The theory of liberal dependency care: a reply to my critics

Caring for Whom? Racial Practices of Care and Liberal Constructivism

“…19 My argument throughout relies on the undefended premise that women of color have legitimate needs to receive sensitivity, consideration, and epistemic leaning from others. 20 In the first two examples, which I include in the mode of personal narrative, or what Bat-Ami Bar On calls public autobiography, [46][47][48] 21 I describe a minority woman who is ambiguously raced enacting an entitlement to run on a public trail, and that act being received with anger and violence when it conflicts with the claims of a white woman and her dog. The third example supplies an additional data point to fill in the larger social context in which microaggressions and racism take on varied forms.…”

“…Because care is the spine of culture [12,20], and how we are habituated in relation to care deeply informs our understandings of the world as well as our physical embodiment in it, many of the people who assert a commitment to equality in a cool and calm moment will not sustain that commitment in their bodily habit and comportment, when relations of care are stake [58]. 36 Therefore, to arrive at a sense of justice in a world with distributive injustice, one that avoids the reification of those very hierarchies, a method for thinking abstractly about distributions of care is needed.…”

“…Constructivism embraces an iterative process of justification, whereby the intuitions employed are reflexively assessed in light of the account of justice that results. However, although the model of the person in Rawls's account of the original position is purportedly neutral, the way persons are understood is in fact informed by assumptions about what a reasonable life includes in social forms where caring labor has been invisible [20] (Chapter 4).…”

“…41 The examples I have discussed offer additional reasons in favor of liberalism as the structuring distributive framework within which to evaluate a society's caregiving arrangement. Theorizing from the perspective of a woman of color, I insist on the enduring need to prioritize autonomy in a society with just care practices, and to maintain a conceptual distinction between autonomy and care (p. 10, [20]). For example, embedding a requirement of responsiveness to others, or of caring, into a conception of autonomy would inevitably transmute into more epistemic leaning and deference from people of color.…”

“…"Liberalism" characterizes a cluster of political theories, and the form of liberalism I advance [12] is a political theory that prioritizes the autonomy and freedom of the individual within the constraints required for fair social cooperation [15,16], (p. 65, [17]), [18,19]. In addition, I insist on conceptual separation between the philosophical doctrine of liberalism and the actual western societies where the doctrine has been developed, but which have never yet conformed to its ideals due to histories of racism, colonization, and gender oppression [19,20]. Thus, I develop a new variety of the philosophical doctrine of liberalism, one that enables critique of the real societies where the doctrine has been dominant.…”