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A Millian concept of care: What Mill’s defense of the common arrangement can teach us about care

Forthcoming in Social Theory and Practice

Accepted manuscript version (3.5.2015)

Asha Bhandary

Abstract This paper advances a Millian concept of care by re-evaluating his defense of the “common arrangement” for a gendered division of labor in marriage in connection with his views about traditionally feminine capacities, time use, and societal expectations. Informed by contemporary care ethics and liberal feminism, I explicate the best argument Mill could have provided in defense of the common arrangement, and I show that it is grounded in a valuable concept of care for care-givers. This dual-sided concept of care theorizes care-giving as both a domain of human excellence and labor with accompanying burdens. Liberal feminists should adopt this Millian concept of care, which can then inform principled thinking about distributive arrangements.

1. Introduction John Stuart Mill was a prescient liberal feminist.1 He advocated women’s suffrage, equality of

opportunity in the professions, and the abolition of what Maria Morales calls “the command and obedience” ethic between husbands and wives.2 One view that interpreters criticize as a failure of his feminism, though, is his advocacy of the “common arrangement.” 3 In The Subjection of Women, Mill endorses a gendered division of labor within marriage when he writes: “…the common

1 Feminists also criticize Mill for the way that his defense of freedom of speech permits pornography, and Mill’s position on pornography is its own debate into which this paper will not enter. See Susan J. Brison, “The Autonomy Defense of Free Speech”, Ethics Vol. 108, No. 2 (January 1998), p. 312-339; and Robert Skipper, “Mill and Pornography” Ethics 103 (1993): 726-30. For an opposing argument that Mill’s views in the Subjection of Women can provide the basis for censoring pornography, and that they are not inconsistent with his major arguments in On Liberty, see David Dyzenhaus, “Mill and Pornography” Ethics Vol. 102, Issue, 3 (1992): 534-551. 2 Maria H. Morales, Perfect Equality: John Stuart Mill on Well-Constituted Communities, Rowman and Littlefield Publisher, 1996. 3 Susan Okin, David Brink and Wendy Donner criticize this view of Mill’s on varying grounds. David Brink criticizes Mill for assuming that a traditional division of labor would likely result from equality of opportunity rather than “supposing that this could be true”, Wendy Donner argues that Mill failed to be consistent when he held this view. Susan Okin advances the most sustained criticism of the view. Susan Okin (New Zealand Journal, 1973), and Okin, “John Stuart Mill, Liberal Feminist” in Women in Western Political Thought, 1979).David Brink, Mill's Progressive Principles, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013, 276; Wendy Donner and Richard Fumerton, Mill, Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, p. 120-121.

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arrangement, by which the man earns the income and the wife superintends the domestic expenditure, seems to me in general the most suitable division of labour between the two persons.”4 In this paper, I reconsider Mill’s endorsement of the common arrangement, and I find that his advocacy of this arrangement is based on several valid premises that liberal feminists should embrace. Most significantly, Mill has resources for a more complex concept of care than liberal feminism’s predominating conceptualization of care-giving as purely burdensome. Mill theorizes the social necessity of care as a type of labor with opportunity costs - in this way sharing some of the concerns of forms of liberal feminism that seek to free women from the disproportionate performance of care-giving – but he also identifies the complexity of care-giving capacities. His consequent endorsement of a form of specialization should not be dismissed on the grounds that it is purely disadvantageous.

Liberal feminists have focused on inequality and questions concerning the distribution of childcare within the family, but theorizing about the concept of care-giving is relatively underdeveloped. Consequently, liberal feminism needs a more robust concept of care upon which to base its theorizing; and Mill’s endorsement of the common arrangement is an underappreciated resource for developing this concept. Here, I advance the project of defining a concept of care-giving, but I also discuss distributive arrangements throughout the paper because the distribution of care inevitably influences the nature of care-giving and the nature of care-giving is will influence how distributive arrangements are assessed. Although I discuss distributive arrangements throughout the paper, but I do not advance a principle to govern the distribution of care-giving here.5 The Millian concept of care is theoretically separable from proposals about how care should be distributed, despite the ways that the value of care is affected by the way that it is distributed. The concept of care that I develop here may be compatible with a range of distributive principles for care-giving, and my remarks about possible arrangements for care in the conclusion will elucidate the latitude of potential arrangements.

I claim that the argument I advance for the common arrangement is one that Mill should have adopted, and it provides him with consistent grounds for his position. My aims go beyond engaging in the debate about Mill’s endorsement of the common arrangement; because my interpretation of the common arrangement reveals a valuable concept of care for liberal feminists, and it demonstrates the way that Mill is a precursor to this form of liberal feminism. Although Mill did not explicitly state the concept of care-giving that I outline or provide a cohesive argument in favor of the common arrangement, one can draw out insightful ideas about liberalism and care by attending closely to some of the things that Mill said about these topics. The resultant dual-sided concept of care draws on his views about feminine socialization, women’s traditional labor, and social expectations. When he defends the common arrangement, Mill implicitly recognizes the strict social necessity that care must be provided. He also discusses care-giving as an activity that utilizes complex capacities; this is a concept of care that liberal feminists should embrace.6 Correspondingly,

4 Mill’s Collected Works (CW) 21: 297. 5 I have elsewhere defended a liberal principle for the distribution of care. See Asha Bhandary, “Liberal Dependency Care”, Journal of Philosophical Research, Forthcoming vol. 41 (2016). The concept of care that I defend here is compatible with that principle, but it does not depend on the acceptance of that principle. 6 My discussion of Mill’s sympathies with care ethics in the context of his liberal feminism joins Mill interpreters Wendy Donner, Maria Morales, and Susan Wendell. See Donner 2009; Maria Morales, 1996; Susan Wendell, “A (Qualified) Defense of Liberal Feminism,” Hypatia 2 (2): 65-94 (1987).

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the resultant Millian concept of care is a valuable contribution to forms of liberal feminism that seek to address human dependency.7

My argument proceeds by talking about individual persons as the primary units of analyses. The project of this paper is to demarcate the fundamentals of a liberal feminist concept of care for the care-giver. I discuss this concept of care for the care-giver with the shorthand “concept of care.” It is a concept of care for liberalism that does not assume that all people will hold doctrines that subjectively value caring relations. The concept of care will extract elements from the care ethical accounts of Joan Tronto, Virginia Held and Eva Kittay. However, whereas the care that is defined by ethicists of care is a relational good that takes into account the care-giving activity and the good that is received by a vulnerable or dependent charge who is receiving care, the concept of care that I build from Mill is but one part of this equation. The view I advance here is also not a moral one, and it does not theorize the robust value present in relationships of love and intimacy.

