The year 2018 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of publication of Joan Tronto's Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. The argument advanced by Tronto in Moral Boundaries represented a significant intervention in feminist scholarship on the question of care and its provision, principally because it called our attention to the political contexts within which this work is always conducted. In this symposium, we have asked contributors to revisit Tronto's contribution with an eye toward assessing the current state of our theoretical as well as political engagement with the question of “social reproduction” in its many forms. This symposium concludes with a response by Tronto to her interlocutors.

For those who are unfamiliar with this path-breaking book or who have not read it recently, Moral Boundaries opens with a question: “What would it mean in late twentieth century American society to take seriously, as part of our definition of a good society, the values of caring—attentiveness, responsibility, nurturance, compassion, meeting others’ needs—traditionally associated with women and traditionally excluded from public consideration?” (2–3). The very asking of this question represented a challenge to much influential feminist scholarship at the time and, specifically, that which affirmed that women are either essentially or in virtue of their distinctive experiences more moral than men (see, e.g., French Reference French1985 and, arguably, Ruddick Reference Ruddick1990). On the basis of this premise, some argued, we should seek to incorporate into the public realm, for example, the virtue of maternal love and the value of peace.

In rejecting these arguments, in part 1, Tronto advanced a paradox: Because so-called “women's morality” is not in fact about women, “we need to stop talking about ‘women's morality’ and start talking about a care ethic that includes the values traditionally associated with women” (3). That success of that project, Tronto affirmed, requires that we rethink the boundaries conventionally drawn between morality and politics. Only when those boundaries are thoroughly reconfigured can we begin to bring the work of care-giving out the shadows and into the public realm where it can receive its proper due. Equally important, only then can we learn how to value less the forms of activity—for example, the accumulation and exercise of power—that are most often thought to define political life. If we can come to conceive of care as a moral as well as a political practice, Tronto contends, we will then be in a position to imagine a “more democratic, more pluralistic politics in the United States, in which power is more evenly distributed” (21) and those now effectively disenfranchised are accorded the justice they deserve.

For present purposes, there is no need to offer a detailed account of each of the chapters in Moral Boundaries. Suffice it to say that in part 2 Tronto undertakes her substantive argument, perhaps surprisingly, with a historical excursus into the Scottish Enlightenment. That analysis enables her to accomplish two purposes. First, it enables her to debunk the association of women with moral sentiments by showing how Frances Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith argued, each in their own way, that men who are raised right are capable of exercising refined ethical sensibilities. And, second, it enables her to show that the boundaries separating politics from morality, the public from the private, are in fact contingent artifacts of the eighteenth century, as the theory of moral sentiments was left behind and the knot tying together women, morality, and domesticity was ever more tightly cinched. With this historical context in place, Tronto turns to an analysis of Carol Gilligan's (Reference Gilligan1982) critique of Lawrence Kohlberg's (Reference Kohlberg1981–84) psychology of moral development. On the one hand, Tronto commends Gilligan for disclosing the tacit but very real gendered presuppositions informing Kohlberg's account of the advance of moral reasoning from an obedience/punishment model to one predicated on universal ethical principles. On the other hand, Tronto argues that Gilligan leaves uncriticized Kohlberg's justification of an especially enlightened ethical elite, and, in consequence, recapitulates his legitimation of forms of privilege that demand demystication.

In part 3, Tronto turns to the heart of her argument by offering a careful disentanglement of the four dimensions of care signaled when we speak of “caring about,” “taking care of,” “care-giving,” and “care-receiving” (106–107). Working with these distinctions, she explains how the way care work is now performed and institutionalized is profoundly bound up with structures of power and inequality. Indeed, the way we now do caring performs an ideological function insofar as it perpetuates forms of racial, gender, and class exploitation while, at the same time, veiling their operation. To think of care as Tronto does, by way of contrast, enables us to render visible and so to critique an order in which the systematic degradation of some is the necessary prerequisite of others’ privileged irresponsibility.

Finally, in part 3, Tronto articulates the terms of an ethic of care that insists on the ineluctable reality of human interdependence and, more specifically, the fact that every one of us at different times in our lives will require the care of others. From this elemental fact, Tronto teases out several striking and, arguably, radical political conclusions. Arguing that “the practice of care describes the qualities necessary for democratic citizens” (161), Tronto insists that we must now rethink the liberal (i.e., Hobbesian) conception of human nature; that we must incorporate certain features of liberalism's “private” sphere (e.g., reproduction and child-rearing) into a transfigured public realm; and, finally, that we must reject any theory of justice (think Rawls) that does not afford care the indispensable role it requires.

One purpose of this symposium is to trace the influence of Tronto's argument in the quarter century since Moral Boundaries was first published. Another is to assess the body of scholarship that has addressed the politics of care (or what some, informed by a different theoretical orientation, call “social reproduction”) since 1983. But perhaps the most important is to ask what work remains to be done if we are to fashion a polity that does justice to the shared vulnerabilities of the human condition.

Joan Tronto's Moral Boundaries has had a profound effect on feminist and political theory in a variety of areas and themes. In the 25 years since I reviewed the book for this journal's predecessor, Women & Politics, I have been very glad to see how far the reach and influence of Tronto's argument have grown, the creative ways in which people have expanded on and made use of her arguments, and, indeed, the centrality of this text to the growth of the subfield of care ethics. And yet I want more. We need more. I write this not just to feminists but to political theorists of all stripes: we need to double down and more fully develop our political theories of care in the way that Joan Tronto has shown us.

In 2018, we can argue that there have been improvements in the care landscape since the early 1990s, with more men participating in child care, the marketization of things such as meal preparation, greater disability access, and an explosion of assisted living residences for elderly citizens. But these changes fall gravely short of what feminists expected from the “care revolution” of the 1980s and 1990s: that the proliferation of markets in care work would be complemented by more robust public supports such as federally funded child care, longer school days, better salaries for nurses and home health aides, greater equity in the sexual division of labor, and even a rethinking of family structure.

