Recorded before a live audience, Margaret Levi, Alison Gopnik, & Anne-Marie Slaughter discuss a CASBS project, "The Social Science of Caregiving," which is reimagining the philosophical, psychological, biological, political, & economic foundations of care and caregiving. The goal is a coherent empirical and theoretical account or synthesis of care that advances understandings and policy discussions. [The episode notes provide links for further exploration.]
Recorded before a live audience, Margaret Levi, Alison Gopnik, & Anne-Marie Slaughter discuss a CASBS project, "The Social Science of Caregiving," which is reimagining the philosophical, psychological, biological, political, & economic foundations of care and caregiving. The goal is a coherent empirical and theoretical account or synthesis of care that advances understandings and policy discussions. [The episode notes provide links for further exploration.]
Article on CASBS's project on The Social Science of Caregiving
Web page for the project on The Social Science of Caregiving
Related: Human Centered episode #61, "Developing AI Like Raising Kids" (Alison Gopnik & Ted Chiang)
Alison Gopnik: CASBS bio | UC Berkeley Bio |
Gopnik article, "Caregiving in Philosophy, Biology & Political Economy" (Dædalus)
Margaret Levi: CASBS bio | CASBS program on Creating a New Moral Political Economy |
Anne-Marie Slaughter: New America bio |
Slaughter articles, "Care is a Relationship" (Dædalus) | "Why Women Still Can't Have it All" (The Atlantic)
Slaughter book, Unfinished Business (Penguin Random House)
Narrator: From the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, this is Human Centered.
Caregiving receives much less academic attention compared with other kinds of social relationships, even as we face crises of both elder care and child care in the US and elsewhere, and even as the demands for the skills of care workers, essential yet undervalued and under-respected, skyrockets. Our cultural and social institutions and markets and the traditional types of social contracts they enshrine are all ill-equipped to accommodate the unique structures of caregiving relationships, which often feature asymmetries of power, reciprocity and autonomy. If we want to care more about caregiving, we need to explore and reimagine the philosophical, psychological, political, biological and economic foundations of care and caregiving.
And we need to foreground a post-neoliberal set of values more explicitly in our explorations and build an interdisciplinary synthesis that advances policy discussions. Today on Human Centered, a conversation between Alison Gopnik, Margaret Levi, and Anne-Marie Slaughter recorded live in front of an audience at CASBS in January 2024. The gathering coincided with the convening of a workshop for a CASBS project called The Social Science of Caregiving, of which the three guests are key participants.
It's led by Gopnik, a 2003-4 CASBS Fellow and renowned cognitive and developmental psychologist and author of, among other books, The Philosophical Baby and The Gardener and the Carpenter, what the new science of child development tells us about the relationship between parents and children. Margaret Levi is a political scientist and former CASBS director who helped steer the project and notably led CASBS project titled Creating a New Moral Political Economy, which in many ways inspired the launch of the caregiving project. She is co-author of the book In the Interest of Others.
Anne-Marie Slaughter is the CEO of New America, former dean of Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, former director of policy planning at the US State Department, and also known for Unfinished Business, a book about the importance of value in care. You're about to hear these brilliant thinkers detangling and probing some of the key issues and challenges necessary for arriving at a coherent, empirical and theoretical account of the general features of care and caregiving. You'll hear them thinking out loud together, deeply listening and learning from one another, as well as some terrific questions from the audience, all hallmarks of what makes CASBS such a remarkable place.
As always, links to full bios and relevant publications are in the episode notes, but for now, let's listen.
Margaret Levi: It’s really exciting to me, and a pleasure to be with two of my favorite people in a conversation about care and caregiving, which has become an extraordinarily, it's always been an important issue, let's be honest, but we've become much more alert to it, particularly as the demography changes, as the systems of government that affect our social insurance systems change, and as our understanding of care changes, thanks in part to the two people next to me. I want to give a little background to this project, and then we'll move into the actual conversation. One of the programs that CASBS ran for several years, was on creating a new moral political economy, how to think about a political economic framework that works for the contemporary era.
Like all political economies has values in it, and we wanted to make them explicit. And one of those values, and one of the concerns about a new moral political economy, is really bringing into the front and center of it, how are we going to deal with issues of care? Care for all kinds of people at all kinds of stages of life, with all kinds of particular needs and issues.
And out of that interest in care, we asked Alison Gopnik to help us think through those questions, as well as later Anne-Marie. And out of that then emerged a new project that focused particularly on care. And thinking about how the social sciences and other disciplines in our larger group are not only political scientists and philosophers and neuroscientists, and another political scientist lawyer as well, but also sociologists, psychologists, and medical people.