2. A liberal feminist criticism of the common arrangement Susan Okin has criticized Mill’s defense of the common arrangement from within a liberal

feminist framework that is primarily concerned with the burdens that accompany women’s disproportionate greater responsibility to provide care to family members.8 Okin condemned Mill for his endorsement of the common arrangement, saying that “His refusal to question the traditional

Wendell argues for a form of liberal feminism that values care, and defends Mill against some standard criticisms of liberal feminism, such as abstract individualism and devaluing care. (Cf. Mill (1870, 105-111); and for additional essays on this topic, see Mill’s The Subjection of Women: Critical Essays, ed. Maria H. Morales, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. Nancy Hirschmann considers Mill’s position the most woman-friendly position of his time. See Nancy Hirschmann, “Mill, Political Economy, and Women’s Work,” The American Political Science Review, Vol. 102, No. 2, (May 2008), 199-213. 7 Liberal feminists who theorize about dependency care needs include Amy Baehr, Asha Bhandary, Maxine Eichner, Janna Thompson, Christie Hartley and Lori Watson. They evaluate care needs within a broadly liberal framework that values autonomy and freedom. See Amy Baehr, “Feminist Politics and Feminist Pluralism: Can We Do Feminist Political Theory Without Theories of Gender?” The Journal of Political Philosophy 2004 Vol. 12, No. 4: 411-436; Asha Bhandary, 2010. “Dependency in Justice: Can Rawlsian Liberalism Accommodate Kittay’s Dependency Critique?” Hypatia 25 (1): 140-156; Maxine Eichner, The Supportive State, Oxford University Press; Hartley, Christie and Lori Watson. 2009. “Feminism, Religion, and Shared Reasons: A Defense of Exclusive Public Reason.” Law and Philosophy 28: 493–536. Feminist contractarians projects are closely aligned with dependency liberal feminists. See, for instance, Janna Thompson, who argues that the social contract tradition must regard reproduction and the “prerequisites of care, as being a central political concern” (Thompson, Janna (1993). ‘What Do Women Want? Rewriting the Social Contract.’ International Journal of Moral and Social Studies 8: 265. The project here is also compatible with Nancy Folbre’s feminist economics. See her substantial corpus on care work, especially Nancy Folbre, Valuing Children: Rethinking the Economics of the Family, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008; Nancy Folbre and Michael Bittman, Family Time: The Social Organization of Care, New York: Routledge, 2004; Nancy Folbre, The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values, New York: The New Press, 2001, Nancy Folbre, Who Pays for the Kids? Gender and the Structures of Constraint, New York: Routledge, 1994. 8 Okin (New Zealand Journal, 1973), and Okin, “John Stuart Mill, Liberal Feminist” in Women in Western Political Thought, 1979).

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family and its demands on women set the limits of his liberal feminism.”9 She then argued that Mill’s theoretical framework should have led him to endorse co-parenting and equally sharing housework.10

Okin argues for the genders to equally share domestic responsibilities through an analysis that theorizes the burdens that accompany care-giving.11 Her related criticism of Mill implies a negative view of domesticity and care. Okin says:

“Thus, in spite of the fact that he had drawn attention to women’s continual preoccupation with domestic detail, in order to explain that they had never achieved any works of genius because they were always amateurs in terms of time and concentration, Mill was not prepared to concede that the tiresome details of domesticity be shared by both sexes. Although certainly a very forward-looking feminist, Mill was not prepared to follow his own theory to the point of seeing the injustice and inequality of opportunity involved in the practice of a man’s being free to choose to have a full career and a family, whereas a woman was free to choose only one or the other12 (my emphasis added). In this passage, Okin pairs the importance of equality of opportunity with a largely negative

view of the nature of domestic work; nowhere in Okin’s corpus is there a sustained treatment of the ways that care-giving can be enriching, meaningful, and a source of value for the care-giver. As Ruth Abbey notes in her critical analysis of Okin’s feminism, “Okin says little about the appeal or advantages of domestic work.”13 Okin notes the pleasures of care-giving only in a footnote, where she writes:

“The importance of shared child rearing for justice between the sexes is not primarily due to its being undesirable work, for in favorable circumstances it can be immensely pleasurable and challenging. Two reasons why shared child rearing is a prerequisite for justice between the sexes are (1) it is immensely time-consuming, and prevents those who do it single-handedly from the pursuit of many other social goods, such as education, earnings, or political office, and (2) it is likely to reduce sex stereotyping in children…” (1989, p. 116). The existence of the above footnote implies that Okin would not have been opposed to the

project I am advancing in this paper, but she never developed this idea any further. More generally, Okin’s work to theorize the burdens of care-giving was part of broader developments in liberal feminism that sought to free women from their economic subordination. In her Justice, Gender, and the Family, she advanced a cogent criticism of the financial vulnerabilities women face in traditionally gendered divisions of labor, which then contribute to women’s decreased financial bargaining

9 Okin, Women in Western Political Thought, 230. 10 Okin has a varied corpus; I am not characterizing her overall philosophy here, but only her views about the traditional division of labor. For an exhaustive discussion of Okin’s feminism, see Ruth Abbey, The Return of Feminist Liberalism, Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011, Chapter 1, “The Feminist Liberalism of Susan Moller Okin,” pp. 22-103. 11 Janna Thompson has criticized Okin’s liberal feminism for conceptualizing women’s traditional care responsibilities purely as obstacles to self-development and equality of opportunity (Thompson (1993, 263). 12 Susan Moller Okin, “John Stuart Mill’s Feminism: The Subjection of Women and the Improvement of Mankind,” in Mill’s The Subjection of Women Critical Essays, ed. Maria H. Morales, 2005, p. 46. Originally published in The New Zealand Journal of History 7 (1973): 105-27. 13 Abbey 2011, p. 27.

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power, exit options, and legal rights.14 According to Okin, care-giving is consequently an impediment to economic power and freedom. For instance, when women are full-time care-givers as stay-at-home moms, they occupy the weaker bargaining position.15 The husband’s contributions are fungible and he is consequently able to walk away from his family responsibilities, whereas the wife’s contributions are non-fungible because they are relational and particular; they are tied to her relationships with the children. Because women will be worse off if they exit the relationship, they accept worse conditions within the relationship. The solution to this inequality, for Okin, is to divide household labor equally, which includes both child care and housework. Okin justifies the argument for an equal division of household labor with the claim that it is necessary for women to have true equality of opportunity in the careers.16

Although Okin identified a pressing source of inequality, her analysis of women’s vulnerability as care-givers should be circumscribed to certain economic and social forms, and Okin is unduly conservative by assuming that this is the economic form we should retain. The tenor of Okin’s analysis is shared by feminist economist Barbara Bergmann, who argues that women need freedom from domestic responsibilities in order to achieve economic independence and liberation.17 According to Bergmann’s economic analysis, care needs should be met in ways that will not impede the professional and economic empowerment of women.

Both Okin and Bergmann portray unpaid care-giving as an obstacle to women’s equality of opportunity and maximal self-development. Of course, the pervasive effects of finances on individuals’ quality of life in a market economy make their vulnerable financial status an important locus for political theory and action. The vulnerabilities that women experience as unpaid care-givers have additional deleterious effects on children if there is no wage-earner in the family because the children then end up living in poverty.18 In these respects, the economic analysis of the opportunity costs of care-giving rightly identifies women’s financial status as an important locus for achieving gender equity. Although this strain of liberal feminism was a valuable cultural corrective to overly halcyonic visions of maternal bliss despite unsupportive conditions, a concept of care-giving that solely theorizes its burdens is incomplete and inadequate when it pairs these claims about the financial burdens of familial care-giving with a concept of care as purely burdensome. The burdens of care-giving was needed to counteract an overly sentimentalized concept of care in traditional forms of liberalism that theorized only its motive of love and occluded its labor, but the burdens view is inadequate as a concept of care for contemporary forms of liberal feminism.

