Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: ethics and depending on others.
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Our Bodies, Our (Moral) Selves
In the past month,
’s new book, The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto has sparked a fruitful debate about morality, the human body, and gender.“There’s Two Core Ideas Threaded Throughout the Book,” said Libresco on our podcast:
… and the first is the feminist idea, which is women’s equality with men does not depend on our being interchangeable with men. That there’s a lot of ways in which advocating for women looks like trying to help women be slightly less defective men. … And this goes into the second idea, which is that dependence, far from being kind of a temporary embarrassment of some parts of our life, especially at the beginning and at the end, but also a variety of bits in the middle, is the pattern for what it means to be human.
Is and Ought. “It is only when she sets out to establish a connection between women’s bodies and their moral orientation that she falters more seriously,” writes Washington Post book critic and philosopher,
, in a review of Libresco’s book. Rothfeld continues:
… it is not obvious that labor translates into any lasting moral attitude; many women have children and remain as uncaring as ever afterward. Besides, not all women give birth, and it seems unlikely that the mere possibility of doing so is sufficient to transform us into virtuosos of caring, at least if labor itself is one of the supposed mechanisms of this metamorphosis.
“The Dignity of Independence.” Writer
splits the difference between Libresco and Rothfeld:
Gender vanishes in Heaven, but is a real spiritual and embodied force here on earth. A pattern, a symbol, a medium through which the soul expresses itself in physical form. Becca’s posture can risk trying to bring about Heaven on earth by preemptively erasing the differences that — in the Christian story — are meant to dissolve only at the end of time. Leah’s position, by contrast, can drift toward a mirror error: softly but subtly insisting that symbolic truths must harden into permanent moral structures in the here and now. Within that framing, temporal gender shifts into eternal vocation, erasing the symbolic and confusing the icon for the essence.
No One Can Fake Autonomy Forever (But Women Usually Get Caught First). On Substack, Libresco responded to Horne:
Becca [Rothfeld] shares my intuition that these traits are not uniquely or necessarily feminine. Suffering and bodily vulnerability are human experiences. I think pregnancy really, really is a distinctive experience for women. … no one, male or female, can fake autonomy forever. It isn’t what we are, but how and why we get caught varies. … on average, women will get caught earlier. Because we might conceive a child, women fit less well into the image of the buffered individual, and we know it. I think of this as a reason women *cannot* go along with a false anthropology as easily as men might (even though both sexes are harmed by it).
Anatomy and Ethics. Also on Substack, Rothfeld clarified her position:
To suggest that one particular claim about one particular piece of anatomy (in this case, the uterus) is wrong is patently not to suggest that the idiosyncrasies of our bodies never matter or merit discussion.
Equality, Care Work and Our Animal Nature
In a recent interview, Libresco cited the philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre (who passed away this year) as a major influence.
We Are Animals. In his 2001 book, Dependent Rational Animals, MacIntyre says that the if we ignore the fact that we are animals, then it’s likely we will also fool ourselves into thinking that we can live completely independent lives:
Consider how both physical and mental disability are afflictions of the body and how therefore habits of mind that express an attitude of denial towards the facts of disability and dependence presuppose either a failure or a refusal to acknowledge adequately the bodily dimensions of our existence. This failure or refusal is perhaps rooted in, is certainly reinforced by the extent to which we conceive of ourselves and imagine ourselves as other than animal, as exempt from the hazardous condition of “mere” animality.
The Injustice of Inequality. But what if after acknowledging our animality, women still do more of the care-work? This is
’s worry:
Sargeant argues that more people should volunteer to help aging parents, make dinner for other families, and take care of others’ children — and I wholeheartedly agree. But the people who do these tasks are already more likely to be women than men, and the book’s hot-pink cover, which has a line drawing of a mother and child, isn’t exactly designed to leap out at the male reader. I worry that her call for more sacrifice, more interruptibility, will be heard largely by women, who, we know from data, are already socialized to give more of themselves.
“The Necessity of Inequality.” Also on the topic of equality, Carmel Richardson writes: “[Libresco’s] case is a powerful and beautiful argument for dependence, and a culture which takes women and men not as separate equals, but as marrow and bone.”
How to Value Care Work. Elsewhere, Libresco has reflected on the value of care work:
As long as housework and care work are validated by analogy to paid services, the more pressure it creates to seek the same efficiencies (or cut the same corners!) that paid services do in order to turn a profit. […] It’s hard for me to see how we value this kind of work unless we value it first for its value in itself and only then try to approximate that value in money, when helpful.
