Eva Feder Kittay
Biographic Data
| ID | 604464 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Eva Feder Kittay |
| GIVEN NAMES | Eva Feder |
| FAMILY NAME | Kittay |
| SIGNATURE | KITTAY E F |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stony Brook University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6911-5322 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 40 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 133 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 4 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1981 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Why Human Difference is Critical to a Conception of Moral Standing
I argue that the claim that merely being born of two human beings in a condition that supports life is sufficient for full moral status. Not only ought we not to exclude any human being from full moral status because they lack the possession of what some have deemed to be morally relevant properties, we don’t have a full grasp of what is morally relevant unless we include the many different possible lives humans live in their diverse bodies and m…
Precarity, precariousness, and disability
Disability Rights as a Necessary Framework for Crisis Standards of Care and the Future of Health Care
In this essay, we suggest practical ways to shift the framing of crisis standards of care toward disability justice. We elaborate on the vision statement provided in the 2010 Institute of Medicine (National Academy of Medicine) “Summary of Guidance for Establishing Crisis Standards of Care for Use in Disaster Situations,” which emphasizes fairness; equitable processes; community and provider engagement, education, and communication; and the rule …
We Have Seen the Mutants—and They Are Us
In this essay, I recount and examine my response to a genetic diagnosis of my disabled daughter. My daughter was forty‐nine before the diagnosis came. All her disabilities were traceable to a de novo single gene variant on the PURA gene that was discovered only in 2014. I speak of the jolt and the recalibration that this discovery engendered, concluding that, while it seemed that everything had changed, nothing had changed. But my family did disc…
A Demanding Ethics of Care
The writer responds to the book review essay “Caring for People with Disabilities: An Ethics of Respect,” by Kevin Mintz and David Wasserman, in the January‐February 2020 issue of the Hastings Center Report, which discusses her book Learning from My Daughter: The Value and Care of Disabled Minds
Where is the “Dis” in Disability? A Review of The Minority Body
Learning from My Daughter
Disability offers a significant challenge to long-held philosophical views of the nature of the good life, what offers meaning in our lives, the importance of care, and the centrality of reason, as well as questions of justice, dignity, and personhood. In Learning from My Daughter, the author claims that living with a daughter who has multiple and significant disabilities, including cognitive disabilities, has been utterly transformative for thin…
Love’s Labor
This new edition of Eva Feder Kittay’s feminist classic, Love’s Labor, explores how theories of justice and morality must be reconfigured when intersecting with care and dependency, and the failure of policy towards women who engage in care work. The work is hailed as a major contribution to the development of an ethics of care. Where society is viewed as an association of equal and autonomous persons, the work of caring for dependents figures ne…
Welfare, Dependency, and a Public Ethic of Care
There is every reason to react with alarm to prospect of world filled with self-actualizing persons pulling their own strings, capable of guiltlessly saying to anyone about anything, and freely choosing when to begin and end all their relationships. It is hard to see how, in such world, children could be raised, sick or disturbed could be cared for, or people could know each other through their lives and grow old together (Scheman, 1983: 240). Is…
Ten Human Dependency and Rawlsian Equality
The dependency care centers on the most acute moments of human dependency: helpless infancy and early childhood, frail old age, and incapacitating illness and disability. This chapter focuses on utter dependency because the inequities in the organization and distribution of dependency work, and the impact of these inequities on the possibility of equality for all, are most evident when dependency is a feature of our human condition rather than a …
A theory of justice as fair terms of social life given our inevitable dependency and our inextricable interdependency
An ethics of care has often been understood as in opposition to an ethics of justice. This chapter proposes that care's rival ethical theory is not an ethics of justice. A theory of justice pertains to the governance of the basic institutions of society, while care is an ethic as such: i.e., it is concerned with interpersonal relationships. If we try to conceive of a theory of justice that is based on and tries to promote an ethics of care, we ge…
Centering Justice on Dependency and Recovering Freedom
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Love's Labor
Caring for the long haul
