in passing (Mill) or mention women only briefly with respect to their role in reproduction (Malthus).30 In contrast, John Stuart Mill and his collaborator Harriet Taylor explored women’s work, argued for their access to paid employment, and offered analyses for the lower wages given to women. They did not, however, incorporate women’s domestic labor into their definitions of productive labor. Their attention to women’s work was therefore unique, but incomplete, and in any case was ignored by later economists.31 In sum, Smith defined “economics” in a way that ignored the concerns addressed in earlier “oeconomics,” concerns about stewarding limited resources and meeting embodied needs. These central human concerns were allocated to the domestic sphere and to women and were not theorized as economic activity. The world of economic production and exchange was a world of autonomous equals, connected through impersonal ties rather than through bonds of affection and driven in predictable ways by the smooth operation of self-​interest. More intense concern for others belonged in the family, along with dependency and care. These spheres were sharply distinguished to allow for clearer analyses:  mixed motives would render the laws of production and exchange less predictable. These basic theoretical moves continued as the discipline of economics developed in the nineteenth century with a greater emphasis on exchange in an increasingly commercial economy.32 In the 1870s, the “marginalist school” of economics emerged, with a very heavy emphasis on markets and exchange processes.33 This school of thought ultimately superseded the classical theorists as the mainstream school of economics. Its basic insights are the core of economic analysis as taught today in universities, now commonly described as “neoclassical economics.” The marginalist economists developed the now familiar economic idea that the value of a commodity will be determined by the Pujol, Feminism and Anti-​Feminism, 19–​20, citing Adam Smith, A Theory of Moral Sentiments (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1976), III.5.1. 30 Ibid., 23. 31 Ibid., 23–​37. 32 Hunt, History of Economic Thought, 282–​283. 33 William Stanley Jevons, The Theory of Political Economy, 2nd ed., ed. R. D.  Collinson Black (Baltimore:  Penguin, 1970); Carl Menger, Principles of Economics (New  York:  Free Press, 1950); Leon Walras, Elements of Pure Economics (Homewood, IL: Irwin, 1954). 29

60

60

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

price point at which supply and demand are equal. In fact, the preferences of consumers as revealed in their buying and selling choices became the only standard of value; these economists eschewed any notion of what is intrinsically good for an economy to produce and distribute. Just as autonomous choice determines political obligation in social-​contract theory, autonomous choice in the market would direct economic production. Any calibration of economic activity to a notion of the good external to buying and selling processes was seen as an infraction of the autonomy of market participants. This would also be true of any orientation of economics toward meeting human needs, toward vulnerabilities that demand a response; these vulnerabilities become heteronomous interferences in the plans of seemingly autonomous choosers. Homo economicus is much like Hobbes’s contractors, sprung up like mushrooms: he is not dependent on others for basic care, he is not giving such care to others, and he is indebted to no one for his status as a mature, autonomous agent. While Hobbes at least felt compelled to mention infants in passing, and showed some embarrassment about their implications for his theory, rational economic man appears never to have been an infant. He has no prevoluntary commitments. The neoclassical assumption of autonomous economic agents and the neoclassical desire to avoid explicit normative commitments are interdependent. We can at least model autonomous adults in such a way that their choices reveal their conception of the good, with no need for evaluation by any external standard. But as I argued in the last chapter, when we act on behalf of dependent persons, we must, and do, make some judgments about what the good is for them in an objective sense. Clearly these judgments ought not to be arbitrary or to assimilate the dependents’ well-​being to our own utility maximization. They ought not be “preferences.” The desire to avoid explicit normative commitments was also part of an effort to maintain the image of scientific objectivity for the discipline of economics.34 Economic analysis is grounded in certain simplifying assumptions that allow for mathematical description and projection of economic behavior. Homo economicus is self-​interested and consistently and rationally pursues his interests in the marketplace, aided by perfect information. His preferences, those things he desires and wishes to pursue, are already fully formed and relatively impervious to outside influences, or “exogenous.” They are assumed not to change or to change very slowly. These assumptions are made, in part, for a practical reason: to Hunt, History of Economic Thought, 262.

34

61

Economics and the Erasure of the Care Economy

61

simplify modeling for analytic purposes. For example, economists hold preferences constant, or assume perfectly competitive markets, to observe more clearly what is going on with other economic variables. Some of the most interesting work in contemporary economics is aimed precisely at playing with these core assumptions, introducing endogenous (malleable) preferences or imperfect information into economic analysis, for example. However, the core model from which these economic explorations deviate still holds the epistemic power of the central case that shapes inquiry. And the assumptions of this core model obscure care:  whereas impersonal exchanges between acquaintances or strangers may be relatively straightforward to predict, the dynamics of care cannot easily be captured in a highly simplified model. For example, the assumption of exogenous preferences evades the reality that care (at least for children) is intended to shape preferences: forming children’s preferences in accord with appropriate values is part of the moral work and the teleology of caring for them. Neoclassical economists also sharpened, to the point of polar opposition, the distinction between public and private spheres that began with Smith’s exclusion of the domestic economy from the scope of economic analysis. One symptom of this opposition is the neoclassical treatment of interpersonal comparisons of utility. In neoclassical theory, preferences are “inscrutable”: there is no way to know how much utility one person gains relative to another person from a similar change in income or goods. If we could perceive the utility functions of Bill Gates and a homeless person, we could determine that the homeless person attains more utility from a loaf of bread than Gates would, or conceivably (at least in this perspective), that Gates attains more utility from the loaf of bread. But, according to the marginalists, we cannot perceive other people’s preferences; to assert this possibility begs metaphysical questions about the accessibility of others’ experience and renders economics unscientific.35 The notion that preferences are inscrutable has come in for significant critique, and not only from feminists; the theory produces circular or logically inconsistent conclusions.36 Perhaps more to the point here, the “inscrutable preferences” assumption undercuts social justice critique. We cannot say what seems For an historical account of debates among economists over interpersonal comparisons of utility, see Drucilla Barker, “Economists, Social Reformers, and Prophets: A Feminist Critique of Economic Efficiency,” Feminist Economics 1, no. 3 (1995), 26–​39. 36 See, for example, Amartya Sen’s classic article, “Rational Fools:  A  Critique of the Behavioral Foundations of Economic Theory,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 6, no. 4 (Summer 1977), 317–​344; Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, ­chapter 1, “In Defense of Universal Values.” 35

62

62

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

obvious: that a very poor person will feel much greater benefit from a small increase in income than will a very rich person. There is no way to critique a person’s preferences or to analyze whether a person’s desires are just. We would need a basic description of universal human needs and goods to critique preferences that sanction dramatic economic inequalities. There is, however, an exception to the assertion that preferences are inscrutable. Preferences inside the family are theorized as completely knowable by other family members and as “soluble.” Family members hold a joint utility function. That is to say, family members are fully aware of the preferences of all other family members and desire things as a unit. Their ties of affection mean that they all want the same things for the family and do not compete with one another for familial resources. As Paul Samuelson put it, “since blood is thicker than water … the family acts as if it were maximizing their joint welfare.”37 The family becomes the mirror opposite of the self-​interested, competitive marketplace in which interpersonal comparisons of utility are impossible. The marginalist school posits different governing principles for the two spheres. Altruism, care, and the ability to understand the wants and needs of another all belong in the family sphere. Rational self-​interest governs the market sphere and is consistent enough to lend itself to “objective,” scientific, and mathematical analysis. The designation of diametrically opposed governing principles radically flattens moral agency in either sphere. Rational actors consistently and predictably pursue their unchanging interests in the marketplace; they can be irrational (defined as inconsistent), but this is not a matter of moral agency. Private family members, in contrast, predictably act to maximize the joint utility of all family members, because their desires are unified. In such a construct, the intrusion of the motive native to one sphere into the other sphere (for example, if the pure self-​interest of the market enters into the altruistic realm of the family) can appear threatening. Certainly a number of Christian ethicists have expressed deep concern about the intrusion of market values into the family.38 And as I will argue in Chapter 5, it is precisely such a sharp separation of motives that structures Gene Outka’s account of agape and “special relations,” and this distinction fuels his deep worry that special relations will trump our universal, inclusive regard for all. However, the lived experience of the domestic economy Paul Samuelson, “Social Indifference Curves,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 70, no. 1 (1956), 10. See, for example, Don S. Browning et. al., From Culture Wars to Common Ground: Religion and the American Family Debate, 2nd ed. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2000).

37 38

63

Economics and the Erasure of the Care Economy

63

does not match the neoclassical picture; family members have both competing interests and shared goods and must negotiate about how the family’s limited resources will be allocated to further the well-​being of all. For this negotiation to be more than a simple power struggle –​in order for it to further justice –​the family must have at least a basic conception of the goods that should be instantiated in the lives of each family member, and the family as a whole, against which family members can assess competing claims and interests. In short, at least some agreement on the good (to give a very basic example:  everyone gets enough food to secure their health) allows for a more complex account of moral agency. Banishing the good from the domestic sphere, as we shall see when we turn our attention to Gary Becker, leads to grotesquely contorted models of dynamics between family members. If the absence of an account of the ends of economic activity leads to absurd results within the family, an absence of any account of the goods sought through market activity leads to a strong normative preference for the distributional status quo, embedded into neoclassical analysis through the concept of efficiency as Pareto optimality. In technical terms, a distribution of resources is “efficient” or “Pareto optimal” if there is no way to redistribute resources without making someone worse off. If we redistribute from a Pareto-​optimal allocation, somebody will lose utility. Optimality sounds like a good thing, and economic efficiency sounds almost sacrosanct to our ears today, trained as they are by the economic discourse that pervades our schooling and media discussion. However, as any beginning student of economics learns, a distribution can be extremely unequal and still be Pareto-​optimal. One person could have 90  percent of a society’s resources, and yet to redistribute a small amount from that person to others in the society represents a drop in efficiency, because that particular person is worse off. Most economists do not oppose all such redistribution, but it is usually cast as a trade-​off: we sacrifice “efficiency” for “equality.”39 Efficiency is cast as a very great good, one that should only be compromised for serious reasons. Since a theory of the good is not incorporated into neoclassical economics, efficiency becomes the effective good; any other goal that attempts to challenge efficiency is immediately suspect. Nozick gives clear expression to this suspicion when he classifies taxation as “on a par with forced labor.”40 And indeed, the presumed See Arthur Okun, Equality and Efficiency:  The Big Tradeoff. Washington, DC:  The Brookings Institution, 1975. 40 Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 169. 39

64

64

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

trade-​off between efficiency and equality in marginalist economic theory is precisely a trade-​off between equality as autonomy (where autonomy is narrowly understood as the freedom to express preferences in the marketplace) and equality as basic need fulfillment, which is theorized as an infringement on autonomy imposed through taxes and redistribution. In later chapters, we will see richer understandings of autonomy that require basic need fulfillment for their exercise, a framework that does not presume such a sharp trade-​off between the two forms of equality. This implicit bias toward the distributional status quo is even more pernicious in light of the exclusion of unpaid domestic labor from the scope of economic productivity. This exclusion has come to seem natural to us, so that proposals to compensate care given within families are often met with alarm: such a proposal seems to threaten the commodification of love itself. However, during the development of neoclassical thought, the decision to exclude domestic activity (including care work) from the domain of economic calculation was quite deliberate. Given their focus on supply and demand in the marketplace, the marginalist thinkers held to an exchange theory of value, wherein the value of a service is determined by the price it commands in the marketplace. This meant, of course, that labor subject to “exchange,” or paid labor, could be accounted for (the price or wage was presumed to equal the value of the labor). Some also recognized the economic value of domestic labor, but made no effort to measure it or incorporate it into measures of economic activity. Alfred Marshall, for example, in his Principles of Economics (first edition published in 1890, and for decades the standard textbook in introductory economics courses), asserted that “(t)he most valuable of all capital is that invested in human beings; and of that capital the most precious part is the result of the care and influence of the mother, so long as she retains her tender and unselfish instincts, and has not been hardened by the strain and stress of unfeminine work.”41 Though he recognized the economic importance of many nonmarket activities, Marshall argued that “it is best here to follow common practice,” and exclude “gratuitous” services from social income. These “are left to be accounted for separately.”42 Marshall argued for the inclusion of salaries for domestic servants in calculations of social income, and noted the “inconsistency in omitting the heavy domestic work which is done Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics: An Introductory Volume, 8th ed. (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1948 [1890]), 564. 42 Ibid., 524. 41

65

Economics and the Erasure of the Care Economy

65

by women and other members of the household, where no servants are kept.”43 However, he did nothing to address this inconsistency. Marshall’s followers quickly enshrined the exclusion of unpaid domestic labor from economic calculations and failed to pursue the separate accounting that Marshall suggested.44 Thus, nonmarket production and exchange simply disappeared from the subject matter of marginalist economics. We can see a similar process of erasure of unpaid domestic labor occurring through changes in census categories for productive labor in Britain and in the British colonies over the course of the nineteenth century. As Folbre demonstrates, these categories reveal a gradual shift in the conception of the locus of production from the family to the individual, and then to the male wage-​earning individual. In Britain, the 1811, 1821, and 1831 censuses asked after the occupations of families; in 1831, occupations of males were also enumerated separately; in 1851, female occupations were enumerated, and one of those occupations was listed as nonmarket household work. Mid-​nineteenth century census documents emphasized the productive importance of women’s work in the home (largely to deplore women’s work outside the home). By 1881, however, “(w)ives and other women engaged in domestic duties were explicitly placed in the ‘Unoccupied Class.’ ”45 Folbre offers a similar chronology for census data categories in the United States. By 1900, the U.S. Census officially defined women and daughters who did not work for wages as “dependents.”46 This conceptual change effectively devalued work primarily done by women in favor of work primarily done by men; eventually, it would contribute to the widespread view that social spending through the welfare state to support dependent care is wasteful spending to be minimized. Though the neoclassical economists understood care as the natural purview of women, they also supported policy measures to enforce the gendered assignment of domestic labor, a departure from their conviction that markets should be allowed to operate freely.47 Mothers of young Ibid., 80. Pujol, Feminism and Anti-​Feminism, 134. 45 Nancy Folbre, “The Unproductive Housewife: Her Evolution in Nineteenth-​Century Economic Thought,” Signs 16, no. 3 (Spring 1991), 472. 46 Ibid., 474–​475. 47 Michèle Pujol outlines the specific policy measures suggested by Alfred Marshall, Francis Edgeworth, William Jevons, and Arthur Pigou, including (depending on the thinker) support of the Factory Acts restricting the hours worked by women, barriers to women’s entry into certain occupations, banning mothers of children under three from the workforce, and either excluding women from minimum wage legislation or legislating a lower minimum wage for women than for men. Michèle A. Pujol, “Into the Margin!” in Toward a Feminist Philosophy of Economics, ed. Drucilla K. Barker and Edith Kuiper (New York: Routledge, 2003), 21–​37. 43

44

66

66

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

children were to be prohibited from engaging in paid labor, women were to receive lower wages than men, and women’s working hours were to be restricted.48 This curious flip-​flop in attitude toward caring relationships –​at one point, they are understood to come naturally to mothers and are perhaps a source of self-​fulfillment, but certainly are not work; at another point, women must be forced to undertake care –​is symptomatic of an overly dichotomized account of motives. Altruism and self-​interest inhabit, in mixed form, both sides of the dualistic construct meant to separate them. Recognition of this complexity and nuance can only appear as a sort of flip-​flop within a conceptual apparatus that separates motive and sphere so thoroughly. Thus we find contradictions: the mother is either the paragon of altruism and self-​sacrifice in the trying duty of child-​rearing, or her parenting is the expression of her own natural desires and preferences, and so fulfilling. Her affections should thus be curbed, to make room for the stranger, or nurtured, to make sure that she is not tempted to work in a factory. Despite the dominance of the marginalist/​neoclassical paradigm, there is now a growing body of economic analysis of domestic labor and production. In the mid-​twentieth century, Hazel Kyrk, whose work focused on household consumption, developed a concept of “waste” as the diversion of resources to nonurgent “whims” before basic needs were met.49 We might hear echoes of James Steuart’s concern, cited at the beginning of this section, that unmet needs indicate a “want of oeconomy.” We might also note that this approach emphasizes equality of basic need fulfillment, where marginalist theory subordinates this form of equality. Kyrk explicitly asserted the need for a conception of the good to underwrite economic analysis, as would be necessary to separate needs from whims; in this respect, she deviated from the neoclassical paradigm.50 Kyrk’s student Margaret Reid developed a method to measure the economic value of household production that is still used by many economists today, thereby countering the notion that the economy is coterminous with the market.51 Pujol, Feminism and Anti-​Feminism, 128–​130. Susan van Velzen, “Hazel Kyrk and the Ethics of Consumption,” in Toward a Feminist Philosophy of Economics, eds. Barker and Kuiper, 40. 50 van Velzen, “Hazel Kyrk and the Ethics of Consumption,” 41–​44. For a helpful treatment of the work of Hazel Kyrk by an economist and Christian ethicist, see Mary Hirschfeld, “Standard of Living and Economic Virtue:  Forging a Link Between Thomas Aquinas and the Twenty-​First Century,” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 26, no. 1 (2006), 61–​77. Hirschfeld draws on Kyrk’s distinction between “needs” and “whims” as a much-​needed contemporary analogue for Thomas Aquinas’s distinction between appropriate (thus virtuous) consumption and greed. 51 Margaret G. Reid, Economics of Household Production (New York: John Wiley, 1934), 11, cited in Yun-​Ae Yi, “Margaret G.  Reid:  Life and Achievements,” Feminist Economics 2, no. 3 (1996), 21. 48

49

67

Economics and the Erasure of the Care Economy

67

She also developed several different methods of measuring the economic value of unpaid domestic labor, which have subsequently been used by many economists and government agencies.52 More recently, the Platform for Action of the 1995 United Nations Beijing Conference on Women set forth, as one of its Strategic Objectives, a call for “developing methods … for assessing the value, in quantitative terms, of unremunerated work that is outside national accounts, such as caring for dependents and preparing food.”53 This has led to the development and implementation of time-​use studies as well as methodologies to assign a monetary value to time spent in unpaid labor, providing a clearer picture of the portion of the overall economy encompassed by care work.54 Some economists have proposed methods for incorporating unpaid labor into macroeconomic models, in order to produce more accurate analyses of international development processes and the effects of structural adjustment programs imposed by development organizations such as the International Monetary Fund.55 This scholarship reveals that the justice implications of the exclusion of domestic labor from the domain of the “economic” are staggering. Using a conservative methodology, Nancy Folbre estimates that unpaid parenting time amounts to over 20 percent of the gross domestic product in the United States.56 This figure does not include the significant and growing Reid defined household production as “unpaid activities which are carried on, by and for the members, which activities might be replaced by market goods or paid services, if circumstances such as income, market conditions, and personal inclinations permit the service being delegated to someone outside the household group.” 52 Yi, “Margaret G. Reid,” 22. 53 “Excerpt from the Report of the United Nations’ Fourth World Conference on Women, Beijing, September 14–​15, 1995,” Feminist Economics 2, no. 3 (1996), 125–​128. 54 Debbie Budlender, ed., Time Use Studies and Unpaid Care Work (New York: Routledge/​UNRISD Research in Gender and Development, 2010); and two special issues of Feminist Economics devoted to “Time Use, Unpaid Work, Poverty, and Public Policy,” volumes 16, no. 3 (July 2010) and 17, no. 4 (October 2011); Valeria Esquivel, “Sixteen Years After Beijing: What Are the New Policy Agendas for Time-​Use Data Collection?” Feminist Economics 17, no. 4 (October 2011), 215–​238. 55 See, for example, Elissa Braunstein, Irene Van Staveren, and Daniele Taviana, “Embedding Care and Unpaid Work in Macroeconomic Modeling: A Structuralist Approach,” Feminist Economics 17, no. 4 (August 2011), 5–​31. 56 Folbre uses both the “replacement cost” of dependent care (what one would have to pay someone else to do it, a number that is artificially low, because the prevalence of unpaid care depresses the price of paid care) and the cost of wages lost by the care-​giver who stays home –​again, a number depressed by the economic realities of salaries for “non-​ideal” workers with dependent care responsibilities. Adding the resulting figure to United States Department of Agriculture estimates of parental cash expenditures on children, Folbre estimates the cost of raising children (excluding health care and higher education expenditures) at approximately 30 percent of the gross domestic product per year. More than two-​thirds of this 30 percent estimate reflect unpaid parenting time rather than cash expenditures. Folbre, Valuing Children, 135.

68

68

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

amount of care required by the elderly in an aging population. Another recent study estimated the annual monetary value of unpaid care work in Massachusetts at $151.6 billion, almost 30 percent of all economic activity.57 Other studies show similar estimates. Once one expands the notion of the economic to include care and reflects on lived experience, these results are unsurprising. Globally, women do much more unpaid work than men do. A recent report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) found that in twenty-​six OECD countries and three emerging economies, “between one-​third and one-​half of all valuable economic activity … is not accounted for in traditional measures of well-​being, such as GDP per capita.”58 In every country studied, most of this work was performed by women. The burden of unpaid care is worse in less developed countries, where governments offer fewer public care services such as health care, child care, and education, and where poor public infrastructure requires women to spend many hours collecting water or firewood.59 This systematic “undercapitalization” of care also drives various forms of injustice in wealthier countries, including constraint on women’s professional success and earnings if they have caring responsibilities,60 and deep cutbacks in “welfare” benefits to poor single mothers, who are perceived not to be working at all because care for their children is not understood to be economic. There are links between the erasure of the economic nature of caregiving and the “global care chains” discussed in Chapter  1. Because care is not properly valued, when women move into the paid economy, they are either expected to continue to do unpaid care labor or must find paid care at a rate that must be significantly less than their own market wages for paid employment to be financially beneficial. Unless the state finds ways to provide care services, or to reimburse essential care that is not exchanged within the market, care will be unpaid or underpaid, and caregivers are subsidizing the larger society. As support for dependent care activities has weakened in relation to the amount of dependent care required, prosperous Mignon Duffy, Randy Albelda, and Clare Hammonds, “Counting Care Work: The Empirical and Policy Applications of Care Theory,” Social Problems 60, no. 2 (2013), 158. 58 Miranda Veerle, “Cooking, Caring, and Volunteering: Unpaid Work Around the World,” OECD Social, Employment, and Migration Working Papers No. 116 (Paris: OECD Publishing, 2011), accessed January 8, 2015, at dx.doi.org/​10.1787/​5kghrjm8s142-​en. 59 Making Women Count:  The Unequal Economics of Women’s Work (Oxfam Canada and Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives, March 2016), accessed December 30, 2016, at www.oxfam.ca/​ make-​women-​count. 60 Williams, Unbending Gender. 57

69

Economics and the Erasure of the Care Economy

69

Western households have increasingly turned to immigrants, documented and undocumented, to meet their dependent care needs. When we recognize that the work of social reproduction is, in fact, work, then we can see this migration of women as a globalization of the subsidies provided by caregivers to the rest of society. These immigrants subsidize our escape from the constraints of dependency: another country produces them, and we then use their labor, discarding them when we have a surplus of labor or when they, themselves, become needy and dependent. In the meantime, they are not available to meet the production and/​or social reproductive needs of their own countries.61

Gary Becker: Flat Moral Agency and Arbitrary Ends Thus we see that the exclusion of the domestic economy from the domain of the discipline of economics has concrete and devastating effects on women and children throughout the world. These social injustices provide a compelling reason for Christian ethicists to commit to recognizing the economic value of care.62 Beyond this, however, the erasure of dependency and care from neoclassical economic theory distorts accounts of relationships and of moral agency in ways that will find echoes in Christian love ethics. We can see this most clearly by examining the work of Gary Becker, Nobel Laureate and “Father” of the “New Home Economics.” Becker, who has been far more influential than his University of Chicago predecessors Kyrk and Reid, takes the tools of marginalist utilitarian analysis, sharpened Folbre, The Invisible Heart, 187. A few Christian ethicists have addressed this issue to date. Christine Firer Hinze has devoted much of her scholarly corpus to uncovering the Christian ethical implications of the care economy; for an overview, see her recent Madeleva lecture, Glass Ceilings and Dirt Floors: Women, Work, and the Global Economy (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2015). Other Christian ethicists engaging with feminist economics addressing the care economy include Barbara Hilkert Andolesen, “Justice, Gender and the Frail Elderly:  Reexamining the Ethic of Care,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 9, no. 1–​2 (Spring–​Fall 1993), 127–​145; Sandra Sullivan-​Dunbar, “Christian Love, Material Needs and Dependent Care:  A  Feminist Critique of the Debate on Agape and ‘Special Relations,’ ” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 29, no. 2 (2009), 39–​59; and Rebecca Todd Peters, In Search of the Good Life: The Ethics of Globalization (New York: Continuum, 2004). See also the article jointly authored by Hinze and Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen, “Whose Marriage? Whose Health? A Christian Feminist Ethical Response,” in Marriage, Health, and the Professions, eds. Don Browning and John Wall (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), 145–​166. The global “care drain” is also receiving some attention from Christian ethicists:  in addition to Hinze, see Catherine R. Osborne, “Migrant Domestic Careworkers: Between the Public and the Private in Catholic Social Teaching,” Journal of Religious Ethics 40, no. 1 (2012), 1–​25; Cristina Traina, “Facing Forward:  Feminist Analysis of Care and Agency on a Global Scale,” in Distant Markets, Distant Harms: Economic Complicity and Christian Ethics, ed. Daniel K. Finn (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014), 173–​201.

61 62

70

70

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

and purified, as we have seen, by the removal of complexities of power and motive involved in dependent care relations and turns them back on the family.63 It is worth exploring the resulting distortions and remembering them as we turn to the accounts of moral agency presupposed by various Christian theologies of love in the coming chapters. Becker has become a lightning rod of sorts for Christian ethicists and social theorists concerned about the penetration of market values into nonmarket spheres.64 These critics tend not to imagine or apply to the family alternative conceptions of the economic that are broader than “the market.” Ironically, however, if we shy away from economics completely as a conceptual category applicable to the family, we capitulate to the dominant, reductionist notion of economics as the summation of individual, self-​interested preference-​seeking behaviors. I  suggest that the concerns frequently raised about Becker  –​that he turns spouses into consumer products and children into investments, abolishes other-​regard, and decimates permanent commitments  –​are really only symptoms of the two more foundational problems that we have seen in our discussion of the marginalist paradigm:  first, the repudiation of any objective account of the goods that economic activity should seek to further, in favor of the summation of individual autonomous “preferences”; second, and related, the reductionist simplification of motives achieved through the separation of self-​interest into the public, economic sphere and altruism into the private sphere. The domestic economy is, in contrast to Becker’s model, directed toward the fulfillment of the concrete, objective goods of human survival and flourishing and involves a complex mixture of self-​interest, other-​regard, and shared goods. Some feminist economists have appreciated Becker for his insistence that the family is economic, at a historical moment when such an assertion counters mainstream assumptions.65 Refreshingly, Becker views child-​ rearing as an investment in human capital and a source of later productivity. However, Becker makes no attempt to calculate the value of this domestic Gary Becker, A Treatise on the Family (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). Don Browning, “Egos Without Selves:  A  Theological-​Ethical Critique of the Family Theory of the Chicago School of Economics,” Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics (1994); Alan Wolfe, Whose Keeper? Social Science and Moral Obligation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); John Wall, “Let the Little Children Come: Child Rearing as Challenge to Contemporary Christian Ethics,” Horizons 31, no. 1 (2004), 64–​87. 65 Paula England and Michelle J. Budig, Gary Becker on the Family: His Genius, Impact, and Blind Spots, in Required Reading: Sociology’s Most Influential Books, ed. Dan Clawson (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 95–​111; Frances Woolley, “Getting the Better of Becker,” Feminist Economics 2, no. 1 (1996), 114–​120. 63

64

71

Economics and the Erasure of the Care Economy

71

labor, estimate the portion of total economic activity that occurs in the unpaid domestic sector, or reference other work by contemporary economists generating such estimates.66 Rather, he treats household activity as a form of consumption. His analytical work models choices between market work and household activity, but he casts this as a trade-​off between labor and leisure, not between different kinds of labor.67 A related and even bigger problem with Becker’s approach is his failure to follow Kyrk and elucidate even the most basic account of the goods that economic activity ought to pursue. He does admit self-​interested negotiation among family members into his models, and some observers see this as an improvement over idealized notions of the family that hide power differences and even abuse.68 However, without reference to some account of the goods that the family seeks and distributes, Becker’s modeling of these negotiations is forced into a highly simplified account of motives and generates results that are absurd, hierarchical, and profoundly gendered. Becker departs from the standard neoclassical notion of a joint family utility function, and instead presumes that different family members have different, and largely competing, individual utility functions. However, he argues that the utilities of all family members are synergized through an altruistic head of household. Altruism has a narrow meaning for Becker: put simply, altruism means that my happiness or utility is increased when your happiness or utility increases.69 Thus, a father (and Becker clearly assumes that the altruistic head is the father) is happiest when he is making his wife and children happy, at least to some degree. Becker does not assume that the father is concerned about others to the extent of being unconcerned about himself; in fact, as Bergmann points out, a father could allocate 90 percent of family income to himself and 10 percent to other members of the family and still be considered altruistic.70 “Altruism” merely requires some concern for others’ utility expressed via some distribution of family resources. The resources are simply presumed to be under the control of the head of household, so any distribution becomes an “altruistic” movement from the initial position in which he holds everything.71 Presumably, England and Budig, Gary Becker on the Family, 104. Yi, “Margaret G. Reid,” 23. 68 Woolley, “Getting the Better of Becker,” 116. 69 Becker, A Treatise on the Family, 278. Note that “h” clearly is chosen to signify “husband,” and “w” is chosen to signify “wife.” 70 Barbara R. Bergmann, “Becker’s Theory of the Family:  Preposterous Conclusions,” Feminist Economics 1, no. 1 (1995), 147. 71 Woolley, “Getting the Better of Becker,” 114. 66

67

72

72

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

this is to avoid the theoretical complications that would ensue if parents jointly controlled family income or if different family members controlled different portions of family income. There is no market inside the family, so in a more complicated constellation of power and resource allocation, members would have to engage in substantive negotiations about distribution of common and competing ends and goods rather than revealing their preferences through intrafamilial exchanges. Meanwhile, even if the other family members are purely self-​interested (and again, Becker writes as if they are), they have an interest in maximizing the utility of the father, since the father’s utility incorporates their own. This results in a “family utility function.”72 Becker’s “Rotten Kid Theorem” postulates that a selfish or “rotten” kid will still try to maximize family utility rather than diminish it. This is because the altruistic head of household, a sort of benevolent dictator, will distribute resources away from rotten kids (or spouses).73 Oddly, the altruism involved in child-​rearing is not acknowledged in this construct. Rather than presuming that the only altruistic member of the household will happen to incorporate child-​care into his own utility function and perform it himself (which is consistent with his treatment of income distribution), Becker presumes this work will usually be performed by the mother because of a biological advantage and predisposition, one that evolves into specialized division of labor.74 Becker explicitly argues for the neoclassical assumption that the family is the site of altruism, whereas the market is the site of self-​interest.75 However, this altruism is centered in one person and then pervades the rest of the family because this person’s preferences dominate those of everyone else. The family is altruistic because men “shop” for the women they can feel most altruistic toward, and women “shop” for the men who will feel most altruistic toward them and thus maximize their own utility. Since wives are cast as beneficiaries of altruism, or in other words as dependent upon their future husbands, they seek the man whose income is highest and who loves them the most, and thus is most likely to share that income with them. Since the altruistic head of household is not the dependent caregiver, the motivation for care implicitly becomes self-​interested preference satisfaction. The theory implies a view of “children as pets,” in Nancy Folbre’s pointed phrase.76 Becker, A Treatise on the Family, 296. Ibid., 288–​296. 74 Ibid., 30–​53. 75 Ibid., 299–​303. 76 Folbre, The Invisible Heart, ­chapter 5. 72

73

73

Economics and the Erasure of the Care Economy

73

Becker’s theory of the altruistic head of household should recall Rawls’s placement of heads of households in the “original position.” Becker is more explicit (excruciatingly so!) about the gender roles inscribed in such an assumption and should debunk any view of this as an innocent theoretical device. Although Becker admits some conceptions of bargaining among individual members of the family into his theory, he radically simplifies the nature of this bargaining through the device of the altruistic head of household, hiding complex dynamics between persons. With more than one altruistic person, things get too murky and unpredictable:  among other problems, how can I act to maximize your utility, if part of your utility involves pleasing me?77 Any sort of complex moral agency, or balance of giving and receiving, is impossible here:  all parties are single-​minded in their pursuit of their own utility, which in one case happens to involve a bit of concern about the utility of the others. Fortunately for everyone, that person is in charge. Though rational economic man is theorized as equal because rationality is similar across persons, equality cannot exist inside Becker’s family. Dependency is now simply assumed through the head of household model. We hear an echo of Robert Filmer, insisting that it is impossible for two persons to share authority. For Filmer, absolute political power vested in a single monarch is required to avoid the chaos of power struggles; for Becker, benevolent dictatorship is required by the imperative of simplicity and predictability. This connection between the oversimplification of models and dictatorship (inside or outside the family) is notable. A more realistic model would allow for complex negotiation between relative equals (in the case of spouses) and the gradual assumption of responsibility by incipient equals (in the case of children). Becker thus shows what happens when a model that has been built on the avoidance of care and provisioning suddenly is applied to the sphere to which care and provisioning have been allocated. He is forced to radically simplify what goes on inside the family, erasing both rich relationships in which self-​and other-​regard are inextricably linked and complex negotiations about needs and interests. Such negotiations were eradicated from the family in neoclassical economic theory by sharply dividing self-​regard and other-​regard between spheres. Becker maintains this sharp division between self-​regard and other-​regard by assigning them to distinct persons within the family. The family is still governed by a single person and is radically unequal. A careful deconstruction of Becker’s work thus reveals that Nancy Folbre and Robert Goodin, “Revealing Altruism,” Review of Social Economy 62, no. 1 (March 2004), 1–​25.

77

74

74

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

reductionist accounts of moral agency lend themselves to gendered hierarchy. Furthermore, there is a deep link between richer and more realistic accounts of moral agency –​ones that involve complex power dynamics in the context of egalitarian relations between spouses, both shared and competing goods, and self-​interest and other regard –​and the recognition of dependency and care.

Valuing the Domestic Economy: Commodifying the Family? To be clear, my critique of the reductionist nature of the neoclassical paradigm is not a critique of the market itself, nor do I mean to argue that marginal utility analysis is absurd in all spheres. Of course, much contemporary production, consumption, and exchange activity does occur in a market context, and marginal utility models can help us to understand, predict, and manage much of this activity. Some exchanges really are about obtaining an appropriate item at a reasonable price or selling one’s products for a fair return, and people will act in relatively predictable ways in such exchanges. Such exchanges can be expressions of right self-​interest or self-​love, or understood as promoting human flourishing. In this, I agree with a number of Christian ethicists who defend the morality of market activity when it meets certain standards of virtue or justice.78 What becomes important, particularly within conversations about the Christian family, dependent care, and Christian love, is that Christian ethicists operate with a model of the economy that integrates the sort of economic “provisioning” that goes on in the household and in care relations with analysis of the market activities that are so central to contemporary economic life. It is important to remember that a significant amount of the work of the domestic economy has long been mediated through the market. Parents who entrust their children to quality child care providers, or children who entrust their aging parents to home health care professionals, generally understand that genuine concern and other-​regard are not destroyed by the receipt of payment for caring labor. (To the degree that they do not understand this, they will surely inflict injustice on the caregivers they employ.)79 If market activity is connected to an understanding See, for example, Albino Barrera, Economic Compulsion and Christian Ethics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Daniel K. Finn, The Moral Ecology of Markets: Assessing Claims About Markets and Justice (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 79 Pierette Hondagneu-​Sotelo provides several narrative accounts of employers who were hurt or angry when their domestic employees or nannies (all migrants) requested a raise. The employers tended to frame the request as a prioritization of money over care for their children. See “Blowups and Other Unhappy Endings,” in eds. Ehrenreich and Hochschild, Global Woman, 55–​69. 78

75

Economics and the Erasure of the Care Economy

75

of the human goods to be served by economic life, then we can acknowledge the market value of care without endangering its essence as care. If economics is only about market exchange to further arbitrary preferences, then receiving economic compensation for care appears selfish, the corruption of an activity that should be about other-​regard. It becomes an inappropriate mixing of separate spheres. But if economics is about provisioning, about the pursuit of important human goods and basic well-​being, then economic valuation of care does not destroy its character as care. In fact, with such an understanding of economics, the economic valuation of care serves human well-​being –​including the well-​being of the caregiver. Rather than separating care sharply from the market to “protect” it, we can then acknowledge the moral value of caring activity that occurs within the market and account for the economic value of unpaid care without endangering its status as an expression of love.

Implications for Christian Theologies of Love The sharp conceptual and practical distinction among market, state, and family that exists today in the United States and, perhaps to a lesser degree, in many Western European countries is a historical development; it is not “natural.” It is subject to reshaping in more just ways. Though dependent care has always largely occurred within the family, the family is now more separate from economic and political structures, and dependent care activities are not well supported by the economic and political spheres (the market and the state). In fact, when state and market abdicate responsibility for the support of dependent care relations and leave it almost exclusively to the very private family, the relationship among these three sectors is exploitative. Contemporary social policy discussions relevant to the organization of dependent care relations, such as debates about the shape of the welfare state, often reify the current shape and relationship of the three institutions of market, state, and family. So do many discussions within Christian ethics. This reification into ontological, ahistorical categories deprives us of a critical tool for analyzing dependent care relations. Christian ethicists must take a step back and question these categories to address the very real issues of poverty, exploitation, and social injustice that arise from the current social organization of dependent care. Attention to the concrete reality of dependent care relations can also reveal distortions in many abstract theological discussions about love. In the next two chapters in particular, we will see operating within the sacrificial and equal-​regard understandings of Christian love some of the same

76

76

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

conceptual architecture I have uncovered in this chapter within economic theory, and in the last chapter, within political theory. We will observe that care is either ignored or allocated to a private family sphere. We will see persons theorized as sharply separate from one another, with moral decisions cast in terms of balancing interests and restraining harm, rather than allocating positive moral effort to sustain life in situations of scarcity and deep need. We will see radical oppositions between self and other, public and private, justice and love, rather than an integrated understanding of these pairs. We will see ambivalence expressed about neediness and “natural” desires. We will see an avoidance of moral ambiguity and complexity that correlates to a dismissal and devaluation of the complex moral work that occurs within caring relations. And we will see love understood purely in terms of the quality of the individual will, much like an inscrutable preference, rather than in terms of the concrete goods that love seeks to accomplish. In Christian love theologies, unlike the economic and political theories discussed in this chapter, these characteristics will be expressed through a theological lens, shaped by doctrines of creation, sin, and redemption. I will have more to say about both the specific problems posed by a Christian theological framework and the unique resources of Christian theology for integrating affirmations of human equality with acknowledgment of dependency and care. But before I can take any constructive theological steps, we must first see how the avoidance of dependency (mis)shapes some central theological accounts.

77

Ch apter  4

Sacrificial Models of Christian Love: Distortions of Need, Nature, and Justice

The sacrificial model of Christian love has been profoundly influential within Christian ethics, particularly since the mid-​nineteenth century, as thinkers such as Soren Kierkegaard, Anders Nygren, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Ramsey, and, more recently, Timothy Jackson and Colin Grant have elucidated versions of the sacrificial ethic.1 This tradition suggests that the Christian moral life should take its cue from Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross. We should give unstintingly of ourselves to the neighbor, without questioning whether the neighbor deserves our care. Our other-​regard should be unsullied by concern for the self. This sacrificial ethic is seen as the necessary corrective to our insistent and entrenched self-​interest. We are not to look to natural impulses as guides or justifications for our ethical choices. Nature has been corrupted by sin, and we must rely on grace to empower in us the same love for others that God has demonstrated toward us. More than any other tradition of Christian love, the sacrificial love tradition, particularly in its nineteenth-​and twentieth-​century incarnations, has been subject to round and varied critique by feminist theologians. Many of these have championed mutuality as the ideal of Christian love.2 Colin Grant, Altruism and Christian Ethics (Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge University Press, 2001; Timothy P. Jackson, The Priority of Love: Christian Charity and Social Justice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, ed. and tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man:  A  Christian Interpretation (Louisville, KY:  Westminster John Knox Press, 1996); Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, tr. Philip S. Watson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982 [1932–​ 1939]); Paul Ramsey, Basic Christian Ethics (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1950). Though Gene Outka is influenced by and shares several characteristics with this tradition, he transforms it in ways particularly significant (yet still problematic) for dependent care relations. He will be referenced briefly here but treated in depth in the next chapter. 2 Barbara Hilkert Andolesen, “Agape in Feminist Ethics,” Journal of Religious Ethics 9, no. 1 (Spring 1981), 69–​83; Margaret Farley, “New Patterns of Relationship: Beginnings of a Moral Revolution,” in Woman:  New Dimensions, ed. Walter Burkhardt (New  York:  Paulist Press, 1975), 51–​ 70; Christine E. Gudorf, “Parenting, Mutual Love, and Sacrifice,” in Women’s Consciousness, Women’s Conscience: A Reader in Feminist Ethics, eds. Barbara Hilkert Andolsen, Christine E. Gudorf, and Mary D. Pellauer (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985), 175–​192; Beverly Wildung Harrison, “The 1

77

78

78

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

An early generation of feminist thinkers expressed concern that sacrifice is not an appropriate ethic for women, who are already asked to sacrifice disproportionately to men.3 Several thinkers have argued powerfully that a focus on Jesus’s sacrifice as the locus of salvation encourages abused and oppressed persons to accept their own suffering as God’s will.4 Others have argued that sacrifice was not the end of Jesus’s mission but only a means to another end, building a community of mutuality.5 Finally, a number of thinkers have argued that the sacrificial love ethic falsely presumes the Christian moral agent to be primordially separate from others, an understanding that negates women’s experience of being deeply embedded in relationships.6 More recently, feminist and womanist thinkers have revised, qualified, and complicated earlier criticisms in a variety of ways, cautioning against dualistic gendered accounts of “experience” and pointing to complexities of race, class, and nationality that complicate patterns of oppression and the distribution of sacrifice.7 Despite the very real dangers highlighted by varied feminist and womanist critiques, sacrifice has an important role in any Christian love ethic. Sacrifice is embedded in creation itself, as a necessary response to the dependency that is a significant part of every human life.8 However, in a love ethic that attends to the central realities of dependency and care, a different account of sacrifice is required than that offered by Power of Anger in the Work of Love,” in Making the Connections: Essays in Feminist Social Ethics, ed. Carol S. Robb (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1985), 3–​21. 3 Andolsen, “Agape in Feminist Ethics”; Valerie Saiving Goldstein, “The Human Situation: A Feminine View,” Journal of Religion 40, no. 2 (April 1960), 100–​112; Judith Plaskow, Sex, Sin and Grace: Women’s Experience and the Theologies of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1980). 4 Joanne Carlson Brown and Rebecca Parker, “For God So Loved the World?” in Violence Against Women and Children: A Christian Theological Sourcebook, eds. Carol J. Adams and Marie M. Fortune (New York: Continuum, 1995), 36–​59. 5 See especially Gudorf, “Parenting, Mutual Love, and Sacrifice”; Harrison, “The Power of Anger.” 6 Daphne Hampson, Theology and Feminism (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1990); Catherine Keller, From a Broken Web:  Separation, Sexism, and Self (Boston:  Beacon Press, 1986); Judith Vaughan, Sociality, Ethics, and Social Change: A Critical Appraisal of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Ethics in the Light of Rosemary Radford Ruether’s Works (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983). 7 Jacquelyn Grant, White Women’s Christ, Black Women’s Jesus: Feminist Christology and Women’s Response (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); JoAnne Marie Terrell, Power in the Blood? The Cross in the African American Experience (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1998); Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, Sex, Race, and God: Christian Feminism in Black and White (New York: Continuum, 1989). 8 Sacrifice is embedded in creation beyond the human community, of course; Bonnie Miller-​ McLemore reflects on the long, unreciprocated labor of a bluebird outside her window, returning over and over with food for a nest of hungry chicks. Bonnie J. Miller-​McLemore, “Generativity, Self-​Sacrifice, and the Ethics of Family Life,” in The Equal-​Regard Family and Its Friendly Critics: Don Browning and the Practical Theological Ethics of the Family, eds. John Witte Jr., M. Christian Green, and Amy Wheeler (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm B. Eerdmans, 2007), 28–​29.

79

Sacrificial Models of Christian Love

79

Kierkegaard, Nygren, Niebuhr, Ramsey, or Jackson. Sacrificial love is not an impossible ideal, the quick flash of an alternate, higher reality into our everyday, egoistic, petty, selfish existence. On the contrary, the pervasive reality of human dependency and neediness calls out sacrifice from caregivers on an ongoing basis, as a demand of continued human existence. Precisely because sacrifice pervades our lives together, we must construct a love ethic that engages sacrifice as an ordinary moral reality and acknowledges that sacrifice is distributed among us in lopsided ways. Because dependent care relations respond to embodied needs with scarce material resources and human labor, sacrificial love must be integrated with a broader conception of justice than most advocates of sacrificial love offer, one that attends to the distribution of these resources and this labor. In light of the range and power of feminist critiques of sacrificial love, few feminist or womanist thinkers have ventured a defense of sacrifice in the Christian moral life. Even for those early feminist thinkers who conceded a role for sacrifice in a Christian ethic, such as Christine Gudorf and Barbara Hilkert Andolsen, the corrective emphasis remained very sharply on mutuality.9 More recently, a few feminists have voiced the need for a modified and qualified account of sacrifice in the Christian moral life and taken some initial steps toward articulating such an ethic. More than a decade after publishing her classic article “Agape and Feminist Ethics,” Andolsen pointed to the limitations of egalitarian reciprocity as an ideal for relationships involving care for frail elderly persons and suggested we expand our conceptions of mutuality to incorporate such relationships.10 More recently, Bonnie Miller-​McLemore and Rebekah Miles have each called for the incorporation of an element of sacrifice into a Christian family ethic (Miller-​McLemore)11 or a Christian love ethic (Miles)12 –​and for that element of sacrifice to be appropriately circumscribed and qualified. These feminist calls for a revised understanding of sacrifice have not yet gained the traction they deserve within contemporary Christian ethical debate. Accordingly, this chapter aims to demonstrate the dangers in the nonfeminist sacrificial love tradition from the perspective of my account of dependent care relations, both at the level of particular relationships and in terms of the social organization of care, and also, building on the work Andolsen, “Agape in Christian Ethics”; Gudorf, “Parenting, Mutual Love, and Sacrifice.” Andolsen, “Justice, Gender, and the Frail Elderly.” 11 Miller-​McLemore, “Generativity,” 18. 12 Rebekah L. Miles, The Bonds of Freedom: Feminist Theology and Christian Realism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 81. 9 10

80

80

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

of Andolsen, Miller-​McLemore, and Miles, to specify the shape that any ethic of sacrifice must take if it is to be integrated into a broader ethic of dependency and care.