Mill’s thinking about care can serve as a basis for theorizing the nature of care-giving within a form of liberal feminism. As Wendy Donner and Keith Burgess-Jackson have argued, Mill’s thinking about the complexity of traditional feminine activities is compatible with care ethicists’

14 Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender and the Family, New York: Basic Books, 1989; Chapter 7. Amartya Sen also theorizes women’s vulnerability within marriage as a “cooperative conflict” within which women are in the worse breakdown position. Amartya Sen, “Gender and Cooperative Conflicts,” WIDER Working Papers, Helsinki: WP 18, July 1987, p. 25. Ann Cudd, Analyzing Oppression, Oxford University Press, 2006. 15 Susan Okin, Justice, Gender and the Family, New York: Basic Books, 1989. 16 Okin 1989, p. 16. 17 Barbara Bergmann, The Economic Emergence of Women, New York: Basic Books, 1986. 18 There are a number of different recommendations for remedying this arrangement, and I will not propose an economic solution here. One recommendation is to split a wage-earner parent’s earnings among both parents, as Susan Okin recommends in (1989).

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work to theorize the intellectual and moral structure of care.19 Mill would have been sympathetic to a module of care ethics that theorizes the cognitive complexity of care-giving as theorized by Sara Ruddick in her account of maternal thinking and Joan Tronto in her account of the practice of care. Due to these affinities with a subset of the tenets of care ethics, Mill’s thinking can contribute to a form of liberal feminism that incorporates its burdens and also grants the validity of care ethical claims about the value and complexity of care-giving for the care-giver. Consequently, his endorsement of the common arrangement and his related view about feminine socialization and the importance of individuality and its limits deserve new appreciation by liberal feminists.

Below, I construct a Millian defense of the common arrangement that infers some additional premises based on his views of gender, the common arrangement, and the value of autonomy. I will develop a Millian concept of care for the care-giver from this argument, and then I will theorize the ways in which the concept of care is tied to distributive principles but can also be conceptually peeled away from them.

3. A new Millian argument for the common arrangement

The set of premises below come together to support the common arrangement, but they are

not a formal argument. It provides structure for the proceeding discussion, where I elaborate on these claims in order to show what the best Millian argument for the common arrangement implies about care. Mill interpreters should note that the view that I present is not one that Mill ever explicitly stated, and throughout I refer to a “Millian” view to demarcate the difference between Mill’s own views and a Millian view. My contention is that liberal feminists and Millians should avail ourselves of the new Millian view I advocate. And, more strongly, that - if Mill were to think about these issues today, he would endorse the concept of care that I defend here; and with that concept in hand he could revisit some of his other commitments. I do not provide a decisive rejection of the common arrangement on Millian terms here. My aims are to see why Mill might have defended the common arrangement and to show that his argument for it is in fact based on a better concept of care than liberal feminists have previously theorized.20

(A) Care is labor 1. Tending to the household and caring for children is socially necessary labor. 2. Social arrangements are needed to guarantee this labor will be performed. 3. Women should not have to perform more than their fair share of work. 4. A division of labor is efficient.21

(B) Caring excellences 5. Household labor requires intellectual, practical, moral and aesthetic capacities. 6. Compassion and empathy are part of self-development.22

19 Wendy Donner has argued that Mill’s thinking is sympathetic to care ethics in Donner, John Stuart Mill’s Liberal Feminism, Philosophical Studies, 1993; Donner and Fumerton, Mill, Wiley Blackwell, 2009). Keith Burgess-Jackson provide a competing interpretation of Mill as a radical feminist in “John Stuart Mill, Radical Feminist,” Social Theory and Practice, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Fall 1995), 380. 20 My fellow feminists may be alarmed by my reconstructed argument for the common arrangement, and here I will do nothing to assuage that alarm. Elsewhere, I have provided extra-Millian grounds for de-gendering care. 21 Hirschmann (2008) directs feminist attention to Mill’s Political Economy for this view. 22 For a complete account of this view, see Wendy Donner’s account of self-development (2009).

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7. Good care-giving requires some self-abnegation. 8. Caring excellences conflict with excellence in several other domains, including

philosophy, science, and the arts. 9. Care-giving is a domain of human excellence. 10. Some people should specialize in care-giving.

(C) Individuality and choice 11. Human individuality should be celebrated and amplified for human progress. 12. Marriage without children permits women a greater range of opportunities in which to

develop their individuality while also benefitting from the companionship of an equal. 13. Women’s individuality can be respected by giving women the choice about whether to

get married and have children. Mill distributed birth control as a way of protecting women’s right to choose whether to have children.

14. When a woman chooses to have a child, she is signing up for the role of care-giver, let us call this the “care conscription through childbirth” principle.23

15. For women, getting married is socially understood as voluntarily taking on a particular profession: the profession of maintaining the household. Mill holds this view in conjunction with his main line of argument that marriage should be an ideal union between equals and not a relationship in which a wife is subordinate to her husband.

16. Individuality is legitimately constrained by the requirements of sharing the burdens needed for the continuation of society, and reproducing society is one of these necessary tasks for social cooperation.

4. Care as socially necessary labor, avoiding a second shift.

The first cluster of premises identifies the nature of care-giving as labor, and considers how

that labor can be performed without disadvantaging any one group of people. Here I explicate premises 1-3 and give evidence for these claims in Mil’s thought. Premise 4’s claim about efficiency is one that I evaluate in section 7.

In virtue of the fact that he proposed the common arrangement, Mill recognized the social necessity of care. In this respect, he provides a foundation for contemporary forms of liberal feminism that identify the importance and value of meeting care needs. He explicitly identifies a principle to govern care-giving – the common arrangement. It is an asset of his theory that he articulates a transparent principle by which to distribute responsibility for care-giving.

In addition to recognizing the social necessity of care-giving, Mill’s defense of the common arrangement also includes the premise that care-giving is a type of labor. Consequently - as Nancy Hirschmann (2008) and David Brink (2013) note - the common arrangement has the merit of avoiding a “double day” or “second shift” for women. Mill states the likely consequence that women will be disproportionately burdened with labor if they work outside the home in addition to caring for their children and tending to the home in the following passage:

“If, in addition to the physical suffering of bearing children, and the whole responsibility of their care and education in early years, the wife undertakes the careful and economic application of the husband’s earnings to the general comfort of the family; she takes not only

23 See Hirschmann (2008) and Morales (1996) for a related discussion.

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her fair share, but usually the larger share, of the bodily and mental exertion required for their joint existence.”24 The same passage continues to assert the necessity that children should receive good care:

“If she undertakes any additional portion, it seldom relieves her from this, but only prevents her from performing it properly.”25 Mill assumes that children must be cared for well, and that a home must be maintained because he does not contemplate the possibility that women might work outside the home and simply leave the household domain untended. The necessity of good child care is evident in its absence, which Mill states will result in the deaths of children who do not receive it:

“The care which she is herself disabled from taking of the children and the household, nobody else takes; those of the children who do not die, grow up as they best can, and the management of the household is likely to be so bad, as even in point of economy to be a great drawback from the value of the wife’s earnings.”26 The passages I have cited above establish that Mill directly links care provision with

the survival of children, thereby establishing its social necessity. He pairs this premise about the necessity of good care with the premise that women should not be disadvantaged overall in the scheme of social cooperation by performing more work than their fair share. Even today, women’s “second shift” continues to result in less leisure time for working women with children.27 Mill’s common arrangement principle has the merit of resulting in less labor for women than Okin’s proposal to split household duties between two working spouses because the equal sharing principle causes two people to share the work of at least three people, and as Nancy Hirschmann argues – “Even splitting these tasks between husband and wife, as feminist critics of Mill want him to do, would still provide an exhausting day for both partners.”28 Consequently, Hirschmann commends the common arrangement as the most women-friendly position for Mill’s time.

