ABSTRACT
The point of the dependency critique is to show that, as long as the bounds of justice are drawn within reciprocal relations among free and equal persons, dependents will continue to remain disenfranchised, and dependency workers who are otherwise fully capable and cooperating members of society will continue to share varying degrees of the dependents’ disenfranchisement. This chapter is the first of two chapters that apply the dependency critique to the work of John Rawls. In this chapter I show that the fact of inevitable human dependence is left out of the key concepts in Rawls’s theory. It is omitted in concepts of the circumstances of justice, the idealization of citizens (as modeled by representatives under the veil of ignorance) as equally situated and empowered, the supposition that citizens in a well-ordered society are independent and fully cooperating members of society, the enumeration of basic goods and the conception of the person as a self-originating or self-authenticating source of valid claims.