So it's not so much about the medicality of care that we're concerned about, as about the kinds of structures that we can provide for care, the kinds of values and the way we think about care as we'll hear. So we're really a very interdisciplinary project, which is one of the things, of course, that CASBS is renowned for. And we're using that as a strength in order to build some new thinking and some new re-imagining around care.
With that, I want to turn to my two colleagues and friends here to really have them present initially sort of how they came to this subject. A very brief history, cuz each of us has very long histories of involvement in the, in the, in the questions. But most importantly, to really begin to present how you would think about the challenges, the framework, the way we need to proceed to go into the future on these questions.
Let me start with Alison Gopnik.
Alison Gopnik: So I'm a cognitive scientist, so what I do is try and figure out how it is that people find out about the world, are intelligent about the world, make decisions about the world. Often this is in the context of thinking about how a computer or an artificial system could do the same thing. And I'm also a developmental psychologist, so I spend a lot of my time thinking about and being with children.
And it took until I was in my 60s to think about this particular aspect of human intelligence, namely the intelligence involved in care. And of course, if you're spending time thinking about children, this is extremely vivid because the children can't exist without caregiving. I mean, literally can't exist without caregiving.
And yet, caregiving is almost invisible in economics, in political science, and in cognitive science as well. So we know a lot, for example, about what's been called theory of mind, work we did back in the 80s. How do we understand other people's minds?
How do we think about other people's minds? More recently, we've done a lot of work on what people sometimes call intuitive sociology, how do we think about things like group identity, in groups and out groups, hierarchies. And we've learned a lot about the kinds of cognitive structures that underpin that.
And yet, in spite of the fact that both in our everyday lives and from an evolutionary perspective, care is one of the most important things we do, we haven't thought about it. We don't know what our everyday conceptions of care are like. We don't know exactly what the evolutionary history is that's led us to have the kinds of understandings of care that we do.
We don't have a sense of the sort of distinctive intelligence of care, which is different. We don't have a sense of the distinctive economics of care, which is different from standard economics. And as I was saying to Margaret when we were preparing for this, it's not even so much that we're rethinking care.
We're just thinking care. Just paying any attention to this at all. And we also have a 2,000 year long history of philosophy, which is my other hat.
And in the 1968 Encyclopedia of Philosophy, there were four references to children, parents, childhood. You could read the entire thing and think that human beings were reproduced by asexual cloning. And there were, in tomes of moral philosophy, you could read those tomes of moral philosophy and never realize that an important moral issue for people is how they take care of their helpless loved ones.
So it has been this kind of amazing absence, and that is also an opportunity for us as social scientists to try and fill in some of that absence. And of course, as Margaret said, the policy implications of it are clear and important. And oddly enough, I mean, I think people have paid more attention to the policy than they have to the psychology and philosophy.
So people are concerned about what the right policy decisions are. But I think just like you can't make good policy decisions in politics or economics without having some kind of theoretical understanding of politics or economics, we aren't gonna be able to make the right decisions if we don't have some broader intellectual understanding of care.
Margaret Levi: So Anne-Marie, you're someone who has been very deeply engaged with policy, but you're also really thinking about this issue in a quite deep theoretical way, about re- well, thinking care. I like that.
And really imagining a very different set of approaches to care. And when we come, at some point I wanna start parsing care, so it's not just about parents and children, but let's move on to you and how you came to this and how you're beginning to think care.
Anne-Marie Slaughter: So I have to start by saying two things. One, I couldn't be happier both to be part of this project and that this project is happening. To build a solid academic foundation under care and the necessity of care and the impact of care is just a godsend for the people who have been working in policy.
But the second thing I have to say is that I'm the generation of feminists from the 70s and the 80s who fled anything that looked like traditional family. When I started my career as a law professor, I remember Martha Field, who was the first law professor tenured at Harvard Law School, did family law, Martha Minow then went into family law. Absolutely not.
The way to legitimacy and success and particularly in foreign policy, which is my area, was to do what the boys did. You did guns and bombs. The idea that I would now be sitting here embracing and talking about care, I absolutely could not have imagined.
I got there through writing the article in the Atlantic in 2012, which some of you will know why women still can't have it all. When I wrote that article, I was really focusing on the workplace. It was, here are the changes we still need to make if we are ever going to get to anything like real gender equality.
And I didn't think about care, and at that point still, my self-worth and the way I thought about what women needed was much more focused on doing the work that our fathers did, not the work that our mothers did. But after that article came out and I started working on a book called Unfinished Business, I really realized we are never going to get to gender equality unless we can value the work that women traditionally did as much as the work that men traditionally did. And for the first, second wave of feminists, I absolutely understand why you couldn't do that.
You couldn't have done that back in the 60s and 70s, and when Betty Friedan published her second book that was much more focused on family, nobody really wanted to hear it. But it's just common, I mean, you just do the numbers. You know, you can't have women doing all the work that women traditionally did and what men did, and men only doing one.
