The 1AC relies on anti-black neoliberalism – their paternalistic savior mentality empowers a hierarchal understanding of care where “people in poverty” rely on an extension of care – that empowers the ruling class and turns the case because it reinstates social disparities.

This third grouping explicitly attacks ‘the abstract model of rational, price-taking economic man and free markets’ (Szreter, 2002: 607). However, the emphasis in this analysis is on improving the nature of the interaction between ‘the needy’ or ‘less fortunate’ (Szreter, 2002: 600) and institutions with which they must necessarily deal, rather than on challenging hierarchy itself. To this end, Szreter (2002) insists that social relations must be ‘respectful’ before trust can be generated. Similarly, Richard Sennett (2003) pursues the importance of respect as a starting place for egalitarian politics. Importantly, a positive step is taken here by redirecting attention from the character deficits of the ‘needy’, assumed to be problematic by Putnam and Fukuyama, to those of the privileged. The rich, according to Szreter and Woolcock (2004: 656), must learn to recognize the plight of the ‘less fortunate’ and to react sympathetically. If they do not do this, the rich bear responsibility for the alienation and resultant lack of trust amongst those who are less well off.

It is clear from this discussion that trust and respect appear as core theoretical concepts across a broad spectrum of political beliefs. However, even those like Szreter, Woolcock and Sennett, who explicitly contest neoliberal premises about independent rational actors, reinstate social hierarchy between the ‘less fortunate’ and the ‘more privileged’. Indeed, Szreter (2002: 595; emphasis added) states explicitly that ‘social capital can only flourish where a society sufficiently embraces the values of egalitarianism combined with order and hierarchy’. Sennett (2003: 59, 98, 261) also condemns what he calls ‘radical egalitarians’, and states repeatedly that ‘there are unavoidable inequalities’. Even in these Bourdieu-inspired, more progressive versions of social capital, therefore, the fate of liberal democracy, as in Putnam, Fukuyama and Krygier, is bound up at the last with the ‘quality of citizens’ (Berkowitz, 1999; Wallach, 2000: 169).

The focus on citizen attributes in trust/respect accounts involves a rather individualized understanding of political change. In addition, any political change that is imagined appears more as an erratum to enable the smoother, less harsh functioning of neo-liberal competitive hierarchical society. Even in the more progressive versions of trust, the rich remain as rich as ever but learn to be nicer about it. Moreover, in trust/respect approaches, bodies remain in the shadows, and the emphasis remains on reform of what appears as largely cognitive functioning. To move beyond the limits of these political visions requires a rethinking of the nature of human interconnection.

This is the point at which care ethics enters the picture. In general care ethicists mount a more substantial challenge to the rational disembodied atomistic individualism of neo-liberalism than those who place trust or respect at the top of their desired list of citizen attributes. The vocabularies are not strictly separate, which signals the possibility of some deepseated commonalities between care and trust, at least among some proponents (Sevenhuijsen, 1998b). All the same, a focus on care is meant necessarily to attend to bodily interactions, in particular the caring responsibilities of women/mothers. To assess its potential as an ethical-political ideal it is necessary to examine carefully the claims made on behalf of ‘care’.

Early care ethicists (Gilligan, 1982; Held, 1993) describe the ability to ‘care’ as a moral attribute and offer a stance steeped in moral philosophy (see Beasley and Bacchi, 2005, and Bacchi and Beasley, 2005, for examples and elaboration). There is a tendency to assume that, if a person learns to care in one-to-one relationships, this will translate into a humane concern for distant others and into humane social arrangements generally – locally, nationally and even internationally. The practice of mothering is endorsed as a means to generate caring citizens (Ruddick, 1990). However, the hierarchical nature of mothering and many caring relationships goes almost unnoticed (Shakespeare, 2000; Hughes et al., 2005). In addition, as in the work of Putnam and Fukuyama, the mechanisms by which an ethic derived from interactions between particular others may be transferred to the public and international domains are taken for granted rather than explained.

Later contributors to care ethics like Selma Sevenhuijsen (1998a, 1998b) and Joan Tronto (1993, 2001) have attempted to deal directly with the limitations of a moral philosophy approach. They insist that care ought to be seen as an important social practice, which should be considered in political deliberations about institutional responses to need, rather than as a moral disposition. This move shifts the discussion from one-to-one caring relationships to institutional caring arrangements (see also Engster, 2004). Importantly, it also draws attention to the already existing caring practices of citizens, who are often women, an insight common in feminist analyses. Nevertheless, we suggest that even in the work of second generation care ethicists – despite expressed desires to avoid paternalism – an asymmetrical relationship is constructed between those needing care and those delivering care, undermining the egalitarian potential of the analysis. Sevenhuijsen (1998b: 7), for example, follows in the footsteps of early care ethicists with her detailed exploration of one-to-one caring arrangements, which presuppose relations of dependence and vulnerability.