Indeed, in many ways, things have become worse. Income inequality has increased sharply, and racism and sexism have been given resounding permission to resurge in particularly virulent forms. Continued efforts to repeal the landmark Affordable Care Act show it is politically acceptable not to care about vulnerable populations. Hyperpartisan politics has given power to people who hold those who most need care in vile contempt. Our “moral boundaries” seem even more starkly drawn than ever.

Why has this happened? Part of the reason is an inevitable circularity of the problem: Tronto notes that “as a type of activity, care requires a moral disposition and a type of moral conduct” (Reference Tronto1993, 177). We already have to be convinced of the need for, and the need to, care before we actually implement it. But context, as Tronto argues, is also important—namely, rampant capitalism. Though markets play an important role in her theory, Tronto notes in Moral Boundaries—and again in her Reference Tronto2013 book Caring Democracy—that capitalism is an important source of care's distortion, its assignment to women and to men of color, and its devaluation and poor remuneration in the market. Growing global markets with exploitative labor conditions, the failure to shift labor markets away from destructive industries such as coal and other fossil fuels, the loss of open space, and the sacrifice of the environment to profit all add up to a world in which care—of our fellow citizens, even of the planet—has become even less valued at a time when it is needed more than ever.

Surely, some parts of the world have done better in implementing the ideas that Tronto puts forth, particularly Scandinavian countries with generous parental leave that incentivizes men to share in such labor, as well as end-of-life and disability provisions that create a higher quality of life for the greatest number of people. And some U.S. companies have made some small advances. But what keeps most of the United States from learning from these examples goes to one of the central messages of Moral Boundaries: “that care is not a gender issue, but one of power and inequality, which our moral boundaries are constructed to support” (Reference Tronto1993, 111). This lesson remains unlearned, unheeded, and ignored by policy makers. It also remains unheeded by too many feminists who continue to frame care primarily in terms of familial relationships such as child care and elder care.

A central theme in Tronto's book is that how we define and think about care impacts what we can do with the concept. As she notes, as long as care is associated primarily with raising children or providing for the daily needs of the sick or elderly, it will never be able to rise to a prominent position on the stage of public policy. That is why her careful analysis and rethinking of the concept have been so important. And yet that problem of circularity remains.

Consider disability, for instance. There have been very powerful, persuasive, and important arguments, many indebted to Tronto's work, for the need for care in disability theory and the recognition of our interdependence. But this concept of care is generally envisioned as hands-on and interpersonal, with an individual giver and an individual receiver. It is difficult not to think in these terms, because disability differs so widely from person to person. Blindness, cerebral palsy, arm amputation, and autism can all be considered “impairments,” but what is required to address and accommodate the needs of individuals with these conditions differs widely from one to another.

Thus, although Tronto rejects the vision of care as “particularistic and local” (Reference Tronto1993, 102), this model hovers over her argument, because, as political theorists know well, how a text is read depends at least as much on the assumptions that the reader brings as on what the text intends to say. When we think that care must be directed at other specific people, it is hard not to think of the end point of individual giving and receiving, whether it is a hospice nurse spoon-feeding a dying patient or a physical therapist helping a new amputee learn how to operate his or her prosthesis.

This form of care is, of course, vital: humans need it. Yet insofar as this conception of care persists, many people with impairments might say they do not want care, but only a differently designed built environment, or employers that see their abilities and not just their disabilities so that they can earn a living, or less stringent pecuniary living allowances on Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) or Supplemental Security Income. They do not want to construe these things as “care”; they are suspicious of care's historical association with paternalism and charity, which might cast such changes in terms of “accommodations” to “special needs,” opening the door to utilitarian complaints (e.g., “All that money spent on building a ramp for three students could have gone instead toward buying more books for the library”) and render them vulnerable to being taken away at any moment, as we are witnessing now in the United States. Instead, disability scholars and activists envision a reconfigured and redesigned world in which such things are not considered care at all, but only living; part of the new normal landscape; not charity but rights.

Tronto's argument shows that this response is shortsighted. Even if we talk about “a right to care” that seeks to put the traditional interpersonal vision of care on a more solid footing, it simultaneously reinforces the dominant model of care as interpersonal, with the sexism, racism, classism, and ableism that Tronto documents. The brilliance of Tronto's argument is that she moves beyond this narrow model of care to a global and political theory: by theorizing care as “a reaching out to something [not necessarily someone] other than the self” that “will lead to some kind of action,” she renders it broad and inclusive: it specifically includes objects while rejecting a “dyadic or individualistic” conception. As Berenice Fisher and Tronto define it, care is “a species activity that includes everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible” (Reference Fisher, Tronto, Abel and Nelson1990, 40).

This disaggregation of the idea of “care” from interpersonal interaction is hugely important for disability theory: the installation of wheelchair ramps is accurately seen as a form of care. When campus buildings are being renovated, advocating for more elevators and more accessible space is a form of care. Progressive tax redistribution to better fund SSDI and the Social Security Administration is a form of care. None of these should be seen as “special accommodations” but rather as forms of care that are just part of everyday life. It is precisely Tronto's enlarging of our conception of what counts as care that makes it comprehensible in political terms. Because enlarging the concept reduces the charity stigma, Tronto's particular vision of care is of central importance to the goals of disability scholars and activists. And the particular insights that political theorists can bring to care via Tronto's argument—by emphasizing the political nature of the concept that she so brilliantly makes clear—is why it is so important for political theorists to turn to disability as a category of analysis.

But disability is not the only arena in which political theorists should be doing a better job of deploying Tronto's argument. Newly emerging ecological political theories are well suited to make use of her work (and some are already doing so), for caring about and for the environment is a global necessity in an age when climate change is dismissed as a myth. Environmentalism is a way to care for and about things—the planet, the flora and fauna inhabiting it—but it is also a way to care about other people that is not interpersonal.