Characteristics of the Disinterested, Sacrificial Love Tradition The sacrificial love tradition emphasizes the radical newness of Christian love in relation to our “natural” human forms of loving. Grounded in an anthropology that sees human persons as deeply sinful, this strand of Christian theological ethics argues that Christian love must be revealed and obeyed; it cannot be discovered in our everyday experiences of loving. It is not an inclination; its very essence may be to contradict our inclinations, which are warped through sin. Our usual way of desiring and loving is corrupted and selfish. Our “natural” self-​love is also deeply suspect in this tradition, and must be radically contained. Thus, the proper response to the revelation of the meaning of Christian love is not to shape and order our desires, but to obey, despite our desires or anxieties. This obedience is enabled, and made joyful, by grace. Thus, in the early chapters of Works of Love, Kierkegaard tells us that the simple command, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” is actually radical, for our self-​love is pervasive and insistent. To love our neighbor in such a way is extremely demanding, and in fact requires that we radically constrain our own self-​love in order to make the “as yourself ” possible. Christian love is a duty; and love as a duty is “an apparent contradiction” that “did not arise in any human heart.”13 According to Kierkegaard, human beings ordinarily think of love as admiration, as a spontaneous reaction to goodness and beauty; love is of something we desire, that we think will make us happy. But such desiring, preferential love is not Christian love; it is ultimately an improper form of self-​love. Christian love is eternal, and love based on preference and desire will change when the preference changes or when the special qualities of the beloved fade.14 Christian love is so radically different from what we usually call love that Kierkegaard describes it as “an offense”:15 offense is the mark of the truly Christian. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 24. Ibid., 31. 15 Ibid., 59. 13 14

81

Sacrificial Models of Christian Love

81

Likewise, Anders Nygren famously paints a sharply dualistic contrast between human love, or eros, and God’s love, or agape. Eros is a needy love that appraises value, desires, and climbs to grasp that value and possess it. Agape is spontaneous and unmotivated, does not regard the value of the loved object but bestows value upon it, and comes from abundance rather than need.16 For Paul Ramsey, Christian ethics “cuts man to fit the pattern, not the pattern to fit man.”17 Human beings are deeply selfish; an orientation to self-​sacrificial love is a “radical remedy for a radical disease.”18 Reinhold Niebuhr also describes Christian love as transcendence of the conflicting interests that pervade historical existence, and therefore as self-​ sacrificial; Christian love is history’s “impossible possibility.”19 Colin Grant wishes to reclaim altruism as an “extreme other-​regard”20 that is admirable but untenable outside of the gospel. We may suspect that a love ethic that is so thoroughly distrustful of our natural impulses will be problematic from the perspective of dependent care relations, most of which involve complex amalgamations of affection, desire, commitment, and dutiful obligation. Indeed, these relations are largely caricatured, understood as uniquely problematic or outright ignored in this body of work. This tradition understands nature as such a dangerous guide for moral decision making that it finds itself ill prepared to speak to those relations that attend to natural needs and impulses. This is true despite a second characteristic of this tradition of Christian love theologies: its emphasis on love as a response to need. As articulated most distinctly by Nygren, the model here is God, whose love responds to our profound need for salvation, given our complete inability to attain this salvation by our own efforts. God is above all want and need. God’s agapic love descends to us spontaneously to give us a gift that we do not deserve and cannot earn or reciprocate. Thinkers in the sacrificial tradition call on us to imitate this selfless response to the needs of the other. For example, Paul Ramsey speaks of “obedient love,” which is elucidated in terms of meeting the needs of the neighbor. Likewise, Timothy Jackson describes Christian love as expressed in “personal care,” or attending to the needs of a dependent other.21 Nygren, Agape and Eros, 210. Ramsey, Basic Christian Ethics, 85. 18 Ibid., 189. 19 Niebuhr, Nature, 2:76. 20 Grant, Altruism and Christian Ethics, xv. 21 Jackson, Priority, 47. 16 17

82

82

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

But these thinkers introduce a problematic element: though the needs of the neighbor are utterly obligating, even the root of “sanctity,” to use Jackson’s term,22 our own need is cast as deeply selfish, grasping, natural to us and yet a fundamental problem within us. Need is thus bifurcated through a very strong split between the self and the other, a dichotomous construct that should ring familiar after the last chapter. This is particularly clear in Nygren, who casts eros and agape as fundamentally opposed: eros is needy, and agape descends from utter abundance to meet needs. Since human beings are, in fact, needy, our very constitution prevents us from loving agapically, unless God acts through us: “in the life that is governed by Agape, the acting subject is not man himself; it is … God, the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ, the Agape of Christ.”23 In a sense, then, our call is to imitate God in a way that is impossible for us as embodied persons. Paul Ramsey softens the bifurcation a bit when he allows for self-​care in the service of care for the other. While he insists that self-​love is “not to be found on the ground floor of Christian ethics,”24 we may have a duty to love ourselves derived from and in service of the duty to love others, within the fulfillment of our vocational callings. There is an acknowledgment here that we must meet our own needs and develop our own potentials in order to meet the needs and develop the potentials of others. But even Ramsey’s derivative admission of self-​love cannot capture the experience of interdependent neediness that is present, for example, to a breastfeeding mother whose own physical and emotional need may be to feed her hungry infant. Such a need is not sinful or grasping. It is precisely a need to give.25 Similarly, we may have a profound desire for a friend to obtain the job she desperately needs; if she gets the job, we are better off because of our love for her. As Gudorf has argued, our needs are often Timothy P. Jackson, “The Image of God and the Soul of Humanity: Reflections on Dignity, Sanctity, and Democracy,” in Religion in the Liberal Polity, ed. Terence Cuneo (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 46. 23 Nygren, Agape and Eros, 129. 24 Ramsey, Basic Christian Ethics, 159. 25 It is not my intention here to romanticize motherhood or breastfeeding, or to presume that breastfeeding relations are always expressions of the sort of interdependence of need that I  am discussing here. As Cristina Traina points out, the goodness and mutual fulfillment of the breastfeeding relationship is subject to distortion and manipulation by the more powerful mother. See her excellent book, Erotic Attunement:  Parenthood and the Ethics of Sensuality Between Unequals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). Nevertheless, it seems clear that mothers often experience the pressing desire to breastfeed precisely because their babies need to be fed, and the physiology of breastfeeding means that the baby’s need for food becomes the mother’s need to release her milk; thus it provides a helpful example of a deeper interdependence of needs and goods than is acknowledged in the sacrificial love thinkers considered here, an interdependence that incorporates the embodied aspects of our needs as well. 22

83

Sacrificial Models of Christian Love

83

deeply bound up with the needs of others, not simply in an instrumental way, but because the good of others is also our own good in many respects.26 Ramsey’s notion of self-​love as instrumental to other-​regard cannot make sense of situations in which the good of others is constitutive of our good. The sharp bifurcation between the neighbor’s need as morally compelling and my own need as selfish and grasping is only possible because of a third characteristic of this tradition: these thinkers conceive of human persons as primordially separate. We must be separate for our neediness to carry such utterly opposed moral freight. Ramsey, for example speaks of a “chasm between self and other” that one must jump across in order to meet the needs of the neighbor.27 The derived duty of self-​love can only take effect after one has jumped across this chasm.28 Niebuhr describes the moral ideal as a self-​sacrificial transcendence of the needs and conflicts of this world, but as we shall see, such transcendence is only possible for a person who is free of obligations to navigate those needs and conflicts on behalf of others. The transcendent person transcends alone. Kierkegaard’s sharp, existential emphasis on the individual person is well known; both he and Outka implicitly understand agape to be exercised by a person free of preexisting commitments and obligations to particular others. In fact, for each of them, the sort of particular commitments and obligations that bind us relationally to others are understood as inherently problematic. Certainly all of these thinkers reference the sociality of the self in various places, and some of them are deeply concerned with issues of social justice and political life. However, in this sacrificial tradition, this self is generally first an individual, who then reaches out to others. In these thinkers, sharply differentiated individuals are usually pictured in dyadic self-​other situations, making moral choices about the proper balance of self-​regard and other-​regard. This model grows out of these thinkers’ deep concern with the proper extent of self-​love and their sense of the strength of human sin and selfishness, which they measure in terms of decisions about whether to pursue one’s own interests or those of another. Paul Ramsey is particularly clear here: the ideal of Christian love is measured by our unstinting response to a single needy neighbor. Ideal Christian love does not consider other obligations and commitments, partly because we can use these obligations and commitments as excuses for sinful avoidance of the radical demands of love of this one neighbor.29 Ramsey recognizes Gudorf, “Parenting, Mutual Love, and Sacrifice,” 185 and throughout. Ramsey, Basic Christian Ethics, 102. 28 Ibid., 161. 29 Ramsey, Basic Christian Ethics, 41–​42. 26 27

84

84

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

that in the present situation, we cannot focus so absolutely on a single person, because of the consequences for the others who depend on us. But this accommodation to consequences is cast as a concession to our present sinful circumstances rather than as the inevitable consequence of our created finitude.30 Within this tradition, situations of multiple others are generally assimilated to the context of harm prevention: for example, they may argue that agape forbids self-​defense but requires us to defend third parties against wrongdoing.31 Almost all the thinkers treated in this chapter explicitly defend the just war tradition in some form. Once we recognize the impossibility of meeting the ideal of Christian love, they argue, we must return to our actual circumstances and do the best that we can, which, if one is a political leader, will mean defending the selfish interests of one’s state against the inroads of other selfish, predatory states. These thinkers do not explore the moral complexities and ambiguities of allocating one’s positive moral efforts toward fostering the survival and well-​being of multiple others, rather than simply defending them from evil. Such a dilemma cannot so easily be attributed to the necessities of a sinful world; it is rather the result of our embodied finitude. A nurse with multiple patients, or a parent with multiple children, makes ongoing decisions about whose needs to fulfill first and to what degree. To a parent or a health care provider, Ramsey’s admonition to focus on a single neighbor’s need, without any sort of principled limit on the attentions bestowed on that one neighbor, is simply a recipe for irresponsibility. Hence this tradition elides the difference between sin and finitude, to the detriment of the moral valuation of caregiving relations. A fourth and related characteristic of this tradition is an emphasis on the internal state of the Christian in evaluating her love. This characteristic is, of course, grounded in the Reformation’s powerful emphasis on grace rather than works in bringing about salvation. Luther offered a rich and compelling account of the radical reorientation of the Christian toward the neighbor, out of sheer gratitude for the unmerited gift of grace, and through radical trust in God’s goodness and wisdom.32 We are subject to Ibid., 42. See Jackson, “Christian Love and Political Violence,” in Priority, 94–​135; Gene Outka, “Universal Love and Impartiality,” in The Love Commandments: Essays in Christian Ethics and Moral Philosophy, eds. Edmund N. Santurri and William Werpehowski (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1992) 34–​37; Paul Ramsey, The Just War: Force and Political Responsibility (New York: Charles Scribner & Sons, 1968). 32 Martin Luther, “The Freedom of a Christian,” trans. W.  A. Lambert and revised by Harold G. Grimm, in Martin Luther: Selections from His Writings, ed. John Dillenberger (New York: Anchor Books, 1962), 42–​85. 30

31

85

Sacrificial Models of Christian Love

85

no external requirements for salvation and cannot ultimately be harmed by “poor health or imprisonment or hunger or thirst or any other external misfortune.”33 Nevertheless, Christian love enabled by grace elicits very concrete acts of service to the neighbor to meet basic needs. Luther finds a ground for the moral obligation to meet basic human needs not in their natural urgency, but in God’s command. In our gratitude for God’s grace and trust in God’s goodness, we find joy in doing God’s will. This will includes living out the patterns of our lives within certain “estates,” such as marriage, ministry, economy, and government, oriented toward the needs of this life. In our joyful obedience, we find meaning in trivial and otherwise offensive tasks such as changing diapers.34 Protestant love theologians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries draw on this profound accent on the importance of the will, its need for radical transformation, and its reflection of our very relationship with God. In some cases, however, they go further than Luther, emphasizing the importance of a pure and loving will precisely by deemphasizing the importance of consequences for the concrete neighbor before us. Thus, Kierkegaard describes the neighbor as “that by which the selfishness in self-​love is to be tested. As far as thought is concerned, the neighbor does not even need to exist. If someone living on a desert island mentally conformed to this commandment, by renouncing self-​love he could be said to love the neighbor.”35 Similarly, he argues that one way to prove that our love is totally innocent of any desire for return is to love by “recollecting one who is dead,” who is absolutely beyond any possibility of mutuality or reciprocity.36 Outka describes the danger of preferential love by describing a man watching television news of enemy body counts in the Vietnam war with “indifference or mild satisfaction.”37 He thus chooses, as a measure of failure of agape, an example in which there is no real possibility for the offending, self-​absorbed man to act to help the others, those Vietnamese soldiers who lie outside the circle of “people like me.” It is the attitude that measures a failure of agape. In each of these examples, an emphasis on the will has moved too far from Luther’s delicate paradox between justification through faith by grace alone rather than by works and the fruitful works that do issue from a Ibid., 54. Martin Luther, “The Estate of Marriage,” in Luther’s Works, Vol. 45, ed. and trans. Walther I. Brandt (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1962), 40. 35 Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 21. 36 Ibid., 345–​358. Sally Purvis offers a critique of Kierkegaard on this point in “Mothers, Neighbors, and Strangers.” 37 Outka, Agape, 273. 33 34

86

86

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

graced will. This exaggerated emphasis on the pure will may reflect the expression of profound Protestant theological commitments through the prism of thinkers embedded in a world of thinner relationships between distant strangers rather than in Luther’s early modern, preindustrial world of closer relations. Nevertheless, as I showed in Chapters 2 and 3, broad historical trends toward greater social distance, more impersonal (often purely commercial) relationships, and an emphasis on universal equality were accompanied by an occlusion of dependency and care relationships. The development from Luther’s graced will turned outward in love toward immediate neighbors encountered within the various institutional estates to Christians purifying their wills on desert islands or their living room couches reflects a similar occlusion of dependency and care. If we think of Christian love in terms of dependent care relations, we cannot drift so far from the consequences of our actions. Having described, in broad strokes, some common features of this tradition, let me now engage one representative in greater depth before turning to contemporary expressions of the tradition. Reinhold Niebuhr will serve well for several reasons. First, Niebuhr has been the target of the vast majority of feminist criticism pointed at the sacrificial love tradition to date. Some of this criticism has been on point, some has been misdirected, and much can be deepened by more explicit attention to caregiving relations and the social organization of care, attention which is implicit in some feminist critique of Niebuhr but not often fully articulated. Second, other than Jackson, Niebuhr is the only thinker in this tradition who explores the experience of caregiving in light of his understanding of Christian love. Third, it is Niebuhr’s paradoxical strength that he is unusually conscious and explicit in illustrating two problematic features of the sacrificial love tradition. First, in this tradition, nature is engaged largely as something to be transcended rather than as an arena of complex moral navigation; it is depicted primarily as the source of selfish survival impulses. In reality, the fact that we are embedded in nature requires us to negotiate material scarcity, to artfully manage competing needs, and to attend to natural impulses (our own and those of others) as sources of information about human flourishing as well as potential sources of moral danger, in need of formation and regulation. Our existence as part of the natural world imposes certain moral tasks upon us, and these tasks are not the result of our own failings, but simply of our existence as embodied creatures in a world where creativity and life are tied up with competition and death. In this tradition, however, these moral realities are not engaged in all their complexity; rather, responsibility for their very existence is laid at the feet

87

Sacrificial Models of Christian Love

87

of human persons. Because these realities are depicted as the result of sin, rather than a constitutive aspect of creation, the moral work of engaging these realities (faced by all of us, but particularly by dependent caregivers) is ignored or even denigrated. The second concern, deeply interrelated with the first, is that these thinkers espouse an overly narrow conception of justice as a moderator of competition between autonomous, egoistic individuals. Justice is conceived primarily as a way to restrain sin or as the arbiter of selfish interests, since our “natural” inclinations are presumed to be sources of egoistic self-​ seeking. Justice is not conceived as a guide for cooperative social beings coping with scarcity, as they distribute the material resources and the labor that is necessary to meet the needs of dependent persons with their natural, embodied needs.

Niebuhr’s Ethic of Sacrificial Love Niebuhr proves a helpful initial conversation partner with respect to these two concerns partly because his conceptions of Christian love and justice are tied to an explicit account of the human situation vis-​à-​vis our natural vulnerabilities and limits. This account is most adequately summed up in a famous citation from the opening pages of The Nature and Destiny of Man: (M)an is a child of nature, subject to its vicissitudes, compelled by its necessities, driven by its impulses, and confined within the brevity of the years which nature permits its varied organic form, allowing them some, but not too much, latitude … . (M)an is a spirit who stands outside of nature, life, himself, his reason and the world.38

Thus humans find themselves in a uniquely paradoxical situation, bound and free, embedded in nature and transcendent of nature. The emergence of reflexivity, the ability to stand outside of and think about natural human limitations and their implications, represents the emergence of human persons from an age of “innocency,” of living according to instinct as do all other animals, into history, in which free human beings reflect on, direct, and critique their own activities. However, our freedom remains bound to natural necessity. We know we are needy, vulnerable, and mortal, and consequently, human persons live in anxiety, aware of our own finitude. We strive to overcome our own natural limits and do so at the expense of other human persons. This is the essence of sin, for Niebuhr, and it accompanies Niebuhr, Nature, 1:3–​4.

38

88

88

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

genuine humanity.39 Niebuhr describes this desire to absolutize ourselves, to escape our finitude, as “pride.” He articulates another possible response to the anxiety of human freedom: sensuality, or turning away from freedom and losing oneself in the “forces, processes and impulses of nature.”40 Some feminist interpreters have suggested that sensuality is properly understood as an equally primordial alternative to the sin of pride, one that resides at the opposite pole of the dual reality of humans as “bounded and free.”41 There is some textual basis within Niebuhr for articulating the sin of sensuality in this way.42 However, following Augustine and much of the Christian tradition, the bulk of Niebuhr’s discussion develops sensuality as subsidiary to pride.43 Niebuhr’s conceptions of justice and of Christian love emerge from this dominant understanding of the human person as anxiously self-​interested, proud, and self-​aggrandizing. Justice moderates the self-​interest, while Christian love radically reverses it. According to Niebuhr, justice is “a balance of competing wills and interests”44 that human persons devise in our historical existence. In our personal lives, we may reach a higher standard: mutual love, or a love that gives of itself at times, though always with the desire to receive something in return.45 Christian love, however, transcends both the historical competition of interests and the desire for reciprocity. It does not assert itself; it is utterly self-​sacrificial, as demonstrated by Jesus’s life and death on the cross. This sacrificial love is history’s “impossible possibility.”46 Anyone who does not “participate in the claims and counterclaims of human existence” will soon be destroyed.47 Nevertheless, such love has been revealed as God’s own character and the Ibid., 1:181–​2. Ibid., 1:234. 41 Plaskow, Sex, Sin and Grace, 62–​69; Susan Nelson Dunfee, “The Sin of Hiding: A Feminist Critique of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Doctrine of Sin,” Soundings 65, no. 3 (Fall 1982), 316–​327. 42 For a discussion that seems more open to a conception of sensuality as equiprimordial with pride, see Niebuhr, Nature, 1:184–​85. For a discussion that situates sensuality as subordinate to sin, however, see Niebuhr, Nature, 1:228–​240. For a clear explication of Niebuhr’s different discussions of sensuality, one that argues that Niebuhr should have treated sensuality as equiprimordial with pride, see Plaskow, Sex, Sin and Grace, 60–​64. 43 Niebuhr, Nature, 1:237–​238. For some more recent arguments about the appropriate interpretation of the sin of sensuality in Niebuhr’s thought, see the various contributions to the roundtable on Valerie Saiving’s critique of Niebuhr hosted by the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 28, no. 1 (Spring 2012). Of particular interest is Jodie Lyon, “Pride and the Symptoms of Sin,” 96–​101; Ronald H. Stone, “Reinhold Niebuhr and the Feminist Critique of Universal Sin,” 91–​96. 44 Niebuhr, Nature, 2:71. 45 Ibid., 2:81–​82. 46 Ibid., 2:76. 47 Ibid., 2:72. 39 40

89

Sacrificial Models of Christian Love

89

eschatological end of human society. For Niebuhr, the transcendence of this sort of love over our normal ways of loving one another in history parallels the transcendence of God. God has an immanent dimension, as does Christian love, but God and sacrificial love partake in human history as utterly other, as revelatory of a totally different reality, one that cannot comfortably coexist with our present circumstances. Though true sacrificial love cannot survive long in history, it must be present as an ideal to prevent the degeneration of history into chaos. This ideal is proven true, Niebuhr argues, by what happens in its absence: “Anything less than perfect love in human life is destructive of life. All human life stands under an impending doom because it does not live by the law of love.”48 God’s will, in contrast, is a full harmony of life with life.49 In other words, the failure of such harmony is ultimately laid at the feet of human persons who are less than perfectly self-​giving.

Three Core Problems with Niebuhr’s Account This account of the human situation presents three interrelated problems from the perspective of the practice of dependent caregiving. First, Niebuhr’s account of sacrifice is too sharply idealized. Niebuhr understands sacrifice as so far removed from our natural tendencies that it becomes an ideal realized only rarely and transiently, even in very close relations. He does not see sacrifice as embedded in everyday life, as an inescapable element of human existence, precisely due to our embodied neediness. Rather, he idealizes transcendence of this embodied neediness. Niebuhr’s ideal stands in sharp contradistinction to his pessimism about our lived moral experience. Niebuhr assumes that power and self-​interest are pervasive and subtle, and so advocates what Robin Lovin calls a hermeneutic of suspicion toward the motives of persons and nations.50 If anyone can truly transcend her self-​interest and express sacrificial, other-​regarding love, this will occur only in the most intimate relationships, and even here we must not assume pure benevolence is operative. In larger groups, there is almost no capacity for the transcendence of self-​interest.51 Reinhold Niebuhr, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1935), 61. 49 Ibid., 107. 50 Robin Lovin, Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian Realism (Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge University Press, 1995), 7. 51 Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932), xi, 9, and throughout. 48

90

90

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

Many feminist critics have seen a sharp dualism between public and private spheres in Niebuhr’s thought, exemplified by his insistence that the ideal of sacrificial love is more possible in close personal relationships than in public affairs.52 We might see initial parallels to the political and economic theories from Chapters  2 and 3 that sharply bifurcated self-​interested motives from altruistic ones. The social-​contract political thinkers, and the classical and neoclassical economists, allocated love, altruism, and care to a privatized family, away from the competing interests of politics and the market. But at least in one sense, Niebuhr is more nuanced than these thinkers, because of his insistence that sin is a reality that infiltrates all human institutions. There is no possibility of cordoning it off into one sector (such as the market) in order to idealize another sector (such as the family). Niebuhr is not naïve about the moral purity of the family. In virtually every place where Niebuhr mentions the family, he also notes the potential for domination in family relations.53 Thus, while there is a problematic dualism within Niebuhr’s thought, it is not, at the most fundamental level, a dualism between public and private. Rather, Niebuhr’s thought is organized around another bifurcation, between the ideal and the real. He allocates altruism and sacrifice to a supernatural realm, one that only enters history in an occasional flash of transcendence. It may be that this occasional flash occurs more often in the family than in politics, but whenever it shows up, it is as a paradoxical reversal of the everyday.54 Because Niebuhr conceives sacrificial love as an “impossible possibility,” he understands persons to be constantly failing at the ideal. He tends not to see the positive moral effort that aims at Andolsen, “Agape in Feminist Ethics”; Beverly Wildung Harrison, “Sexism and the Language of Christian Ethics,” in Making the Connections, ed. Robb, 27. 53 For example, Niebuhr, Nature, 1:92; 1:282; 2:124; Interpretation, 194. Rebekah Miles treats the textual evidence at length in “Freeing Bonds and Binding Freedom: Reinhold Niebuhr and Feminist Critics on Paternal Dominion and Maternal Constraint,” Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics (1996), 127–​131. 54 Were it not for this duality between the ideal and the real, Niebuhr’s presumption that domination is possible in all forms of human relation could be exploited precisely to destabilize a sharp public–​private split. As we shall see, Gene Outka, who has been less critically received by feminists than Niebuhr, builds his work on a much sharper distinction between public and private, mediated by a sharp distinction between preferential and nonpreferential relations. Niebuhr’s emphasis on mixed motives in all our relations offers greater potential for recognizing moral complexity in those relations, though like his fellow sacrificial love thinkers, he gives short shrift to motives of benevolence and compassion such as are evident in many dependent care relations. Niebuhr also displays greater awareness than many of his fellow writers on Christian love that economic and political developments have shaped the definition of the public and private spheres, and that the relationship among kinship, the economic, and the political shifts through history. See, for example, The 52

91

Sacrificial Models of Christian Love

91

nurturing life into survival and greater flourishing, but sees any failures in this process as devolutions from a preexisting ideal state. The relations most obscured by this idealization are precisely relations of dependent care. Niebuhr is simply incorrect in his statement that “[a]‌nything less than perfect love in human life is destructive of life.”55 There is not a preexisting, full, harmonious life at which we chip away with our selfishness. Life is given to us in a form that requires intensive positive effort from others to bring to fruition. This effort occurs in the context of our embodied finitude, and we must creatively engage our moral agency to determine the best way to foster life and flourishing. Our concrete examples of complex, conflicted caregiving contradict Niebuhr. Judith, the Guatemalan migrant working in the United States to feed her children back home; Gottlieb, father to a disabled daughter with complex medical needs, balancing those needs with those of his other daughter, himself, and his marriage; a sleep-​deprived mother riding the bus all night to prevent herself from harming the baby who will not stop crying –​none of these has achieved a perfect love. Social and economic circumstances prevent them from perfectly meeting the embodied needs of their dependents, but as fellow human beings we know that none have achieved a pure love even in their wills. Yet their lack of perfect love can hardly be said to be destructive of human life. Their imperfect and poorly supported loves are engaged in the building up of human life. That is the purpose of these loves. Their positive achievements are still achievements, however limited. This highly idealized account of Christian love is linked to the second core problem with Niebuhr’s account of the human situation: his overly simplified account of the relation between the human person and “nature” or the “natural.” We can discern the problem by taking a close look at Niebuhr’s account of human development from a prehistoric, unfree “innocency,” through a history of freedom and clashing egos tamed by mutual love and justice, to the eschatological harmony of life with life that is prefigured by self-​sacrificial love. This account, offered in Niebuhr’s masterwork The Nature and Destiny of Man, effectively eliminates any moral navigation of the needs and conflicts of nature. During the “age of innocency,” these needs and conflicts exist, but are nonmoral, because there is not yet human freedom. Niebuhr understands nature in this prehistoric Structure of Nations and Empires (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1959), 33–​41; Man’s Nature and His Communities (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1965); Nature, 2:197. 55 Niebuhr, Interpretation, 61.

92

92

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

period to encompass a “harmonious relation of life to life.”56 And yet this “harmonious relation” seems also to encompass conflicting natural impulses rooted in the survival instinct. Presumably the harmony Niebuhr mentions reflects the smooth working of the processes of collaboration and competition for survival between creatures that lack the capacity for choice and responsibility. This “harmony” clearly must encompass death through struggle, illness, starvation, and predation, but these realities are morally neutral in the age of innocency. Once humanity emerges into history and freedom, “nature” takes on a negative cast for Niebuhr:  it means our egos clashing with one another, driven by the “survival impulse.”57 The struggle for survival now becomes problematic, because “(m)an knows … that life ought not to be lived at cross purposes, that conflict within the self, and between the self and others, is an evil.”58 It is not clear, however, why and whether “man knows” this, given that life is clearly lived at cross purposes in the prehistorical natural state. The transition from prehistorical, unfree homo sapiens to historical and free human persons is here pictured as a leap from a naturalistic struggle for survival to its radical opposite, the moral obligation to disregard one’s own survival completely, even though it is impossible to do so. In other words, the ideal is not the highest achievement of moral goodness within the context of the actual embodied challenges of human life, but the complete opposite of the real and the natural. The leap from amoral nature into idealized altruism should call to mind the sharp dualisms, and attendant avoidance of complex negotiation of needs and scarcity, that we saw in economic and political theorists in Chapters 2 and 3. Such a leap is deeply problematic, because once humanity moves into history and freedom, we are still ensconced in a world full of conflict and cross-​purposes, struggle and scarcity, illness and predation. However anxious free humans may be, conflicts between life and life cannot be reduced to conflicts between self-​interested egos. They are also conflicts between embodied needs, just as they were in the state of nature. Dependent caregivers know this all too well, as they struggle to sustain life and foster flourishing with both help and resistance from natural and historical factors  –​which are so deeply intertwined as often to be indistinguishable. Furthermore, in dependent care relations the goals of survival and Niebuhr, Nature, 2:80–​81. Niebuhr, Interpretation, 38. 58 Niebuhr, Nature, 2:81–​82. 56

57

93

Sacrificial Models of Christian Love

93

flourishing are undertaken on behalf of another, complicating Niebuhr’s sharp contrast between egoistic survival instinct and altruistic self-​sacrifice. Niebuhr’s ideal person may transcend body and nature in order to exhibit sacrificial love, but dependent caregivers continue to negotiate the world of need and scarcity. Again, dependent care is economic, in that it seeks to provide for concrete human needs in the context of limited resources. One might be able to transcend the claims and counterclaims of historical existence if one is willing to sacrifice one’s own survival and flourishing. One cannot transcend the claims and counterclaims of human existence when one is busy making claims on behalf of another person’s survival and flourishing. And if agape is interested in the survival and flourishing of another, one cannot abandon such claims in the name of Christian love. This is not a matter of our sinful nature curbing achievement of the moral ideal; the ideal itself becomes irresponsible in this light. Thus we see that early feminist charges that Niebuhr constructs an overly individualistic, “separative” self do stick to some extent.59 If the moral agent cannot meet the moral ideal of a theological ethic while engaged in the (often prevoluntary) relationships that involve giving and receiving essential care for basic needs, then that theological ethic simply is not adequately social or relational, no matter how many references a thinker may make to the formation of our selves within community or how much attention a thinker pays to social or public policy issues. Niebuhr’s picture of an initial perfect harmony, later disrupted by prideful human wills, is very Augustinian. However, Niebuhr’s account of the transitions from the state of innocency, to history, to the eschatological harmony between life and life is a schematic picture of a gradual evolution; Niebuhr rejects the notion of a Fall that occurred once and for all in history. In this, he departs from Augustine, who had no knowledge of the evolutionary science that Niebuhr takes for granted. For Augustine, death is the result of the Fall, so a world without sin would also be a world without death. In such a world, one could dispense with concern for one’s own survival and the survival of one’s offspring. For Niebuhr, free and anxious human persons emerge from an earlier evolutionary stage in which they are like other animals. There has always been death and competition for survival. When human beings become persons, become free and self-​transcendent, they ought to repudiate that struggle, but instead they For charges of the separative self, see Keller, From a Broken Web; Hampson, Theology and Feminism; for an argument that criticisms of Niebuhr’s autonomous self are overstated, see Miles, Bounds of Freedom, 33–​34.

59

94

94

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

inject domination into it, and thus sin. However gradual this process, the moral response to the transition into personhood is depicted by Niebuhr in terms of a radical leap from one standard to its complete opposite, a binary. This binary leaps over and leaves behind the complex interplay between legitimate desire for survival and well-​being and concern for the survival and well-​being of others that the actual human situation requires. Niebuhr then imports this complexity back into the theological ethic in the form of a justice that restrains and governs competing expressions of self-​interest, a second-​best ethic cast as the result of sin and balking at excessive moral aspiration: “realism.” But the moral valence of dependent care relations is largely constituted by navigation of complex, competing demands by a range of collaborative practices oriented toward fostering widespread flourishing and by the formation of ambiguous (not purely selfish) desires: in other words, by the complexity that Niebuhr leaps over to reach the sacrificial ideal. An ethic of responsible navigation of multiple needs and desires is preferable to describe dependent care relations. This is not a regrettable second-​best option but the heart of our moral situation from the start. Rebekah Miles provides a helpful proposal that leads us back into this complexity through the integration of one of the bipolar tensions that structures Niebuhr’s theology: the tension between our freedom and our boundedness. Niebuhr speaks of dependent care relations only in his scattered reflections on motherhood, which he viewed as the quintessential site of the “bounded” side of the human condition. While Niebuhr is not guilty, as some feminist critics have charged, of assigning motherhood to all women as their primary role, he watched his wife Ursula contend with certain constraints associated with pregnancy and motherhood, and his conception of freedom simply did not allow him to conceive of these constraints simultaneously as conditions that both form and allow the expression of freedom.60 Niebuhr talks about radical freedom as the ability to rise above the pole of our “natural” bounds or even to contradict them: “Genuine freedom” includes the “implied possibility of violating the natural or rational structures of the world.”61 Miles offers an alternative, integrated understanding: human freedom is a “transforming quality” that is grounded in our bounds, is shaped by our bounds, and pervades our bounds. Freedom is not a way of rising above our bounds, but “a creative Miles, “Freeing Bonds and Binding Freedom,” 134. Miles, Bonds of Freedom, 72, citing Reinhold Niebuhr, Christian Realism and Political Problems (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953), 178.

60 61

95

Sacrificial Models of Christian Love

95

quality of boundedness.”62 Miles speaks of parenting as one of the highest expressions of this freedom working in and through our bounds. Her suggestion that freedom and boundedness are deeply integrated aspects of the expression of moral agency is particularly suggestive for this chapter, since for Niebuhr, the highest expression of his conception of freedom is sacrifice. A more integrated notion of freedom and boundedness suggests a notion of sacrifice as an everyday reality that is integrated in complex ways with fulfillment of our projects, aims, and desires.63 The third problem with Niebuhr’s account of the human person, when evaluated from the perspective of dependent care relations, is that his conception of justice is too narrow. Niebuhr illustrates a recurring characteristic of the sacrificial love tradition: his notion of justice does not address the distribution of material goods or of labor, including the labor of caregiving. Interestingly, Niebuhr describes his eschatological ideal of perfect harmony between life and life as the elimination of one of David Hume’s “circumstances of justice,” the circumstance of moderate self-​interest. This would be replaced with utter lack of self-​regard and total concern for the other. Hume describes moderate self-​interest as the primary subjective circumstance of justice.64 Niebuhr does not address, however, Hume’s other major circumstance of justice, the central objective circumstance: the condition of moderate scarcity.65 In other words, Niebuhr transfers to the subjective human will a problem that confronts human persons objectively in the natural, material world. He seems to presume that if human persons could perfect their wills and become perfectly other-​regarding, natural scarcity and conflicting embodied needs would cease to be a challenge. Niebuhr’s conception of justice as rules and restraints to govern competition between egoistic interests, and his failure to address the circumstance Ibid., 155. It must be said that, although Miles offers this integrative account of agency as a corrective to Niebuhr’s account of freedom, she does not apply the same model to Niebuhr’s understanding of sacrifice. This is problematic, since sacrifice is the highest expression of freedom for Niebuhr; they are parallel terms in his thought. Miles suggests that the understanding of agape love as sacrifice be included as one element of love among others: creation, liberation, and incarnation (Miles, Bonds of Freedom, 81). However, these are not alternate elements to be activated at different times and in different circumstances. We should not accept the ideal of Christian love as radical self-​sacrifice and then add in an appreciation of creation alongside this. Rather, the doctrine of creation should shape and transform what sacrifice means, because sacrifice is embedded within creation, not a corrective of creation. An account of sacrifice as ordinary, pervasive, and deeply integrated with creation would seem to better parallel Miles’s insight that our freedom is grounded in and shaped by our bounds, rather than rising above or violating those bounds. 64 Hume, Enquiry, 185–​192. 65 Niebuhr, Nature, 2:83–​84. 62 63

96

96

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

of material scarcity, precludes any notion of justice as a fair distribution of the burdens of care. The unequal distribution of sacrifice within intimate relations of care calls for amelioration, not idealization. If women and children are widely impoverished by their involvement in relations of dependent care, society should take measures to eliminate their poverty. If some parents must choose between being physically present to their children or meeting their children’s basic needs for food, health care, and education, as is the reality for many working-​class parents and especially for migrant careworkers, we should seek to avert the need for such a choice. In addition, as Gudorf has argued, by failing to recognize the ongoing, everyday sacrifices made within personal relations (and perhaps within more public relations as well), Niebuhr discounts possibilities for more positive, collaborative forms of justice.66 Conceptions of human finitude also take on a new cast when we examine Niebuhr’s theology through the lens of dependent care relations. Niebuhr does not understand our finitude as itself sinful, though it includes “the imperfect vision of human reason and the blindness of human impulse.”67 Finitude exists prior to history and freedom, “where the individual does not try to make itself the center of existence, but merely makes itself the center of its own existence.”68 Nonreflective creatures do their best to survive; this struggle for survival only takes on “imperial or demonic pretensions” with the advent of freedom and thus true humanity.69 In Niebuhr’s account, therefore, finitude troubles us primarily as we reach up toward transcendence and away from the bonds of nature. He would have us accept our own finitude and our natural limitations to avoid harming others in the quest to survive and flourish. When thinking about Christian love through the lens of dependent care relations, however, finitude also constrains us as we reach outward to others in a field of immense human need. We cannot do everything for everyone. We still need to accept this, but the emphasis is on the limits to helping others rather than the desire to use and harm others. And an emphasis on the finite capacities of the individual encourages us to work together to meet the demands of human need. It points toward a collaborative and distributive notion of justice, not a justice limited to restraining competing interests and egos. Gudorf, “Parenting, Mutual Love, and Sacrifice,” 186–​187. Niebuhr, Interpretation, 91. 68 Ibid., 92. 69 Ibid., 91. 66

67

97

Sacrificial Models of Christian Love

97

In contesting Niebuhr’s overly idealistic notion of love, my intention is not to romanticize care relations. In fact, it is the opposite. I want to point to the very real, ongoing fund of reflective and intentional other-​ regard that is expressed within them, every day, in billions of human relationships. True, dependent care relations are often contaminated with selfishness, abuse, impatience, and manipulation of the dependent. Still, these are distortions of the basis of the caregiving relation, at the heart of which is intensive effort to aid the survival and flourishing of another person, an effort that may come at significant cost to the caregiver’s personal needs and desires. Without some such other-​regard, the dependent would simply die. Without widespread caregiving relations, the human race would not survive. The prevalence of such relations belies Niebuhr’s view of human persons struggling to transcend their egoistic competition with one another. Much like Hobbes, whose theory erases (but assumes) the affection, altruism, and vulnerability necessary for human persons to commit to care for children in a world where all are bent on domination,70 Niebuhr has no room within his theological anthropology for the ongoing other-​regard expressed within dependent care relations. Reading Niebuhr through the lens of dependent care relations thus reveals that Niebuhr falsifies not only female experience, as charged by early feminists, but all human experience, in that he obscures the moral work involved in responding to the human dependency shared by all of us. He does so by idealizing transcendence of the natural desires, abundance, conflicts, and challenges that pervade human life and are highly visible in the experience of dependency and dependent care. These natural constraints, opportunities, and conflicts are the fodder for our moral agency; they are not primarily the source of impulses that corrupt our moral agency.

Contemporary Expressions of the Sacrificial Love Tradition The sacrificial love tradition continues to evolve. In the contemporary conversation, we see thinkers explicitly drawing upon the theological commitments of the sacrificial love tradition in conversation with some of the resources I use in this book to illuminate issues around dependent care. Timothy Jackson specifically engages feminist philosophical thought on care and dependency, for example, and Colin Grant offers a trenchant See the discussion in Chapter 2.

70

98

98

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

critique of the separate and autonomous self that is presumed in contemporary economics, sociobiology, and political philosophy. Engagement with these thinkers is therefore enticing, but it is also ultimately frustrating: neither allows new insights from these contemporary trajectories of thought to lead toward those fundamental modifications to the sacrificial love tradition that are necessary to make sense of dependency and support a just social organization of caring relations. Instead, each falls into certain contradictions and inconsistencies, clinging to certain aspects of the sacrificial love tradition that ultimately render their projects deeply inconsistent. Jackson recognizes important parallels between feminist emphases on our dependency on caregivers and Christian affirmation of our dependence on God. He argues for what he calls “strong agape,” a “meta-​value,” preceding and grounding all other values, including the value of justice. Strong agape encompasses three elements:  “(1) unconditional commitment to the good of others; (2) equal regard for the well-​being of others; (3) passionate service open to self-​sacrifice for the sake of others.”71 This ethic does not valorize sacrifice for its own sake, but the practice of strong agape will often call for sacrifice. Jackson also describes strong agape as “personal care,” or care for the “moral and material needs” of other human beings.72 Strong agape precedes all other values, according to Jackson, because we are the recipients of such agape, poured out gratuitously upon us in three ways. First and second, our creation and redemption by God are utterly gratuitous; we are dependent on God in every moment of our lives. We have done nothing to earn our own existence, let  alone the forgiveness of sin. Third, in language that mirrors that of many recent feminist ethicists, Jackson reminds us that we would never reach the relative autonomy of adulthood without receiving gratuitous care from other human beings.73 The priority of strong agape is ontological, for Jackson; agape is God’s own nature, and God has structured creation such that we require ongoing care.74 This agapic personal care is thus the prerequisite for all other goods. Thus Jackson wants to refocus attention on the gratuity of human existence, in a cultural and intellectual environment that he feels overemphasizes Timothy P. Jackson, Love Disconsoled: Meditations on Christian Charity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 15. 72 Ibid., 21. 73 Jackson, Priority, 34. 74 Ibid., 32. 71

99

Sacrificial Models of Christian Love

99

individual autonomy and sees persons as fundamentally entitled rather than graced. It would be possible to integrate this emphasis on gratuity, grace, and human vulnerability with a conception of justice that presupposes interdependence and collaboration and attends to the distribution of the labor and material prerequisites of care. Unfortunately, rather than broadening his conception of justice beyond the contractual, as many of his feminist interlocutors do, Jackson consciously and explicitly limits this conception so that it distributes goods only in accordance with merit and contract, and not in accordance with need. This is very odd, given that response to need is so central to Jackson’s understanding of love, and, as we shall see, he identifies neediness as the ground of our sanctity and inviolability. Jackson explicitly considers, and rejects, recourse to the biblical notion of tsedeqah, a justice that meets the basic needs of all persons for material goods, economic subsistence, and communal belonging. He claims that “if justice is understood as biblical righteousness, it is virtually synonymous with agape,”75 but argues that the “liberal” conception of justice as a matter of contract and reward for merit is so pervasive today that to speak of justice in biblical terms would “seem merely to change the subject.”76 He thereby capitulates to the terms in which “the subject” of justice is defined by many (certainly not all) contemporary thinkers. He ignores the opportunity, and fails to see the urgent need, to broaden our account of justice and particularly to incorporate a notion of distributive justice.77 Jackson’s prioritization of agape over justice is paralleled by his advocacy of a strong “supernaturalist” ethic, one that can stand firm in the face of amoral natural processes and transcend the selfishness of sinful humanity.78 He notes that the Christian doctrines of creation and incarnation do not allow for an utterly negative, oppositional stance toward nature. But in the end, Jackson argues, natural processes are too harsh and chaotic to ground a Christian love ethic, and natural human instincts are too warped by sin. Jackson is correct that natural processes cannot ground an ethic in any simple or straightforward way, though caregivers can certainly take some cues from some of these processes, such as those that produce food and resources for human survival, and Ibid., 33. Ibid., 38. 77 For related arguments about Jackson’s views on love and justice, see Sandra Sullivan-​Dunbar, “Gratuity, Embodiment, and Reciprocity:  Christian Love and Justice in Light of Human Dependency,” Journal of Religious Ethics 41, no. 2 (June 2013), 254–​279. 78 Timothy P. Jackson “Naturalism, Formalism, Supernaturalism:  Moral Epistemology and Comparative Ethics,” Journal of Religious Ethics 27, no. 3 (Fall 1999), 494–​496. 75 76

100

100

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

the developmental processes that bring children into adulthood. I will say more about the extent to which a dependent care ethic can be “naturalistic” in Chapter 6; though I am less pessimistic than Jackson, this is a complex question. For now, however, I want to make a specific point about human nature in light of an ethic of dependent care. In any Christian perspective, our best human moral efforts are flawed and require transformation by grace. And yet I do not believe that Jackson’s strong supernaturalist slant accords well with the pervasiveness of dependent care relations in human life. At several points, Jackson indicates that agape is possible only through conversion and grace.79 The unconditional commitment expressed by strong agape reflects the inbreaking of the supernatural, “a gift of grace that transforms natural instinct.”80 But Jackson’s emphasis on agape as personal care in response to concrete, embodied needs, an improvement over most recent elucidations of the sacrificial love tradition, places him in an awkward position with respect to that tradition’s strong split between nature and grace. After all, personal care is ubiquitous and necessary for survival, as much for non-​Christians as for Christians. Persons throughout the ages and in all cultures have entered into “passionate service open to self-​sacrifice for the good of another” within relations of dependent care. Jackson does not fully plumb the implications of widespread sacrificial caregiving activity, outside the parameters of the Christian faith, for his understanding of the relation between nature and grace. Put differently, when Jackson points to personal care for the needy and vulnerable as a primary example of agapic love, he places into question the insistence by Nygren, Niebuhr, Kierkegaard, or Ramsey that Christian love is radically different from our natural ways of loving. In his writings on political liberalism, Jackson claims that liberal society has been sustained by the very Jewish and Christian values that it tries to contain, values that respond to human neediness.81 Many feminist thinkers would argue that liberal society has been sustained by the concrete acts of caregivers, most of them women, and many of them marginalized and exploited by their caregiving activities.82 Women, and particularly Jackson, Priority, 9, 61. Jackson, Love Disconsoled, 62. 81 Timothy P. Jackson, “To Bedlam and Partway Back: John Rawls and Christian Justice,” Faith and Philosophy: Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers 8, no. 4 (October 1991), 423–​447. 82 Many of these thinkers will be examined in later chapters, but they include, among others, Eva Feder Kittay, Virginia Held, Joan Tronto, Nancy Folbre, Evelyn Nakano Glenn, and Christine Firer Hinze. 79 80

101

Sacrificial Models of Christian Love

101

women without social and economic privilege, have done the unsung work of bringing into being the autonomous political citizens of liberal democracies, whether or not these caregivers are Christian. The ubiquity of unearned care in human life, emphasized by Jackson himself, suggests that there are greater untapped prophetic moral resources within society than he recognizes. We might look precisely to those harmed by injustice in the social organization of care for the insight and commitment to renew our society. Christians and caregivers alike can challenge the autonomy model in liberal political thought. If Jackson’s suspicion of naturalism stands in uneasy tension with his emphasis on the pervasiveness of care in human life, it also sits uncomfortably with his later work on sanctity and dignity. In his efforts to ground the inviolability of every human being, Jackson grounds the sanctity of all people precisely in vulnerability, bodily needs, and undeveloped potentials.83 For Jackson, human dignity, or “achieved merit based on personal performance,”84 is secondary to, and arises out of, sanctity. Jackson specifically correlates sanctity with the agape that responds to neediness, and dignity with the justice that allocates that which each person has earned or contracted.85 He goes so far as to locate the Imago Dei primarily in our vulnerability and embodied needs, and only secondarily in our dignity. This is bold and interesting, but it is not clear how this move coheres with Jackson’s debt to a tradition that sees agape emerging precisely from an absence of neediness. In the sacrificial love tradition, God loves spontaneously and with no expectation of return, because God needs nothing from us. Likewise, as we have seen, many thinkers in the sacrificial love tradition place great importance on fulfilling human needs, but denigrate neediness in the moral agent as a source of selfishness. Jackson participates in this paradox as well. Inspired by Nygren, he describes eros as “a preferential and needful longing.”86 But one cannot simultaneously denigrate the neediness of eros as selfish and valorize neediness in others as the essence of sanctity. Some more complex understanding of the moral exigency of need in oneself and in others is required, and can be expressed with a specification of the meaning of justice. Timothy P. Jackson, “The Image of God and the Soul of Humanity:  Reflections on Dignity, Sanctity, and Democracy,” in Religion and the Liberal Polity, ed. Terence E. Cuneo (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 46–​49. 84 Ibid., 46. 85 Ibid. 86 Jackson, Love Disconsoled, 70. 83

102

102

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

This curious paradox, or contradiction, in Jackson’s work  –​that we image God in our vulnerability and neediness while imitating God’s agape that issues from invulnerability and self-​sufficiency –​points to a recurring problem within this tradition. The thinkers treated in this chapter (and, as we shall see, Outka in the next) ask us to imitate God without accounting for a crucial difference between ourselves and God: we are finite, embodied, and vulnerable. If we are to imitate God’s love, we must do so as the kind of creatures we are –​as God created us. We must imitate God as limited, needy beings. This means that we require a rich conception of justice as principles to govern our cooperative, reciprocal activities, as together we strive to meet the immense human needs around us. If Jackson makes human neediness both the source of selfish grasping and the root of our sanctity and rules out precisely the conception of justice that his understanding of strong agape requires, Colin Grant finds himself in a different contradiction. Grant explores altruism, characterizing it as “extreme other-​regard,”87 and “a crypto-​Christian concept that invites criticism because of its untenability apart from the gospel that gives it meaning and motivation.”88 He also argues that the concept of altruism as it is explored in contemporary economics, sociobiology, and political theory, for example, is an essentially modern concept, incoherent prior to the modern conception of the radically separate and autonomous self.89 These two statements may seem to conflict:  if altruism has its roots in Christianity, how could modernity invent it? To sort out what Grant is getting at, it helps to understand that he is fundamentally concerned with defending the distinctiveness of agape from other kinds of love, and therefore the central importance of “religion” in a world that he sees as corrupted through secularization. He explicitly admires Nygren and Niebuhr for defending agape as the essential form of Christian love, rather than subsuming it under eros or philia (and Grant argues that theologies that try to make a place for all three kinds of love will ultimately absorb agape into the others and thus lose it).90 Thus Grant’s argument seems to be that modernity has corrupted the Christian conception of agape by secularizing it. However, in the course of his discussion, it is difficult to discern any real difference between the conception Grant, Altruism, xv. Ibid., xvii. 89 Ibid., 86–​87. 90 Colin Grant, “For the Love of God: Agape,” Journal of Religious Ethics 24, no. 1 (Spring 1996), 3–​21. 87 88

103

Sacrificial Models of Christian Love

103

of agape that Grant favors and contemporary concepts of altruism. He fails to recognize that the theologians he most admires actually presuppose the modernist assumptions he criticizes. Grant wants to demonstrate the persistence and profound, transcendent value of genuine altruism. He offers an insightful and trenchant critique of the assumption of pervasive self-​interest that structures the fields of economics, political theory, and sociobiology. “The self-​interest metaphor,” he writes, “sees altruism and self-​interest relating in terms of contrast. Altruism is a fringe phenomenon, qualifying a way of life that is characterized essentially by selfishness.”91 Grant is concerned, in contrast, to demonstrate that “altruism happens!”92 –​that it is a persistent element in actual human lives. He does this through a review of social science and sociobiological research on altruism and discussion of historical episodes of altruism, such as the actions of those who risked their lives to rescue Jews in Nazi Germany. Grant appears not to recognize, however, that sacrifice is theorized as a “fringe phenomenon” by the two theologians he most explicitly admires:  Niebuhr and Nygren. Grant criticizes Richard Dawkins’s portrayal of altruism as a “strategy for suckers” in the struggle for evolutionary survival, but how can one miss the parallel to Niebuhr’s assertion that the practitioner of sacrificial love will quickly be destroyed by the clash of interests that characterizes human history? Likewise, Grant argues that Richard Dawkins’s “appeal to a heroic, unnatural altruism” at the close of his discussion of the selfish gene “is completely consistent with modern western self-​centeredness, and can very readily accompany a reading of the natural order as genetically programmed for selfishness.”93 But Nygren and Niebuhr are quite clear that agape is opposed to our natural (understood as fundamentally selfish) ways of loving. Why are they not subject to precisely the same critique? For Grant, the modernist conception of altruism results in three “paradoxes.” The hedonic or “psychological” paradox consists of the problem that “no matter how much our focus may be on the other, on their welfare or pleasure, that focus itself will bring satisfaction to us.”94 Thus, “there cannot be such a thing as pure altruism.”95 In this view of the person, my pleasure in your well-​being is taken not as a sign of genuine Grant, Altruism, 71. Ibid., 224. 93 Ibid., 28–​9. 94 Ibid., 77. 95 Ibid. 91

92

104

104

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

empathy and concern for you, but as problematic, even manipulative. Likewise, altruism, because it requires a recipient, “approaches complete contradiction”: the altruist becomes the one in need, self-​interested in her search for an object of her altruism. Second is the “moral paradox”: when we see altruism as an ideal, he says, this implies that it can never be real; and conversely, to the extent that we see altruism as a real phenomenon, it loses its power as an ideal. Finally, Grant describes the “religious paradox”:  just as we become aware of ourselves doing good, we are no longer doing good. True moral goodness is not even aware of itself as choosing the good; one reaches out beyond the self and is truly focused on the other.96 In short, “self-​conscious, deliberate altruism is a contradiction in terms.”97 The reader waits for clarification about whether Grant is contesting the notion of altruism through these “paradoxes,” since (as he himself notes) they only make sense within the radical separation between self and other that Grant has critiqued as a symptom of the malaise of modernity. However, Grant suggests that the way out of these paradoxes is through “transcendence”; we need “religion” to move us past the contradiction between ideal and reality and to allow us to behave altruistically without focusing on ourselves and our own altruism. In short, his discussion of the paradoxes sets up his argument for the importance of Christianity in human social life (despite the blanket –​and undefined –​use of the term “religion,” he has told us that other-​regard is rooted in the gospel) and for the distinctiveness of agape as the content of the Christianity that society needs so desperately. Grant needs the paradoxes to make the point he wants to make, even though the paradoxes themselves only make sense in terms of the modernistic accounts of the self that he has critiqued so thoroughly. The paradoxes should be deconstructed rather than transcended. They fall apart as soon as one considers the pervasive realities of dependency and care in human life. For example, consider the paradox that altruism requires a recipient, and this renders the altruist needy and self-​interested. If we think about this “threat” to altruism from the perspective of the global care crisis, enormous unmet needs for care, and the pervasiveness of dependency and need in human life, this concern about the self-​ interested search for an object of one’s altruism becomes a bit ludicrous. The need to assert that “altruism happens!” reflects the conceptual erasure Ibid., 82–​84. Ibid., xviii.