From the Crowd
“Correct in the near term; wrong in the far term.” So judges
about ’s Tuesday Note, where Christine read the signs of MAGA’s downfall. Asked to elaborate, Morgan wrote:Christine is right in that the euphoria among the GOP and the MAGA coalition (whatever that was/is) could not and did not carry over into actual government. In this Trump is a normal president: making grand promises, offering fabulous prizes, giving trinkets in return, and paying for it with unwelcome outcomes in local and, very likely, midterm elections.
I was not surprised at the Democratic gains in Virginia, New Jersey, and New York City. They faced pretty weak opposition and were smart to keep things focused on nuts-and-bolts priorities and the fact that everything is expensive. (Though I think Sherrill’s Trump-focused campaign in NJ was disingenuous as Trump was not president for half of her predecessor’s much-disliked tenure.) But these elections are only interesting within their local contexts. Nationally they reinforce the ambivalence that continues to plague the party. Mamdani seems (and I really do mean seems) like a dynamic visionary who galvanizes the youth with his zeal and ideas; federal prosecutor Sherrill and CIA agent Spanberger are dull technocrats who are going to trudge along with the status quo. And with no centralizing personality, the Democrats’ paradoxical, ultimately conservative political vision that sees a bright future framed by a glorious past (whether in Clinton or in LBJ) remains exposed for all to see and be confused by.
Certainly the mere election of Trump does not vanquish the ideology of his most fervent opposition anymore than Democrats switching from culture war to “It’s the economy, stupid” (let alone treating those things as separable) de-escalates culture war. But I never bought this idea that Trump is a sentient kidney stone that you can just pass, marvel at its painful grandeur, and then forget about. I agree with his most deranged and obsessed haters that Trump is not a normal president, I just think they approach the abnormality in a way that is somehow both insensible and unimaginative.
The tariff as a practical measure was always nonsensical. Ambrose Bierce had it right all the way back in the The Devil’s Dictionary when he defined them as “A scale of taxes on imports, designed to protect the domestic producer against the greed of his consumer.” Clearly they have wrought no magic cure for our present ills, and Trump wields them in a bizarre vibe-based manner, treating them as restorative one day, retaliatory the next. Nevertheless, tariffs were the most important act of 2025. They might even come to symbolize his whole term.
“Intention, political or otherwise, is always hard to fathom,” George Grant wrote in Lament for a Nation. “This does not prevent decisions made in public having consequences that are not difficult to understand.” Which is to say that hopes and promises are one thing, results are another, and more important.
Looming behind the hard policy of the tariffs is yet another instance of iconoclasm and taboo-breaking that has typified the last five years of discourse and which is now brought into politics. It is the device by which we, to put it crudely, “say the thing” against the post-Cold War NAFTA consensus. Of course what “the thing” is depends upon your position, but both positions place economics and culture firmly together: “The present system exploits rural and working people” (Subcomandante Marcos) or “The present system reduces citizens to consumers” (Pat Buchanan). We see it already with Fox News all but proclaiming that it’s perfectly fine to extend Buy Nothing Day into Buy Nothing Month. Without really knowing it, the full weight of American power is now in the hands of a stack of back issues of Adbusters. If we are retreading the 1990s, it is the 90s with the mask off.
This leads us into territory neither party is entirely prepared to confront. Through it’s bubbling up in places both fringe and respectable, ideas of nationalism and isolationism are given newer, slightly less horrified glances. Even so, these ideas are left scattered on the ground, waiting for someone with keener political sense to pick up and use. That’s difficult if not impossible to anticipate and make historical comparisons for Trump sort of ludicrous. Though if we’re still going to make them if only for rhetorical show, perhaps we need to get away from typical dictators and toward Mikhail Gorbachev, René Lévesque, or even Hugo Chavez turned inside out. Obviously those are no less ominous, but they are more realistic.
See you next week!
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Just a reminder: We are individuals and not just data points on a demographic chart.
If I tell you I am a man, how much can you presume from that? Or a woman. Or black. Or white, Asian, Hispanic, etc.
I'll readily point out that there are general differences between men and women (emotional as well as physical), but you still can only presume just so much from a person's sex.
It's interesting that there is talk in this article of nationalism. Isn't presuming that your sex is superior really just another form of nationalism? Or your race? Or your political philosophy?