Mill does not think that the traditional division of labor is problematic in itself. What is problematic is the vulnerability and disadvantage that women suffer within it, the elimination of which are required for a just arrangement: “In an otherwise just state of things, it is not, therefore, I think, a desirable custom, that a wife should contribute by her labour to the income of the family.”29 In an unjust state of things, though, women need to gain outside employment to increase their power.

To redress the disadvantages that accompany caring labor, Hirschmann devises the following sympathetic revision to Mill’s views: He should include traditional women’s work in the category of productive labor because participating in productive labor serves as the basis for both property rights and equality for Mill. Mill excluded household labor from productive labor because he theorized it to derive from the motive of love, which disqualifies that activity from counting as labor.30 Hirschmann argues that Mill should drop this view about the motive of love so that women 24 Mill, The Subjection of Women, Chapter 2 in On Liberty and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini, Cambridge University Press, p. 164. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Nancy Folbre and Michael Bittman, eds. Family Time: The Social Organization of Care, Routledge, 2004. 28 Hirschmann 2008, p. 203. 29 Mill, The Subjection of Women, Chapter 2 in On Liberty and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 164. 30 Mill states the view in question in the Principles of Political Economy, Books I-II, Liberty Fund reprint of 1965, University of Toronto Press, p. 41, 35.

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performing traditional forms of women’s work will not be disadvantaged. Would anything be wrong with women performing more care if it is done without consequent disadvantages? In order to answer that question, a more robust concept of care must be developed.

Based purely on considerations of labor, Hirschmann’s amendment is an attractive one. It has the benefit of avoiding a double shift for the women who attend to the demands of care and the household and it gives women the basis for substantive equality. If married women who are care-givers can avoid the economic and relational subordination that typically accompanies familial care-giving, and also avoid a double shift of work, then reasons to reject the common arrangement cannot be limited to considerations of work load and bargaining disadvantages. In fact, Mill was right to argue for those considerations as reasons to endorse the common arrangement rather than to reject it.

Mill’s writing about women’s activities and gendered socialization are in no way limited to the view that women’s traditional activities are burdens, though. In his writing on these topics, there are resources for a robust account of care-giving as a domain of human excellence that is cognitively complex. The second cluster of premises in my argument above concerns the complexity of care-giving, which I will defend in the proceeding section. My argument here is sympathetic to Maria Morales and Wendy Donner’s forms of Millian feminism. Morales also defends a Millian feminism that does not devalue care-giving labor and that correspondingly does not require women to engage in nondomestic forms of labor. Criticizing varieties of liberal feminism that devalue care, she writes that “the assumption that the strength of a feminist position depends at least in part on arguing that women should engage in nondomestic forms of labor uncritically devalues domestic labor.”31 Instead, domestic labor has robust value for Morales’s Mill. Consequently, according to Morales, Millian egalitarianism does not require that women participate in public or paid labor in order to be equal. The view in the proceeding section is also sympathetic to Wendy Donner’s account of Millian self-development, which places capacities for sociality, empathy and compassion at its core.32

In the proceeding section, I develop an account of Millian care-giving skills that is liberal in virtue of its emphasis on individuals as the units of analysis. My argument will draw upon Mill’s writings on society’s gendered expectations and women’s seemingly inferior production in areas of human excellence. I contend that Mill’s discussion of the capacities women use in traditional roles can serve as a foundation for care-giving excellences, which is one essential component of the Millian concept of care.

5. Caring excellences

This section unpacks premises in the (B) cluster of the argument for the common arrangement on pages 6-7. I will argue that Mill recognizes that caring activities utilize intellectual capacities and cultivate complex abilities.33 I find evidence in Mill for the seed of the concepts of care-giving that care theorists Sara Ruddick, Virginia Held, Joan Tronto and others have developed. This reading of Mill is only possible after the advances and insights of these care theorists.

More specifically, Joan Tronto and Berenice Fisher’s account of caring practices specifies the essential capacity of attentiveness as the capacity to notice the needs of another person using physical and verbal cues.34 It requires being perceptive and open to experience, and it consequently requires an ability to displace one’s ego from the primary location in one’s cognitive schema and priorities.35 31 Morales 1996, p. 193. 32 Donner 2009. I discuss Donner’s claims about excellences in section 8. 33 Susan Wendell brings attention to this aspect of Mill’s thought in her (1987, p. 79). 34 See Joan Tronto, Moral Boundaries, New York: Routledge, 1993, 127. 35 See Bhandary, “Liberal Dependency Care,” JPR, 2016, Section V.B..

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Mill notes the merits of a related perceptual capacity that is linked to openness and to its greater cultivation among women. This capacity is “intuitive perception,” which is “lively perception and sense of objective fact.”36 He argues that this capacity enables women to apprehend the details of a circumstance more quickly, and to make better decisions in situations that are dynamic and complex.37 A capacity for intuitive perception is a precursor to care ethicists’ capacity for attentiveness. On this point then, I augment Mill’s actual premises with a linking premise that states that a “capacity for intuitive perception” is necessary to be a good care-giver because perceiving the needs of a vulnerable person requires reading that vulnerable charge’s cues and interpreting them into an understanding of what that person is experiencing.

Mill also identifies the training and education that women undergo in the process of managing the many details of a household. In the following passage, Mill links this capacity to women’s facility at managing many small details: “They perhaps have it from nature, but they certainly have it by training and education; for nearly the whole of the occupations of women consist in the management of small and multitudinous details, on each of which the mind cannot dwell for even a minute, but must pass on to other things…”.38 These capacities develop because women are primarily responsible for managing “the superintendence of the family and the domestic expenditure”, resulting in the ability to mentally store, organize, and track many details at once.39

Women’s traditional responsibilities also promote the ability to think concretely about the effects of her actions on other people – which is a claim that Mill makes in the following way: “A woman seldom runs wild after an abstraction….her more lively interest in the present feelings of persons, which makes her consider first of all, in anything which claims to be applied to practice, in what manner persons will be affected by it…” (my emphasis).40 The passages cited above show that Mill links women’s functional role to a valuable intellectual capacity.

Mill’s comment about the mental activity of managing the household should be embraced by contemporary liberal feminists. It is also evidence that - if Mill were thinking about this issue today – he would be sympathetic to Sara Ruddick’s theory of maternal activity as an intellectual practice.41 Mill certainly did not develop a full account of the intellectual structure of care-giving, but contemporary Millian liberals should welcome and incorporate Ruddick’s insights. Ruddick advanced three regulative aims that structure maternal practice: preservation, growth, and social acceptability.” According to Ruddick, being a mother means that one is committed to meeting these demands through preservative love, nurturance, and training.”42 These demands require the cultivation of complex skills and competencies as well as a longitudinal commitment to one’s children. The intellectual complexity of the practice of care-giving for one’s own children is defined in part by a set of longitudinal goals and aims. Consequently, care-giving practice cannot be maximally divided and distributed among care-givers who do not have enduring relationships with a child.

Despite his prescient remarks about the connection between traditionally feminine labor and intuitive perception, Mill also theorizes the mental activity as burdensome in itself. He writes about the mental burdens of running a household as an activity that is “extremely onerous to the thoughts”,43 and consists in “this number of little practical interests (which are made great to 36 Mill 1989, p. 174. 37 Ibid, p. 176. 38 Ibid, p. 180. 39 Ibid, p. 190. 40 Ibid, p. 174. 41 Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace, Boston: Beacon Press, 1989, 2002. 42 Ruddick, 2002, p. 17 43 Mill 1989, p. 190.

