Expanding the Community of Fate by Expanding the Community of Care

Most of us share an interest in care—for children, the frail elderly, the sick, the mentally or physically challenged. This is particularly true if they are our relatives or friends, but many of us also feel obligations toward others in our society in need of care. Alloparenting, that is, the care of non-kin children, has its roots in prehistory but persists to this day.1 A reevaluation of the role of both kin and non-kin in the provision of care across the life course is emerging with changes in demography, fertility, and mortality.2 We may disagree intensely on who is deserving of attention personally or societally, and we may diverge on how best to provide and pay for that care.3 Nonetheless, caring for and about others is a concern nearly all of us share. Certainly, one of the most important relationships we have as individuals and as members of society is that of caring, whether we are taken care of by others or we take care of others. 

Can care and caregiving serve as the basis for the creation of the kind of democratic public that philosopher John Dewey envisioned? “Wherever there is conjoint activity whose consequences are appreciated as a good by all singular persons who take part in it, and where the realization of the good is such as to effect an energetic desire and effort to sustain it in being just because it is a good shared by all, there is so far a community.”4 For Dewey, the means for turning a disorganized and inchoate citizenry into a democratic public requires a community that shares interests, but institutions that protect (and facilitate) voting, argument, and experiments are also important. If care and caregiving are indeed a common denominator, can they serve as the basis for solidarity and costly actions on behalf of others well outside of an individual’s normal circles of interaction? Can caring become the basis of an expanded and inclusive community of fate, those with whom we perceive our destinies to be entwined? We all have some small community of fate, usually with members of our family and others we hold dear. But is it possible to develop a broader, more encompassing community of fate among those with whom we are unlikely to ever interact? If we determine that it is, we must then consider how to enable people to learn of and believe in others’ needs, and we must develop means for resolving inevitable disagreements about what actions to take and when. 

Community of fate is a concept derived from the old union slogan, “An injury to one is an injury to all” and elaborated by me and John Ahlquist.5 Earlier and often important historical figures have expressed similar ideas. Martin Luther King Jr., for example, claimed, “we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”6 

Ahlquist and I were able to provide a proof of the possible through investigation of certain longshore worker unions in Australia and the United States.7 These are organizations whose primary aims are economistic: improvement of wages, hours, benefits, and working conditions. Yet their members choose to engage in costly political actions on behalf of distant others who are unlikely to reciprocate directly. They express solidarity with those who could not help the union effort; it is solidarity for prosocial ends. Their motto has become a guiding principle in the form of a commitment to prevent and to mitigate the injuries others experience. 

An additional finding concerns the mechanism for deciding whom to help and how. These are unions that practice a form of participatory democracy that permits discussion of the information that inspires the action and builds loyalty, trust, and respect of difference among the participants. Such governance and decision arrangements also facilitate deliberation and agreement to extend the community of fate to strangers the union members would probably never meet and from whom they could expect little, if anything, in return for their support. 

It is worth emphasizing that reciprocity in such a community of fate is not the one-to-one idea of a direct return for a gift or favor. Reciprocity here implies community responsibility. That is one reason votes or deliberation or some other collective decision-making process is essential. A subgroup of the community of fate is defining and then making an investment in others in a larger community. The expectation is not of direct reciprocal payback but a shared understanding that when subgroup members are in need, others from the larger community will step in to help. It is a sense of community responsibility and morality that motivates those not part of an affected population to march and sacrifice for the civil and human rights of peoples being denied those rights. Those fighting to save the earth from humanmade degradations are not expecting thank you notes from the earth.