96

97

105

Sacrificial Models of Christian Love

105

of dependent care relations, or their naturalization to the point that theologians feel able to construct theories of love as if the survival and flourishing of human persons were somehow akin to the growth of grass. Likewise, it is unclear why the ideal and the real must remain so sharply separated in order for the ideal to have meaning. Altruism is impossible, Grant says, where social relationships are organized such that human needs are met through widespread reciprocal relationships or ordered assignments of responsibility for care.98 Of course, human needs have never been fully met in any social organization, but if such a society were to exist –​if the ideal became real –​it is hard to see how widespread need fulfillment becomes the problem of lack of opportunities for heroic self-​ gift. Here again we have the intensive focus on the will of the individual moral agent seeking to express Christian love, emphasized to the point of disregarding the meeting of actual human needs. In any case, however much progress we make toward the ideal, the ideal will remain an ideal. The human condition demands care. The amount of care required by the young, the aged, and those with disabilities greatly exceeds the supplies currently on offer. More supportive social policies can only hope to make a dent in this care deficit, never to eliminate it. Grant’s critique of modernity does not take account of feminist scholarship describing the privatization of care and altruism during the advent of modernity. He thus misses an enormous resource for his project of convincing us that “altruism happens!”: the autonomous, egoistic moral agent that he critiques is dependent upon the hidden relations of care that he ignores. Grant turns to a transcendence that takes us beyond ourselves, so that we care for the other for her own sake, as the particular contribution of “religion” and as the solution to the “paradoxes” of altruism. We can surely see this sort of transcendence of self as an expression of grace. But we do not need to see it as unusual and surprising, nor as the exclusive purview of Christianity or even “religion.” Grant is also concerned that contemporary philosophy is intended precisely to limit the scope of our responsibilities. For this reason, he critiques Gene Outka for analyzing agape through the lens of Enlightenment philosophy: “We confront here the gap between, on the one hand, the vision that sees life as a gift, so that we live as recipients, linked in common total indebtedness, and, on the other hand, a vision of life that sees it as our possession, to be shared to some reasonable extent and to be subject to our withholding or bestowal beyond that. This gap confirms Nygren’s Ibid., 222–​224.

98

106

106

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

contention that what is at stake is a matter of comprehensive paradigms.”99 What is at stake is indeed a matter of comprehensive paradigms. I would argue, however, that the primary difference in paradigm is not between theology and philosophy per se, but between a worldview that acknowledges the fundamental nature of our dependency (on other human beings, and on the ground of our being) and one that does not. As Jackson sees (though Grant does not), there are parallels between the denial of dependency in our worldly, embodied lives and the denial of dependency on God; but a philosophy is possible that takes into account the dependency that is empirically a part of the human condition, and such a philosophy can cooperate with, rather than undermine, theological understandings. For both Grant and Jackson, then, a dominant concern that religious and theological values are losing cultural influence seems to drive theoretical choices that introduce deep contradictions into their proposals. The secularization with which these thinkers are so deeply concerned occurred hand in hand with the marginalization of human dependency and care. While both Jackson and Grant do important analytic work in reclaiming dependency (Jackson) and showing the limitations of the radically autonomous self of modernity (Grant), both also remain blind to the ways in which the trends that concern them are wrapped up in the privatization, naturalization, and devaluation of care. Their primary motivation is to defend Christianity and the unique contribution Christianity should make to our cultural and moral ethos. But they fail to see the ways in which the decline of the values that they see as quintessentially Christian are also tied up into dependent care relations.

What Ethic of Sacrifice Do We Need? I hope I  have demonstrated that the sacrificial love tradition, as it is expressed by Kierkegaard, Nygren, Niebuhr, Ramsey, Grant, and, to an extent, even Jackson, both presumes and erases dependent care relations. Grant, “For the Love of God,” 15. As we shall see in the next chapter, I  also find Outka’s use of philosophy to be problematic, but this is because the philosophy that Outka draws upon actively obscures caregiving, not because it attempts to limit our moral responsibilities. Because Enlightenment philosophy is characterized by the need to understand the scope of our responsibilities in a world of increasingly distant relations with a multitude of unknown others, this concern with determining the scope of responsibility is understandable. The problem, as we shall see, is that Outka’s preferred philosophical tools focus on the individual as the primary locus of responsibility, and not on social collaboration that would allow us to extend the scope of our care. The combination of a universalist ethic (such as Outka’s) and a focus on the individual moral agent will always obscure care relations.

99

107

Sacrificial Models of Christian Love

107

Someone must have spent long years nurturing the autonomous moral agents who populate their theories of Christian love before these agents can make choices about the appropriate balance of self-​ interest and other-​regard in their interactions with other autonomous moral agents. Had these advocates of sacrificial love fully accounted for dependent care ­relations –​with their everyday sacrifices; the receiving that is wrapped up in their giving; their efforts at building up life from an incomplete beginning, rather than dominating it or tearing it down from a preexisting ideal  –​ they simply could not have produced the theologies that they produced. Nevertheless, any Christian love ethic adequate to encompass dependent care relations must incorporate sacrifice, because sacrifice is intrinsic to dependent caregiving. Some elements of the nineteenth-​and twentieth-​ century sacrificial love tradition will need to be dropped or modified, however, if an ethic of Christian love is not to impose inordinate and unjust sacrifice on those who are most marginalized and rendered politically and economically vulnerable by their participation in dependent care activities. Here it may be appropriate to offer some reflections on the conception of sacrifice I am working with here and in the book as a whole. By “sacrifice,” I mean some action that reduces one’s own well-​being for the sake of another. But this conception begs some questions, questions that are implicit in disparate understandings of Christian love: to what extent do we truly suffer a loss of our own good, in giving up our time, resources, or care to someone else? Might our good be furthered when the good of another also increases –​even if their increased good also comes at our own expense, in some sense? Is it in some sense good for the parent to get up in the middle of the night to feed the baby, even as it is also painful to do so? When we make an immediate sacrifice, might this be for our own ultimate good, earthly or otherwise? Furthermore, is a sacrifice only a sacrifice if it is a sacrifice of something we need, or is it also a sacrifice if it is of something we want or to which we are entitled in some sense, whether or not we “need” it? If others need it, are we entitled to it? And how do we determine the difference between a need, an entitlement, and a want? If, as a result of caring for a dependent, I exist for a number of years on very little food or sleep, but manage to stay alive and functional, do I need more food or sleep, or would I just prefer more food or sleep? These questions do not have simple answers, and we will see resonances of them in other discussions in the book, for example, about the scope and cause of scarcity of resources, about whether the individual good is ultimately commensurable with the common good, and the extent to which we are unified with others in our loving and so share in their good.

108

108

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

I would suggest that there is some degree to which our good and the good of our loved ones are intertwined; but it is possible that this interdependency can be stretched too far, so that caregivers, for example, have their labor and resources drained to a degree at which they clearly cannot be said to be flourishing. Sacrifice is built into the human condition, but when does it become a problem? We might, for discussion’s sake, describe the self-​gift that enhances our flourishing “good sacrifice,” and the clear loss of our own well-​being as “bad sacrifice” (not because the moral agent making the sacrifice is bad, but because the sacrifice itself is problematic). In light of the questions I raised about the extent to which sacrifice for another may be in some sense good for us, however, this is a formal definition, not a substantive one. However, I think that it is less important to precisely define the point at which “good sacrifice” becomes “bad sacrifice” than to notice that, at present, self-​gift is forcibly transformed into harmful sacrifice for far too many caregivers, that this transformation from self-​gift to harmful sacrifice is forced disproportionately on marginalized groups of people, and that to some extent this deterioration of self-​gift into problematic sacrifice can be ameliorated by more just forms of social collaboration for caregiving. The fact of the matter is that under the current social organization of care, many people are suffering extreme damage to their own flourishing to provide necessary care. They are sacrificing more than their fair share, and more than is required by the basic facts of human biological and social existence. We can and should ameliorate some of this sacrifice through more just forms of social collaboration to provide care. Having offered these reflections on the definition and evaluation of sacrifice, let me articulate several features that must shape any conception of sacrificial love that is incorporated into a Christian ethic for dependent care relations. First, and most fundamentally, a sacrificial love ethic must treat sacrifice as an ordinary moral reality that is embedded in creation, as a necessary response to the dependency that is a significant part of every human life. This response cannot be exclusively affective; some human persons must give of their limited resources and energies for labor to allow other persons to survive and flourish, and this care is often given without any expectation of direct reciprocity. Thus, sacrifice is not an “impossible possibility”; it is not a contradiction of all our ordinary, sinful ways of interacting with one another. It is not limited to fleeting and extraordinary circumstances. Sacrifice is ordinary, mundane, and pervasive.

109

Sacrificial Models of Christian Love

109

Second, although sacrifice may serve to correct and redirect an overly selfish will, this is a secondary purpose. Any theological ethic that depicts sacrifice only as a remedy for sin will be distorted and devalue dependent care relations. When we view Christian love in terms of these relations, we see a human moral task that is given to us, a project at its beginning stages, a long-​term endeavor that we take up through positive, other-​regarding actions. We do not see a perfect, preexisting harmony that we proceed to disrupt through our selfishness. Furthermore, a view of sacrifice as a remedy for sinful inclinations has led the thinkers treated in this chapter to emphasize purity of the will over concrete consequences of our loving actions. However, an ethic of sacrifice for dependent care relations must engage the interplay among our will, our affections, and our concrete acts in service of another, as all these will impact the well-​being of the object of our caring. Third, precisely because sacrifice is an everyday, embodied moral reality, any ethic of sacrifice must be integrated with a broad conception of justice, one that incorporates distribution of labor and resources. A Christian ethic of sacrificial love will be harmful to caregivers if the corollary conception of justice is restricted to regulating the clash of egoistic interests or contracts among autonomous adults. Sacrifice can be distributed precisely because we are finite, embodied beings who require material resources (including food, clothing, shelter, time, and energy) to do the moral work of care. Sacrifice is concrete. And no matter how generous the caregiver may be with her resources, time, and energy, these have limits among embodied human beings. Thus, we need to determine a fair distribution of this sacrifice and consider ways that state, market, and family or kinship structures can facilitate such a fair distribution or supplement the resources of those who serve the common good by providing dependent care. This might mean family allowances; other forms of income support; publicly supported, high-​quality childcare and health care; or relief care. Fourth, a sacrificial love ethic must understand our engagement with nature as an arena of nuanced exercise of judgment and responsibility –​ not just as a source of corrupting instincts and needs. If Christian ethics aims at fostering life and well-​being, then moral responsibility involves engaging the natural forces that are part and parcel of our well-​being, both as threats to flourishing and as friends to flourishing. If we, as biological creatures, possess both prosocial and antisocial inclinations, as both contemporary biology and the experience of caregiving tell us, then we cannot conceive of Christian love as the transcendence of our nature. We must

110

110

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

engage our nature, understand and shape it, in accordance with a moral ideal, not one that is fully defined by nature itself, but certainly one that has reference to our flourishing as embodied creatures who are part of the natural world. I will take up these questions more fully in Chapter 6, as they have been explored in greater depth by thinkers operating in the Thomistic tradition, which turns more readily to nature as a source of moral guidance. As we shall see, that tradition must confront some very challenging questions about the role of nature in Christian ethics associated with new understandings of human origins and human inclinations presented by evolutionary theory. For the purposes of the present chapter, however, my point is this:  a Christian love ethic cannot simply avoid this challenge by leaping beyond nature. Some writers (including some in the Thomistic tradition) still write as if the Garden of Eden were a historical reality and thus continue to treat death, suffering, and competition, human realities that provide the foil for the moral work of caregivers, as symptoms of human sinfulness, best addressed by idealizing an original, lost moral purity. Among sacrificial love thinkers, Niebuhr is intellectually courageous enough to address new scientific knowledge about human evolution from other species through competition for survival. But as we have seen, he evades the implications of this knowledge for a Christian love ethic through a simplified conceptual binary between humans without freedom, fully embedded within natural processes, and humans with freedom, rising above natural processes. Such a binary, as we have seen, does a disservice to caregivers, evading and rendering problematic the moral conflicts and ambiguity that their work must engage on an everyday basis. Fifth, while any Christian ethic will affirm that our natural inclinations are suffused by sin, and while there is a legitimate spectrum of views among Christian ethics about the degree to which human nature has fallen, the profound distrust of natural inclinations represented in most of the thinkers in this chapter goes too far and flattens out the nuances of actual human relations of care. When we see caregiving as a form of Christian love –​including caregiving that will not be reciprocated and thus involves a form of sacrifice –​the very sharp distinction between Christian love and “natural” forms of loving put forth by Kierkegaard, Nygren, and Niebuhr no longer appears tenable. Precisely because caregivers, both inside and outside of the Christian tradition, are engaged in everyday sacrifices to build up (not tear down) the lives of dependent others, others who cannot fully reciprocate, it becomes difficult to assert that sacrifice is only possible

111

Sacrificial Models of Christian Love

111

through a grace that enables us to transcend our nature. This is not to say that selfishness and manipulation do not creep into every human relationship, and relationships with dependents present special dangers in this respect because of the power differentials within them. But first and foremost, if a child grows to adulthood and some semblance of well-​being, this is the result of another person’s positive moral effort at helping them to do so, however flawed the effort may have been. Sixth, a Christian love ethic must incorporate sacrifice into a complex and nondualistic model of moral agency, something akin to Miles’s account of bounded freedom. This ethic must recognize that sacrifice ordinarily exists in mutual interpenetration with creativity, fulfillment, and receipt of benefits. I do not claim that sacrifice never exists in simple opposition to self-​fulfillment or well-​being, that we never simply deny our own interests for those of the other. But sacrifice as an ordinary moral reality generally weaves in and through those aspects of life that build us up as persons, develop our talents and bring about our accomplishments, and deepen our relations with others. The experience of sacrificing for another is often tied up so intimately with the experience of joy in the other’s well-​being that we cannot easily disentangle them. As with other bipolar accounts, such as love or justice, self or other, the good or the right, public or private, or (as we shall see in the next chapter) special relations or agape, a bifurcation of sacrifice from creativity and fulfillment is likely to disregard, or actively hide away, the morally laden complexity that exists in the integration of these poles. This complexity and integration are the moral grist of dependent care relations: judgment calls about the balancing of competing needs, when to foster an appetite (in oneself or in another) and when to curb it, and when to help someone and when to challenge them to help themselves. We cannot value dependent care relations properly from a dichotomized account, nor can we integrate the polarities without attending to relations of care. Seventh, an ethic of sacrifice must incorporate some basic notion of the goods that sacrifice aims to further. Sacrifice is not for its own sake, nor, as I have noted, is its primary purpose the correction of a distorted, selfish will. Sacrifice is meant to further the well-​being of oneself or others, and decisions about whether sacrifice is called for must be made in relation to some account of what will thereby be accomplished: the baby will be fed because the caregiver got up in the middle of the night; the child will survive this infection because her society uses tax dollars for universal access to health care; the elderly person will be able to join a family gathering

112

112

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

because a son spent his day assisting her with transportation and basic needs. Just as some notion of the good is necessary for economics to illuminate caring relationships within the family without a hopelessly simplified yet contorted account of human motivations, so some notion of the good is necessary for theology to incorporate sacrifice as a key aspect of the Christian moral life without crushing vulnerable and marginalized caregivers with an ethic that idealizes heroic, transhistorical other-​regard. Thus my seventh characteristic connects to the eighth and final characteristic of a sacrificial love ethic that can value and support dependent care relations:  an ethic of sacrifice in service of human goods must be integrated with a notion of justice that protects both dependents and caregivers. I would agree with Andolsen and Miller-​McLemore that particular instances of sacrifice should be assessed according to justice criteria, to help discern when sacrifice is oppressive to particular persons. How voluntary is this sacrifice? What aim does it further  –​for example, will this sacrifice help challenge oppression, or does it call on a marginalized person to squelch her own life projects to forward the projects of another, probably with more social power?100 In the context of an entire life, does it enrich, or does it diminish the person who is sacrificing? As Miller-​McLemore sums it up: “Does sacrifice, in essence, lead to a more just and loving relationship?”101 Here we return to my definitional reflections about the nature of “good” and “bad” sacrifice. Justice should seek to critique and minimize “bad” sacrifice and to enable sustainable self-​gift.

Conclusion The sacrificial love tradition  –​at least as that tradition has developed since the advent of modernity –​is influenced in subtle and problematic ways by the same worldviews that pervade political and economic theory, as described in the previous chapter. These worldviews conceive the human person as fully mature and autonomous; the tradition assumes but ignores the pervasive need for care that is a constitutive part of the human condition. Although the Christian tradition possesses resources that can embrace our dependency on the natural and the supernatural levels and can integrate this dependency with a profound understanding of human equality before God, the recent sacrificial love tradition has not adequately tapped into these resources. Instead, the tradition has sought to Andolsen, “Agape in Feminist Ethics,” 77. Miller-​McLemore, “Generativity,” 37–​38.

100 101

113

Sacrificial Models of Christian Love

113

reclaim the importance of Christianity by painting Christian discipleship in opposition to the autonomous and egoistic actor of secular modernity. Unfortunately, this opposition assumes the validity of the picture that it opposes. Furthermore, in its rejection of equality as an Enlightenment ideal that sanctions too much self-​interest, this tradition completely obscures the importance of equality as fulfillment of basic needs and renders its achievement impossible. In their privileged obsession with heroic sacrifice, these thinkers unwittingly underwrite the sacrifice of the less privileged, a sacrifice of the prerequisites of survival and basic well-​being. This tradition can benefit from, though it must change in response to, engagement with feminist work that deconstructs and reconstructs the moral agent of modernity.

114

Ch apter  5

Agape as Equal Regard: Importing Moral Boundaries into Christian Ethics

One of the most widely discussed and respected twentieth-​century treatments of agape was put forth by Gene Outka in his 1972 book Agape: An Ethical Analysis. Outka has incurred appreciation, or at least milder criticism than that directed at Niebuhr, from many Christian feminist theologians.1 In part, this is because Outka analyzes agape through the lens of secular philosophy that does not encourage self-​sacrifice but presumes the legitimacy of concern for the self. Outka acknowledges that moments of sacrifice may have a role in the Christian moral life, but suggests that self-​sacrifice should always be instrumental to promoting the well-​being of the other, lest it become a goal in itself, turning the self in on itself.2 He further argues that for the good of the neighbor as well as for the good of oneself, we should resist exploitation and should not give a “blank check” to the other to take advantage of us.3 However, a deeper analysis reveals the need for a more robust feminist critique of agape as “equal regard.” In fact, the body of philosophical work that Outka uses to analyze conceptions of Christian love is itself deeply problematic from the perspective of dependent care relations. It has been subjected to very effective criticism from feminist philosophers, but this critique has yet to be applied to Outka himself. The problems with this philosophical framework are clearest in Outka’s treatment of agape and “special relations,” or our particular, intensive bonds. In this chapter, then, I examine Outka’s understanding of agape as equal regard or universal love, his corresponding notion of “special relations,” and the debate that he sparked within Christian ethics about the relative importance of these types of relationship within the Christian moral For appreciation, see Gudorf, “Parenting, Mutual Love, and Sacrifice”; for lukewarm reception and/​ or criticism, see Andolsen, “Agape in Feminist Ethics”; Purvis, “Mothers, Neighbors, and Strangers.” 2 Outka, Agape, 278. 3 Ibid. 1

114

115

Agape as Equal Regard

115

life. This debate did not escape Outka’s dyadic, gendered construct of two competing types of moral obligation and eventually dwindled without offering a satisfactory account of how particular caregiving relationships might be integrated with a commitment to the well-​being of all human persons. This debate within Christian ethics shows striking resemblance to the early justice and care debates sparked within feminist ethics by the work of Carol Gilligan. As feminist philosopher Joan Tronto has shown, the justice and care debates reflected prevailing “moral boundaries” that marginalized dependency and care, excluding these from coherent articulation within dominant moral theories. However, work in feminist care ethics has moved well beyond Gilligan’s discussion of two moral orientations toward an integrated understanding of justice and care, one that focuses not just on moral orientations but on the concrete activity of care and the allocation of responsibility for care. Recent developments in political feminist care ethics have redrawn the “moral boundaries” identified by Tronto, creating new possibilities for articulating the moral and political content and implications of care. The same movement has not yet occurred within Christian ethics; thus Christian love ethicists can learn from this feminist work. In this chapter, I  analyze both these conversations to show how the discussion within feminist ethics broke out of these “moral boundaries,” while Christian ethics did not. In Chapter 8, I will give more focused attention to a few feminist thinkers as resources for a Christian ethic of dependent care relations.

Equal Regard or Universal Love: Agape as Inclusive and Disinterested In the 1972 book, his first and best-​known writing on agape, Outka examines the extensive body of work on Christian love produced between 1930, the date of publication of Nygren’s Agape and Eros, and Outka’s own writing. Outka asserts that the primary purpose of this work is not to put forth his own theory of Christian love, but rather “to bring badly-​needed clarity to a theological literature which is confused as well as rich.”4 In pursuit of this goal, Outka explicitly adopts the tools of twentieth-​century Anglo-​ American analytic moral philosophy,5 and seeks some common normative Ibid., 2. Ibid. Many early analytic philosophers were characterized by their attention to linguistic analysis and their dismissal of normative dimensions of philosophy. By adopting Anglo-​American analytic moral philosophy, as he explicitly does, Outka makes clear that he is referring to a later generation of “analytic philosophers” who self-​define as such based on a shared commitment to precise analysis

4 5

116

116

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

content among these widely varied treatments. He identifies the following features: “Agape is a regard for the neighbor which in crucial respects is independent and unalterable. To these features there is a corollary: the regard is for every person qua human existent, to be distinguished from those special traits, actions, etc., which distinguish particular personalities from each other.”6 Further, drawing on Karl Barth: “agape means ‘identification with (the loved one’s) interests in utter independence of his attractiveness.’ ”7 Outka summarizes this conception of agape with the term “equal regard.” In this definition, and in Outka’s subsequent discussion, it is clear that the core element of equal regard is unalterability: agape does not withdraw, but is steadfast in the face of change in the loved one. For Outka, the “corollary” follows from this central fact of unalterability; it is precisely the “special traits, actions, etc.,” that draw out a love that is conditional on those traits or actions rather than independent; thus it is precisely those special traits or actions that render our love alterable. If the trait alters, if the action ceases, so may the love. Here is our first clue that certain relationships will be obscured in Outka’s account: as Sally Purvis has eloquently articulated, disinterestedness is not a necessary corollary to unconditional commitment. Many parents, for example, love their children in a way that is deeply invested in and attentive to particular characteristics, gifts, and needs, and is simultaneously unconditional and unwavering.8 Their love can focus on the unique goodness of their child while being regulated by the rightness of unconditional commitment. In his emphasis on equality, universality, and abstention from preference, Outka’s formulation is clearly influenced by Soren Kierkegaard.9 Kierkegaard is often characterized as an advocate of sacrificial love, and indeed there is less difference between Outka’s conception of “equal regard” and more explicitly sacrificial theologies than many observers presume. As Kierkegaard emphasizes, loving the neighbor as oneself is no of limited, sharply defined questions, applying this analysis to a variety of subfields, including moral philosophy. 6 Ibid., 9. 7 Ibid., 11–​12, quoting Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/​2, trans. G. W. Bromiley (Edinburgh, UK: T & T Clark, 1958), 745. 8 Purvis, “Mothers, Neighbors and Strangers,” 24–​28. 9 Outka states explicitly that characteristics of Kierkegaard’s notion of agape adequately represent the literature that Outka reviews (Outka, Agape, 16). However, Kierkegaard is the only writer examined in depth by Outka who predates, and rather significantly, the time period Outka sets out to review. It would thus seem that Kierkegaard informs rather than represents that aspect of the twentieth-​ century literature that Outka extracts as the normative core of the meaning of agape.

117

Agape as Equal Regard

117

straightforward, “reasonable” moral requirement. For creatures steeped in self-​love, to love the neighbor as oneself demands “the change of eternity.”10 This command “is as perilous to self-​love as possible. Self-​love itself perceives the impossibility of wriggling out of it.”11 And when we incorporate action to meet concrete needs into our conception of agape, as attention to dependent care relations requires us to do, the challenge of loving one’s neighbor as oneself becomes evident: it seems to require sharing my energies and resources to a degree that would quickly exhaust and impoverish me. By setting up his inquiry as a descriptive one, Outka invests this notion of equal regard with the appearance of the authority of tradition, and many subsequent thinkers have taken his definition as authoritative.12 However, Outka is not offering a neutral survey and description. In order to reach the “normative core” of equal regard, he must dispense with some of the central theological claims of his primary interlocutors. Equal regard is not the normative core of meaning in Catholic personalist theories of Christian love as mutuality aimed at communion.13 Such theories highlight precisely the particular qualities of the persons loved and valorize love relationships in which the lover receives something in return for her love. In contrast, while Outka acknowledges that mutuality and communion are possible outcomes of agape, and ones to be hoped for –​communion is not a reward that somehow cancels the Christian nature of the love –​ he insists that agape will never be dependent upon the achievement of mutuality or communion. Outka’s account replaces with an affirmation of universality Karl Barth’s insistence that the primary location of agape is within the Christian community, while he shows Reinhold Niebuhr’s greater emphasis on the need for self-​sacrifice to be internally inconsistent, because it cannot be acted upon by all persons at the same time.14 Though Outka does not attempt to justify his conception of agape by drawing on biblical scholarship, it is also worth noting that the term agape as used in Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 18. Ibid., 20. 12 Meilaender, Friendship; Harlan R. Beckley, “A Christian Affirmation of Rawls’s Idea of Justice as Fairness, Part II,” Journal of Religious Ethics 14, no. 2 (Fall 1986), 230–​231; William Werpehowski, “Agape and Special Relations,” in eds. Santurri and Werpehowski, Love Commandments, 138–​156; Purvis, “Mothers, Neighbors and Strangers,” 21. 13 See, for example, Martin D’Arcy, S.J., The Mind and Heart of Love:  Lion and Unicorn:  A  Study in Eros and Agape (New  York:  Meridian Books, 1956); Robert O. Johann, S.J., The Meaning of Love: An Essay Towards a Metaphysics of Intersubjectivity (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1959); Jules Toner, The Experience of Love (Cleveland: Corpus Books, 1968). 14 Outka, Agape, 276–​278. 10

11

118

118

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

the New Testament does not signify “equal regard.”15 Accordingly, “equal regard” should be recognized as Outka’s own preferred notion of agape rather than as the consensus of modern Christian theological ethicists. We should note that the tools of twentieth-​century Anglo-​American moral philosophy are not neutral analytic tools, but are characterized by a strong methodological individualism: inquiries generally start from the assumption of an autonomous individual making moral choices between pursuing self-​interest or engaging in altruistic attention to the interests of others.16 The problem of “special moral obligations,” or the place of our commitments to particular persons within a universalist ethic, is prominent within this literature. Robert Goodin points out that analytic moral philosophy conceives of special obligations as grounded in contract or promise, a choice of “central case” that colors every aspect of the analyses.17 As we shall see, the notion that special obligations are the result of free choice informs Outka’s earliest formulation of the relation between these obligations and agape. Outka offers a second statement of the nature of Christian love in a lengthy 1992 article exploring “universal love.”18 Here, rather than employing secular philosophical tools, Outka presents his conception of love in more explicitly theological categories. However, despite some development, and a change of label from “equal regard” to “universal love,” the conception here is essentially similar.19 Outka makes a theocentric case that Christians are called to love universally. God’s love is universal; we are obliged to express our love for God by loving whom God loves.20 Universal love, for Outka, incorporates a weak form of impartiality as universalizability or interpersonal consistency, intended to rule out double standards and “self-​partiality in particular.”21 Beyond this minimal test to forestall Steven P. Ahearne-​Kroll, “ ‘Who Are My Mother and My Brothers?’ Family Relations and Family Language in the Gospel of Mark,” Journal of Religion 81, no. 1 (January 2001), 1–​25. 16 I do not mean to imply that analytic philosophy is always unhelpful in sorting out the meaning of love and justice or in illuminating the centrality of dependency in human life. However, analyses focused narrowly on one or two mature and autonomous moral actors make presumptions that marginalize dependency and care. 17 Robert E. Goodin, Protecting the Vulnerable:  A  Reanalysis of Our Social Responsibilities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). 18 Outka, “Universal Love and Impartiality.” 19 Outka clarifies, in a later exchange with Stephen Pope, that the shift in language from “equal regard” to “universal love” does not signal any “normative sea change”; the term “equal regard” itself was a “shorthand referent” for a “cluster of convictions” about “an independent and unalterable commitment to the well-​being of others and a view of the neighbor as irreducibly valuable,” a cluster that he intends “universal love” also to encompass. See Gene Outka, “Comment on ‘Love in Contemporary Christian Ethics,’ ” Journal of Religious Ethics 26, no. 2 (Fall, 1998), 438. 20 Outka, “Universal Love and Impartiality,” 2–​3. 21 Ibid., 75. 15

119

Agape as Equal Regard

119

unjustified discrimination, Outka’s account of “universal love” allows for a certain attention to context in moral situations. The context, however, is limited to differences between the self and one similarly situated neighbor. Universal love allows for a “practical swerve” in the direction of the other’s interests, to counter our inherent self-​preoccupation. Universal love makes room for the phenomenon of “obedient willing,” or claiming our own agency and prioritizing our own projects and commitments when they exist in response to our discernment of God’s will for us. Finally, universal love accommodates the fact that we can do more good for ourselves than for others.22

Universal Moral Obligations, Individual Moral Agents, and the Disappearance of Dependency A number of commentators have reflected that Outka’s conception of agape as equal regard or universal love seems to reduce to a version of Kant’s “respect for persons.”23 They point out that a conception of agape that is simultaneously universalist and focused on the individual moral agent must be primarily negative, in the sense of abstention from harm, or attitudinal, in the sense of a basic respect for persons. Though Outka takes issue with these characterizations of his work, emphasizing his theocentric focus, it must be said that the architecture underlying his ethic is more similar to Kant than to many classic Christian thinkers in key respects. Specifically, Outka’s conception of human dignity and equality, and the inclusive scope of agape, is framed within a different conception of the relation between the individual and the community than that presumed by earlier thinkers such as Augustine or Aquinas. Augustine, for example, distinguished between our internal attitude (equal love for all) and our external actions, in which we express this attitude toward those we encounter within the ordered structures of nature and history, with family taking precedence.24 He, and Aquinas after him, understood the “universal” scope of Christian love to take shape, for created human Ibid., 79–​88. James Gustafson, Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective, Volume Two:  Ethics and Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 164n3; Stephen Pope, “‘Equal Regard’ Versus ‘Special Relations’? The Inclusiveness of Agape.” Journal of Religion 77, no 3. (July 1997), 366; Stephen Post, A Theory of Agape:  On the Meaning of Christian Love (Lewisville, PA:  Bucknell University Press, 1990), 31; Purvis, “Mothers, Neighbors and Strangers,” 22; Edward Vacek, S. J., Love, Human and Divine: The Heart of Christian Ethics (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1994), 160–​161, 270. 24 Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, tr. D. W. Robinson, Jr. (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1958), I.28. 22 23

120

120

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

beings, within the context of finite, diversified roles within ordered social structures.25 Outka, in contrast, frames his analysis in a way that presumes an individual who exists prior to such roles and structures. This framing is reflected in a new emphasis, by Outka as well as several of his intellectual influences, on randomizing the neighbors we are to serve. Thus Kierkegaard asserts to anyone trying to determine who is the neighbor: “Shut your door and pray to God … when you open the door that you shut in order to pray to God and go out the very first person you meet is the neighbor, whom you shall love.”26 Ramsey speaks of the paradigm of our obligations in Christian love as our actions toward “whomever happen(s) to be standing by,”27 or “a single, chance neighbor.”28 Both Kierkegaard and Ramsey emphasize randomness explicitly in order to neutralize our own selfish preferences, to curb the grasping desire exercised in our own autonomous choice of love objects. In the same vein, Outka notes that equal regard is “universal in that not a single person is to be excluded though of course de facto not all come into range.”29 He acknowledges that very many people may “come into range” in the sense of being affected by our actions.30 Still, this language of “coming into range” does not help us adequately to sort out how we can extend ourselves “universally” or nonexclusively and yet account for the limits on our ability to help everyone. We do not passively sit and wait for persons to come into our range. We determine with whom we interact, to a large degree, by where we live, what we choose as a vocation, and what pressing human need in some other part of the world we choose to aid (or not). Our encounters are not so random as to neutralize the many individual and social decisions that place us in proximity to particular needy neighbors (or comfortably distant from needy persons who live in poorer countries or worse neighborhoods). Ironically, those who “come into range” for us, those persons who are most likely to be given rather than chosen, may be certain kin relations –​our parents, our children, our siblings. In contrast, the young woman who boards a plane in the Philippines and travels to Los Angeles to care for the children of young, well-​educated professionals, leaving her own children behind for Augustine, City of God XIX.14, trans. Henry Bettenson (New York: Penguin Books, 1972), 873. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 51. 27 Ramsey, Basic Christian Ethics, 39. 28 Ibid., 42. 29 Outka, Agape, 12. 30 Ibid., 284–​285. 25 26

121

Agape as Equal Regard

121

years in the care of a grandmother or cousin, is not “coming into range.” She and her employer are each making choices in the context of global migration patterns, deepening global inequalities, cultural norms about child care, and gender norms. This language of “coming into range” erases key aspects of our moral agency, the aspects that deal with situating ourselves among certain persons and not others, with choosing which among multiple possibilities for positive assistance we will pursue. Such an emphasis on helping those who happen to be near us made more sense (though, perhaps, it was not completely satisfactory) in Augustine’s time, when there was little sense that human agents could collectively and intentionally alter social and political institutions and the organization of social relations. Augustine presumed that the system of social and political relations around him was an expression of God’s providence; even when these relations seemed deeply unjust, they were organized according to the measure of God’s infinite wisdom.31 Thus to respond first to those closest to us was to cooperate with God’s intentions. Today there is a greater sense that our agency can and should involve shaping these social and political structures, not simply responding to them, though there is certainly disagreement about the degree to which existing human institutions can be reshaped. Our equal regard for all persons must be reflected in social institutions that facilitate equality of autonomy and of basic need fulfillment for all persons. This equality cannot be achieved through the summation of chance individual encounters and efforts. Outka’s 1992 discussion of “universal love” encounters similar difficulties: it raises the question, what could “universal love” possibly mean? Whereas we might be able to extend Kantian respect for persons to all human beings, love implies a richer, more particular engagement, one that seems incompatible with universality. Outka himself tells us that “a love can be discernibly universal in two respects at least.” These are elucidated in contrast or in relation to our “particular roles and practices” (the term he substitutes for “special relations” in this later work). Negatively, universal love “can set boundaries within which particular roles and practices come into their own.”32 Outka seems to mean that universal love strengthens unalterable commitments, imposing restraints that allow particular Thus, for example, in book XIX, ­chapter 15 of City of God, Augustine describes slavery as the result of sin; slaves are either being punished for sin or may make good moral use of slavery by submitting willingly to their masters as a sign of subservience to God: “this can only happen by the judgment of God, with whom there is no injustice, and who knows how to allot different punishments according to the deserts of the offenders.” 32 Outka, “Universal Love and Impartiality,” 90 31

122

122

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

relationships to flourish; it is not clear, however, what the connection is between “unalterable” and “universal.” Positively, universal love “can go beyond the limits these roles and practices may impose.”33 But the status of this “going beyond” is not clear. Does “going beyond” mean attending to a few other persons beyond those whom we most love and to whom we have particular responsibilities? If so, this is hardly universal in the usual sense; and the energies and resources we expend on these few persons may quickly place us in special relations to them. Furthermore, if agape goes beyond “the limits and roles these practices may impose,” are we here in the realm of supererogation? Is the “going beyond” a “going above and beyond”? It would seem this is not the case, since Outka has outlined universal love as a foundational obligation based in God’s love for us. Thus even with this explication of two ways in which loves can be universal, it is still not clear what “universal love” means in the concrete; and care is quite concrete. In a world of primordially separate individuals who choose their various commitments, a universal obligation must attach to the autonomous individual rather than to a network of persons embedded in an enormous web of social relations. But to ensure that every person is loved in any sense that involves positive effort to instantiate human equality as the fulfillment of basic needs, we must collaborate with one another through communal efforts and social policies. Here is the first point at which Tronto can point toward a more constructive approach. Tronto offers an account of four stages of care that can be, and often are, performed by different persons. Her analysis provides a helpful tool to counter Outka’s intensive focus on the individual moral agent. “Caring about” means to recognize that care is necessary, to identify a need and determine that the need should be met. We become aware, for example, that children in another part of the world, or another part of our community, are sick or hungry. This requires a certain degree of attentiveness and openness. “Taking care of ” means to take some level of responsibility for meeting the need, but “taking care of ” may be done from afar: the individual may write a check to a charity organization, or the doctor may place an order for blood tests. “Caregiving” is the stage in which direct care is actually given; this is the place in which the caregiver comes into contact with the recipient of care. This phase often involves care for bodies. Finally, Tronto identifies “care-​receiving” as a stage of care, to recognize the agency of the recipient of care in Ibid.

33

123

Agape as Equal Regard

123

responding to care, and the importance of the care recipient’s own sense that the need has been met.34 This framework helps us to see that in Outka’s account, agape will often take the form of “caring about” or “taking care of ” rather than caregiving. If love is to be in some sense “universal,” yet enacted by the individual, it will be far too widely distributed to involve the intensive effort involved in caregiving. In fact, given the abstraction from consequences we saw in many contemporary sacrificial love theologies, we may wonder whether the Christian even reaches the point of “caring about”: can loving the neighbor from Kierkegaard’s desert island meet this standard? It is not clear that, in the effort to restrain one’s self-​love to equal neighbor-​love, one is even reaching the point of identifying a need for care that should be fulfilled. Tronto’s account reveals care to be a collaborative social process. The nurse may administer medication and wash bodies, but her efforts are supported by many forms of “caring about” and “taking care of,” such as legislators appropriating health care funds, doctors supervising treatment, and hospital administrators hiring and training employees. Analyzing care as a social process allows us to ask critical questions about the social organization of care, the social meanings of care, and the valuation of various forms and stages of care. Tronto notes that in our society, it is primarily the socially powerful who “take care of,” and primarily the less powerful who engage in direct caregiving.35 We will return to this important insight soon.

Equal Regard and Special Relations: A Dichotomous, Gendered Construct Outka’s abstraction of the individual from preexisting webs of social relations deeply impacts his account of our particular, intensive commitments, what he terms in the 1972 work “special relations.” These include “spouses, children, friends, colleagues, perhaps co-​religionists, perhaps fellow countrymen.”36 Outka asks whether these relationships can be expressions of agape. We cannot assume that they are, he says, because “agape enjoins one to attribute to everyone alike an irreducible worth and dignity, to rule out comparisons at the most basic level, to refuse to defer to the particular social and ethnic groups to which individuals happen to belong.37 Outka Tronto, Moral Boundaries, 105–​108. Ibid., 114–​115. 36 Outka, Agape, 268–​269. 37 Ibid. 34 35

124

124

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

describes special relations such that they are grounded almost exclusively in preference, and the grounds for preference are themselves conceived very narrowly: “obvious physical differences such as age, sex, intellectual endowments, and beauty; differences in particular interests, tastes, and values, many of which may not be the appropriate subject for moral praise and blame; meritarian differences, reflecting the possessor’s use of his talents and opportunities.”38 The absence here of kinship as a basic reason for offering more of our time and energy to some persons than to others is striking. The reasons Outka recognizes for developing special relations imply that these relations are chosen, not given. Outka acknowledges that some special relations are morally compelling in their own right. However, he argues that special relations must have a different grounding, separate from agape, and he does not elucidate this different grounding. In his words, “Agape is the guardian in rather than the direct inspiration of every special relation.”39 Though special relations are important, they threaten to trump agape understood as universal regard.40 Thus his account of agape and special relations depicts these as mutually exclusive and competing. The moral task, as Outka depicts it, is an appropriate balancing of these competing relational obligations, which can remain mutually exclusive because they are defined primarily in terms of the internal attitude of the moral agent. Influenced by the parable of the Good Samaritan, and by experiences of caregiving, we could instead, or additionally, understand relations with loved ones and strangers in terms of an element that they frequently have in common: concrete actions to meet the needs of others. Then the moral challenge might include some balancing on the personal level, but would also involve work for the sort of justice that ensures everyone finds a place within personal, economic, social, and political structures that allocate care and responsibility for care, as well as the material prerequisites of care: food, shelter, and health care. An exclusive focus on agape as a matter of abstention from preference locates all responsibility for the allocation of love and care in the will of the individual moral agent. This conveniently excuses the privileged among us for our broader social responsibility for meeting needs for care. The sharp distinction between strangers and enemies who need help and intimate loved ones who enrich our lives Ibid., 270. In a similar vein, see page  262, where the “particularity” that Outka says agape may attend to without violating equal regard is assimilated to “achievements” and “excellences.” 39 Ibid., 274. 40 Ibid., 272. 38

125

Agape as Equal Regard

125

obscures important moral realities that exist on a continuum in our relationships with both strangers and intimate loved ones. Outka maps duty and random, heteronomous imposition onto our relationships with strangers and desire and fulfillment onto our relationships with intimates. In reality, both kinds of relationship involve a mixture of choice and imposition, of duty and desire. This sharp distinction also creates implicit, passive “others”: the ones who, unlike “us,” are needy, call on our help, and are not agents of agape. But our children may be the ones who are hungry, and we should not assume that the only ones concerned about agape are those privileged with the choice about what to do with extra resources. Because Outka remains so focused on the state of the individual will, he needs to engage in a certain sleight of hand when he inquires about the relationship of agape to social justice (though he appears to be unaware of this). He changes the content of agape as he shifts attention from the individual moral agent to social structures. Outka suggests that the notion of social justice closest to agape is “to each according to his needs,” because “what is often sought above all is to lessen suffering, and usually without reference to desert.”41 This is an odd statement, since his earlier treatment of agape focused on regard and not response to need or the lessening of suffering. And in fact, his treatment of agape expressed by the individual must abstract from need fulfillment to be expressed equally and universally. We might cut Outka a break here –​it is good that he is concerned about need fulfillment! –​except that his ensuing discussion reinforces his problematic views of special relations. Outka explicitly contrasts the fulfillment of need with what he takes to be the legitimate but different ground of special relations –​most commonly, contract, preference, or kinship relations abstracted from need.42 The implication is that needs are fulfilled by agape, and special relations have another purpose altogether. Underneath this presumption lies the privatized family as the reliable but invisible site of dependent care and naturalized bonds of affection to motivate and reward such care. But needs are fulfilled primarily within particular, intensive relations, particularly dependent care relations. If agape itself is about the fulfillment of needs and the relief of suffering, then “special relations” of dependent care must be expressions of agape and not merely guarded by agape. Ibid., 91. Outka again defends “need fulfillment” as the appropriate understanding of agape in a 1974 article addressing the moral grounding of universal access to health care. Outka, “Social Justice and Equal Access to Health Care,” Journal of Religious Ethics 2, no. 1 (1974), 11–​32. 42 Outka, Agape, 91–​92. 41

126

126

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

Outka’s correlation between agape and justice as need fulfillment reveals an intuition about the connection between distributive justice and concrete acts of care, however. The appropriate conception of the relationship could be better stated like this: distributive justice should support agape as need fulfillment by supporting relations of dependent care –​justice means, in part, distribution of the material prerequisites for the network of particular relations that can allow the concrete actualization of agape’s universal inclusiveness.

The Debate over Agape and Special Relations Outka’s treatment of “special relations” probably received more commentary and critique than any other aspect of his 1972 book. Most of the subsequent commentators accepted the conceptual formulation that agape and special relations are two differently grounded Christian moral obligations. They are mutually exclusive (although agape may guard special relations, special relations qua special relations are not expressions of agape), and they compete for our moral and material energies. Participants in this debate can be divided roughly into four approaches:  those that place special relations at the heart of agape, over and against inclusive and universal concern; reclamations of the Thomistic order of love tradition; reclamations of the Protestant notions of vocation; and universalist responses emphasizing the moral obligation of individuals to respond to the immensity of unmet human needs. None of these approaches achieves an integration of particular and universal relational obligations adequate to properly locate and value dependent care relations within a Christian love ethic.

Special Relations as the Heart of Agape One of the earliest responses to Outka simply reverses his suspicion of special relations as a threat to universal agape. Stephen Post’s 1990 book, A Theory of Agape, is written specifically and explicitly to counter Outka. Post draws on scripture and everyday experience to argue that “friendship, marriage, family, and ‘special’ relations in general should be at the center rather than at the periphery of Christian reflection on the love theme.”43 In this first writing on the subject, Post asserts that “(t)o ignore or devalue ‘special relations’ is to reduce love to passing episodes like the Post, A Theory of Agape, 29.

43

127

Agape as Equal Regard

127

one in the biblical parable of the Good Samaritan … .”44 Such dismissal of the Good Samaritan’s outreach to stranger and enemy does not provide a tenable account of Christian love; in later work, Post takes more seriously the moral gravity of our obligations to those outside our own circle of intimate relations. He posits two “spheres of love”: spheres of personal and of impersonal ethics.45 Now echoing Outka’s framework, Post asserts that these two spheres are both important. They compete, and must be balanced.46 We should not attempt a systematic ordering of these two responsibilities. The shape that they take in each life should reflect individual discernment and conscience.47 Post’s contributions have the merit of illustrating the theoretical bind created by Outka’s formulation. As long as agape and special relations are seen as separate and competing obligations, our attention must focus on one reality at the expense of another. The two obligations are presented as competing and incommensurable, and the balance between them is left up to individual “discernment.” Individual discernment, however, occurs within the social, economic, and political structures that organize the allocation of caring responsibilities. When these structures are pervaded by profound injustice, the individual moral agent, on her own, cannot adequately balance these moral obligations, nor can the privatized family, to which Post largely turns with the “new familism” that he advocates throughout Spheres of Love.

Thomistic Reclamations Roman Catholic thinkers have generally entered the discussion about “special relations” through the Thomistic tradition, which places such relationships at the center of the Christian moral life. They may draw on this tradition directly, as in Stephen Pope’s reclamation of the Thomistic “order of love,” or may evidence Thomistic influences filtered through the lens of modern or contemporary thought, as in Jesuit theologian Edward Vacek’s rich and theocentric account of love as “an affective, affirming participation in the goodness of a being (or Being),” which is influenced by the “transcendental Thomism” of Karl Rahner.48 For both Pope and Vacek, love is an Post, A Theory of Agape, 100. Stephen G. Post, Spheres of Love: Toward a New Ethics of the Family (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1994). 46 Ibid., 7. 47 Ibid., 105. 48 Vacek, Love, Human and Divine, 34. 44 45

128

128

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

emotional response to value or goodness, one that brings a certain sort of union with the object of our love. Such a notion of love clearly must begin from rich, intensive particular relations. Both thinkers also give some attention to the need to relate love to justice. Neither, however, engages the global injustice that pervades the contemporary social organization of care. I will give more attention to Pope in the next chapter, in which I argue that affirmation of and concrete support for relations of dependent care must follow Thomas by deeply integrating love and justice, albeit in a way transformed to suit a much different social and economic context than that in which Thomas wrote. For my present purposes, I observe that while Pope and Vacek each conceive of networks of relational obligations in more complex terms than Post’s account of two “spheres,” neither of them moves far enough toward the required integration. Vacek asserts a need for inclusive respect for all human persons and even for the fulfillment of basic human needs or positive rights. However, like most of his contemporary interlocutors, Vacek assimilates the fulfillment of these basic needs and rights to a question of the prioritization of our individual loves, thus relocating the question from an issue in social ethics to one of personal responsibility and individual discernment about the objects of our love and care.49 Pope offers a detailed defense of the Thomistic “order of love,” according to which our responsibilities to others are calibrated to their proximity to us, as part of a providentially ordered system for meeting the needs of all.50 The “order of love” presumes that we live in a network of relationships that differ from one another in terms of degree of intimacy rather than falling into qualitatively different categories. However, when he enters the conversation about agape and special relations, he adopts Outka’s framework. Pope argues that both “equal regard” and “special relations,” in other words, universal respect and particular affections, are encompassed within agape.51 But he follows Outka in conceiving these as qualitatively distinct categories of relationship, and so his inclusiveness, like Post’s, ultimately implies “balancing” rather than integration. Pope also refers achievement of this inclusiveness to the individual moral agent; he does not turn the discussion to social institutions and public policies necessary to integrate love and justice in the contemporary (global rather than feudal) context. Ibid., 179. Stephen J. Pope, The Evolution of Altruism and the Ordering of Love (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1994.) 51 Pope, “ ‘Equal Regard’ versus ‘Special Relations’?” 354. 49 50

129

Agape as Equal Regard

129

Pope’s brief references to justice presume a basic respect for persons but do not move toward the distribution of care and its material prerequisites.52

Vocation and the Discernment of Obligations Another group of thinkers explicitly accepts Outka’s understanding of agape as definitive and then addresses seemingly intractable tensions between personal and universal commitments through the Protestant notions of vocation and orders of creation. Thus Gilbert Meilaender, in his 1981 book Friendship: A Study in Theological Ethics, explores five “tensions” between agape and philia, or friendship.53 The first three chapters of the book are devoted, in particular, to explorations of the three characteristics of agape that Meilaender takes to have been definitively established by Outka  –​ that it is nonpreferential, expects no return, and does not change. Philia, while morally valuable, stands in tension with agape because it is quintessentially preferential, mutual, and subject to change. Meilaender’s choice of friendship as a focus reflects Outka’s presumption that special relations are chosen to bring us fulfillment, rather than being prevoluntary relations oriented toward the fulfillment of basic material needs. Families do come up, however, in the context of Meilaender’s discussion of the quintessential illustration of neighbor-​love, the parable of the Good Samaritan. Because of our inherent finitude and basic commitments to friends and family, he argues, a love like that shown by the Good Samaritan is “not a love fitted for society.”54 The Samaritan “evidently is bound by no special ties to others –​family or friends –​since he writes a blank check for the innkeeper.”55 This leads to Meilaender’s proposal of a strategy through which “love can remain non-​preferential and yet be fitted for society through a commitment to vocation.”56 Vocation requires discerning God’s call to a particular form of service to others and living out that call despite the costs to oneself, and without regard for the merits or attractiveness of the others one serves. Meilaender understands there to be “a whole system of vocations used by God to care for (many) neighbors.”57 Within this system, “the final responsibility for meeting those universal needs rests with God.”58 Stephen J. Pope, Human Evolution and Christian Ethics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 249. 53 Meilaender, Friendship. 54 Ibid., 34. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid., 86. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid., 100. 52

130

130

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

Meilaender has written movingly about parenthood and family bonds in other contexts, including the unconditional commitment these often involve and the prevoluntary nature of the bonds.59 However, in this book, framed as it is by Outka’s analysis, parenthood is obscured as a vocation. The book pits vocation (an expression of “universality” in loving, divorced from personal fulfillment) against the rewards of friendship. Where would relations of dependent care fit into this picture? Luther saw marriage and family as one of the estates or orders within which we find our vocation and understood family as integrated with economic life.60 However, Meilaender obscures caregiving as a vocation when he observes that the demands of vocation may require one to move frequently, thus exacting a cost in terms of deep personal relationships left behind. The intrafamilial relations, those who presumably move with the spouse or parent, are not mentioned here. One can see here the neoclassical economic assumption of family as a private unit, with a single utility function, though here the family end is understood as a vocation of service rather than utility maximization: the vocation of the family head requires all to move. If we recognize parenthood or care for one’s aging parents as a vocation and a form of work, we might note that vocations often require staying in one place; surely this is more often good for one’s dependents. This sort of “vocation” has simply disappeared, however, in Meilaender’s analysis. For Meilaender, the individual Christian finds a vocation that appears to correlate to paid employment in the contemporary money economy. The person with this vocation has a wife who handles care work, which does not require theorization. Meilaender, in fact, illustrates beautifully how Outka’s formulation of agape and special relations presumes and supports a privatized, gendered family as the site of care work. William Werpehowski also makes clear that he takes Outka’s understanding of agape as authoritative.61 To address the place of special relations, Werpehowski draws on Karl Barth’s definition of vocation as “the whole of the particularity, limitation, and restriction in which every man meets the divine call and command … and to which above all wholeness and See, for example, Gilbert Meilaender, Things That Count: Essays Moral and Theological (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2000), especially the essays “I Want to Burden My Loved Ones” and “The Meaning and Presence of Children.” 60 Paul Althaus, The Ethics of Martin Luther, trans. Robert C. Schultz (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972), 36. Luther spoke of the “orders,” also known as “institutions,” “estates,” or “offices,” at various points throughout his works. 61 Werpehowski, “Agape and Special Relations,” 138. 59

131

Agape as Equal Regard

131

therefore total differentiation and specification are intrinsically proper.”62 In light of this definition, according to Werpehowski, we must align and integrate our special relations “with a surrounding context of character, social situation, and normative ideals  –​including the ideal of agape.”63 In pointing to God’s providence as the ultimate location at which the tensions between universal and particular commitments are addressed, both of these thinkers gloss over serious economic and political injustices instantiated in the arrangement of the vocations available to us. Any affirmation of a providential “system of vocations” must always retain a critical edge:  is the current shape of the family, economy, and dependent care relations truly expressive of God’s will? Can we affirm current economic realities and the decision of the state to maintain only minimal support for the “private” activities of dependent care and simply find our vocation within these structures? Outka himself, in his later work, reflects the influence of friendly interlocutors such as Meilaender and Werpehowski, with their emphasis on the finitude of persons and situatedness within communities and systems of vocations. He moves to more communitarian language about “particular roles and practices” in his 1992 essay, and here focuses far more on the positive aspects of such relationships than he did in Agape. He continues to understand the Christian moral life to include two different kinds of moral relationship, both of which are important, but each of which has a different kind of moral grounding. However, he does not emphasize so strongly the danger posed by our particular commitments to a more inclusive love.64 Later, in 2002, Outka draws on Augustine’s language of the “order of love” to emphasize God’s providential governance over creation as the source of ultimate resolution of tensions between our various relational obligations: “To integrate our attachments over a lifetime remains a viable hope and in doing so we adhere to an order that is there.”65 Thus, Outka emphasizes the threat of exclusion posed by special relations in his early work. In his later work, he downplays such exclusion and injustice to affirm the importance of particular roles and practices. Again, the structure of Outka’s ethic, one that places the onus for universal concern on the individual moral agent, theorized separately from Ibid., 147, citing Barth, Church Dogmatics III/​4, 599–​600. Ibid. 64 Outka, “Universal Love and Impartiality,” 91. 65 Gene Outka, “Theocentric Love and the Augustinian Legacy: Honoring the Differences Between God and Ourselves,” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 22 (2002), 101. 62 63

132

132

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

social structures and policies, means that thinkers must choose between an emphasis on justice for the stranger or an emphasis on rich care for those near us. However, we require an ethic that ameliorates the need for such a choice. This can occur only if agape is integrated into a rich social ethic, one instantiated through public policies that recognize and support caregiving as economically productive labor and thereby empower and facilitate particular relationships of care for all persons. Our existing social and economic structures and policies often mean that precisely by attending well to our particular commitments, we may participate in deep injustice. When drawing on an “order of love” approach, then, we must ask how the “order that is there,” God’s intended, providential order, relates to the “order” that we see in the economic, political, and social forces that allocate the material resources and the time and energy spent on dependent care. Since this latter order clearly instantiates some profound injustices, we must ask, how are we called to adjust the latter order to ensure that all be cared for within particular, intensive, affective relations? Will a young mother who migrates to a wealthy country to care for someone else’s children, to send money home to biological children who grow up without her, feel at the end of her life that she has been able to “integrate her attachments over a lifetime”? Such a feeling of satisfaction and integration at life’s end begins to look very privileged when seen from the perspective of the migrant caregiver.

