Matilda Carter

Relational egalitarians oppose social hierarchy. Or, more precisely, they oppose intolerable social hierarchy. Stigma is often included among those unequal forms of relating that relational egalitarians ought to oppose, but there are circumstances in which stigmatizing behaviors or group identities might be strategically important for opposing social inequalities. Working through different responses to this puzzle, in this paper I advance the view that stigma is neutral, such that relational egalitarians should only oppose forms of it that are unwarranted.

By emphasising the role of concepts like social status, power and respect, all relational egalitarians seek to demonstrate that there is more to the political concept of equality than the distribution of goods. While there is a broad consensus on the nature of equality, however, the nature of justice is a matter of internal dispute. The aim of this paper is to disentangle these argumentative threads, building on work in early relational egalitarian scholarship to develop a relational approach to justice, both distinct from the distributive approach to justice and isolated from the relational approach to equality. In doing so, I reveal possible and sometimes surprising alliances between relational egalitarians and other scholars on the nature of justice.

This paper deals with the ethics of gender affirmation – or, as I frame it, the ethics of responding to gender identity claims. Drawing on Stephen Darwall’s concept of recognition respect, I make the case for a moral duty of affirmation: conceived of as a duty to affirm a person’s standing to self-theorise. In this I break from other philosophical treatments of the issue, separating the ethics of affirmation from the ethics of assent. In a social world characterised by uncertainty and reasonable disagreement about the metaphysics of sex and gender, we can all expect others to respect our standing to self-theorise. But because of that disagreement, I argue, this rarely (if ever) entails that others are under a duty to acquire the belief (or to aspire to acquire the belief) that we actually are a member of the gender category with which we have claimed identification. Recognising that affirmation and assent come apart in this way, I go on to demonstrate, can help us in navigating a number of fraught contemporary disputes.

This book offers a moral and political analysis of the social position of people living with dementia. It takes a relational egalitarian view on the demands of justice, reflecting on what would be required for our society to become one in which we relate to members of this group as equals. By making several contributions to the legal and political philosophy of dementia care, the author uses a novel framework to underpin several public policy recommendations, aimed at remedying the injustices those living with the condition face. Whilst doing so, she takes care not to overlook the legislative and economic barriers to achieving an ideal, dementia-inclusive society, and considers ways in which they might be overcome. Providing public policy insights while furthering scholarship on justice, equality, and capability, this is a timely and novel book that speaks to some of the most urgent questions facing contemporary ageing societies.

Relational egalitarians oppose social hierarchy. Or, more precisely, they oppose intolerable social hierarchy. Stigma is often included among those unequal forms of relating that relational egalitarians ought to oppose, but there are circumstances in which stigmatizing behaviors or group identities might be strategically important for opposing social inequalities. Working through different responses to this puzzle, in this paper I advance the view that stigma is neutral, such that relational egalitarians should only oppose forms of it that are unwarranted.

This paper deals with the impact of the extended mind thesis on relational egalitarianism: the now-dominant view on (the politically relevant form of) equality within contemporary political philosophy. If proponents of the extended mind thesis are right, I argue, persons have two core interests that arise from their relationships with elements of the external environment: an interest in an environment supportive of cognition and an interest in extended mental authenticity. Acknowledging this requires relational egalitarians to be spatially-conscious, giving these interests due weight wherever they are engaged. This will not always change their conclusions, but there are a range of cases in which this form of relational egalitarianism yields unique insights. In this paper, I examine three: the relationship between landlords and tenants, cloud software and tech ecosystems, and forced transfers for dementia care.

By emphasising the role of concepts like social status, power and respect, all relational egalitarians seek to demonstrate that there is more to the political concept of equality than the distribution of goods. While there is a broad consensus on the nature of equality, however, the nature of justice is a matter of internal dispute. The aim of this paper is to disentangle these argumentative threads, building on work in early relational egalitarian scholarship to develop a relational approach to justice, both distinct from the distributive approach to justice and isolated from the relational approach to equality. In doing so, I reveal possible and sometimes surprising alliances between relational egalitarians and other scholars on the nature of justice.

Emphasising the vulnerability and interdependency of humans, care ethics has emerged in recent years as a powerful alternative to dominant modes of thinking in moral theory. Bringing together the theoretical and applied dimensions of care ethics, this pioneering volume provides an authoritative overview of what care ethics is, the internal debates within the field, and the contributions it can make to pressing contemporary problems. Divided into three parts, Part I of The Bloomsbury Handbook of Care Ethics traces the development of care ethics and how it interacts with other central components of moral reasoning, such as freedom and normative justification. Part II then introduces readers to the ongoing discussions among care ethicists about the direction, scope, and underlying mechanisms of the theory. Finally, Part III showcases the varied contributions care ethics can make to key areas of applied philosophy, from medical ethics, disability and care, and feminist ethics to timely issues such as school design and public administration. With an international team of experts providing interdisciplinary approaches to care, this is the place to start if you want to gain an in-depth insight into the field of care ethics and its crucial role in addressing worldwide vulnerabilities.

