Social Theory and Practice

Volume 42, Issue 1, January 2016

Asha Bhandary
Pages 155-182

A Millian Concept of Care
What Mill’s Defense of the Common Arrangement Can Teach Us About Care

This paper advances a Millian concept of care by re-evaluating his defense of the “common arrangement,” or a gendered division of labor in marriage, in connection with his views about traditionally feminine capacities, time use, and societal expectations. Informed by contemporary care ethics and liberal feminism, I explicate the best argument Mill could have provided in defense of the common arrangement, and I show that it is grounded in a valuable concept of care for care-givers. This dual-sided concept of care theorizes care-giving both as a domain of human excellence and as labor with accompanying burdens. Liberal feminists should adopt this Millian concept of care, which can then inform principled thinking about distributive arrangements.