Freedom to Care: Liberalism, Dependency Care, and Culture Asha Bhandary, New York: Routledge, 2020 (ISBN: 978-0367245481)

Abstract

Liberal political theory has long been criticized for its omissions regarding the concerns of justice raised by the facts of human dependency. In Freedom to Care: Liberalism, Dependency Care, and Culture, Asha Bhandary aims to reconstruct a version of Rawlsian liberalism that responds to the basic human facts of dependency and the universal need for care (to varying degrees over the course of life), as well as the fact that those who provide care for others (women, generally) are often systematically disadvantaged relative to those without caregiving responsibilities. In other words, she aims to respond to “the dependency critique” of liberalism. As is well known, Eva Feder Kittay offers the most sustained account of that critique in Love’s Labor (Kittay 1999). Kittay argues that traditional forms of liberalism, and Rawls’s view specifically, fail to account for the fact that all humans need various forms of care over the course of a life and some humans need ongoing, sustained care for the whole of life, as well as for the injustices that arise for caregivers. The theoretical bases of liberalism—including strong forms of individualism, the characterization of the moral powers of persons as requiring attainment of forms of rationality, as well as the indices for evaluating just distributions (the account of primary goods in Rawls’s work)—exclude proper theorizing about persons as dependents as well as for dependency workers and fail to provide the conceptual tools for recognizing their needs as claims of justice. Kittay suggests one solution to these problems could include adding the capacity to care to the moral powers of persons as well as including “goods related to our interdependence in state of vulnerability in the index of primary goods” (Kittay 1999, 112). Bhandary takes up Kittay’s response and frames the first chapter in terms of the Rawls–Kittay debate. However, she departs from Kittay and offers her own account of the key issues and potential solutions aiming to recover Rawls. In short, Bhandary argues that Kittay’s proposed solutions for a revised Rawlsian liberalism are inadequate because “they result in an incoherent theory when combined with other Rawslian commitments” (25). Specifically, the suggestion of adding a third moral power fails to “include all utter dependents” (for example, those with extreme cognitive impairments [31]). Rather, Bhandary argues that by making the fact of human dependency known to deliberators in the original position, representatives in that position “will know to consider that they might be a dependent charge or a dependency worker” (32). Yet Bhandary does endorse the suggestion of adding