I offer this argument as an extension of Alstotts, not as a challenge to it.Whereas her case is founded on the liberal goal of autonomy, I believe thatthe basic moral principle at stake is that caretakers have a right tothis support.
Im not sure this will be viewed as a welcome extension. It is noteworthythat Alstott, Kittay, Fineman, and Becker have not put the case in this way.Alstotts avoidance of rights discourse is especially striking, given her evidentdesire to couch the argument for support of caretakers in terms of liberalvalues. Still, the avoidance of rights arguments is understandable. At leasttwo familiar features of liberal rights, as constructed in our legal culture,suggest a deep inhospitality of rights (and of liberalism) to the needs ofcaretakers, and hence an incompatibility between the logic of rights andcaretaker interests.
First, as construed in this country (less so elsewhere) rights have beenalmost uniformly "negative": rights provide a shield against wrongful orexcessive state action, but rarely if ever an entitlement to state action, or amandate that states accept some sort of responsibility for our well-being.Rights delineate what the state may not do; they do not delineate what thestate must do. Thus, for example, we have negative rights against statecensorship, but no positive right to the education, or the material resourcesneeded to provide one; we have rights against various forms of policemisconduct, but no positive right to state protection against private violence.A "doulia right," if it exists, is a quintessentially positive right: the right itprotects is the right to something from the state, not a right to be kept freeof it.
展开