And so from that, I got to, so we have to value that work. So we have to think about what that work is. And I read a little book called On Caring by a philosopher, not a philosopher quite, I think, at your level, a guy named Milton Meyendorf, who wrote it in 1971, so you have a male philosopher who writes a book called On Caring.
And he talks about it as being a father, but also being a creator, that you are investing in something else, and you are both putting yourself into it, and Alison, it's very much the way you've written about it, and you are letting that thing, that child, but he also talks about symphonies and poems, take on a life of its own, which is the way a lot of composers and authors actually talk about their work. And, that got me thinking about, wait a minute, this is work where we invest in another, and it doesn't have to be a biologically related other. And one of the ways you know it's care is when they succeed, you're just as happy as if you succeeded, which is not always true in our world, right?
Even our friends, when they succeed, there can be a little twinge of wishing that you had. Care is a different way of relating. So, for the last ten years running New America, I have written extensively on the need to value care.
And New America and other organizations have worked on improving the lives of caregivers, raising the wages of caregivers. I can't talk about care without saluting Ai-jen Poo, who really has driven the modern care movement. And last October, I was at CareFest in LA, the first ever meeting of 500 care leaders from across the country.
You had union leaders, you had home health aid workers, academics. It was really quite something. And that work is, you know, now we talk about building an infrastructure of care, which failed, but we talked about it.
Ai-jen had mentioned that as early as 2009. And so what I now see this project as, again, is there's that policy work and it's so important, but we will get much further if we can actually put this foundation under it.
Margaret Levi: So in talking about what the foundation is, both of you and in my own work as well, none of us buy the model of self-interest as driving behavior, certainly narrow self-interest. I mean, obviously people have interests and they act on them. But that narrow self-interest cannot be what the basis of the caregiving relationship is. And so maybe you could each expand on that a little bit.
Alison Gopnik: Yeah, well, I mean, the basic, from the perspective of the kind of work that I do, the social contract has been the sort of basic formal structure for thinking about human relations, at least since the Enlightenment. And if you look at even mathematical accounts of the origins of altruism, they're all based on this idea, which is actually a lovely idea that you have individuals there pursuing goals independently of one another, and then they discover that they can trade off goals and the result is that you can end up in a positive sum game as opposed to a negative sum game. Everybody can do better as a result of trading off interests with one another.
And a lot of work in moral psychology, that's obviously the foundational model for economics, it's the foundational model for Enlightenment politics. And one thing that I've thought about is you can think of a lot of the institutional achievements of the Enlightenment as really being forms of software that let you scale up the social contract. So if you think about markets on the one hand, political democracies and states on the other hand, those are all ways of being able to have these contractual relationships, not just between two people in the village, but literally across the planet.
And I genuinely think those are great accomplishments. But if you think about care, it's kind of like the anti-social contract. Because what happens, you think about this model, this picture of here's Agent A and here's Agent B, and they both have utilities and they both have resources.
The social contract picture is each of them is just trying to pursue their utilities and figuring out how to do it. And you can also have power relationships where A has more resources than B, and that means that B has to subordinate their goals to A's. That's a very common, you can think of that as being kind of not the liberal enlightenment picture, but say the Marxist picture generally construed.
But what happens in care? You've got one agent who has more resources than the other and has different goals than the other. And exactly because you have more resources than your infant does or than your patient does or than your student does, you subordinate your goals to the goals of the patient or the student or the infant.
And I think it's important that it isn't just a kind of solidarity relationship, something that Margaret and others have talked about. You could think, well, okay, what happens is sometimes people pool their resources and their utilities. So you say, okay, we're in a group and we all have the same goals.
It's not even just that you're happy when the person you care for accomplishes their goals. It's even weirder than that because even if you don't have the same goals as the person you're caring for, and sometimes even if you think that the person you're caring for shouldn't have those goals, that they should have other goals, hello, anybody who's had a teenage child, you still feel as if you want them to have the autonomy to be able to accomplish those goals. Or you think about anyone who's also had an elderly parent.
You want them to be in a position where they can do something that you think is not necessarily the best thing for them. So it's a really, and as Margaret's pointed out, this isn't just, I think the example of this and probably the evolutionary foundational one is this relationship between mammalian mothers and babies. But it's clear that by the time you're talking about humans, this applies to friends, it applies to students, it applies to patients, it applies to animals, non-human animals, it applies to the environment.
In all of these cases, you have this abstract structure where because you have more resources, you spontaneously think that what you should do with those resources is follow the goals, fulfill the goals of another agent precisely because they don't have as many resources.
Margaret Levi: But because you care about them.