Twenty-five years ago, I wrote, “Tronto's book challenges feminists to think harder about what it means to take care seriously as a political and theoretical ideal” (Hirschmann Reference Hirschmann1998, 108). But I was wrong: it challenges all political theorists. The illustrious career and significant impact of Moral Boundaries should not allow us to feel complacent. Tronto is certainly not, and her continued work in this area is essential to the field. But more political theorists need to focus on pressing political problems such as climate change, disability, torture, growing economic inequality, the persistence of racism and sexism, through the theory of care that Tronto has given us. In today's political world, we need Joan Tronto's Moral Boundaries more than ever.

Moral Boundaries is an extraordinarily important book in the history of care ethics. When Joan Tronto published this book in 1993, care ethics was still commonly portrayed as a gendered morality, a victim's morality, and a morality that was appropriate for personal relations but not for public affairs. In Moral Boundaries, Tronto rebuts these limiting claims and reframes care ethics as a universal moral and political theory on a par with utilitarianism, Kantianism, and virtue ethics.

Although Tronto acknowledges in Moral Boundaries that care ethics expresses values traditionally associated with the work of women and disadvantaged groups, she argues that it is neither a women's morality nor an expression of internalized repression. It is instead a morality that valorizes the everyday practices—performed largely by women and disadvantaged groups—that sustain and repair human society and our world. Even though care ethics is practical and contextual and often performed in close personal relationships, Tronto further claims that care ethics can still guide general moral and political thinking. The misunderstandings of care ethics, Tronto argues, are the result of established moral boundaries—between morality and politics, everyday practices and rational moral theories, and private and public life—that function to contain or ignore moral perspectives such as care ethics that do not fit into traditional categories. Care ethics cuts through these moral boundaries, Tronto asserts, confounding dominant understandings of morality and politics by asking us to imagine what the world would look like if we moved care to the center of human life.

In the 25 years since Tronto first published Moral Boundaries, the field of care ethics has grown exponentially. Scholars from around the world have explored care ethics and applied it to a wide diversity of subjects (e.g., Barnes et al. Reference Barnes, Brannelly, Ward and Ward2015; Engster and Hamington Reference Engster and Hamington2015). Even so, Tronto's original work remains central to current scholarship. Her definition and analysis of care, in particular, remain the starting point for most arguments about care ethics.

Despite the expansion of care ethics, it remains hemmed in by a number of moral boundaries—some that Tronto identifies in her work and others that are variants on them. The public-private moral boundary, for example, continues to play a major role in containing care ethics, particularly through ideologies such as neoliberalism that frame care as a personal, family, or market responsibility (Tronto Reference Tronto2017). Two other boundaries also continue to stymie the full development and wide acceptance of care ethics.

Tronto partially anticipates the first of these boundaries in the insightful and greatly underappreciated second chapter of Moral Boundaries. In this chapter, Tronto explores how the sentiment-based moral philosophies of Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith—similar in many ways to care ethics—came under strain during the eighteenth century because of economic and social transformations and eventually gave way to more rationalistic moral philosophies. As markets and trade expanded and cities and states grew, Tronto claims, social life became more impersonal and the prospects for a morality based on sympathy, which functions best among individuals who already closely identify with each other or are in close proximity, became more implausible. Tronto argues that the popularity of Kant's rational morality toward the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries can be understood in part as a response to the need for an impersonal moral theory better equipped to mediate relations between strangers.

Tronto's discussion of Hume's and Smith's attempts to adapt their moral philosophies to an increasingly impersonal social environment is insightful in thinking about the obstacles to, and perhaps even dangers of, trying to develop and expand a morality of care today. The limiting boundary here—related to but distinct from the three moral boundaries that Tronto explicitly identifies—is that between in-groups and out-groups. As Tronto notes, in a theory that requires active sympathetic identification with others, Smith recognized that people are likely to sympathize most readily “with those who are better off” and “ignore the poor.” People are also likely to be most responsive to and interested in others who are closest to them—whether in terms of race, nationality, geography, or other traits (Tronto Reference Tronto1993, 46). All of this seems relevant in thinking about recent electoral outcomes in the United States and Great Britain, where care for one's own—for example, the “America First” slogan—has carried the day (see Tronto Reference Tronto2016).

I do not mean to suggest that care ethics is somehow responsible for the Brexit vote or the election of Donald Trump. However, these events do serve to highlight the importance for care theorists of giving more attention to the in-group/out-group boundary. Even though few care theorists today rest their theories on natural sentiments, the problems that the Scottish Enlightenment moral philosophers confronted continue to haunt us. Any theory that aims to promote the care of others must not only avoid the well-recognized problem within care ethics of parochialism (usually understood as a narrow outlook focused on a local area) but also find a way to encourage people to cross the moral boundary between “us” and “them” (a stronger and deeper distinction that reappears in various guises). In challenging the dominance of Kantian moral theory, care ethicists have once again opened up questions about the moral capacities of individuals to care for strangers (however defined). How people can be prodded to expand their circles of care to include individuals from what they consider to be out-groups remains an important question that care theorists have yet to address adequately.

A second boundary that continues to limit the development of care ethics is the one between morality and politics. In Moral Boundaries, Tronto argues that most political thinkers view the relationship between morality and politics in one of two ways. In the “morality first” view, thinkers first outline moral principles and then identify the political institutions and policies that follow from them (Tronto Reference Tronto1993, 7, 158–61). In the “politics first” view, thinkers first identify a set of political values such as security and order and then show how moral values might supplement them. In lieu of this dichotomy, Tronto argues, we should view morality and politics as intertwined. How exactly Tronto envisions this intertwining nonetheless remains vague in Moral Boundaries. It seems to involve using care ethics critically to interrogate existing practices of care and making care the subject of egalitarian democratic deliberation. In her recent book Caring Democracy (Reference Tronto2013), for example, she draws on care ethics to challenge a number of passes that men and individuals from other privileged groups use to get out of doing care work and argues for a new egalitarian democratic politics organized around discussions about who should do the care work in society and how.

