Care as the indispensable basis of justice

The second stage is caring for, i.e. taking responsibility. Recognising a need does not automatically imply taking responsibility for it. Whereas "caring for implies taking responsibility for the identified need" (p. 6). Social asymmetries emerge with particular clarity at this stage: responsibility for care is often assigned by default to certain individuals - families, women, migrant workers - without this being the result of collective deliberation. Justice, for Tronto, requires that the responsibility for care be politically explicit and shared, not naturalised.

The third phase is care giving: the concrete caring relationship. This is where competence comes into play. "Adequate care requires competence; care that is not competent cannot be good care" (p. 6). This passage is crucial because it prevents care from being romanticised. Without resources, training and time, even the best intentions produce bad care. Empathy is not enough without the skills to provide adequate care. The failure, in this case, is not individual but institutional: a society that undercuts, precariousises or marginalises care work consciously chooses to produce injustice.

The fourth stage is that of care receiving, i.e. "the response of care recipients to the care itself" (p. 7). Here, an element often absent in public policy is introduced: the point of view of the vulnerable. Without listening and without feedback and reciprocity mechanisms, care risks turning into control or paternalism. From this perspective, justice implies institutions capable of learning, correcting and adapting their practices. Of co-planning and personalisation.

Finally, Tronto introduces a fifth phase, that of caring with. Here care becomes explicitly democratic practice. "The caring with requires that democratic values of justice, equality and freedom guide care practices" (p. 9). Care is no longer merely a response to individual needs, but a criterion for organising collective life. The costs and benefits of care must be distributed fairly and decisions concerning care must be subject to public deliberation.

If Joan Tronto's work has the merit of unmasking the hidden assumptions of autonomy-based theories of justice and showing the intrinsically political dimension of care, political philosopher Daniel Engster takes a further and more ambitious step: to transform the ethics of care into a theory of justice in the proper sense, capable of competing on the same ground with Rawlsian liberalism and the other great families of contemporary political philosophy. Engster's starting point is deliberately elementary, almost disarming in its simplicity: 'The activity of care resides at the very heart of human existence' (The Heart of Justice: Care Ethics and Political Theory. Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 1). A restatement of 'ontological primacy'. Care is neither an additional value nor an optional virtue, but the very condition of possibility of human life and social cooperation. Without care, not only autonomy, but biological survival, capacity development and intergenerational continuity would be impossible. It is caring that creates, Heidegger would say, the very possibilities of 'being'.

Unlike much care ethics, Engster is not content to describe the moral importance of care. His stated aim is to address one of the historical weaknesses of care ethics: the absence of a theory of moral obligation. It is not enough to say that care is important; it is necessary to explain why we are morally obliged to care for others, even when there are no emotional ties, proximity or immediate reciprocity. Engster's answer is clear: the obligation arises from the universal condition of dependence. All of us, without exception, have been dependent on the care of others and continue to be so, in different forms, throughout our lives. Hence a minimal but binding principle of justice: those who are able to do so have a duty to help ensure that the basic care needs of others are met.

This move is theoretically crucial because it allows Engster to decouple care from sentimentalism. Care is not required because 'we feel compassionate', but because we structurally benefit from a system of care that makes possible our very existence as moral and political subjects.

The philosopher explicitly defines his as a minimalist theory of justice. This is not because it is weak, but because it intends to identify a core of moral obligations that every just society must fulfil, regardless of how it declines other values such as the good, freedom or civic virtue. In this sense, care logically precedes traditional distributive justice. Rights, freedoms, opportunities and even 'capabilities', in the sense of Sen and Nussbaum, remain empty concepts if they are not supported by adequate care practices and institutions. As Engster writes, a just society is only such if it "organises its political and economic institutions in such a way as to ensure sufficient care for all" throughout the life cycle (2007, p. 28). An important difference to Joan Tronto is apparent here. If Tronto insists on the democratic and relational dimension of care, Engster makes a different normative formalisation: care becomes a criterion of justice, not just a practice to be valued.

This theoretical framework finds its full development in Justice, Care, and the Welfare State (Oxford University Press, 2015), where Engster performs an operation that clearly distinguishes him from much of contemporary political philosophy: the explicit adoption of a non-ideal theory of justice. This move begins with an open critique of those theories of justice that, following Rawls, assume the existence of idealistic individuals: rational, autonomous, healthy, fully cooperative. These theories may be elegant on a normative level, but they are blind to fundamental social facts. Among these facts, the most relevant is precisely the structural dependence on the care of children, the elderly, the sick or disabled. The choice of non-ideal theory allows Engster to integrate normative philosophy and empirical evidence and to draw very concrete operational consequences for the architecture of the welfare state. This means, first of all, abandoning the idea of a 'standard' citizen - adult, healthy, fully employable - and designing institutions from an elementary empirical fact: dependency is not an exception, but a structural condition of human life. In this perspective, welfare can no longer limit itself to protecting against risks, but must guarantee continuity of care throughout the entire life cycle. Childcare, healthcare and care for the dependent are not residual interventions, but central components of social justice. Rights and opportunities remain purely formal if they are not supported by institutions capable of ensuring sufficient levels of care for all. A second crucial junction concerns time. The non-ideal theory shows that care does not only require monetary resources, but above all available time. Hence a conception of welfare as a social time policy: working hours compatible with care, adequate leave, non-penalising flexibility. A system that redistributes income but systematically compresses care time produces a less visible, but no less profound, form of injustice. Finally, care emerges as a transversal social infrastructure, not just an area of expenditure. A labour reform or growth policy can be macroeconomically efficient and yet unfair if it offloads the costs of care onto families and the vulnerable. The non-ideal theory rejects the illusion of institutional neutrality and assumes that, in the absence of public intervention, care is always regressively redistributed.

In short, care-oriented welfare does not aim to maximise welfare, but to ensure sufficient and universally demandable standards of care, judging policies not only by how much they produce, but by how much they enable people to care and be cared for. It is in this sense that, for Engster, care does not exhaust justice, but constitutes its minimum and indispensable core.

In the landscape of justice theory, Engster has carved out a peculiar position for himself. On the one hand, he shares with Tronto the radical critique of abstract autonomy; on the other, he openly dialogues with Rawls and Sen, accepting the challenge of public justification and normative generality. The result is a theory that does not replace other conceptions of justice, but relocates them hierarchically: care does not exhaust justice, but constitutes its minimal and non-negotiable foundation. In this sense, as Engster writes, care defines the heart of justice: that without which no other principle can function.

The ethics of care does not propose a kinder morality, but a more realistic theory of justice. It does not call for the abandonment of autonomy, but to stop assuming it as a starting point. Justice does not arise from independence, but from the equitable management of dependence. In an era marked by demographic, health and environmental crises, the decisive question is not just how to distribute resources or rights, but who takes care of whom, how and under what conditions. It is a political question, before being a moral one. And perhaps it is precisely from here that our 'hope for justice', today, should start again.