As the mother of a daughter who has and will always require care to meet her most basic needs, I have seen firsthand how critical it is to have adequate means by which to meet those needs—for her sake, mine, and my family’s. Her flourishing life has contributed to enhancing not only our own, but those of all who care for her and who enter our lives. I have wanted to see us do better by all the families who struggle and have to scratch and claw th…
Frames, Fields, and Contrasts
Recently, there has been a surge of interest in the lexicon. The demand for a fuller and more adequate understanding of lexical meaning required by developments in computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science has stimulated a refocused interest in linguistics, psychology, and philosophy. Different disciplines have studied lexical structure from their own vantage points, and because scholars have only intermittently co…
The Ethics of Care, Dependence, and Disability
According to the most important theories of justice, personal dignity is closely related to independence, and the care that people with disabilities receive is seen as a way for them to achieve the greatest possible autonomy. However, human beings are naturally subject to periods of dependency, and people without disabilities are only “temporarily abled.” Instead of seeing assistance as a limitation, we consider it to be a resource at the basis o…
Forever Small
I explore the ethics of altering the body of a child with severe cognitive disabilities in such a way that keeps the child “forever small.” The parents of Ashley, a girl of six with severe cognitive and developmental disabilities, in collaboration with her physicians and the Hospital Ethics Committee, chose to administer growth hormones that would inhibit her growth. They also decided to remove her uterus and breast buds, assuring that she would …
Planning a trip to Italy, arriving in Holland
Cognitive disability and its challenge to moral philosophy
Through a series of essays contributed by clinicians, medical historians, and prominent moral philosophers, Cognitive Disability and Its Challenge to Moral Philosophy addresses the ethical, bio-ethical, epistemological, historical, and meta-philosophical questions raised by cognitive disability: Features essays by a prominent clinicians and medical historians of cognitive disability, and prominent contemporary philosophers such as Ian Hacking, Ma…
The Personal Is Philosophical Is Political
Having encountered landmines in offering a critique of philosophy based on my experience as the mother of a cognitively disabled daughter, I ask, “Should I continue?” I defend the idea that pursuing this project is of a piece with the invisible care labor that is done by people with disabilities and their families. The value of attempting to influence philosophical conceptions of cognitive disability by virtue of this experience is justified by a…
The Global Heart Transplant and Caring across National Boundaries
Blackwell Guide to Feminist Philosophy
The Blackwell Guide to Feminist Philosophy
The Blackwell Guide to Feminist Philosophy
At the Margins of Moral Personhood
Dependency, Difference and the Global Ethic of Longterm Care
When Caring Is Just and Justice Is Caring
“Praise to you, Lord God, king of the universe, who varies the forms of thy creatures. ” So begins an ancient Hebrew prayer which is to be recited upon encountering an individual with “deformities.” Wolf Wolfensberger, The Principles of Normalization in Human Services When speaking of a person labeled “profoundly mentally retarded” emphasize “profound.”
Taking Dependency Seriously
Contemporary industrialized societies have been confronted with the fact and consequences of women's increased participation in paid employment. Whether this increase has resulted from women's desire for equality or from changing economic circumstances, women and men have been faced with a crisis in the organization of work that concerns dependents, that is, those unable to care for themselves. This is labor that has been largely unpaid, often un…
Centering Justice on Dependency and Recovering Freedom
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Forever Small
I explore the ethics of altering the body of a child with severe cognitive disabilities in such a way that keeps the child “forever small.” The parents of Ashley, a girl of six with severe cognitive and developmental disabilities, in collaboration with her physicians and the Hospital Ethics Committee, chose to administer growth hormones that would inhibit her growth. They also decided to remove her uterus and breast buds, assuring that she would …
Loves Labor Revisited
Love's Labor explores the relations that dependency work fosters between women and between men and women, and argues that dependency is not exceptional but integral to human life. The commentaries point to more facets of dependency such as the importance (and limitation) of personal narrative in philosophizing dependency (Ruddick); the role of spirituality that Gottlieb addresses with regard to his disabled daughter; and the application of the th…
Dependency, Equality, and Welfare
Love's Labor Revisited
Woman as Metaphor 1
Women's activities and relations to men are persistent metaphors for man's projects. I query the prominence of these and the lack of equivalent metaphors where men are the metaphoric vehicle for women and women's activities. Women's role as metaphor results from her otherness and her relational and mediational importance in men's lives. Otherness, mediation, and relation characterize the role of metaphor in language and thought. This congruence b…