In arguing against the moral boundary between morality and politics, Tronto has inadvertently, in my opinion, contributed to a new boundary with the potential to limit the future development of care ethics. In the years since the publication of Moral Boundaries, a number of care ethicists have adopted a “morality first” approach to care ethics—outlining a set of political institutions and policies that follow from and support practices of care (e.g., Eichner Reference Eichner2010; Engster Reference Engster2007, Reference Engster2015; Held Reference Held2006; Kittay Reference Kittay1999; Noddings Reference Noddings2002; Slote Reference Slote2007). Meanwhile, others have developed care ethics in a more critical and democratic vein (e.g., Barnes Reference Barnes2012; Cole Reference Cole2016; Ferrarese Reference Ferrarese2016; Robinson Reference Robinson1999, Reference Robinson2011). Both approaches, I think, have their strengths and weaknesses. The first approach clearly defines the institutions and policies that proponents of care ethics might work to implement but fails to acknowledge sufficiently the political context in which care occurs, the unavoidably pluralistic nature of democratic life, and the generative power of democratic deliberation for devising new policies and solutions. The second approach, by contrast, offers trenchant critiques of existing policies and care arrangements and can help us to better understand how everyday care might inform existing arrangements, but can seem frustratingly open-ended or indeterminate in regard to institutional or policy design. The two theories can be complementary, I think, but the danger also exists that a new moral boundary will form between the two wings of political care theorists, with each ignoring or criticizing the theories of the other.

Upending this moral boundary between analytical (morality first) and critical/democratic approaches to care ethics seems important for the future development of political theories of care. Care ethicists should make evident the political context of their argument and highlight the need for a democratic determination of policies without shying away from identifying some of the policies that citizens and activists should contend for in the democratic arena. What exactly this analytic/critical/democratic political theory of care might look like remains fuzzy. But continuing to push the moral boundaries that Tronto originally identified, and breaking down new ones as they appear, remains just as important to the development of care ethics today as it was when Tronto first set out this project 25 years ago.

Joan Tronto's Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care represents a milestone in the development of care ethics research. Until its publication in 1993, an “ethic of care” was most closely associated with Carol Gilligan's (Reference Gilligan1982) research in moral psychology and Nel Noddings's (Reference Noddings1984) work on ethics and moral education. Both Gilligan and Noddings focused their work on the personal development of individuals as moral beings. Even Sara Ruddick's Maternal Thinking, which developed a theory of antiviolence from the disposition and activities of mothering, maintained a separation between the activities of mothers and the “outside” world of politics—such as war, poverty and racism, all of which “twist a mother's best efforts” (Ruddick Reference Ruddick1995, 29). Joan Tronto's book Moral Boundaries was different. Moral Boundaries explicitly and thoroughly challenged the boundary between ethics and politics, paving the way for more than two decades of innovative, critical scholarship on care and the political.

In this short essay, I will explore Tronto's vision of care as political, explaining why it has been and continues to be so important for the development of research and thinking on care ethics and indeed ethics more generally. First, I will discuss Tronto's rejection of what she calls the “morality first” strategy of political theory and the related point that care is “always already” a political idea (Tronto Reference Tronto1993, 138). Second, I will explore the contributions of Moral Boundaries to our understanding of the relationship between the ethics of care and the work of social reproduction. Finally, I will describe some recent research on care ethics and the political that builds on and develops Tronto's work. The aim here is not to reject Tronto's formulation but rather to emphasize the deeply important legacy of her political argument for an ethic of care.

Tronto is well known for her definition of care; developed with Berenice Fisher, this definition posits care as “a species of activity that includes everything we do to maintain, contain, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment” (Fisher and Tronto Reference Fisher, Tronto, Abel and Nelson1990, 40). In Moral Boundaries, Tronto expands on this definition, setting out the four stages/elements of a care ethic: attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness. This understanding forms the groundwork for her elaboration of care as a political idea. “What distinguishes my approach to care,” Tronto argues, “is my insistence that we cannot understand an ethic of care until we place such an ethic in its full moral and political context” (Reference Tronto1993, 125).

Integral to this task is the rejection of what she calls a “morality first” approach. This way of doing political philosophy takes a preexisting moral idea (usually a “principle” or set of principles) and then seeks to “apply” it to politics. This approach reifies the boundary between ethics and politics, imagining ethics as “good” and usually “ideal,” whereas politics is amoral or immoral and “real.” Against this way of doing political theory, Tronto reminds us that the rigid boundary between politics and morality prevents us from seeing that moral theory conveys power and privilege (Reference Tronto1993, 93). On this view, Lawrence Kohlberg's ostensibly “impartial” account of moral development—to which Gilligan's early work on the voice of care was responding—cannot be understood outside of, or apart from, the political. It is not an objective truth that the most “successful” and “adept” in society are also the “most moral”; in this regard, moral theory appears to reinforce the position of the powerful (93). Moral theory, Tronto writes, functions as an ideology (93).

It is here that Tronto reveals the political significance of the ethic of care. Care is indeed a “different voice,” a way of thinking and speaking about morality that departs radically from dominant, principled ethics. But when we listen to and recognize the voice of care, we are not simply adding another moral theory; rather, we are uncovering the power relations that have led to the silencing of this voice. This is care ethics as politics.

But Moral Boundaries reveals the political in yet another way. Tronto's political argument encourages us to see the relationship between an ethic of care and particular practices of care. Care is thus a mode of moral reasoning—“thinking” and “being”—but it is also about “doing.” While caring for loved ones had previously been constructed by rationalist, masculinist moral philosophy as outside of the realm of the ethical, Tronto's book challenged this boundary. Caring for those with whom we exist in relationships—being attentive and responsive to their needs—is thus positioned as an integral aspect of morality, rather than in the realm of “natural” responses or merely “personal” relations.

