Masters Degrees (Philosophy)

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Browsing Masters Degrees (Philosophy) by Author "Calitz, Vasti"

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    The exploitation of the labour of love
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2018-03) Calitz, Vasti; Du Toit, Louise; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Philosophy.
    ENGLISH SUMMARY: This thesis seeks to establish the wrongfulness of an unequal division of nurturing work between members of heterosexual couples. Nurturing work is the overlapping constellation of housework, care, and emotion work, each of which women do more of than their male partners. I turn to feminist political philosophy (specifically Susan Moller Okin) to show that justice requires, at minimum, that the vulnerability women experience as a result of marriage needs to be mitigated by the state, and that the equal distribution of nurturing work needs to be facilitated by labour law. However, this is not enough to establish whether or not one wrongs one’s partner by allowing her to do more nurturing work. In order to prove this, I rely on Ruth Sample’s work to show that an unequal division of labour constitutes degradation of women in three ways. Firstly, it constitutes taking advantage of an existing injustice by gaining the benefit of receiving more care than one gives because one’s female partner was socialised into giving it. Secondly, an inequality of nurturing work is also an inequality in status accord, and if such inequality is endered, it confirms for oneself and one’s partner, as well as other witnesses, the relative lesser importance (and therefore inferiority) of women. This is also degradation. Thirdly, I argue, using Miranda Fricker and Sandra Bartky, that a gendered distribution of nurturing work contributes to the hermeneutical marginalisation of women, which also constitutes a degradation of women. I thus prove a strong moral obligation to refrain from degrading one’s partner, and therefore a strong moral obligation to not allow one to be taken care of more than one takes care of one’s partner. In the last chapter I show that nurturing work is significant for improving the quality of a relationship, as well as for contributing to one’s human flourishing. I argue this because even if the background conditions are not such that an unequal division of nurturing work would be degradation, there are very good reasons to become good at nurturing work, since it contributes to the flourishing of the individual as well as the relationship.