Rereading Freud on ‘femininity’ or why not womb envy
Semantic Fields and the Structure of Metaphor
Preview this article: Semantic Fields and the Structure of Metaphor, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/sl.5.1.03kit-1.gif
Rereading Freud on ‘femininity’ or why not womb envy
The identification of metaphor
Metaphor
Woman as Metaphor 1
Women's activities and relations to men are persistent metaphors for man's projects. I query the prominence of these and the lack of equivalent metaphors where men are the metaphoric vehicle for women and women's activities. Women's role as metaphor results from her otherness and her relational and mediational importance in men's lives. Otherness, mediation, and relation characterize the role of metaphor in language and thought. This congruence b…
Philosophy and Feminist Thinking
Taking Dependency Seriously
Contemporary industrialized societies have been confronted with the fact and consequences of women's increased participation in paid employment. Whether this increase has resulted from women's desire for equality or from changing economic circumstances, women and men have been faced with a crisis in the organization of work that concerns dependents, that is, those unable to care for themselves. This is labor that has been largely unpaid, often un…
AH! My Foolish Heart
Dependency, Equality, and Welfare
Dependency Relations as a Starting Point for Justice
have a choice if she's not well positioned financially? Loves Labor challenges a political system that makes those situations threatening for many women and that puts the responsibility more on them than on men. The book also criticizes contemporary philosophical theories of equality and justice for ignoring the unique social position of people who care for dependents. With profound wisdom, clarity, and compassion, Eva Feder Kittay envisions a so…
When Caring Is Just and Justice Is Caring
“Praise to you, Lord God, king of the universe, who varies the forms of thy creatures. ” So begins an ancient Hebrew prayer which is to be recited upon encountering an individual with “deformities.” Wolf Wolfensberger, The Principles of Normalization in Human Services When speaking of a person labeled “profoundly mentally retarded” emphasize “profound.”
Love's Labor Revisited
Loves Labor Revisited
Love's Labor explores the relations that dependency work fosters between women and between men and women, and argues that dependency is not exceptional but integral to human life. The commentaries point to more facets of dependency such as the importance (and limitation) of personal narrative in philosophizing dependency (Ruddick); the role of spirituality that Gottlieb addresses with regard to his disabled daughter; and the application of the th…
At the Margins of Moral Personhood
Case Study
Dependency, Difference and the Global Ethic of Longterm Care
The Blackwell Guide to Feminist Philosophy
The Blackwell Guide to Feminist Philosophy
The Global Heart Transplant and Caring across National Boundaries
Blackwell Guide to Feminist Philosophy
The Personal Is Philosophical Is Political
Having encountered landmines in offering a critique of philosophy based on my experience as the mother of a cognitively disabled daughter, I ask, “Should I continue?” I defend the idea that pursuing this project is of a piece with the invisible care labor that is done by people with disabilities and their families. The value of attempting to influence philosophical conceptions of cognitive disability by virtue of this experience is justified by a…
Planning a trip to Italy, arriving in Holland
Cognitive disability and its challenge to moral philosophy
Through a series of essays contributed by clinicians, medical historians, and prominent moral philosophers, Cognitive Disability and Its Challenge to Moral Philosophy addresses the ethical, bio-ethical, epistemological, historical, and meta-philosophical questions raised by cognitive disability: Features essays by a prominent clinicians and medical historians of cognitive disability, and prominent contemporary philosophers such as Ian Hacking, Ma…
The Ethics of Care, Dependence, and Disability
According to the most important theories of justice, personal dignity is closely related to independence, and the care that people with disabilities receive is seen as a way for them to achieve the greatest possible autonomy. However, human beings are naturally subject to periods of dependency, and people without disabilities are only “temporarily abled.” Instead of seeing assistance as a limitation, we consider it to be a resource at the basis o…
Forever Small
I explore the ethics of altering the body of a child with severe cognitive disabilities in such a way that keeps the child “forever small.” The parents of Ashley, a girl of six with severe cognitive and developmental disabilities, in collaboration with her physicians and the Hospital Ethics Committee, chose to administer growth hormones that would inhibit her growth. They also decided to remove her uterus and breast buds, assuring that she would …
Sociology (26 works) · Political science (20 works) · Computer Science (19 works) · Psychology (19 works) · Law (17 works) · Philosophy (15 works) · Epistemology (12 works) · Political Philosophy and Ethics (11 works) · Ethics in medical practice (8 works) · Economic Justice (7 works)