28
choices to insure resources against possible brute luck in the hypothetical insurance market, as
Dworkin explains, or “voluntary” choices to cultivate taste for ancient claret and plovers’ eggs, as
Cohen specifies. Unlike those choices posed by luck egalitarians, the choice of dependent caretakers
makes a positive contribution to the society: without care work provided by caretakers, society cannot
survive and thrive. In the case of the dependent caretakers, it is thus unfair to say that they should be
held fully responsible for the cost of their choice.
Second, the disadvantages women suffer because of their choice to do care work is largely
caused by the social context that unfairly ignores the unavoidable fact of human dependency. For
example, the labor market is designed to best-fit the full- time worker who can work at least eight
hours a day and five days a week. Often job requirements are designed on the assumption that the full-
time worker does not assume the responsibilities for doing housework and taking care of children and
other dependents. Given these circumstances, the employment possibilities for those who do take care
of dependents and assume housekeeping responsibilities (mostly women) are more limited than those
of those who do not (mostly men). Since dependent caretakers cannot fit into the social structure that
is modeled for the full-time worker, they generally cannot compete in the labor market on equal terms
with those who are not so encumbered. Consequently, a high proportion of those in the dependent
caretaker group who are also employed in the work force end up having part-time, temporary, lower-
paid, and/or less prestigious jobs.
It is true that all choices are socially shaped within a context. Such a context, however,
provides more barriers to the choices of a certain group of people than to those of others. Hirschmann
also points out that “we always live in contexts, and those contexts always socially construct the
people who live in them. But the contexts that construct the choosing subject are not necessarily
neutral in a relativist sense. Rather, contexts contain conditions that empower some people and restrict
others.”
71
No one person and no particular group, such as any one man or all men, have full control
over the entire social structure. Nevertheless, overall non-dependent caretakers are placed in a more
71
Hirschmann, The Subject of Liberty, p. 96.
Convention