dependents and dependency workers, and that the relation between the dependency
worker and the charge should be viewed as the paradigmatically moral relationship. In
Kittay’s view, humans are primarily connected through relations of dependency. These
relations are normatively, conceptually, and temporally prior to all other relations, and so
all subsequent moral and political relations ought to be subordinate to the requirements
necessary for legitimate dependency relations. Given the features of legitimate
dependency relations, this means that Kittay at once expands the moral and political
domain and rejects impartialism as the proper way to conceptualize the type of reasoning
that must go on in that domain.
However, both sides in this debate have conflated issues that must remain
separate. They conflate the question of how the moral and political domain is defined
with the question of what sorts of justificatory constraints ought to be operative within
this domain (see Benhabib, 1995, p. 187). Habermas adopts an impartial conception of
moral reasoning whereby moral and legal principles must be decided in accordance with
impartial procedures of argumentation. This leads him to view questions of how we are
to care for dependents and dependency workers as a question of application—as
fundamentally about questions of the “good life” rather than of justice narrowly defined.
Kittay, in contrast, thinks that dependency issues are fundamentally moral, and so
impartiality is not a good way of understanding the justificatory constraints found in the
moral domain. In contrast to both of these positions, I argue that there is no necessary
connection between the definition of the moral domain and the kinds of reasoning that
must go on there. Kittay is correct to view dependency concerns as an essential part of
justice and morality, but Habermas is correct in his elucidation of moral and legal
legitimacy in terms of universal and impartial procedures of argumentation. With this
4
Convention