2.1 Cognitive Ability Does Not Correlate With Social Contributions

Despite his appreciation for LDC's theoretical protection for the rights and claims of care providers, Wolf urges me to embrace what he calls “subject-centered liberal justice” (Wolf, passim). This modification, however, would not preserve the merits of LDC that Wolf so clearly identifies. Instead, I show below that LDC's approach to social cooperation is more inclusive than he claims because people whose care is costly are included in my account. Nowhere in Freedom to Care do I exclude people who might give rise to costly needs for care; nor is their exclusion implied by the infrastructure of the account.

Wolf argues that John Rawls, Cynthia Stark, Samuel Freeman, and I all suffer from a commitment to David Hume's framing of justice as a mutually beneficial arrangement whereby each person must do her part, or the whole apparatus falls apart. Comparing distributive justice to the social virtue of justice, he invokes Hume's metaphor of an arch. Wolf writes:

However, whereas Hume might be read as linking rationality to the idea of social contributions, I do not. Wolf credits the idea that everyone must contribute to a scheme of social cooperation with the exclusion of people who need dependency care throughout their entire lives. But the claims of people who need care throughout their lives are not excluded from justice in LDC.

Because the account of fairness that I offer is about social arrangements, nothing follows from my work about how we should assess the life of any particular individual. It is not an account of exchange reciprocity.Footnote ³ Understanding justice as being fundamentally about the fairness of the system of practices, or of social cooperation, does not mean that people who require more care than they can contribute are excluded. It also does not mean that everyone benefits from each interaction. Wolf asserts, “On the standard interpretation of Hume's view, parts of which Bhandary endorses, individuals who lack underlying capacities that make mutually beneficial reciprocal relationships possible simply do not fall within the scope of justice” (Wolf, Section 2). However, Wolf moves too quickly here when he attributes this aspect of a Humean picture to me.Footnote ⁴ What I embrace from Hume is the idea of the circumstances of justice, which includes the idea that a background framing of moderate scarcity makes justice both necessary and possible. As a form of constructivism, LDC requires rationality in the modelling of agents in the original position, who subsequently arrive at principles to which everyone can agree. It does not, however, equate the model conception of persons in the original position with the set of people who count as those to whom justice is owed (Bhandary, Reference Bhandary2020, p. 40). Instead, the role of rationality is to ascertain what would be fair by thinking about terms everyone would accept.

The four principles of just caregivingFootnote ⁵ that I defend in LDC are fully compatible with meeting the needs of humans with disabilities, and these needs are included in my account of justice. The aspect of Rawls's thought that I embrace is the original position, through which we understand hypothetical acceptability. The original position includes the idea of rationally arriving at the principles of justice that one would accept from any social position. The use of rationality in that context does not describe the people to whom the principles apply. In no way do I think rationality is a precondition for social cooperation, nor is it a guarantee for social cooperation.

2.2 Toward a Realistic Historical Assessment of Social Harms and Contributions

A view that actually measured any one individual's contributions would also have to measure the harms that person causes society. Such a view would quantify social contribution in a way that assesses the person's contributions and the damage he causes. This is not my view, but thinking in this way makes it abundantly clear that rationality is neither necessary nor sufficient for a person to be a contributor to the benefits and burdens of society.

Consider white males, a social group by whom the dominant liberal tradition was authored. This social group has benefitted from the ongoing appropriation of the labour, bodies, and capital of others. Consequently, the paradigm person upon whom the idea of the ‘contributor’ has been founded is shaped by the assumptions and experiences characteristic of this social group. And because their way of life is premised on unjust distributions and relations of appropriation, those facts were invisible, according to the terms of social cooperation.Footnote ⁶

However, there is today mounting global awareness that the members of this small and powerful subgroup have not, in fact, been contributing what they claim. Therefore, political theories of distributive justice should not abandon a role for social contributions in an account of fairness — certainly not at the precise moment when we are making visible how little these men, who were previously paradigm social contributors, actually contribute. Instead, political theorists of distributive justice should assert that social contributions come in many forms. By including care, it becomes undeniable how much people of colour, women, and specifically women of colour contribute relative to white men. My account of social cooperation in LDC calls for a clear-eyed assessment of the ways individuals contribute, rather than the loss of the idea of contributions altogether, where contributions include and extend beyond material/productive, intellectual, and reproductive labour.

