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Dependency and Emancipation in the Debt‐Economy: Care‐Ethical Critique of Contractarian Conceptions of the Debtor–Creditor Relation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir
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Abstract

The fight for emancipation takes place on different levels, and one of them is the level of contemporary financial capitalism as debt‐economy. Debt can be a major tool of control and exploitation in that it produces subordinate subjects situated in exchange relations of debt and credit. Recent work on financial debt and the debt‐economy has, however, not taken gender adequately into account in philosophical definitions of indebted subjects. Gender analysis discloses how the debtor–creditor relationship is based on a contractarian idea of the indebted subject as an autonomous moral agent (Pateman and Mills 2007), and on a masculine, that is, a‐relational understanding of what counts as debt and what does not in the contemporary debt‐economy. In contrast to atomistic notions of the subject in liberal, contractarian theories (deriving from Locke and Hobbes), relational notions of the subject as advanced in care ethics are a better point of departure for capturing the interdependence of subjects within a debt‐economy as a core feature of a nonsustainable monetary system. On the basis of such analysis, care ethics also offers means for imagining ways of emancipation from private and public problem credit in order to make financial systems more sustainable and more just.

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Articles
Information
Hypatia , Volume 30 , Issue 3: Special Issue: Emancipation , Summer 2015 , pp. 564 - 579
Copyright
Copyright © 2015 by Hypatia, Inc.

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