Abstract

Which political philosophical standards could help determine the legitimate expectations that citizens ought to have towards each other and state institutions? To Philip Pettit, the support needed to achieve the status of being non-dominated is the only standard that ought to guide us. Non-domination can work as the singular guiding ideal since providing for this citizen-status is a gateway to achieving all the other goods that we can legitimately expect from citizens' collective efforts. Since I take non-domination to be an important good but worry that focusing on this gateway good alone leads to a neglect of care work, I question a specific but easily neglected dimension of Pettit's argumentation. My arguments center on a set of constraints of an apparently neutral and merely methodological nature that, to Pettit, necessarily limit the legitimate tasks of states. In light of feminist argumentation, however, these constraints fit too easily with ideologically laden ideals of the productive and independent citizen in light of which human dependency marks a deviation from the norm. Furthermore, they make us lose sight of how citizens tend to lead their lives in a life cycle (with maturation and decline). Neither are the constraints necessary once we consider the numerous existing welfare state practices of care work in a life cycle perspective. Thus, to make critical sense of relations of care that states ought to support, non-domination should not be our only gateway good.

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Organised by the Research Group for Ethics, Legal and Political Philosophy (Research Programme for Philosophy and Intellectual History)