Dependency is the condition of requiring care from others. Care ethics treats dependency not as a deficiency or deviation from an ideal of autonomy but as a fundamental feature of human existence. All persons are dependent at some point — as infants, as ill or aging bodies, as members of communities — and many are dependent throughout their lives in ways that liberal political theory systematically renders invisible.
Virginia Held and Eva Feder Kittay argue that the fiction of the autonomous, independent rational agent — the subject of social contract theory — is produced by ignoring the dependency relations that sustain it. The “independent” subject is always already supported by care work that has been made invisible: feeding, cleaning, teaching, nursing, comforting. Dependency is not the exception to autonomy; autonomy is the ideological product of unacknowledged dependency.
Kittay introduces the concept of “nested dependencies”: the caregiver who tends a dependent person is themselves made dependent by that work — dependent on resources, support, and recognition that are often withheld. The political question is not how to eliminate dependency but how to organize social life so that dependency does not produce domination.
Related terms
- Vulnerability — the susceptibility to harm that accompanies dependency
- Particular other — the concrete person whose dependency calls for care
- Attentiveness — the moral capacity to perceive dependency
- Care work — the labor that responds to dependency