Alison Gopnik: But because you care about them and that's what happens in relationships of care that makes them really different from relationships of power or relationships of social contract. But of course the question that we've talked about some is, if you think about someone like the people that Anne-Marie was just talking about, professional caregivers, there's an interesting argument that that very fact that makes care so morally profound and deep and important also means that that's a way you can get away with not paying people well, right? Because if the work is being done because it's morally satisfying to care for someone, then that's not a social contract.
And you want, when you're talking about salaries, you kind of want a social contract. You want a social contract structure. And it's very, very easy for this to turn into care relationships, to turn into power relationships.
That's what happens when we talk about something being paternalistic, for example, right? I mean, there's a reason why we use the word paternalistic to mean paternalistic.
**Margaret Levi:**But it's not just power relations, and this may get into some of Anne-Marie's concern too. It's also transactional relations.
Alison Gopnik: Yeah.
Margaret Levi: So given the world as it's structured right now, I can't imagine getting everyone who cares for a child or an older person or a disabled person being someone who cares deeply about them in that moral sense.
Some of those people are simply paid, hopefully trained well, hopefully good hearted, hopefully not abusive, but nonetheless paid. It's a transaction, and I know you have some reactions to that, Anne-Marie.
Anne-Marie Slaughter: I do, and I'm going to start just by saying I am still really wrestling with these parts, because this is very complicated. So just to start with just the semantics of it. So one way to restate what you just said is you care for people you care about, but actually that can be a tautology, because if I say I care for you, I'm actually saying I care about you.
So to get to what you're saying, you have to say I take care of you, although we never call humans caretakers, which is another thing, but I take care of you because I care about you. But that takes you to where Margaret is, and I think she's right, that yes, you take care of people because you care about them, but that is not necessarily love or affection. It's not even the friend, it's not the family relations, the friend relations.
It's more I am invested in your success in some way. Now, you might be because you're paid to do it, but I think what I, I start from a different place, so I'm going to now switch gears and talk about how I get there. I start from the proposition that we must think of care as a relationship and not a service.
Now, that's very important from an economic point of view because we can't, we don't have a category for valuing relationships. You know, we take account of goods and services and care is a service, and it is bathing or feeding or driving, all the things we do, and those are all taken account of in the economy. They are not paid for when they're done as labors of love, right?
But they're seen as a service. And I think that, to start with, you have to say that's wrong, that a robot can perform those services, and does. But I think that's not care. I think care is a relationship between two people that, at its most intense, is a relationship of love. And almost, Alison, you talk about the expansion of the self, that you really feel like that person and you are fused in some way. But it doesn't have to be.
It can also be a relationship, could be of affection, but could just be of respect and awareness of the dignity and autonomy of the other. And so that, to me, is still care. If you think about, you talk about, and I agree with you, teachers and students, therapists and clients, mentors and mentees.
I mean, I definitely care deeply about my mentees, but it's not necessarily love or affection. It's the sense of pride in their success and my investing in that, that is a form of, you might want to call it Care Plus, but it's definitely on the care spectrum. So I don't quite, I know it's a relationship, I don't think it requires the kind of love and affection that many of our care relationships express, but I think it can't be, if I take care of you and I provide those services and I'm mean, or I don't respect your dignity, that's not care. That's something else, and we need to understand how to talk about that.
Margaret Levi: So, for both of you, I hear the notion of care really coming from the parenting relationship, because what you start with is this fusion of self with the other, and then there are varieties that move away from that. So, one of the questions that we've been raising in the piece that I'm co-authoring with Andy Elder, who is here, and I think Renak is here, Trivedi, is really thinking about, you know, with parents and children, if we see a child sitting on the sidewalk by itself, we hold that parent responsible for leaving that child on the sidewalk by itself. If we see an elderly person sitting on the sidewalk by herself, we don't know who to go to. Do we go to her children? Do we go to the police? I mean, it's a different...
So I'm just trying to open up this box so that caring doesn't just become an image of the parent with the child. It's so much more complicated than that.
Alison Gopnik: Well, I mean, of course, the thing that's interesting, and Sarah Hurdy, I guess, is not here for this workshop, but has been part of this, is that even from an evolutionary perspective, one of the things that I think we have good reason to believe is most distinctive about humans is that even for parents and children, we're not just parents and children. So we have evolved our parents from very, very early on in our evolutionary... I mean, as soon as we were homo sapiens, we had many different people involved in care for children because human care is so labor intensive and it's so difficult.
And it involves cooperation among different caregivers as well. So we sort of are in a situation where we have to care for the other caregivers who are involved in taking care of children. And I think there's a good argument that even the neural pathways, and we have people who can talk to that here, get accepted as it were for other kinds of care and cooperation.