There are several additional noneconomic benefits from action that can also be motivating. One is “the pleasure of agency,” the feeling of efficacy derived from acting.8 Another is the empowerment that comes with participation in a collective action or civic duty.9

In an article written in the emergency stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, I expressed my belief that the pandemic would produce an expanded and inclusive community of fate.10 As with so many predictions by political scientists, I was wrong. It most certainly did not in the United States or indeed in any country in the world where politicians and other leaders chose to fuel cleavages and misinformation to their individual advantage.11 There were a few notable national exceptions, but in too many locales, division and conflict over the nature of the threat and the safety mandates accompanied governments’ efforts to protect their populations. It is worthwhile sorting out the reasons for that variation, but the aim of this essay is to figure out how to create an expanded and inclusive community of fate that should, in principle, encompass almost everyone in a particular society, perhaps even across the whole world. 

One possible unifying interest is protection from the environmental and climate threat. Although the issue remains a continuing source of discord and polarization, there is also a growing movement for change. Young people have led the way, worrying about their futures, yes, but also the future of the earth and all its species. Climate change and environmental concerns could serve—perhaps are already serving—as the soil for cultivating  an expanded and inclusive community of fate.

The “Social Science of Care” project headed by Alison Gopnik that formed the basis for this volume of Dædalus turned my attention in another direction. I’m part of this project as one of the non-psychological social scientists. And why am I part of it? One reason is that care is an important aspect of a moral political economy, a large-scale program at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, from which the care project evolved.12 Equally as significant, almost all (perhaps all) of my work focuses on relationships. Some of it considers the conditions and institutional arrangements: that is, the rules of the game, under which individuals, organizations, and institutions establish their trustworthiness and on how groups of individuals develop forms of solidarity that might lead them to act in the interests of others. I am also concerned about when those relationships are reciprocated, when they are not, and when it matters or does not matter if they are.

As the care project has evolved, I have become increasingly aware of the community of fate that care and caregiving creates. We have all been babies, and all of us have parents. Many of us are parents, and some of us will grow old and frail or need health facilities. We’ll require care and give care. We rely on each other, on companies that insure us, and on organizations that provide for us. As Elizabeth Garlow and Anne-Marie Slaughter explain in their essay in this volume, the assumption, indeed the finding that is the basis of these claims, is that humans are relational beings.13 While they have individual goals, they also seek and maintain connections that stimulate them to care for and about others.14 Indeed, as Ashley Thomas and her coauthors note in this volume, infants come to “understand care relationships as intimate, altruistic, and asymmetric.”15 As the authors conclude, not only does this affect caregiving in early life, it also has implications for the attitudes and behaviors of the adults the infants become.

In the contemporary world, caregiving occurs over the life course, even after death, and it comes in multiple forms.16 The carers may be family members, groups designed to provide help, religious organizations, or governments.17 They may volunteer their services or be paid. They can be human or technological.18 Caring often combines many of these forms, as illustrated in the essay in this volume on the frail elderly.19 As the importance of public subsidy and services increases, it is increasingly important how we measure care and its provision, and that we figure out what it is likely to cost and how to cover those costs.20 

It is also worth exploring how the state can be a means of expanding the community of fate and making it more inclusive. From the Deweyan perspective, a state accountable to the public enables that public to sustain itself and its members to articulate their interests effectively.21 What does it mean to incorporate care into the role of the state? One possibility: the government has an obligation not only to safeguard its population from external threats but also to provide for their needs throughout the life course and given differential resources and capacities to secure nonstate care—be it familial, organizational (for example, religious), or market-based. Of course, this varies over time and place.22 A more minimal strategy is that government provides background conditions by setting standards for the facilities and providers of care. Both of these approaches assume that care is limited to the servicing of needs of those the state accepts as its responsibility. Yet the word “care” also connotes an emotional attachment, the carer wants what is in the best interest of the cared-for, even if it requires some self-sacrifice on the part of the carer. Care has the additional connotation of listening to those being cared for and responding, as much as possible, to their concerns. It requires relationships between those receiving care and state actors that involve mutual trust or at least beliefs that the one who has hierarchical power has the interests at heart of the more dependent partner in the relationship. Thus, state agents are to provide care but also care about the responses and reactions of those for whom they have responsibility.