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them).”44 A dominant strain of liberal feminism has focused on this negative conceptualization of traditionally feminine work are onerous and trivial. I reject that strain; whereas Mill is right to identify the ways that the cognitive demands of running a household are burdensome; his view that women inflate the value of this enterprise should be rejected by contemporary liberal feminists theorizing about care, who should recognize the way that paying attention to many small details comes together to create the effect of a home. The value of this activity is accordingly great to the members of the household.

One of the benefits of the common arrangement is that it provides supportive conditions for cultivating the capacity of intuitive perception and fluency in juggling many details. It does so because it treats the activity of mother as a kind of career and provides time for the development of these skills. Further theorizing about care arrangements must incorporate a general desideratum that is embedded within the common arrangement: conditions for care-giving should be conducive to cultivating excellence in care-giving capacities.

A readiness to respond

Mill identifies the competing demands of household maintenance with endeavors in other areas. There are conflicts in discrete units of time that can be spent either painting, for instance, or tending to children. According to Mill, women are less innovative in the domains of art, philosophy, and science because of a practical conflict between the work of the household and the demands of excellence – for which “consecutive engagement” is necessary. These attentional demands conflict with the practical demands of maintaining a household.45 The outcome of this competition is that women participate in the arts, philosophy and science as hobbies rather than as professions. As a result, their work fails to ascend to the highest level of quality and innovation.

Mill also theorizes the way that the cultivation of a capacity to respond to others conflicts with excellence. In addition to competing demands for a woman’s time, there is also a social expectation that impedes women from cultivating the habits of mind needed for great cultural achievements; Mill makes this claim in the course of explaining why women have not produced any of the best intellectual or artistic products in several disciplines when he writes: “No production in philosophy, science, or art, entitled to the first rank, has been the work of a woman.”46 In particular, he identifies the specific type of inferiority in this domains to be a “deficiency of originality.”47 He contends that women have not produced any great ideas that shape an era or new conceptions of art that create new possibilities or found new schools. “Their compositions are mostly grounded on the existing fund of thought, and their creations do not deviate widely from existing types.”48 One of his explanations for the claim that women have not founded new paradigms is that women are expected to maintain an attitude of openness to others in order to be available to respond to people who want to reach them. Mill astutely identifies this social expectation in the following passage: “Independently of the regular offices of life which devolve upon a woman, she is expected to have her time and faculties always at the disposal of everyone…. She must be always at the beck and call of somebody, generally of everybody.”49

Mill’s assessment of the deleterious effects of society’s expectations of women is an astute one; not only do actual interruptions conflict with the achievement of excellence in these domains, 44 Ibid, p. 191. 45 Mill 1989, p. 189-191. 46 Mill 1989, p. 184. 47 Mill 1989, p. 185. 48 Ibid. 49 Mill 1989, 191.

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but the knowledge that you may be interrupted at any moment also obstructs the cultivation of the habits of mind needed for intense concentration. Withholding some of her mental capacity and concentration to be able to respond quickly and effectively to the needs of others is bound to affect the other endeavors in which a woman engages. The conflicts between society’s expectations of women and women’s cultural achievements, therefore, are not merely about direct competition over a unit of time. Society’s expectations of women also impede women from developing the habits of mind needed for endeavors requiring a single-minded focus. In this way, society’s cultivation of a readiness to respond among women becomes an obstacle to sustained artistic or philosophical efforts even when a person is not being called upon by others because the mental stance required to be ready to respond to the needs of others requires withholding some of one’s concentration from the task at hand.

Mill’s recognition of the demands of responsiveness should be included in a liberal concept of care, but the liberal concept of care should amend Mill to include the domain of care-giving among the domains for innovation and genius. In the next section, I will argue for the claim that care-giving should be included among the domains of human genius. The scope of the conflict between a readiness to respond and genius consequently changes; a readiness to respond is necessary for excellence in the domain of care-giving – despite posing a challenge for excellence in other domains. In addition, the capacity to be responsive does not pose an insurmountable obstacle to achieving excellence in other domains because some individuals can juggle these demands. In this way, human variability and individuality must be taken into account when theorizing social arrangements.

6. Geniuses as the salt of the earth

Truly original people are “the salt of the earth”, and their innovations promote human progress. Mill describes these geniuses in the following passage:

There are but few persons, in comparison with the whole of mankind, whose experiments, if adopted by others, would be likely to be any improvement to established practice. But these few are the salt of the earth; without them, human life would become a stagnant pond….Persons of genius, it is true, are, and always are likely to be, a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow. Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom. Persons of genius are, ex termini, more individual than any other people—less capable, consequently, of fitting themselves, without hurtful compression, into any of the small moulds which society provides in order to save its members the trouble of forming their own character.50 Mill does not discuss care-givers or traditional feminine roles in his discussion of persons of

genius. One of my critical amendments to Mill’s own views, then, is that he should include care-givers in this domain. There are enough resources in his writing about the complexity of care-giving to suggest that he would have been open to this view if he were to think about the topic today. Care-giving is a domain in which human excellence can express itself, and genius can be cultivated in the care-giver him/herself. Care-giving differs from many other domains of genius, though, because of its strict necessity on behalf of the person receiving care – where the necessity constrains the ways that the care-giver can innovate. Section 9 will explore the limits of care-giving’s contribution to the self-development of the care-giver.

I discuss individuality in Section 8, but I will note here that the reader who is looking for reasons to reject the common arrangement might amplify the claim that care-giving is a domain for 50 Mill, “On Liberty” in On Liberty and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini, Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 65.

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human genius and pair it with the importance of individuality to claim that the common arrangement should be rejected because it excludes men from this domain of human excellence.51 Excluding these categories of people unnecessarily limits those who can innovate about care, and it thereby impedes social progress. The reformed Mill can argue that care-giving practices, methods and norms will benefit from the broadest range of contributions, and we do not want this vital domain of human life to miss the potential genius of people who have heretofore not been included in this domain.

The Millian concept of care I have developed incorporates its burdens and its complexity. It is this concept of care that liberalism should adopt. The liberal concept of care must include that there is a strict social necessity of meeting care needs, that meeting these care needs can impose burdens on the care-giver, and that care is also a domain of human excellence in which genius can express itself. Incorporating all of these seemingly contradictory aspects of care is essential for a liberal view of care, and any consequent principles for distributing care should be based on this complex concept.52

The most cogent Millian argument for the common arrangement requires an additional implicit premise that connects specialization with the aim of a maximally efficient division of labor. Although I ultimately reject the aim of maximal efficiency, and thereby part from Mill, I will first present a charitable rescue of Mill’s argument for the common arrangement that advocates efficiency while maintaining a commitment to individuality.53 Sections 7 and 8 articulate this argument through a discussion of the roles of specialization and individuality in Mill’s argument. Section 7 will conclude that liberal feminism should grant the worth of Mill’s views about specialization while rejecting a rigid social arrangement that achieves maximal efficiency. Section 8 establishes (a) that respect for individuality is a reason to maintain latitude in care arrangements, and (b) that Mill advocates reasoned limits to individuality for the sake of social necessity, and this is an important contribution to a form of liberalism that will address care needs in ways that are transparent and systematic.

