While it has been argued that relational egalitarianism can capture the vulnerability to inequalities of people’s self-respect, the relationship between vulnerability and relational equality remains largely underexplored. In this chapter, I embark on this project, with a particular focus on risk. I argue that both risk and vulnerability capture situations in which there is a possibility of harm, but harm has not yet materialised and I claim that a number of situations in which one’s interests are at risk of harm matter for relational egalitarians. Sometimes risks and vulnerabilities amount to relationships of domination, in other cases exposure to risk, especially when unequal, signals a failure of the state to treat citizens as equals. Bringing together the literature on vulnerability and risk, which are rarely put in dialogue, is key in reflecting on the terms on which people are able to relate to each other as equals: this ex-ante outlook brings to the forefront the different ways in which risk and vulnerability not only can amount to objectionable forms of inequality but can also endanger equality. This, I argue, should lead relational egalitarians to regard the commitment to the robust protection of people’s equal status as central to their theory.

This chapter explores two kinds of vulnerability which appear to cause a problem for neo-republicanism as a form of relational egalitarianism: the vulnerabilities involved in intimate and caring relationships, and those generated by complex economic and social processes like the global financial system. I argue that the standard neo-republican strategy of constraining arbitrary power can successfully account for the former; the value of the vulnerabilities involved in intimate relations depends on the presence of constraints which prevent power being exercised in ways which do not track relevant interests. But this approach is less successful in dealing with the latter kind of vulnerability, which generates cases in which agents can be subject to domination without suffering the loss of status, and accompanying inequality, usually characteristic of domination. I argue that while these cases count as exceptions to the standard relationship between non-domination and egalitarianism, neo-republicanism remains a form of relational egalitarianism.

The Introduction opens with a (personal) precursor to the writing of the book. It discusses the methodological, normative, and theoretical basis of the book. It offers an overview of the argument and the chapters, and outlines sources employed in the research.

This chapter investigates the mechanisms of sexist domination and women’s apparent complicity in their own oppression in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman. It takes as its starting point Wollstonecraft’s claim that aristocratic women are as birds in cages who swap their freedom and reason for clothes and food. I ask whether this can be interpreted as a form of adaptive preferences, and, secondly, existentialist bad faith. I argue that while these theories are useful for understanding Wollstonecraft’s schema, they do not suffice to explain it.

This chapter looks at the role of parents and schools in children’s education with a particular emphasis on the domination that adults inevitably exert on children. The first section explores the way adults may exercise tyranny over children and whether sharing the responsibility of care may help mitigate this. In the second section, we look at how teaching children how to use their own reason – while it does not mean domination plays no part in the adult–child relationship – can mitigate its effects by shortening it. The third section looks at how gendering parental roles makes parenting harder and less effective, and that Wollstonecraft’s anti-essentialist views are reflected are very much part of her discussion of motherhood. Finally, I ask why Wollstonecraft could not simply have modeled her account of parenting onto the first parts of Rousseau’s Emile, and I argue that this would have amounted to a very ineffective pink-washing of Rousseau’s essentially sexist views.

Despite negative effects on their health and social lives, many informal carers of people living with dementia claim to be acting in accordance with a moral obligation. Indeed, feelings of failure and shame are commonly reported by those who later give up their caring responsibilities, suggesting a widespread belief that professional dementia care, whether delivered in the person’s own home or in an institutional setting, ought always to be a last resort. This chapter, however, suggests that this common intuition gets things the wrong way around. The most serious injustices engendered by present-day dementia care services are contingent on broader societal structures – they can thus be ameliorated relatively easily (if resource intensively). Informal dementia care, on the other hand, carries similar risks of injustice and is much more resistant to structural reform. While there may be moral obligations to provide informal dementia care in present-day societies, then, they arise because of the deficiencies of professional care, not the virtues of its informal counterpart.