Sarah's new book, which isn't out yet, but which I fortunately got to read in proofs, there's a bit of name drafting for you, is about fathers. And she has these beautiful examples of looking at this kind of natural experiment of gay fathers who were adopting children now. And then you look at their brain activation, and it looks like their brains are looking like the brains of mothers.
And my guess is that you'd find similar kinds of things if you were looking at all sorts of other kinds of care relations. So I think you're absolutely right. It's got this broader character. But in some sense, it's always had this broader character.
Margaret Levi: But what you're bringing in is it's not just a dyadic relationship. It's really a community relationship. There's cooperation among various individuals. I know some of what you talk about is the role that grandparents play.
Alison Gopnik: Yeah, that's right. And we know the grandparents have been there as long as we've... This is an empirical question that I think you were asking, Margaret. And I've been asking all my anthropologist friends and there may be people here who have a sense of it. Like, when do we start caring for elderly people? You know, is that...
You could certainly tell a story about the fact that we rely on elders so heavily for children to survive, which we have really good evidence for, and that we rely on elders to pass on cultural information, which is another thing that's very distinctive and important about humans and we have good evidence for. Both of those are reasons why we might feel that we wanted to care, I mean, evolutionary reasons as to why we might want to care for elders, but I think it's quite up for grabs about when does that start, how do we, you know, when do people start caring for elders outside of that healthy 55 to 75 post-menopausal.
Margaret Levi: And who does the society hold responsible for that? But let's...
Alison Gopnik: Oh, one more thing I want to mention, which I think is relevant to this, this is something that Zach comes up, which is that religious traditions also have this structure. So when you were talking about, you know, being further, a bodhisattva or a Christ is supposed to have the same relationship with everybody that you have with your child or that you have with the person that you really care about. And that's been a sort of picture for as long, I think, as we've had, as long as we've had that kind of religious, those kind of religious traditions.
I'm sorry, I just wanted to bring that in.
Anne-Marie Slaughter: No, no, I think that's important. And I loved the point about, you know, elder people transmitting. We're there with elephants and whales, which is a really great place to be. In terms of the animals that also do that.
So I think care is a relationship. I think care is a relationship that is not just motivated by love or affection. But then you have to ask yourself, so what's not care? So another way to kind of get at this is to say, what is not care? And to me, and again, Alison, I was so struck by your argument about the expansion of the self.
And lots of, again, if you read about parents, they talk about that. But you read about lovers, they talk about that. And when you talk to children caring for parents, what you often hear is that they came to a completely different understanding of their parent and themselves.
And again, you're not sugarcoating that this is all lovely, but I was saying 40% of male caregivers at home for parents now are men. And they talk about, and for non-paid caregivers, family caregivers are men. And again, for all the kind of difficulties of caring for an elder person, it's a profound experience.
So what I want to then say is, so maybe care in its broadest interpretation, its broadest spectrum, is that relationship that shapes your mutual identity. So it's very easy with parenting. You're a mother or a father. You are a child. You are a sibling. You are a spouse. Those are all very easy. You are a friend, and being a friend is part of your identity, at least for most of us. I definitely define myself as a friend. I define myself as a mentor, as a teacher. You can broaden that out. My identity is actually being shaped by that relationship with the other person, until you get to consumer, and there are others.
But no, when you get to transactional relationships, I do not define myself as a consumer or a customer. That is not part of the sort of mutual construction of identity that I think you might be able to use that to bound what are the relationships that would give rise to care. You're still not taking account of the paid relationship, but at least I'm really trying to get it hard at what does bound that relationship we call care.
Alison Gopnik: Yeah. One of the things we've been doing in the project is trying to point to, here's features that seem to be distinctively features of care. Do people actually treat those features as if they were distinctive? Some of the candidates are this idea of locality, the fact that you don't care about everybody equally unless you're a bodhisattva. The rest of us mere mortals can't do that. It's a relationship you have with a specific person. That makes it different from, say, a market relationship where the idea is you could, in principle, have a market relationship with anybody who's in the market.
Another one is, now here's an interesting case where I think maybe I would disagree with what you were just saying, Anne-Marie. Another one is this asymmetry. You can have these solidarity relationships with a spouse or with a friend or with your department or with CASBS where we feel as if our identity is in this larger group and we even would say, well, CASBS decided to do X and Y or the department is excelling this year, something like that, and we become part of the department.
I think there's something about the asymmetry. There's something about the fact that in caring relationships, you don't have equal resources. You don't have equal capacities that makes them different from...
There's the quality of extending the self, but it's a really interesting way of extending the self, which isn't like the kind of solidarity extension of the self. And even if you think about lovers, for example, it feels like...
Part of the reason I got interested in this was that my husband was really, really sick for a year and I was suddenly in the position of caring for him. And even with spousal relationships, which you want to be equal, you do have this sort of sense that if your spouse got really, really sick and wasn't the lively person that you'd married, how would you feel? Would you take care of them?