Furthermore, Tronto's account reveals the ways and extent to which moral practices of care are also care work. “It is a fact of great moral significance,” Tronto argues, “that … some must work so that others can achieve their autonomy and independence” (Reference Tronto1993, 165). This fact, however, is obscured by the public-private dichotomy, which conceals many aspects of women's lives. On this account, we begin to see that the same patriarchal forces that silence the voice and practices of care also marginalize and denigrate the labor of care. Bringing this labor into view is itself a political project, since it allows us to notice that those who are least well-off in society are disproportionately those who do the work of caring, and that the best-off members of society often use their positions of superiority to pass caring work off to others (Tronto Reference Tronto1993, 113).

Tronto reminds us that these patterns of giving and receiving care have their roots in the history of colonialism and slavery. Today in the United States, the job categories in which women and people of color are most disproportionately employed include private household cleaners and servants and private household child care workers (Tronto Reference Tronto1993, 113). Moral Boundaries thus brings into view the ways in which gender intersects with race and class in the context of care work. Of course, some forms of care—”taking care of” and “caring about”—remain the province of white wealthy men, most notably in the profession of medicine. “Care-giving and care-receiving,” Tronto argues, are left to the less powerful (Reference Tronto1993, 114).

While Tronto does address the significance of “care-receiving” in her book, the subject position and political nature of the care recipient does not play a large role. In an important new contribution to the care ethics literature, Tiina Vaittinen builds on Tronto's work on the political nature of care by focusing on the political significance of care receivers. Vaittinen argues that most of the work on care ethics and the political, while it helps us recognize how care in society is organized through hierarchical and gendered divisions of labor and responsibility, fails to recognize the political meaning in the “vulnerable body.” Through a deconstructive reading of care ethics and Tronto's (Reference Tronto1993) ethics of care in particular, she seeks not to oppose, but to displace and resituate in order to redirect attention to the marginalized position of the care-recipients (Vaittinen Reference Vaittinen2015, 111).

Vaittinen argues that the attempt of care ethics to define care as a source of the political is biased by the modern tendency to exclude the vulnerable body. The political relations of care, she suggests, derive from human vulnerability and our concrete, corporeal need of care from embodied others (Vaittinen Reference Vaittinen2015, 112). But this is not cause for despair: in the face of “endlessly totalizing tendencies,” the neoliberal political economy remains “incomplete and open for change.” Indeed, “[f]or as long as our bodies need other bodies for survival, there is relatedness that continues to make the economy political” (Hoppania and Vaittinen Reference Hoppania and Vaittinen2015, 87–88).

Vaittinen's work pushes our thinking about care into new territory; that said, it would not have been possible without the groundwork of Tronto's Moral Boundaries. While other philosophers in the 1980s and early 1990s took Gilligan's insights and developed them into strongly normative accounts of “women's morality,” Tronto set out a blueprint for care as a tool for critical political analysis that reveals relationships of power (Reference Tronto1993, 172). Her rejection of the “ethics first” approach places her squarely within the tradition of critical theorizing. Hers is not an emancipatory political theory that looks to a future filled with ideally caring citizens; rather, it is a more cautious approach that offers care not as a moral theory to be applied to politics but as a critical tool that reveals the “always already” political nature of care as a moral voice, a set of practices, and a form of labor. Without Moral Boundaries, the past 25 years of feminist moral and political theory would not have been nearly as rich, innovative, and exciting as they have been.

It is widely recognized that the publication of Moral Boundaries marked a sea change in the treatment of gender and care within political (moral) theory. Challenging the association of care as women's prerogative and concern, Joan Tronto emphasized the universal centrality of care as a human value and to relations of interdependence in everyday life. In her words, caring is “the concern of living, active humans engaged in the process of everyday living” (Tronto Reference Tronto1993, 104). By the time Moral Boundaries was published, in 1993, the necessity of rooting care and care work in wider social, political, and cultural contexts had already taken hold in ways that were generating rich contextualizations of the gendered social organization and social relations of care in different countries. Against this background, Tronto's scholarship made an important theoretical intervention in its insistence that care can serve as a tool for critical political analysis (172) insofar as it draws attention to “the qualities necessary for democratic citizens to live together well in a pluralistic society” (161).

Because feminist scholarship of many kinds now takes this normative-theoretical argument as a starting point, it is useful to start this short essay with a reminder of the formative influence of Moral Boundaries in shaping scholarship outside of political theory. Works by, for example, Fiona Williams (Reference Williams2012), Olena Hankivsky (Reference Hankivsky2004), and Rosmari Lappalainen and Nilssen Motevasel (Reference Lappalainen and Motevasel1997) indicate the influence of Moral Boundaries in the ways they root an ethos of care centrally in their analyses of welfare theory and practice and argue that an ethic of care is essential for the development of social policy founded on and generative of social justice. They take up Tronto's argument in showing that although care is a universal organizing principle of social life, it is not (yet) a central principle of political policy making. In doing so, they concretely demonstrate the “boundaries” between morality and politics and between public and private life that prevent the incursion of a care ethic into welfare provision and social policy. As these and other works have shown, those who stand to benefit most from the integration of an ethic of care are often those most in need of systems of social provision that ensure redistribution, production, reproduction, and protection. This is because (among other things) such systems are more likely to recognize care as an indispensable element of social (including gender) equality. By developing the precepts of Tronto's work, important distinctions between care as an interpersonal practice, care provision as a focus of policy, and institutionalized systems of social provision underpinned by an ethic of care are made. Such delineations have been necessary for placing Tronto's theoretical argument at the heart of a powerful living political idea capable of informing grounded, practical, and ambitious actions for social and political transformation.

We should not overestimate the appeal and influence of Moral Boundaries at the time and since. What I mean by this is that Tronto's arguments are not yet firmly enough embedded. Despite progress in some countries on some issues, the practical business of policy making remains largely immune to the precept that care is a universal social value. Care as a relational quality has not broken free from essentialist constructs of femaleness; care work continues to be, on the whole, women's work. Women disproportionately bear the costs of providing care in the face of all evidence about the value of doing so to economic and social development (Razavi Reference Razavi2011, Reference Razavi2016).