Universalist Responses: Burdening the Individual The thinkers discussed so far do not focus on the vast amount of unmet human need in the world and the implications this depth of deprivation has for the allocation of our love and caring efforts. Two other respondents do offer such a focus. Their analyses remind us that, as I  argued in the previous chapter, the need for sacrifice is built into the structure of human existence: we all require intensive care from others during portions of our lives, and someone else must provide that care if we are to survive and flourish. Instead of looking to the social order to help organize our collective response to this immense field of need, however, Garth Hallett, S.J., and Julia Judish focus sharply on the individual moral agent as the locus of response. Hallett does not explicitly engage Outka, but he engages in a book-​ length study of the “problem of the nearest versus the neediest,” and comes down on the side of the neediest. His focus on material need is painfully precise:  he analyzes whether a father should pay for his son’s university

133

Agape as Equal Regard

133

education or use the same money to save two hundred children from death by starvation.66 The number of children to be saved (reflecting the cost of higher education at the time of his writing and the cost to bring a single starving child back to health) raises, in the starkest manner possible, how high are the stakes for our definition of agape as neighbor-​love. Hallett wants to identify a principle, abstracted from context, to govern decisions to favor the nearest or the neediest. This focus on principle over context, he says, guards against our tendency to explain away our very real moral obligations to the needy by highlighting our obligations to those closest to us. It is actually a good thing, for Hallett, that we do not have all the facts. But the context thereby erased is deeply morally relevant. For example, Hallett notes that the question of the son’s education versus the lives of the two hundred children takes on particular resonance today because the media has made us more aware of starvation in faraway places, international relief organizations exist that can provide the needed aid to the starving children, and we have better transportation systems with which to deliver food than in centuries past. But, I  would ask Hallett, would we have any of these things if we did not also have institutions of higher education and many people educated within them? Furthermore, where did the father get the money he is now deciding how to spend? Probably it is his own college education that has allowed him to collect such a sum. If the father does not pay for his son’s education, the son will likely seek financial aid, thus drawing down resources from another source that might have been used for other students to gain a higher education –​or to save starving children. In other words, our decisions about how to relieve the suffering of our neighbors are socially and institutionally embedded. Judish explicitly accepts Outka’s conception of agape and thus of the problem of special relations as he frames it.67 She draws upon Alan Gewirth’s attempt to provide a moral ground for our particular preferential relations via a prior commitment to ethical universalism.68 Gewirth uses his theory of universal human rights, originally set out in The Community of Rights, to ground particular relations as one of those rights.69 Basically, Gewirth legitimizes “special relations” such as the family because they are Garth Hallett, S.J., Priorities and Christian Ethics (Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge University Press, 1998). 67 Julia E. Judish, “Balancing Special Obligations with the Ideal of Agape,” Journal of Religious Ethics 26, no. 1 (Spring 1998), 17. 68 See Alan Gewirth, “Ethical Universalism and Particularism,” Journal of Philosophy 85, no. 6 (1988), 283–​302. 69 Alan Gewirth, The Community of Rights (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 66

134

134

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

expressions of the freedom to form voluntary associations, an intrinsic part of the “additive well-​being” to which we all have a human right, as long as this “additive well-​being” does not conflict with someone else’s basic well-​being, their access to basic necessities such as food and shelter.70 But as Judish compellingly argues, the weight of dire and unmet human need in the world is so enormous that, under Gewirth’s schema, the additive right to form voluntary associations such as the family would never become effective.71 The moral obligations of “special relations” are thus completely overwhelmed by the universal obligation to provide for basic well-​being. And yet, strong moral intuitions tell us that we cannot simply ignore our special relations. Judish does not accept Gewirth’s assertion that if the weight of human need becomes too large for the individual agent, the responsibility for alleviating such need transfers to the state (and individuals have the moral obligation to engage in political action to ensure that the state accepts this responsibility).72 Thus Judish illustrates the fault lines in Outka’s theory that appear when the positive fulfillment of basic needs is given a central place. Rather than positing a social aspect to agape, however, Judish retreats to the individual moral agent, noting the tragic nature of moral decisions between the two competing goods of active concern for the suffering stranger, and the flourishing of those intimate relations that are so central to human life and well-​being. Interestingly, Judish invokes moral psychologist Carol Gilligan’s language of a “different voice” as a parallel agape and special relations, seen as “two moral perspectives, each with its values and emphases, neither subordinated to the other,” and “sometimes incommensurable.”73 The combination of a strong focus on the individual moral agent and on material deprivation in both Hallett and Judish leads to two different moral conclusions, both ultimately unsatisfactory. While Hallett concludes that the individual moral agent with material resources must make radical individual sacrifices to comply with the love command, Judish supports a balancing of important but incommensurable obligations and acknowledges that the suffering of the world will thereby largely go unrelieved. Although neither embraces a social response to widespread material deprivation, the structure of their argument points to the need for one. Gewirth, “Ethical Universalism,” 291. Judish, “Balancing Special Obligations,” 29–​32. 72 Ibid., 26. 73 Ibid., 42. 70 71

135

Agape as Equal Regard

135

A Parallel Debate: Justice and Care The conversation about agape and special relations dwindled away in the mid-​1990s. It could hardly continue to be a productive conversation while locked into the parameters of the question as set by Outka. And yet the problem of integrating our intensive particular commitments with a more inclusive and universal concern remains pressing, particularly in a globalizing era. We need a different framework for asking and answering such questions. I suggest that Christian ethicists can see a way forward by tracing a similar conversation within a different discipline, one that evolved more productively. The conversation among feminist ethicists about justice and care was sparked by Gilligan’s 1982 book, In a Different Voice. Gilligan noticed that in the stages of moral development produced by her mentor, Lawrence Kohlberg, women very rarely reached the highest stage. Gilligan offered an alternative approach:  she discerned two moral “orientations,” which she claimed were empirically (though not necessarily “naturally”) correlated to gender. The “justice” orientation is characterized by a focus on rules and principles; an emphasis on individual rights; a view of the person as primordially separate; and an abstraction from particular contexts, interests, and emotions. Kohlberg’s stages privileged the justice orientation. The “care” orientation is characterized by a focus on maintaining relationships, a conceptual emphasis on “responsibility” rather than “rights,” and a prioritization of context and emotion in moral life. Many respondents noted that the empirical observations that first associated women with “caring” and men with “justice” were methodologically flawed, and later empirical studies have questioned that association.74 Nevertheless, the notion of a “care” orientation that might be more common among women has held great appeal for many thinkers, and Gilligan’s work, in tandem with the more deeply gendered and essentialist work of Nel Noddings, sparked a vibrant discussion over the relationship between justice and care. Writing two years after Gilligan, Noddings put forth an account of care that might seem to justify Outka’s concerns about the parochialism of special relations.75 Noddings explicitly argued that justice and inclusivity are not of

Tronto, Moral Boundaries, 82–​84. For (conflicting) critical summaries of empirical studies of Gilligan’s work, see Mary Jeanne Larrabee, ed., An Ethic of Care:  Feminist and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 1993). 75 Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 74

136

136

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

central importance; for Noddings, thinking about justice posed a danger of interrupting the primary ethical reality, deep engrossment with the reality of the other.76 Her ethic encompassed multiple delimitations on the inclusivity of care.77 The initial responses to Gilligan and Noddings invoked the importance of various aspects of justice:  as a way to resist complicity in evil-​doing, either within intimate relations, or against those whom we shall never meet; as a way to secure cooperation with distant persons to whom we are connected through cause and effect;78 as a way to guard against inappropriate self-​sacrifice by caregivers;79 and as a tool with which to critique any moral voice shaped by structures of gender oppression.80 In response, yet another group of thinkers acknowledged the importance of justice, but continued to understand it as essentially competing with care and to prioritize care. These thinkers tended to conceive “justice” in the same terms as Kohlberg, Kant, and many contemporary justice theorists. Namely, they saw justice primarily in terms of negative rights and abstract principles; then they asserted the priority of care over justice so conceived.81 Thus, in the early layers of the discussion on justice and care, we see thinkers volleying back and forth arguments about the priority of justice or care, much as we saw Christian ethicists debating the priority of agape or special relations. This similarity reflects parallels in framing of the two debates. First, early care thinkers describe care primarily as an orientation, a cluster of values, or a deep intersubjective engagement rather than as an activity or practice. As such, the early responses to Gilligan and Noddings mirror conceptions of Christian love as diverse as Outka and the Roman Catholic personalist love theologians. Second, thinkers in the early justice and care conversation remained very focused on the individual moral agent as the locus of moral reasoning and of the negotiation of any conflicts Ibid., 4. We may restrict our circle of contacts so as not to be overwhelmed by the demands of caring (18); a monk who retreats to a mountaintop for solitude cannot be said to violate the ethic of care unless someone in need of help “intrudes upon his privacy” (85); we may need to turn away from particularly difficult “cared-​for” persons in order to reserve our reservoir of caring for others who are easier to care for (124); there is no obligation to care where there is no possibility of response or “completion” of care (86), thus no obligation to care for those on other continents. 78 Claudia Card, “Caring and Evil,” Hypatia 5, no. 1 (Spring 1990), 101–​108. 79 Sarah Lucia Hoagland, “Some Concerns About Nel Noddings’ ‘Caring,’ ” Hypatia 5, no. 1 (Spring 1999), 109–​114. 80 Marilyn Friedman, “Beyond Caring: The De-​Moralization of Gender,” in Justice and Care: Essential Readings in Feminist Ethics, ed. Virginia Held (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995), 61–​77. 81 See A. C. Baier, “The Need for More Than Justice”; Virginia Held, Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture, Society, and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 76

77

137

Agape as Equal Regard

137

between justice and care. Third, these thinkers engaged with some of the same questions within analytic philosophy as Outka had: discussions on the relative weight of universal rules versus attention to particularity and context or about the importance of partiality versus impartiality, for example.82 Fourth, though most discussants quickly came to recognize a role for both justice and care, just as most Christian ethicists quickly acknowledged the importance of both agape and special relations, these were understood as separate or even opposed to one another. This, again, is in part because these thinkers operated within a very narrow understanding of justice as respect, impartiality, or abstention from harm:  as Outka’s interlocutors have pointed out, as something very similar to what is encompassed within the concept of “equal regard.” Eventually, some ethicists in the care-​justice conversation began to move away from describing care only as an orientation or as deep intersubjective engagement. Instead, they described care as a concrete activity, labor, or “practice” that is constituted by a complex mixture of action, attitude, and affect. The earliest example of this approach was Sara Ruddick, who offered her conception of care for children as a practice that aims at certain broad ends: preservation of the life of the child, growth of the child, and training the child for social acceptability (which may be construed in plural ways in varied communities). This practice produces a distinct form of thinking –​“maternal thinking” –​for those “mothering persons” (not always biological mothers, or even women) who engage in care for children.83 Ruddick’s work existed more alongside the early justice and care debates than as a participant in them. She managed to avoid the gendered justice/​care dichotomy even while affirming that the practice of caregiving produces modes of thinking that are different –​and, she is willing to say, better –​than other modes of thinking, such as those employed in military practice. These modes of thinking motivate and shape varied forms of political engagement and resistance: care as a practice informs a practice of justice. With the move toward conceiving care as a practice or activity, thinkers could begin asking questions about the material prerequisites of care and the allocation of responsibility for care, and they did so by analyzing the relation between care and broader conceptions of justice, including See, for example, Lawrence Blum, “Gilligan and Kohlberg:  Implications for Moral Theory,” in Larrabee, ed., Ethic of Care, 49–​68; Marilyn Friedman, What Are Friends For? Feminist Reflections on Personal Relationships and Moral Theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). 83 Ruddick, Maternal Thinking. 82

138

138

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

distributive justice. Uma Narayan pointed to the number of children (particularly girls) worldwide who suffer “fatal neglect” due to limited family resources with which to provide care.84 Diemut Bubeck suggested that much care involves exploitation, in the technical Marxian sense: the value created by care labor is extracted for someone else’s benefit, and without remuneration. Because the consequences of withholding care can be disastrous for the person in need of care, if there is a conflict between justice for the caregiver and the care itself, caregivers will frequently sacrifice justice.85 The solution to this problem, argues Bubeck, is the systematic social provision of care where it is needed to avoid exploitation.86 As we saw in Chapter 2, Eva Feder Kittay proposes amendments to John Rawls’s theory of distributive justice that would call for a range of public policies to support care, including paid family leave policies, flexible workplaces, and generous state payments to caregivers.87 More recently, Daniel Engster has offered one of the most fully developed arguments that a care ethic implies that governments should help people to meet basic needs, develop capabilities, and avoid unwanted suffering.88 In fact, among secular feminist care ethicists, there is now almost a consensus that social policies should support caregivers. This is true even of the later work of early care theorists who privileged care over justice, though these thinkers often seem to simply assume this state support will exist, without arguing for it, and continue to subordinate this supportive justice to care.89 Thus feminist ethicists began to construct connections between justice and care and to urge public policies that provide material support for caregiving; such state support is an essential element of justice for dependent care relations, in part because so much care is unpaid or Uma Narayan, “Colonialism and Its Others:  Considerations on Rights and Care Discourses,” Hypatia 10, no. 2 (1995), 139. 85 Diemut Bubeck, Care, Gender and Justice (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1995), 13. 86 Ibid., 255–​256. 87 See also Eva Feder Kittay, “A Feminist Public Ethic of Care Meets the New Communitarian Family Policy,” Ethics 111, no. 3 (April 2001), 523–​547. 88 Daniel Engster, The Heart of Justice:  Care Ethics and Political Theory (Oxford, UK:  Oxford University Press, 2007), 11. In Engster’s most recent (2015) book, he reviews extensive social science literature to propose concrete policies through which the state can meet this moral obligation. See Daniel Engster, Justice, Care, and the Welfare State (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015). See also Grace Clement, Care, Autonomy and Justice:  Feminism and the Ethics of Care (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996). 89 For example, Virginia Held, The Ethics of Care:  Personal, Political, Global (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2006), 11, 50, 81, 132. In this respect, Held’s work parallels that of Protestant ethicist Timothy Jackson, discussed in Chapter 4. 84

139

Agape as Equal Regard

139

underpaid relative to its economic value (where “economic value” is understood to encompass a broader understanding of economics than the market).

Moral Boundaries Care is political not only in the sense that it requires support from the juridical structure that is the state. In fact, as Tronto’s concept of “moral boundaries” suggests, the way that we construct our moral theories is shaped by structures of power; thus the very shape of a care ethic (and a Christian love ethic, since care is an expression of Christian love) has political implications. Looking back twenty years after its publication, Joan Tronto recently described her task in her groundbreaking 1993 book, Moral Boundaries: Toward a Political Theory of Care thus: it was “to think about a concept that had no articulable coherence. It is not that care did not exist or that it was not vitally important to living a good human life. It was that it was inconceivable to think about care in a coherent way.”90 Likewise, as we have seen, care has no articulable coherence within Outka’s framework of agape and special relations. Dependent care relations are not part of the moral landscape of relationships either chosen based on preference or committed to in abstraction from preference. To make it possible to speak coherently about the place of care within Christian ethics, we need a different framework. Tronto developed the notion of “moral boundaries” as a way of showing how care had been rendered impossible to articulate. Moral boundaries are conceptual schemas that separate arenas of human life seen as properly the subject of moral debate from those seen as nonmoral.91 These boundaries determine what will be counted as a moral question and what kind of moral theories will respond to those questions. Although these boundaries are not deliberately planned, they also are not neutral; they do not merely serve as useful conceptual tools for sorting out what to think about when we wish to think about ethics. Moral understandings within these boundaries reinforce the privileges of the powerful: they highlight moral dilemmas as they present themselves in privileged lives, they offer answers to those moral dilemmas that allow the privileged to seem very moral, and Joan C. Tronto, “Moral Boundaries After Twenty Years:  From Limits to Possibilities,” in Gert Olthuis, Helen Kohlen, and Jorma Heier, eds., Moral Boundaries Redrawn: The Significance of Joan Tronto’s Argument for Political Theory, Professional Ethics, and Care as Practice (Leuven:  Peeters, 2014), 10. 91 Tronto, Moral Boundaries, 6. 90

140

140

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

they trivialize the moral importance of certain areas of human life that are socially assigned to the nonprivileged.92 The boundaries facilitate some forms of moral thinking and foreclose others. In her writing of 1993, Tronto argued that three moral boundaries organized much moral theory, including the early debates on justice and care. The boundaries, Tronto argued, marginalized the practice of care, which she defined, in collaboration with Berenice Fisher, as “a species activity that includes everything 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.”93 What we need to do, says Tronto, is to shift our moral boundaries such that this substantive practice of care moves to the center of our moral and political life. The implications for both moral theory and politics, she says, will be radical.94 The first boundary separates “morality” from “politics.” This boundary is gendered: it implies that women live in the world of emotion, responsiveness, and attention to needs, whereas men must live in the harsh world of competitive self-​interest. In other words, women live in the world of morality, while men must live in the world of politics and economics. But as long as the two worlds are separate, morality cannot effectively influence politics or economics. Women’s concerns about care and need fulfillment are considered noble, but irrelevant to the “real world” of competition and difficult political choices.95 This boundary also exists in Outka’s construct of “agape” and “special relations,” although the location of morality is “flipped”:  agape governs relations with strangers and is intended to counter the presumed self-​interest of intimate particular relations. However, we have seen this phenomenon before: when a theory sharply bifurcates motives, the location assigned to self-​interest or other-​ regard tends to flip (because in reality, both public and private, relations with intimates and strangers, encompass a combination of motives that therefore inconveniently appear in the opposite sector to the one to which they are assigned).96 Because of the sharp distinction between disinterested, Ibid., 5. Berenice Fisher and Joan C. Tronto, “Toward a Feminist Theory of Care,” in Circles of Care: Work and Identity in Women’s Lives, eds. Emily Abel and Margaret Nelson (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991), 40; italics in original. This definition has been widely criticized as too broad (a criticism with which I agree), but Tronto has maintained it throughout her subsequent writings. For my present purposes, the key point is that Tronto and Fisher defined care as a substantive practice aimed at well-​being rather than as an internal moral orientation. 94 Ibid., 3. 95 Tronto, Moral Boundaries, 5. 96 See my discussion of neoclassical economics and of Becker in Chapter 3. 92

93

141

Agape as Equal Regard

141

universal, and therefore “public” relations and interested, particular, and therefore “private” relations, Outka’s account cannot acknowledge the intensive other-​regarding moral effort that goes on within special relations of dependent care and the extent to which this care is often outright heroic due to the marginalization of that work, of caregivers, and of those in need of care. This ethic cannot make sense, for example, of the “othermothering” activities that occur within black communities or the efforts of home health care workers to enable disabled clients to achieve the greatest possible sense of autonomy.97 And as we shall see, the practice of care has political dimensions that are impossible to discern within the confines of Outka’s construct. As theorized by Outka, “special relations” have no chance of informing political processes or outcomes. Second, Tronto identifies the “moral point of view” boundary.98 This boundary defines moral theory as grounded in universal reason rather than in the contextual views and practices of particular communities. Morality, in this view, should be disinterested and disengaged. Thus morality is that which abstracts from particular contexts and emotions.99 This second boundary is somewhat muted in Outka’s theory. He is not trying to elucidate universal principles, as are most of the philosophers upon whom he draws. He is trying to advocate for universal love, and love addresses concrete persons in its very nature. Thus, Outka tells us that we are to regard each person as possessing a fundamental dignity, but “equal consideration is not the same as identical treatment.”100 Agape will attend to the particular nature of the object of our love, and respond in a way appropriate to that particularity. However, this is itself a sort of universal principle, and therein lies the problem. When we move from abstract principle to concrete loving relationships, our particular attention to one person will always preclude particular attention to another person. The problem of determining on whom to bestow this inherently unequal attention requires some more substantive account of the goods we seek for our loved ones and a contextual account of our finite position and roles within See the vignettes about moral complexity in caregiving relations discussed in Chapter 1. Tronto, Moral Boundaries, 9. 99 Ibid., 10. Kant’s own theory makes room for context in moral theory, where that context is relevant. The categorical imperative is determined in abstraction from empirical facts, but the application of the categorical imperative must of course attend to the particulars of the situation. Kant’s attitude toward emotions is more complex and problematic. For a helpful assessment of context in the implementation of Kant’s categorical imperative, and of Kant’s treatment of emotions, see Marcia Baron, “Kantian Ethics and Claims of Detachment,” in Feminist Interpretations of Immanuel Kant, ed. Robin Schott (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 147–​170. 100 Outka, Agape, 20. 97 98

142

142

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

a network of human relationships. Outka does not provide us with such a substantive or contextual account.101 To the extent that the “moral point of view” boundary abstracts from emotion, it parallels an account of agape that abstracts from the attractiveness of the object that might draw out our love. In a sense, because Outka’s understanding of Christian love does not consider love as an emotion but as a duty and a regard for the other, affective connections are automatically lumped under special relations and considered as separate from agape. Just as Tronto’s philosophical contemporaries too often considered emotions to be distractions from disinterested, rational moral choices, so emotional relations in Outka’s work are potential distractions from the disinterested love of agape. Because dependent care relations generally involve a complex mixture of affective response and dutiful commitment, attention to particularity, and unconditional regard, a Christian ethic of dependent care relations will require a conception of love that can integrate these elements. The third moral boundary is that between the public and the private.102 This boundary clearly operates in Outka’s work, as special relations are seen as quintessentially private, expressions of personal preference, whereas agape is open to all persons. Thus, working within Outka’s construct, we cannot even imagine public support for “special relations” (as we have seen, when he discusses universal, government-​funded health care, he sees this as support for agape in contrast to special relations). Outka’s construct cannot make sense of the many relationships that do not divide themselves neatly into “public” or “private.” For example, into which camp, agape or special relations, public or private, do we place relations between students and teachers? What about deeply caring relationships between paid child care workers and young children? We might call to mind the growing numbers of migrant care workers, a trend that brings the most distant strangers together in profoundly intimate proximity. Is the employer interacting with a stranger, in the person of the migrant careworker, or a “member of the family”? From the migrant care worker’s perspective, are these children she cares for the abstract “neighbor,” or are they special relations? Lawrence Kohlberg, in his final response to Gilligan’s critique, acknowledged that something like a “care orientation” may exist; but claimed that The argument that Outka’s work requires a basic theory of the good is made effectively by Jean Porter in The Recovery of Virtue:  The Relevance of Aquinas for Christian Ethics (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1990), 21–​24. 102 Tronto, Moral Boundaries,10. 101

143

Agape as Equal Regard

143

the proper realm for that orientation is the private sphere of family and close relationships, not the public world of autonomous moral choosers.103 In a similar way, most of the participants in the debate about agape and special relations were quick to affirm the importance of the latter, but they almost universally agreed that special relations are qualitatively different from agape; many thinkers still understood them as slightly suspect and somehow less moral than agape. On the other hand, as we have seen, like many of those feminists who wish to assert the preeminence of care over justice, those Christian ethicists who advocated for the centrality of special relations ultimately did not give enough attention to real problems of injustice. Emphasizing one or the other side of a division between justice and care, or between agape and special relations, maintains the bifurcation, forcing us to choose between love and justice. Neither side of this false choice can fully support dependent care relations. To articulate care in its fullest sense, which means to speak of both love and justice, emotion and duty, public and private, we must disrupt this binary and mutually exclusive paradigm of agape and special relations.

More Political Dimensions of Care So a Christian love ethic that encompasses care (as any Christian love ethic taking its cue from the Good Samaritan must do) is political in the sense that it must recognize the need for state support of caregiving relations; and in the sense that its very structure will be shaped by and reinforce privilege, unless we explicitly counter this tendency by giving voice to human realities and practices that are marginalized in both theory and in lived experience. Beyond these arguments, however, care theorists have argued that the practice of care itself possesses multiple, interrelated political dimensions. By focusing intently on the practice of care, rather than assigning care to the thinly articulated category of “special relations,” care ethicists have opened up important new insights about care and justice that should be of interest to Christian ethicists. For example, care involves relations between unequals and thus involves power at the most intimate level.104 This being the case, part of the moral task of dependent caregiving involves fostering agency while offering protection and correction in ways that will sometimes contradict the dependent’s agency. It also requires refraining from harm and Ibid., 59–​60. Tronto, Caring Democracy, 33, 159.

103 104

144

144

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

neglect, when one has the power to harm and the temptation to neglect. Care receivers frequently also have some power, particularly in the frequent case in which the receiver of care occupies a more privileged social location than the caregiver.105 All these elements of the caregiving relationship –​fostering agency, choosing when it is appropriate to impede agency, refraining from harm and exploitation –​are important in themselves. But they may have analogies in judgments about the exercise of state power, in the casting of laws and regulations, in the practice of policing and administration of governmental functions, and in relations of inequality outside the primary purview of the state (for example, between teachers and students). Given that our equality exists only in and through our dependency, the practice of care provides crucial experience in honoring and fostering that equality in the face of the concrete realities of human biological and social existence that include inevitable dependencies and hierarchies. Thus caregiving can train us for the just and respectful exercise of power over others, but it can also be useful as a tool for harnessing power from below or for the exercise of collective political agency (even as caregiving obligations may render it more difficult for caregivers to find time for political engagement). Ruddick argues that the thinking skills required and developed by the practice of mothering are transferable to peace activism.106 Tronto argues that the practice of care provides training for democratic citizenship: the qualities of attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness necessary to carry out good care are also applicable to our lives as democratic citizens, allowing us to have an open, honest, public discussion of needs and interests.107 Care also has critical epistemological value for discerning power relations. Human communities construct agreements about who should engage in what kinds of care and with what sort of acknowledgment or reward, but these are generally taken for granted and rarely critically examined. These social understandings are generally pervaded by presumptions about gender, race, class, and nationality. Privilege enables some people to obscure their own neediness and appear autonomous even while feeling entitled to high levels of care. Some persons’ needs come to appear more pressing than others: the professional woman “needs” her children’s paid migrant caregiver to work additional hours at low pay, but that caregiver Joan C. Tronto, “Vicious Circles of Privatized Caring,” in Socializing Care, ed. Maurice Hamington and Dorothy C. Miller (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 3–​27. 106 Ruddick, Maternal Thinking. 107 Tronto, Caring Democracy, 148. 105

145

Agape as Equal Regard

145

does not “need” to be able to visit her own children in her home country. Tronto and others have argued that one way to uncover a society’s power relations is precisely to notice who is giving care, who is obligated to give care, who feels entitled to receive care, and what kinds of care are considered most pressing.108 As we shall see in Chapter 7, feminist political ethicists of care have also offered mechanisms by which we might deconstruct, and subject to inclusive democratic negotiation, definitions of “needs” and the allocation of responsibilities for care.109 This critical epistemology can also be put in the service of more effective ways to meet actual human needs. Fiona Robinson and Julie Anne White each emphasize rich and overlapping relational networks as the locus for giving and receiving care. For Robinson, this approach “recognizes that these relationships are both a source of moral motivation and moral responsiveness and a basis for the construction and expression of power and knowledge.”110 Robinson focuses on these complex relational networks in international contexts, where they serve as the matrix for human security, understood in terms of the reliable provision of food, shelter, income, and social interaction.111 White emphasizes the importance of such networks in the context of domestic social policy.112 This approach is far more revealing of power dynamics than traditional policy approaches structured by dichotomies between autonomous citizens and needy beneficiaries of professional service providers (in domestic politics), or between the autonomous, self-​interested state and the individual citizen requiring humanitarian assistance (within international contexts). Such a focus is also more effective in terms of identifying barriers to flourishing and strategies to address these barriers. In Tronto’s most recent book (2013), she brings together many of these threads in her conception of “caring democracy.” Here she adds a fifth “stage” to her description of care. “Caring with” means noticing what care Ibid., 56. For similar discussions, see Glenn, “From Servitude to Service Work”; Selma Sevenhuijsen, Citzenship and the Ethics of Care: Feminist Considerations on Justice, Morality, and Politics, tr. Liz Savage (London: Routledge, 1998). 109 Nancy Fraser, “Women, Welfare, and the Politics of Need Interpretation,” Hypatia 2, no. 1 (Winter 1985), 103–​121; Margaret Urban Walker, Moral Understandings:  A  Feminist Study in Ethics, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Joan C. Tronto and Julie Anne White, “Political Practices of Care: Needs and Rights,” Ratio Juris 17:4 (December 2004), 425–​453. 110 Fiona Robinson, Globalizing Care:  Ethics, Feminist Theory, and International Relations (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999), 2. 111 Fiona Robinson, The Ethics of Care: A Feminist Approach to Human Security (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011). 112 Julie Anne White, Democracy, Justice, and the Welfare State: Reconstructing Public Care (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). 108

146

146

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

activities are occurring and which are neglected, who is performing them, and who is able to avoid responsibility for caregiving. Caring with should involve attending to and communicating or negotiating about the fairness of such allocations, and thus how well they foster trust and respect.113 Tronto argues that the moral boundaries she wrote about in 1993 have shifted; globalization and neoliberalism are the current realities that push care to the margins.114 Indeed, the original boundaries are no longer so dominant in moral theory, and yet there are continuities between these boundaries and the conceptual foundations of the neoliberal economics expressed in current globalization processes, for example. And care is still not at the center of politics and morality. The modes of marginalization of care and caregivers have changed to some degree: for example, more care is provided in institutional settings, and more care is provided by migrant care workers. Furthermore, in the United States as in many other developed countries, the intervening years have seen the erosion of the safety net that previously provided some support to some caregivers. If Christian ethicists are to recognize and respond to these injustices, we need to draw on the work done by feminist political ethicists of care, as they have broken out of the moral boundaries that sharply divided care from justice; revealed the deep moral significance and challenge of particular caregiving relations; and produced tools to discern and combat marginalization, exclusion, and oppression within the social organization of care.

Conclusion Despite the criticisms that I  have pressed in this chapter, Outka’s deep concern about the exclusion of some persons from the scope of agape is a salient one. If we, like some early critics, react to Outka’s problematic construal of “special relations” by uncritically championing them as the center of the Christian moral life, we will reverse his error, and dismiss too quickly the importance of inclusion, of reaching out to strangers. However, Outka misconstrues the shape of the problem of exclusion and harm as it exists today. He theorizes this as a problem of individual moral agents selfishly directing their wills toward those persons who bring them joy, pleasure, and fulfillment. But the dyadic self-​other model is not the most revealing way to analyze this parochialism, nor is a definition of agape in terms of abstention from preference. Injustice in dependent care relations occurs Tronto, Caring Democracy, 35, 169. Tronto, “After Twenty Years,” 22.

113 114

147

Agape as Equal Regard

147

not primarily along axes of preferential and nonpreferential relations, but along axes of domination and marginalization, axes of race, class, gender, and nationality. Thus the problem should primarily be delineated not according to fickle preference versus unalterable commitment but according to which persons in our society command resources and care, and which persons do not. As we have seen, the field of feminist care ethics, which has largely evolved into the political ethics of care, offers a description of what does not work in Outka’s conceptual apparatus. It does this in the shape of the internal feminist critique of the early dichotomy between justice and care, a dichotomy that mirrors, in many respects, the dichotomy between agape and special relations. Furthermore, recent work in feminist ethics offers resources for a much richer account of Christian love and its intersection with justice, an account that can encompass care. This chapter has attempted to map the territory of what feminist care ethics might offer such an ethic; in Chapter 8, I will explore a few of the thinkers occupying that territory in greater depth. But first, I  turn to one more school of thought on Christian love, recent reclamations of the Thomistic order of love, to assess its contributions and its weaknesses for a contemporary Christian ethic of dependent care relations.

148

Ch apter  6

Contemporary Retrievals of Thomistic Accounts of Love and Justice

The previous chapters have argued that recent sacrificial and equal-​ regard Christian love theologies partake of certain modern conceptual assumptions that occlude human dependency and care relations. A  number of contemporary ethicists draw upon a tradition with premodern roots, Thomistic thought, as a rich resource for thinking about love and justice in the contemporary context. In this chapter, I examine Aquinas’s complex account of love, and of the order of love  –​or the principles determining how much we should love persons connected to us in various ways, and upon whom we should bestow our finite capacities for benevolence. The “order of love” therefore encompasses some of the concerns I  have raised about justice in the distribution of responsibility for care. As Stephen Pope has shown, the Thomistic tradition highlights some elements that have been occluded in the sacrificial and equal-​regard traditions: our embodied finitude; our position within a wide social network in which each person has a particular role to play; and a basic account of the human good, one that can help us describe the purposes of care and assess it normatively. This tradition also engages the reality that each of us faces multiple and conflicting obligations, and the prevoluntary nature of many of our most pressing moral roles.1 These features are essential for an ethic of dependent care relations. Furthermore, contrary to charges that Thomas puts forth a fundamentally self-​centered ethic, his account is very stringent in its demands for other-​regard and inclusion of all members of the community within the scope of care. To these observations made by Pope, I  would add that the Thomistic virtue tradition, and particularly the virtue of prudence, provides a rich template for describing and assessing the complex moral work involved in particular relations of dependent Pope, Evolution of Altruism.

1

148

149

Contemporary Thomistic Accounts

149

care –​offering far more adequate tools for this task than the sacrificial or equal-​regard traditions. However, when we turn to ask questions about justice and the social organization of care, we find deeper obstacles to the retrieval of Thomas Aquinas for a contemporary dependent care ethic. Aquinas’s “order of love” presupposed a social and economic context that no longer exists and biological understandings that have now been superseded by an evolutionary account of human origins. In other words, retrievals of Thomistic accounts of love encounter challenges in the same broad conceptual domains as did Niebuhr and the sacrificial love theologians: the role of nature in an ethic of love and the relationship between love and justice. These problems emerge in a different shape within Thomas’s very different systematic presuppositions, but the arenas of challenge are the same. Thus this tradition cannot be retrieved in full and without adjustment, and the sacrificial and equal-​regard traditions hold on to important contemporary values that are not fully encompassed in contemporary Thomistic retrievals. In particular, given the contemporary global commodification of care, it is no longer clear that the individual good and the earthly common good can be made fully commensurable in the way that Thomas Aquinas supposed.

Framing Love Within Thomas’s Theology Before engaging in these arguments about Thomistic retrievals, however, we must have a clear understanding of the tradition that is being retrieved. This is particularly true because Aquinas’s understanding of love and justice are profoundly different from the understandings presupposed by the sacrificial and equal-​regard thinkers. For Thomas, love is not self-​sacrifice or dutiful regard divorced from natural inclination. In fact, it is an ontological force that pervades all of creation, and human persons, seen as profoundly continuous with the rest of creation and yet unique within it, experience and express this force in a characteristically human way. To address Thomas’s conception of love, then, we must start with some basic aspects of his theology of creation and the place of human persons within that creation. Given the systematic nature of Thomas’s thought, we must also attend to his conceptions of natural law and virtue, as these are constitutive of his understanding of what it means to love rightly and well. I will give particular attention to the virtues of charity, prudence, and justice; taken together, these cover much of the conceptual ground presumed in contemporary discussions

150

150

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

of love and justice, though as we shall see, certain elements will show up under different labels in the scope of Thomas’s thought. In mapping these concepts, I  prepare for an investigation of two questions. First, how well does Thomas’s system help us to describe, understand, and evaluate the moral activities encompassed within dependent care relations? Second, to what extent can Thomas’s understanding of the relationship between love and justice address the contemporary social organization of dependent care relations?

Creation and the Place of Human Persons In a book aiming for an integration of “equality” and “dependency” adequate to honor and acknowledge dependency and care, it is first important to note that Aquinas does not share in all aspects of the modern valuation of equality, though he affirms our moral equality as persons capable of friendship with God.2 Aquinas’s account of love is embedded within his theology of creation, and thus is shaped by the assumption of an ordered, hierarchical universe, created and governed by God’s providence.3 Aquinas understands causality as central to that creation: more complex and individuated beings have greater causal efficacy than simpler and less differentiated beings; thus they are in an important sense “higher” than simpler beings.4 Diversity among creatures allows the fullness of creation to better reflect the fullness of divine goodness.5 But this very diversity requires hierarchy, because some things have more goodness than other things.6 Thus for Aquinas, order and hierarchy are deeply linked; hierarchy is reflected both in the social order that surrounds him and in the metaphysics he believes underpins creation and that social order. Though Aquinas recognizes the empirical existence of domination within many hierarchical relations, he believes that a hierarchy focused on the well-​being of all parties, Katherine Archibald, “The Concept of Social Hierarchy in the Writings of St. Thomas Aquinas,” The Historian XII:1 (Autumn, 1949), 28–​54. 3 See, for example, Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, tr. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1947), I.22.3; ST I.103.6; ST I-​II.91.1. 4 Jean Porter provides a helpful account of the connection between causality and hierarchy in Aquinas’s thought in The Recovery of Virtue, 40–​43. 5 Aquinas, ST I.47.1. 6 Ibid., I.47.2: “Hence in natural things species seem to be arranged in degrees; as the mixed things are more perfect than the elements, and plants than minerals, and animals than plants, and men more than other animals; and in each of these one species is more perfect than the others. Therefore, as the divine wisdom is the cause of the distinction of things for the sake of the perfection of the universe, so it is the cause of inequality. For the universe would not be perfect if only one grade of goodness were found in things.” 2

151

Contemporary Thomistic Accounts

151

not imbued with domination, is possible.7 God Himself created inequalities “so that the beauty of order would more shine forth among men.”8 In sum, Aquinas’s understanding of both creation and society is pervaded with hierarchy, and he sees this hierarchy as fundamentally good in a sense that is foreign to much contemporary thought. This hierarchy has its own beauty and necessity and is intended to ensure the well-​being of all. In such a system, the acknowledgment of dependency does not present the same problems that it posed for Hobbes and Locke, or for us in the post-​ Enlightenment context. However, when asking whether the Thomistic tradition can be retrieved for contemporary usage, we will need to ask how fully the positive aspects of this tradition can be actualized in a context that values a more pervasive equality than Thomas envisioned.

Order and Natural Law For Thomas, each created thing has its own principle of motion and an end toward which it develops.9 To reach one’s end, and thus one’s fullness of being, is also to attain one’s greatest goodness; “being,” or participation in God who is the ultimate Being, is equivalent to goodness in Thomas’s metaphysics.10 Furthermore, since all things together are created by God to reflect and participate in God’s goodness, every created object is ordered to other created things and to the whole. Aquinas believes that created things are designed so that their individual ends harmonize with one another, leading all to this ultimate end of creation.11 Within this overall structure of creation as a host of differentiated ends working harmoniously together for the good of the whole, human beings have a twofold end. Our natural end is to live in accord with the natural law, the rational creature’s participation in God’s eternal law.12 The natural law orients us toward our own, specific human flourishing in this life. Because we are social creatures, our flourishing includes and requires the flourishing of the community, so the natural law aims at the common good as well as the individual good, and Thomas understands these to be See his discussion of two kinds of subjection, “servile subjection” and “economic or civil subjection,” at ST I.47.2. The former reflects abuse of power, while in the latter “the superior makes use of his subjects for their own benefit or good.” 8 Aquinas, ST I.96.3 ad 3. 9 Ibid., I–​II.93.1, 4–​6. 10 Ibid., I.103.1-​2. 11 J. H. Wright, “Universe, Order of,” New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd ed., Vol. 14 (Detroit: Catholic University Press, 2003), 339–​343. 12 Aquinas, ST I–​II.90.2. 7

152

152

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

in a dialectical, interdependent relationship. Our supernatural end is to reach the eternal vision of God.13 This supernatural end is attainable only in the life to come,14 and only with God’s assistance, but our natural end of human flourishing supports us in reaching this supernatural end. To orient us toward these ends, human persons, like all created things, have a divinely implanted “principle of motion” toward our ends. This principle consists of our appetites or inclinations. Human beings, as rational animals, possess an order of inclinations –​we share the inclination of every created thing to “persist in being,” which for us as living things means to continue living; we share in the animal inclinations to reproduce and to educate our young; and we have additional inclinations that Thomas saw as unique to human beings, to live in society and to seek knowledge about God.15 Our natural inclinations to love our kin, friends, and community members with a special intensity find their place within this overall order of inclinations.16 These inclinations are instruments of God’s providence; they are pointers toward the good. However, in the case of human persons, they are not fully specified nor fully trustworthy guides to the good. They are not fully specified, because human beings can apprehend complex particulars about competing goods in specific situations that far exceed the general indicative capacity of inclinations. Human persons must use a well-​developed practical reasoning capacity to interpret these particulars and determine the most appropriate way to further, in specific situations, the goods toward which the inclinations point.17 The inclinations are not fully trustworthy because of sin: our inclinations may be distorted or misdirected and thus require shaping in accordance with the good.18 Human persons alone among all embodied creatures have the ability (and the need) to reason about the Ibid., I–​II.2.8; I-​II.3.8. Ibid., I–​II.5.3. 15 Ibid., I–​II.94.2. 16 Stephen Pope articulates this well in Evolution of Altruism. 17 In describing the role of our basic inclinations in this way, I am agreeing with Cristina Traina and Jean Porter that the inclinations are pointers toward the good, which is not immediately clear in its entirety, but must be discerned through practical experience and reflection. They are not, as John Finnis and Germain Grisez argue, coincidental parallels to basic goods that are discovered not through experience but through speculation. See John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford, UK:  Oxford University Press, 1980), 33–​36; Germain Grisez and Russell Shaw, Fulfillment in Christ (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1991), 55; Jean Porter, Nature as Reason: A Thomistic Theory of the Natural Law (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2005), 127–​ 131; Cristina Traina, Feminist Ethics and the Natural Law: The End of the Anathemas (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1999), 71–​74. 18 Aquinas, ST I–​II.63.2. 13 14

153

Contemporary Thomistic Accounts

153

various goods we can seek and to order them in relation to one another to promote our holistic human good, which includes the common good of our society.