Carers often interfere with the choices of people living with dementia. On neo-republican and (most) relational egalitarian views, interference can be justified if it tracks a person’s interests: if it does not lead to a relationship of domination. The kind of environment-shaping interventions carers often choose to pursue, however, would be considered infantilising or objectionably paternalistic in other cases. This chapter defends what it calls the indirect-first approach to dementia care, arguing that it offers the best prospects of avoiding domination.

The framework set out in this book reconceptualises the problem of dementia care as a problem of power and social exclusion. At every stage, the goal should be to empower recipients of care to meet their own needs and participate fully in social life as equals, necessitating restrictions on the power of carers and radical changes to our cultural assumptions about and depictions of dementia. Though few would disagree that Western dementia care services are in need of reform, the book’s emphasis on social equality means that the depth and character of the proposed reforms differ significantly from many of those under public discussion. Indeed, as demonstrated in this chapter, significant changes would be needed to the way the UK treats people living with dementia under the law in order to support the reforms recommended in this book.

Georas analyzes different dilemmas that arise when we use robots to serve humans living in the digital age. She focuses on the design and deployment of carebots in particular, to explore how they are embedded in more general multifaceted material and discursive configurations, and how they are implicated in the construction of humanness in socio-technical spaces. In doing so, she delves into the "fog of technology," arguing that this fog is always also a fog of inequality since the emerging architectures of our digitized lives will connect with pre-existing forms of domination. In this context, resistive struggles are premised upon our capacity to dissent, which is what ultimately enables us to express our humanity and at the same time makes us unpredictable. What it means to be human in the digital world is thus never fixed, but, Georas argues, must always be strategically reinvented and reclaimed, since there always will be people living on the “wrong side of the digital train tracks” who will be unjustly treated.

Chapter 2 theorizes the relationship between culture and politics in a manner that explains the Turkish case and can also be applied more generally. I begin by discussing scholarly approaches to the role of culture in contentious politics before offering my conceptual framework for furthering these approaches. How does culture matter in the creation of oppositional identities and political mobilization? Most often, scholars have answered this question by emphasizing structural conditions, movement frames, or personal narratives. Instead, I focus on dispositions. I draw from practice theory to rethink issues of consent and social movement resistance, and I draw from the concept of "practice" to study the processes through which powerful actors cultivate symbolic oppositions within individuals in the form of dispositions. But the implications of this process for movement mobilization have been undervalued. The chapter makes the case that shared dispositions between mobilizing agents and their constituencies produce collective practices among otherwise dispersed individuals and secure consent on the alternative cosmology. While laying the groundwork to establish specific dispositions may take quite some time, once this groundwork has been completed, mobilizing agents can more easily convince people to "hear" insurrectionary messages as well as act on them.

Humility is neither a virtue of caring nor an enkratic virtue, but consists in an absence or dearth of concern for the pseudo-good of self-importance, the kind of personal “importance” that people seek in being envious, vain, domineering, conceited, and arrogant. Self-importance is not the same as the true importance of persons, the kind that is affirmed in people’s loving and respecting others. The vices of pride are important because they spoil or exclude the virtues of caring. Their absence purifies and liberates the personality to love the good, and that is the moral value of humility. Proper pride is a sense of one’s importance as a person where ‘importance’ refers to the real dignity and excellence of oneself as expressed in one’s concern for the good. The absence of the vices of pride that are expressed in self-display – for example, vanity and pretentiousness – is sometimes called modesty, but the more general term for this virtue is ‘humility.’

Freedom in a choice does not just requires the absence of interference by another, whether with a preferred option or with any option; it requires the absence of domination: the absence of vulnerability to a power of interference on the part of another. Law and only law can guard citizens equally against the domination of others by identifying a common set of basic liberties and by providing intuitively adequate resourcing and protection against others to enable people to exercise those choices. But the state that imposes law will itself dominate all or some of its citizens if it is not subjected to a system of intuitively adequate, democratic control over its imposition of law. Such a system should enable people to shape the framework of government, to impose operational checks, constitutional and contestatory, on officials in government, and to appoint or oversee the appointment of such authorities.