Pragya Dev discusses the Indian care system in this personal review, in dialogue with Miller’s foundational text.
It all began when I was with my mother in the hospital ward number 1024. With nothing better to do, I asked my mother a thought experiment question-
“Hey, Maa, suppose our family (my father, brother and I) were drowning, and you could save only one person; who would it be?”
“What kind of question is this?”
You’re stuck with me, literally. You have to answer. I want to know who your favourite is!”
“I’d rather die than make this choice. Stop this nonsense at once.”
And just like that, this question laid the foundation for one of the chapters of my doctoral thesis. I often wonder about my mother, an educated homemaker who is a religious, dedicated, and dutiful wife and daughter-in-law, as well as a caring mother who has spent thirty-four years of her life catering to the needs of her family.
Growing up in a household with blurred boundaries between care, need, moral obligation and dependency has always led me to question whether it is possible to separate these facets of human existence. Indeed, these questions have troubled me to such an extent that they became a significant component of my academic research endeavours. In June 2024, my mother, Seema Devi (Ma from here onwards), was diagnosed with a critical cardiological condition and was urgently advised to undergo CABG (Coronary Artery Bypass Graft). By that time, I had spent approximately three years as a scholar of care studies and around 27 years observing care in the domestic realm, but this incident transformed theories into praxis for me. My mother, a primary caregiver for most of her life, was now on the other side of the table. I spent one month as her carer, a woman visibly uncomfortable with this arrangement. This experience allowed me to explore the response of a care receiver who has been a caregiver throughout her life. Her resistance to receiving care led me to understand the position of a caregiver as a care receiver unaccustomed to being cared for. Additionally, it prompted me to reassess the role of dependency and its entanglement with need. Drawing upon the discourse of care, I juxtapose Sarah Miller’s conceptualisation of ‘ethics of needs’ with the Indian sensibility of morality-driven care.
Sarah Clark Miller’s The Ethics of Need (2012) certainly takes a step towards providing an understanding situated at the intersection of Kantian moral philosophy and feminist care ethics. Throughout the book, Miller responds to preliminary questions that she poses in the introduction of her work: To what extent is it morally permissible to prioritize our own needs over others’ needs?” (Miller, p. 3). She iterates how ‘fundamental needs’ are “[r]ooted in biology, but related to culture” and describes eleven types of fundamental needs while leaving sufficient room for local interpretation and revision (Miller, p. 37).
One of the many stereotypical Indian household interpretations of ‘need’ overlaps with ‘obligation’ or, as Miller puts it, “duty to care” (Miller, p. 45). However, the distinction lies in the understanding of ‘agency’, which is altered or carefully removed (in extreme cases) from the comprehension of fundamental needs. Let us clarify this with a description of an incident. While I was the only one present during her pre-operative care, we would watch films and pragmatically discuss how things escalated to the point where the operation became the solution to her problems. We also assessed how she regarded every family member’s need as a ‘fundamental need’ while paying little attention to her own requirements. Everything took a turn for the worse when Ma met my father just before her operation; it took her mere seconds to shift her concerns—she was more worried about what my father would have for breakfast, how he would spend his time, and who would take care of my grandparents whilst he was in the hospital. She even began to fret about how (more importantly, who) the kitchen would be restocked, as she had not prepared the house for her absence. Ever since then, I have been pondering where this ‘need’ fits: the need to fulfil an unwarranted “duty to care” even when no one expects it from her. Which chord of morality could result in such a convoluted understanding of fundamental ‘needs’?
As mentioned earlier, Miller situates her understanding of needs at the crossroads of Kantian moral philosophy and feminist care ethics. She explicitly pushes the defined boundaries of the Kantian notion of needs to accommodate feminist approaches and depicts how feminist care ethics borrows the ‘duty to care’ to build a case for the components of good care. For her, care comprises power relations and often entails dependency- something that can be observed in Ma’s case where “[b]ound by the duty to care”, she gave and continues to give as much as she can, to an extent where she pushes herself at the “margins of agency” (Miller, p. 84; Miller p. 97). As Miller iterates:
The duty to care opens a space for consideration and critique of the ways in which social mechanisms can produce and maintain vulnerabilities. It incorporates a distinction between “natural” need and “generated” or “socially imposed” need… In addition to these natural needs, vulnerabilities, and dependencies, socio-economic injustice may produce further generated needs, vulnerabilities, and dependencies, and the unnecessarily compromised agency of elderly individuals that could otherwise be avoided…The duty to care recognizes that humans cannot respond to every need they encounter. To do so would mean certain and complete sacrifice of their own ends. Sacrificing such ends runs counter to duties that individuals have to themselves. (Miller, p. 106)
Despite the duty of care being flexible and accommodating, “normative assumptions of policy recommendations conceive of women as willing to sacrifice their own needs so that others’ needs can be met” (Miller, p. 114). Indeed, women in every context are the frontrunners of “cosmopolitan care” (Miller, p. 120). Both Kantian philosophy and care ethics object to “self-sacrifice involving meeting others’ needs” (Miller, p. 62). Therefore, the question here remains: to what extent can one care while relinquishing their agency to fulfil the needs of others? In the context of Ma, at what point does the duty to care turn into an obligation that subsumes the carer’s agency? This may be regarded as a personal choice, but what about the sociocultural influences whereby the woman of the house is assigned the “duty to care” in such a way that it becomes part of her identity, with her worth being directly proportional to how much her family relies on her for the fulfilment of their needs? Is it not a melting pot called ‘need’ with cultural significance, societal structures, obligatory morality, and sacrifice as its components? Can it be considered as a tenet of care? In this regard, Miller contends:
I cautioned that the identification of the moral weight of fundamental needs does not automatically translate into a moral obligation to respond to such needs when found in others. I suggested that one would need to provide further argumentation to establish the entailment of obligation (Miller, p. 44).
Since the ‘duty to care’ is not prescriptive (i.e., it does not dictate what ‘moral agents’ should or should not do), “it means that moral perception and moral judgment must play a prominent role in determining right action” (Miller, p. 66). In my view, this is where Miller’s conceptualisation falls short in justifying the theory as practice. The fact that I am questioning and articulating the concept of need on behalf of Ma speaks volumes, while she continues to address the needs of the family. I wonder how Maa would react if she shared a table with Ayn Rand, Nel Noddings, and Sarah Miller. I wonder whether she would agree with Joan Tronto’s model of care. I ponder if she understands the meaning of altruism and the harm she inflicted on herself in the name of love and the pursuit of caring for others. I want to help her realise that while she fulfilled every need that arose, those needs were imposed upon her, and she could have drawn the line.
Morality is not black and white; it is a vibrant spectrum with countless intersections and influences of class, caste, race, culture, and society. Conversely, ethics, with a broader continuum, considers the aspect of well-rounded development (both personal and for loved ones), thereby providing a better foundation for definitions and justifications for embodying care in practice. By drawing this distinction, I am in no way siding with the care ethicists who refute ‘duty to care’. Instead, I am, following the suggestions of Sarah Miller, filling the room assigned for local interpretation with diverse and subjective experiences of care.
About the Author:
Pragya Dev is a senior research fellow in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, India. Her doctoral work, grounded in literary analysis, investigates the ethics and politics of care with a particular emphasis on vulnerability, dependency, relationality, and the cultural narratives that shape our understanding of care relationships. She may be contacted at pragya.d.iitr@gmail.com or on LinkedIn.
References:
Miller, Sarah Clark. The Ethics of Need: Age Dignity and Obligation. Routledge, 2012.