This distinction between the needy or vulnerable and those attending to their needs appears also in some postmodern attempts to ground a new ethical sociality around the social relations of ‘care’. We turn in this context initially to Emmanuel Levinas. His work is significant because of its continuing influence in many postmodern writings, including the work of Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva (Beasley and Bacchi, 2005: 52; Derrida, 1994; Kristeva, 1997; Burke, 2000; Dunphy, 2004). Levinas does not use the word ‘care’, but his focus on a form of caritas, upon responsibility, responsiveness and compassion for the ‘other’, precisely replicates the compassionate action of care ethics. Yet Levinas’ influential reflections on ethical responsibility, like those of care ethicists, assume a ‘radical asymmetry’ in the ‘apprehension of the Other’, retaining a focus on ‘the fragility of the other’ and the ‘radical generosity of altruistic existence’ (Wyschogrod, 2003: 63), thereby reinstating asymmetry at the core of the relationship. Displaying related ideas, Iris Marion Young draws upon Levinas (in Shildrick, 2001: 238) to theorize the ways in which the ‘bodily need and possibility for suffering’ of the other ‘makes an unavoidable claim on me’. In these accounts the caring ‘exchange’ is viewed consistently as a form of altruism (for an extended discussion see Beasley and Bacchi, 2005).

There are several points to make here. First, we are struck by the way in which establishing benevolence, compassion, gift giving, altruism or generosity as an ethical starting point typically involves the promotion of care as a desirable moral quality or disposition held by individual citizens – akin to the focus on trust and/or respect as desirable character traits – and neglects or understates potential connections between care and power. Such an ethical starting point reinstates aspects of hierarchy that undermine egalitarian social relations (see Minow, 1990; Bacchi, 2001, 2004). Second, presuming an asymmetry between the conditions of the ‘weak’ and the ‘strong’ grounds a politics limited to efforts to ‘protect’ the ‘weak’ by establishing minimum resources or basic rights, a reformist political agenda that reinstates asymmetries of power and wealth.

In their emphasis on an embodied altruistic politics, care ethicists can certainly be credited with offering a critique of the rational atomistic self/citizen associated with neo-liberalism. However, the asymmetry at the heart of the political vision of care ethics in important ways leaves in place this active independent self/citizen of neo-liberalism, who is distinguished from dependent others. Neo-liberalism, like all variants of liberalism, rests upon hierarchical distinctions between autonomous individuals and those that are not (Gunew, 1990: 17). Those designated as individuals are deemed capable of independent thought and action and hence afforded full citizenship status and minimal government oversight/intervention. They are defined against those deemed less capable and therefore requiring governance/protection (Flax, 1995). Care ethicists prescribe a caring interchange between active citizens and dependent others, which is clearly an advance on the less compassionate and more atomistic framing of neoliberal competitive individualism, but the paternalist protectionism that care ethics invokes represents only a partial challenge to neo-liberal thinking.

The vocabulary of care is at least somewhat levelling, in that all of us do undertake and need care. Yet the radical democratic potential of care thinking is further undermined by its particular limited conception of embodied sociality. Fleshly interconnection is understood for the most part in the narrow sense of moments of dependency when those who remain independent should care. This difficulty regarding hierarchy is present in all incarnations of vocabularies stressing altruism, including those regarding gift giving, compassion, love, generosity, and need.1 Such a model of interconnection, at least in the work of later care ethics writers, does provide support for the welfare state, thus offering more than a mere erratum to neo-liberal social life. Nevertheless, it remains a restricted challenge to dominant political arrangements and understandings.

In sum, it would seem that the vocabularies of trust and care – as exemplary alternative ethical ideals – do not sufficiently challenge dominant neo-liberal assumptions which conceive of sociality in terms of hierarchical distinctions between those characterized as dependent ‘others’ as against those cast as autonomous individuals/citizens. With this starting point, the most that can be defended in terms of political change are mechanisms to protect the ‘weak’ and the ‘vulnerable’ from the worst effects of this inequality. By contrast, we wish to stress not a ‘shared vulnerability’, a shared capacity for dependency, but embodied coexistence, in order to develop a new vocabulary which brings together embodiment and the socio-political.