Mind the Economy/ Justice 136

That valuable work that politics does not recognise

by Vittorio Pelligra

18 January 2026

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8' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

8' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

If we take seriously the idea that vulnerability and dependence are not exceptions but ordinary conditions of human experience - as the ethics of care has been arguing for years - then it follows, inevitably, that care can no longer be thought of as a private matter, nor as a moralising appendix to institutions otherwise considered neutral. Rather, care becomes an invisible social architecture, without which neither markets nor democracies could function. On the one hand we have what Luigina Mortari refers to as the 'ontological primacy' of care, and on the other its continuing and persistent marginality among the high categories of philosophical reflection and political practice. A real blind spot in modern thought.

A decisive step towards breaking out of this impasse - we have seen this in last weeks' Mind the Economy - was taken by Joan Tronto, when she tried to turn the ethics of care into a real political theory. Care, for Tronto, should not be thought of as an individual virtue nor as a private sentiment, but rather as "that set of activities that comprises everything we do to maintain, preserve and repair our world" (Caring Democracy. Markets, Equality, and Justice. NYU Press, 2013, p. 19). A world made up not only of bodies, but of relationships, institutions, environment and life times. The proposal of such a definition produces radical consequences. If almost everything that makes social life possible is care, then no institution can be considered neutral with respect to it. Indeed, every political arrangement radically influences the distribution of the burden of care, deciding who should bear it, who should benefit from it, who should provide it free of charge and who, on the other hand, can afford to abstain from it. From this perspective, the inability to provide care or the provision of 'bad care' cannot be dismissed as individual moral failures. They are, rather, systemic institutional failures.

Vulnerability, addiction and institutions

The fact that this is not only a problem for a small minority of 'unfortunate' citizens is explained to us by Eva Feder Kittay. "We are all a mother's child," writes the New York philosopher in Love's Labor (Routledge, 1999, p. 29). We have all been dependent, and many of us will be again as we grow older. Yet, institutions continue to be designed as if addiction were a residual problem, to be compensated for ex post. Kittay suggests we take this a step further. As the mother of Sesha, a girl with a very severe disability, she knows how the relationship of dependency extends from the care receiver to the care provider. Dependency very often also makes caregivers dependent. She writes in Learning from My Daughter (Oxford University Press, 2019) "Having to meet the needs of people who are unable to provide for themselves makes women derivatively dependent, unable to compete on an equal footing in the workplace and perhaps dependent on the affection of a man or the benevolence of the state in order to obtain the resources they need to adequately support themselves and their dependents" (p. 143). Caring relationships generate secondary vulnerabilities. Caregivers are forced to give up income, time, career, social recognition. I have known many mothers who are voluntary prisoners of love for their disabled daughters and daughters. Prisoners because they are totally absorbed in their care, a care that on the one hand gratifies a special relationship with special sons and daughters, but on the other hand excludes them from their relationship with 'outside' life, with society, with normality. Mothers, usually, buried alive by love. But can a society call itself formally egalitarian and yet produce profound inequalities in a systematic way, simply because it chooses to consider this type of relationship a private matter? Nor is it necessary to choose to discriminate openly. It is enough to assume that someone, somewhere, will choose to take charge of this care. Usually the most fragile individuals. Women, mothers, immigrants. In ancient Greece it was the slaves.

The limits of the rationality of rights

That it is not just a 'gender issue', as one might superficially think, is clearly demonstrated by Carol Gilligan's work. Her main contribution is not so much to oppose a morality of care with feminine connotations to a morality of justice with masculine connotations. Her main contribution has been to highlight the epistemic error underlying the way modernity defines moral judgement and, by extension, political judgement. In his important In a Different Voice (Harvard University Press, 1982), Gilligan shows how the dominant models describing the processes of moral development assume as an implicit paradigm an abstract, separate subject called upon to resolve dilemmas through the impersonal application of rules. In doing so, however, these models render invisible another form of moral rationality, one that is more attentive to contexts, relationships, and the concrete consequences of decisions on the lives of others. The 'different voice' of which Gilligan speaks is no less rational nor less demanding than that of the instrumental rationality of economics. It is a voice that rejects the stark alternative between obedience to the rule and subjective arbitrariness, because it assumes that relationships count morally as much as abstract principles. "The moral problem," Gilligan writes, "arises from conflicting responsibilities rather than competing rights" (p. 19). Seeing ourselves embedded in a network of meaningful inter-human relationships and understanding how it is this network that is the locus of our flourishing is the culmination of a long process of moral maturation that takes us from a situation in which the only interest is in taking care of oneself to a point in which we understand that the relationship with the other in need is a relationship between integral subjects and not between one who sacrifices and the other who benefits from the sacrifice. The political implications of this approach are profound. A public rationality built exclusively on the language of rights and rules risks becoming blind to the systemic effects of its decisions. Formally just policies can produce predictable and persistent harms if they ignore how costs are distributed in everyday relationships. The voice of care does not ask for indulgence, but asks different questions: who bears the burden? who adapts? who pays the price for institutional balance?

