Mind the Economy/ Justice 133

When the social contract works, but not for everyone

It is in the way we design institutions, services and cities that we decide whether vulnerability should be an individual destiny or a public and shared responsibility

by Vittorio Pelligra

29 December 2025

10' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

10' min read

Translated by AI

Versione italiana

The station lift is out of service. 'We apologise for the inconvenience' is written on a laminated sign. Two people stop, read, sigh and continue in the direction of the stairs. A few steps, a little effort, five minutes lost. Then the day starts again. But it doesn't for everyone. Because a wheelchair cannot take the stairs and the lift is not taken by choice. And for some, that sign, so aseptic, is not just a warning, it represents a public decision: 'today this station is not for you'. It is not malice, usually. It is not even, in the proper sense, intentional discrimination. It is something more impersonal and for that reason even more resistant. It is the result of a system designed to work well, but only 'around the mean'. A system that therefore fails when it has to deal with the tails of the distribution of needs. Statisticians speak of outliers. The points far from the centre of the distribution, the eccentric cases, the observations that 'disturb' the model. But when the distribution is made up of lives and needs, the outlier stops being a statistical curiosity and becomes a person: the 'excluded'. He who cannot continue his journey because the lift is out of order, or because there is no ramp to enter a shop, or no lift to get on the bus, no standard toilet to do those actions that the 'norm' performs without even thinking about it and that for the 'excluded', instead, become insurmountable obstacles. And the question then becomes one of political justice: what do we do with those who do not fit the standard profile around which the institutional and physical spaces have been designed?

Not everyone is allowed to sign

A large part of modern political philosophy stems from the idea that social cooperation is rational because it benefits all those involved. It is the grammar of mutual benefit. We explored it in Mind the Economy devoted to the thought of Hobbes, Hume and more recently that of David Gauthier. But this grammar contains a silent clause: the deal only works between those who have something to put on the table. Those who have a way of actively contributing to the determination of collective benefits. But if justice is a pact between parties who cooperate under conditions of reciprocity, what happens to those who, for different reasons, cannot cooperate under those same conditions? When they cannot 'give back' in a comparable way? David Gauthier had the merit, rather rare even among philosophers, of stating this clearly and without extenuating circumstances. "The problem," writes Gauthier, "is not the care of the elderly, who have paid for their services with their former productive activity. However, life-prolonging therapies have a disturbing redistribution potential. The main problem is care for the disabled. Talking euphemistically about enabling them to live productive lives, when the services required exceed any possibility of repayment, conceals an issue that, understandably, no one wants to address' (p. 19). This is a harsh but, theoretically, coherent statement. And it is precisely this consistency that makes it disruptive. If we take the contractualist paradigm of mutual benefit seriously, some lives will remain excluded, precisely because of the basic criterion of contractual justice. They will not be holders of rights, but objects of benevolence. Not citizens like others, but exceptions.

Addiction as an ordinary human fact

It will be the American philosopher Eva Kittay who will turn the problem on its head, starting with a sharp critique of the anthropology implicit in contractual logic. The idea that human beings are, under normal conditions, autonomous and self-sufficient, in fact, is not neutral, it is just a convenient fiction. Dependency is not a misfortune. It is one of the fundamental forms of human experience. "Dependence is not a deviation from the human norm, but one of its constitutive forms," Kittay writes in Love's Labor (Routledge, 1999). "Our dependence is not an exceptional circumstance. To regard it as such reflects a view that downplays the importance of human interconnectedness' (p. 29). The same point is emphasised by Alasdair MacIntyre when he states that 'vulnerability (...) and dependence in their related manifestations seem so obvious as to suggest that no credible explanation of the human condition is possible without acknowledging the centrality of their role'. Yet, MacIntyre continues, if we were to look with this perspective at the history of Western philosophy, we would realise that 'The sick, the suffering or the disabled find a place in the pages of a book of moral philosophy, only and always as a possible object of benevolence on the part of the true moral agents who are themselves presented as invariably rational, healthy and free of any problem. Thus, when we think of disability, we are invited to think of 'the disabled' as 'them', as something different from 'us', as a separate class, not as ourselves as we have been, as we are now, and as we might be in the future' (Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues, Open Court, Chicago, 1999).