Nor is the academy exempt from resistance to the implications of Tronto's argument. In the context of this essay, it is pertinent to note that, all too often, care remains framed as an issue for and about women, families, and relationships. As I have previously argued (Yeates Reference Yeates2009), this may reflect a familiar feminist terrain: the provision of domestic care in household settings. The overwhelming share of attention within feminist scholarship on care—notably, that focusing on its intersections with international migration—centers on domestic care work. Whether pursued through the concept of a global intimacy regime or through care transnationalization, the lasting influence of Marxist-feminist domestic labor debates is evident in the prevailing focus on the household sphere as the archetypal social setting and on domestic labor as the archetypal social reproductive labor (Yeates Reference Yeates2009, 39; Reference Yeates2012).

This remains evident, ironically, in Tronto's more recent work published with Minh Nguyen and Roberta Zavoretti (Reference Nguyen, Zavoretti and Tronto2017). Care ethics scholars, they argue, have done the most to highlight the ideological processes underpinning the rise of privatized solutions to the “problem” of care provision and have been at the leading edge of scholarship rooted in a notion of care as a complex social process. For all the strengths of their argument, my worry, however, is that it falls into this “familiar” trap. Their focus on family care as the centerpiece of neoliberal ideological constructions of welfare and responsibilized citizenship reifies the “familiar” feel of care studies, which does not seem to have traveled so very far from its equation with women's morality and women's work. Against this backdrop, the expanded global care chain analytical framework is notable precisely for the ways in which it has generated discursive spaces for understandings of care transnationalization (and globalization more generally) that reveal a broader notion of care and the variety of social and institutional arrangements in which it is embedded and which produce it (Yeates Reference Yeates2009, Reference Yeates2012).

Looking ahead, what are the opportunities for an agenda inspired by the idea of care as a universal human value, a reality of daily living, and a basis for socially transformative social policies? These opportunities lie in two policy worlds simultaneously: the world of policy as politics in practice and the world of policy as a subject of academic study and analysis. To make the most of them, we need to work across them simultaneously. Globally, the centrality of care to socially transformative development and its relevance for gender equality are widely recognized, but there is a continued role for policy-oriented analytical research and campaigns that keep this understanding of the importance of care at the foreground of policy making in practice. This statement holds true whether the focus is on the spheres of cross-border governance and policy or at the level of individual countries. Among the challenges are to identify actionable “policy options for supporting care without reinforcing it as an exclusively female domain” (Razavi Reference Razavi2016, 1) and, at the same time, to (re)build robust, universalist systems of social provision, regulation, and rights embedded in a strong and revitalized public realm.

In order to address issues of resourcing and recognition that lie at the heart of care as an ethic that is needed to underpin a revitalized commitment to social justice, a materialist and laborist approach to care is essential to realizing in practice the relational aspects of care prioritized in Moral Boundaries. The establishment of an international welfare state founded on universal human rights lies at the very heart of this. This includes the introduction of universalist systems of social provision guaranteed by enforceable social rights where they do not exist, and their development and extension where they do exist but are not yet comprehensive enough to attain acceptable social standards. Such systems need to incorporate transborder structures of entitlement that reflect the realities of transnational social life and practices of daily living (including but not confined to the provision of care), including complex relations between citizens and multiple states. An international welfare state must be conceived in broader terms than simply “welfare”: sustained public investment in accessible infrastructure and investment in “decent” work and the raising of labor and social standards are needed. “Care policies” and provision must be seen in this context and should encourage men to share in the fulfilment of care responsibilities (including mitigating the costs of temporary withdrawal from employment to provide care for others) alongside “high road” strategies leading to affordable, high-quality formal care services backed by proper regulation and funding (cf. Razavi Reference Razavi2016). These are ambitious but eminently achievable goals, the attainment of which would give a new vitality to the precept that an ethic of care is indispensable to projects of social transformation globally founded upon the principles of democratic socialism.

It is a great honor to have Politics & Gender revisit this book after a quarter century, and I am grateful as well for this opportunity to respond to these fine critics. I am relieved to be able to say that I mainly still find the argument not only persuasive but generative of new directions of thought. I think the basic spatial metaphor of moral boundaries still works well; indeed, the separations of morality from politics, of “the moral point of view” from everyday life, and of public and private spheres continue to serve as ways of defining the political crises in which we find ourselves, though the particular forms of crises have changed by now. In this response, I would like to respond to my critics by thinking about the past (when the book was written), the present (when care has gained some traction), and the future (when care might actually be valued appropriately).

Moral Boundaries is itself a spatial metaphor; when it was written, it was largely a plea for opening up a variety of new spaces in political theory and practice. Back then, political theorists were still in the thrall of abstract and universalizing theories; virtue ethics was hardly taken seriously, “non-ideal theory” was not yet a term of art, and focus in the subfield mainly grew out of the tradition of interpreting canonical Western thinkers. Moral Boundaries picked up the argument, advanced as well by Raymond Geuss (Reference Geuss2005), that “morality first” approaches misunderstood the relationship of politics and morality and used it to explore the relationships of marginalization of some groups and life activities. The book offered an alternative account of how to do political theory as well as an alternative vision for the political world:

At the time, there were some other directions that the argument might have taken. Other feminists were thinking about care work and its structural place. From popular movements for “Wages for Housework” (Ehrenreich Reference Ehrenreich2000; McCluskey Reference McCluskey2003) to socialist feminists’ analyses of social reproduction (e.g., Davis Reference Davis1983), it was well noticed that the traditional assignment of care work to women and others of low status created a structural problem. The problem with the socialist feminist approach, though, was and still is the dual nature of care. Care is not only work or labor; it is also a disposition and an attitude taken that requires one to focus on the needs of the cared-for object or person or group. But the big breakthrough that Moral Boundaries represented was that it also recognized that care goes beyond the private or familial realm to the social and political realms as well. By now it is commonplace that providing care happens at every level in human society; this was not the view 25 years ago.

