Understanding Dependency in the Work of Eva Feder Kittay and Alasdair MacIntyre

Abstract

This thesis offers a systematic exploration of Eva Feder Kittay’s and Alasdair MacIntyre’s perspectives on dependency, primarily through a comparison of their work in Love’s Labor and Dependent Rational Animals respectively. While Kittay and MacIntyre share what I call a “care concern” (namely, an understanding of the importance of the reality of dependency in human lives), their differing ethical frameworks of a care-ethics-informed liberalism and Aristotelian-Thomistic virtue ethics lead to different conceptions of dependency and different recommendations for responding to that reality. In Ch. 1, I compare Kittay’s and MacIntyre’s accounts of dependency from within their ethical frameworks and argue that their attempts to integrate care concerns into ethical frameworks which do not usually contain them leads to parallel sources of potential self-contradiction. In Ch. 2, I compare the two theorists’ large-scale recommendations for responding to dependency, highlighting the ways that their central disagreement about the merits of liberalism and liberal government paves the way for their differing recommendations, specifically Kittay’s focus on governmental monetary support for dependency workers and MacIntyre’s focus on mid-sized communities. In Ch. 3, I build a conceptual framework to highlight three shared concepts in Kittay’s and MacIntyre’s interpersonal ethics: 1) uncalculating care, 2) expanded (or community-based) reciprocity, and 3) the role of the emotions and desires in moral action. I argue that these similarities provide both Kittay and MacIntyre with robust interpersonal frameworks which are responsive to our moral intuitions about care relationships and so avoid some of the pitfalls of other ethical frameworks. In Ch. 4, I ask broader questions about collaborations between ethical frameworks, using my work in this thesis as a backdrop. I put forth and illustrate three models of collaboration: 1) the critique model, 2) the learning model, and 3) the hybrid model. Finally, I use the work of this thesis to enter into conversations about the relationship between care ethics and virtue ethics. I argue specifically that care ethics cannot be subsumed under virtue ethics without losing some of its central and unique features (namely, its focus on care as the central ethical concept and its relational ontology) and that we can turn to MacIntyre’s work on traditions to investigate the relationship between an ethic which has care concerns and a care ethic.