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Reviewed by:
  • Human Dependency and Christian Ethics by Sandra Sullivan-Dunbar
  • Lorraine Cuddeback-Gedeon
Human Dependency and Christian Ethics
BY SANDRA SULLIVAN-DUNBAR
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 254 pp. $99.99

Sullivan-Dunbar’s book covers a wide swath of literature, engaging political theory, economics, feminist theory, sacrificial love ethics, Thomistic retrievals, and more in exploring a framework for Christian ethics that attends to the oft-hidden role of dependency relationships within a globalized world. In doing so, she brings disparate corners of Christian ethics into conversation, bridging predominantly Protestant and Catholic discourses, as well as Christian and secular ones. Human dependency is a fundamental element of our existence, and Sullivan-Dunbar offers a strong constructive proposal for making this experience far more central to theology and ethics.

The first chapters of the book set up the socio-political issue by tracing the obfuscation of dependency care in both political theory and classical economics, highlighting the presumptions of autonomy that mark modern thought. Sullivan-Dunbar highlights the contemporary inheritance of figures such as Hobbes, Locke, Rawls, and Smith in today’s socioeconomic structures. Yet, despite the [End Page 424] seeming hegemony of the autonomous individual subject, Sullivan-Dunbar raises up feminist philosophers, such as Eva Kittay and Martha Nussbaum, who engage these figures to constructively revise their projects in light of dependency. Within these chapters, Sullivan-Dunbar also introduces a recurring pivot point throughout the text, namely the problem of scarcity: of money, resources, time, and labor (48–50). Today’s “moderate scarcity” raises dependency care as a particular problem not only because of the amount of resources it can consume, but because of ongoing issues with global inequities; because of this, “the most marginalized among us will be forced to respond to dependency as best they can, with too little social support, and at great personal cost” (51).

Conversely, the following two chapters on sacrificial love ethics deal with a strain of theology that is all too aware of scarcity, namely the limits of human finitude in loving others. Reinhold Niebuhr, Gene Outka, and their later interlocutors feature as theologians working to understand how persons navigate among competing demands for our attention. These debates might seem odd inclusions, as by Sullivan-Dunbar’s own assessment they “dwindled” in the 1990s (135). Still, she sees a way out for conversations that did not need to stall by drawing on the “justice and care” debates of feminist theorists; in particular, she uses Joan Tronto’s discussion of “moral boundaries” as way of overcoming the dichotomies of Niebuhr and Outka (139–43). Rather than accept presumptions of autonomy, Sullivan-Dunbar argues for recasting the sacrificial love tradition with deepened attention to our embodied realities, and resisting dualistic accounts of moral agency, e.g., self vs. other, natural vs. supernatural, etc. (108–12).

In the final three chapters, Sullivan-Dunbar shifts into a more constructive register. First, through contemporary Thomistic accounts of virtue, she argues for a collaboration of love and justice that the sacrificial love tradition neglects. Yet, the problem of scarcity creates tensions for dependency care in the Thomistic framework for justice (161–66). To work through this tension, Sullivan-Dunbar proposes elements for a just dependent care ethic (188–94), and supports these with recourse to the Catholic social tradition, feminist accounts of justice, and feminist retrievals of natural law. Sullivan-Dunbar closes her argument with a proposal for a theological grounding of human dignity in our relationship with the Creator that can strengthen secular, feminist accounts of equal dignity.

A great benefit of Sullivan-Dunbar’s work is that it moves conversations from ostensibly “contextual theologies” (feminist theologies, disability theologies) into a more central location within Christian ethics. She is evenly charitable and critical of her interlocutors, effectively allowing dependency to illustrate gaps in the arguments of canonical figures such as Niebuhr and Aquinas. Thus, she shows the importance for all work in our field to attend to the margins, especially people both performing and receiving dependent care. [End Page 425]

Lorraine Cuddeback-Gedeon
Mount St. Mary’s University
...

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