Philosophy
Dependency is not an exception to human life but one of its deepest structures, hidden only by systems that glorify independence and erase care.
On Dependency, Shame, and Its Confusions
Dependency is not a marginal condition. It is not the temporary embarrassment of the surgical patient, or the permanent condition of the disabled, or the political problem of the refugee. Dependency is structural to human life. We are born wholly into it. We spend years partially inside it. We return to it at illness, at grief, at old age. In between, we depend on those who grow food, who maintain roads, who teach our children, who answer emergency calls at three in the morning. The fiction of the independent self (the Kantian rational agent who legislates his own life from pure reason) is a fiction that has always required the invisible labour of others to sustain it. This is Eva Feder Kittay’s argument, made with a philosopher’s patience and a mother’s fury. Kittay is the mother of Sesha, a woman with severe cognitive and physical disabilities, and she begins her moral philosophy not from the thought experiment of the rational contractor behind the veil of ignorance, but from the bed, the bath, the feeding; the body that requires and the body that provides. Her argument is simple and devastating: the tradition of political philosophy that grounds justice in the reciprocity of rational agents has systematically excluded those who cannot participate in that reciprocity, and has simultaneously rendered invisible the labour of those who care for them.
What the liberal tradition calls the problem of dependency is not a problem of the dependent person. It is a problem of a theory that cannot accommodate the fact that humans need each other in ways that are not symmetrical, not temporary, not contractual and not shameful.
I want to pause on that word. Shameful. Because shame is the mechanism through which the conflation of dependency and vulnerability does its particular damage. When dependency is read not as a human condition but as a personal failing, when the person who needs help is implicitly positioned as having placed a burden, something curdles in the relationship. The elderly person who can no longer drive is not merely inconvenienced. They are repositioned, in the family’s eyes and sometimes in their own, as someone who has begun to decline, to cost more than they contribute, to move in the wrong direction through the human life cycle. The disabled person who requires assistance with daily tasks is framed, persistently, in the language of institutions and sometimes of intimacy as a problem to be managed rather than a person to be known.
Nirmala Erevelles, writing at the intersection of disability, race, and colonialism, pushes this further. She argues against what she calls the “ideology of normalcy”, the assumption built into medical, educational and political institutions that there is a correct way to have a body, and that disability is a deviation from this norm requiring correction or management. The problem with accommodation, even well-intentioned accommodation, is that it leaves the norm intact. It says: here is the standard human being, and here is what we will do to include those who fall short of it.
What disability studies argues instead is that the disabled body is not a deficient version of the normal body. It is a different relationship to the world, one that reveals how constructed the so-called normal relationship is. The built environment, the workplace, the school, the political forum: all designed around assumptions about bodies that are treated as universal but are in fact particular. The wheelchair user who cannot enter the building is not failing to meet a neutral standard. They are encountering a choice that was made, a design that encoded a preference. The similar logic applies, with its own textures, to old age. Ageing bodies are routinely treated in medical and social contexts as bodies in decline, moving away from function, toward dependency, toward the end. The language is almost always comparative: what the elderly person could once do and can no longer. What has been lost. What must now be compensated for? There is rarely a language for what has been gained, the long perspective, the knowledge accumulated through decades, the particular authority of someone who has lived through what the young person can only theorise about. The body changes. The person does not become less. Dependency becomes shameful when a theory of the rational agent, of the productive citizen, of the normal body cannot accommodate it. Then shame is not inherent to the needing. It is imported, from outside, by a framework that was never built to hold it.