Love and Its Formation Through Virtue Thomas’s understanding of love reflects this broader understanding of a hierarchical, providentially ordered creation in which each created thing possesses a divinely given principle of movement toward its proper end or good, and all these ends harmonize with one another, allowing creation as a whole to participate in its highest and final good, God. In fact, in the broadest sense, love is this principle of movement, which Thomas describes as an appetite, something that seeks the good. There are three levels of loves or appetites. The first, natural love, exists in all created things including inanimate objects. In Aquinas’s favored example, a heavy body “desires” to fall to the ground; it has a “natural love” for the ground.19 This “natural love” is simply the connaturality of every created object for its own end. Sensitive love is an additional dimension that love takes in sensate creatures, or animals; it represents the passion or movement that is elicited in such creatures when they sense an object for which they have a natural affinity –​for example, when an animal sees its preferred food. This process involves both cognitive and appetitive dimensions; the animal needs to recognize the food, for example, to desire it. Human love, which builds on both natural and sensitive love, is also a passion, since we too are sensate creatures who can be moved when we sense objects that seem good to us;20 but human love also involves the much more complex cognitive processes of which human beings are capable.21 Our intellectual processes Ibid., I–​II.26.1. Strictly speaking, in Thomas’s complex account of the passions, love is the first moment: the “aptitude or proportion of the appetite to good,” the second moment of the passion is desire, or movement toward the good; the third moment is joy, resting in the good (ST I–​II.26.2). For my purposes, this level of detail is less important than the key dimensions of the Thomistic account of love articulated here. 21 Contemporary scholars debate the precise mechanisms by which the appetitive and the cognitive dimensions of the passions are related, or more concretely, whether the cognitive powers of the person act within the passions or simply act on the passions. Diana Fritz Cates provides a careful argument that for Thomas, passions or emotions are “appetitive motions that cannot be aroused or sustained apart from particular acts of cognition; yet emotions are not themselves forms of cognition.” See Diana Fritz Cates, Aquinas on the Emotions:  A  Religious-​Ethical Inquiry (Washington, DC:  Georgetown University Press, 2009), 63. For my purposes here, the key point is that for Thomas, the passions (including the moment of love) involve both appetitive and cognitive elements, however the subtle mechanics of the interaction between those elements are described. 19

20

154

154

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

can help shape our passions and affections to accord with reason, or the true and most complete good. As Diana Cates puts it, humans have some power to consent to an emotion or to withhold consent. We have some power to direct our imagination so as to view a particular object from a different angle and reconsider its significance for us. We can redirect our imagination in ways that we know, from experience, are likely to make us feel one way or another. We thus have the power to become active, in certain respects, in determining how we are moved.22

Every fully human act by definition proceeds from some sort of love, because in every act, the agent acts for an end,23 and “the end is the good desired and loved by each one.”24 We can be wrong about whether something is good for us, so in a sense we can love what is evil, but “evil is never loved except under the aspect of good.”25 We love it because on some level we think it is good for us, even if we are wrong about that. The path to our most complete good involves ordering our loves for a multitude of lower goods. The process of ordering our loves, of habituating them so that we desire a holistic good, is accomplished through the moral virtues of temperance, fortitude, and justice. If we possess these virtues, our “appetitive faculties” –​our passions and our will –​are in the habit of inclining toward our genuine good, or what is in accord with reason. Among the natural virtues, prudence, or practical reason, has pride of place: it is an intellectual virtue that directs and orders the moral virtues in such a way that a person’s inclinations harmonize to point the person toward the complete human good. Thomas articulates two categories of human love: the love of friendship (which is love for a person) and the love of concupiscence (love of the good thing that one wishes for oneself or for another person one loves).26 Both loves bring about union between the lover and the beloved –​the love of concupiscence does this because the end of such love is to possess the loved object;27 in the case of friendship, the union is a union of affections and shared goods. Thus, “love itself is this union or bond”;28 it makes us more like the other, in that we love the same things and wish the good for our Cates, Aquinas on the Emotions, 132. Aquinas, ST I.II.1.2. 24 Ibid., I–​II.28.6. 25 Ibid., I–​II.27.1 ad 1. 26 Ibid., I–​II.26.4. 27 Ibid., I–​II.28.1. 28 Ibid. 22

23

155

Contemporary Thomistic Accounts

155

friend just as we wish it for ourselves.29 The good of the other becomes part of our own good in the love of friendship.30 Finally, while our loves are part of our “natural” creaturely existence, and while the “natural” virtues can be acquired through practice, the human person’s final end is beatitude, the contemplation of God. This beatitude is beyond our natural capacities, and so we require God to infuse in us the theological virtues, to order us toward this final end.31 Among these theological virtues, charity is the highest; it is friendship with God, a sharing in God’s goodness; it unites us with God and conforms our will to God’s will.32 Because charity is focused on God as our final, highest end, it infuses all of our other acts and orders them toward our last end as well; thus, Thomas says, charity is the form of all other virtues, making them virtues in the truest sense of the word.33 Still, Thomas’s entire ethical system is built on the basic premise that “grace perfects nature.”34 Thus, in Thomas’s account, charity builds on our natural loves rather than erasing them and replacing them with a radically different orientation.35

The Thomistic Account of Love and Dependent Care Relations Stephen Pope has written extensively about the advantages of the Thomistic conception of love relative to much twentieth century Roman Catholic thought on love. Specifically, he argues for the importance of an ethic that builds on our natural inclinations and is therefore achievable, appreciates Thomas’s integration of the best available science into his account of love, approves of Thomas’s attention to the interrelation of reason and passion in human loving, and endorses the theorization of the human person within a web of relationships of mutual responsibility.36 This last characteristic, I would agree, is an unambiguous strength of the Thomistic account. The other characteristics are also important, but may be subject to some further qualification, as we shall see. For now, I wish to focus on some advantages of the Thomistic account of love to which Pope gives less attention but which are particularly important for an ethic of dependent care. Ibid. Ibid., I–​II.28.2. 31 Ibid., II–​II.24.2–​3. 32 Ibid., II–​II.23.1, 3. 33 Ibid., I.1.8 ad 2; I.62.5; II–​II.23.8. 34 Ibid., I–​II.3.8. 35 Ibid., II–​II.26.6. 36 Pope, Evolution of Altruism. 29 30

156

156

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

Most fundamentally, dependent caregivers may appreciate the Thomistic notion of love as a response to goodness, rather than Nygren’s depiction of Christian love as bestowed on objects whose sin renders them utterly unworthy, or even Outka’s view that Christian love is bestowed without regard to value or attractiveness. Parents, in particular, may experience their children as amazing evidence of God’s capacity for creating rich, unique, delightful goodness, and not as objects for our graced willingness to love that which is unworthy. Despite the doctrine of original sin, in the contemporary context, most parents will hear a baby’s cry as an expression of neediness from an intrinsically good and glorious creation, and not, as Augustine did, as evidence of sinful possessiveness.37 The presumption that sinful humans naturally choose the objects of our love out of inappropriate self-​concern seems less credible when we are talking about deeply dependent persons than when we implicitly presume that the object of our love is another mature, autonomous agent who can reciprocate our care. Furthermore, within a Thomistic framework, goodness is loved for its own sake, not simply in a possessive form, as something beneficial to oneself. Children are good because they participate in the ontological good of the God who created them, a goodness that has not been thoroughly obscured through sin. Contemporary Roman Catholic love theologians retain this emphasis on love as a response to objective goodness. As Margaret Farley elucidates so well in her conception of a “just love,” such a love sees and affirms loved ones accurately, in their “concrete reality.”38 Edward Vacek also emphasizes that love is a response to objective value.39 Without this clear affirmation of the objective goodness of the object of our love, the only way to explain the evident delight so many parents take in the care of their children is to assimilate their love to self-​interest: the child gives me fulfillment, the child is an extension of me. As we have seen, this assimilation of love for our children to self-​interest is a pervasive theme, seen in cultural constructions of children as consumer products, acquired by parents as part of their overall conception of a fulfilling life; in Outka’s conception of “special relations” as grounded in “preference”; and in the reductive approach of some sociobiologists who see concern for children as the assertion of selfish genes.40 Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1991), I.8. Margaret Farley, Personal Commitments:  Beginning, Keeping, Changing, rev. ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013), 103. 39 Vacek, Love, Human and Divine, 34. 40 Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 30th Anniversary Edition (Oxford, UK:  Oxford University Press, 2006). 37 38

157

Contemporary Thomistic Accounts

157

Though our love recognizes the goodness of the object for its own sake, our love for the other person does bring us fulfillment. The Thomistic account of love as union may speak to the common experience within caregiving relations, as within many other relations, of delighting in the good of another, such that we experience the good of the cared-​for as our own good. Again, this understanding of shared goods reappears in most contemporary Roman Catholic thought on love.41 For example, Vacek defines love as “an affective, affirming participation in the goodness of a being (or Being).”42 Furthermore, he notes that an object of our love can be experienced as “important in itself to me”;43 that is to say, the object is both good in itself, and I have allowed its goodness to become relevant to my own well-​being.44 The language of participation, and his understanding of philia as love “for the sake of ” the relationship (rather than for either party in the relationship), retain the affirmation that the good does not have to be assigned to one person or another, and passed back and forth in acts of selfishness or altruism. This understanding of shared goods has been wrested away in contemporary economic accounts of competing interests or theological notions of the autonomous self making stark choices between self-​concern and other-​regard.45 Finally, the Thomistic account makes room, within the context of an overall account of love as pointing toward the good, for acknowledging conflict between nonultimate goods, as well as loves that are disordered and distorted. Caregivers will resonate with the potential for their own delight and affection to turn toward selfish manipulation, as well as for the objects of their care to be difficult and unreasonable. They will likewise See, for example, Farley, Personal Commitments, 39; Jules Toner, The Experience of Love, 117–​139. Vacek, Love, Human and Divine, 34. 43 Ibid., 18. 44 Ibid. Vacek’s adoption of a process metaphysic means that his account of love as “participation” has some different connotations than Thomas’s understanding of love as bringing an ontological union. Vacek is quite critical of Thomas Aquinas in some points, though he draws on the “transcendental Thomism” of Karl Rahner. 45 Darlene Weaver’s “hermeneutical account of self-​relation” and of right self-​love provides one helpful account of the distinction but intimate interrelation among love of self, God, and neighbor. In her appropriation and revision of Rahner and Tillich, she argues that right self-​love involves the constitution of our self in response to God’s love and in relation to God, and that neighbor-​love is a constitutive part of this self-​love: “We cannot identify, much less morally assess self-​relation or our relation to God apart from our being and acting in relation to others and in the world … . The social character of the person is not some quality alongside others but touches every dimension of the person. Thus, the person comes to know herself, to be herself in relations with others. The person’s self-​determining response to God is not achieved over against others but within these relations.” See Darlene Fozard Weaver, Self-​Love and Christian Ethics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 141. 41

42

158

158

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

resonate with the moment-​to-​moment challenges of balancing the needs of multiple charges, the needs of the dependent with their own needs, or different but conflicting needs of the dependent. The Thomistic account of the virtues as the habitual inclination to choose what promotes holistic flourishing provides a language and a framework for engaging the multiple, often competing goods at which caregiving aims. Because love is oriented toward different goods, we require the affectionate virtues to train our appetites and prudence to orient us toward the overall good, which will include justice. Precisely because of the complex mixture of fulfillment and sacrifice involved, caregiving may involve both satisfaction of one’s own desires and the need to stand back from one’s desires. In order to meet the needs of the dependent, or indeed to avoid damaging her, the caregiver must be formed in virtue. For example, as Cristina Traina shows in her important study of the ethics of sensuality between unequals, the caregiver must have a well-​ developed virtue of temperance, the virtue that moderates our desires for goods in accord with reason. Infants and children need touch, and adult caregivers experience sensual pleasure in providing this needed touch. Although Thomas himself did not theorize touch in this way, in a Thomistic framework, we can understand this pleasure received through caregiving as an indication of God’s providence: that which is necessary for flourishing also provides pleasure, and we are inclined toward it naturally. Caregivers must form their desires so that they can touch at the proper time, in the proper way, in the proper amount, to meet the needs of the dependent, not the needs of the caregiver. They must be able to step back from their desires for the good of touch, evaluate them and modulate them, in accordance with a higher and more complete good, to include the exceptionally fragile, vulnerable good of the child. However, stanching desire altogether will end up harming the dependent, since touch is necessary to her basic flourishing; a sacrificial ethic will not help us here. The temperate person has ordered her desires to incline toward this complete and inclusive good; she revels in appropriate touch and recoils from harmful touch. The same will be true of other pleasures attendant upon the practice of caregiving. In each case, the virtuous caregiver has come to understand the good of the dependent as part of her own good, so that deferring her pleasure at times on behalf of the dependent’s needs is good for the caregiver as well, when understood in terms of a complete good that includes the relationship with the dependent and, in theological perspective, the relation of both to God.46 Traina, Erotic Attunement.

46

159

Contemporary Thomistic Accounts

159

As noted earlier, the virtue of prudence denotes the habit of right reason about things to be done. It guides all the moral virtues, elucidating the most complete human good so that the moral virtues can form appetites to desire the appropriate, rational mean. The exercise of prudence, in Thomas’s rendering, is an extremely complex and subtle activity, involving attention to context and concrete particulars in decisions about specific acts.47 It grows with long experience of navigating interpersonal interactions, noticing needs and desires; balancing competing goods; communicating; seeking the wisdom of others; and predicting, noticing, and remembering the results of various choices. This also describes well the complexity of the ongoing process of decision making encompassed within caregiving. A caregiver must make decisions ordering various goods: for example, respect for the need of a child to explore versus the need to keep the child safe; fostering autonomy in a person with disabilities while keeping visible and valuing the work of care that enables this autonomy; and honoring a history of care and guidance received from an aging parent while at the same time providing him with guidance and care necessary in the current situation. An excellent caregiver knows her charge well, knows whether, for example, a child is likely to be too daring on the playground, or whether the child’s native caution is likely to kick in. An excellent caregiver knows when his charge’s demand needs to be gently denied (because it will not lead to her greater good, or is an inappropriate demand on the caregiver at that time), and when it is best acknowledged and fulfilled. I am not making the case, of course, that only within the Thomistic tradition can we adequately describe the moral complexity of particular caring relations, but only that the Thomistic tradition does this more adequately than some of its contemporary theological alternatives, dealt with in earlier chapters. Having said this, it is interesting to note that the first feminist philosopher to provide a moral epistemology of the practice of “mothering,” Sara Ruddick, drew upon the language of virtue to do so. Ruddick’s use of the terminology of virtue is assuredly not a Thomistic account, and yet she shares with the Thomistic tradition a focus on practical activity aiming at ends (without Thomas’s teleological metaphysics); an emphasis on the delicate, difficult judgments necessary to balance competing ends or goods (without Thomas’s sense that seemingly conflicting ends ultimately coincide in the overall order of God’s providence); an emphasis on the subtle judgments and intuitions Aquinas, ST II–​II.47.3.

47

160

160

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

involved in care and the need for attention to particular contexts in order to judge appropriately; discussion of the interplay of emotion and cognition; and the ability to notice and achieve distance from one’s emotions (even while one engages in a practice that may be shot through with powerful emotions). Though she does not use the Aristotelian-​Thomistic language of the “mean,” the virtues Ruddick describes with respect to mothering are all a matter of balance, and can easily degenerate into vices if the “mothering person” fails to hold competing ends in view and adjudicate their priority in particular situations. For example, “scrutiny,” a “mental habit or cognitive style” of scanning for dangers and avoiding or neutralizing them without being too intrusive into the child’s need to explore, can become overbearing.48 Likewise, “humility,” or “a selfless respect for reality” that involves “a profound sense of the limits of one’s actions and of the unpredictability of the consequences of one’s work,” can easily degenerate into passivity.49 Ruddick’s work, like most groundbreaking works, has been both subject to intensive (in her case, feminist and other liberationist) criticism and used as a building block for other feminist work on mothering.50 Much of the criticism has focused on the specific ends of mothering that Ruddick proposed, as well as on perceptions that she was insufficiently sensitive to differences in the ends and practices of mothers from different social locations. It is worth noting, however, that criticism has not focused primarily on Ruddick’s description of the complexity of mothering work, its direction toward aims that encompass the well-​being of the child, or its need to negotiate the relation between reason and emotion. It seems that these parallels to the Thomistic virtue ethics encompass widely recognized aspects of the moral work of care; what remains is to argue about which ends, the forms and elements of complexity, and the nature of the relation between reason and emotion. In short, Aquinas, Ruddick, and Ruddick’s feminist critics all seem to incorporate elements of love or

Ruddick, Maternal Thinking, 71–​73. Ibid. 50 For alternative accounts of “mothering” or “motherwork,” which nevertheless are oriented around particular ends that require complex thinking, skills, and self-​regulation, see Patricia Hill Collins, “Shifting the Center:  Race, Class, and Feminist Theorizing About Motherhood,” in Mothering:  Ideology, Experience, Agency, ed. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Chang, and Linda Rennie Forcey (New  York:  Routledge, 1994), 45–​ 65; Serene J. Khader, “Beyond Inadvertent Ventriloquism: Caring Virtues for Anti-​Paternalist Development Practice,” Hypatia 26, no. 4 (Fall 2011), 743–​761; Kittay, “Maternal Thinking with a Difference,” in Love’s Labor, 162–​181. 48

49

161

Contemporary Thomistic Accounts

161

care that the sacrificial and equal-​regard traditions evade in their discussions of Christian love.51

Inclusivity of the Thomistic Order of Love So we see that the Thomistic love tradition provides a richer language and more adequate conceptual framework to describe the experience and the complex moral work of particular caring relations than do the sacrificial or equal-​regard traditions. However, is this still just a description of caregivers focused too intensively on their own charges? Does it ignore concerns raised by Outka about our tendency to neglect or exclude those who are uninteresting or even repulsive to us? Many thinkers have expressed concerns about exclusion in Thomas’s love ethic, and these concerns may seem amply justified. Thomas articulates an order of love, whereby we are called to love some persons more than others.52 This order of love reflects and justifies our natural inclination to love our near kin more than our distant kin, and these distant kin more than strangers or enemies. However, as Stephen Pope has shown, a close textual analysis of Thomas’s writings on charity reveals an ethic that is quite inclusive and stringent in its demands for other-​regard.53 While appreciating Pope’s analysis, I  will suggest that There has been a debate among some care ethicists about whether care is appropriately designated a virtue, or whether care ethics should be integrated with virtue ethics. This discussion revolves around different concerns than Ruddick’s rich, nuanced account of moral agency as it is expressed in the practice of mothering. Some care ethicists have argued that care is not best understood as a virtue, because, they charge, virtue is not “relational” but focused on the individual moral agent and her perfection. See, for example, Nel Noddings, Caring, 96–​97, and Nel Noddings, Starting at Home: Caring and Social Policy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002, 19; Held, The Ethics of Care, 19–​20, 51–​53; Maureen Sander-​Staudt, “The Unhappy Marriage of Care Ethics and Virtue Ethics,” Hypatia 21, no. 4 (August 2006), 21–​39; Tronto, Caring Democracy, 36. Others argue that care is a virtue (see, for example, Michael Slote, The Morality of Virtue (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1992); or that care ethics should be integrated with virtue ethics to provide a norm of justice and of good care. See Raja Halwani, “Care Ethics and Virtue Ethics,” Hypatia 18, no. 4 (August 2003), 161–​192; ; Shirong Luo, “Relation, Virtue, and Relational Virtue: Three Concepts of Caring,” Hypatia 22, no. 3 (Summer 2007), 92–​110; Margaret A. Maclaren, “Feminist Ethics:  Care as a Virtue,” in Feminists Doing Ethics, eds. Peggy DesAutels and Joanne Waugh (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 101–​117. Those who are more hospitable to thinking of care in terms of virtue also tend to give greater attention to Aristotelian moral anthropology and to Aristotle’s integration of personal virtue with political and social concerns. In any case, the virtues that Ruddick attributes to mothering persons can hardly be described as overly focused on the perfection of the moral agent; they are enacted in a practice that is oriented toward the survival, flourishing, and social formation of another. My concern here is with the richness and complexity of her account of the moral agency exercised through an ongoing relation of care for a young child. 52 Aquinas, ST II.II.26. 53 Stephen Pope, “The Moral Centrality of Natural Priorities:  A  Thomistic Alternative to ‘Equal Regard,’ ” Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics 10, no. 1 (1990), 109–​129. 51

162

162

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

this inclusivity is only effective when situated within Thomas’s own historical and social context and within the scope of his overall metaphysics. If we import the Thomistic order of love into our current context without adaptation, particularly in light of the current social organization of care relations, we will reinforce injustice. For Aquinas, we are to love some neighbors more than others, and this difference in loving applies not simply to outward acts of benevolence but to our inward affections.54 As grace perfects nature in a Thomistic ethic, so the “order of charity” mirrors the natural inclinations that lead us to love and provide care to some persons more than others.55 The order of love is necessary not only because it reflects the internal ordering of our inclinations, but because it helps to order an external world in which each individual plays a limited role in meeting the needs of all. According to Aquinas, our loves should be ordered according to two metrics: the goodness of the object, which is equivalent to its closeness to God; and the closeness of the object to ourselves.56 The importance of proximity as a metric for determining how much we should love another is at least partially rooted in God’s providential design for meeting our natural biological needs. Thus Thomas tells us that in heaven, the goodness of each object will take priority over proximity in governing the degree to which we should love each person, since the saints will no longer have any unmet physical needs.57 At the same time, there is a universal aspect of charity: we are to love all persons with the love of benevolence, which is to say we are to wish them well.58 Such universal benevolent love seems very similar to Outka’s “equal regard.”59 The universal claim to benevolence is grounded in our “natural aptitude for understanding and loving God,”60 and thus the capacity for eternal fellowship with God.61 The conceptual framework, then, provides both for universal regard and special attention to those closest to us. But how does this play out in terms of concrete actions to meet the needs of others? It turns out to be Aquinas, ST II–​II.26.6. Thomas explicitly differentiates himself from Augustine, who argued that inward affections should be equal, and outward acts of benevolence should be allocated by proximity. See Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 23–​24. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid., II–​II.26.7. 57 Ibid., II–​II.26.13. 58 Ibid., II–​II.26.6 ad. 1. 59 Pope and Porter each make this point. Pope, “The Moral Centrality of Natural Priorities,” 123; Porter, The Recovery of Virtue, 135. 60 Aquinas, ST I.93.4, cited in Pope, “The Moral Centrality of Natural Priorities,” 119. 61 Aquinas, ST II–​II.25.6; II–​II.23.1 ad 2; II–​II.25.1 ad 2. 54

163

Contemporary Thomistic Accounts

163

rather demanding. Aquinas begins by limiting the scope of our responsibility: “since it is not possible for one individual to relieve the needs of all, we are not bound to relieve all who are in need, but only those who could not be succored if we did not succor them.”62 However, in such a case, if we have any surplus over what is needed for the survival of ourselves and our dependents, and do not provide that surplus to the desperately needy person, we have as much as killed him and have sinned mortally.63 And in considering whether we have any surplus, we are not to consider our future needs, but only our present needs.64 The foundational nature of the claim of a person in dire need is demonstrated by the fact that a person may steal to meet such needs without sin.65 In fact, in such a situation, the person may be understood to be taking what is rightfully hers.66 Thus the demands of charity can be quite stringent, incorporating strangers67 and enemies,68 and can often trump the prima facie obligations to those nearest to us within the order of charity.69 Aquinas also stipulates that the giver, before giving, should ordinarily have a surplus over and above what is needed to maintain his station in life.70 This caveat seems to neutralize the profound other-​regard of the love command, and to contemporary readers, the notion that one would first maintain a lifestyle appropriate to one’s place in a hierarchical social order before meeting the concrete needs of others sounds callous and unjustified. This is not a provision that we would want to adopt into the current order of global capitalism. In Aquinas’s own historical context, however, this concern is mitigated by two factors. First, in his highly stratified and static society, persons did have needs specific to their social status that could be regarded as real needs rather than frivolous luxuries. As Michel Mollatt writes, In the Middle Ages, to suffer a loss of status meant literally to fall from one’s estate, to be deprived of its instruments of labor and of the marks of its condition. For a peasant this meant the loss of farming implements and animals; for an artisan, loss of the tools of his trade; for a merchant, loss of his shop; for a cleric, loss of his books; for a noble, loss of his horse and Ibid., II–​II.32.5. Ibid., ad 2. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid., II–​II.32.7. 66 Ibid., II–​II.66.7 ad 2. 67 Ibid., II–​II.31.3. 68 Ibid., II–​II.25.9. 69 Ibid., II–​II.32.9. 70 Ibid., II–​II.32.6. 62 63

164

164

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics arms. Without these things a man ceased to be anything, because he no longer possessed the means to carry on a social existence. Stripped of his social position and excluded from the community, he was forced into emigration and vagabondage.71

Secondly, Thomas’s specific directions for alms presuppose a world of finite but sufficient resources for all, commensurate with his understanding of God’s ordered providence. In the thirteenth century, agricultural technology was still basic, and there was no trace of the contemporary theoretical presupposition that limitless economic growth is possible.72 Thus, the finite quantity of existing goods must be distributed in such a way that each person receives what is appropriate and necessary, and no more: surplus is to be given in alms.73 If these guidelines are followed, however, all should have what they need. As Albino Barrera has argued, Thomas’s metaphysics imply a perfect creation, in which material insufficiency is simply impossible, though God’s plan requires human moral agency to ensure that material goods are appropriately distributed.74 If the goods of creation are distributed in radically unequal ways, such that some people go without the basic necessities, this is the result of the sin of avarice.75 Without avarice, Aquinas appears to assume that the needs of all (including the needs appropriate to one’s social status) would be met. This would certainly seem to be the implication of the assertion that a person may take the property of another to ensure one’s own survival.76 Michel Mollatt, The Poor in the Middle Ages: An Essay in Social History, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 6–​7. 72 Stephen J. Pope, “Aquinas on Almsgiving, Justice and Charity: An Interpretation and Reassessment,” Heythrop Journal 32, no. 2 (April 1991), 183. See also Jacques Le Goff, Medieval Civilization,400–​1500, trans. Julia Barrow (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 222–​3. 73 Aquinas, ST II–​II.23.5 ad 2. 74 Albino Barrera, O.P., God and the Evil of Scarcity: Moral Foundations of Economic Agency (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005). Barrera’s argument takes Thomistic metaphysics to be correct. Later in the chapter, I will take issue with Barrera’s attempt to apply this metaphysics to contemporary questions about scarcity. However, as a statement of Aquinas’s own understandings, Barrera’s argument is quite clear. For Aquinas, the moral problem is appropriate distribution of material goods, which are presumed to be sufficient to support everyone, within the context of a hierarchical social order and a relatively simple economy. 75 Pope, “Aquinas on Almsgiving,” 184, citing ST II.II.118.1 ad 2[needs dash]: “one man cannot overabound in external riches, without another man lacking them, for temporal goods cannot be possessed by many at the same time.” 76 This does not mean, of course, that the actual social world reflected God’s providential intentions. Medieval historians document widespread poverty and misery during the time when Aquinas was writing. See Le Goff, Medieval Civilization, especially ­chapter 7, “Material Culture”; Mollatt, The Poor in the Middle Ages; Robert S. Lopez, The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 950–​1300 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1976). However, in the Middle Ages, the misery and poverty of some were not seen as the unfortunate result of, or even the prerequisite of, economic 71

165

Contemporary Thomistic Accounts

165

For Thomas, though the individual may, in some circumstances, be called upon to sacrifice her life for the sake of the earthly common good, the earthly common good does not fundamentally compete with the individual good; in fact, it is constitutive of our individual good. Conversely, the individual good is only achieved when oriented toward the good of the community.77 The community is necessary to the material survival of each person. Beyond this, by mediating both language and knowledge to the person, the community allows for our growth into the rationality that allows us to know and love God.78 Thus the community has strong claims on the individual as the presupposition for the individual’s existence and the prerequisite for her eternal communion with God. Thomas presumes that the individual will feel the claims of the universal community as part of the constitution of her very self: he asserts bluntly that “the common good is always more lovable to the individual than his private good.”79 At the same time, the individual person, as one with the capacity to know and love God, is the foundational reason for the community’s existence, and the community must not impede her pursuit of the fundamental inclinations toward the human good: inclinations to survive, to have basic needs met, to reproduce and educate children, and to seek friendship with God. She must never be harmed for the good of the community, unless she has forfeited this claim to immunity by damaging the community.80 Positively, the goods of the community belong to the individual members: “when the goods of the community are distributed among a number of individuals each one receives that which, in a way, is his own.”81 Thus, for Thomas, the earthly common good does not subsume the good of the individual. The common good and the individual good are interdependent and mutually supportive; and this mutual support is part of God’s providential plan, which can also be seen in the workings of nature. In sum, Thomas’s writings presumed what he considered to be an appropriately ordered social system with clearly defined roles and a relatively clear assignment of responsibility for meeting the needs of self and particular others. He believed that hierarchy was necessary and compatible with meeting the basic needs of all persons, both for sustenance and for growth, as much classical and contemporary economic theory would imply. Thomas considered it to be remediable through virtuous moral agency. 77 Susanne DeCrane, Aquinas, Feminism and the Common Good (Washington, DC:  Georgetown University Press, 2004), 70–​71. See also Aquinas, ST I.II.19.10. 78 Porter, The Recovery of Virtue, 124–​127. 79 Aquinas, ST II–​II.26.4. ad. 3. 80 Porter, The Recovery of Virtue, 125–​134. 81 Aquinas, ST II–​II.61.1 ad. 2.

166

166

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

maintenance of their role in that social system. Rather than advocating unstinted giving to everyone who “comes into range” of the individual Christian disciple, then, Thomas assumes an ordered system for assistance to others along lines of kinship and other social groupings. Those who do not fall into the web of near-​neighbors are to be cared for if we have time and a surplus of goods, and God’s providence assures that, were it not for sin, this system would be sufficient to meet the needs of all. Seen in his own context, then, Thomas’s order of love can be seen to be both inclusive of the needs of all and potentially quite demanding of the individual moral agent. Having said this, in the present context, the Thomistic order of love may have difficulty underwriting an ethic that calls for the inclusive provision of the rich, complex, positive good of care. Difficulties emerge in two fundamental areas. First, since Thomas sees natural processes and inclinations as pointers toward the good, new scientific understandings of natural processes, particularly evolutionary processes that are not directed to inclusive flourishing, raise some challenges. Second, while the Thomistic account of justice as a virtue may be suited to Thomas’s own medieval context, it is inadequate to a globalized community in which caregiving is, to some extent, an international commodity. Thus, contemporary retrievals of the Thomistic order of love will require some rather foundational adaptations if they are to adequately inform a Christian ethic of love and justice for dependent care relations.

Nature and Evolutionary Biology In Chapter 4, I argued that thinkers in the sacrificial love tradition evade the full moral complexity attendant upon our existence as embodied creatures with “natural” inclinations to flourish, embedded within a world of natural forces that both foster and threaten life, and of material provisions that are abundant but not unlimited. Given Thomas’s view that grace perfects nature, we might expect retrievers of the Thomistic tradition to engage more fully with such complexities, and indeed many of them do. As we have seen, Aquinas considers all of creation to reflect God’s providential ordering, and his account of the human person and the natural law stresses human uniqueness in the context of our immersion in the natural world and continuity with other creatures. Given that Thomas sees love as a natural appetite that moves all created things toward their ends, this focus on nature becomes particularly relevant with respect to a Christian love ethic. It is not surprising, then, that dramatic transformations in our

167

Contemporary Thomistic Accounts

167

understanding of biology, and particularly the theory of evolution, would be seen as posing challenges to Thomistic understandings of the order of love. The human race is now seen to have evolved through a struggle for survival involving “extravagant loss, death, and extinctions.”82 At least on some readings, this appears incommensurable with Thomas’s account of creation as an ordered harmony of ends. Furthermore, our “nature” is now understood to include proclivities toward aggression, lust, and xenophobia that have fostered survival in the past and thus are not simply aberrations from an initial harmonious ordering of our inclinations. These challenges are formidable and comprise one factor in the retreat of many Roman Catholic thinkers from the traditional engagement of Catholic theology and ethics with nature and the biological sciences. As Pope points out, for example, while the personalist love theologies offered by many mid-​twentieth-​century Roman Catholic theologians have a number of strengths, they abstract from our embodiment and material needs, often depicting the depth of personhood in contrast to our animality rather than as continuous with it.83 Likewise, the “new natural law theory” developed by John Finnis, Germain Grisez, and others offers a purely rationalist account of the natural law. They build a moral theory on the notion of basic goods that are self-​evident to reason, construed in a more Kantian sense as abstracted from empirical inputs rather than on goods that are discerned through rational reflection on lived, embodied experiences that illuminate the complex components of our flourishing.84 On the other hand, some thinkers seem too sanguine about the implications of new biological understandings. We are told, for example, that an understanding of the massive suffering, competition, and death encompassed in the process of natural selection adds nothing to the problem of evil that Christians have wrestled with from the beginning;85 or that the John Haught, “Darwin, Divine Providence and the Suffering of Sentient Life,” in Darwin and Catholicism: The Past and Present Dynamics of a Cultural Encounter, ed. Louis Caruana (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2009), 211. 83 Gerard Gillemann, The Primacy of Charity in Moral Theology, tr. William F. Ryan, S.J., and Andre Vachon, S.J. (Westminster, MD:  Newman Press, 1961); Bernard Haring, C.S.S.R., Free and Faithful in Christ, 3 vols. (New York: Seabury, 1978, 1979, 1981); Robert Johann, S.J., The Meaning of Love: An Essay Toward A Metaphysics of Subjectivity (Glen Rock, NJ: Paulist Press, 1966); Karl Rahner, S.J., Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity, tr. William V. Dych (New York: Seabury, 1978). 84 See Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, particularly 33–​36. For brief, cogent critiques of the “new natural law” theory and its abstraction from “nature,” see Porter, Nature as Reason, 127–​131; Traina, Feminist Ethics and the Natural Law, 71–​75. 85 John Haught, Science and Religion: From Conflict to Conversation (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1995), 59, cited (approvingly) by Pope, Human Evolution and Christian Ethics, 12. 82

168

168

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

need to integrate the conflicting, and often antisocial, inclinations that human beings have inherited through this process is functionally equivalent to the formation of desires that Thomas describes in his account of virtue.86 Such statements brush off the implications of our new biological understandings too easily. These implications will play out with particular importance for the universalist aspect of a Christian love ethic.

Evolution, Ethics, and Theology: Three Approaches One question raised by evolutionary theory for any ethic that finds at least partial guidance in “nature” regards the competition for survival intrinsic to the evolutionary process. This aspect of evolution raises questions for any theological ethic that looks to nature as a source of guidance. If “nature” is so ruthless and exclusionary, if it sacrifices many lives in order to produce the evolutionary “winners,” how can we draw upon it to guide a Christian ethic, particularly one of universal inclusion? Of course, as I  have discussed, Thomas does not read an ethic directly off of natural processes; we use our practical reason to shape, order, and even contradict some of our inclinations. Yet Thomas believes that natural inclinations generally point in the direction of the good, and love is in effect a natural process expressing God’s providence. Surely when our understanding of the entire framework of these processes alters from one that is oriented toward the inclusive flourishing of all creation to one driven largely by competition for survival, we must rethink the extent to which our ethic can use natural processes as a model. Does not a universal ethic of flourishing imply a reversal of natural processes rather than a refining and shaping of them? Certainly a number of secular thinkers have argued that our understanding of evolution discredits the idea of any “objective” ethic, and certainly of Christian ethics, which many such thinkers tend to identify univocally with altruistic self-​sacrifice.87 Ethics, for many such thinkers, is simply an evolutionary adaptation: “an illusion fobbed off on Pope, Evolution of Altruism, 79. See Michael Ruse, “Evolutionary Theory and Christian Ethics:  Are They in Harmony?” Zygon 29, no. 1 (March 1994), 5–​24. Of course, many biologists or philosophers of biology believe that evolutionary biology disproves the existence of God and demonstrates the impossibility of central Christian doctrines. Much of this work is characterized by very unsophisticated assumptions about the doctrines it attempts to rebut. For some of the more egregiously reductionist work in this area, see Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006); for rebuttals of Dawkins’s picture of Christian doctrines of creation and providence, see, among others, Pope, Human Evolution and Christian Ethics, 12–​18. Here I focus on more specific questions about the implications of evolutionary biology for a Christian love ethic seeking some grounding in nature.

86

87

169

Contemporary Thomistic Accounts

169

us by our genes to get us to cooperate.”88 In response, Christian theologians have taken several different approaches to reconciling the competition for scarce resources, suffering, and death that appears intrinsic to creation with Christian theology and ethics. Some thinkers have argued that new evolutionary understandings demand that we depart from traditional Thomistic metaphysics in favor of process theology. John Haught, for example, characterizes the Big Bang as a form of “kenosis” or self-​emptying by God; God “lovingly renounces any claim to domineering omnipotence,”89 and “withdraws” to allow the creation autonomy as it evolves toward perfection.90 Haught proposes a “metaphysics of the future” in which God calls out to creation, drawing out ever new forms of beauty.91 This process entails suffering, which is “taken into God’s own feeling of the universe” and receives “a significance that forever eludes our own finite grasp.”92 Haught implies, then, that we can find meaning in suffering and death when we understand this pain as part of God’s creative intention. In addition, we find comfort in the knowledge that God suffers with us.93 Darwin’s gift to theology is thus to “challenge religious thought to recapture the tragic aspects of divine creativity.”94 While there is merit to a spirituality of acceptance of one’s finite role in God’s creation, Haught may wax a bit too poetic about the suffering intrinsic to this process. From the perspective of dependent care relations, one might think that Haught should never serve as a chaplain in a children’s hospital. Though there are certain similarities between Haught’s spirituality of acceptance of one’s finite place in the overall process of creation, and more traditional Thomistic approaches (as we shall see below), Haught’s process approach ultimately causes more problems than it solves. God does not have to withdraw from creation to allow us freedom and creativity. While we may appreciate God’s taking on vulnerability and suffering in Jesus, we have good reason to continue to affirm God as fully transcendent and omnipotent, which does not have to mean, as Haught appears to assume, “domineering.”95 Haught’s valorization of the “autonomy” of Michael Ruse and Edward. O. Wilson, “The Evolution of Ethics,” New Scientist 108 (October 17, 1985), 52, cited in Pope, Human Evolution and Christian Ethics, 250. 89 John Haught, God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolution (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000), 50. 90 Ibid., 49. 91 Ibid., 88. 92 Ibid., 129. 93 Ibid., 47. 94 Ibid., 5. 95 Ibid., 50. 88

170

170

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

creation should also worry us, particularly in the context of an ethic of dependent care relations. Traditional understandings of the God-​human relation affirm that our greatest autonomy occurs precisely through our dependence on the ground of our being.96 For the individual whose life is sacrificed to the creative process of the universe, it is surely better to experience one’s being as grounded in the fully transcendent yet intimately present God of so much of the Christian tradition, rather than in one who absents Godself to allow for that creatively destructive process. Haught derives an ethics from his understanding of God and creation. We are to align our “moral instincts” with the “aesthetic cosmic principle” that the purpose of the universe is the “ongoing creation of beauty.”97 Caught up in the spiritual and religious meaning of this process, “we would continue to idealize and practice justice, compassion, humility, love of enemies, moderation, and gratitude,”98 which Haught casts as universal religious values with self-​evident content. I am unable to see the obvious link, however, between a creative process that incorporates suffering and death as it leads toward new forms of beauty and the moral ideals that Haught enlists. Certainly, there is no obvious link between this process and any universalist claim to the prerequisites of survival and flourishing, including care. Rather, aligning our “moral instincts” with the “aesthetic cosmic principle” seems more likely to encourage us to sacrifice less beautiful creatures to the process. Why should we include all in the scope of our efforts to promote survival and flourishing when the creative process driving the universe clearly does not do so? The individual good is not interdependent and commensurable with the common good, in this vision. In sum, Haught’s derivation of ethical imperatives from his revised theological vision is vague and unconvincing and will not help us build an ethic of dependent care. A second approach remains committed to traditional Thomistic accounts of a transcendent, perfectly good and powerful God, but interprets the ethical implications of this account in a way that avoids the implications of evolutionary theory. For example, Albino Barrera argues, This is well put by Rahner: “The radical dependence and the genuine reality of the existent coming from God vary in direct and not in inverse proportion. In our human experience it is the case that the more something is dependent on us, the less it is different from us, and the less it possesses its own reality and autonomy … . But when we reflect upon the real transcendental relationship between God and a creature, then it is clear that here genuine reality and radical dependence are simply just two sides of one and the same reality, and therefore they vary in direct and not in inverse proportion” (Rahner, Foundations, 79). 97 Haught, God After Darwin, 128. 98 Ibid., 133. 96

171

Contemporary Thomistic Accounts

171

through deductive reasoning from Thomistic metaphysical principles, that God has created a world with sufficient material provisions for all. God as Creator of the universe is the Architect of all creation. Imperfections or deficiencies that impede the essential operations of the universe and its parts (such as destitution for human beings) would reflect imperfections or faulty planning on the part of their Creator. Since perfection is a necessary attribute of God, we would expect divine plans to be flawless. This necessarily includes adequate material provisions for the survival and sustenance of human beings and other creatures.99

Barrera is aware, of course, that for millennia, human history has encompassed material deprivation on a vast scale. This tells us, he says, that God’s intended material sufficiency is provisional.100 Realizing this material sufficiency for all requires human collaboration and ingenuity, a requirement that Barrera casts as providential, for it allows human persons a deeper participation in God’s perfection, creative agency, and love. It is not clear what providential purpose is served by the scarcity encountered by the “other creatures” mentioned, for whom this level of participation is not a possibility. Barrera calls the initial scarcity that can be overcome through human agency “existential scarcity”: “the need to make allocative choices with their accompanying opportunity costs by virtue of human nature’s finitude.” The sort of scarcity that results from these allocative choices, or “consequent scarcity,” is a “post-​Eden phenomenon” and the result of original sin.101 In later work, Barrera develops the view that “economic security is embedded within God’s intended order in creation and in human affairs.”102 This security is realized within a nurturing community and through individual effort to the extent possible.103 As I have emphasized, material scarcity constitutes a significant aspect of the moral challenges confronted by dependent caregivers, so explanations of the source and meaning of this scarcity matter deeply for a theological ethic of dependent care. In this light, I appreciate Barrera’s emphasis on collaborative human agency and creativity in confronting this scarcity, as well as his scripturally based argument that God’s intentions for material sufficiency have always required transfers of income that may be sacrificial for those who begin with more resources.104 However, Barrera’s overall Barrera, Scarcity, 25. Ibid., 159. 101 Ibid., 157. 102 Barrera, Economic Compulsion, 81. 103 Ibid., 77. 104 Barrera, Scarcity, 174; see also his discussion in Economic Compulsion, 125, 133. 99 100

172

172

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

argument that God could not have created a world of scarcity appears deliberately oblivious of evolutionary understandings. In Barrera’s earliest treatment of scarcity, neither the language of his metaphysical argument nor his corresponding scriptural exegesis, intended to show the confluence of revelation and reason, would give any indication that the creation account in Genesis is not historical.105 Though he later insists that the historicity of the Genesis account is not at stake in his argument,106 the structure of that argument depends on evading the evolutionary process. What can we do with the notion that human agency, which Barrera argues is necessary to actualizing the material sufficiency that God provides, evolved over millennia, as a continuation of a process that has led to death and extinction of both individuals and species (including species very closely related to Homo sapiens)? How has God provided these hominid ancestors with material sufficiency? Even after the advent of Homo sapiens, most generations did not possess the technology to effect universal material sustenance. At best, Barrera’s argument seems to presuppose a very sharp distinction between the most recent generations of humankind and all those who went before us. In short, Barrera articulates with admirable clarity how Thomas Aquinas might have understood the providential purpose of material scarcity, but we know more about the scope of scarcity throughout the history of creation than Aquinas did, and we cannot evade the implications of that knowledge. The strategy to render individual and common goods commensurable rather than primordially competitive, here, is through deliberate oblivion to eons of natural competition. Finally, in a third approach, some writers argue that traditional Thomistic accounts of God, creation, and providence are not fundamentally threatened by new scientific understandings of the process of creation; the Thomistic theology of creation does not exclude an understanding of evolution as the process by which that creation unfolds in time.107 Those writers who remain committed to Thomistic conceptions of God’s transcendence and who acknowledge contemporary evolutionary understandings tend to describe scarcity, suffering, and death as intrinsic parts of God’s creation, oriented toward the overall good of the universe. Suffering and death, while painful for the individual creatures involved, reflect our finite roles in a much broader, interdependent creation. Since the good of the individual is dependent upon and taken up within the Barrera, Scarcity. Barrera, Economic Compulsion, 81. 107 Porter, Nature as Reason, 86; Pope, Human Evolution and Christian Ethics, 11. 105 106

173

Contemporary Thomistic Accounts

173

good of the whole, there is a way in which even our own suffering and death are part of our good. Thus Diana Cates notes that Aquinas “allows us to see (and experience) that we are part of a complex, interactive whole that is remarkably well ordered and exquisitely beautiful even as the world is also (and feels to us) in many respects chaotic, destructive, and painful.”108 The Thomistic conception of love is the motive force in this order, and thus is implicated in the pain and destruction. Human beings, for example, digest plants and other animals, bringing about their destruction, and this is an expression of the love that orders the universe, although it destroys the plant. We love the plant as something suitable for us, something that can move us toward our end or good: “This principle determines that both life and death are integral parts of a larger cosmic process.”109 Similarly, Pope notes that “the fact that animals become sick and die, that they often kill to eat, that habitats can be marked by scarce resources and therefore are the scene of the ‘struggle for existence’ and extinctions … are not ‘good and evil’ in any moral or religious sense, but simply biological benefits and costs to various organisms.”110 And, Pope suggests, the appropriate response to these realities involves an acceptance of our own finitude, vulnerability, and dependence, as well as gratitude for our existence.111 This approach is the most satisfactory of the three outlined here: it neither erases nor romanticizes lives and species cut short by competition. It faces suffering and death squarely as something taken up into our intimate relationship, beyond life and death, with an immanent and transcendent God. However, even in this approach to addressing new biological understandings, the individual and common goods may not be as commensurable as Thomas presumes. For Thomas, since humans have a twofold end, the natural end of human flourishing in community with one another on earth and the supernatural end of contemplation of God, there is also a twofold aspect to the common good. In the earthly sense, the common good exists when society is ordered so that all have the opportunity to move toward their perfection in virtue. However, the final, universal common good –​the common good of the entire universe –​is God.112 All created things are destined to return to God. Death, for human persons, is

Cates, Aquinas on the Emotions, 10. Ibid., 109. 110 Pope, Human Evolution and Christian Ethics, 14. 111 Ibid., 15. 112 Aquinas, ST I–​II.109.3. 108 109

174

174

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

entrance into the vision of God, and thus into our fullest participation in the universal common good. In her nuanced retrieval of a Thomistic account of the natural law, Jean Porter argues that human morality “should be understood first and foremost as a natural phenomenon, ‘natural’ in contrast to ‘transcendentally grounded’ or ‘implicitly divine.’ ” This foundation is based on the theological view that “it is an expression of God’s will that creatures should exist and flourish.”113 We can agree with Porter that God wills the good of all creation, and even that death is part of that good: the arc of our lives, including suffering and death, is oriented toward God. If we are able to stretch our conception of the degree of suffering and death that is consistent with God’s will that creation flourish, then to a certain extent we can see this final orientation as continuous with natural processes while acknowledging the findings of evolutionary science. Put differently, we can reconcile the suffering and death intrinsic to the evolutionary process with Thomas’s conception of the universal common good. However, precisely because our destiny in the universal common good appears to occur so often by way of suffering and premature death, it may be more difficult to embrace Thomas’s insistence on the natural consonance of the individual good and the earthly common good, because the latter is constituted by our earthly flourishing. And relations of dependent care aim to secure earthly flourishing. While it may be possible today to incorporate all human persons into our conception of the common good and provide for their flourishing –​ indeed, this is the ethic of dependent care that I argue for –​it is no longer possible to see such an ethic as continuous with the natural processes that God has used to bring the human community into being. Therefore, contemporary evolutionary science cannot undergird (though it does not require us to negate) the inclusive aspect of a dependent care ethic in the way that Aristotelian biology undergirded Thomas’s order of love (which could be seen as inclusive in his own context). The process of evolution itself is only possible because species produce far more offspring than can possibly survive.114 We can see that the process of evolution has left us with prosocial impulses, and that such impulses aided human survival across ages of evolution. But these impulses stretch primarily to our own communities. The moral commitment to provide the basic requirements for Porter, Nature as Reason, 126. See Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species:  A  Facsimile of the First Edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), especially chapter III, “Struggle for Existence.”

113 114

175

Contemporary Thomistic Accounts

175

survival and flourishing to all human persons –​equality of basic need fulfillment, in the terms laid out in the first c­ hapter –​thus represents not an extension of our evolutionary heritage, but a sort of U-​turn from the competitive foundation of that heritage. This is true despite the fact that both Pope and Porter offer reasonable accounts of universal human dignity that comport with our knowledge of our evolutionary history and our kinship with other species. Porter couches her claim in the broader assertion that all creatures have distinct modes of flourishing that should not be actively obstructed. Chickens should not be locked in tiny cages where they are unable to scratch; likewise, humans have distinctive capacities, inclinations, and modes of acting that should not be frustrated.115 Pope grounds human dignity in the uniquely complex emergent capabilities for understanding and love that human persons have evolved.116 These higher emotional, social, and cognitive capacities allow us to reason about our overall good and choose actions that will promote that good, to feel compassion, to evaluate the situations that cause our emotional responses, and so to shape those emotions; and to care about others whether or not their well-​being enhances our own genetic fitness.117 However, both Porter and Pope describe the implications of human dignity in terms of protection against harm; they do not focus on the positive claims on others instantiated through possession of dignity. Porter explicitly leaves aside “the difficult questions of positive and collective rights.”118 These accounts of dignity thus cannot be used to ground a universal claim to care. Dependent care is a positive moral effort, not primarily a restraint from harm. It is aimed at fulfilling precisely the kind of claims to survival, development, and flourishing that are encompassed in the accounts of positive rights that Porter puts to the side. It therefore bumps up against the realities of scarcity and competition in a way that an ethic of dignity as respect for persons or “negative” rights does not do. Just because it is difficult to fashion a dependent care ethic that is universal in scope does not mean that we should not do it. But in moving to a universalistic Christian love ethic, we are, in a certain sense, called to work harder than nature for inclusion. The burden of the effort to include all in the scope of care is a heavy one and must be acknowledged and borne by the human community as a whole. If we do not acknowledge it as a shared Porter, Nature as Reason, 102. Pope, Human Evolution and Christian Ethics, 208. 117 Ibid., 132–​147. 118 Porter, Nature as Reason, 356. 115 116

176

176

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

burden, we will leave it for individual caregivers to take up as best they can, or we will actively push it onto those who are marginalized. Indeed, we are doing this now, and have long done this, both in theory and practice. Failure to confront the degree of difficulty involved in fulfilling an ethic of universal care is akin to failure to confront dependency in a political theory based on equality, or failure to incorporate domestic labor and caregiving into the scope of economic valuation. Theoretical avoidance, in each case, reinforces heavy practical burdens for those whose lives are deeply engaged with the reality that remains untheorized. Living faithfully to Jesus’s description of neighbor-​love thus will require that the human community creatively collaborate in a way that does not mirror the processes by which we have evolved but transcends or opposes them to some degree. This means that the distrust of “nature” in sacrificial and equal-​regard love ethics has a real basis, even as it remains true that an ethic of dependent care must also engage and draw upon nature. The content of human flourishing is, to at least some degree, an outgrowth of our biological nature. A Christian love ethic that engages dependent care relations cannot simply leap over our natural inclinations to an ethic of pure duty or sacrifice, nor can it characterize these inclinations in purely problematic terms. Dependent caregivers are, after all, engaged in helping vulnerable persons to fulfill these inclinations  –​and especially the inclination to persist in being –​to survive. Recognizing these basic human inclinations as pointing to real human goods is essential to honoring and supporting the moral efforts of persons who are engaged in caring for natural needs, material needs. But the universality of human flourishing is not “natural.” To ground the moral obligation to provide the basics of human flourishing to all persons, a dependent care ethic requires a deontological element: an element of duty, one that may be experienced as a heteronomous demand rather than as an integral aspect of our own nature and our own good.

Natural Inclinations as a Source of Moral Guidance We have seen that competition for survival disrupts the presupposition of a harmony reflected in natural processes that can be refined, through human agency, to ensure the commensurability of the individual and common goods. The theory of evolution also raises questions about human nature or the extent to which our natural inclinations can serve as a guide to the moral good. In light of evolutionary theory, we know that there has never been a time when our inclinations and our relations with other persons

177

Contemporary Thomistic Accounts

177

and creatures were completely harmonious. Of course, a Thomistic understanding of the moral life affirms that our natural inclinations need to be shaped, ordered, and integrated into an overall life aimed at the good of the individual and her community. Our moral capacities have always needed work. However, there may be important differences between inclinations that “fell” from an original, intended harmony, and are working through a process of sanctification to return to that harmony, and inclinations that were never completely harmonious to begin with –​at least not in terms of harmonizing the individual good with the good of the community as a whole. Stephen Pope, who has given more attention to these questions than any other contemporary scholar, becomes increasingly circumspect about the moral guidance we can take from the inclinations. In his first book (1994), Pope argues that the findings of evolutionary biology, particularly notions of “kin altruism” (our willingness to sacrifice our well-​ being for close genetic relations) and “reciprocal altruism” (the notion that mutual giving and receiving within the community may enhance evolutionary “fitness”), support a contemporary “order of love.”119 In other words, he argues, evolutionary biology can help ground a Christian ethic that focuses our first and most intense care on close family members, expanding outward to encompass more distant connections when possible. However, in 2007, Pope writes, “Nature is a competitive if also a cooperative evolutionary experiment, not a smoothly integrated ‘order of nature,’ as Thomas thought … . There is no reason to think that there was ever a time when we were not conflictual, manipulative, selfish, and prone to deceit and violence –​as well as cooperative, generous, empathic, and altruistic.”120 The moral task becomes one of integrating these inclinations to the extent possible; they can be “brought into working order, and not complete harmony, only through intentional effort and discipline.”121 Pope also moves from an earlier emphasis on the Thomistic trope that “grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it,”122 to the later assertion that “grace does not simply ‘perfect’ nature. Grace also inhibits, thwarts, suspends, and channels various inclinations of human nature.”123 In short, Pope’s long and deep engagement with evolutionary biology seems to have Pope, Evolution of Altruism, especially 77–​94. Pope, Human Evolution and Christian Ethics, 314. 121 Ibid., 268. 122 Pope, Evolution of Altruism, 59, 138. 123 Pope, Human Evolution and Christian Ethics, 151. 119 120

178

178

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

led to greater reserve about the normative value of our natural inclinations. This trajectory is significant. Just as I argued that sacrificial love theologies separate nature and grace too sharply, failing to acknowledge the vast fund of other-​regard and mundane, pervasive sacrifice that occurs within relations of dependent care, so contemporary biology cautions against too much trust that our natural inclinations can point in the general direction of a universally inclusive obligation to provide care. Our inclinations may need not just shaping but a more fundamental redirection. The ambiguity of our “natural” inclinations becomes a particularly acute problem with respect to the “order of love”: the question of the appropriate allocation of our caring energies among self, kin, strangers, and enemies. If evolution is, at least in part, a competitive process, then the inclinations that emerge from this process will not necessarily orient us toward a just balance between our own needs and the needs of others, particularly when the community of human others is a universal community. We have evolved some prosocial inclinations: affection for offspring, and some degree of cooperation within one’s own community, aid in both flourishing and reproduction. But some of the inclinations that we might now evaluate as “negative” have also served our flourishing –​flourishing that competed with the flourishing of others. For example, our ancestors surely struggled over scarce resource in times of material scarcity. As a result, we might now be inclined to aggressively defend our own food supply even if it means that others will starve. As Porter points out, aggression and dominance can function to sustain individual and social life.124 However, this is sustaining for the aggressive community, not for the community that is being attacked. The ambiguity of our inclinations thus requires a standard, model, or norm against which to measure not just their appropriate and virtuous formation but also the degree to which they must be turned in a different, more inclusive direction. To what extent should our inclinations be nurtured and shaped, and when should they be curbed? Of particular relevance to the questions about love and justice raised by dependent care relations, to what extent should we bestow love on our nearest and dearest, to what extent on ourselves, and to what extent on more distant connections, strangers, or enemies? For whom should we provide care, and how much? Pope himself takes two different approaches to the question of a measure or norm to guide the formation of our natural inclinations, reflecting Porter, Nature as Reason, 150.