The theory of LDC provides a framework with which to identify distributive injustice, and it is one that can be used to identify, for instance, the caregiving labour slave families, servants, and colonial subjects provided to European whites. A theory that only evaluates what we all deserve or need, without also identifying where the labour comes from, loses the theoretical power to make comparative assessments and to identify the exploitation and differential burden of labour performed by people of colour. And maintaining scepticism about human nature in LDC protects people from being exploited within the terms of the theory itself; this is what the role of prudential self-interest, as represented by Rawlsian mutual disinterest in the original position, provides. Rationality's role in the original position is to evaluate terms for social cooperation when people do not know who they are in the resultant schema; this way of presenting peoples’ views protects us from inaccurate empathy and mistaken understandings of what other people need.Footnote ⁷

In the development of our systems of social cooperation, we must meet the needs of people with severe disabilities; this outcome is required under LDC's criteria to meet society's needs for care. In doing so, however, we must remain attuned to the complexities of speaking for others.Footnote ⁸ When technology develops to the point where people who are currently non-verbal can convey their values, the intimates of people who could not speak should be prepared to learn that their formerly disabled intimates valued otherwise than they believed. Thus, we must remain attuned to the fact that describing the needs of people with severe cognitive disabilities, and seeking to meet them in the absence of communication, will be an imperfect exercise.Footnote ⁹

Because the social contract tradition has paid too little attention to the tenuous links between rationality, social contributions, and social harm, let me now elaborate on the third consideration, social harm. Who creates the greatest needs for care? When considering Kenneth Arrow's bottomless pit, who is the target for the analysis? Wolf writes, “Bhandary, Arrow, and Stark are right to be concerned that people with expensive permanent needs might impose excessive social costs, including the burden of care imposed on those who provide it” (Wolf, Section 4).

However, excessive costs do not play a role in my own view. If I were to evaluate costs, I would include the sources of needs for care, and once we do so, masculinity will be responsible for a large bill, for norms of masculinity are the cause of many needs for care. For instance, males have higher rates of risk-taking, which lead to, among other things, higher rates of traumatic brain injury (TBI) in males than in females (Tamás et al., Reference Tamás, Kocsor, Gyuris, Kovács, Czeiter and Büki2019).Footnote ¹⁰ Because a person who suffers from severe TBI requires caregiving by others, when costs of care are included in a system of social cooperation's “account books” (Baier, Reference Baier1994, p. 8), we must also include the extractive and violent tolls created by masculine violence.Footnote ¹¹ Therefore, if I were to evaluate conditions merely in terms of the crude analysis of financial cost, it would be clear that a person with disabilities does not cost society more than the abusive and able male who harms multiple people. But financial cost is not even a metric I articulate in my theory. My view, instead, tracks the distribution of benefits and burdens in our systems of social cooperation. As theorists of justice and as real-world participants in our societies, we will decide, for instance, that the ‘cost’ of taxpayer dollars supporting a person to work as an aid to a child with cerebral palsy so that he can participate in a junior high band is important and valuable. The fact that a theory of justice includes a Rawlsian concept of reciprocity does not bias against this outcome.

2.3 On the Relationship Between the Justice of Institutions and Just Persons

The essence of Wolf's alternative proposal is to include everyone as a self-authenticating claimant, and therefore as a subject of justice. If the concept ‘subject of justice’ identifies the set of people who are owed legal obligations, Wolf's proposal is attractive. And this is perhaps the dominant usage of the word ‘justice’ — one that follows Ronald Dworkin's formulation of liberalism as the minimal use of the law. My account of justice as distributive justice follows the Rawlsian usage, however. Whereas Dworkin's liberalism is about the limits of the law, Rawls's account is fundamentally an assessment of the distributive arrangement, or, even more foundationally, the fairness of the “system of practices” (Rawls, Reference Rawls1958, p. 169; see also Bhandary, Reference Bhandary, Bhandary and Baehr2021, p. 147). Furthermore, the way people are modelled for Rawls is not equivalent to Hume's discussion of them. And my view is not reducible to Rawls's view. What I adopt and revise from Rawls is the idea of hypothetical acceptability as a way of coming to identify principles to constrain social arrangements so that the society is acceptable from any social position. This is the idea of fairness that Rawls elucidates with his idea of the original position. Therefore, Wolf's critique of Hume does not apply to LDC.