And you sort of feel like, you know, if you would disappear, if you would bugger off, then you're not really... That's not really love, right? That doesn't really count as being love. That's kind of like the acid test for whether it's a relationship of caring or love.
Sorry, go ahead.
Anne-Marie Slaughter: No, no, but again, the semantics are tricky. Like, God care... I care about you, God caring about us, the Bodhisattva, all that. That's not the care part that we're trying to tease out, right? That's again... We have to focus on care as taking care of someone, because caring about, that's way too broad. So taking care of someone, I agree with you that there's an asymmetry. In some cases, you might say there's expected reciprocity, right? So I'll take care. We pledge when we marry in sickness and in health.
But I agree with you that there's this idea that you have more resources and you are subordinating, you're either spending those resources on the other person or doing something you really don't particularly want to do because you have this relationship with the other person.
Margaret Levi: But the other side of it that I think you're pointing out, Alison, is that it's a power asymmetry too. It may be a short-term power asymmetry, but it is a power asymmetry. So you have power over your child. You have power over the sick person, old or young or disabled, in terms of making certain decisions on their behalf or giving them certain things or not giving them certain things. So, I mean, I think the kind of care relation you're talking about to really pull it out to the fullest, we have to bring some power into that.
Anne-Marie Slaughter: And is that true of Dr. Patient and therapist, client and mentor-mentee too?
Alison Gopnik: Yeah, I mean, I think that's exactly, you know, for people in this audience, if you think about your graduate students, right, that's exactly the thing that makes it hard to be a mentor, is that there's one sense in which this is obviously and transparently a power relationship where you have the power and you can write the reference letters and they can. And yet all of us, I think, feel like that, if that's the relationship, there's something that's wrong about it, that the sense in which the mentor is willing to say, you know, that's a research topic that I'm not really wanting to pursue, but, you know, if you need to pursue it, then I'm going to give you the resources to, I'm going to give you the resources to pursue it, or the strange sense in which you're happiest when your graduate students go off and do the thing that you never would have thought of and that you, on many occasions, told them was a really foolish project and that was never going to succeed, right? Like, all of us can recognize that that's when you really feel like, I have been a good teacher, right?
Margaret Levi: So we only have a few minutes before I want to open it up to the audience for questions. And there are at least two big issues on the table. One we're going to skirt for the moment because I think it's implied, which is gender and the role that gender plays in all of this.
And the other is technology, which both of you have addressed in different ways. So there's the question of technology and how it helps or hurts in the caring relationship. And there's the question of technology, something that you've addressed quite explicitly, Alison, about how machines need mothers. So let's start with how technology helps or hurts us, and then maybe we can get to how machines need mothers and value alignment problems with the kind of technology that we're introducing.
Anne-Marie Slaughter: Well, I think I'll just start with the easiest to me, the easiest proposition, which is as we develop socially assistive robots, we will make the actual physical caregiving much easier. I mean, when you look at home health aids, or if you have a parent or anyone, when you try to lift somebody who's a dead weight, it's very hard to do. It's disastrous for your back.
And many of the home health aids or the caregivers need care themselves in lots of ways. So it makes the job easier. I think we will very quickly get to the point where it just makes the job better for both the person who's the caregiver or the carer, I prefer the British, and the person being cared for because it will help you preserve your privacy and dignity.
A robot will help you get to the bathroom and not. So that will be much better all around. But it also will do a lot of the things that right now are hard to do and not well paid, and allow the caregiver to focus on, if it's a child, you know, the more I've learned about the development of children's brains, the more I think, oh my God, I needed to know a whole lot more. Or it would have been better. I mean, it was fine. But wouldn't it be great if you could spend time doing developmentally appropriate stuff as you're talking to the child, bathing and feeding and all of that.
But similarly, taking care of anyone or an elder where there's so much more to the job if the physical parts can be taken care of. So I see a much brighter future for home care with a lot of technology. The last thing I will say there also, and we know this, as you bring more technology into a job, men are more attracted to that job and then the wages go up. So that will be good for the overwhelming number of black and brown women who do most of our elder care and home health care. And a lot of nannies too.
Alison Gopnik: Yeah, I think that's right. It is worth saying that robots are terrible now. I mean, they're really, really amazingly awful. I spend half of my time with roboticists. And one thing that is a dead giveaway is whenever they show you one of the videos of what their robot can do, you'll see it says 10X on the top. And what 10X means is we've sped this up by 10 times because otherwise what you'd be watching is this incredibly painful, awkward, slow process for the robot.
**Margaret Levi:**And they still can't fold towels, right?
Alison Gopnik: And they still can't fold towels.
Anne-Marie Slaughter: But they do use them in Japan already.