124

179

Contemporary Thomistic Accounts

179

his engagement with two different contemporary scholarly conversations about foundational moral norms. The first approach is an extension of his engagement in the debate over agape and special relations. In speaking of the moral benefits of “emergent complexity,” Pope uses the metaphor of extension: we extend our affections and care beyond our kinship circle and immediate community of reciprocity to “all who are needy, whether they are members of one’s own in-​group or not. ‘Neighbor’ no longer means ‘near one,’ but rather any human being whom one happens to encounter.”125 It is worth noting this language of “happen to encounter,” which should be familiar from our discussion of Outka. Here Pope, like Outka, is still operating on the model of random encounter and of what I would call the stretchy moral agent: an individual who, after meeting the needs of those closest to her, stretches further to meet the needs of those farther away. The moral ideal becomes stretching ever farther, but it is not possible to stretch far enough to meet universal needs. In this approach, Pope is shaped by contemporary paradigms both within and beyond Christian ethics that promote universalism while focusing on the individual agent. Pope also notes, “Christian ethics recognizes that there are limits to what can be expected of any one finite person.”126 But when are we to stretch, and when are we to invoke our limits? It is difficult to know the answer to this question in a world of such widespread unmet need. Pope’s discussion seems to imply that the answer is “just keep stretching,” which does not provide sufficient guidance, particularly for dependent caregivers. Secondly, Pope references the virtue of prudence as a standard for assessing an appropriate ordering of our inclinations, including inclinations toward a just allocation of our caring energies.127 I have already argued that the virtue of prudence provides a helpful framework to describe the sort of context-​sensitive, intuitive, consultative, embodied, and experienced decisions made moment by moment within dependent care relations. The virtue of prudence helps to shape our appetites toward the complete human good and thus has a guiding role for the moral virtues of temperance, fortitude, and justice. Prudence orders goods and loves according to the standard of holistic flourishing of the individual and community, but it may be less adequate to do so in a globalized care economy. Pope himself simply references prudence as the Thomistic standard of objectivity in specific situations of choice, without much explication.128 Other contemporary Pope, Human Evolution and Christian Ethics, 240. Ibid., 310. 127 Ibid., 248. 128 Ibid., 310. 125

126

180

180

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

Thomistic retrievers, such as Jean Porter and Alisdair MacIntyre, engage prudence in more depth. But in light of contemporary global dynamics, their account of prudence has significant limitations. For MacIntyre and for Porter, there can be no account of prudence that does not emerge from the practices of a particular human community in its search for the human good. Porter’s reconstruction of scholastic accounts of the natural law sees the inclinations as preconventional, prerational indicators of human goods. Particular communities will generate norms and laws –​a concretely specified notion of the natural law –​through processes of social deliberation about the realization of these goods; these norms and laws will vary according to the social and historical context of the community. The deliberative process will be guided by reflection on the broadest good or end of human life, as discerned through experience of living and seeking to flourish in community with others.129 Contrary to many modern and contemporary accounts, therefore, Porter argues that Thomas understood the universality of the natural law to consist not in laws or principles accessible to all persons, but in a capacity of human persons to discern the moral requirements of a particular, context-​laden situation of choice.130 This capacity is instantiated through the virtue of prudence. Whether norms, or particular moral decisions, are appropriate and “right” will depend on reflection on the telos of human life as it is instantiated within a particular communal context. Teleology generates deontology, in this account. Alisdair MacIntyre offers an Aristotelian-​ Thomistic account of the immensely complex development of practical reason in young children. He begins by describing the slow acquisition of practical reason in highly intelligent nonhuman animals, particularly dolphins. This acquisition is an embodied process, building on sensory experience, accumulated incidents of receiving and interpreting communications from other dolphins, and practice predicting the behavior of other dolphin group members in various situations. In human persons, the process of acquiring this wisdom is also embodied, continuous with the processes displayed by other intelligent animals, and yet immensely more complex, for we can step back and assess our reasons for acting, adjust our notion of our most complete good, and allow both our actions and our sense of what is good for us to alter to meet this more reflective and fully developed notion of the good. Caregivers assist children in this process of developing practical rationality, Porter, Nature as Reason, 117–​122. Ibid., 13–​16.

129 130

181

Contemporary Thomistic Accounts

181

of learning through experience to interpret words, customs, and their own bodily reactions; and of learning to infer what others might be thinking or feeling and to respond accordingly. Most importantly, caregivers help young children to learn to step back from and evaluate their reasons for action, to begin the process of forming appetites to aim not solely at immediate goods, but at broader and more inclusive goods. This very process of learning to step back from one’s immediate desires and redirect those desires to accord with a more complete good is also necessary to increase the harmony between individual good and common good: the child learns the ways in which his own flourishing is intimately tied to that of the community and learns to desire the good of the community as an intrinsic part of his own good.131 Likewise, adults continue to need feedback and correction from other community members to develop their practical reasoning.132 The whole process of caregiving is, in this vision, an exquisitely complex, nuanced, intuitive, integrative, embodied, and disciplined moral undertaking, one that blends into later processes of both physical and moral interdependence in the community as a whole. The “right” is, again, wrapped up in the good, which is more primordial. These accounts of the development of practical reason follow Thomas in articulating a certain harmony between the individual good and the common good. Ensuring this integration is the work of the virtues of justice and prudence, virtues exercised by individuals, though shaped by the community. Thomas affirms that the virtue of prudence “regards not only the private good of the individual, but also the common good of the multitude,”133 and calls the sort of prudence directed to the common good “political prudence.”134 All persons can exercise political prudence by virtue of the fact that they can reason about and act for the common good. Rulers, however, exercise “regnative prudence,” which is “prudence in its special and most perfect sense,” precisely because it is oriented toward the common good of a political community.135 Further, because prudence guides all of the moral virtues, regnative and political prudence are related to the virtue of justice: these forms of prudence direct persons toward the common good, while justice executes the direction of prudence for the common good.136 Alisdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals:  Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (Chicago: Open Court, 1999), 119. 132 Ibid., 81–​98. 133 Aquinas, ST II–​II.47.10. 134 Ibid., II–​II.47.11. 135 Ibid., II–​II.50.1. 136 Ibid. 131

182

182

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

Thomas divides the virtue of justice into two species. He gives the most extensive treatment to the species of commutative justice, which regulates relations between two individuals; it deals with the avoidance of harm to others and treating each person with a basic fairness. In other words, as Porter argues, the subject matter of commutative justice lays out, in detail, a substantive account of the norms of nonmaleficence and fairness implied by Outka’s more formal account of equal regard.137 The second species, distributive justice, is realized when the person who has authority over the community distributes the goods of that community in proportion to each person’s due. This person should be a person of regnative prudence, able to weigh many relevant factors in order to determine a just distribution of the particular goods of a particular community.138 Aquinas does not lay out extensive rules to guide this process. Rather, his account presumes that the virtue of justice operates within a well-​ordered community, in which both ruler and subjects understand the various roles, practices, and relationships within that community. Such particularized knowledge is a prerequisite to the prudent application of distributive justice. But it is not available to contemporary leaders in larger, more complex societies. Though we may hope that our political leaders are prudent and just, no leader’s prudence can encompass the deep, particular knowledge of shared goods of a global or even national community. This limitation, based on the finitude of leaders, is compounded by the profound, systematic injustice that pervades the social organization of care at the global, national, and local levels. Nor can ordinary individuals, nonrulers, fully express justice in their everyday decisions about the distribution and consumption of resources or labor. In our context, for example, it may be that the individual Christian can make appropriate or prudent decisions about the amount of food his or her body needs, but it is far more difficult to determine one’s fair share of food in a world in which food scarcity reflects complex global and agricultural trade dynamics. Aquinas could assume that the answers to these two questions –​how much food my body needs, and how much of the communal supply of food it is fair for me to take –​would not be too far apart, because his world was smaller, and because he presumed that the Porter, “De Ordine Caritatis: Charity, Justice and Friendship in Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica,” The Thomist 53, no. 2 (1988), 208. Aquinas’s notion of harm prevention is more substantive than Outka’s in a sense, however. Porter points out that “harm,” for Aquinas, means interference with a person’s ability to fulfill her fundamental inclinations –​and the greatest harm is associated with the obstruction of the most basic inclination, the inclination to live or persist in being. In other words, denial of the basic material necessities of life is a violation of justice, and thus Aquinas’s conception of justice implies what we might today describe as “positive” rights. 138 Aquinas, ST II–​II.50.1. 137

183

Contemporary Thomistic Accounts

183

social order reflected, to a significant extent, God’s providential intentions. Turning to the distributive questions that we are pursuing here –​the distribution of care and responsibility for care –​the Thomistic virtues of prudence and justice can no longer provide adequate guidance in determining the appropriate allocation of our energies, affections, and resources among self, loved ones, strangers, and enemies. This is due, in part, to the size of contemporary national communities and the global dynamics of the care economy. In the contemporary situation, therefore, we cannot meet the challenge of the parable of the Good Samaritan –​the challenge to provide to all the extravagant care necessary for survival and flourishing  –​solely through the development of prudence and justice as virtues of individuals within particular communities of giving and receiving. The individual’s prudential judgments about balancing competing obligations will likely go astray, because she is embedded in structures of injustice. Our inclinations cannot provide sufficient guidance in this situation. Even if these inclinations are well formed, such that the person discerns and desires to combat injustice, she may not be able to realize the appropriate balance of concern for various persons because of the structures within which she lives. For example, at present, due to the exclusion of caregiving from the realm of the “economic,” parents frequently can only contribute to and benefit from the paid workforce by paying someone extremely low wages to provide care for their children, and persons with disabilities must often rely on home health care workers, making less than minimum wage without benefits, to meet their basic needs. There are certain parallels between my discussion here and the conception of “burdened virtues” put forth by feminist ethicist Lisa Tessman. “Burdened” virtues, for Tessman, are those that violate Aristotle’s connection between virtue and happiness; they do not contribute to the flourishing of the person possessing the virtue, but “burden their bearer.” Such virtues will exist under situations of oppression; they “deserve praise only in the qualified sense of being the best that is possible under awful conditions.”139 Of particular interest here is Tessman’s exploration of sensitivity to the suffering of others: there is no mean for such sensitivity. At any point between extreme sensitivity to others’ suffering and extreme insensitivity, “I can be characterized as both excessively anguished and excessively indifferent … precisely because of there being so much suffering in the world Lisa Tessman, Burdened Virtues:  Virtue Ethics for Liberatory Struggles (Oxford, UK:  Oxford University Press, 2005), 7.

139

184

184

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

that one could potentially face.”140 We can see the parallel to my concern about the enormous quantity of unmet needs for care in the world and the inability of a virtuous ordering of our loves through prudence to facilitate an appropriate balance between care for near and dear ones and action to foster the well-​being of distant strangers. As Tessman notes, Aristotle considered “that the virtues that benefit primarily self and those that benefit primarily others could converge,” at least among those privileged enough to be included within Aristotle’s circle of concern (free male citizens). This is not possible, she notes, given the enormity of present injustice and suffering. “If one’s well-​being is really tied up with the well-​being of all others … then none of us will ever live well in any foreseeable future, for it is inconceivable that across the globe unjust suffering will be eradicated.”141 From the perspective of Christian ethics, we might say that it is only conceivable that unjust suffering will be eradicated in eschatological perspective, that God will ultimately take up these contradictions and heal them; for now, we live “already” and “not yet” in the kingdom of God. As a secular thinker, Tessman is not interested in questions about God’s providence. However, she points, just as I do, to the seeming incommensurability between individual worldly flourishing and the worldly flourishing of all. For this reason, a Thomistic conception of justice as a virtue, on its own, cannot be sufficient for a Christian ethic of dependent care relations. We will need a more multidimensional conception of justice for this task. In the next chapter, I will outline some necessary elements of such a conception of justice and turn to some resources that might help us construct such a conception.

Conclusion The Thomistic account of love and its ordering, while able to capture some of the richness and moral complexity of dependent care relations, is also embedded within a profoundly systematic theology in which love, justice, nature, and prudence are all deeply connected to one another. This theological system is, in turn, reflective of a particular understanding of the social order and of the natural world emerging from Thomas Aquinas’s medieval, feudal historical context and the Aristotelian biology that represented the best scientific knowledge at his own time. Alterations in social structures, including global interconnections between local communities, Ibid., 85. Ibid., 87.

140 141

185

Contemporary Thomistic Accounts

185

egalitarian ideals in place of the Thomistic presumption of a beneficial ordered hierarchy, and new scientific understandings of the process of creation, all raise foundational questions for any contemporary retrieval of the Thomistic order of love. Put differently, while the Thomistic account provides rich descriptive and evaluative tools for particular relations of dependent care, when we step back from individual relationships to the systematic relationship between love or care and justice, the Thomistic synthesis requires significant revision and adaptation in order to inform a contemporary Christian ethic of dependent care relations.

186

Ch apter  7

Elements of Justice for a Dependent Care Ethic

In my introductory chapter, I turned to the parable of the Good Samaritan to argue that any Christian ethic love ethic must be universally inclusive in scope, and that the content of this universal love must include the extravagant care needed to respond to the periods and forms of dependency that are so pervasive in human life. This means that dependent care relations are important  –​even central  –​forms of Christian love. And thus, as I have further argued, we require accounts of Christian love that are adequate to the deep moral complexity of dependent care relations. Dependent caregiving and care receiving require us to balance conflicting needs and obligations; to allocate finite resources; to exercise appropriate degrees of authority while fostering or preserving autonomy, or alternately, if one is the care receiver, to learn how to assert agency and when to accept the help and guidance of others; to listen well; to define and articulate needs and responsibilities; to navigate power relations in a way that is appropriately respectful to all parties in a caregiving relation; and to engage the political realm in order to secure appropriate support for caregiving relations. I have argued that a Thomistic virtue approach allows for a more adequate description of this complexity than either an account of Christian love as equal regard or as sacrifice when we are considering particular relations of dependent care. However, a Thomistic virtue ethic is not a fully adequate framework for assessing the contemporary global social organization of care. A Christian love ethic that encompasses dependent care relations must be deeply integrated with a complex and multivalent conception of justice. To provide extravagant care to all demands various forms of social collaboration; such an ethic cannot stop with descriptions of personal obligations within individual caring relations. A  Christian ethic of dependent care relations cannot simply be counterpoised to a justice ethic, nor can the love expressed in dependent care relations be depicted as a moral commitment that goes above and beyond justice. In a dependent care ethic, 186

187

Elements of Justice for a Dependent Care Ethic

187

love and justice are intertwined in multiple ways; they are equiprimordial. A dependent care ethic cannot be fulfilled without a justice that supports the material, embodied labor of care. Unfortunately, most recent and contemporary Roman Catholic love theologians leave their correlative conception of justice underdeveloped. As Stephen Pope points out, twentieth-​century personalist love theologies rarely mention justice.1 While Pope himself references –​very briefly –​the need to coordinate any contemporary retrieval of the Thomistic order of love with a conception of justice, his passing references describe justice as “a sense of duty, impartiality, and suchlike.”2 But given that the current empirically existing “order of love” involves a global and radically unjust care economy, any normative statements about the appropriate order of love will require integration with a justice that goes beyond an individual sense of duty or impartiality. Likewise, Edward Vacek, in his passing treatments of justice and inclusion, remains very focused on the individual agent. He treats the “order of love” as an internal ordering of affections, and as an expression of personal identity, as seen through the shape of each person’s various commitments and the goods that she seeks.3 With respect to the balance of love among God, self, and near and far neighbors, he asserts that we must “love God above all else,” and refers the rest to individual discernment.4 Like most of his contemporary interlocutors, then, Vacek relocates the question of the allocation of love and care from an issue in social ethics to one of personal responsibility. Margaret Farley does attend to the connection between justice and love  –​as is clear from her development of an explicit account of “just love.”5 Her primary focus, in this regard, is on a rich conception of respect for persons as loving someone in accordance with their “concrete reality,” which, for human persons, includes their autonomy and relationality, as well as the particular characteristics, capabilities, needs, and commitments that constitute their individual identity and full selfhood.6 A just love also honors the concrete reality of the lover.7 Farley gives some attention to social conditions that must exist in order to support justice within Pope, Evolution of Altruism, 5. Pope, Human Evolution and Christian Ethics, 249; see also Pope, The Evolution of Altruism, 158. 3 Vacek, Love, Human and Divine, 42. 4 Ibid., 310; see also 270. 5 This conception was first laid out in her early book, Personal Commitments, 101–​106. See also her more recent book, Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics (New York: Continuum, 2006), 196–​215. 6 Farley, Personal Commitments, 101–​106. 7 Farley, Just Love, 200. 1

2

188

188

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

particular relations of love and compassion and makes some references to distributive justice in her work on the intersection of compassion and justice in medical ethics.8 However, her treatment of justice does not reach as far as a Christian ethic of dependent care relations requires in the contemporary context. One might build upon her insights about the context of social justice required for just loving, to address the global injustices in the distribution of caregiving, but this work remains to be done. In exploring Christian theologies of love and justice, we have seen justice understood as a way to regulate conflicts between self-​interested parties; as suspiciously similar to a conception of agape as “equal regard”; and as a virtue that, within a medieval European context, interlocks with other virtues in an ordered society that mirrors an ordered creation. While all these conceptions of justice are important for certain purposes, each of them is too narrow to address the contemporary, global social organization of care. Even in combination, they do not accomplish the task. The sort of justice called for in a dependent care ethic is far richer and more multidimensional than justice as it is usually conceived in conversations within Christian ethics about the relation between love and justice. In this chapter, therefore, based on discussions in this book to date, I  propose some key elements that such a justice ethic should incorporate.

Necessary Elements of Justice for a Dependent Care Ethic Distribution. A major element of justice necessary for a Christian ethic of dependent care relations, one that I have emphasized repeatedly, is a distributive element. As we have seen, a significant characteristic of Christian love is its response to embodied needs in a world in which neediness and dependency are pervasive. To respond to embodied needs requires us to draw on resources that are limited: human labor, and the time and energy that such labor requires, as well as material resources. These resources are currently distributed in profoundly unequal ways. In addition, the fact that care has been excluded from the scope of the economic, and is often provided outside of the money economy, means that an enormous amount of economic activity is not remunerated through the mechanism of market exchange. As we have seen, when Christian theologians speak of the relationship of justice to love, they frequently avoid speaking of justice in Margaret Farley, Compassionate Respect: A Feminist Approach to Medical Ethics and Other Questions (The 2002 Madeleva Lecture in Spirituality) (New York/​Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 2002).

8

189

Elements of Justice for a Dependent Care Ethic

189

distributive terms. But our ethic cannot promote equality of basic need fulfillment without incorporating principles of distributive justice. A Role for the State. Any conception of justice adequate to address the contemporary global social organization of caregiving relations requires some mediation by juridical political entities such as states and international agencies. It might seem obvious that a justice ethic requires a role for the state, but if the justice ethic is applied to dependent care relations, many Christian thinkers become skittish or avoidant. As we have seen, the sacrificial and equal-​regard traditions are very much focused on the individual as the agent of Christian love and assess Christian love largely based on the state of the Christian’s will. The distribution of any resources other than the individual’s attention and concern does not come into play here. In the Thomistic tradition, government exists according to God’s creative plan in order to facilitate social cooperation to promote the common good. For Thomas, the relationship between love and the common good (facilitated by government) is deep and systematic, as love is the ontological force drawing all created things, including humans, toward their ends or goods. However, in contemporary Roman Catholic love theologies, as we have seen, the role of justice or the state is often treated very much in passing, if at all. Some contemporary Thomistic thinkers, notably Alisdair MacIntyre and Jean Porter, remain focused on particular communities and social practices as the locus of conceptions of justice. MacIntyre explicitly argues that the contemporary nation-​state is not able to facilitate the development of the “virtues of acknowledged dependence”9 necessary for flourishing human communities.10 Certainly this is true: nation-​states are too large and impersonal to serve as sites of intensive, communal reasoning about the good and consequent growth in virtue. But in the present context, where care itself has become a commodity exchanged across thousands of miles and national boundaries, social collaboration to provide care extends beyond the local community and therefore must be instantiated not just through communal norms and practices but through national and international laws. In fact, if MacIntyre is correct, and relations of care within broader, ordered relations of giving and receiving are the very condition for the development of virtue and practical reason, then we must address the “global heart transplant”11 that extracts care from impoverished areas of MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals, 119. Ibid., 129–​146. 11 This phrase was coined by Arlie Russell Hochschild in her essay “Love and Gold,” in Global Woman, eds. Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 22. 9 10

190

190

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

the world and inundates privileged dependents with intensive care in more prosperous parts of the world. Even within the state, the social organization of care is not circumscribed within self-​contained communities sharing a conception of the good that incorporates relations of giving and receiving. On the contrary, the history of the distribution of responsibility for care has been pervaded by race, gender, and class relations in ways that exploit some communities for the benefit of others and disrupt modes of care within marginalized communities. The history of the social organization of care relations provides a stark reminder that community practices and norms need to be judged, in part, according to standards beyond those generated by the community itself. A contemporary dependent care ethic requires recourse to a justice that can operate across and between distant communities. This requires a role for the state and, ideally, for international regulatory, financial, and development organizations. Of course, one reason that Christian discussions of justice, like some philosophical counterparts, often ignore care relations is that these are widely seen to be the responsibility of the family. Here it may be helpful to apply Maxine Eichner’s conception of the supportive state.12 Eichner draws on Robert Goodin’s distinction between disjunctive and conjunctive responsibility to make an argument that both the state and the family have responsibility for care, but in different ways, appropriate to their particular competencies. Disjunctive responsibility applies in situations in which any of several people can take responsibility for something, and if one takes responsibility, the others need not do so: the responsibility has been discharged. This could be the classic case in which many bystanders notice a person in danger of drowning –​if one dives in to help, the others need not do so. Or it may operate when one party is held to have primary responsibility, and others step in when the first party cannot or will not discharge the responsibility. Those who believe that the state is responsible for care only when the family has failed in its task are drawing upon this conception of disjunctive responsibility. But this model is a poor fit for describing responsibility for care; for one thing, it presumes that different agents act independently of one another and sequentially, but “institutions structured directly and indirectly by the state profoundly affect families’ ability to care for their members.”13 Conjunctive responsibility describes Maxine Eichner, “The Supportive State:  Government, Dependency, and Responsibility for Caretaking,” in Care Ethics and Political Theory, eds. Daniel Engster and Maurice Hamington (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015), 87-​ 107. 13 Eichner, “The Supportive State,” 96. 12

191

Elements of Justice for a Dependent Care Ethic

191

situations in which many different people have responsibility, though each may have a different task involved in discharging that responsibility. Responsibility for care is a conjunctive responsibility: the family and the state each bear part of it. The family is responsible for direct care: family members best know what each individual needs. They can provide care that is permeated by affection and personal concern and attend to particular circumstances. The state is responsible, through laws and regulations, for shaping and maintaining the institutional context that can either support care or interfere with it. Some have argued that the state is becoming much less relevant in an age of globalization. While the role of the state is changing, and multinational corporations are harder for the state to regulate, the state is by no means obsolete. As Martha Fineman notes, the state is involved in our lives in myriad ways and is the entity ultimately responsible for defining and regulating the institutions that facilitate our social cooperation in processes of caregiving, from families, to corporations, to schools.14 “Understood historically as the manifestation of public authority and the ultimate legitimate repository of coercive power, the state is the only realistic contender”15 for this definition and regulation. Certainly, many of these processes and institutions encompass interstate and global relations more than ever before, and this calls for new forms of political governance. Instituting such governance will be an immensely challenging task. My primary point here, however, is that care and market entities exist within juridical frameworks, and any ethic of dependent care relations must address, critique, and suggest constructive changes to these juridical frameworks. An Element of Sacrifice. The preceding reference to coercive power is important. In a Christian ethic of dependent care relations, states are needed to coerce because some communities are so much more deprived than others. Only a higher-​level juridical structure can help to remedy this. The demands of distributive justice may be experienced as heteronomous to us on some level. Consider, for example, the widespread resistance to redistributive programs such as the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) in the United States. Such programs are widely seen, not as a part of the communal relations of giving and receiving described so eloquently by Alisdair MacIntyre, but as impositions. Many United States citizens perceive the use of tax dollars to fund social programs as Fineman, “The Responsive State,” 272. Martha Albertson Fineman, Transcending the Boundaries of Law: Generations of Feminism and Legal Theory (New York: Routledge, 2011), 164.

14

15

192

192

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

intrusions into their own well-​being. We cannot return to a time when shared traditions of giving and receiving rendered this redistribution a deeply felt part of our own good, if such a time existed. But we are nonetheless ethically obligated to redistribute resources to meet needs as basic as nutrition. If I am to include all other human beings into the scope of my “community,” and in particular, if I am to include them as legitimate claimants to adequate care and basic flourishing, then I will have to sacrifice my own good to some extent. To some degree, I will experience attention to the needs of the other as sacrifice rather than as an integral element of my own good. As we saw in Chapter 5, Hallett, Judish, and others call this to our attention: feeding the hungry elsewhere in the world will claim our resources, perhaps to a very significant degree. This will be true even if meeting the needs of the hungry is accomplished through collective means via public policy –​as it must be, in part; sacrifice must not be assigned exclusively to the realm of private relationships. In short, equality as autonomy must be somewhat restricted to promote equality of basic need fulfillment. We cannot rely on the sporadic and heroic sacrifice of individuals for this purpose. We must institutionalize some sacrifice through the states, partly to avoid what Niebuhr insisted would happen to those who express his version of Christian love: that they will be destroyed. An Epistemologically Humble Account of the Good. Precisely because the state must be, in some respects, coercive, precisely because this ethic is a costly ethic, a Christian ethic of dependent care relations must articulate and justify an account of the human good that invokes this sacrifice. Coercion and sacrifice must not be arbitrary, but justified by a reasonable, revisable consensus about the goods that are due to human persons in order to bring them to a level of flourishing appropriate to their dignity. Furthermore, an account of the good is necessary because dependent caregivers must, to some degree, determine the good for their charges. We need some account of what all human persons need and are entitled to in order to serve as a critical check on abusive or deeply mistaken conceptions of the good of dependents. In addition, an account of the good is necessary for basic coherence in an account of justice in care relations. We have repeatedly seen, in my analyses of political theory, economic theory, and recent conceptions of Christian love, that the marginalization of dependent care relations in such theories is intertwined with an unwillingness to specify the goods that justice, economics, or love seek to provide to dependent and interdependent human beings. In particular, a Christian ethic of dependent care relations requires a conception of justice that guarantees the fulfillment of basic needs, those things required for human

193

Elements of Justice for a Dependent Care Ethic

193

survival and a very basic level of flourishing, such as food, shelter, basic health care, and basic education. Although we must come to some (tentative, dialogical, revisable) account of the human good in order to give care, uncover power relations behind supposedly “neutral” accounts of the right, and make appropriate social policy, this project is fraught with the danger of imposition of notions of the good that are not justifiable to all affected parties. Ongoing, Inclusive, Critical Assessment of Care and Its Social Organization. As I noted in Chapter 6, while Aquinas sees our natural inclinations to care for those nearest to us as expressions of God’s providential ordering (though requiring refinement through practical reason), the contemporary social organization of care means that our inclinations will go astray, because we are embedded in structures of injustice. Furthermore, given that norms about the appropriate allocation of caregiving are so profoundly shaped by gender, race, class, and nationality, tools for critical reflection on and deconstruction of these norms are sorely needed. Any account of justice that is to be integrated with an ethic of dependent care relations must therefore incorporate mechanisms for critical assessment of the social organization of care, assessment to be informed by the concrete moral knowledge gained within the practice of caregiving. Of particular importance is the moral knowledge of marginalized persons giving care in oppressive or exploitative circumstances. Such criticism must be democratic, dialogical, and ongoing. These tools are needed as a critical check upon the Thomistic order of love, Protestant conceptions of the orders of creation, contemporary Catholic social thought, or any model that too easily presumes that the contemporary social organization of care is an expression of God’s will. This element of a justice ethic offers a new understanding of equality as autonomy. This is not autonomy as unfettered choice detached from relational obligations and oblivious to preexisting inequalities. Rather, this is an autonomy envisaged as participation in communal processes of communication and negotation about needs and the allocation of responsibilities. Equality here means inclusion in the process, with equal voice. Equality as autonomy is used to ensure equality of basic need fulfillment. An Adequate Grounding for Moral Equality. Finally, a Christian ethic of dependent care relations must understand justice to include respect for the dignity and moral equality of each and every human person. Furthermore, this moral equality must be understood to instantiate a claim to the care and resources necessary for survival and flourishing. Again, such an ethic is very demanding; as we have seen, thinkers such as John Rawls exclude

194

194

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

some persons from the full scope of justice in order to render the ethic less costly. A  Christian ethic of dependent care relations, taking its cue from the parable of the Good Samaritan, cannot do so. Furthermore, to be inclusive, this justice ethic cannot ground moral equality in any particular capacity that not all human persons can be said to fully possess, such as rationality. Thus, this ethic calls for an alternate basis or justification for human moral equality. With these criteria in hand, in my final chapter, I will explore contemporary resources that we might draw upon to construct a Christian ethic of justice that meets all of them. A Christian ethic of dependent care relations must integrate such a justice ethic with an ethic of Christian love that is universal in scope while attending, as did the Good Samaritan and as do caregivers, to deep human need and vulnerability.

195

Ch apter  8

Resources for a Conception of Justice Within a Dependent Care Ethic

A conception of justice that meets all the criteria outlined in the previous chapter will need to draw on a range of contemporary conceptions of justice, none of which is adequate to the task on its own. Here I explore some resources within contemporary thought, both in Christian ethics and in feminist philosophy and political theory, that might serve as building blocks for such an ethic of justice. These include Catholic social thought, Martha Nussbaum’s and Eva Feder Kittay’s conceptions of a distributive justice that can incorporate dependency, feminist retrievals of Thomistic natural law thought, and secular feminist political ethics of care. Some of these resources stand in tension with each other, in the values they prioritize; these tensions must be addressed and perhaps cannot be fully resolved. However, acknowledging competing emphases, and attempting to honor all these elements as best as we can, will make for a far better ethic than one that attempts to avoid tensions, trade-​offs, and ambiguities by erasing dependency and care, an arena of human life in which they must be confronted. Finally, I turn to recent efforts to ground human personhood, dignity, and equality in light of dependency, vulnerability, and disability, given the growing recognition that human autonomy and rationality are not fully adequate grounds for this dignity. Although there is much creative work currently occurring on this question, secular feminist philosophers repeatedly bump up against a foundational dilemma, when trying to affirm equality in the fact of dependency, that theological resources can better address. I turn to Kathryn Tanner’s account of noncontrastive transcendence as an alternate resource for grounding moral equality.

Catholic Social Thought One contemporary resource for the development of this justice ethic is Catholic social thought. In its official form, this tradition is encompassed 195

196

196

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

within a series of papal and conciliar encyclicals –​letters articulating official Church teachings –​generally agreed to begin in 1891 with Pope Leo XIII’s letter, Rerum Novarum (On the Condition of Labor).1 Though Catholic social teaching has evolved in response to historical circumstances, central themes are recognizable through subsequent documents issued over the ensuing 125 years. At the center of the tradition is an affirmation of the dignity of the human person, grounded in the biblical conception of humans as imago Dei, created in the image of God. Thus Catholic social thought begins from a strong affirmation of moral equality. This affirmation grounds the claim that all human persons are entitled to a number of important goods, including substantive positive entitlements to “the right to life, to bodily integrity, and to the means which are suitable for the proper development of life; these are primarily food, clothing, shelter, rest, medical care, and finally the necessary social services.”2 Human beings also have the right to education, freedom of religion and artistic and cultural expression, and meaningful work with safe working conditions. Catholic social thought also draws on and develops Thomas Aquinas’s concept of the common good as fulfilled when every member of the community possesses the prerequisites of flourishing.3 In contemporary Catholic social thought, as in Aquinas, the content of the good (including the common good) is understood to be an expression of the natural law. This, in turn, means that all human persons have the capacity to discern the good and the moral imperative it imposes; this is not intended to be a sectarian ethic. Still, many aspects of the good as articulated in the Catholic social documents may not be readily accepted by all; perhaps the most obvious example is the insistent reiteration of the moral prohibition on contraceptive technologies. I have argued that a dependent care ethic requires us to come to some agreement about the goods we believe must be accessible to all –​in the case of dependent persons, through caregiving relations. The Catholic social tradition offers one such account, which is broadly defensible in many respects, but also demonstrates the dangers of incorporating elements that may be controversial and seen as unwanted intrusions into arenas of legitimate personal autonomy. Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum (On the Condition of Labor), at w2.vatican.va/​content/​leo-​xiii/​en/​encyclicals/​documents/​hf_​l-​xiii_​enc_​15051891_​rerum-​novarum.html. 2 John XXIII, Pacem in Terris (Peace on Earth) 11, at w2.vatican.va/​content/​john-​xxiii/​en/​encyclicals/​ documents/​hf_​j-​xxiii_​enc_​11041963_​pacem.html. 3 John XXIII, Mater et Magistra (Christianity and Social Progress) 65, at w2.vatican.va/​content/​john-​ xxiii/​en/​encyclicals/​documents/​hf_​j-​xxiii_​enc_​15051961_​mater.html. 1

197

Resources for a Dependent Care Ethic

197

I have also argued that an ethic of dependent care relations requires a role for the state, to redistribute resources (particularly given the large amount of economic activity, including much care work, that occurs outside the market), and to offer protections to care workers and recipients. Catholic social thought affirms an indispensable role for government, but one that is conditioned on the exercise of political authority for the common good.4 Throughout the documents of the Catholic social tradition, the state is ascribed specific functions in promoting the fulfillment of the goods due to all persons, advancing development, providing a juridical framework for the economy, protecting workers, and protecting the environment. In light of growing global interdependence, papal encyclicals have even emphasized the need for a universal or world political authority. John XXIII was the first to make this call in 1963, in response to incipient processes of globalization.5 John Paul II noted that an increasingly internationalized economy calls for “effective international agencies which will oversee and direct the economy to the common good, something that an individual State, even if it were the most powerful on earth, would not be in a position to do.”6 Benedict XVI reiterated this call for a universal authority in 2010.7 These popes did not specifically reference the globalization of the care economy and consequent need for international regulation and protection; however, the “global heart transplant” is a key example of a violation of the global common good, which exceeds the capacities of the contemporary nation-​state to fully address. While a global “government” may be unrealistic, one would hope that existing forms of global governance will be leveraged to increase justice in the care economy.8 For example, see Leo XXIII, Rerum Novarum 33–​60; John XXIII, Pacem in Terris 47–​48, 53–​54; John Paul II, Centesimus Annus (After 100 Years) 11, 15, 46–​49, at w2.vatican.va/​content/​john-​paul-​ii/​en/​ encyclicals/​documents/​hf_​jp-​ii_​enc_​01051991_​centesimus-​annus.html. 5 John XXIII, Pacem in Terris 137. 6 John Paul II, Centesimus Annus 58. 7 Pope Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate, at w2.vatican.va/​content/​benedict-​xvi/​en/​encyclicals/​documents/​hf_​ben-​xvi_​enc_​20090629_​caritas-​in-​veritate.html, 67. Unsurprisingly, many observers have found this proposal to be unrealistic and have pointed toward other modes of international collaboration toward the common good, such as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). See Lisa Sowle Cahill, “Caritas in Veritate: Benedict’s Global Reorientation,” Theological Studies 71 (2010), 306–​308; and comments by Bryan Hehir and John Coleman in The Moral Dynamics of Economic Life:  An Extension and Critique of Caritas in Veritate, ed. Daniel K. Finn (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2012), 58–​60. 8 The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are showing increasing awareness of the centrality of unpaid care to successful development policy, though policy analyses do not seem to have had much impact on conditions of loans yet. The structural adjustment programs required by these institutions imposed heavy burdens on women, who took up increased unpaid care to make up for cuts in public services. See World Development Report 2012: Gender Equality and Development (Washington, DC:  International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/​World Bank, 4

198

198

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

Within Catholic social thought, the affirmation of the importance of political authority (including this proposed global authority), is properly understood only in conjunction with the principle of subsidiarity, which specifies that community functions should happen at the most local level possible and should receive support (subsidum) from higher levels of social organization whenever necessary.9 The principle of subsidiarity reflects the idea, pervasive in Catholic social teaching, that the dignity of human persons entails that individuals and communities should be able to exercise their own agency to address their needs and promote their own flourishing, to the extent possible. It reflects as well the consistent affirmation within Catholic social thought of a supportive and coordinating role for the state. Drew Christiansen thus describes subsidiarity as a “double-​edged sword.”10 It is necessary to keep in mind both edges of the sword –​both the local autonomy and the supportive function of higher levels of society and government.11 Thus Catholic social thought provides a sort of infrastructure of some of the central elements that I have identified as necessary for a contemporary ethic of dependent care: an account of universal moral equality, an affirmation of concrete goods that are due to each and every person on account of their human dignity, a role for the state to distribute and foster these goods, and an emphasis on the agency of individuals and communities in discerning and fulfilling needs. This infrastructure is promising, but the promise is somewhat undercut by other elements of Catholic thought and practice. We can see these elements by examining the few points at which Catholic social thought has addressed dependent caregiving directly. 2011); Christian Gonzales, Sonali Jain-​Chandra, Kalpana Kochhar, Monique Newiak, and Tlek Zeinullayev, Catalyst for Change: Empowering Women and Tackling Income Inequality (Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund, 2015). 9 For this affirmation of the role of the state in tandem with subsidiarity, see Mater et Magistra 53–​58; for explicit definitions, see Pius XI, Quadregesimo Anno (After Forty Years), at w2.vatican.va/​content/​pius-​xi/​en/​encyclicals/​documents/​hf_​p-​xi_​enc_​19310515_​quadragesimo-​anno.html, 76–​80; Centesimus Annus 48. 10 Drew Christiansen, SJ, “Commentary on Pacem in Terris (Peace on Earth), in Modern Catholic Social Teaching:  Commentaries and Interpretations, ed. Kenneth R. Himes, O.F.M. (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005), 240 n.51. 11 Interpreters who draw upon the principle of subsidiarity as ground for shrinking necessary programs to assist the poor either misunderstand or deliberately misuse the principle. Then chair of the House Budget Committee, U.S. Representative Paul Ryan indicated that his proposed 2013 federal budget was inspired by the Catholic principle of subsidiarity; he was greeted with a wave of criticism from bishops, Catholic moral theologians, and others. For the response of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, see “Federal Budget Cuts Must Protect Poor, Vulnerable People, Says U.S. Bishops’ Conference” (April 17, 2012), at www.usccb.org/​news/​2012/​12–​063.cfm.

199

Resources for a Dependent Care Ethic

199

To date, there has been some, but not much, attention to the ways in which Catholic social thought might recognize and support a more just allocation of care. Early documents in the Catholic social tradition endorsed the notion of a “family wage,” or a wage sufficient for a a male worker to support himself, his wife, and their children.12 In the United States, social theorist John Ryan wrote extensively in support of the family living wage as well.13 This proposal channeled economic sustenance within a money economy through a male head of household so that a wife could stay home and manage care responsibilities. Such a system (which has rarely existed in U.S. society, and never for all families) at least acknowledges that care requires economic support, but from a feminist perspective, to channel support for caregiving only through a male head of household is hardly just and renders women and children deeply vulnerable. This presumption of patriarchal control over family resources is somewhat alleviated by Pope John Paul II’s 1981 suggestion that the state provide “family allowances of grants to mothers devoting themselves exclusively to their families.”14 Ten years later, in Centesimus Annus, John Paul calls for the state to provide “adequate resources and sufficient means of support” for the family to fulfill caregiving functions for both children and the elderly while warning against overly bureaucratic intrusions into the family and other intermediary groups.15 This model of the state’s relation to the family –​support and resources without overtly intrusive bureaucracy –​is quite a promising vision, but much depends on how it is implemented. In this light, it is important to recognize that John Paul II’s discussions of caregiving roles are deeply gendered. In his 1981 encyclical on the family, Familiaris Consortio, John Paul II combined an affirmation of “women’s access to public functions” with a concern that such public functions not impede their “maternal and family role,” which the pope casts as their most important role. While he emphasizes the “original and irreplaceable meaning of work in the home and in rearing children,” and urges a harmonization of this work with women’s public roles, he also See, for example, Rerum Novarum 9; Quadregesimo Anno 45; Mater et Magistra 45, 112; Pacem in Terris 21. 13 John A. Ryan, A Living Wage: Its Ethical and Economic Aspects (London: Macmillan, 1906). Christine Firer Hinze offers an excellent analysis of both Ryan and official Catholic teachings on the family living wage in “Bridge Discourse on Wage Justice: Roman Catholic and Feminist Perspectives on the Family Living Wage,” Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics (1991), 109–​132. 14 John Paul II, Laborem Exercens (On Human Work) 19, at w2.vatican.va/​content/​john-​paul-​ii/​en/​ encyclicals/​documents/​hf_​jp-​ii_​enc_​14091981_​laborem-​exercens.html. 15 John Paul II, Centesimus Annus 49. 12

200

200

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

insists on “different vocations of men and women.”16 This combination of gendered assumptions about caregiving with a stress on the importance of both domestic labor and women’s public roles has garnered an enthusiastic reception from some Catholic feminists.17 However, I agree with Christine Firer Hinze that the gendering of home-​based work operates at cross-​purposes with John Paul II’s insistence upon the profound importance of such work and his concern that neoliberal capitalism fails to appropriately value care work.18 I  further agree with Catherine Osborne that the strong split between public and private in Catholic social thought –​while softened somewhat by discussions of the family as the cell of the broader society and of its social justice function –​makes it very difficult to address justice for migrant careworkers.19 Meghan Clark has suggested that the principle of subsidiarity requires support for family caregivers, and she calls for a gender critique of Catholic social teachings. She is clearly correct on both counts, though it is not clear that her strong emphasis on care by family members can address the global caregiving economy.20 The promise of the principle of subsidiarity for underwriting justice in dependent care relations is partly abrogated by the fact that any official Catholic teachings on this subject emerge from a hierarchical, noninclusive teaching authority, one that is insufficiently attentive to power relations. In the current Roman Catholic ecclesial context, local decision making often means the decision is laid in the hands of an area conference of bishops or local bishop (all of whom are male and vowed celibates, thus unlikely to be engaged in direct caregiving). As we shall John Paul II, Familiaris Consortio (The Christian Family in the Modern World), at w2.vatican.va/​content/​john-​paul-​ii/​en/​apost_​exhortations/​documents/​hf_​jp-​ii_​exh_​19811122_​familiaris-​consortio. html, 23. 17 See especially Elizabeth Schiltz, “Should Bearing the Child Mean Bearing All the Cost? A Catholic Perspective on the Sacrifice of Motherhood and the Common Good,” Logos 10, no. 3 (Summer 2007), 15–​33; Elizabeth Schiltz, “West, MacIntyre, and Wojytla: John Paul II’s Contribution to a Development of a Dependency-​Based Theory of Justice,” Journal of Catholic Legal Studies 45 (2006), 369–​414; Susan J. Stabile, “Can Secular Feminists and Catholic Feminists Work Together to Ease the Conflict Between Work and Family?” University of St. Thomas Law Journal 4 (2006–​2007), 432–​467. 18 Christine Firer Hinze, “Women, Families, and the Legacy of Laborem Exercens: An Unfinished Agenda,” Journal of Catholic Social Thought 6, no. 1 (2009), 63–​64. See also Lisa Sowle Cahill, “Justice for Women:  Martha Nussbaum and Catholic Social Teaching,” in Transforming Unjust Structures: The Capabilities Approach, ed. Séverine Deneulin, Mathias Nebel, and Nichols Sagovsky (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), 96–​97. 19 Osborne, “Migrant Domestic Careworkers.” 20 Meghan Clark, “Crisis in Care:  Family, Gender, and the Need for Subsidiarity in Caregiving,” Journal of Catholic Social Thought 7, no. 1 (2010), 63–​81. 16

201

Resources for a Dependent Care Ethic

201

see, feminist political ethicists offer richer and more inclusive accounts of local decision making about the allocation of care and responsibility for care. Finally, caregiving as an expression of Christian love requires greater systematic articulation in order for Catholic social thought to inform an ethic of dependent care relations. As we saw, for Aquinas, love is a sort of ontological force that moves created things toward their ends, such that God’s intended harmonious order is achieved in society (where it encompasses flourishing for all human persons), as in the universe at large. But at least until recently, references to love and its relation to the common good within contemporary Catholic social thought have been brief and unsystematic. A theology of love has become more prominent in the encyclicals of John Paul II, with his emphasis on the concept of solidarity, and even more so in the encyclicals of Benedict XVI, which develop social thought around an account of caritas. But this work has not yet been developed in a way that can fully encompass dependent caregiving as an aspect of solidarity or of caritas. John Paul II defines solidarity as “a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good; that is to say to the good of all and each individual, because we are all really responsible for all.”21 In Centesimus Annus (1991), John Paul II links the notion of solidarity to previous references to love or related categories in Catholic social thought: friendship (Leo XXIII); social charity (Pius XI); and the civilization of love (Paul VI).22 In addition, John Paul II connects solidarity to charity in that it “seeks to go beyond itself, to take on the specifically Christian dimension of total gratuity, forgiveness, and reconciliation.”23 When John Paul II says that “we are all really responsible for all,” this does not give much guidance about for whom, among an entire world of neighbors, we should take up specific responsibility, or how to balance our intensive, particular relations of care with concern for neighbors across the globe. Likewise, though he refers to solidarity as a virtue,24 John Paul’s treatment differs from the treatment of virtue in Aquinas or Aristotle. In particular, virtue in the Aristotelian and Thomistic sense is a mean, but what would be the mean of solidarity? John Paul’s language of “total gratuity” is not virtue language; we can hear Lisa Tessman in the background John Paul II, Solicitudo Rei Socialis (On Social Concern) 38, at w2.vatican.va/​content/​john-​paul-​ii/​ en/​encyclicals/​documents/​hf_​jp-​ii_​enc_​30121987_​sollicitudo-​rei-​socialis.html. 22 John Paul II, Centesimus Annus 10. 23 John Paul II, Solicitudo Rei Socialis, 40. 24 Ibid., 38. 21

202

202

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

reminding us that there can be no mean when it comes to responding to global suffering; and such a response may not promote our own flourishing. However, John Paul’s reminder that solidarity calls for sacrifice echoes themes articulated in my previous chapters. Furthermore, John Paul does not fall into the trap of casting “universal love” as an attitude of individuals. Solidarity involves active work for justice and calls for social groups to organize to “construct effective instruments of solidarity.”25 John Paul acknowledges the seemingly intractable nature of structures of sin, and he calls for a response that involves concrete action and not just a “feeling of vague compassion.”26 Overall, while his language of solidarity is primarily aimed toward our responsibility for distant neighbors harmed by global inequalities, rather than toward our near and dear dependents, John Paul’s articulation of solidarity does include elements that might be developed into a more adequate ethic of dependent care relations. The recent pope who has most explicitly tied the Catholic social tradition to a theology of love is Benedict XVI. In his 2005 encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, Benedict draws on the parable of the Good Samaritan as “a standard which imposes universal love towards the needy whom we encounter ‘by chance,’ ”27 and articulates the content of Christian love: “first of all, the simple response to immediate needs and specific situations:  feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, caring for and healing the sick, visiting those in prison, etc.”28 Thus he points to both the universal inclusivity and substantive content of Christian love that I have emphasized. However, like so many contemporary interpreters of this parable, Benedict seems to presume that the person we meet today in need of care is a stranger, encountered by chance, and that intensive, responsive care is most properly the realm of Christian discipleship because it is distinctively Christian to love the stranger or enemy. Relations of dependent care are not in view here. In addition, whereas I have argued that to provide inclusive and substantive care, we need the state to redistribute resources, in Deus Caritas Est, Benedict casts state-​sponsored care as bureaucratic and impersonal, lacking the “look of love” that occurs through personal encounter.29 He does not reiterate John Paul II’s call for state caregiving subsidies to families and does not seem to envision a state that can facilitate care and empower John Paul II, Centesimus Annus, 16. John Paul II, Solicitudo Rei Socialis, 38. 27 Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est (God Is Love) 25, at w2.vatican.va/​content/​benedict-​xvi/​en/​encyclicals/​documents/​hf_​ben-​xvi_​enc_​20051225_​deus-​caritas-​est.html. 28 Ibid., 31 29 Ibid., 18. 25 26

203

Resources for a Dependent Care Ethic

203

caregivers, in part through redistributing the material prerequisites of care. As we have seen, state support for dependent care relations is a necessary condition of justice in these relations. We should of course scrutinize the conditions of this support:  they can be intrusive, disciplinary, bureaucratic, and biased (as is generally the case for income support to low-​ income mothers in the United States), or they can be relatively simple and free from intrusive regulation (as is the case for Social Security retirement income in the United States). Benedict’s tone shifts in his 2010 encyclical, Caritas in Veritate: here he emphasizes “the institutional path  –​we might also call it the political path  –​of charity, no less excellent and effective than the kind of charity which encounters the neighbor directly, outside the institutional mediation of the polis.”30 Benedict does not apply this “political path of charity” specifically to dependent care relations, but he does articulate a more mutually supportive relationship between the state and the exercise of charity. Overall, the rhetoric about the state in these two documents is somewhat contradictory; it could be remedied by a clearer account of the differential responsibilities of both state and family for care, such as Eichner provides in her development of the concept of “conjunctive responsibility.” Though some other lines of thought developed in Caritas in Veritate echo themes articulated in this book, Benedict does not elaborate them in terms of dependent care relations. He is concerned that we have forgotten our own dependency and indebtedness, the gratuity that undergirds our very existence. Benedict emphasizes the spiritual aspects of this gratuity:  his discussion of the “astonishing experience of gift” encompasses truth, hope, fraternal communion, and our creation itself.31 He does not, however, emphasize the embodied aspect of this gratuity or touch on the intensive material care that must be given for human beings to survive. This is a missed opportunity. Perhaps the most original contribution of Caritas in Veritate is Benedict’s call for “further and deeper reflection on the meaning of the economy and its goals.”32 He rejects a binary between market and state with strictly opposed motives, in which the market is the realm of self-​interested exchange and the state is the agent of coercion, imposing duty and other-​regard.33 Economics is normative to its core, he argues, and must be infused with Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate, 7. Ibid., 34. 32 Ibid., 32. 33 Ibid., 39. 30 31

204

204

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

caritas at every level. Thus, he advocates an increase in economic enterprises that are driven by a complex range of motives and values, not simply by profit –​what he calls “hybrid forms of commercial behavior.”34 However, Benedict’s language reveals a conception of the economy as coterminous with commercial activity. His purposes would be well served by acknowledging caregiving itself as economic. The care economy is, indeed, an arena of a complex range of motives, an arena, as we have seen, that was deliberately extracted from both political and economic theory precisely to allow for a simplified and binary account of motives. To reclaim this sector as a part of the economy would be to honor embodied caregiving relations but also to upset sharp market-​state binaries and to remind us of a pervasive economy that already involves both exchange and gratuity. Benedict does not move in this direction, but many of his lines of thought could well be developed in this way. In summary, Catholic social thought provides a range of promising resources for a Christian ethic of dependent care relations, both in its account of a just social order, governed by a state that exists to promote the common good, and instantiating the principle of subsidiarity; and in the reflections of John Paul II and Benedict XVI on the relationship between Christian love and social justice. But to achieve this promise, future development of this tradition must attend consciously and directly to the role of dependent care relations and must transcend some deeply gendered assumptions. Perhaps the most daunting obstacle to the use of this resource is the hierarchical and exclusive ecclesial structure from which the encyclical tradition is generated. The depth of this failing may best be appreciated later in the chapter, in dialogue with resources that emphasize inclusive dialogue about the content and allocation of responsibility for care.

