Rethinking Interpersonal Dependence

Abstract

As finite and social beings we depend on one another for survival, flourishing, and for the mundane forms of assistance that allow us to move through our days. Understanding the resulting “web of social interconnection” is an essential part of the care ethical project. In this dissertation, I critique previous attempts to theorize this “web”, offer a novel account of interpersonal dependence, and explore the nature of the dependence involved in caring and loving relationships.In Chapter 1, “Dependency Relations Are Not (Necessarily) Need-Meeting Relations,” I provide negative arguments against the way dependency has traditionally been theorized in care theory – namely, as a need-meeting relationship. In Chapter 2, “Depending on Others,” I offer a positive account of dependence itself. I analyze dependency as a relation in which someone normatively expects another person to perform work, and that second person countenances their expectations. I also address an obvious objection: what about the dependency of, for instance, newborn infants, who don’t appear capable of normatively expecting work of others? On a practice-based view of action, infants can expect insofar as they are meaningfully treated as participants in cross-cultural parenting practices. Chapter 3, “Love, Fairness, and Sharing a Life,” concerns how dependency work is distributed in loving partnerships. I precisify and challenge the idea that considerations of fairness are out of place in relations of love. I argue that love and fairness are integrated in the sense that partners who “share a life” are only able to perform particular “relationally participatory” acts (loving and expressing love) if their actions are sensitive to fairness. Chapter 4, “Rethinking Dependence and Care,” I reject Care Monism, the view that all idealized dependency relations are caring. Embracing Pluralism about dependency ideals allows us to explain the value of non-caring and non-intimate relations of “help”, and to grant disabled people greater control over the meaning of their relationships with personal assistants.