7. The specialization argument; not just biology

Maria Morales has criticized Mill for assuming that women’s biological capacity for child-bearing should naturally lead women to specialize in child-rearing. She finds that position, which I call “care conscription via childbirth”, inconsistent with Mill’s own critique of gender essentialism. Morales interprets Mill’s defense of the common arrangement to imply the following premise:

Most women are biologically ‘suited’ to bear children, yet Mill argued against the traditional view that there is a natural correlation between women’s biological capacities and their social roles. Thus, his implicit assumption that the social role of child-rearer goes hand in hand with the biological capacity to bear children sits uneasily with his argument against the claim that women are by nature suited to do

51 More precisely, in the argument I have constructed, it is males and non-child-bearing females who would be excluded from the domain of care-giving. 52 The project of this paper is not to propose a distributive principle for care; instead, it is to develop a concept of care and to mark out all of the considerations that must be taken into account when devising a principle for care provision. In a companion paper, I argue for a principle to guide distribution, showing that what follows from a combined concept of care is a principle that gives everyone a baseline ability to be responsive and then promotes specialization for some people. 53 I have argued for a contractarian approach to care elsewhere. See Asha Bhandary, “Liberal Dependency Care”, Journal of Philosophical Research, Forthcoming vol. 41 (2016).

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certain things better than men. In effect, it draws a normative inference about social roles from a fact about biology. 54 Morales’s interpretation of Mill is a response to the following questions: Why does Mill

assume that it is the married woman who should be the child-rearer in addition to the child-bearer? Why not assume that the father should attend to the needs of the children once they are born, or that the parents should split the responsibilities? Morales attributes Mill’s failure to consider these possibilities to biological essentialism. On Morales’s view, Mill’s claim is that - when a man and a woman choose to have a child - it is the woman who is the care-giver because she is the one who can be pregnant, or because of her biological makeup. The gender essentialism claims results from this interpretation.

Is Mill’s view necessarily the one Morales attributes to him? Although her interpretation is highly plausible, it is not the only interpretation that is possible based on Mill’s view.55 The claim that Mill is not making is that all women ought to be care-givers; he does not claim that every person who has the biological capacity to bear children should also be a care-giver. Another argument is available to Mill that avoids the claim that women’s biology prescribes a destiny as care-givers; I call this argument the “specialization argument.” It is the experience of motherhood that promotes facility at care-giving, and this is not merely a fiat of biology. The specialization argument contends that biological mothers are in a strong position to develop care-giving skills in response to the physical experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding. A woman who bears a child necessarily experiences extreme limits on her actions through pregnancy and childbirth; these limits arise in the form of restrictions to diet, movement, and so forth. In addition, a breastfeeding mother of a new baby must feed that baby during regular intervals that include nighttime intervals for at least the first six weeks, which prescribes where her body should be in relation to that baby during those times and thereby constraints her other activities.56 Through the experience of radically prioritizing the life of another person, the mother becomes adept at juggling various needs and continuing to insure that the needs of the baby are met even if they conflict with her own needs. These capacities are required for excellent care-giving. The kind of specialization that occurs can become so thoroughly integrated into the mother that she becomes incapable of prioritizing her own needs because of habitually prioritizing the needs of others.

The advocate of the efficiency argument will claim that biological mothers already have an advantage to develop the skills of attentiveness and responsiveness. The claim about biological mothers is then not the claim that they are “naturally” more caring, but rather, that they have to develop these capacities because of the ways that their actions are directly linked to consequences for a fetus or embryo, and then also – for an infant. The immediate effects on the fetus of a mother’s actions help to motivate mothers to develop facility at the demanding practice of maintaining two sets of needs in one’s mind.

The specialization claim I have given to Mill still need to be paired with a claim about efficiency if it is to yield an endorsement of a rigid arrangement in which all mothers are care-givers, and no one else provides care. An advocate of the efficiency argument must then argue that it is not socially efficient for men to cultivate their care-giving capacities because they cannot benefit from the experience of pregnancy that motivates an extreme form of other-concern. Consequently, men 54 Morales 1996, p. 172. 55 Therefore, the difference in interpretation between Morales and myself cannot be settled by what Mill actually says on the topic. 56 The American Academy of Pediatrics officially recommends that infants receive a diet comprised exclusively of breast milk for a minimum of four months due to benefits that include better immunity for the baby.

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find it difficult, if not impossible, to grasp a strict connection between their actions and a particular other person’s health and development. Men will never excel at these capacities because they never have the same degree of motivation to develop their capacity to reason about the effects of their actions on one other person. Therefore, men should direct their efforts in other areas. If we are to have social arrangements that are maximally efficient, then biological mothers should specialize in care-giving, leaving other domains to other people. The role of specialization, when paired with Mill’s endorsement of the efficiency of a division of labor, would designate females who bear children (biological mothers for shorthand) as society’s care-givers – not only for their own children, but also for other dependent people in society.

Although the “care conscription via childbirth” principle may well be the most efficient social arrangement that also avoids a double shift and recognizes the demands of developing care-giving skills, I reject it because it gives mothers the status of people who cannot make claims of their own. It is dystopian for women who bear children to be enlisted to promote everyone else’s ends because they have developed a specialization in care-giving.

The concept of care should embrace the complexity of care-giving and the way that excellent care-giving requires attention, effort, and specialization. Mill’s views about feminine socialization and a readiness to respond are a resource for the premise that embraces the importance of specialization. We should reject a strict connection between specialization and efficiency, though. I have rejected this principle on non-Millian grounds elsewhere.57

Whereas I reject the aim of maximal efficiency, though, a Millian basis for rejecting the care conscription via childbirth principle is underspecified.58 A Millian view might ultimately endorse the common arrangement for the reasons that I have provided above, or it might reject it based on considerations of individuality for mothers. Section 8 will note that Mill wants all women to have a choice about whether to become a mother, and therefore he is not limiting the options of all women when he connects motherhood to care specialization.

To summarize, the Millian concept of care should be embraced by liberal feminists; it has worth that is independent of our judgments about his specific distributive principle. Feminist distributive principles should reject the efficiency premise that ties specialization to the common arrangement, but liberal feminists should simultaneously not lose sight of the ways that care-giving is complex.

I embrace the social and individual value that specialization can contribute while rejecting a rigid arrangement aimed at maximal efficiency. The Millian view is ultimately underdetermined by his writing on the topic of gender – it will depend on the relative weight of efficiency and individuality.59 In the next section, I will reject efficiency by amplifying Mill’s commitment to individuality. The result of that argument is to reject an overly prescriptive view in favor of social 57 See author’s unpublished ms., Freedom to Care: Liberalism, Dependency Care, and Multiculturalism. 58 I can only suggest some possible ways for him to reject this principle. Perhaps he would reject it based on the possibility that women might refuse to have children if doing so conscripted them into a broader role as a care-giver for society, but Mill certainly did not think it was necessary for everyone to have children, and he thought a decrease in the size of the population would have been a positive outcome. There are extra-Millian reasons to reject care conscription via childbirth, such as the contractualist reason that it denies mothers claim-making status. See author’s unpublished ms., Freedom to Care: Liberalism, Dependency Care, and Multiculturalism (Chapter 2) for a defense of mothers as self-authenticating sources of valid claims. 59 See Hirschmann, p. 200 for a discussion of how efficiency is used to justify mother’s roles as care-givers. She interprets Mill as foreshadowing Becker’s efficiency model (Becker, Gary S. A Treatise on the Family, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991).

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arrangements that include more latitude for the expression of individuality, including the individuality of biological mothers. In devising latitudinarian social arrangement for care, though, we should retain the premises that some people can and should specialize in care, and that care-givers should have competencies in self-abnegation, responsiveness, and intuitive perception.