Feminist Dependency-​Based Accounts of Justice: Nussbaum And Kittay Another important resource for a Christian ethic of love and justice for dependent care relations is found in contemporary feminist accounts of justice incorporating dependency. Here I  explore two prominent examples, the work of Martha Nussbaum and Eva Feder Kittay. As we saw in Chapter 2, both of these thinkers engage with, and suggest modifications to, John Rawls’s theory of justice. Accordingly, both thinkers presume Ibid., 36.

34

205

Resources for a Dependent Care Ethic

205

that distributive justice, facilitated by the state, is an important aspect of a dependent care ethic. Nussbaum’s strength is her thicker account of the goods that should be provided through care relations. Kittay’s strength is her clearer engagement with the realities of deep dependency and with material scarcity. If they are allowed to mutually correct one another, they meet most (though not all) of my criteria for a conception of justice within a dependent care ethic. Nussbaum offers a list of basic human capabilities –​things that human persons are able to do and be, which define what it means to live a fully human life, a life worthy of the human being. In her early work, she describes this list of capabilities as “a thick, vague notion of the good.”35 Because the capabilities are central to the human good, every person has a moral claim to have them developed up to the point at which the person can have a genuine choice about whether and how to use or develop them further. Thus Nussbaum’s approach brings together considerations of the right  –​what is required universally, in justice, in our relations with all persons –​with considerations of the good –​substantive statements about the positive content of what is owed to all human persons as persons.36 She grounds her approach in an “intuitive idea of a life that is worthy of the dignity of a human being.”37 This dignity, which grounds our moral equality, is of fundamental importance to her argument, even though she eschews metaphysical grounding for it.38 The list of capabilities is drawn from human experience, constructed in ongoing cross-​cultural dialogue, subject to multiple concrete specifications, and is revisable.39 Thus Nussbaum makes moves toward an inclusive and critical process of debate over the content of the universal human good, though this discussion does not explicitly attend to the social organization of care. As we saw in Chapter 2, Kittay carefully deconstructs Rawls’s theory and suggests modifications that incorporate dependency at its various stages. And as we shall see, Kittay also has proposed grounds of moral equality that can incorporate all, including persons like her daughter Sesha, with profound cognitive disabilities. Kittay expands Rawls’s list of primary goods to include the ability to receive needed care and to give care without Martha Nussbaum, “Aristotelian Social Democracy,” in Liberalism and the Good, eds. Bruce R. Douglass, Gerald M. Mara and Henry S. Richardson (New York: Routledge, 1990), 203–​252. 36 Nussbaum, Frontiers, 161–​162. 37 Ibid., 70. 38 Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 5. 39 Nussbaum, Frontiers, 78–​80. 35

206

206

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

incurring undue sacrifice.40 However, as we have seen, she does not give an adequate account of the substance of these goods.41 I agree with Nussbaum that we must further articulate the content of care, and the ends of care, both to know how to support such care (what goods to distribute, institutions to establish, etc.) and to hold persons accountable for the quality of care. Nussbaum suggests that her own list of capabilities should provide the basis of a more substantive list of the goods that should be fostered and allocated through distributive justice.42 In her work since 2000, and clearly influenced by Kittay, Nussbaum has engaged significantly with questions of dependency. She argues that the social-​contract tradition cannot readily encompass justice for persons with disabilities, because it is based on the premise of autonomous equals choosing to enter society for mutual advantage. Nussbaum argues eloquently for a conception of justice that can encompass benevolence rather than simply self-​interest,43 and that can admit persons as subjects of justice for reasons other than their capacity to reciprocate benefits;44 and for a conception of human dignity that encompasses our need and animality.45 Any appropriation of Nussbaum for a dependent care ethic must, however, retain a critical edge, one that Kittay can provide. Nussbaum’s work provides a cautionary tale about how difficult it can be to escape our assumptions of autonomy: even as she challenges us to confront dependency, she frequently presumes autonomy as the norm in her own constructive proposals. Our first clue to this tendency is that she subsumes needs under the umbrella of capabilities. “Being able to be adequately nourished” or “being able to have adequate shelter”46 would be better described simply as needs, the needs for food and housing, than as capabilities. Likewise, Nussbaum speaks of care itself primarily as a capability, implicitly focusing on the subject of care, not the object of care, and thus on agency rather than dependency, and on choice about giving care rather than the social and biological imperative of receiving care. In fact, in Nussbaum’s treatment of the family, dependency and kinship disappear. Nussbaum describes children as “captives (of the family) in all matters of basic survival and well-​being.”47 But in proposing guidelines for state intervention to Kittay, Love’s Labor, 103. See the discussion on pages 62–​63. 42 Nussbaum, Frontiers, 178. 43 Ibid., 122–​123. 44 Ibid., 87–​89. 45 Ibid., 160. 46 Ibid., 76. 47 Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 274. 40 41

207

Resources for a Dependent Care Ethic

207

protect children, she argues that state activity must aim at the preservation of each person’s “individual capability to choose relationships of love and care.”48 While dependents express complex forms of agency, children are not generally able to choose the specific persons who comprise their family. The contradiction seems lost on Nussbaum. In fact, she specifies marriage as the point at which we enter a family.49 But this is to erase the fact that we are born into families; it erases kinship. Nussbaum asserts that “(t)he family is a social and legal construct in a much more fundamental and thoroughgoing way” than either religious institutions or universities.50 But this is simply not the case. Kinship, education, and religion are basic human realities and practices that are instantiated through more formalized structures in human history. They eventually receive some sort of public stamp of recognition that bestows certain rights and privileges. But kinship is more basic and primordial than religion and education; kinship begins in reproductive biology.51 Again, at key points in Nussbaum’s critique of social-​contract theory, she speaks as if we are all autonomous choosers. For example, she says that social-​contract doctrine has “been giving us a defective story about why people get together to form a society.”52 But who is this person who makes a choice to “get together and form a society”? Was she not born into one? Did she not receive care to survive and grow into relationships of shared ends and mutual benevolence? Nussbaum’s blind spot is evident also in her misplaced critique of Kittay, whom she charges with “rejecting independence as a major social goal and conceiving of the state as a universal mother.”53 Though indeed, Kittay insists that we squarely face the pervasive fact of human dependency and the need for care, there is no textual basis in Kittay’s work for the charge that she “rejects independence as a major social goal.”54 On the contrary, Kittay offers proposals with the explicit aim of fostering fuller equality for those who give care –​primarily women. Ibid., 275. Martha C. Nussbaum, “The Future of Feminist Liberalism,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 74, no. 2 (November 2000), 61. 50 Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 275. 51 When Nussbaum begins to engage questions of dependency, this new emphasis does not inform her conception of the family. See her discussion in “The Future of Feminist Liberalism.” Six years later, in her lengthy treatment of justice for persons with disabilities in Frontiers of Justice, she refers us back to Women and Human Development for her views on the family. See Frontiers, 212. 52 Nussbaum, Frontiers, 223. 53 Ibid., 217. 54 Indeed, Nussbaum’s public policy proposals are, if anything, more expansive than those suggested by Kittay: see, for example, Nussbaum’s account of what her notion of the good requires of governments in “Aristotelian Social Democracy,” 229–​230. 48

49

208

208

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

Kittay understands that responding to dependency is costly, and that the only way to achieve a (limited) amount of autonomy for all is to distribute the burden of this response. Unlike Nussbaum, in other words, Kittay sees that we can only achieve equality by squarely facing dependency. As I discussed in Chapter 2, Nussbaum conflates Rawls’s adoption of Hume’s “circumstances of justice” with Rawls’s emphasis on reciprocal cooperation (and thus some degree of equal power) between the subjects of justice. In so doing, she evades the question of Hume’s central objective circumstance of justice: moderate scarcity. She goes so far as to claim that we need to consider efficiency, when framing principles of justice, only if we “are envisaging society as a scheme of cooperation for mutual advantage.”55 On the contrary, scarcity is a fact of human existence that must be navigated by human persons, and particularly by dependent caregivers. Nussbaum’s failure to confront moderate scarcity is a version of her failure to fully confront human dependency. She emphasizes our desire to cooperate with one another, our natural sociability; she does not emphasize our need to cooperate with one another to provide care and to share the limited resources needed to allow human persons to survive and flourish. Kittay confronts scarcity more directly; rather than critiquing Rawls for his adoption of the circumstances of justice, she expands those circumstances to include dependency, and her work gives explicit attention to the costliness of care for those with disabilities.56 In short, while both these thinkers make enormous contributions to the project of a theory of justice that can encompass dependency, Kittay needs to move toward a more explicitly articulated account of the content of good care (which is to say, the human good), and Nussbaum needs to gaze more directly at the realities of dependency and the foundational difference this dependency makes for our ways of thinking about justice. I see no reason why these two elements cannot be held together. In fact, as I have argued, they must be: if we are to call on each other to share the sacrifice called out by the necessary caring response to dependency, we ought to have a reasonable account of the sort of goods care should seek to fulfill, so that as far as possible, our sacrifices serve a justifiable purpose. One final comment on Nussbaum seems called for here. Nussbaum has been subject to trenchant criticism of her claims to egalitarian inclusivity in the determination of the capabilities list. Alison Jaggar argues that Nussbaum, Frontiers, 126. Eva Feder Kittay, “When Caring Is Just and Justice Is Caring,” Public Culture 13, no. 3 (2001), 557–​579.

55 56

209

Resources for a Dependent Care Ethic

209

Nussbaum’s approach covertly sets her up with the authority to determine which moral intuitions about the good or desires for goods are appropriate and which should be discarded. Jaggar’s charge of moral imperialism is well documented; Nussbaum does, indeed, appear to set up her procedure in such a way as to grant herself the position of ultimate and authoritative arbiter of what does and does not belong on the capability list; and her discussions about the content of the good are not as inclusive as we might be led to believe.57 Jaggar’s own proposal is for a more robust proceduralism to determine a list of shared goods. As I  have pointed out, there is no procedure that can include all persons; some cannot participate and need representation, so there is no way to avoid some explicit prescription of goods for other people. But Jaggar’s critique of Nussbaum points to the need for any procedure for determining these goods to be more thoroughly inclusive, egalitarian, and democratic. The tension between these two important elements –​an explicit account of the goods to be promoted within caregiving relations, and continual interrogation and revision of this account through inclusive discussions that give special attention to marginalized voices –​can better be explored through a dialogue between two other feminist bodies of work.

Critical Feminist Retrievals of Natural Law and Feminist Political Ethics of Care Critical feminist retrievals of natural law theory comprise another contemporary expression of the Thomistic tradition. Thinkers such as Cristina Traina, Lisa Sowle Cahill, and Susanne DeCrane draw upon certain of the central presuppositions of Thomas Aquinas to propose an ethic oriented toward the flourishing of embodied and spiritual human persons.58 This flourishing is inclusive of all persons, and individual flourishing is understood as interdependent with the common good. They draw out from the Thomistic account an inductive, dialogical, and epistemologically humble Alison Jaggar, “Reasoning About Well-​Being: Nussbaum’s Methods of Justifying the Capabilities,” Journal of Political Philosophy 14, no. 3 (2006), 301–​322. Nussbaum reports that she and Jonathan Glover sought out “people with whom we spoke a sufficiently common philosophical language so that we could communicate reasonably well, and who, at the same time, related their general claims to their own cultural and religious traditions, and who had done practical political work in addition to their own philosophical work.” Martha C. Nussbaum, “Public Philosophy and International Feminism,” Ethics 108 (1998), 779 n. 42, cited in Jaggar, “Reasoning About Well-​Being,” 313. 58 Lisa Sowle Cahill, Sex, Gender, and Christian Ethics (Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge University Press, 1996); DeCrane, Aquinas, Feminism, and the Common Good; Traina, Feminist Ethics and the Natural Law. 57

210

210

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

approach to determining the requirements of human flourishing. The emphasis on the accumulation of moral wisdom through long experience and attention to the fine details of context is arguably more faithful to Aquinas than the sometimes didactic approach of papal interpreters, who are often concerned to correct what they see as errors in the moral views of the laity. Despite this epistemological humility and attention to diverse contexts, feminist natural law thinkers also presume, in Cahill’s words, that “human beings share certain basic characteristics and experiences that are recognizable by reason,” many of which are “defined by the needs and capacities of the human body.”59 These critical feminist retrievals of Thomistic natural law do not tend to focus directly on the problem of the social organization of care, but they draw on a tradition in which love and the “order of love” are intimately linked to the requirements of the natural law and the common good. Thus their field of discourse is similar to that of feminist political ethicists of care, who have broadened a conversation about care in particular relationships to encompass questions about the social, political, and economic context for relations of care. Each of these bodies of thought balance two essential aspects of a dependent care ethic that nevertheless stand in a certain tension with each other. Specifically, feminist political ethicists of care offer more fully developed critical tools than does the Thomistic tradition for deconstructing unjust power relations that structure the social order. Postmodern or critical care feminists give greater emphasis to the ways in which discourses and power structures shape the very processes of practical reason, without the full awareness on the part of the individual that she is being shaped, but they sometimes move so far along the “postmodern” spectrum that they cannot provide a robust enough normative vision to guide social and political policies. Feminist natural law thinkers are more comfortable offering a conception of the good (albeit an epistemologically humble and revisable one) and invoking the state and other juridical structures to regulate economic and social practices and distribute goods where necessary. But they are developing a tradition that gives too little attention to power relations and must do more to specifically counter this failing, particularly given that care has been marginalized and assigned to those with little social power. Because each group of thinkers prioritizes a different side of this tension between ongoing critical deconstruction of care relations, and articulation of the goods that care should seek to Cahill, “Justice for Women,” 84.

59

211

Resources for a Dependent Care Ethic

211

realize, they are fruitful to read together, so that neither side of the tension is submerged. A good place to start this dialogue is with the feminist moral epistemology of Margaret Urban Walker, who has developed an “expressive-​ collaborative” view of morality “as a socially embodied medium of mutual understanding and negotiation between people over their responsibility for things open to human care and response.”60 Walker’s approach might be understood as “postmodern” in that she eschews abstract principles as forms of moral justification, seeing “moralities” as constructed in particular communities, through narratives and practices imbued with power relations. These moralities identify and allocate responsibilities and thereby construct “habitable ways of life.”61 Nevertheless, she does not give up normative assessment: some moralities can be identified as better than others based upon “the goods to be found” in living out particular moral understandings within “a particular lifeway,”62 as well as by whether a particular community’s allocation of responsibility “can survive the transparency that reflection produces.”63 This reflection is critical, dialogical, and inclusive; it must investigate whether a community’s moral understandings are coherent and justifiable to all those who enact them. Most such arrangements that have existed in human history would probably not be justified through such a critical process of reflection. Those who have experienced slavery or colonization are highly unlikely to have found such systems for allocating responsibility to be “habitable.” They have accepted their responsibilities “under coerced or manipulated conditions that imposed grave, even catastrophic losses.”64 Walker thus proposes that we first describe allocations of responsibility through an “empirically saturated reflective analysis,” and then interrogate and revise allocations of responsibility through a thoroughly inclusive, radically democratic, reflexive process of communication and negotiation. The point of her ethic, she says, is to “put people and responsibilities in the right places with respect to each other.”65 Joan Tronto frames her own political ethics of care in terms of Walker’s “geography of responsibility,”66 describing care as the substance of responsibility, given Walker, Moral Understandings, 9. Ibid., 7. 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid., 9. 64 Ibid., 13. 65 Ibid., 84. 66 Ibid., 86. 60 61

212

212

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

that care is pervasive in human life, encompassing much of the scope of human activity.67 Framing the allocation of care in terms of a responsibility framework is helpful for a number of reasons. First, responsibility is something we take up; it implies positive action to address needs or to further the good.68 Taking responsibility is not primarily a matter of policing our motives for selfishness, as in sacrificial or equal-​regard love theologies. Taking responsibility involves the proactive and risky process of addressing complex, thorny situations in order to meet needs and make things better. Secondly, responsibility is allocated, and a feminist political ethic of care demands that we ask how it is allocated, who has the social power to allocate it, or what cultural norms and political and economic structures shape this allocation. Feminist political care theorists advocate an inclusive and critical process not just for assigning responsibility, but also for assessing the needs that invoke these responsibilities. Thus Tronto and Julie Anne White advocate a form of Nancy Fraser’s “politics of needs interpretation.”69 As Fraser emphasizes, needs are usually defined by the powerful, by those seen as not needy. For example, contemporary welfare states define the type and degree of needs that render members of the society eligible for receiving particular benefits, delivered through an administrative system designed to measure and certify the need, in order to deliver or deny the benefit in the appropriate form or amount. But there will often be a gap between administrable needs and actual experience of need. The “needy” are constructed as passive and are required to shape their needs to meet bureaucratic definitions. Thus, the process of needs interpretation needs to be reclaimed from bureaucratic structures and repoliticized.70 Furthermore, in light of the sorts of cultural constructions that highlight some persons’ needs and mask other needs behind a mirage of self-​sufficiency, Tronto and White argue that this process must be radically democratized. White has Tronto, Caring Democracy, 55. It can also address our participation in unjust structures and help to identify our responsibility for the harm done by such structures, as in Iris Marion Young’s “social connection model.” Here I focus primarily on the allocation of positive responsibilities, in keeping with my overall emphasis that Christian love ethics must shift to the tasks that must be taken up, from its intensive focus on purification of our will and abstention from harm. Still, Young’s model is relevant to an ethic of love and justice for dependent care; it provides tools to assess, for example, the moral responsibility we incur when employing marginalized persons as caregivers. See Iris Marion Young, “Responsibility and Global Justice: A Social Connection Model,” Social Philosophy & Policy 23, no. 1 (January 2006), 102–​130. 69 White and Tronto, “Needs and Rights.” 70 Fraser, “Politics of Need Interpretation.” 67 68

213

Resources for a Dependent Care Ethic

213

translated this insight into arguments that domestic social policy should empower existing local relationship networks to identify needs and implement solutions; Fiona Robinson has made similar arguments about efforts to address global poverty.71 Within the relational networks highlighted by these critical and postmodern feminist care thinkers, we find the moral complexity that is erased in dichotomous constructs, whether offered by Enlightenment social-​contract thinkers, in the conditions of John Rawls’s original position, in Gary Becker’s theory of the family, or in the division between disinterested agape and preferential special relations. Whereas Becker radically flattened moral agency by purifying and separating motives, these thinkers make room for care as a process that occurs over time through expression, dialogue, discernment of needs, negotiation, and renegotiation as persons and communities try to nurture well-​being. In these relationships, we can discern the positive moral effort that goes into such nurturing and pinpoint the true mechanisms of the exclusion and harm with which Outka and other Christian ethicists are concerned. There are strong parallels between Walker’s responsibility ethic (which has explicitly influenced Tronto, Robinson, and White) and contemporary feminist retrievals of a Thomistic natural law ethic. Much of Cristina Traina’s evocative description of the Thomistic account of prudence applies as well to Walker’s “expressive-​collaborative” ethic:  both are “experiential, embodied, consultative, creative, calculating, inductive, flexible.”72 It is not clear that Walker would accept Traina’s final adjective, principled, but clearly the inductive, consultative, creative, and flexible approach is shared. In her view that participants in moral understandings can assess “habitability” by reflecting on their own experience, Walker offers a sort of parallel to the Thomistic notion that practical reason can discern better and worse orderings of goods. And contemporary feminist natural law thinkers parallel Walker’s contextual approach when they draw out Thomas’s emphasis on both the variation in the requirements of natural law depending on the particular situation and the difficulty of discerning what the natural law requires “as we descend to matters of detail.”73 Furthermore, the prudent person is receptive to the experience of others, particularly the wise –​which, in contemporary Robinson, Globalizing Care; White, Democracy, Justice, and the Welfare State. Traina, Feminist Ethics and the Natural Law, 64; italics in original. 73 Aquinas, ST I–​II.94.4. 71

72

214

214

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

feminist retrievals, though not in Aquinas himself, encompasses a particular openness to the poor and marginalized.74 The local, dialogical processes of negotiation over the allocation of responsibility, or of needs interpretation, described by feminist political ethics of care may invite comparisons to the Roman Catholic social principle of subsidiarity. Both critical feminist ethics of care and the principle of subsidiarity can be leveraged to argue for fewer administrative restrictions and much greater local autonomy in the use of funds distributed by the state to support caregiving processes. For Catholic thinkers to leverage subsidiarity in this way, however, they will need to recognize that much of the moral knowledge generated within care relations may be disruptive: caregivers and care receivers carry knowledge in their bodies of the injustice of the present social organization of care. This knowledge may challenge, rather than support, gendered assumptions about women’s vocation to provide mothering care, for example. And again, the hierarchical and exclusive nature of the Roman Catholic ecclesial teaching function is at odds with the inclusive and particular epistemology envisioned by feminist political care ethicists for determining a just allocation of responsibility for care. Feminist natural law theorists, of course, will want to push the Roman Catholic conversation in the direction of a more democratic assessment of responsibilities and needs as exercised through the virtue of prudence. However, it seems important to recall, and actively correct, the clearly hierarchical context of prudence exercised in political reason as it is depicted in Thomas Aquinas. As we saw in Chapter 6, Aquinas describes political prudence as practical reasoning about how an individual’s acts relate to the common good.75 The prudence of a ruler, as he considers what law or exercise of authority will further the common good, is regnative prudence.76 For Aquinas, these aspects of prudence come together in a thoroughly hierarchical way: political prudence requires citizens to further the common good precisely by subjecting themselves to the regnative prudence of the ruler: “men who are slaves or subjects in any sense” exercise political prudence “so that they may direct themselves in obeying their superiors.”77 Thus, while prudence is a consultative virtue, exercised by humans who are thoroughly social and political, for Thomas this sociality Cristina Traina, “Feminist Natural Law,” Concilium (2010), no. 3, 79–​87. Aquinas, ST II–​II.47.10. 76 Ibid., II–​II.50.1. 77 Ibid., II–​II.50.2. 74 75

215

Resources for a Dependent Care Ethic

215

is profoundly hierarchical. When feminists retrieve Thomistic prudence with an emphasis on his inductive method, his emphasis on consulting the experience of self and others, and his epistemological humility, they ought to explicitly counter its exclusively hierarchical exercise and might wish to explicitly invoke the picture of inclusive, democratic negotiation over the definition of needs and the allocation of responsibility that is drawn by thinkers such as Walker, Tronto, Fraser, and White. Traina and Cahill have suggested that postmodern feminism, without recourse to some normative standard to evaluate and compare different configurations of power or social constructs, cannot critique oppressive practices.78 But political ethics of care, with their postmodern but still normative approach, lie along a spectrum with, and not even very far apart from, critical feminist retrievals of the Thomistic emphasis on human flourishing. Though much postmodern thought may seem to deny any normative standards, postmodern care ethics cannot do this, precisely because care is oriented to human well-​being. Both groups of thinkers presume that practical reason, responsibility, or “moral understandings” are aimed at positive, creative moral agency working to foster good things for human persons; such goods are not privatized “interests” that can be freely expressed within the constraints of rules that themselves prescind from any account of the good (as in Rawlsian political theory, or marginalist economics), nor is the primary measure of moral rectitude the avoidance of selfishness. The primary end of moral agency is to foster Traina’s “holistic flourishing” or Cahill’s “critical moral realism” about shared goods.79 Or we can describe the end in Walker’s deliberately less ambitious terminology of “habitable lives”; or Joan Tronto and Berenice Fisher’s definitional language of care as “a species activity that includes everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible”;80 or Fiona Robinson’s conception of human security as secured through networks of relationships that provide predictable access to meeting human needs;81 or even, on the most postmodern end of the spectrum, Selma Sevenhuijsen’s “plea for a postmodern form of humanism,” grounded in the fact that “all people are vulnerable, dependent, and finite, and that we all have to find ways of dealing with this in our daily existence and in Cahill, Sex, Gender, and Christian Ethics, 20; Traina, “Feminist Natural Law.” Cahill, Sex, Gender, and Christian Ethics, 2; Traina, Feminist Ethics and the Natural Law, 85. 80 Fisher and Tronto, “Toward a Feminist Theory of Care,” 40; italics in original. Tronto reiterates this definition in Moral Boundaries and in many subsequent articles, up to and including her most recent book, Caring Democracy. 81 Robinson, The Ethics of Care, 5. 78

79

216

216

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

the values which guide our individual and collective behavior.”82 In each of these theories, agency is exercised to help human beings live well; some conception of living well is implied. Because of this focus, both bodies of thought avoid the incoherencies that we saw in those economic and political theories, and those love theologies, that explicitly avoid aiming at the good. Having said this, Catholic feminist natural law thinkers place greater emphasis on the possibility and necessity of identifying certain shared goods at which care processes and social policies should aim. Although critical feminist care ethicists implicitly presume a human good, they avoid specifying universal needs and goods, out of concern that any such specification will sediment power relations, construct norms that serve the interests of the powerful, and obscure the genesis of these norms. A Christian ethic of dependent care relations ought to move further along the spectrum toward a specification of those goods that constitute human flourishing. There are several reasons for this. First, the tools that critical feminist ethicists use to discern and critique dynamics of power and privilege in the social organization of care would do their work more effectively if anchored to an account of the human goods to be fulfilled within care relations. Instead, secular feminist thinkers often try to distinguish appropriate allocations of care from exploitative ones without reference to such goods. For example, Tronto draws on Norwegian sociologist Kari Waerness’s distinction between “personal service” and “necessary care.” “Necessary care” is care that the care receiver could not possibly provide for herself, such as feeding an infant. “Personal service” is care that we could provide for ourselves, but that another person provides for us, such as when we do laundry for a spouse, or when we hire someone to clean our home. The socially powerful are able to demand more “personal service” while the less powerful provide it.83 Such distinctions provide useful clues to the operations of privilege and power in the social organization of care. Nevertheless, such distinctions are too simple to determine the personal and social importance of different kinds of care. For example, I  cannot teach myself to fly an airplane. Thus, one might classify a flight instructor as providing me with “necessary care” under Waerness’s rubric, particularly in light of Tronto and Fisher’s very broad definition of care. But it is not Sevenhuijsen, Citzenship and the Ethics of Care, 28–​30. Tronto, “Vicious Circles,” 10–​13, citing Kari Waerness, “Informal and Formal Care in Old Age: What Is Wrong with the New Ideology in Scandinavia Today?” in Gender and Caring: Work and Welfare in Britain and Scandinavia, ed. Clare Ungerson (London: Harvester, Wheatsheaf, 1990).

82 83

217

Resources for a Dependent Care Ethic

217

clear, without a more detailed assessment of my own needs and the needs of society, whether resources should be devoted to teaching me to fly. Do we need more pilots? To what end? Will I use these planes to meet basic needs of other persons, to satisfy their frivolous preferences, or to drop missiles on cities? Do I have greater need or claim than other persons to be the one who is trained to fly airplanes for these purposes? Such an analysis would be more effectively accomplished with a fuller account of the personal and social goods that care aims to fulfill. Furthermore, as Walker herself notes, any project that compares the results of myriad local processes of negotiations over responsibility, across the globe, is “epistemologically staggering.”84 It calls to mind Susan Moller Okin’s interpretation of Rawls, discussed in Chapter 2, that participants in the original position empathically identify with the perspective of every other participant before negotiating principles of justice. Though these two thinkers address very different procedures, both are procedural approaches to justice. While the process itself is intended as a manifestation of justice, in the sense of honoring the agency of all and considering the voices of all, at a certain point any process must give way to actual implementation, so that the urgent needs of embodied persons can also be met. To move forward with the practical project of furthering justice in the social organization of care, it is necessary to come to an agreement, for example, that every human person requires sufficient nutritious calories, clean water, and shelter. Furthermore, such agreement is quite possible. In a world where 17,000 children under five die every day, most of them of easily preventable causes,85 we can agree on some universal human goods that are due to every human person as a matter of justice. Despite legitimate concerns about imposing norms on the less powerful, the colonized, the other, it is quite possible to identify at least some goods that are necessary for any human life. Finally, as I have referenced elsewhere, any human community will contain a significant number of persons who must rely on others to care for them, determine what is best for them, and negotiate for them. This being the case, a dependent care ethic needs at least a basic conception of what is good for humans, and thus what are some of the central aims of care. Only in this way can we assess whether care for the deeply dependent is appropriate or abusive. However, feminist political theorists still tend not Walker, Moral Understandings, 14. UN Inter-​Agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation, Levels and Trends in Child Mortality: Report 2014 (New York: United Nations Children’s Fund, 2014), 1.

84 85

218

218

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

to squarely face the fact of deep or irremediable dependency in human life; as we shall see in the next section, this creates problems for their efforts to provide a justification or ground for human moral equality. Thus feminist political ethicists of care and Catholic feminist natural law thinkers, particularly in dialogue with one another, provide an account of practical reason and of responsibility that can fulfill the requirement for ongoing, inclusive, critical assessment of care and its social organization. The tension between affirmation of shared goods and openness to plurality is pervasive in contemporary moral theory; this is a tension that a dependent care ethic must inhabit, however, as both elements are crucial to such an ethic.

Moral Equality in Light of Deep Dependency An ethic that is both inclusive and substantive, one that encompasses both elements of the parable of the Good Samaritan, one that affirms that each and every human person is due the extravagant and substantive care required for human survival and flourishing, is a very demanding ethic. As we have seen, those ethicists who have been the most honest about the scope of these demands, and who acknowledge the scarcity of resources we have to fulfill them, have often dealt with this challenge by deliberately excluding the most dependent persons from the scope of justice. To make a case for full inclusion, which will require sacrifice particularly on the part of those with greater resources and privilege, requires a compelling account of the moral equality that grounds the claim to care. But existing accounts of moral equality that find their basis in autonomy or rationality are not adequate to ground a dependent care ethic, as many dependents lack sufficient autonomy or rationality to qualify as moral equals on these bases. Thus, here I explore recent work within philosophy and theology seeking an adequate ground of moral equality for a dependent care ethic.

A Theological Approach: Imago Dei As we have seen, within the Christian tradition, the moral equality of human persons is generally affirmed on theological grounds, most commonly the notion, taken from Genesis 1:26–​27, that we are imago Dei, created in the image of God. Human persons are considered to be unique in this imaging. Affirmations of humans as existing in imago Dei have the advantage of uniting Christian believers in the conviction that all human persons are equal in the most foundational way, before God. However, this

219

Resources for a Dependent Care Ethic

219

theological conviction can only be seen as an assertion by those who do not recognize the Genesis account as authoritative in itself; it may resonate with the intuitions and convictions of others that this human moral equality exists, but if we are seeking to build common ground with persons of every faith and no faith, we will have to look beyond this assertion. In addition, even while agreeing that all human persons bear the imago Dei and that this endows human persons with a profound equality, theologians debate the content of imago Dei. Often, it has been understood in terms of rationality and autonomy, which presents the same problems within theology as it does within philosophy, as discussed in the following section. Thus, affirming that humans exist in the imago Dei is important and helpful, but to be effective, a dependent care ethic should aim for additional or parallel grounding that does not depend on scriptural revelation. As we shall see, however, most nontheological accounts encounter challenges in theorizing equality while also acknowledging our deepest dependencies.

Approaches Within Feminist Political Theory We have seen that critical feminist care ethicists have proposed democratic, expressive-​collaborative processes for determining an appropriate allocation of responsibility in a community or for describing certain human claims as needs. These thinkers are well aware, however, that any such process is prone to cooptation by the powerful, so that, for example, an upper-​ middle-​class woman’s “need” for a nanny to be available to her children at all hours of night or day will trump the nanny’s need to give basic care to her own children. Those with political and economic power generally shape perceptions of needs, and they can construct themselves as autonomous, while they may demand a very high level of care. What criterion for participation in the “politics of needs interpretation,” or in democratic discussions about the allocation of care, would be more inclusive and egalitarian, and thus provide a counterweight to these power dynamics? Feminist political care ethicists turn to the universally shared human experience of vulnerability or of participation in care processes.86 This brings feminist political care theorists and us to an interesting discussion:  because they are focused so deeply on both democracy and on care, these thinkers find themselves grappling explicitly with the relationship between equality and dependency. While these thinkers call attention See, for example, Sevenhuijsen, Citzenship and the Ethics of Care, 28; Tronto, Caring Democracy, 150; White, Democracy, Justice, and the Welfare State, 157.

86

220

220

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

to dependency and vulnerability, they also evince a certain discomfort with the idea of dependency. They are very concerned to avoid paternalism, and this often leads them to gaze at dependency sideways, so to speak: they do not want to dwell on it, and particularly on the deepest forms of human dependency. Put differently, while they thoughtfully consider the project of equalizing power in a world full of inequalities, they do not want to confront the fact that some inequalities are irremediable. But without gazing squarely at the depth and primordial nature of our dependency, we cannot adequately theorize equality. In an effort to find some concrete shared characteristic or experience on which to ground moral equality, and thus the claim to care and political inclusion, these thinkers end up categorizing persons in a way that excludes some from the scope of equality. Joan Tronto emphasizes caregiving as a practice that moves toward equalization of parties who begin as unequals. She asserts that a democratic order is the necessary antidote to the “dangers of dependence,”87 the danger that caring relations will foster greater than necessary hierarchy and domination. She describes dependency “as a necessity but also as a condition to overcome.”88 This is helpful in that it emphasizes the degree to which equality is a project rather than a given –​a project that requires positive, creative commitment from individuals and society as a whole – but poses the danger that our deepest and most inevitable dependencies will be obscured. Tronto also proposes that we integrate human vulnerability and the need for care into democratic theory by designating care as a ground for citizenship. Unlike other categories that have served as the basis of citizenship in various historical periods, such as property ownership, possession of arms, military service, farming, or wage work, “participation in care processes” is a universal category.89 In the past, those who provided the care that is the necessary prerequisite for citizens to engage in their citizenship-​ meriting activities have themselves been excluded from citizenship. In the present context, as care becomes a global commodity, exclusive notions of citizenship increase the already great potential for exploitation in dependent care relations, as so many caregivers are not citizens of the countries in which they provide care.90 Tronto’s use of the language of “participation Tronto, Moral Boundaries, 163. Ibid.; see also Tronto, Caring Democracy, 33. 89 Joan C. Tronto, “Care as the Work of Citizens: A Modest Proposal,” in Women and Citizenship, ed. Marilyn Friedman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 139. She draws her list of previous understandings of the basis of citizenship from Engin F. Isin, “Who Is the New Citizen? Towards a Genealogy,” Citizenship Studies 1 (1997), 115–​132. 90 Ibid., 134. 87 88

221

Resources for a Dependent Care Ethic

221

in care processes,” rather than caregiving, is explicitly intended to render the category of citizenship a universally inclusive one. As she notes, while not everyone will be a caregiver, “we are care receivers, all.”91 In addition, Tronto frequently stresses the agency of care receivers; this combats the notion that the receipt of care is a passive process and holds receivers accountable for the grace and justice with which they respond to caregivers. This proposal also affirms the importance of including care receivers in political deliberations about needs and the allocation of responsibility for care.92 Tronto’s point that human agency exists on a continuum and is exercised by care receivers is an important one. However, while there is value in pointing to the active, rather than passive, elements of care receiving, some care receivers are not able to be very active in their receipt of care in a way that reflects the requirements of citizenship. Infants may coo, smile, cry, and cuddle, but neither they, the extremely frail or dying elderly, nor the severely cognitively disabled express in their care receiving the sort of agency that correlates well to political engagement. Thus the question becomes whether “citizenship” is the proper grounding for the moral claims of these persons on the rest of the community. Furthermore, by designating both caregiving and receipt of care as grounds of citizenship, Tronto dulls the critical edge of her own question, “who cares?” She mitigates the impact of her powerful insight that much care is provided by marginalized persons, that its immense value is not recognized, and that in fact those with greater privilege have a greater ability to avoid caregiving responsibilities. Should a business executive be granted the status of “citizen” based on the fact that a custodian takes out his garbage, particularly when the custodian’s care remains invisible to the “care receiver”? If we are going to award citizenship based on participation in processes of care, should we not have some standards for that participation such that the care forwards the good of the community? The broad and imprecise nature of Tronto and Fisher’s definition of care complicates this question further. Is the businessperson providing care if he is an investment banker? A defense contractor? The CEO of a company cooking and delivering healthy meals? In short, while caregiving is central to the maintenance of society and should certainly merit citizenship for caregivers, and while care receiving is often a very active process, sometimes involving agency that is relevant to political discussions, Tronto’s proposal to use “participation in care Tronto, Caring Democracy, 146. Ibid.,100.

91

92

222

222

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

processes” as a ground for citizenship blurs important distinctions between different expressions of caregiving and the ends toward which caregiving may be oriented. Likewise, in seeking a ground for our universal, equal inclusion, Tronto blurs important differences in the levels of dependency experienced by different persons. This is somewhat ironic, since Tronto and the other critical or postmodern feminist care ethicists are so profoundly concerned about making room for plurality and difference. Tronto does not assume, like the classical social contract theorists, that equality of power is our original condition. She encourages us to work toward equality of power. When Tronto says we must overcome dependency, she intends to neutralize the dangers of paternalism in an ethic of care and to call out collaborative social efforts to nurture agency in all persons –​both laudable goals. However, full equality of power is not accessible; it is rendered impossible by the human condition. Hobbes ignored this; a political ethic of care cannot do so, or it will undercut efforts to achieve an integration of moral equality, equality as autonomy, and equality as fulfillment of basic needs. A theory that can squarely face dependency, in all its degrees and expressions, including deep dependency, will paradoxically better enable us to secure equality. Another group of feminist philosophers has initiated a conversation around the differences between dependency, vulnerability, and other related concepts to discern when the state has an obligation to provide support for care to assist citizens in surviving and increasing their autonomy. Kathryn Norlock, for example, suggests that, contrary to Kittay’s claim, we are not all dependent. We are all vulnerable to harm, and the vast majority of us are reliant on many others within communities that assist each other in a wide range of ways, as when farmers grow food for others to eat. “Reliance” here indicates being in a relationship with a particular other person whom you expect to help meet a need. But this is not dependency; she could, Norlock notes, grow her own food; her dependency on the farmer is not “inevitable.”93 Likewise, Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers, and Susan Dodds offer a taxonomy of the sources of vulnerability, distinguishing between “inherent” (intrinsic to the human condition), “situational” (contextual), and “pathogenic” (the result of abuse or oppression) vulnerability. They seek to distinguish between vulnerabilities that are intrinsic to embodied human existence (for example, vulnerability to illness or sickness) and those vulnerabilities Kathryn Norlock, “The Case for Our Widespread Dependency,” Social Theory and Practice 30, no. 2 (April 2004), 247–​257.

93

223

Resources for a Dependent Care Ethic

223

that arise from abusive relationships, oppressive social systems, and the like.94 Martha Fineman argues that vulnerability is much like inevitable dependency  –​dependencies that are part of the human developmental process, such as the dependency of infancy  –​except that vulnerability persists throughout life, whereas dependency is “sporadic.”95 Fineman suggests that vulnerability is a more “politically potent” concept precisely because vulnerability is universal and ongoing; policy makers can ignore dependency because they may not be dependent at the time they are making policy, but they remain vulnerable.96 It is certainly important to sort out, as far as possible, the degree to which various dependencies or vulnerabilities are remediable or not, and how social, economic, and political processes may intensify our vulnerabilities or render us safer and more resilient. Nevertheless, these efforts to distinguish “vulnerability” from “dependency” raise some concerns. We should notice, for example, that the “vulnerable subject” invokes the person who might be harmed; the “dependent subject” invokes the person who must be helped. We can easily imagine that this distinction, rather than combating paternalistic intervention into things we can do for ourselves, could become an excuse to provide no support at all to persons who theoretically “could” provide child care to their own children if they would just give up work in the paid economy or “could” work in the paid economy if they would stop having or caring for children. The baseline is seen as vulnerable autonomy; dependency becomes the exception, a deviation from the norm; and policy responses are most likely to be cast as protecting autonomy rather than responding to dependency. Furthermore, since individual levels of vulnerability vary so widely, largely correlative to gender, economic position, race, ethnicity, and nationality, it is not at all clear that placing vulnerability in the forefront will increase sympathy among those in power –​who tend to be least vulnerable, and perhaps best able to manage denial of their own vulnerability –​to remedy the situation of those who are the most marginalized. In fact, it would seem that we are far more equal in our shared dependency, even if the phase of deepest dependency is behind us in infancy or ahead of Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers, and Susan Dodds, “Introduction,” in Vulnerability:  New Essays in Feminist Philosophy, eds. Mackenzie, Rogers, and Dodds (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 95 Martha Albertson Fineman, “The Vulnerable Subject:  Anchoring Equality in the Human Condition,” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 20 (2008), 9n25. 96 Ibid., 11. Susan Dodds also argues that dependency is temporary while vulnerability is ongoing; see Dodds, “Dependence, Care, and Vulnerability,” in Vulnerability, eds. Mackenzie, Rogers, and Dodds, 181–​203. 94

224

224

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

us in old age, than we are in vulnerability. So the pragmatic argument for highlighting vulnerability does not seem convincing. Beyond this, however, Fineman’s pragmatic appeal to vulnerability is ultimately an appeal to self-​interest  –​I  want to protect vulnerable people because I  am vulnerable –​and it is simply not clear that we can ever muster support for universal fulfillment of care needs through an appeal to self-​interest. The very point of emphasizing moral equality, dignity, and personhood is to say that all persons are owed certain things, whether or not they suit the self-​interest of others. Again, separating lives into periods of dependency and periods of vulnerability belies the fact that dependency shoots through our existence; it is not something we fully transcend. For example, let us grant that Norlock could grow her own food. She could not, presumably, perform for herself every function required to stay alive. While each of us could likely perform certain functions that are currently taken care of for us by others, in our complex society, very few of us would survive long if required to manage alone every detail necessary to feed, clothe, and house ourselves; transport ourselves; defend ourselves; and manage our own illnesses and injuries. I cannot do everything for myself, even if virtually everything that is done for me is a thing I could do. Furthermore, even if each of us could grow our own food, build our own houses, transport ourselves without using the roads, cars, and trains built and maintained by others, virtually none of us are doing so. Yet those with the most privilege think of themselves as independent anyway, and this mythology becomes an excuse for their privilege. In reality, dependency is more universal, more foundational, and more pervasive than autonomy. This proposed distinction between dependency and vulnerability can be seen as an attempt to mark out a space where autonomy prevails and can define us, but whatever autonomy we achieve is always shaped in and through our finitude and our various dependencies. It does not get its own territory marked off on the map, its own time slot in the course of a human life. It is always there but subject to different levels of response, management, and shaping at different periods of our lives. Furthermore, while it may be helpful to parse out degrees of dependency and autonomy in order to better assign responsibility for self and others more justly, this parsing often seems to miss the more foundational way in which each of us is dependent at all times: we are creatures. Even if we grow our own food, we are dependent on other aspects of creation, the earth, the seeds, the sun, the rain. In Christian theological perspective, furthermore, to say that “we are creatures” means that we are dependent upon God. And while this dependence on God for being itself does not relieve us of the

225

Resources for a Dependent Care Ethic

225

responsibility to navigate how we will respond to embodied dependency as a community, or how we will allocate responsibility for necessary caregiving, it does relativize the importance of parsing out differences in our levels of dependency. In the context of our dependency on our Creator, the Ground of our Being, we are profoundly equal. And while our complex dependency on each other is qualitatively different from our dependency on our Creator, in its very pervasiveness, it may provide an analogue to that more primordial dependency. In short, attempts to distinguish vulnerability from dependency have use in our social and political lives, to help us engage in political deliberations about the allocation of resources and responsibilities. We must use our agency to shape our collective response to dependency. However, this nuancing must take place in the context of a deeper affirmation of our dependency, or it may become an excuse for sorting people into categories that exclude some from moral equality and consequent entitlement to social resources needed to ensure flourishing, including care resources. We must face our dependency more squarely than do these theorists. For approaches that do face deep disability squarely, we might look to the recent spate of work on the philosophical implications of cognitive disability. Persons with deep cognitive disabilities are clearly dependent, and arguably do not possess the autonomy and rationality that so much of the Western philosophical tradition has seen as the ground of human dignity. Even among disability theorists, cognitive disabilities were a somewhat taboo subject until recently, taking a back seat to the need to emphasize the agency and capacities of persons with disabilities. But this silence has now been broken as a number of thinkers have embarked on the project of articulating an alternative meta-​ethical ground, beyond rationality or autonomy, for the claims to moral equality of persons. A pioneering voice has been that of Eva Feder Kittay, who writes from her experience as mother to Sesha, a daughter with profound cognitive disabilities. Kittay proposes a relational understanding of equality: our moral equality, our entitlement to inclusion within the scope of justice, lies not in any particular capacity but in our status as “some mother’s child.”97 We have each received the attention and care of a “mothering person” (not necessarily a woman or our own biological mother) in order to survive to adulthood; some person has considered us worthy of such attention and care. The relationship between caregiver and dependent “is ubiquitous in Kittay, Love’s Labor, 68–​69.