2.4 ‘Disability’ Is Not a Natural Kind

Finally, let me address the meaning of the category ‘people with disabilities.’ Humans vary greatly in our capacities and abilities. We all have differing abilities, and what counts as a disability is dependent on the technology of a society, our access to it, and the prevalent norms of functioning. People who are characterized as existing within this group vary, as do people who are characterized as ‘able.’ Disability or ability are range properties relative to the social environment.Footnote ¹²

4.1 Why I Do Not Endorse Political Liberalism

Let me emphasize, though, that I am not rejecting political liberalism. Instead, I am presenting some of my reasons for refraining from taking a position in the political and comprehensive liberal debate in Freedom to Care. Most significantly, it does not seem respectful, to me, to not hold up one another as equals in discourse. Therefore, insofar as political liberalism requires that we present our claims as claims that are based in a shared public political culture, it demands that we maintain reticence about our real commitments in the political sphere.

In addition, political liberalism's concept of a shared public political culture is vague. Determining the content of public political culture requires assessing which claims count as claims to freedom. There is too much latitude in the interpretation of these claims to determine the content of this “shared public political culture,” particularly because our claims to freedom often conflict with one other.

4.2 Philosophy Is Not Diplomacy

Nonetheless, political liberalism might be effective as a political strategy. It is certainly endorsed by philosophers who are fair-minded and supportive of diversity. Here again, though, I am sceptical as to whether it really is politically effective. I suspect, instead, that real people care more when their way of life, and thus, their context for intelligibility, is changing than when a position is presented in terms that do not overtly conflict with their value claims. As I argued through my discussion of the value of “being at home” (Bhandary, Reference Bhandary2020, p. 180), the importance of the intelligibility of action is a source of some people's resistance to changing the social structure in the fundamental ways required to achieve justice such that the just society includes the caregiving arrangements.

The political liberal's attention to expressive disrespect is an important addition to the liberal tradition. But attention to expressive disrespect sometimes seems to require the view that it is disrespectful to say, ‘I disagree with you, and here's why.’ The difficult task of determining how to communicate disagreement is a problem for diplomats and politicians, but how we should communicate our disagreements should not be confused with discerning and articulating what those disagreements are in the first place.

Philosophers should not modify accounts of justice with attempts at diplomacy. In fact, in virtue of philosophers’ commitments to openly assessing facts and arguments in the search for truth, we are among the last people I would suggest to serve as diplomats. When we are debating — even debating about normativity — there is value in asserting the view without artifice.

In contrast, when the purpose of debate is to arrive at an agreement with real people, then diplomacy is needed. Diplomatic communication may include attention to how all parties can ‘save face’ or how parties who do not ultimately win the day may feel that they ‘remain standing.’ Thus, diplomatic efforts in politics may require that views are not rejected altogether. How to accomplish this task is a subject for psychologists and specialists in a number of other disciplines.

4.3 Which Disagreements Matter Today? Moving Beyond the Reformation

Political liberalism's goal of attaining stability in the face of disagreement is laudable, and necessary. But liberalism's focus on toleration was shaped by early liberal thinkers’ apprehension of the effects of religious disagreement in relation to the Reformation and its aftermath.Footnote ¹⁵ As a result, contemporary liberalism has inherited an approach to disagreement for which religious disagreement is the paradigm case. However, because the most pressing matters of disagreement in many nations today have to do with racial inequality, ethnic nationalist claims to territory, and the end of patriarchy, that paradigm should no longer be the one we use to understand disagreement. Therefore, the liberal tradition should not remain wed to framings that characterize all disagreement along terms initially formulated to address religious disagreements to prevent religious violence.