8. Individuality and choice

Does Mill fail to respect women’s individuality when he endorses the common arrangement, as Wendy Donner has argued? Donner writes: “In the example of women’s choices in work, Mill should reasonably expect to find many women and men both interested in and able to seek fulfillment and economic prospects in working outside the home and childrearing. Instead, Mill perceives women as having homogeneous desires and choices. Married men retain their individuality in matters of work after marriage, while married women lose it.”60 I agree with Donner that there is an asymmetry to Mill’s view about married women and men. He assumes that men’s activities and capacities will not change significantly as a result of becoming husbands. However, Mill does not think women have homogeneous desires overall. He demonstrates respect for the individuality of a subset of women: non-married women without children. By distributing birth control and arguing against marriage, Mill aimed to respect women’s individuality.61 It was against this backdrop of changes to the context of choice that he considered marriage a career choice. He states the view that marriage is a career choice – but only one for women - in this passage:

“Like a man when he chooses a profession, so, when a woman marries, it may in general be understood that she makes a choice of the management of a household, and the bringing up of a family, as the first call upon her exertions, during as many years of her life as may be required for the purpose; and that she renounces, not all other objects and occupations, but all which are not consistent with the requirements of this” (Ibid, p. 164-165). Mill’s proposal promotes the individuality of women by giving women choices about

whether or not to get married and to have children. It is in this reformed society that a woman would be signing up for a career as a care-giver by getting married and having children. Consequently, we can claim that Mill respects women’s individuality, but he does not respect the individuality of mothers. On Mill’s own terms, the common arrangement – pursued against the backdrop of gender equity - this is a sensible position to advocate.62

Mill is not simply failing to respect an ascriptive identity group, though, because becoming a mother is a kind of career choice. Consequently, the ascription of care-giving to biological mothers is not like assigning it to a racial group. If motherhood is a career choice, then the desires and choices of the women who pursue it would have a lot in common with one another – or at least as much as the desires and choices of people within any one profession. According to Mill, then, a

60 Donner 2009, 121-122. 61 Donner writes about Mill’s defense of the traditional division of labor within marriage, “Whether it springs from failure of logic and vision or from his decision that extending to its obvious conclusion would be too inflammatory and counterproductive, Mill’s arguments seem deficient to twenty-first century eyes” (2009, 123). 62 I reject this distributive arrangement elsewhere. Bhandary, “Liberal Dependency Care” Journal of Philosophical Research vol. 41, Forthcoming 2016. Eva Kittay’s theory of doulia is a powerful one that insists on meeting the care needs of the dependency worker. Policies that satisfy doulia require much more of a society than most societies are accustomed to granting to mothers or dependency workers. It is likely that these arrangements, which I advocate, are inefficient in most economic senses, but that considerations of justice require them.

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woman becomes a mother only if she wants to become a care-giver. An important part of his view is then that women should be free to choose whether to become mothers.63

Donner, Brink and Morales criticize Mill for limiting married women’s individuality. I have sympathetically modified Mill to show that this restriction is not just an ad hoc restriction of women, but rather, a restriction of a set of people who choose the role of care-giver. Although I ultimately reject even the narrower scope of limitations to individuality to mothers, I think that it is valuable that Mill recognizes that someone’s individuality might have to be restricted to meet society’s care needs.64 Mill’s defense of the common arrangement also implies that meeting the needs of dependent persons is strictly necessary. Mill thereby recognizes a central tenet of care ethics: that someone who is caring for a vulnerable charge is obligated to prioritize that charge’s needs.65 A liberal discussion of care that recognizes its necessity should be preferred over a view that advocates freedom from caring responsibilities. Distributive principles for care provision should respect individuality as much as possible while also accommodating the strict necessity that care must be provided. Some restrictions to the maximal expression of individuality will be necessary. The question that distributive principles must then solve is one about how to fairly distribute these restrictions on individuality. I find Mill’s views about individuality to be underdetermined by his writing on these related topics.

63 The obstacle to free choice, though, is that social arrangements perpetuate themselves through a variety of mechanisms. As Ann Cudd argues, the effects of women’s habitual roles as care-givers extend beyond the individual women who actually take on substantial responsibility for unpaid familial care of others. The social anticipation that women will have children and become responsible for their care also causes women to earn lower salaries—even if they have no care-giving responsibilities at the time. Cudd shows that a “vicious cycle” ensues, so that the choice that is individually rational for any particular couple is shaped by these facts about the broader social context. For a contemporary feminist analysis of the multiple factors that make it individually rational for women to choose to become care-givers – and for proposals to break that cycle, see Ann Cudd, Analyzing Oppression, New York: Oxford University Press, 2006, 150. Multiple interventions are required to modify conditions for meaningful free choice. One of these interventions should be to modify gendered socialization. Nadia Urbinati has interpreted Mill as an early advocate of androgyny because he thought there were no essential differences between gendered characters; instead, he thought the basis for these differences was entirely artificial. Nadia Urbinati argues that Mill had an early commitment to androgyny in that he separates biological sex from gender and rejects gender essentialism. Nadia Urbinati (1991), “John Stuart Mill on androgyny and ideal marriage,” Political Theory 19 (4):626-648. On Urbinati’s view, Mill would welcome modifying socialization so that it includes the functionally valuable elements traditionally associated with femininity and masculinity but unhinges them from biological sex. I find this reading plausible, but underdetermined by Mill’s actual thinking about the question. 64 I have argued elsewhere for the conclusion that meeting society’s care needs may require some restrictions on individual freedom if the needs of the vulnerable population are significantly great in magnitude and intensity. See Bhandary 2016. 65 Eva Kittay rejects the Rawlsian view of freedom as having the status as a self-authenticating source of valid claims for this reason. Bhandary (2010) argues for the importance of maintaining that ideal within a social system that fairly distribute infringements on autonomy. Eva Kittay, Love’s Labor, Routledge: 1999; Virginia Held, The Ethics of Care, Oxford University Press, 2006.

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The argument that I have presented here shows that Mill’s defense of the common arrangement is a specific solution to a general problem: how should care-giving responsibility be assigned? His answer to this general problem is that women who choose to have children should specialize in care-giving. Ultimately, extra-Millian reasons are the most decisive way to reject the common arrangement as a distributive principle he advocates, but he was prescient for recognizing the general problem and for presenting an explicit principle to guide distribution.66

9. The value of care-giving cannot be reduced to self-development

The precise nature of the distributive arrangement will influence the nature of the activity of care-giving because care-giving that is performed without adequate support will be less rewarding and a care-giver who seeks to cultivate the care-giving excellences will face additional obstacles. Both sides of the concept of care are essential elements of it – the labor, which must be incorporated into evaluations of burdens – and also the excellences of care-giving. The dual-sided concept of care is an antidote to the following conceptualization of care: if care-giving is an excellence, then providing care is always a way of promoting the development of the care-giver, and its burdens need not be included in the concept of care. Indeed, theorizing about caring excellences and caring virtues runs the risk of losing from sight that the care recipient must receive good care from the care-giver, and that the demands of good care may well conflict or undermine the flourishing of the care-giver. It is paramount that an account of caring excellences not reduce them to their value to the individual because caring excellences are necessarily directed at promoting the well-being of the charge.

If a capacity directly conflicts with a person’s physical and emotional well-being, then it promotes self-development in only a very tenuous sense. While some amount of care-giving for another person will promote self-development through the cultivation of caring excellences, care-giving for a dependent charge can also easily exceed these demands if there is a sole care-giver for an utterly dependent charge, and if that care-giver is inadequately supported. For instance, studies show that some incidence of post-partum depression is aggravated by, and may even be caused by, a lack of sleep that is derivative of insufficient support for the mother to meet the intensive demands of an infant and her own basic health needs.67 In all cases of inadequate support, when care-giving is marked by the strains of overwork and concern about whether the care-giver will be able to meet the care needs of her charge, not to mention of herself, providing care is not primarily a form of self-development. It is, instead, aimed at developing another person – sometimes at great cost to oneself.