Arguments about the importance of care were often dismissed at the time, and in Moral Boundaries, I argued that the broader arguments met with a “containment” strategy. Some also mistakenly labeled care theory as a form of “cultural feminism,” a label that presumed something especially “female” about caring and about valorizing the feminine. As a result, many scholars never took these arguments so seriously. In retrospect, it is clear that what critics missed was a key part of the argument: that “care ethics” (not the most appropriate label, but the one that had already been used in the literature) is about relational power. In this regard, care theorists began exploring several of the central insights of feminist theory: first, that actors need to decenter themselves in order to better understand the world, and second, that all relationships are already shaped by power and privilege.

At least two key implications follow from this second point. First, any model of justice as a distributive system is fatally flawed (Young Reference Young1990). The necessity of human care, and the ways it is organized in our society, are central dimensions in creating a more just society. Care practices, I argued in Moral Boundaries, are especially prone to two forms of unjust dangers: paternalism (in which care givers assert their judgments over the needs of others) and parochialism (in which care givers favor those closest to them). Second, privilege produces what I called in Moral Boundaries “privileged irresponsibility” (120–22). One of the more far-reaching claims of the book is that those whose privilege allows them to ignore domination—the critique advanced in chapter 3 of Kohlberg's sequential steps of cognitive moral development—have shaped a world in which care has been devalued.

Coming forward to the present, relationality, with its implicit and explicit critiques of domination, has become a widely discussed and more central theoretical claim of feminist theory (Koggel Reference Koggel, Downie and Llewellyn2012; McKenzie and Stoljar Reference McKenzie and Stoljar2000; Nedelsky Reference Nedelsky2011). I believe that the categories explicated in Moral Boundaries are still useful in thinking about how care works as a critique of contemporary society. Let me turn now to the critics’ points.

Nancy Hirschmann's appreciative essay “Care as a Political Concept: Now More than Ever” observes that “rampant capitalism” is now an even more “important source of care's distortion,” and she decries the fact that the lesson of care—it needs to be understood not as an issue of gender but of one of power and inequality—”remains unlearned, unheeded, and ignored by policy makers” (xx). Hirschmann, whose own writings have challenged the familial bias of much writing on care by upper-middle-class white women (see Hirschmann Reference Hirschmann2010), proceeds to explore the complicated account of care theory and studies of disability. Hirschmann could have been more critical here. There is a strong distaste on the part of people with disabilities for care ethics; many have argued that care ethics errs against a more rights-based approach to disability and leaves people with disabilities in a state of being dependent. But, as Hirschmann observes, my goal was to enlarge care beyond charity, and indeed, disability theorists who have argued, for example, for movements for universal design do fit well with the broader arguments about care. Hirschmann has also, somewhat indirectly, raised the question of whether care ethics is hostile to rights-based approaches. My view, as Hirschmann's essay discerns, is that rights are important political tools, but they need to be understood in their context since there are often issues of power, inequality, and relationship intertwined in asserting rights claims.

Daniel Engster's review focuses on ongoing issues in care ethics research. He advises care ethics scholars, first, not to lost sight of the parochialism problem in care ethics. He reminds readers that I made the argument in part historically, describing the move to more impartialist ethical theories as an attempt to cope with greater social distance. He asserts that care ethics scholars need to pay more attention to the in-group/out-group boundary. Second, he provides an overview of current care ethics literature and sees a continuing division “between analytical (morality first) and critical/democratic approaches to care ethics” (xx) that needs to be overcome. Both of these points are, of course, well taken. Engster's (Reference Engster2007, Reference Engster2015) own work explores care practices in various contexts and boldly makes policy recommendations.

Engster's concerns do remain fundamental, but perhaps they derive from his ambitious view of care ethics. At the opening of his essay, he suggests that Moral Boundaries offered care ethics as a “universal moral and political theory on a par with utilitarianism, Kantianism, and virtue ethics” (xx). Engster is correct to see that care ethics is different, but its place, to me, depends on a different view of the nature of moral and political theory, one that is more radically democratic. To me, the best description of the nature of moral theory comes from Margaret Urban Walker's ([1998] Reference Walker2007) account of Moral Understandings. Walker presumes that moral life is always an “expressive” and “collaborative” enterprise in which people work out their moral understandings among themselves. Any attempts to provide “universal” or “final” answers to ethical questions are thus seeking an impossible outcome. Engster is more committed to more universalistic approaches, and our disagreements grow out of this more fundamental one. To me, Engster's characterization of the current state of the literature does not pay much attention to the dimension of relational power. Power is implicated in all of the judgments and forms of care that he would have us consider. Indeed, power is involved even in the question about how an “in-group” gets to think of itself as, or to act as, a group, and to make others into an “out-group.” The problems are not in care ethicists’ different approaches but in the reality of power inequalities.

Fiona Robinson's essay, “Care and the Political,” provides a fine summary of the importance of the deeply political nature of care and of my assertion that separating morality and politics “prevents us from seeing that moral theory conveys power and privilege” (xx, quoting Tronto Reference Tronto1993). If moral theory itself is part of the problem, then the need is to turn to a way of thinking that is closer to care on the ground. She observes how the separation of public and private life obscures the labor of care and that it is not only gendered but also (as Mignon Duffy [Reference Duffy2011] has persuasively demonstrated) raced and classed. Robinson has applied care ethics research herself in international relations. Her work has been pathbreaking in showing how these public/private divisions, structures of commodified care, and basic carelessness function even on the international level and in asserting the centrality of care for revamping our conceptions of security (Robinson Reference Robinson1999, Reference Robinson2011). Robinson's main criticism of Moral Boundaries in this essay, and a fair one, is that Moral Boundaries is written, and care is conceptualized, largely from the standpoint of caregivers, not care receivers. She is correct to observe this point, and I have tried in subsequent writings to correct this oversight. She is also correct to note that Tiina Vaittinen's (Reference Vaittinen2015) work, focusing concretely on the “vulnerable body,” makes these arguments more visible.