Instead, we need to evaluate the resistance to change prompted by movements toward racial and ethnic equality as we (hopefully) leave a global order of European white male domination. The concept of “being at home” (Bhandary, Reference Bhandary2020, p. 180) that I explicate as a source of the resistance of patriarchal men to my claims can elucidate the resistance that derives from an individual's embeddedness in a way of life and context of intelligibility. When a person's context of intelligibility is founded on injustice, the changes required to achieve a just society may be felt to threaten the very self of the beneficiaries of the old social arrangement. When a person's sense of self is threatened, it will not be surprising if that person fights to retain it.

4.4 LDC's Argument for Autonomy Skills

So, where do these considerations leave LDC's argument for autonomy skills? In Freedom to Care, I distill a set of valuable criteria from the political liberal turn:

Edenberg identifies that satisfying these criteria is not the only way that one can fail to be a political liberal. She writes, that, “Political liberalism's shallow justification eschews comprehensive commitments to any particular metaphysical doctrine and instead grounds the justification in minimal values derived from our common culture” (Edenberg, Section 4). Although it would certainly be a welcome result if a feminist political liberal were to show how my account of autonomy skills might be justified through political liberalism, LDC is not a form of political liberalism. Instead, the claim I defend is that LDC can endorse an account of autonomy while remaining culturally sensitive and applicable to a broad range of societies (Bhandary, Reference Bhandary2020, p. 99). The account of autonomy skills I advance does not require that people make any particular choices or that they live in particular ways. Moreover, my approach to justification does not assume that there is meaning in claims about a ‘common culture.’ What the culture means, and to whom, and from which vantage point, all vary greatly.

Autonomy skills are designed to enable persons who are oppressed gain an understanding of who they are — without requiring that they endorse or reject the practices that oppress them. Thus, these skills leave open that people might continue to embrace oppressive practices for selective beneficial consequences from these practices. For instance, as Uma Narayan argues, women might participate in patriarchal practices through an assessment of the relative benefits and costs of attempting change (Narayan, Reference Narayan, Antony and Witt2002, p. 420). Therefore, although I welcome the possibility that Edenberg might show that the argument for autonomy skills can be made in political liberal terms, LDC does not require that argument.

In the context of evaluating the width and depth of LDC's account of political justice, Edenberg identifies that I assert LDC's cross-cultural applicability. She is right. Two-level contract theory allows for variation in the principles of justice that various societies might endorse, but the core idea of fairness is one for which I see no reason to limit the scope. To fill in the content of the idea of fairness, people in the society need to have autonomy skills. We cannot know what people value unless they communicate those values in some way, and the pervasive presence of oppression across human history is a reason we should not demur about the value of autonomy.

Edenberg notes, as well, that I theorize about justice in a way that includes some distance from questions about state coercion. Nonetheless, she argues, the state may need to play a role in the following situations: “If a person's legitimate needs are not addressed, and this qualifies as an injustice, the state should play a role in ensuring that these needs are met. … the state can play a role in supporting legitimate entitlements to care” (Edenberg, Section 5). Here, Edenberg raises the possibility that my proposal to teach autonomy and caregiving skills could be forced upon parents. She writes, “The state may presumably step in to force parents to ensure that a minimal level of autonomy and caregiving skills are developed if this is part of the justification of the theory” (Edenberg, Section 5).

However, I do not endorse forcing parents to ensure that a minimal level of autonomy and caregiving skills are developed. Instead, I assume the presence of the types of policies currently in place in the U.S. allowing parents to opt out of selective aspects of public education curricula, such as ‘health’ or ‘personal development’ classes. Because I consider autonomy intrinsically valuable (although my arguments do not rely on it), I predict that enough people will value autonomy skills to secure the adequacy conditions for theorists that I specify as an essential component of two-level contract theory.