Long ago, I wrote about a kind of social contract between the government and its population when governments demand extractions such as taxes or military service.23 The individuals affected are willing to engage in quasi-voluntary compliance, complying because they think they should but with a backdrop of coercion given that the behavior was legally mandated. Such a social contract requires promises from both sides. The population has to believe and find credible government promises that they will receive certain benefits in return for their compliance: public goods, security, and so on. Their compliance further depends on a belief that government is not only competent to provide those benefits and services but also that it keeps its promises as best it can. In addition, the people expect that the government will provide benefits according to the standards of fairness of the day. Finally, the government has to give its population confidence that it can identify and punish free riders so that those complying don’t feel like suckers. 

These conditions equally apply to the provision of care, in which there must be cooperation between the cared-for, carers, family members, and government. Governments also have a role in establishing the trustworthiness of those providing care, given that the cared-for are generally vulnerable due to age (young or old) and capabilities (mental or physical). Trustworthiness of government agents depends on at least two features. The first is that the agents are competent to provide the care. The second is that the cared-for and their families believe that the government and their paid caregivers have their interests at heart. For both, institutional safeguards and resources are essential for ensuring these conditions are met. 

This is not to imply that paid caregivers are incapable of finding and securing the training they need. Nor does it imply that caregivers never develop an emotional attachment and commitment to the person being cared for; many do and should. But personal efforts and attachments neither can nor should be counted on. It is essential to have governmental and institutional safeguards to protect the cared-for, as well as to ensure that the carers are safe and have what they need to do their jobs. Are both the carers and cared-for free from abuse, verbal and physical? Do they have the diapers, playpens, walkers, medicine, instructions, and other tools they need? 

But there is another set of conditions. There have to be ways to incorporate the voices and concerns of those to whom care services are provided, as well as their families and others implicated in their well-being. This is not to suggest directly asking small children or the extremely frail elderly or others who lack or have lost their capacity to self-advocate. But it does require recognizing that most of those needing care are embedded in their own personalized community of fate, that their destinies are entwined with those of others who are concerned about and affected by the person(s) requiring care. These can be family members, but the circle could also include friends, physicians, social workers, teachers, paid workers, or pastoral counselors. 

Here it is worth attending to the approach Hilary Cottam takes in Radical Help.24 Her work is grounded not on randomized controlled trials (RCTs) but on what I have come to label RWEs, or real-world experiments.25 They are proofs of the possible. Cottam advocates recognizing the complexity of the problem and all the relevant actors, listening to what they think they want and need, and then both reconciling their objectives and coordinating their actions. Sometimes this involves simply listening but sometimes it also requires providing options for opportunities that had not previously been considered. This may mean new services or coordination and a reduction of redundancies among those already offering help.

The role of the state in generating an expanded and inclusive community of fate around care and caregiving goes beyond regulation and consultation of the affected. It implies active engagement in creating and enabling the interconnections and awareness of others on which a community of fate depends; it involves helping to produce that community and/or taking advantage of preexisting communities. Governments across the globe have helped construct neighborhoods that are intergenerational and diverse in ways that facilitate caring in all stages of life and with the added advantage of multiple cultural resources.26 All communities are networks of individuals who are somehow related to each other through one node or another, but they could also be virtual communities.27 Digital tools allow connections among a much wider array of people across a country and even nations, but the trick is to find a means to create a collective identity (for example, a neighborhood or a common cause) that is the basis for mobilization and contributes to societal welfare. 

