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Democratic caring as an alternative to neoliberalism

4 important questions on Democratic caring as an alternative to neoliberalism

What are the remaining challenges left from a care-ethical approach?

Care often involves dependency relationships.
1. How can democratic societies, committed to a starting assumption of equality, be squared with dependency relationships?
2. How can care eliminate hierarchies in allocating the responsibilities for care?

What is the "satanic mill" according Polanyi?

The desire to turn everything into a marketable commodity.
To stop it, dissenting thinking - we need to engage in an alternative economy (eg bartering) and deny the power of capitalist economics.

Following Stephanie Collins; The heart of care ethics is the idea that dependency relationships generate duties. What is characteristic of these duties?

They are not a matter of choice. By its nature, the real concrete existence of human relationships establishes the centrality of relationships in human life. Such relationships belief the ideology of the market-operating individual. Neoliberalism reveals itself to be an ideology in the face of an ethic of care.

We should understand the allocation of caring responsibilities as the understanding of the substantive work of democratic life. What are the main two dangers in reallocating caring responsibilities?

1. Parochialism - refers to the ways in which caring relationships tend to be drawn in narrow circles, for example, around families or social groups.
2. Paternalism - refers to the ways in which caregivers, by virtue of the fact that they often have power over care receivers, are able to substitute their judgements for those of care receivers about what the caring needs in any situation actually are.

The question on the page originate from the summary of the following study material:

There is an alternative: Homines cadans and the limits of neoliberalism

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