ABSTRACT
The dependency care centers on the most acute moments of human dependency: helpless infancy and early childhood, frail old age, and incapacitating illness and disability. This chapter focuses on utter dependency because the inequities in the organization and distribution of dependency work, and the impact of these inequities on the possibility of equality for all, are most evident when dependency is a feature of our human condition rather than a consequence of socially prescribed roles, privileges, or distribution policies. Most women, by virtue of their traditional roles and the ineluctable demands of dependency, and some men, primarily those from marginalized classes, find themselves with the responsibility to care for dependents. The principles of justice proposed by Rawls are intended to govern the basic structures of a well-ordered society; these principles, he argues, would be chosen by reasonable and rational persons under certain specified conditions, conditions simulated in the original position.
