Why? Philosph­i­cal dis­cus­sions about every­day life. Inter­view with Pro­fes­sor Eva Kit­tay on Jus­tice, Car­ing, and the Men­tally Disabled.

On this radio show— Why? Philosph­i­cal dis­cus­sions about every­day life. the host, Jack Rus­sel Wein­stein, inter­views Eva Feder Kit­tay, Pro­fes­sor of Phi­los­o­phy at the State Uni­ver­sity of New York, on ques­tions about jus­tice, car­ing, and the men­tally dis­abled. She is the author of Cog­ni­tive Dis­abil­ity and Its Chal­lenge to Moral Phi­los­o­phy; Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equal­ity and Depen­dency (Think­ing Gen­der); The Sub­ject of Care: Fem­i­nist Per­spec­tives on Depen­dency (Fem­i­nist Con­struc­tion) which she coau­thored with Ellen K. Feder, and more.

Pro­fes­sor Kit­tay is the mother of a forty year-​old daugh­ter with severe men­tal retar­da­tion and Cere­bral Palsy. She had pre­vi­ously worked with abstract, lin­guis­tic aspects of phi­los­o­phy; but even­tu­ally found that lib­eral phi­los­o­phy, in its efforts to define what is human and what is just, excluded human depen­dency and those who care for the depen­dent. She chal­lenges the fail­ure of lib­eral thought to address jus­tice in fam­i­lies, and for the men­tally dis­abled. She asks, “What is the rela­tion­ship between fam­ily and state?” and points out that his­tor­i­cally, indi­vid­ual mem­bers of fam­i­lies were invis­i­ble, and it was only the head of the house­hold that was given the agency to make con­tracts. The lib­eral con­cep­tion of jus­tice, that all are free and all should be treated fairly, in accor­dance with laws that serve each well, seems unaware of the fact that it is embed­ded in a fun­da­men­tally patri­ar­chal soci­ety in which women are assigned the respon­si­bil­ity of care, and the role of care­givers. In this role, indi­vid­ual women seem to be invis­i­ble in phi­los­o­phy. By pri­or­i­tiz­ing the indi­vid­ual, with­out chal­leng­ing the patri­ar­chal struc­ture of soci­ety, lib­eral phi­los­o­phy fails to rec­og­nize depen­dency as a uni­ver­sal and nec­es­sary part of being human.

Philoso­phers have tra­di­tion­ally used the term “men” as if they were talk­ing about all of human­ity, but essen­tially, they’ve been talk­ing about men by fail­ing to address depen­dency, inter-​dependency, and the need for care in human soci­ety. Though women have made much progress, the pay dif­fer­en­tial between men and women has hardly changed. She asks, ‘Why have women not been able to obtain equal­ity, and polit­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tion? How dif­fi­cult is it for women to par­tic­i­pate in the pub­lic sphere, and com­pete in the job mar­ket when they are pri­mar­ily respon­si­ble for giv­ing care? Care-​giving is a hand­i­cap on women that makes it dif­fi­cult or impos­si­ble to com­pete as inde­pen­dent equals. Most women have a child or chil­dren, at the same time of life in which career devel­op­ment is most impor­tant and most expected. Though house­work can be evenly divided and/​or out­sourced, tak­ing care of depen­dents is a hands-​on job, though it is not rec­og­nized as a job. Pro­fes­sional care­givers are poorly paid, because there are so many women doing these jobs for free.

Depen­dency is a human con­di­tion in early life, later life, and with dis­abil­ity and ill­ness. The fail­ure to rec­og­nize this dis­torts our under­stand­ing of the human con­di­tion and our efforts to achieve jus­tice and fair­ness for all. This reminded me of an arti­cle I read recently, Plu­ral­ism in ‘Aca­d­e­mic Pol­i­tics’: The Col­lat­eral Dam­age of Crony­ism and Legal Aspects of Com­mon Mis­con­duct, by Naomi Zack. In it, she talks about white male crony­ism in phi­los­o­phy depart­ments and the ways in which it dis­torts the cronies’ per­cep­tions of them­selves and the value of their work, and how it cor­rupts their use of power. Here is a per­sonal exam­ple I thought of, when Pro­fes­sor Kit­tay dis­cussed the invis­i­bil­ity of women as care­givers in our society.