Many caregivers feel that they need to lie or withhold the truth from people living with dementia, but worry that, in doing so, they are violating a duty to tell the truth. In this article, I argue that withholding the truth from and, in limited circumstances, lying to people living with dementia is not only morally permissible, but morally required by a more general requirement that we treat each other as persons worthy of respect. I do so through an analysis of the groundings of the duty to tell the truth, and a critical reflection on its cognitively ableist construction.

While there are urgent health-related demands surrounding dementia, there are sociopolitical dimensions to this issue that ought not to be neglected, concerning the ways in which institutions and individuals treat people living with dementia. Key among these concerns, for dementia self-advocate Christine Bryden, is the dominant narrative of dementia as a process that irreversibly sets those that live with it on a path to the destruction of their personal identities and personhood. In this paper, I bolster Bryden’s arguments against the loss narrative and develop a novel conception of personhood as a first step towards challenging it.

The dispute between the transgender-rights movement and “gender-critical” activists represents a stark division in British public discourse. Although the issues of contention are numerous and require their own philosophical treatment, a core metaphysical concern underlies them. Gender-critical activists, such as Kathleen Stock, tend to argue that recognizing trans women as women requires erasing the category of biological sex. This implies that all trans women are male, and thus recognizing them as women rips female biology from the root of the category “woman.” In this article, I argue that this view is mistaken. As exogenously produced sex characteristics should count toward a person's sex classification, all trans women are female.

This article takes as its starting point the moral requirement to include persons with serious cognitive impairments in democratic decision‐making. That said, including such persons poses particular practical challenges to effective democratic participation. Nussbaum has set out the most extensive proposals for inclusion based on a model of guardianship, but we find they fall short due to not suitably respecting and facilitating the subjective decision‐making of impaired persons. Instead, we argue for a model of co‐constitution, whereby aides work within a supported decision‐making paradigm to arrive at political choices in collaboration with impaired persons. To flesh out this model, we propose collaboration be based on three ideal types of interaction – expert, Socratic, and deliberative – designed to accommodate differing degrees and types of cognitive impairments. We further argue that the aide should have a relationship of detached professionalism with the impaired person and therefore should not be the person’s carer. Finally, we conclude that this separation be combined with transparent and regular invigilation of the aide’s decision‐making process to best safeguard the process from abuse or error.

Carers often interfere with the choices of people living with dementia. On neorepublican and (most) relational egalitarian views, interference can be justified if it tracks a person's interests: if it does not lead to a relationship of domination. However, the kind of environment-shaping interventions carers often pursue would be considered infantilising or objectionably paternalistic in other cases. In this paper, I defend this indirect approach and argue that it offers the best prospects of dementia care without domination.

Despite negative effects on their health and social lives, many informal carers of people living with dementia claim to be acting in accordance with a moral obligation. Indeed, feelings of failure and shame are commonly reported by those who later give up their caring responsibilities, suggesting a widespread belief that professional dementia care, whether delivered in the person's own home or in an institutional setting, ought always to be a last resort. In this paper, however, I suggest that this common intuition gets things the wrong way around. Adopting a relational egalitarian framework, I argue that the most serious injustices engendered by present‐day dementia care services are contingent on broader societal structures—they can thus be ameliorated relatively easily (if resource intensively) by changing those structures. Informal dementia care, on the other hand, carries similar risks of injustice and is much more resistant to structural reform. While there may be moral obligations to provide informal dementia care in present‐day societies, then, they arise because of the deficiencies of professional care, not the virtues of its informal counterpart. Though we may be far from achieving just care arrangements in most of our societies, we must never lose sight of the fact that, when we engage in morally permitted informal dementia care, we are exercising our last resort.

Elizabeth Barnes has recently developed an account of disability that is sensitive to the role of self-evaluation. To have a physical disability is, according to Barnes, to have a body that is merely different from the norm. Yet, as Barnes notes, some disabilities will genuinely frustrate some life plans. It may be the case, therefore, that a disability is instrumentally bad for a person and that acquiring one may be a genuine loss. Equally, however, a person may genuinely value a disability such that it is instrumentally good for them and that they experience the acquiring of it as a gain. Notably, Barnes explicitly restricts this analysis to physical disabilities, leaving open the status of mental disabilities. Nevertheless, Barnes does not rule out the extension of her model to this category, and she expresses a desire to see future work on other disabilities built upon it. This article takes up this challenge, making the case that to possess a mental disability is merely to possess a minority mind.

In medical ethics, there is a well‐established debate about the authority of advance directives over people living with dementia, a dispute often cast as a clash between two principles: respecting autonomy and beneficence toward patients. In this article, I argue that there need be only one principle in substitute decision‐making: determining authenticity. This principle favors a substituted judgment standard in all cases and instructs decision‐makers to determine what the patient would authentically prefer to happen—based not merely on the patient’s decisions but also on their present settled dispositions. Adhering to this principle entails that, in a significant range of cases, an advance directive can (and indeed ought to) be overruled.