Finally, I insist on the distinction between distributive justice and justice as an account of the justified use of state violence. LDC is an account of distributive justice rather than a guide to the state's use of violence. Although Edenberg correctly identifies that education is, in fact, coercive in one regard, as is taxation to pay for educational reforms, there is a meaningful distinction between taxation used to pay for school curriculum and a police officer using deadly force. While refusals to pay taxes might eventually result in violence, the varieties, degrees, and proximity of likely force all certainly matter. To see this point more clearly, let's engage in an imaginative exercise where social organization takes on unfamiliar forms. In this world, people might be less concerned with controlling one another. One can imagine, as well, possible worlds where humans do not perpetrate so many violent acts. What must be remedied, and how it must be remedied, will depend on details about our social practices and on their failings. Clearly, incarceration, fines, and the death penalty are not ideal methods for governing. Thus, the ‘state’ should not serve as a euphemism for purportedly justified violence. When we imagine radically different societies, we should think, in an open way, about the forms of enforcement and regulation of individuals. Moreover, when we attend to the way racism has been built into the content and enforcement of laws, the idea that enforcement via violence-wielding authorities is the paradigm of justice becomes evidently specious. By insisting on this conceptual separation between justice as fairness, practical legitimacy, and legal coercion, though, I am not denying the urgency of questions about how to make institutions factually legitimate, as well as effectively legitimate — that is, legitimate in the eyes and real lives of the people who are subjected to their laws.

4.5 Justice Is Incompatible With Oppression

Edenberg shares my foundational commitment to fighting oppression. She writes that, while we share this commitment as feminists, “However, this is a deep value commitment, and one that may not be accepted by all reasonable comprehensive doctrines” (Edenberg, Section 4). It is necessary, she argues, to defend the claim that “foundational commitments to freedom and equality also require resisting oppression” (Edenberg, Section 4) — a task undertaken by a number of leading feminist political liberals.

I simply do not see why a theory of justice should make room for the idea that a specification of justice would support oppression. If freedom and equality do not entail anti-oppression, then they are versions of freedom and equality that only apply to some people, and that are predicated on the oppression of others. A theory of justice that does not supply the conceptual toolkit for identifying oppression is simply a rationalization of the status quo.

Throughout Freedom to Care, my concern is to develop a theory of distributive justice. A theory of distributive justice should provide a framework with which to identify, in order to rectify, injustices in our social arrangements that run afoul of basic constraints for social cooperation. Theorists who have occupied the most socially privileged positions in their societies have not found the varieties of oppression to be relevant.Footnote ¹⁶ But those of us, like Edenberg and myself, who are feminists because we have critical knowledge of our societies, recognize the complexity of oppression. I simply do not see how an inquiry into injustice can proceed without a deep engagement with the complex phenomena of racism and gender subordination (see Mills, Reference Mills2017, p. 214; Young, Reference Young and Young1990).

5.1 Arrow of Care Map

In fact, the arrow of care map is an abstract tool designed precisely for identifying the complexities of caregiving arrangements. The concept is based in my rejection of the idea that the heterosexual family should serve as the base unit for inquiring about caregiving injustice. The arrow of care map is an open concept, a scaffolding to employ for intra-cultural and cross-cultural analyses about groups. To arrive at a just society — one that is just with respect to care — we must evaluate the extent to which the care needs of LGBTQIA+ individuals are met, and this category — one that is indeed comprised of multiple categories — must be included. We must note as well that queer individuals intersect and overlap with heteronormative communities.

There should be iterations of the arrow of care map that are employed in ways that incorporate LGBTQIA+ identities, and a focus on identifying the harms experienced by members of these groups is essential. But it is also vital to identify inequalities within groups. Nonetheless, I am reluctant to be the person who applies LDC to the internal workings of these groups because meanings of care may differ when a person expresses care in a social context where they are embattled. Although I am part of the LGBTQIA+ community in certain respects, and I am an ally, my social location in a heterosexual marriage means that I do not experience daily marginalization.

