Colloquium Lecture: Anna-Bella Sicilia (University of Arizona), "Depending on Others"

Abstract: As finite and social beings, we depend on one another for survival, flourishing, and for the mundane forms of assistance that help us move through our days. Despite its centrality in our lives, the nature of dependence itself - what it means to say "I'm depending on you" - is somewhat mysterious. Worse, our understanding of dependence is distorted by sexist, ageist, ableist, and racist ideology.

In this talk I argue that dependence on others is an expectation-meeting relation. In short, I depend on someone when I normatively expect them to perform some work, and where they countenance my normative expectation. This represents a departure from previous approaches in care ethics and philosophy of disability, which treat dependence as a matter of needing something I can't get myself. But an expectation-centered account can better honor the original motivations and desiderata outlined by these previous theorists. In particular, it identifies various forms of dependence that get obscured by bad ideology, including the dependence of the very powerful and dependence that is enriching and valuable. It offers insights about the nature of our unchosen intertwinements, which we often navigate by cultivating or suppressing dispositions to expect things of others. Finally, it allows us to morally appreciate aspects of close, personal relationships (like those shared with friends and family members) in more nuanced ways than an appeal to need-meeting. Expectation-centered dependency both represents a recommitment to care theoretical concern with webs of social interconnection and offers other domains of moral and political philosophy a useful philosophical tool.