Nicola Yeates's essay “Beyond Moral Boundaries: Reflections on a Global Care Agenda” notes that Moral Boundaries emphasized the “universal centrality of care as a human value” (xx). Yet she notes that despite some progress, “the practical business of policy making remains largely immune to the precept that care is a universal social value” (xx). More seriously from the standpoint of care theory, Yeates observes that “care as a relational quality has not broken free from essentialist constructs of femaleness; care work continues to be, on the whole, women's work” (xx). Yeates offers the serious critique that “all too often, care remains framed as an issue for and about women, families, and relationships” (xx), noting that one of my recently coauthored works has fallen into “this ‘familiar’ trap” (xx).

Yeates is of course correct to note that overemphasizing the role of family, and the place of women in families, constrains how we might better think about care on a global level. She rightly cites the work of Shahra Razavi (Reference Razavi2012), whose suggestion of a “care diamond” brings care from the family into the social, political, and economic spheres. Noting that care is still stuck, in important ways, in the family is not the same as asserting that this is where it belongs, though. In my subsequent work, I have tried to dislodge care only from the family. In the context in which I usually write, the United States, where the ideological strength of “personal responsibility” is almost hegemonic, it is difficult to escape the association of care with the familial. Yet Yeates is certainly correct to argue for a broader vision. The way around to an “international welfare state” may seem impossible from an American perspective, but care is being taken up more broadly elsewhere in the world. In Uruguay, for example, a cabinet-level post now systematically follows society's provision of care (Espino and Salvador Reference Espino and Salvador2014; Junta Nacional de Cuidados 2015; Sistema de Cuidados 2015). A global perspective, and one that starts, as does Yeates's perspective, from a desire for global social transformation toward the principles of democratic socialism is a necessary larger vision from which to view the often grinding practices of daily care. But where I would also depart from Yeates's critique is in thinking about the meaning of the “relational” qualities of care. While Yeates uses this term to refer to familial and other intimate relationships, it also applies wherever there are relations of power. Seeing the relations among nations, for example, is a robust way to offer a critique of “the world is flat” assertions of neoliberal thinkers. Again, the focus of relational thinking should be on unequal forms of power.

Yeates's call for a “revitalized commitment to social justice” founded on “universalist systems of social provision guaranteed by enforceable social rights” (xx) brings us to the larger questions of the future of care ethics. Throughout this essay, I have asserted that care ethics is a relational notion, but now we need to explore this idea more thoroughly.

One of the most important aspects of care ethics that is somewhat missed by insisting that care is a practice as well as a disposition is the additional dimension that care is, as well, discursive. Care is not only about actual work but also about how that work is done. It is also about the distribution of resources to do such work and the justifications for such distributions. Thus, to assert that care is a concept that describes a value and a large set of human practices does not yet go far enough to provide us with a view of the meaning of care in any society. Every political and social theory has embedded within it a concept of care; this is necessary given the nature of humans. Yet care in a slaveholding society is not the kind of care that anyone today would wish to endorse. An early critique of care ethics literature made this point: Uma Narayan (Reference Narayan1995) shows how care functioned as a discourse to support British colonialism. So, in the final analysis, the question becomes, within what theoretical frame should we explore care further? I asserted in Caring Democracy (2013) that in a democratic society, we need a democratic account of care. Such accounts will require that we recognize the central role of setting caring responsibilities among people as the primary task of democratic politics and making certain that all people are able to participate in the discussions about what those responsibilities will entail. Only then can democratic citizens be certain that they are not taking advantage of privileges to foist caring responsibilities that might rightfully be theirs onto others. This is the concrete way in which attention to actual care practices becomes a way to move beyond the familial (as Yeates rightly asserts we must) and toward a description and discussion of patterns of domination. Yet, since care is vitally necessary in people's lives, the discussion of domination does not become an end unto itself but a part of a discussion of how policies might better allow everyone to take care of themselves and those who are near and dear to them.

In this way, caring democracy is the next step in the journey begun in Moral Boundaries; it is a way to understand how caring requires public processes by which the value of care is recognized in public life. Thus, Hirschmann's concerns for rethinking what disability means, her emphasis on the environment, Engster's concern for workable public policies that do not just benefit any in-group, Robinson's concerns not to lose sight of vulnerability that is embodied, and Yeates's admonition to think at the international level all require, in order to be fully answered, a directly political approach.

At the same time, it is useful to show that caring democratic approaches are not now widely used in the world. The neoliberal paradigm of care (Tronto Reference Tronto2017)—take care of yourself (and your family)—is now met by a neopopulist rhetoric that seems a return to a virulent form of what Engster has called “in-group” care.

There is still considerably more work to do, of course, to think about the nature of good care. Different national contexts mean that fully exploring what “good care” requires needs to consider deeply the contexts in which care ethics is deployed. While care ethics should never assert that all care can be done well, discerning better and worse forms of care at every level is still an important theoretical task. And as Robinson reminds us, we need to continue the feminist practice of not seeing ourselves always as the ones doing the caring work. We are all, every day of our lives, also recipients of care, even if some of that care is care that we can give to ourselves. Humans cannot escape their bodily limits; care forces us to take that equalizing reality as a lesson for stopping our domination of others.

It is in allowing people to see that care is a critique of domination that there is the most promise. The urgency of caring for our world becomes more stark every day. The solution of economic, productive growth to all human problems has been, for at least several centuries, unchallenged. The idea of unlimited economic productivity focuses our attention on a metaphor of mastery over the material world, one which is incompatible with continued healthy life on this planet. Our ultimate relationship with this world matters greatly, too, as we pursue social justice.

Twenty-five years ago, care promised to usher in a revolutionary way of rethinking how humans might relate to each other, to things, and to the world itself. Because it offers a more complete and complex view of the world than that offered by political theories that start from already created autonomous actors ready to affect the world around them, care has more modest ends. Seeing ourselves as committed to equality and freedom—in the context of our human limits—seems more compelling still today.