A way to promote the development of the care-giver is to secure conditions that diminish conflicts between her well-being and the well-being of the charge. For instance, in professionalized healthcare, policies are in place to avoid extreme conflicts between the needs of the care-giver and his or her charges. Recent limits for medical resident work hours have decreased their hours to an 80 hour work week averaged over four weeks. These restrictions are intended to prevent chronic sleep-deprivation for residents.

Parents of small children have no such limits; in this kind of care-giving arrangement within a family, the adult care-givers are never off-duty, and sleep deprivation is a frequent incidence that can continue for years. Cultural customs like bringing food to new parents and mothers caring for their daughters when they become mothers are practices embody the principle of support Eva Kittay has defined as doulia, which requires supporting the care-giver. These types of support are 66 Arguing against the conclusion that mothers’ individuality should be limited require contractarian premises that move beyond Mill. 67 See for instance the Mayo Clinic description of physical, emotional and lifestyle causes at http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/postpartum-depression/basics/causes/con-20029130.

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not guaranteed to all parents, though, and they are particularly scarce when a person is caring for an utterly dependent adult, such as an elderly parent.

The burdens of care-giving become apparent when it occurs without adequate support, and the idea that care-giving is an excellence that is part of self-development can be used to gloss over these demands. It is only when care-giving is adequately supported so that these conflicts are not present that the way in which care-giving can be part of the development of the individual becomes apparent.

I have insisted that care should not be solely theorized as an excellence because to do so risks eliding the burdens of care. We see this elision in Michael Slote’s virtue ethical account of care, for instance. Slote’s account of caring virtues characterizes caring excellences as possessing intrinsic value for their possessor.68 Virginia Held accurately criticizes virtue accounts of care to be inadequate because they do not guarantee that good care will be provided. According to Held, Tronto, and other care ethicists, care requires actually providing effective care; it goes beyond possessing caring dispositions and motives.69 For care ethicists, it is more important that the good care be provided than that it be provided for the right reasons, and in the right way.70

Wendy Donner has developed a promising variation of caring virtues within Mill’s utilitarianism that does not fall prey to this criticism. According to Donner, self-development requires the cultivation of stable character traits that are ultimately good for society, which include compassion and empathy as well as the canonically liberal virtues of autonomy and individuality to come together into a balanced whole.71 For Donner and other virtue ethicists, a caring practice and a Buddhist practice are valuable for the capacities they promote in the person who possesses them, who rightly wants to experience loving and caring relationships. Emotional intelligence can be cultivated by communing with nature or appreciating poetry – or, more robustly as Donner recognizes, by caring for others. We should note, again, that compassion and empathy do not automatically result in action; if they are properly cultivated, they should lead to action to promote the well-being of other people, but these actions do not automatically occur as a result of these emotional and cognitive processes. The reason that Donner’s account of Millian caring capacities is not subject to Held’s critique of Slote is because the Millian justification for any specific aspect of self-development is that they must promote social progress and increase happiness overall – not simply for their possessor. Consequently, if social progress and happiness required a greater amount of self-abnegation in the population overall, Millian self-development would have to endorse this change.

As Mill’s own view stands, though, I think the role played by sociality and emotional sensitivity is too thin to ensure that the person who possesses these capacities will act to provide care; indeed, the methods he recommends for developing these excellences suggests that they will fall short of providing actual care – he recommends developing one’s emotions by reading poetry, communing with nature, or deliberating on behalf of others. These activities can make a person more sensitive and attuned to the needs of others and better able to perceive the salient features of a situation, but they clearly fall short of acting to care for a dependent person and, in particular, with acting to meet that person’s needs even when doing so is not aligned with one’s motive and dispositions. Acting to meet the care needs of vulnerable people is necessary even in cases of this kind of conflict. 68 Michael Slote, The Ethics of Care and Empathy, Routledge, 2007. 69 Virginia Held, The Ethics of Care, New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. 70 I do not rule out the possibility of an adequate account of caring virtues, and these comments are deliberately incomplete here. 71 (Donner 1991); (Donner 2009, p. 80).

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A new Millian view of care must go farther than Mill’s stated position to recognize that the excellences required to provide good care are much more than the emotional capacities sustained through nature and art. A care-giver with responsibility for a dependent charge must respond to the needs of that charge.72 Mill’s endorsement of the common arrangement provides support for a Millian view of care that recognizes that it is not reducible to personal flourishing because it may require restrictions to the autonomy of the care-givers.

10. Conclusion I have articulated a consistent argument for Mill that supports his defense of the common

arrangement, and I have argued that it has some overlooked merits with respect to care: It recognizes that care-giving is demanding, and that it involves skills that are developed through a process of specialization. By refraining from the assumption that marks some contemporary discourse about care-giving that “anyone can do it”, Mill more highly values the complexity of care-giving skills than people who argue for men to provide care without first acquiring the requisite skills. The idea that some people should specialize in care-giving – which is an idea that I sympathetically attribute to Mill in virtue of his assigned role for married women – respects the specialization and complexity of the skills required for this role. Mill’s thinking about gender equity thus provides many of the necessary elements of an adequate account of care – he thinks about the social necessity of care, the fact that it is labor, and the ways that socialization contribute to the kinds of skills we possess, and both the role of respect for individuality and its limits. A Millian view of caring excellences will grapple with the complexity of care-giving as well as the way that it can be an obstacle to excellence in a number of other domains. The extent to which the demands of care-giving excellence will conflict with excellences in other domains will depend on individual variability; some people can excel at one endeavor while others can excel at more than one endeavor.

I have shown that liberal feminists should look to Mill for inspiration when developing a concept of liberal care because he has an appreciation of the concept of care-giving that goes beyond its burdens. Consequently, Mill does not advocate a type of liberal feminism that seeks to maximize individual power and autonomy by gaining freedom from caring responsibilities. Mill held that some people will have to compromise their self-development and individuality to meet society’s care needs, and this is more realistic than views that propose everyone should maximally develop themselves.73 Mill’s understanding of the importance of limits to self-development provides a valuable corrective to some contemporary trends in liberal feminism. Once we have fixed ideas about the concept of care, then further inquiry and exploration of various distributive practices should proceed. If mothers are to have the option to excel in domains other than care-giving - then we will have to reject the aim of maximal social efficiency based on specialization. Millians might justify uncoupling care specialization from the biological capacities of females with an argument that is based on the value that males can contribute to the domain of care-giving once it is counted as a domain of innovation and progress. Contemporary Millian feminism should include care-givers among the innovators who promote social progress and who are “salt of the earth” even though Mill did not include care-giving as one of the domains of human genius. One potential way to avoid the common arrangement as a distributive principle while embracing the Millian concept of care will be to secure the aim of substantive equality of opportunity for men in 72 This claim is a presumption for the paper. For one account of the basis for our obligations to respond to vulnerability, see Robert Goodin’s vulnerability model. Robert Goodin, Protecting the Vulnerable: A Re-Analysis of our Social Responsibilities, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. 73 Wendy Donner and David Brink’s proposal that self-abnegation and self-development should be in balance depends on the magnitude of care needs.

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this domain and to promulgate a social expectation that they should become “ready to respond” to the needs of others; but a thorough Millian analysis of this distributive proposal is one that I cannot pursue here.