Reading group: Eva Kittay’s Love’s Labor and the dependency critique of Rawls
Eva Kittay's Love's Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency (1999) is one of the books that turned care ethics from a set of intuitions into a challenge to political philosophy. I teach parts of it every year, but I've never read it straight through with people outside a classroom. Let's do that.
The core claim: inevitable human dependency (in infancy, illness, disability and old age) is not an exception to the normal condition of free and equal citizens but a basic fact of human life. Someone must care for dependants, and the "dependency worker" who does this becomes vulnerable herself, because her attention is on another's needs. Theories of justice that begin with independent, fully cooperating adults have left both of them out.
Kittay also writes about her daughter Sesha, who has severe cognitive disabilities, and those chapters are what many readers remember most.
Plan (three sessions, two weeks each; I'll group chapters by theme rather than strictly in sequence):
1. The opening account of dependency, the dependency worker, and the idea of doulia, care for the carer, which she names after the doula.
2. The chapters arguing with Rawls about the circumstances of justice, the list of primary goods and the idea of society as cooperation among equals.
3. The chapters about Sesha and on policy.
Any edition will do. Please post your reactions as you finish each session, including disagreements. I want this to be a reading group, not a fan club.