what Lawrence Blum (1988) has called an “impartialist conception of morality.” An
impartialist conception holds that genuinely moral and political principles involve
impersonal decision-making, justice, the use of formal rationality, and a universal
principle. This basic orientation to morality, Blum argues, is the “dominant conception
of morality in contemporary Anglo-American moral philosophy, forming the core of both
a Kantian conception of morality and important strands in utilitarian…thinking as well”
(p. 472). In this tradition, and my primary example will be Habermas’s (1996, 1998a)
theory of legal legitimacy, social welfare is an effort to actualize universal guarantees of
public and private autonomy in concrete conditions. Thus, rights to social welfare are not
an essential aspect of legal legitimacy. Once citizens decide to coordinate their lives
together through positive law, they must pay due respect to the freedom and equality of
each consociate by granting one another rights guaranteeing their public and private
autonomy. Social welfare only becomes necessary as citizens try to realize this due
respect under concrete conditions.
The second approach is associated with recent work in feminist care ethics (see
Gilligan, [1983], 1993; Tronto, 1993; Noddings, 1984; Ruddick [1989], 1995; Kittay,
1999 and 2001). Despite important differences between the various articulations of care
ethics, the core idea is that relations of care, dependency, and nurturance are genuinely
moral or political concerns, and that they must form an essential part of any conception of
moral or political legitimacy. Morality and justice, in their view, are not exhausted by
impartialism, and they must at least be complemented (or replaced, as some theorists
argue) by an ethics of attachment, empathy, and responsiveness to the concrete needs of
particular others. My primary point of departure will be Kittay’s version of this
argument. Kittay argues that matters of justice must be expanded to include the needs of
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Convention