One reason that I did not employ examples of LGBTQIA+ individuals in my discussions of care inequality and exploitation was that the focus of my analysis was to identify asymmetries and relations of privilege and resistance to change. Because queer communities are marginalized communities, I did not want to extend my theory's critical lens into these communities. For instance, a simplistic way to extend my claims would have been to point to members of same-sex lesbian parenting relationships, and to identify the enduring presence of a linkage between feminine coded behaviour, other-directedness in activity, and care exploitation. But inequalities in the distribution of labour might have different meanings in this context, and what is normatively salient may also differ. For instance, as Varden highlights, the social perception of being unworthy of care is perhaps a more salient type of injustice and inequality for the LGBTQIA+ community than is feminine-coded caregiving. An analysis that responds to differences in meanings and moral salience is precisely a virtue of the arrow of care map. In virtue of its abstract nature, it respects the variation across contexts and is ready to be employed in these various contexts by scholars working in these domains. For instance, the arrow of care map might be employed in relation to William G. Hawkeswood's (Reference Hawkeswood1996) ethnography of African American gay men in Harlem, which “reveals how Black gay men in New York City forge alternative familial networks …, creating a viable alternative to the biological family from which they have been excluded” (Arnold & Bailey, Reference Arnold and Bailey2009, p. 173).Footnote ¹⁸

Let me clarify, as well, that when I write about the social construction of the heteronormative family form, it is not a way of indirectly endorsing this family form as the best kind of family. It is, instead, a way of responding to the fact that this construction is a core social practice for the liberal philosophical doctrine, and that norms governing this social practice are integral to the social form. In Freedom to Care, boys get a whole chapter (Chapter 7) because socialization into a form of self-oriented boyhood remains perhaps the most significant obstacle to justice in caregiving arrangements — and this is the case in many countries and cultures across the world. Liberalism's understanding of the representative man occurs in a world where heterosexual-presenting boys and men are not expected to attend to the needs of others. Therefore, I subject them to a sustained critique because they are such a large part of the problem of unjust caregiving.

The arrow of care map is designed to address the ways in which important phenomena and injustices in care may be missing from longstanding liberal feminist and ‘mainstream’ justice analyses in political philosophy. My arguments for the necessity of abstraction are based on the idea that we do not know all of the oppressed categories, or which categories will be oppressed in the future. It is my hope that scholars in queer studies will apply the map concept to identify the nature of care arrangements within queer communities as well as the ways these community constructions interact with institutions that remain predominantly heteronormative.

5.2 Examples and Methodology

Varden's question about examples intimates a broader inquiry about the use of examples in philosophical methodology. When we use an example, the example might be interpreted as setting forth an exemplary case, one that is particularly worthy of discussion. Examples interpreted in this way might indicate that it is this case that is exemplary, and therefore the most valuable version of the kind it exemplifies. These examples, — let us call them ‘exemplary examples’ — are implicitly held up as examples of excellence or typicality, where their valuation implies that other cases are less valuable. The implied value of these cases is often linked to assumptions that other cases are disvalued to the extent that they depart from these cases. For instance, a white, heterosexual, upper-middle class set of parents with children, a nuclear family, with the financial flexibility to decide that one parent can stay out of the paid workforce, might be construed as the ideal family in the U.S., and family constructions that depart from this one might be considered less ideal to the extent that they depart from it.

A different kind of example might be fictional, such as a Barbie doll represented as a model of an ideal woman.Footnote ¹⁹ Charles W. Mills describes this kind of example as an ideal-as-idealized model (Mills, Reference Mills2017, p. 74). This kind of example does not identify an actual instance of a category, but rather, a (purported) ideal or, as in the case of Barbie, a visual and conceptual mechanism for regulating the behaviour of real people and valourizing those who come closest to its approximation. The heterosexual examples in Freedom to Care are used as objects of inquiry rather than examples to emulate. My vision of a just society is one in which LGBTQIA+ families are as central to the basic structure as are heterosexual families.

But there were reasons for proceeding as I did, and why I still think that including LGBTQIA+ examples in my explication of the theory of LDC is a theoretically and methodologically complex endeavour. I think it would be inadequate for me to simply change the language — in no small part, because the meanings of actions change when people are prohibited from participating in a domain of life. Moreover, queer relationships may have more freedom to experiment with different models of family life. Despite that freedom, manipulation and exploitation can also occur within queer relationships because narcissistic personalities, for example, can exist in any gender.