Care, Passions and Social Time

A crucial question remains: why do we continue to reproduce these failures even when we have identified and diagnosed them accurately? It is a question of passions, Elena Pulcini explains. In her Tra cura e giustizia (Bollati Boringhieri, 2020), Pulcini insists on a point that is by no means obvious. Modernity has not completely eliminated the role of passions, but it has selected them, legitimising those linked to self-interest and competition and devaluing, instead, those linked to care and responsibility for the other. The contemporary crises - health, ecological, demographic - clearly show that we are not just facing problems of resources or coordination, but crises of ties, of relationships, broken or pathological. Because 'a society that denies vulnerability ends up producing pathological forms of individualism' (p. 67). Care can therefore be thought of as a civil passion, a disposition that can and must be institutionally cultivated.

But if care is social architecture and public passion, there remains the decisive question of how to translate it into institutions without emptying them of meaning. It is on this ground that Jennifer Nedelsky's proposal represents one of the most ambitious and concrete recent attempts to reformulate the nexus between justice, care and economic organisation. Nedelsky starts from a radical critique of the way we think about time and work. The division between 'productive' and 'caring' time is not a natural fact. Rather, it is the result of a normative construction that reflects an implicit hierarchy of values. If care is a condition of democratic citizenship, then this hierarchy is not only inefficient; it is unjust. In Part-Time for All. A Care Manifesto (Oxford University Press, 2023), Nedelsky argues that 'The goal must not be to help caregivers fit into existing structures, but to change those structures so that care becomes a normal part of everyone's life' (p. 6). Hence the proposal for a compulsory reduction of standard working hours for all, which would free up time to devote to care work that would be taken away, in this way, from the logic of silent delegation and that would begin to involve everyone, not only women. But also men, not only immigrants, but also natives, not only poor but also rich, including politicians, who would perhaps understand and be able to get out of the abysmal ignorance that characterises their normative approach to care issues, as Nedelsky always states.

The crucial point is that this proposal is not just about welfare, but about distributive justice at its deepest core. Sharing care time means redistributing income, power, opportunities. Because "time is one of the most important resources through which inequality is created and perpetuated" (p. 42).

How about here?

The Italian case is particularly instructive in this regard. Our welfare system continues to rest on a fragile and deeply unequal combination of unpaid female labour, informal family care and care work very often performed by migrant women workers, often in very precarious conditions. A balance that continues to hold only because care work remains largely invisible. The figure of the family caregiver is emblematic of this removal. Although it is central to the day-to-day functioning of the sociomedical system, it is to this day legally non-existent. Over the last fifteen years, some thirty bills have been presented on the subject, none of which has ever even come to a vote. This legal vacuum is not the result of mere legislative inertia, but of an implicit choice that has meant abandonment, isolation and lack of protection for millions of people.

But on 12 January the Council of Ministers approved a new bill that legally recognises the figure of the family caregiver. An encouraging sign, if it were not for the fact that the risk of this recognition remaining purely symbolic appears more than concrete. The requirements for access to economic support, for example, are so stringent as to effectively empty the recognition itself. Only those who devote at least 91 hours a week to care work and have an annual income of less than three thousand euros (an ISEE threshold for extreme poverty) will be entitled to the contribution of four hundred auro per month. The implicit message is clear: one is only recognised economically as a caregiver when one is already completely crushed by dependency. And the pay is equivalent to one euro per hour. One euro per hour. But the paradox does not end there. Excluded would be precisely those who, despite carrying very high care loads - 60 or 70 hours per week - try to maintain a minimum of economic autonomy through part-time work. Trying not to disappear from the labour market becomes a guilt, not a resource. And even for those who manage to access the contribution, the absence of any social security recognition clearly signals the underlying hierarchy: care work continues not to be considered real work, but second-class work. A private and politically invisible sacrifice. This umpteenth case of incongruous regulation shows with particular clarity what the ethics of care has long denounced. The problem is not just a lack of resources, but a culturally distorted conception of justice. Care is only recognised when it coincides with total renunciation, never when it demands to be shared. This is the exact opposite of what Nedelsky's proposal suggests.

In a broader perspective, the trajectory of thought from Joan Tronto to Jennifer Nedelsky, via Kittay, Pulcini and Gilligan, converges on a simple and disruptive thesis: that of care is not an area of intervention, but a criterion of judgement. A criterion for assessing the quality of our institutions, for designing the forms of work most appropriate to our times, for evaluating the appropriateness of increasingly necessary public policies. It is not a question of 'adding' the idea of care as an appendix to a pre-existing model of justice, but of recognising that without the prospect of care, that model only holds up by systematically offloading the costs onto the most vulnerable. In a landscape where the rhetoric of autonomy continues to dominate public discourse, the ethics of care introduces a decidedly uncomfortable question: who is it that in silence and invisibility makes our independence possible? As long as this question remains unanswered politically, justice will continue to be fair but blind. And precisely at a time when there would be the greatest need for it to stop being an abstract promise and finally become shared practice.