97

226

226

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

human society and is as fundamental to our humanity as any property philosophers have invoked as distinctly human.”98 Kittay invokes the language of sanctity about this relationship: to dishonor “some mother’s child” is to violate “the sanctity of the relation that makes all human connection possible.”99 The relationship itself holds the dignity of the persons in it, in a way which holds across all similar relationships, simply as dependent care relations. Kittay says that to be recognized as a mother’s child is to be deemed worthy of the treatment offered within maternal practice. Her language suggests that our status as “some mother’s child” depends upon the decision of someone to become a “mothering person” to us, to deem us worthy, and to bestow the sort of care necessary to allow us to survive and flourish. But this would seem to imply that if a child is subject to abuse or neglect rather than “mothered,” this renders her a person deemed worthy of abuse and neglect. Clearly this is not what Kittay intends to say, but my point here is that human relationships are all too fallible to serve as the ground for human dignity, personhood, or moral equality. Rather, it would seem that it is an intrinsic dignity in the child that calls out a commitment from a mothering person and holds maternal practice to standards that honor this dignity and foster flourishing. Whence, then, comes this dignity? Kittay intuits something that is truly there when she writes with eloquence of her daughter’s personhood, but her grounding of moral equality in our status as “some mother’s child” cannot reach to the depths of this “something.” Other thinkers have tried to ground human personhood in capabilities other than autonomy and rationality. Martha Nussbaum argues for a notion of human dignity rooted not in one or two particular human capabilities but in and through all of them, albeit with the “architectonic” capabilities of sociability and practical reason conceived as infusing all the others and thus of particular significance.100 Under this paradigm, Nussbaum argues, Kittay’s daughter Sesha would be endowed with personhood because she possesses “some of the most important human capabilities,” such as “the ability to love and relate to others, perception, delight in movement and play.”101 Kittay herself has, at times, drawn on the language of capacities to try to express her sense of Sesha’s personhood, and thus of her moral equality. Sesha has a deep capacity for joy, a love of classical music, and “capacities Ibid., 25. Ibid., 69. 100 Nussbaum, Frontiers, 162. 101 Ibid., 188. 98

99

227

Resources for a Dependent Care Ethic

227

for love and happiness.”102 Kittay has also suggested that “being a person means having the capacity to be in certain relationships with other persons.”103 While Kittay’s descriptions are deeply evocative of the person that Sesha is, ultimately a grounding of personhood based in any sort of capacity may be problematic, for there is probably no human capability that every single human person possesses. Perhaps this is why, in more recent conversations with philosophers Peter Singer and Jeff McMahon, who argue that a human person’s claim to dignity is correlative to level of cognitive capacity, Kittay retreats from capacity-​based arguments and returns to the relational grounding of personhood to defend her daughter’s claim to justice.104 As Michael Bérubé notes, “any performance criterion –​ independence, rationality, capacity for mutual cooperation, even capacity for mutual recognition  –​will leave some mother’s child behind. It will create a residuum of the abject, a fraction of the human family that is to be left out of the accounting.”105 Ultimately, neither the relational approach to personhood nor the approach based in human capabilities provides a satisfactory philosophical grounding of the personhood of those who are the most deeply dependent on others. The discussion so far suggests that any effort to affirm our moral equality while acknowledging our dependency (in its various forms) will encounter problems unless we can acknowledge that in some sense, we are all always dependent, in a way that is inescapable and even necessary for our autonomy as embodied finite creatures. Efforts to mark off areas of autonomy as the uniquely salient aspect of our humanity will go wrong, precisely because our autonomy is conditioned autonomy, growing by degrees and then decreasing, shaped by the concrete characteristics of our bodies, relationships, modes of cognition, and the natural and social circumstances in which we live. Just as a haiku poem is not what it is, cannot do what it does, without the form that limits and defines it, so our agency is shaped by our limits. In our social and political lives, we should work to examine and overcome concrete social and political inequalities that prevent the fullest possible expression of this autonomy-​in-​dependency. But this Kittay, Love’s Labor, 152. Kittay, “When Caring Is Just,” 568. 104 Eva Feder Kittay, “The Personal Is Philosophical Is Political:  A  Philosopher and Mother of a Cognitively Disabled Person Sends Notes from the Battlefield,” in Cognitive Disability and Its Challenge to Moral Philosophy, eds. Eva Feder Kittay and Licia Carlson (Malden, MA:  Wiley-​ Blackwell, 2010), 409–​411. 105 Michael Bérubé, “Equality, Freedom, and/​or Justice for All: A Response to Martha Nussbam,” in Cognitive Disability and Its Challenge to Moral Philosophy, eds. Kittay and Carlson, 100. 102 103

228

228

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

political work can go wrong if it evades the dependency that shapes the autonomy we seek to enable. Rather than grounding our equality in the ways we can overcome dependency, we must find that equality in the most primordial, profound, and universal form of dependency. I want to suggest that Christian theological understandings of the divine–​human relation can provide the sort of integration of equality and dependency that secular philosophers have not yet attained. In a theological perspective, we can acknowledge our dependency at a more foundational level than any of the secular feminist thinkers do: we are dependent for our ongoing existence at any given moment on the ground of our creation. We are held in being by a Source on which we are dependent. Paradoxically, this dependence is also the source of our fullest being and of our equality. There are no gradations of reliance on the ground of Being; this dependency is absolute. To some, this recourse to a Christian account of the divine–​human relation may seem just as arbitrary as the scripturally based assertion that human beings are created imago Dei, in the image of God. It will not suffice for those who do not affirm such a source of being. Nevertheless, as we have seen, this integration of equality and profound dependency is a task that secular feminism struggles toward but has not fully achieved; and I have argued that it fails by steering away from a steady gaze at our dependency. These thinkers have attempted (without success) to demarcate dependency from autonomy so that autonomy might remain the ground of equality. A theological approach can offer a way around this, a way to theorize equality in our dependency rather than over against our dependency. A theological approach can recognize that dependency, at the most primordial level, is not just on other “autonomous” human persons, but is dependency on God that is shared by those autonomous human persons. Thus our equality is always in and through this deeper dependency –​a dependency that is not simply asserted but is present to human experience, even if it is not always fully acknowledged, and even if that on which we depend is not described as “God.” There are any number of Christian theological voices that one could draw upon to further elucidate this equality in dependency in the divine–​ human relation. Here I  turn to Kathryn Tanner’s notion of God’s non-​ contrastive transcendence, partly because she is attempting to articulate an affirmation she finds in many central figures in the Christian tradition, and partly because she herself places this conception of the divine–​human relation in the service of affirmations of the moral and political equality of all persons. As first discussed in God and Creation in Christian Theology, and as reiterated throughout each of her subsequent books, Tanner argues that

229

Resources for a Dependent Care Ethic

229

a notion of the “non-​contrastive transcendence” of God is found in the thought of Irenaeus, Tertullian, Aquinas, Schleiermacher, Rahner, Barth, and many others.106 This radical transcendence is beyond the sort of contrasts that can be applied to particular, finite beings, contrasts between, for example, “fixed” or “changing,” “at rest” or “in motion.” The latter sort of contrasts could be applied to God only if God were one among other objects. When we oppose God to creation in this way, “(d)ivinity … is brought down to the level of the world and the beings within it by virtue of that very opposition: God becomes one being among others within a single order.”107 Conversely, “if divinity is not characterized by contrast with any sort of being, it may be the immediate source of being of every sort.”108 Precisely because God is not one object among many, God can be equally intimately related to all created beings. In her second book, The Politics of God, Tanner further argues that her radical, non-​contrastive understanding of transcendence implies certain formal ethical requirements for how human beings ought to regard and interact with one another.109 These ethical requirements can protect against the exclusion of, and diminished respect for, persons with dependencies that, in the temporal sense, seem unusually deep relative to other human persons who can seem “autonomous.” Tanner acknowledges that notions of divine transcendence are deeply ambiguous in their actual historical usage; they have, of course, been translated into inappropriate models and used repeatedly to justify hierarchies of power. For example, the monarch’s relation to his subjects or the husband’s authority over his family has been modeled on God’s presumed relation to the world. However, Tanner carefully deconstructs the various ways that authoritarian political power and rigid social hierarchies have been justified by understandings of God as Father or monarch and shows that no such usage is consistent with an understanding of God as radically transcendent. Such models view the monarch or the father as “more like God” than others. It might similarly view the “fully abled” person as more like God than the disabled.110 But according to an appropriate understanding of God’s transcendence, Kathryn Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1988), particularly ­chapter 2. 107 Tanner, God and Creation, 46. 108 Ibid. 109 Kathryn Tanner, The Politics of God: Christian Theologies and Social Justice (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992). 110 On this, see Deborah Creamer, Disability and Christian Theology: Embodied Limits and Creative Possibilities (Oxford, UK:  Oxford University Press, 2009); Nancy L. Eiesland, The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1994). 106

230

230

Human Dependency and Christian Ethics

“the difference between God and created beings is more qualitative than quantitative.”111 To understand some persons as more like God, or closer to God, than others assumes that God “exists or operates within the same arena as creatures.”112 But again, God is not an aspect of creation, but is Creator, and as such has a direct relationship with all created things as the source of their being. This, in turn, grounds formal ethical assertions: all persons possess a fundamental equality by virtue of their relation to God; all persons are therefore due respect and tolerance. Furthermore, this affirmation of equality coexists with a deep appreciation of plurality: in our differences, we are not more or less like God, because God is not like us in any way that can be measured in terms of degrees of similarity. Our differences, through which we come into our own particular fullness of being, exist through our creation by God. For each of us, our differences become the specific mode by which we are intimately related to God as the ground of our being. Such a claim to equality based in our relationship to our Creator is better able to support our equality in dependency than a claim based in the vicissitudes of human rationality, capacity, or relationship. A Christian theological perspective may better allow us to live inside the paradox of equality in dependency –​equality, because bestowed by God, is not subject to such vicissitudes. We can still think of equality in the more practical sense, as autonomy and the ability to set some life goals and direct ourselves toward them, to participate in political decisions and the life of the community. We can think of autonomy as a project –​something toward which society should assist us in striving. We can and should think about how, in our concrete, embodied, pluralistic lives, we should devise processes to express and negotiate what we need as concrete, finite, diversely needy, and diversely abled selves. But drawing on Tanner’s Christian theological account of the divine–​human relation, we can better acknowledge that this “autonomy as project” always exists in the context of varying levels of dependency, as well as our ultimate dependency on God for our continued existence in every moment. At the same time, the various feminist philosophical approaches discussed in this section make important contributions to instantiating the implications of this moral equality in our embodied social and political existence. Once we have acknowledged this profound equality in our very dependency, particularity, and difference, we can approach the creative Ibid., 135. Ibid.

111 112

231

Resources for a Dependent Care Ethic

231

political work of elucidating the autonomy that is possible for each one of us, of identifying and challenging social and political structures that impede this bounded autonomy for so many. In this search, inclusive and democratic dialogue and negotiation is essential, and we must work to identify the ways in which each one of us is vulnerable, dependent, autonomous, and responsible.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have laid out some necessary elements of a conception of justice to be incorporated into a contemporary ethic of love and justice for dependent care relations. Though the elements are quite demanding, particularly taken together, there is also a great deal of creative and substantive work in recent Christian and feminist ethics that develops in the direction I have laid out here. There are also ways in which some of these elements and some of these theories stand in a certain tension with one another. Still, we can develop more adequate and multivalent understandings of justice than have been presupposed by most recent Christian theologies of love, and in so doing, we can work toward a Christian ethic that can see, assess, honor, and support the moral work done within dependent care relations.

232

233

Select Bibliography

Andolsen, Barbara Hilkert. “Agape in Feminist Ethics.” Journal of Religious Ethics 9, no. 1 (Spring 1981): 69–​83.   “Justice, Gender and the Frail Elderly: Reexamining the Ethic of Care.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 9, no. 1–​2 (Spring–​Fall 1993): 127–​145. Archibald, Katherine. “The Concept of Social Hierarchy in the Writings of St. Thomas Aquinas.” The Historian XII: 1 (Autumn, 1949): 28–​54. Arneil, Barbara. “Women as Wives, Servants and Slaves: Rethinking the Public/​ Private Divide.” Canadian Journal of Political Science 34, no. 1 (March 2001): 29–​54. Augustine. City of God. Translated by Henry Bettenson. New  York:  Penguin Books, 1972. Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica. Translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province. New York: Benziger Brothers, 1947. Barrera, Albino, O.P. God and the Evil of Scarcity: Moral Foundations of Economic Agency. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005. Becker, Gary. A Treatise on the Family. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. Benedict XVI. Caritas in Veritate. At www.w2.vatican.va/​content/​benedict-​xvi/​en/​ encyclicals/​documents/​hf_​ben-​xvi_​enc_​20090629_​caritas-​in-​veritate.html. Bhandary, Asha. “Dependency in Justice: Can Rawlsian Liberalism Accommodate Kittay’s Dependency Critique?” Hypatia 25, no. 1 (Winter 2010): 140–​156. Bubeck, Diemut. Care, Gender and Justice. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1995. Butler, Melissa. “Early Liberal Roots of Feminism:  John Locke’s Attack on Patriarchy.” In Feminist Interpretations of John Locke, edited by Nancy J. Hirschmann and Kirstie M. McClure, 91–​121. University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Cahill, Lisa Sowle. “Justice for Women: Martha Nussbaum and Catholic Social Teaching.” In Transforming Unjust Structures:  The Capabilities Approach, edited by Séverine Deneulin, Mathias Nebel, and Nichols Sagovsky, 83–​104. Dordrecht: Springer, 2006. Cates, Diana Fritz. Aquinas on the Emotions:  A  Religious-​ Ethical Inquiry. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2009.

233

234

234

Select Bibliography

Clark, Meghan. “Crisis in Care: Family, Gender, and the Need for Subsidiarity in Caregiving.” Journal of Catholic Social Thought 7, no. 1 (2010): 63–​81. Hill Collins, Patricia. “Black Women and Motherhood.” In Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (2nd ed.). 173–​199. New York: Routledge, 2000. Donath, Susan. “The Other Economy: Suggestions for a Distinctively Feminist Economics.” Feminist Economics 6, no. 1 (2000): 115–​123. Duffy, Mignon, Randy Albelda, and Clare Hammonds. “Counting Care Work:  The Empirical and Policy Applications of Care Theory.” Social Problems 60, no. 2 (2013): 145–​167. Ehrenreich, Barbara and Arlie Russell Hochschild. Global Woman:  Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy. New  York:  Henry Holt and Company, 2002. Eichner, Maxine. “The Supportive State:  Government, Dependency, and Responsibility for Caretaking.” In Care Ethics and Political Theory, edited by Daniel Engster and Maurice Hamington, 87–​107. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015. Engster, Daniel. The Heart of Justice:  Care Ethics and Political Theory. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007.   Justice, Care, and the Welfare State. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015. Farley, Margaret. Compassionate Respect: A Feminist Approach to Medical Ethics and Other Questions (The 2002 Madeleva Lecture in Spirituality). New York: Paulist Press, 2002.   Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics. New York: Continuum, 2006.   Personal Commitments:  Beginning, Keeping, Changing. Revised edition. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013. Filmer, Sir Robert. Patriarcha and Other Writings. Edited by Johann P. Sommerville. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Fineman, Martha. “The Vulnerable Subject and the Responsive State.” Emory Law Journal 60 (2011): 251–​275. Folbre, Nancy. “The Unproductive Housewife:  Her Evolution in Nineteenth-​ Century Economic Thought.” Signs 16, no. 3 (Spring 1991): 463–​484.   The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values. New York: New Press, 2001.   Valuing Children:  Rethinking the Economics of the Family. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Fraser, Nancy and Linda Gordon. “ ‘A Genealogy of ‘Dependency’:  Tracing a Keyword of the U.S. Welfare State.” In Justice Interruptus:  Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition, edited by Nancy Fraser, 121–​149. New York: Routledge, 1997. Gewirth, Alan. “Ethical Universalism and Particularism.” Journal of Philosophy 85, no. 6 (1988), 283–​302. Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. “From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor.” Signs 18, no.1 (Autumn 1992): 1–​43.

235

Select Bibliography

235

  Forced to Care: Coercion and Caregiving in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Goldstein, Valerie Saiving. “The Human Situation: A Feminine View.” Journal of Religion 40, no. 2 (April 1960): 100–​112. Gottlieb, Roger. “The Tasks of Embodied Love:  Moral Problems in Caring for Children with Disabilities.” Hypatia 17, no. 3 (August 2002): 225–​236. Grant, Colin. “For the Love of God: Agape.” Journal of Religious Ethics 24, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 3–​21.   Altruism and Christian Ethics. Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge University Press, 2001. Gudorf, Christine E. “Parenting, Mutual Love, and Sacrifice.” In Women’s Consciousness, Women’s Conscience:  A  Reader in Feminist Ethics, edited by Barbara Hilkert Andolsen, Christine E. Gudorf, and Mary D. Pellauer, 175–​ 192. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985. Hallett, Garth. Priorities and Christian Ethics. Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge University Press, 1998. Harrison, Beverly Wildung. “The Power of Anger in the Work of Love.” In Making the Connections: Essays in Feminist Social Ethics, edited by Carol S. Robb, 3–​ 21. Boston: Beacon, 1985. Haught, John. God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolution. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000. Held, Virginia, editor. Justice and Care:  Essential Readings in Feminist Ethics. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995. Held, Virginia. Feminist Morality:  Transforming Culture, Society, and Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.   The Ethics of Care:  Personal, Political, Global. New  York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Himes, Kenneth R., O.F.M, editor. Modern Catholic Social Teaching: Commentaries and Interpretations. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005. Hinze, Christine Firer. “Bridge Discourse on Wage Justice: Roman Catholic and Feminist Perspectives on the Family Living Wage.” Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics (1991): 109–​132.   “Women, Families, and the Legacy of Laborem Exercens:  An Unfinished Agenda.” Journal of Catholic Social Thought 6, no. 1 (2009): 63–​92.   Glass Ceilings and Dirt Floors:  Women, Work, and the Global Economy. New York: Paulist Press, 2015. Hobbes, Thomas. De Cive, edited by Howard Warrender. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1983.   Leviathan. London: Penguin Classics, 1985 (1651). Hume, David. Hume: Moral and Political Philosophy. Edited by Henry D. Aiken. New York: Hafner Publishing Company, 1948 (1751). Hunt, E. K. History of Economic Thought: A Critical Perspective (2nd ed.). Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2002. Jackson, Timothy P. “Naturalism, Formalism, Supernaturalism:  Moral Epistemology and Comparative Ethics.” Journal of Religious Ethics 27, no. 3 (Fall 1999): 494–​496.

236

236

Select Bibliography

  Love Disconsoled: Meditations on Christian Charity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999.   The Priority of Love: Christian Charity and Social Justice. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003.   “The Image of God and the Soul of Humanity: Reflections on Dignity, Sanctity, and Democracy.” In Religion in the Liberal Polity, edited by Terence Cuneo, 43–​74. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005. Jaggar, Alison. “Reasoning About Well-​Being: Nussbaum’s Methods of Justifying the Capabilities.” Journal of Political Philosophy 14, no. 3 (2006): 301–​322. John XXIII. Pacem in Terris (Peace on Earth). Accessed October 16, 2016. www .w2.vatican.va/​content/​john-​xxiii/​en/​encyclicals/​documents/​hf_​j-​xxiii_​enc_​ 11041963_​pacem.html. John Paul II. Centesimus Annus (After 100 Years). At www.w2.vatican.va/​content/​ john-​paul-​ii/​en/​encyclicals/​documents/​hf_​jp-​ii_​enc_​01051991_​centesimus-​ annus.html.   Laborem Exercens (On Human Work). At www.w2.vatican.va/​content/​john-​ paul-​ii/​en/​encyclicals/​documents/​hf_​jp-​ii_​enc_​14091981_​laborem-​exercens .html.   Solicitudo Rei Socialis (On Social Concern). At www.w2.vatican.va/​content/​ john-​paul-​ii/​en/​encyclicals/​documents/​hf_​jp-​ii_​enc_​30121987_​sollicitudo-​ rei-​socialis.html. Judish, Julia E. “Balancing Special Obligations with the Ideal of Agape.” Journal of Religious Ethics 26, no.1 (Spring 1998), 17–​46. Kierkegaard, Soren. Works of Love. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995. Kittay, Eva Feder. Love’s Labor:  Essays on Women, Equality and Dependency. New York: Routledge, 1999.   “A Feminist Public Ethic of Care Meets the New Communitarian Family Policy.” Ethics 111, no. 3 (April 2001): 523–​547.   “When Caring Is Just and Justice Is Caring.” Public Culture 13:3 (2001): 557–​579. Kittay, Eva Feder and Licia Carlson, editors. Cognitive Disability and Its Challenge to Moral Philosophy. Malden, MA: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2010. Lambert, Brittany and Kate McInturff. Making Women Count:  The Unequal Economics of Women’s Work. Oxfam Canada and Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives (March 2016). Accessed December 30, 2016. www.oxfam.ca/​ make-​women-​count. Larrabee, Mary Jeanne, editor. An Ethic of Care:  Feminist and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 1993. Locke, John. “Second Treatise, or An Essay Concerning the True Original Extent and End of Civil Government.” In Two Treatises of Government, edited by Peter Laslett, 265–​428. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1967. Luther, Martin. “The Freedom of a Christian.” Translated by W. A. Lambert and revised by Harold G. Grimm. In Martin Luther: Selections from His Writings, edited by John Dillenberger, 42–​85. New York: Anchor Books, 1962.

237

Select Bibliography

237

Lyon, Jodie. “Pride and the Symptoms of Sin.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 28, no. 1 (Spring 2012), 96–​101. MacIntyre, Alisdair. Dependent Rational Animals:  Why Human Beings Need the Virtues. Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, 1999. Mackenzie, Catriona, Wendy Rogers, and Susan Dodds, editors. Vulnerability: New Essays in Feminist Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Marshall, Alfred. Principles of Economics:  An Introductory Volume (8th ed.). New York: Macmillan Company, 1948 (1890). Meilaender, Gilbert. Friendship:  A  Study in Theological Ethics. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985. Miles, Rebekah L. “Freeing Bonds and Binding Freedom: Reinhold Niebuhr and Feminist Critics on Paternal Dominion and Maternal Constraint.” Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics (1996): 127–​131.   The Bonds of Freedom: Feminist Theology and Christian Realism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Miller-​McLemore, Bonnie J. “Generativity, Self-​Sacrifice, and the Ethics of Family Life.” In The Equal-​Regard Family and Its Friendly Critics:  Don Browning and the Practical Theological Ethics of the Family, edited by John Witte, Jr., M. Christian Green, and Amy Wheeler, 17–​39. Grand Rapids, MI:  Wm B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2007. Narayan, Uma. “Colonialism and Its Others: Considerations on Rights and Care Discourses.” Hypatia 10, no. 2 (1995): 133–​140. Nelson, Julie A. “The Study of Choice or the Study of Provisioning? Gender and the Definition of Economics.” In Beyond Economic Man:  Feminist Theory and Economics, edited by Marianne A. Ferber and Julie A. Nelson, 23–​36. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Nicholson, Linda. Gender and History: The Limits of Social Theory in the Age of the Family. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Niebuhr, Reinhold. An Interpretation of Christian Ethics. New  York:  Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1935.   The Nature and Destiny of Man:  A  Christian Interpretation. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996. Noddings, Nel. Caring:  A  Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Norlock, Kathryn. “The Case for Our Widespread Dependency.” Social Theory and Practice 30, no. 2 (April 2004): 247–​257. Nozick, Robert. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books, 1974. Nussbaum, Martha C. “The Future of Feminist Liberalism,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 74:2 (November 2000): 47–​79.   Women and Human Development:  The Capabilities Approach. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.   “Rawls and Feminism.” In The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, edited by Samuel Freedman, 488–​520. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

238

238

Select Bibliography

  Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Nygren, Anders. Agape and Eros. Translated by Philip S. Watson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982 (1932–​1939). Okin, Susan Moller. Justice, Gender, and the Family. New York: Basic Books, 1989.   “Reason and Feeling in Thinking About Justice.” Ethics 99, no. 2 (January 1989): 229–​249. Osborne, Catherine R. “Migrant Domestic Careworkers: Between the Public and the Private in Catholic Social Teaching.” Journal of Religious Ethics 40, no. 1 (2012): 1–​25. Outka, Gene. Agape:  An Ethical Analysis. New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 1972.   “Universal Love and Impartiality.” In The Love Commandments:  Essays in Christian Ethics and Moral Philosophy, edited by Edmund N. Santurri and William Werpehowski, 1–​103. Washington, DC:  Georgetown University Press, 1992.   “Comment on ‘Love in Contemporary Christian Ethics.’ ” Journal of Religious Ethics 26, no. 2. (Fall 1998): 435–​440.   “Theocentric Love and the Augustinian Legacy:  Honoring the Differences Between God and Ourselves.” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 22 (2002): 97–​114. Pateman, Carole. The Sexual Contract. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988.   “ ‘God Hath Ordained to Man a Helper’:  Hobbes, Patriarchy, and Conjugal Right.” British Journal of Political Science 19, no. 4 (October 1989): 445–​463. Plaskow, Judith. Sex, Sin and Grace:  Women’s Experience and the Theologies of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich. Lanham, MD:  University Press of America, 1980. Pope, Stephen J. “Aquinas on Almsgiving, Justice and Charity: An Interpretation and Reassessment.” Heythrop Journal 32, no. 2 (April 1991), 167–​191.   The Evolution of Altruism and the Ordering of Love. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1994.   “ ‘Equal Regard’ Versus ‘Special Relations’? The Inclusiveness of Agape.” Journal of Religion 77, no. 3 (July 1997): 353–​379.   Human Evolution and Christian Ethics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Porter, Jean. The Recovery of Virtue: The Relevance of Aquinas for Christian Ethics. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1990.   Nature as Reason: A Thomistic Theory of the Natural Law. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2005. Post, Stephen G. A Theory of Agape: On the Meaning of Christian Love. Lewisville, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1990.   Spheres of Love: Toward a New Ethics of the Family. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1994. Pujol, Michèle A. Feminism and Anti-​ Feminism in Early Economic Thought. Aldershot, England: Edward Elgar Press, 1992.

239

Select Bibliography

239

  “Into the Margin!” In Toward a Feminist Philosophy of Economics, edited by Drucilla K. Barker and Edith Kuiper, 21–​37. New York: Routledge, 2003. Purvis, Sally. “Mothers, Neighbors and Strangers: Another Look at Agape.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 7, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 19–​34. Ramsey, Paul. Basic Christian Ethics. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1950. Rawls, John. “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory.” Journal of Philosophy 77, no. 9 (September 1980): 515–​572.   A Theory of Justice. Revised edition. Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press 1999.   Justice as Fairness: A Restatement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Robinson, Fiona. Globalizing Care:  Ethics, Feminist Theory, and International Relations. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999.   The Ethics of Care: A Feminist Approach to Human Security. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011. Ruddick, Sara. Maternal Thinking:  Toward a Politics of Peace (2nd ed.). Boston: Beacon Press, 1995. Ruse, Michael. “Evolutionary Theory and Christian Ethics:  Are They in Harmony?” Zygon 29, no. 1 (March 1994): 5–​24. Sandel, Michael. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Schochet, Gordon J. The Authoritarian Family and Political Attitudes in 17th Century England:  Patriarchalism in Political Thought. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1988. Sevenhuijsen, Selma. Citizenship and the Ethics of Care:  Feminist Considerations on Justice, Morality, and Politics. Translated by Liz Savage. London: Routledge, 1998. Shanley, Mary Lyndon. “Marriage Contract and Social Contract in Seventeenth-​ Century English Political Thought.” Western Political Quarterly 32, no. 1 (March 1979), 79–​91. Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Edited by R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner. Reprint Edition. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981. Steuart, Sir James. An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy: Being an Essay on the Science of Domestic Policy in Free Nations, in Which Are Particularly Considered Population, Agriculture, Trade, Industry, Money. Volume 1 (1–​3). Dublin, 1770. The Making of the Modern World. www.catalog.hathitrust .org/Record/008598761 Stone, Ronald H. “Reinhold Niebuhr and the Feminist Critique of Universal Sin.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 28, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 91–​96. Sullivan-​ Dunbar, Sandra. “Christian Love, Material Needs and Dependent Care: A Feminist Critique of the Debate on Agape and ‘Special Relations.’ ” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 29, no. 2 (2009): 39–​59.   “Gratuity, Embodiment, and Reciprocity:  Christian Love and Justice in Light of Human Dependency.” Journal of Religious Ethics 41, no. 2 (June 2013): 254–​279.

240

240

Select Bibliography

Tanner, Kathryn. God and Creation in Christian Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1988.   The Politics of God: Christian Theologies and Social Justice. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992. Tessman, Lisa. Burdened Virtues:  Virtue Ethics for Liberatory Struggles. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005. Traina, Cristina. Feminist Ethics and the Natural Law: The End of the Anathemas. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1999.   “Children and Moral Agency.” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 29, no. 2 (2009): 19–​37.   “Feminist Natural Law.” Concilium 3 (2010): 79–​87.   Erotic Attunement:  Parenthood and the Ethics of Sensuality Between Unequals. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.   “Facing Forward:  Feminist Analysis of Care and Agency on a Global Scale.” In Distant Markets, Distant Harms:  Economic Complicity and Christian Ethics, edited by Daniel K. Finn, 173–​201. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014. Tronto, Joan C. Moral Boundaries:  A  Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York: Routledge, 1993.   Caring Democracy:  Markets, Equality, and Justice. New  York:  New  York University Press, 2013.   “Moral Boundaries After Twenty Years: From Limits to Possibilities.” In Moral Boundaries Redrawn: The Significance of Joan Tronto’s Argument for Political Theory, Professional Ethics, and Care as Practice, edited by Gert Olthuis, Helen Kohlen, and Jorma Heier, 9–​28. Leuven, Belgium: Peeters, 2014. Tronto, Joan C. and Julie Anne White. “Political Practices of Care:  Needs and Rights.” Ratio Juris 17, no. 4 (December 2004): 425–​453. Vacek, Edward. Love, Human and Divine:  The Heart of Christian Ethics. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1994. van Velzen, Susan. “Hazel Kyrk and the Ethics of Consumption.” In Toward a Feminist Philosophy of Economics, edited by Drucilla Barker and Edith Kuiper, 38–​55. New York: Routledge, 2003. Veerle, Miranda. “Cooking, Caring, and Volunteering: Unpaid Work Around the World.” In OECD Social, Employment, and Migration Working Papers, no. 116. Paris: OECD Publishing, 2011). Accessed January 8, 2015. www.dx.doi .org/10.1787/5kghrjm8s142-en. Walker, Margaret Urban. Moral Understandings: A Feminist Study in Ethics (2nd ed.) New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. White, Julie Anne. Democracy, Justice, and the Welfare State: Reconstructing Public Care. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000. Woolley, Frances. “Getting the Better of Becker.” Feminist Economics 2, no. 1 (1996): 114–​120. Yi, Yun-​Ae. “Margaret G.  Reid:  Life and Achievements.” Feminist Economics 2, no. 3 (1996): 17–​36.

241

Index

agape, 4, 6, 8, 62, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 93, 99, 100, 102, 103, 105, 114–​15, 140, 141, See also Christian love, love as equal regard, 24, 114, 115, 116, 118, 188 feminist conception of, 8 and special relations, 126–​27, 179 strong agape, 98, 100, 102 and vocation, 129–​32 altruism, 62, 66, 70, 71, 81, 90, 102–​05, 157 Becker’s head of household and, 71–​73 family defined as site of, 55, 62, 72 kin altruism, 177 in Niebuhr, 90, 92, 97 paradoxes of, Colin Grant’s account of, 104–​05 Andolsen, Barbara Hilkert, 79 Anglo-​American analytic moral philosophy, See moral philosophy Aristotle, 161n. 51, 183, 184 Arneil, Barbara, 34 Arrow, Kenneth, 48 autonomy, 2, 18, 23, 27, 28, 33, 37, 40, 48, 50, 59–​60, 98, 99, 121, 141, 159, 169, 170, 186, 187, 192, 193, 195, 196, 198, 206, 208, 214, 218, 222, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227–​28, 230, 231 basic need fulfillment as prerequisite for, 12, 64 and dependency, 15, 42, 43, 45, 50, 170, 222, 223, 224, 225, 227–​28 equality as, 2, 10–​11, 12, 13, 21, 36, 64, 192, 193, 230 as ground of equality, 2, 12, 47, 195, 218 Barrera, Albino, 164, 171–​72 Barth, Karl, 116, 117, 130 Becker, Gary, 22, 63, 69–​74, 213 Benedict XVI, Pope, 197, 201, 202–​04 Bergmann, Barbara R., 71 Bérubé, Michael, 227

Bubeck, Diemut, 138 burdened virtues, 183, See also virtues Cahill, Lisa Sowle, 209, 210, 215 capabilities approach, 41, 47, 138, 205, 226–​27 care, 1–​2, 62, See also caregiving relations relations of dependent care for children, 30, 97, 137 as economic, 22, 25, 55, 56–​69, 74–​75, 90, 93, 183, 199 feminist political ethics of, 9, 12, 14, 24, 26, 195, 209–​18 and justice, 135–​39 labor of, 5, 22, 52, 58, 68, 74, 138 marginalization of, 2, 23, 24, 28, 146 moral complexity of, 15–​21, 37 paid care, 18 for persons with disabilities, 1, 18–​19, 44 as political, 42, 139, 143–​46 as practice, 137, 140, 141, 143, 144 privatization of, 2, 21, 35, 37, 44, 90, 105, 106, 125, 127, 130 social organization of. See social organization of care Tronto and Fisher’s definition of, 140 Tronto’s four stages of, 122–​23 unpaid care, 22, 68, 75 caregiving relations, 24, 28, 40, 43, 84, 86, 97, 144, 157, 186, 196, See also relations of dependent care caregiving work, distinctive characteristics of, 58–​59 Cates, Diana Fritz, 153n. 21, 154, 173 Catholic social thought, 195–​204 charity, 122, 149, 155, 161, 162, 163, 201, 203 order of, 162, 163 child-​rearing, 58, 66, 70, 72, 199 children, 13, 53, 96, 156, 199, 206 and parents. See parents–​children relationships and caregivers, 1

241

242

242

Index

Christian love, 2, 3, 5, 6, 12, 16, 20–​21, 23, 24, 75, 76, 80, 81, 83, 84, 86, 88, 91, 96, 100, 107, 109, 117, 127, 136, 156, 176, 186, 188, 189, 192, 201, 202 as action, 8 agape. See agape as duty, 80, 142 equal-​regard. See equal-​regard love eros. See eros as inclusive, extravagant care, 6–​10 and justice, 2, 3–​4, 87, 186, 188 and nature, 110–​11, 166 philia. See philia sacrificial, 12, 13, 111, See also sacrificial love universal scope of, 118, 119, 168, 175 Christiansen, Drew, 198 circumstances of justice, 46, 47, 49, 95, 208 subjective and objective, 95 citizens/​citizenship, 45, 49, 144, 145, 220–​21 Clark, Meghan, 200 cognitive disabilities, persons with, 205, 225 common good, 107, 109, 151, 153, 165, 170, 172, 173–​74, 176, 181, 189, 196, 197, 201, 204, 209, 210, 214 communitarianism, 5, 36, 131 conjunctive responsibility, 190–​91, 203 death, 86, 93, 110, 167, 169, 170, 172, 173, 174 DeCrane, Susanne, 209 deep dependency, 205, 218, 222, 228 denial of dependency, 106 DeParle, Jason, 19 dependent care relations, See relations of dependent care dependent caregivers, 4, 92, 156, 171, 176, 179, 192, 208 disabilities, persons with, 18–​19 cognitive disabilities, 205, 225 disjunctive responsibility, 190 distributive justice, 40, 47, 96, 99, 126, 138, 182, 188, 189, 191, 195, 205, 206 and Christian love, 4 Dodds, Susan, 222 domestic economy, 69, 70 erasure of, 56–​69 valuing, 74–​75 domestic labor, 17, 22, 52, 54, 58, 59, 66, 71, 176 economic value of, 64 gendered assignment of, 65 unpaid, 64, 65 doulia, principle of, 46 economic valuation of care, 75 economics, 27, 28, 52, 60–​61, 203 neoclassical. See neoclassical economics

Eichner, Maxine, 190, 203 Engster, Daniel, 138 Enlightenment, 12, 21, 28, 36, 105 social contract theory. See social contract equality, 2, 27, 28, 29, 36, 47, 119, 195, 224, 230 as autonomy, 2, 10–​11, 12, 21, 37, 64, 193 as basic needs fulfillment, 11–​12, 22, 37, 64, 66, 121, 122, 125, 175 integrating forms of, 13–​14 moral equality, 10, 12, 21, 37 of power, 12–​13, 22, 31, 37, 222 equal-​regard, 23, 24, 25, 75, 114, 116, 117, 118, 120, 121, 123–​26, 128, 137, 148, 149, 161, 162, 176, 188, 189, 212 eros, 6, 81, 82, 101, 102 evolutionary biology, 166–​68, 177 family, 36, 39, 59, 62, 63, 73, 75, 130, 206, 213 Becker's treatment of, 69–​74 in Catholic social thought, 199–​200 commodification of, 74–​75 communitarian views, 36 Hobbes’s treatment of, 30–​32 Locke’s treatment of, 32–​34 in neoclassical economics, 62–​63, 130 Niebuhr and, 90–​91 Nussbaum’s treatment of, 206–​07 privatization of, 37, 125, 127, 130, 142 Rawls’s treatment of, 37, 39–​40, 41, 43–​44 relation to political and economic spheres, 28, 74–​76, 190–​91, 198, 199 Smith’s treatment of, 58–​59 family wage, 53, 59, 65, 66, 183, 199 Farley, Margaret, 156, 187 feminism, 1, 8, 9, 25, 34, 37, 38 postmodern feminism, 210, 215 feminist economics, 9, 52, 70 feminist political ethics of care, 9, 12, 14, 24, 26, 195, 209–​18 feminist political theory, 9, 219–​31 Filmer, Robert, 30, 32, 33, 35, 41, 42, 73 Fineman, Martha, 191, 223 finitude, 84, 87, 88, 91, 96, 129, 131, 148, 171, 182, 224 Finnis, John, 167 Fisher, Berenice, 140, 215 flourishing, 3, 4, 23, 25, 29, 45, 49, 52, 70, 74, 86, 91, 93, 94, 97, 105, 108, 134, 145, 151, 158, 167, 168, 170, 174, 175, 176, 178, 181, 183, 189, 192, 193, 196, 201, 202, 209, 210, 215, 216, 218, 225, 226 Folbre, Nancy, 58, 65, 67, 72 Fraser, Nancy, 53, 212

243

Index Gewirth, Alan, 133 Gilligan, Carol, 9, 24, 115, 134, 135–​36 Glenn, Evelyn Nakano, 54 global care chains, 5, 68 global heart transplant, 5–​6, 189, 197 globalization, 146, 197 God, 81, 89, 101, 153, 155, 169, 173, 174, 184, 224, 229–​30 love of, 81, 102, 118, 122 non-​contrastive transcendence of, 228 will of, 85, 89, 174 good, 25, 28, 30, 37, 38, 40, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 60, 66, 107, 108, 111, 112, 119, 151, 152, 153, 154, 156, 157–​59, 166, 172–​73, 174, 175, 176, 177, 180–​81, 190, 192–​93, 196, 209, 210, 215 agreement on, 63 avoidance of, 16, 23 communitarianism, 5 for dependents, 41–​42 for others, 28, 29, 37, 41, 83, 114 and parenting, 15, 41 personal conception of, 45 Rawls on, 38, 40 reasoning about, 189 and self-​sacrifice, 100 good, reasoning about, 41 Good Samaritan, 6, 7, 8, 8n. 9, 124, 127, 127n. 44, 129, 143, 183, 186, 194, 202, 218 Goodin, Robert, 118 Gordon, Linda, 53 Gottlieb, Roger, 18 grace, 84–​85, 100, 177 Grant, Colin, 23, 77, 81, 97, 102–​06 Grisez, Germain, 167 Gudorf, Christine, 79, 82, 96 Hallett, Garth, 132–​33, 134 Hartmann, Heidi, 58 Haught, John, 169 heads of households, 39–​40, 44, 71–​73, 199 hierarchy, 28, 30, 35, 41, 150, 165, 185 Hill Collins, Patricia, 17–​18 Hinze, Christine Firer, 200 Hobbes, Thomas, 11, 13, 21, 28, 30–​31, 32, 60, 222 Hochschild, Arlie Russell, 5 Homo economicus, 60 Hondagneu-​Sotelo, Pierette, 74 hooks, bell, 43, 226–​27 human capabilities, 41, 47, 138, 205, 226–​27 human dignity, See dignity human goods, 22, 25, 47, 50, 75, 112, 148, 153, 154, 159, 165, 176, 179, 180, 192, 193, 205, 208, 216

243

human love, 81, 153, 154–​55 human nature, 3, 99–​100 human persons, 152 and nature, 91–​95 as primordially separate, 83–​84 humanity, 5, 10, 88, 92, 96, 99, 226, 227 humans, as bounded and free, 87–​88 Hume, David, 13, 46, 49, 95 imago Dei, 196, 218–​19, 228 individual good, 107, 149, 151, 165, 170, 172, 173, 176, 181 individualism, 34, 39, 83, 118 industrialization, 53, 54 infants as contractors, 32 injustice, in dependent care relations, 2, 4, 21, 22, 25, 40, 42, 43, 52, 53, 68, 69, 74, 75, 101, 127, 128, 131, 132, 143, 146, 162, 182, 183, 184, 188, 193, 214, 221 inscrutable preferences, 61–​62, 76 internal state of Christian in evaluating her love, 84–​85 International Monetary Fund, 197n. 8 Jackson, Timothy, 23, 77, 81, 97, 98–​102, 106 on sanctity, 82, 99, 101, 102 Jaggar, Alison, 208 John Paul II, Pope, 197, 199–​200, 201–​02 John XXIII, Pope, 197 Judish, Julia, 132, 133–​34 just love, 156, 187 justice, 22, 35–​38, 50, 87, 88, 94, 98–​99, 124, 149, 182, 186 and care, 135–​39 care, assessment and social organization of, 193 Catholic social thought, 195–​204 and Christian love, 2, 3–​4 circumstances of, 46, 47, 49, 95, 208 distributive, 4, 40, 47, 96, 99, 126, 138, 182, 188, 189, 191, 195, 205, 206 feminist dependency-​based accounts of, 204–​09 human good element, 192–​93 moral equality, 193–​94 sacrificial element, 191–​92 and sacrificial love, 95–​96 state’s role, 189–​91 Kant, Immanuel, 141n. 99 Kierkegaard, Soren, 77, 80, 83, 85, 116, 120 kinship, 27, 207 Kittay, Eva Feder, 46–​47, 138, 204, 205, 207, 208, 225–​27 Kohlberg, Lawrence, 135, 142 Kyrk, Hazel, 66

244

244

Index

labor, 18 of care, 5, 68, 74, 138 division of labor, 57, 58, 72 domestic labor. See domestic labor productive, 57, 58, 59, 65, 132 unpaid, 64, 65, 67 unproductive, 57 wage labor, 53 Leo XIII, Pope, 196 Locke, John, 11, 21, 28, 30, 33–​34 love, See also Christian love and common good, 189 of concupiscence, 154 and dependent care relations, 155–​61 as duty, 80 of friendship, 154 and justice, 188 as natural appetite, 166 as participation, 157n. 44 as pointing toward the good, 157 as a response to need, 81–​83 as union, 157 and virtue, 153–​55 Lovin, Robin, 89 Luther, Martin, 84, 130 MacIntyre, Alisdair, 180, 189, 191 Mackenzie, Catriona, 222 marginalization, 10 of care, 146 of caregivers, 23, 24, 146 of dependency, 1–​2 of moral labor, 23 marriage authority in, 31 as contract, 33 Marshall, Alfred, 64–​65 material scarcity, 47, 49, 86, 96, 171, 172, 178, 205 maternal practice, 226 maternal thinking, 137 McMahon, Jeff, 227 Meilaender, Gilbert, 129–​30 migrant careworkers, 5, 10, 18, 19, 69, 91, 96, 132, 142, 144, 146, 200 Miles, Rebekah, 79, 94 Mill, John Stuart, 59 Miller-​McLemore, Bonnie, 79 moderate scarcity, 49, 50, 51, 95, 208 Mollatt, Michel, 163–​64 moral agency, 22, 63, 73, 74, 91, 95, 97, 161n. 51 complex, 15–​16 moral boundaries, 115, 139–​43, 146 moral point of view, 141–​42 morality–​politics, 140–​41 public–​private, 142–​43

moral complexity of care, 15–​21 moral equality, 10, 12, 21, 37, 44, 48, 193–​94, 205, 218, 226, See also equality moral obligations, 5, 7, 8, 45, 118, 126, 127, 133, 134 moral orientations, 9, 115 justice and care, 24, 135 moral personhood, 47, 48, See also personhood moral philosophy, 115, 118 moral powers, 45, 46, 47 morality, 174, 211 and politics, 140–​41 motherhood, 17, 94 mothering, 144, 159–​61 mothering person, 137, 160, 225, 226 mutual love, 77, 79, 88 Narayan, Uma, 138 nation-​states, 27, 189, 197 natural inclinations, 3, 25, 87, 110, 149, 152, 152n. 17, 155, 161, 162, 166, 168, 176–​80, 183 natural law, 3, 26, 149, 151–​53, 166, 174, 180, 195, 196 critical feminist retrievals of, 209–​18 natural scarcity, 3, 95 nature, 3, 11, 13, 31, 86, 110, 166–​68, 176, 177 neighbor-​love, 7, 8, 22, 117, 129, 176 neoclassical economics, 57, 59, 61–​62, 63, 64, 65, 69, 72, 73, 90, 130 and governing principles of family and market spheres, 62–​63 neoliberalism, 146 new natural law theory, 167 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 23, 77, 81, 83, 86, 103, 110, 117 account of the human situation, 87–​89 account of the human situation, problems with, 89–​97 conception of Christian love, 87–​89 conception of justice, 87, 88, 95–​96 conception of sin, 87–​88 on nature and history, 91–​95 Noddings, Nel, 135–​36 Norlock, Kathryn, 222 Nozick, Robert, 35–​36, 63 Nussbaum, Martha, 39, 40, 47, 49, 204, 205, 206–​09, 226 Nygren, Anders, 77, 81, 82, 101, 103, 105, 115, 156 obligations, 4, 5, 7, 8, 83, 126, 127, 131, 133, 134, 186 oeconomy, 56 Okin, Susan Moller, 35, 39, 40, 42, 217 order of love, 25, 126, 127, 128, 131, 132, 148, 149, 177, 178, 187, 210 inclusivity of, 161–​66

245

Index original position, 38, 41, 42, 45, 61, 73, 213, 217 Osborne, Catherine, 200 othermothering, 18, 20, 141 other-​regard, 41, 70, 73, 77, 83, 89, 97, 140, 141, 157 Outka, Gene, 24, 62, 83, 85, 105, 114, 116, 117, 118, 213 paid care, 18, 20 parenting, 15, 67, 95 parents–​children relationships, 29, 31, 33, 41, 74, 156 Pareto optimality, 63 Pateman, Carole, 31 paternalism, 28, 220, 222 patriarchy, 28, 30, 55, 59, 199 personal care, 18, 81 agape as, 98, 100 personhood, 12, 94, 167, 195, 224, 226–​27 moral personhood. See moral personhood philia, 6, 102, 129, 157 political authority, 13, 21, 23, 28, 29–​34, 197, 198 Enlightenment social contract notions of, 29–​35 patriarchal notions of, 30 universal, 197 political oeconomy, 56 political prudence, 181, 214 politics, 12, 27, 28, 35, 56, 75 Pope, Stephen, 127, 128–​29, 148, 155, 161, 167, 173, 175, 177–​80, 187 Porter, Jean, 152n. 17, 174, 175, 178, 180, 189 Post, Stephen, 126–​27 postmodern feminism, 210, 215 power, 89 absolute political power, 33, 73 equality of, 12–​13, 22, 31, 37, 222 moral powers, 45, 46, 47 practical reason, 38, 41, 60, 152, 154, 168, 210, 213, 214, 215, 218, 226 MacIntyre’s account of development of, 180–​81 practice of care, 137, 140, 141, 143, 144, 158, 193 of mothering, 144, 159 Prado, Anayansi, 19 preferences, 4, 43, 60–​62, 66, 70, 72, 75, 80, 120, 124, 139, 142, 156, 217 inscrutable, 61–​62, 76 pride, 88, 93, 154 primary goods, 40, 41, 46, 48, 205 privatization, 38–​47 of dependency, 21, 30, 35, 50 of care, 37 privatized family, 37, 125, 127, 130, 142 productive labor, 57, 58, 59, 65, 132

245

Protestantism, 8, 9, 85, 86, 126, 129, 193 prudence, 149, 154, 158, 159, 179, 180, 214–​15 political, 181, 214 regnative, 181, 182, 214 Pujol, Michèle, 65n. 47 Purvis, Sally, 116 Rahner, Karl, 127, 157n. 45, 170n. 96 Ramsey, Paul, 77, 81, 82, 83, 120 Rawls, John, 21, 29, 36–​37, 38–​47, 193, 208, 213 difference principle, 40, 46, 48, 49 realism, 94, 215 regnative prudence, 181, 182, 214 Reid, Margaret, 66 relations of dependent care, x, 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 22, 32, 36, 37, 81, 92, 97, 125, 139, 169, See also care caregiving caregiving relations and justice. See justice and love, 155–​61, See also Christian love love sacrificial love marginalization of, 2, 15, 192 and moral agency, 15–​16 motherhood, 94 organization of, 9, 75 and sacrifice, 6, 23, 107, 109, 112, 142, 178, 186, 203, 210, 226, 231 state support for, 197, 203 valuing, 111, 126 religion, 102, 104, 105, 196, 207 responsibility, 135, 212, 213, 215, 217, 218, 225 conjunctive and disjunctive, 190–​91, 203 personal, 187 Rivas, Lynn May, 18 Robinson, Fiona, 145, 213, 215 Rogers, Wendy, 222 Rotten Kid Theorem, 72 Rousseau, Jean-​Jacques, 13 Ruddick, Sara, 16, 137, 144, 159–​61 Ryan, John, 199 sacrifice, 78, 132, 176, 208 definition and evaluation of, 108–​10 and justice, 109 and moral agency, 111 as ordinary moral reality, 108 as a remedy for sin, 109 sacrificial love, 23–​24, 66, 75, 77, 79, 81, 91, 97–​ 106, 114, 117, 148, 168, 176, 178 characteristics of, 80–​87 contemporary expressions of, 97–​106 ethic of, 87–​89, 106–​12 and human finitude, 96 human person and nature, 91–​95 and human relations of care, 110 and justice, 95–​96

246

246

Index

St Augustine, 93, 119, 121, 131 St Thomas Aquinas, 119, 148, 196, 209, 214 conception of love and dependent care relations, 155–​61 on creation, 150–​51 evolutionary biology and, 166–​68 on God, 170–​71 on love and virtue, 153–​55 on natual law, 151–​53 notion of love, 12, 13, 24, 153–​55, 156, 157, 173, 201 on love and justice, 149–​50 on natural law, 26 on order, 151–​53 order of love. See order of love on prudence, 25 on virtues, 25, 148, 158, 160 Samuelson, Paul, 62 Sandel, Michael, 36 scarcity, 171–​72, 208 Barrera on, 171–​72 material, 47, 49, 86, 96, 171, 172, 178, 205 moderate, 49, 50, 51, 95, 208 natural, 3, 95 self-​interest, 28, 44, 47, 58, 59, 62, 66, 70, 72, 89, 94, 103, 140, 206 selfishness, 81, 103, 120, 157 self-​love, 80, 82, 83, 117, 157n. 45 Sevenhuijsen, Selma, 215 Shanley, Mary Lyndon, 33 shared goods, 63, 70, 154, 157, 182, 209, 215, 216, 218 sin, 84, 87, 90, 94, 99, 152, 156 Singer, Peter, 227 Smith, Adam, 56–​58, 59 social contract, 11, 21, 28, 29–​35, 38, 90, 206, 207 social organization of care, 13, 36, 75, 79, 86, 98, 108, 123, 128, 146, 149, 162, 182, 190, 193, 205, 210, 214, 216, 217, 218 globalization of, 5, 24, 25, 186, 188 injustice in, 21, 101 solidarity, virtue of, 201–​02 special moral obligations, 118

special relations, 4, 7, 24, 62, 114, 121, 123–​27, 133, 141, 142, 156 state, 143, 197, 198, 206, See also nation-​state Steuart, James, 66 stigmatization, of dependency, 53–​56 stretchy moral agent, 179 strong agape, 98, 100, 102, See also agape subsidiarity, 198, 200, 214 Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), 191 Tanner, Kathryn, 228–​30 Taylor, Harriet, 59 Tessman, Lisa, 183–​84, 201 Traina, Cristina, 15, 152n. 17, 158, 209, 213, 215 Tronto, Joan, 115, 122, 123, 139, 142, 144, 145–​46, 212, 215, 216, 220–​22 UN Beijing Conference on Women (1995), 67 universal love, 8, 118–​19, 121–​22, 186, 202, See also Christian love love unpaid care, 22, 68, 75, 197n. 8 unpaid labor, 64, 65, 67 economic value of, 67 incorporation into macroeconomic models, 67 Vacek, Edward, 127–​28, 156, 157, 187 virtues, 149, 158–​59, 168, 183, 184, 201 and love, 153–​55 MacIntyre’s account of formation of, 180 vocation, 129–​32 vulnerability, 222–​24 Waerness, Kari, 216 Walker, Margaret Urban, 211–​12, 213, 215, 217 Weaver, Darlene, 157n. 45 welfare states, 55–​56, 65, 75, 212 Werpehowski, William, 130–​31 White, Julie Anne, 145, 212 World Bank, 197n. 8 Young, Iris Marion, 212n. 68

247

newgenprepdf

titles published in the series (continued from page iii) 14.  The Market Economy and Christian Ethics, Peter Sedgwick 15.  Churchgoing and Christian Ethics, Robin Gill 16.  Inequality and Christian Ethics, Douglas Hicks 17.  Biology and Christian Ethics, Stephen Clark 18.  Altruism and Christian Ethics, Colin Grant 19.  The Public Forum and Christian Ethics, Robert Gascoigne 20.  Evil and Christian Ethics, Gordon Graham 21.  Living Together and Christian Ethics, Adrian Thatcher 22.  The Common Good and Christian Ethics, David Hollenbach 23.  Self-​Love and Christian Ethics, Darlene Fozard Weaver 24.  Economic Compulsion and Christian Ethics, Albino Barrera 25.  Genetics and Christian Ethics, Celia Deane-​Drummond 26.  Health Care and Christian Ethics, Robin Gill 27.  Alcohol, Addiction and Christian Ethics, Christopher C. H. Cook 28.  Human Evolution and Christian Ethics, Stephen J. Pope 29.  Media Violence and Christian Ethics, Jolyon Mitchell 30.  Forgiveness and Christian Ethics, Anthony Bash 31.  Market Complicity and Christian Ethics, Albino Barrera 32.  Global Justice, Christology and Christian Ethics, Lisa Sowle Cahill 33.  Lying and Christian Ethics, Christopher O. Tollefsen 34.  Moral Passion and Christian Ethics, Robin Gill

248