The criterion of profit leads to exclusion, as does the social contract based on mutual benefit. How, on the other hand, can vulnerability and dependence be placed as the foundation of the social bond? Through a pathway that leads from vulnerability to dependence, from dependence to trust, and from trust to responsibility. The trust of the one who trusts, towards the one who takes care of the vulnerability of others, which in turn is sustained on the 'symmetry of needs', gives rise to the need to give care, the urgency to take care. Then it is precisely this vulnerability and the interdependence that arises from it, that makes us originally social subjects, or as MacIntyre puts it, 'rational dependent animals'. If this is true, then the problem is not outliers. The problem is a theory of justice constructed as if dependence were a rare incident, and not a structural fact of social life. Kittay adds a decisive passage in this regard: dependency does not only affect those who receive care, but also those who provide it. Indeed, care work produces economic vulnerability, social exposure, and power asymmetry. "Those who perform dependency work become in turn vulnerable precisely because of that relationship" (p. 34) writes Eva Kittay again. Here the question immediately becomes political. For if a society is founded on the presumption that it is an independent citizen and then offloads care into the private sphere, then it is producing structural inequality without even being able to recognise it as such.

Outliers as a justice 'stress test'

Let's see how. Let us try to think of an ordinary primary school in a large Italian city. A child with cognitive disabilities attends an ordinary class. Formally, he is 'integrated'. He has a support teacher for a few hours a week, a regularly approved individualised educational plan, an up-to-date certification. From an administrative point of view, everything works for the best. The system can be said to be inclusive. But real inclusion is played out elsewhere. In the hours when the support teacher is not there and the child remains on the sidelines. The tasks are too fast, the language too abstract, the timings too rigid. The class moves forward and he falls behind. Not through ill will, but because the structure of teaching is not designed for him. A first crucial point emerges here: formal inclusion is not the same as substantive inclusion. The school system admits this, but does not allow itself to be transformed by its 'eccentric' requirements.

In a theory of justice based on contribution or mutual benefit, this situation is also not read as an injustice. The child does not appear excluded because he participates. The problem is that participation is defined according to standards that presuppose capabilities that he does not possess and will never possess. As Martha Nussbaum notes, contractualist theories tend to treat these cases as marginal, because those who cannot contribute to the mutual benefit "are not part of the moral relations founded by contract" (Frontiers of Justice. Belknap Press, 2006, p. 137). The result is paradoxical: the child is inside the institution, but outside its logic. Integrated, but not fully considered.

Behind that school integration is a family. Usually a mother. She is the one who accompanies her son every morning, who picks him up before official school hours because the school does not have a canteen, and who makes up for the missing support hours with her time, skills, and presence. Formally, no one imposes anything on her. She has 'chosen' to be there. But her choice is made in a precise context of insufficient services, fragmented territorial assistance and expensive or non-existent private alternatives. Not choosing would mean leaving her child in an even deeper state of exclusion. Eva Kittay insists on this point with great clarity when she emphasises that dependency is not a deviation but "one of the constitutive forms of human life" (1999, p. 29) and when she stresses how "the dependency worker is made vulnerable by the dependency relationship itself" (p. 34). It is the mother herself who becomes, in turn, almost by contagion, an outlier. She will no longer fit into standard career, income, social protection paths. Her position will not be the result of private preference, but the predictable effect of an institutional set-up that offloads care onto the private sector. But if a society as a whole benefits from the care work performed by an individual - a positive externality, economists would say - then the private decision to care generates public support obligations and would justify a subsidy. Otherwise, responsibility would be totally privatised and injustice normalised.

But our story is not over. Years later, in fact, that same child will have become an adult with disabilities. He will struggle to find a full-time job; he will probably not work at all. Next to him remains a caregiver, often still the mother, now older, with less strength and energy but still with the same responsibilities: therapies, bureaucracy, medication, relations with health and social services. This figure is central to the functioning of the welfare system, yet remains on the margins of legal, economic, even symbolic recognition. It does not contribute to GDP, it does not fit into standard employment models, it is difficult to classify. It is still an outlier.

