John Rawls and Asha Bhandary use David Hume's conditions of justice to frame the original position choice from which principles of justice are selected. To use Hume's conditions in this way excludes from representation those who are not full cooperators, including people who need lifelong dependency care. This implies that their claim to dependent care is not a fundamental claim of justice, but must have significantly lower priority. This article argues that an appropriate theory of liberal dependency care will abandon this Humean framing assumption, and will treat the claim to dependency care as a fundamental requirement of justice.

In this introduction, I offer a broad overview of Asha Bhandary's Freedom to Care: Liberalism, Dependency Care, and Culture so that readers can better situate the suggestions of this symposium's contributors: Clark Wolf, Elizabeth Edenberg, and Helga Varden. Bhandary develops and defends the theory of liberal dependency care in response to the failure of past liberal theorizing to appreciate that dependency care — which is essential to our survival — is a matter of justice. By concluding with a Hamptonian framing, I hope to further generate discussion of this novel work that broadens the influence of contemporary feminist liberal theorizing.