The form and quality of social cohesion can reinforce existing attitudes and values or transform them. An emphasis on personal attainment or on exclusivity tends to exacerbate the divergence between the interests of the individual and society as a whole. Free riding, violation of norms governing common pool resources, and other self-serving acts dominate over actions that uphold a common good. When citizens find their comfortable social identities and ways of life under challenge, they may well retreat to the comfort of insular and exclusionary communities of fate. Particularly affected are those who remain rooted in their traditional homeland and whose reliance is on family, neighbors, and church rather than on government or the corporation, the worlds political scientist Elinor Ostrom, sociologist Arlie Hochschild, and political scientist Katherine Cramer portray.28 

Individuals in relatively narrow communities of fate can become increasingly alienated from the society at large, especially as their livelihoods and homes become less secure due to the kinds of demographic, climatic, economic, and technological pressures felt today. Digital tools and social media can and often do contribute to alienation and polarization. But they can also be—under the right conditions—the means for expanding a positive, productive, and progressive community of fate. We know something about those conditions in traditional and historical spaces of work, neighborhood, and politics. We are just beginning to learn what works in the new spaces created by the digital world. 

Several pathways exist for making people aware of their social connections and enabling them to act. One is through socialization.29 The other is organizational. Organizations that are structured in ways that bring people together and foster their commonalities can evoke both empathy and respect for differences. Political scientist Hahrie Han documents the making of such bonds and connections in explaining how participants embedded in a multiracial evangelical organization were able to change their attitudes to each other and to prejudiced members of their larger society as they acted to create support for a universal preschool program.30 Labor organizer and sociologist Marshall Ganz makes a similar point with his examples of how the relationships developed in civic associations can become commitments to larger social causes when conscious organizing involves relationship building, storytelling, strategy, and developmental leadership committed to democratic structures and practice.31

In the view presented here, the state can help provide care, but it should also be expected to contribute to the creation of an expanded and inclusive community of fate around a mutual interest in care. Everyone is likely to be a provider and a recipient of care over the life course; all are dependent on other individuals as well as the government at some point. Government has a potential role in both revealing the interdependencies of the various actors across communities and making those relationships productive and viable, assisting in forming a public care network. This means reducing the frictions and the costs, both monetary and cultural. How to improve the capacity of national and local governments in building a community of care deserves further exploration. So, too, does consideration of how international governance and philanthropic organizations can work to do the same across national boundaries. 

It is crucial to create an expanded and inclusive community of fate with recognition of mutual interdependence, social connectedness, and the creation of empathy for all those brought into this broad and caring community. A healthy society requires provision for the common good while also addressing the unique needs of each individual. Reciprocity is key, but it is not one-to-one or symmetric. As in the labor unions studied by Ahlquist and me, reciprocity is a community-level responsibility. Building on preexisting bonds—be they related to a neighborhood, religious institution, government, or another source of connection—the organization nourishes the responsibility of that community to its own members but also to strangers, often distant strangers, who deserve recognition as members of the larger human community. It is far less about reciprocity between individuals than about a community responsibility to take care of and stand up for those in need.

The best way of achieving an expanded and inclusive community of fate around care and caring is to develop relationships of mutual understanding and some degree of trust and empathy through a process that engages the community members in determining the kinds of policies and practices most suited to their needs. But this cannot be a simple expression of preferences. It requires deliberation and debate, learning and unlearning. It requires giving people the tools of agency that will enable them to work collectively to identify and then mobilize for their common good. And, in turn, it requires organizations and leadership that enable individuals to develop their voices and autonomy. This essay and others in this volume argue that the provision of care services is only part of the story. Also essential is caring about and listening to those who need help. Despite considerable progress as reflected in these pages, there is so much more to learn about how to achieve care in all its senses. That is the next step. 

author’s note

I have presented versions of this essay in multiple venues: in June 2024, at the opening convening of the Cohesive Capitalism program at the London School of Economics, and at the Berggruen Institute symposium on “What is Universalism” in Venice; in October 2024, at the Oxford Philosophy, Law, and Politics Colloquium; and in November 2024, at the Instituto Carlos III-Juan March de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. I want to thank all the participants at those sessions who gave me invaluable feedback. I am also indebted to Ashley Thomas and Alison Gopnik for their probing questions at our April 2024 meeting of “The Social Science of Caregiving.” Zachary Ugolnik, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Ruth Chang, Henry Farrell, and John Ahlquist gave me extremely useful suggestions as I revised for publication.