The city is a moral infrastructure

The boy and his mother inhabit, then, a city that, formally, is the same for all of us. Yet, actual access to that city is profoundly unequal. Pavements are narrow or bumpy, traffic light times do not take into account those who move more slowly, public transport is erratic, overcrowded and often inaccessible. Lifts are too narrow and steps omnipresent. Health and rehabilitation services are concentrated in only a few areas, far from the suburbs. The 'best equipped' schools are selectively distributed. Social spaces are designed for autonomous, rapid, normative bodies. The city does not expel anyone explicitly, but actually enables some while disabling others. On this point, Canadian scholar and activist Tom Malleson's insight that disability is not so much a property of the individual as it is a 'misfit' relationship between bodies and the environment is valuable. 'Incapacity and disability,' Malleson writes, 'emerge from the misfit between people's physical or mental conditions and the environment - geographical, architectural, social, political - in which they live' ('Interdependency: The fourth existential insult to humanity'. Contemporary Political Theory 17, 2018, p. 165). In this sense, then, the city should best be understood as a gigantic moral infrastructure that decides who can move, stay, participate, and at what cost. Every step, every distance, every imposed wait is a political micro-decision that helps to distribute possibilities and opportunities. For the boy and his mother, the city is a sequence of obstacles that turn every move into an undertaking. It is a device that multiplies the burden of care. The time it takes to accompany the child, coordinate transport, and fit school, health and work schedules together is the predictable product of an urban space built around the ideal of the autonomous individual. As Malleson further observes 'We are all functionally dependent on the infrastructure of the built environment to fulfil our ends' (p. 164), but this dependence is rendered invisible as long as it coincides with the 'right' body. The city is not the neutral backdrop of individual lives, but a power structure that configures ability and disability. "A ladder is a ladder only for those who can climb it. For others, it reveals what it always was: a power structure' (p. 176). This is why, in this sense, the boy and his mother should not just be statistical outliers, but a stress test for our conception of 'right'. They are outliers not because they deviate from the norm, but because they make the norm itself visible: an urban, institutional and social model built on the systematic removal of dependency.

Justice must be designed upstream

If we begin to take interdependence seriously as a general human condition, then institutions, as well as the city, should be redesigned not around the idea of a hypothetical self-sufficiency, but as the purpose of operating as enabling environments. This is not a marginal adaptation for those who are different, but the recognition that we all live, always, within environments that make us more or less capable. A city without barriers is a more liveable city for everyone, for the disabled boy as for a mother with a pushchair, for an elderly person as for my friend Mario who fractured his ankle playing five-a-side football. The question is not whether the mother and child need help, but whether urban order continues to be designed as if need were an exception and not an ordinary condition of social life.

Our institutions often do not generate injustice because they are openly hostile, but because they are designed around a narrow and unrealistic idea of our human nature. The social contract works, schools include, welfare assists, the city welcomes, but only within the confines of an implicit model of the autonomous, productive, mobile, independent agent. Those who place themselves permanently or even temporarily outside that profile are not radically expelled, but find themselves forced to live in a grey zone of private adaptations, of invisible care, of expectations, obstacles and renunciations.

This is why outliers help us to understand that justice is not only played out in formal access to rights, but in the concrete structure of possibilities, expectations and trust that institutions make viable. This is why taking an 'outliers' perspective does not mean dealing with marginal cases, but questioning the very heart of the social bond. A society that takes dependency as the exception and self-sufficiency as the norm is bound to produce exclusion without even recognising it as such. On the contrary, taking interdependence seriously, in schools, care work, workplaces, urban space and political relations, means recognising that justice is not a downstream compensation, but an upstream design issue.

It is here, in the way we design institutions, services and cities, that we decide whether vulnerability should be an individual destiny or a public and shared responsibility.

*Professor of Economics C-BASS, Center for Behavioral and Statistical Sciences, Director Department of Economics and Business,

University of Cagliari