Disability, dependency, and care - with Eva Feder Kittay

How can we ensure that the drive for gender equality acknowledges relationships of dependency and care? What kinds of social policies are needed to ensure that caregivers are properly supported and cared for? What can the experiences of people with disabilities teach us about what constitutes a 'good' life? And is it possible to achieve a balance between autonomy, dependency, and care?

These are some of the questions we explore in this episode with Eva Feder Kittay, one of the pioneering voices in feminist care ethics and in the emergent field of the philosophy of disability. Eva is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Philosophy at Stony Brook University in New York State, where she taught for many years. She received her bachelor's degree from Sarah Lawrence College in 1967 and went on to receive her doctoral degree from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 1978.

Eva has published numerous articles on the philosophy of language, feminist philosophy, and disability studies, and her work has garnered several honours and prizes. In 1999, Eva published Love's Labor: Essays on Women and Equality, a groundbreaking work in feminist philosophy, which has become one of the foundational texts of care ethics. Eva's work has been shaped in part by her experience as the mother of Sesha, a woman with significant disabilities, and in 2019 she published her book Learning From My Daughter: The Value and Care of Disabled Minds, which was the winner of the 2020 Prose Award for Excellence in Philosophy and which has recently been issued in paperback.

We discuss the following topics in this episode:

Eva's background as the child of Holocaust survivors, growing up in America in the 1950s and 1960s, and the roots of her vocation as a philosopher (02:37)

Eva's introduction to feminism and political activism (05:30)

The story behind Love's Labor (07:55)

The 'dependency critique' of equality (18:10)

The caregiver as 'dependency worker' (20:28)

De-gendering care (22:52)

'Some mother's child': caring for caregivers (27:18)

'Connection-based equality', 'nested dependencies', and doulia (30:09)

The limited role of the state in supporting care and the value of 'caring communities' (33:33)

How Eva's relationship with her daughter Sesha has shaped her thinking - and the origins of Learning from My Daughter (37:28)

Combining the personal and the philosophical in the writing process (39:47)

Challenging conventional notions of what constitutes a 'good' life (42:42)

Reproductive choice in the context of disability (46:03)

Independence, dependency, and care ethics (49:30)

The reception and completion of care (52:18)

Bodily integrity and the body as a window on the soul (56:13)

Eva's plan for a follow-up book on personhood and disability (59:00)

Some of the publications discussed in the episode

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace

Eva Feder Kittay and Diana T. Myers, Women and Moral Theory

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies

Other writers and thinkers mentioned in the episode

Carol Gilligan

John Rawls

Martha Nussbaum

Susan J. Brison

You can download a transcript of this episode by following this link to the Careful Thinking Substack newsletter.