Costanza Porro

Current Research: Caring among Equals 

My current book project, based on research funded by the British Academy, offers a novel perspective on the place that care should have in our understanding of justice, centred on the under-explored relationship between relational equality and care. I aim to contribute to the growing literature on care and justice by offering a political account of care which captures the political significance of care beyond dependency care and by exploring the implications of this understanding of care for our thinking on justice and equality. I propose a novel relational theory of justice and care which does not focus on providing the good of care to people, framing care primarily as a concern of distributive justice, but looks at the social structures, institutions, norms and policies that can support the creation and the flourishing of an array of diverse caring relationships. The support to relationships of care, I argue, is owed to all as the appropriate response to their status as moral equals, a status that is not exclusively understood through the lenses of our moral agency but also looking at our nature as dependent and caring beings enmeshed in a web of relationships of care and interdependence. Looking at questions of care through the lenses of relational equality, I address issues of inequalities of power and status in caring relationships and caring practices, including failures to properly recognise the value of care and the equal status of care receivers and caregivers, as well as the question of who provides care, and how that intersects with existing gender, race, class and migration-based based inequalities of status.

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Previous Research: Equality and Vulnerability

While at the University of Hamburg, I mainly worked on the concept of vulnerability and its relationship with moral and relational equality. My research on the concept of vulnerability addressed three main questions: that of how to define vulnerability, the question of whether vulnerability is necessarily bad and the problem of whether vulnerability is a helpful normative concept. Together with Christine Straehle, I have edited a collection on relational equality and vulnerability, which is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press, and explores the ways in which vulnerability should inform how we think of equality as a political ideal. I have also co-authored pieces on the relationship between vulnerability and human rights and the role of moral equality in environmental ethics.

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PhD Project: Relational Equality and Punishment

In my doctoral thesis, I started reflecting on the nature of equality by defending a relational understanding of equality. I explored some implications that the commitment to equality, understood as a property of social relations, has on our understanding of the relationship between those who commit criminal offences and the state, as well as other members of the political community. This project allowed me to combine my interests in egalitarianism and in the philosophy of criminal punishment and to reflect on some of the ways in which the criminal justice system stigmatises and excludes those who are punished, including the removal of voting rights and the expression of blame by the state. Looking at the social meaning of the actions of the state, I also explored how these forms of exclusion intersect with existing inequalities, especially race and class inequalities. Moreover, I had the chance to explore two under-researched themes in the social egalitarian literature: the relevance for the realisation of social equality of the distribution of social esteem, and of the attitudes expressed by the state through its policies and laws. From my PhD thesis, I published three articles, one on criminal blame, one on penal disenfranchisement and one on inequalities of esteem.

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