Alison Gopnik: Yeah, I mean, I think there are things that they can do, but I think we underestimate just how peeling ginger, I have saw a robot. Now, to be fair..
Anne-Marie Slaughter: That is hard, peeling ginger!
Alison Gopnik: But like this was the standard, was our robots can peel cucumbers, not ginger, we don't think they can peel ginger, but we're starting to get them so they can peel cucumbers. But the other side of it is if we ever do think about having artificial systems that have some intelligence and autonomy, I don't think we're really in the ballpark of doing that now, but if we do, then we have this famous alignment problem, which is how will we get them to have the same goals that we do? How will we get them to do the right things and not the wrong things?
Not turn everybody in the world into paper clips, for example, to use the Nick Bostrom example. And the interesting thing about that is the way that that's often phrased is, well, what we'll do is we'll just train them to have our goals. We'll train them to look at us and know what we want and do what we want. And that's kind of a creepy picture, right? I mean, that's kind of a picture of having them as a kind of slave, right? Where the slavery is built in.
And if you actually had something that was intelligent and autonomous, you wouldn't, or at least you could argue that that's not the relationship you want. The relationship you want is for them to be able to set up goals for themselves.
Anne-Marie Slaughter: That's Clara and the son.
Alison Gopnik: Right, yeah exactly. For them to have a kind of autonomy. Now, how can you have that? How can you have autonomy and have good goals at the same time?
Well, that's a problem that we have with every single time we raise a child. Every child we've ever raised, we have this problem about how do we get them to have goals that are like our goals, but we know that we don't want them to be the same as our goals, because that's the whole point of having a new generation. That's a problem that is central to thinking about care.
And you've mentioned this several times, this balance between autonomy and having goals that are good, right? Autonomy and utility, that's a really fundamental thing. And I think it comes up even in picking someone up, doing this very physical kind of care.
If you're holding a baby, and people who study infancy have talked about this, the way that infants are molding to your body, and yet you have to figure out how to hold them so they can do that in a way that lets them actually be making some of the decisions about what their posture is. So I think that's a very deep thing that we're going to have to think about if we are going to ever have any genuinely autonomous or intelligent agents. And maybe I was thinking about this as we were coming.
To some extent, even if we don't have AGI, we do have that relationship to our artifacts too. And this is something that I think will come up. We think about care as just being human, but to some extent we feel like we need to respect the artistic achievements of the past, and we feel as if someone came in and smashed up CASBS, that that would be, physically, that would be a horrible thing, that we need to think about how we feel about our houses, or we feel about the planet, or land, exactly, or gardens.
It's not necessarily that we do that because they'll extend our utilities. Maybe we have our national parks because it's nice to visit the national parks, but there's also a sense in which we feel like we have resources and responsibilities to care for those systems in this broader way. Again, this alignment issue about even if you're thinking about something like a national forest, you feel, even though it sounds sort of strange, you sort of feel like, well, it should have its own goals.
My goal might be to go and visit and go camping and have a beautiful time, but what I'm doing when I'm preserving it is I have some implicit sense that there's a stable ecology that it should have.
**Margaret Levi:**Well, there's a whole movement right now about giving rivers and rights, giving them a voice, giving them a decision-making power in some sense.
Anne-Marie Slaughter: So I'll just, this conversation has helped. I think, again, we keep flipping between care as a service, which I've said isn't care, unless it is accompanied by attachment. So care as attachment is what I think we're really trying to get at, which must infuse those services to be care.
But then really does leave wide open what, you know, where IGEN or any of the people that I've been working with would start, which is no, there are people who are caregivers, and this is what they do, and what they do is not valued, and you're not going to get there by insisting they love or feel affection for their people. So there's still a gaping hole in the argument.
**Margaret Levi:**But I think what is clear, and then we'll go to questions, is that there's, that that attachment has an emotional, a strong emotional element. And one of the limits of robots right now is that it may be, as in the Japanese, some of the Japanese cases, there is an emotional attachment from the person using the robot . But does the robot have an emotion that it can convey, that it cares, that its body can be molded, that it's concerned?
And that's the thing we haven't, so it's more than value alignment. I mean, that is, it's also this introduction of the emotional arrangements in this relationship that create the kind of thing that you mean by care. So let us open it up to the rest of you to see what you want to do.
Audience Member: So I'm Megan Gunner, and one of the things that struck me throughout this whole conversation, how deeply embedded it has been in our own cultural perspective, there are cultures where the whole issue is obligation. And I don't care what you feel for me. There are many cultures where we don't want our kids to grow up to be independent.
That would be an anathema. So I wonder as we think about this, how we can begin, and sometimes I think when we look at evolution, we take the pieces of it that fit nicely with our own cultural perspective and sort of ignore the rest. So I really think as we talk about this, we need to step back and think about how much our thinking and framing of all of this has been embedded in our own.