While in a mil­i­tary unit in which I suf­fered sex­ual harass­ment and abuse from being shunned as being the les­bian I never was, to a rape attempt; two of my supe­ri­ors would use any excuse to den­i­grate, pun­ish, and try to humil­i­ate me; even as they had me doing a job that was way above my pay grade and involved a lot of respon­si­bil­ity, because I did it very well and I was very respon­si­ble. One day, my imme­di­ate enlisted super­vi­sor stand­ing in the mid­dle of oper­a­tions, in front of every­one, started bitch­ing about the con­di­tion of my uni­form. He pointed to him­self and his uni­form as an exam­ple of how much bet­ter an air­men he was than I. So, I replied,

“LOOK ME IN THE EYE AND TELL ME THAT YOUR WIFE DOESN’T TAKE YOUR UNIFORMS TO THE CLEANERS!”

silence

“IT WOULDN’T SURPRISE ME IF SHE SHINED YOUR BOOTS!”

silence and a whiff of regret, I think, that he decided to try to humil­i­ate me in front of my peers

By not acknowl­edg­ing the work that women did in their lives, these men gave them­selves credit for things they didn’t do and they got awfully haughty about it, too. Men in author­ity do this a lot. When men or women do this in phi­los­o­phy, their phi­los­o­phy fails to rec­og­nize what is cen­tral to human expe­ri­ence, denies one’s own depen­dency in child­hood, the pos­si­bil­ity of becom­ing depen­dent later in life through old age, ill­ness, or injury; and fails to rec­og­nize reliance on peo­ple in other capac­i­ties. The ten­dency to want to see one­self as a per­fect spec­i­men of inde­pen­dent thought and action is essen­tially delu­sional, but it insid­i­ously works it way into uncon­sciously judg­ing and exploit­ing oth­ers while but­tress­ing one’s dom­i­nance over oth­ers by merely rein­forc­ing the sta­tus quo with­out chal­lenge. Which, I think, is why it’s so impor­tant to chal­lenge this delu­sion on every level at its level, which is why I think the work of fem­i­nist philoso­phers is vital for humanity’s task in fac­ing real­ity and deal­ing with each other in just and human­is­tic ways so that we don’t destroy our­selves by per­pet­u­at­ing harm­ful delu­sions and the evils to which these delu­sions lend themselves.

Back to the talk— when asked by a caller if her choice to include her per­sonal story in one of her books was a rhetor­i­cal device or some­thing more, Pro­fesser Kit­tay described how, through the influ­ence of fem­i­nist phi­los­o­phy, she became aware that her expe­ri­ence and the expe­ri­ence of other care­givers was excluded from phi­los­o­phy. Her aware­ness that none of us could sur­vive unless a per­son spent time, energy, and effort to take care of us as chil­dren required her to address the inti­mate bond of car­ing from a per­sonal per­spec­tive, because inti­mate car­ing bonds are fun­da­men­tally and nec­es­sar­ily per­sonal, and so she included her per­sonal rela­tion­ship with her depen­dent daugh­ter in her book. Since her daugh­ter didn’t speak, she could not deter­mine if her daugh­ter was ratio­nal, and so pon­dered the fact that in the the his­tory of phi­los­o­phy many attempts have been made to describe spe­cific traits, the use of lan­guage, and self-​consciousness, for instance, as being fully or morally human. She asserts that what makes us a good soci­ety, and a just soci­ety is being more trust­ing, more inclu­sive, and more under­stand­ing of all peo­ple with our imper­fec­tions, rather than pro­mot­ing an ideal that can­not exist.
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