[Presented at the 2022 annual American Political Science Association Conference.]
According to Sally Haslanger, offering mothers maternity leave, lactation rooms, and other accommodations is a matter of justice. “For me to have to bear the disadvantages that might come with pregnancy and lactation [that is] nonetheless going to benefit lots of people other than me, I think that’s unfair,” Haslanger maintains.
Implicit in Haslanger’s remarks are arguments that resemble those advanced by Rawls in his 1964 “Legal Obligation and the Duty of Fair Play.” Rawls writes that those who gain benefits from their participation in a cooperative enterprise ought to fairly distribute the burdens of the same. He is concerned with “free riders”: those who enjoy social benefits without shouldering social burdens.
Amid debates about the continuation of the American child tax credit, some, like Senator Joe Manchin, have insisted that only employed Americans be entitled to the benefit. They appear to employ something like Rawls’ principle of fair play to ground their case. Parents who receive the child tax without working would simply be free riders.
Yet such a view overlooks the fact that parenting is work. That it involves such extensive unpaid labor should generate social gratitude, not disregard.
In fact, as the paper argues, women’s physical work in gestating and nursing children crucially contributes to the health of their society. If anything, it is those men who do not gestate and nurse children that might be said to be free riders, unless they contribute in other meaningful ways to the raising of future generations.