Rebecca L. Clark

Working from home has rapidly become commonplace in recent years, expedited by the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper asks whether a default employee entitlement to work from home would promote or hinder the pursuit of gender justice. While such a policy would likely improve the employment prospects of women with significant caregiving responsibilities, this could come at the expense of creating a new glass ceiling and exacerbating the gendered division of labour. I argue on pragmatic grounds that feminists should nevertheless endorse the policy, in tandem with measures to mitigate these negative effects.

Changing a diaper, cooking a meal, comforting a friend. Should we think of these activities as work? What, if anything, is wrong with how they are currently organized? What would be better? This chapter addresses these questions in the context of contemporary Western capitalist economies. Drawing on feminist scholarship, the author argues that the status quo is both unjust and inimical to human flourishing. It is unjust because caregivers are systematically disadvantaged and the work is not fairly distributed within and between households. It is inimical to flourishing because of the isolated and socially coercive conditions in which caregiving often takes place, as well as its relentlessly repetitive nature. It is suggested that caregiving work is normatively distinctive, since it is often unpaid, naturalized, and motivated by care for others. The chapter ends by considering ways in which caregiving work could be transformed to address these concerns, or otherwise reduced or redistributed.

Realist ideology critique (RIC) is a strand of political realism recently developed in response to concerns that realism is biased toward the status quo. RIC aims to debunk an individual's belief that a social institution is legitimate by revealing that the belief is caused by that very same institution. Despite its growing prominence, RIC has received little critical attention. In this article, I buck this trend. First, I improve on contemporary accounts of RIC by clarifying its status and the role of motivated reasoning. Second, I show that realist ideology critics face a dilemma: either their account makes deeply implausible epistemological assumptions, or they temper its epistemology at the expense of rendering it toothless. I argue for each horn in turn before revealing the dilemma to be a false one by making a novel distinction between varying strengths of RIC based on their underlying epistemological assumptions. I propose Moderate RIC as a solution: upon discovering that one reason for your belief that a social institution is legitimate is likely malignantly epistemically circular, the belief should undergo further epistemic testing. I respond to three potential objections and suggest that Moderate RIC would make a fruitful addition to political theorists' methodological toolkit.