And also, we're Americans. We are so freaking individualist that you have to want to do this. It is a choice. And we're of course seeing what's happening is many young people are choosing not to have children.
Margaret Levi: So I'm going to keep you at the question level. You're absolutely right. And the larger project does attempt to do that. You heard a piece of it. I will let each of you try to respond to that as well.
Alison Gopnik: Yeah, I mean the empirical question, exactly what we're doing in this empirical project is saying, you know, I was thinking about this in terms of the caregivers. We just don't know. I mean, do people who are professional caregivers feel as if it's important to have an emotional relationship?
It's just an empirical question that we could find out about. Do you need to have these features of asymmetry and locality? Do you have them across different kinds of cultures and different traditions?
Do people feel differently about it? I think the sort of prima facie point, and Barbara Rogoff responded when we were talking about this, is that actually in most cultures, care is more deeply embedded in the cultural practices and institutions. By the time you're 15, you've cared for many, many children and you've been cared for by many, many people. And some part of me…
Audience Member: Not necessarily by choice. There’s this obligatory thing going on.
Alison Gopnik: Well, I mean, so that's a question, right?
Margaret Levi: That’s an empirical question.
Alison Gopnik: That’s an empirical question. Do you feel as if these... To what extent are these things issues of solidarity?
Margaret Levi: And I think those are great questions, and that's part of what we're trying to open up, is that space to really think about that. So thank you for the...
Anne-Marie Slaughter: I would just say... So my husband always says he went to South Korea for six months right after he graduated from college, and he was hanging out with his Korean friends and he was stunned that they would say things like, oh, I really don't like my mother. Because exactly, he always explained it as you did, that there was no question he was going to take care of his mother, and since that was very clear, he did not have to sort of love her to motivate the care.
And so I do think, I think there is a lot... I think the way I'd frame the question you asked, which we need to look at, is to what extent does my... and both of us, this assumption that it's motivated at least by close attachment, affection, to what extent is that because it isn't a structure of obligation?
Audience Member: =Thank you for this exceptionally lucid and broad-ranging conversation. My name is Mitchell Stevens. I'm a sociologist here at Stanford.
It struck me that a lot of the infrastructure of your thinking owes a substantial debt to several generations of feminist theorizing and research, which I didn't hear explicitly surfaced in your dialogue. I'm just wondering if you might think about how, as we continue to build this intellectual apparatus, we sort of recognize the shoulders of the scholars we stand on.
Anne-Marie Slaughter: Thank you for saying that. I wanted to mention Nancy Folbrey, who is the feminist economist..
Margaret Levi: and has been part of this group.
Anne-Marie Slaughter: … who’s led a tremendous amount of that work and many others.
Alison Gopnik: I would say though, one of the things that struck me starting to do the literature search and reading about this is, there was this moment of the ethics of care within philosophy and psychology. There was this moment of saying we need to have an ethics of care and that's a feminist idea. There was not very much development of that that happened in the psychological or in the kind of standard philosophical literature, aside from just saying we need an ethics of care.
If you read all the work that's been done in moral psychology, for instance, which has been an enormous topic over the past 20 years or so, aside from just saying and feminists say that we need to have an ethics of care, all the kinds of questions that we've been raising haven't really been things that have been worked out empirically. People may have been thinking about them, but the empirical questions about what people are doing and how they're thinking about it, those haven't been addressed using the empirical tools that are available in social science to a very large degree, at least.
Anne-Marie Slaughter: Was Carol Gilligan's work continued?
Alison Gopnik: No. Carol Gilligan's work is a good example. First of all, Carol Gilligan's work turned out not to be very empirically well founded, and that became the kind of story about that, that became the story about that work, and it wasn't continued within the traditions of psychology.
So even though it was really important if you look at contemporary moral psychology, Margaret and I have had a bit of a joke about this as we've been involved in this project, so we turn to one field or another and we say, gee, look, here's the moral psychologists and they're giving you this taxonomy of all the kinds of moral relationships, and there's no care. There's nothing about, there's nothing about care. Why would that be? Is there any common feature of the people who are doing this that might explain? And no, here's the economists and they're giving you a taxonomy of all these, you know? And no care.
Why is it that that hasn't happened? So I think it's true. It's been in the feminist tradition, but it hasn't made contact with the rest of the, especially the rest of the empirical socialists.
Margaret Levi: I think in economics and actually in sociology as well, there's been a little more advance than that. So in, you know, in economics, Nancy Fulbury's work, you mentioned, has been foundational for a whole group of empirical economists, some of whom are men as well as women, but trying to understand the relationships and the bargaining and contractual relationships within the family and to some extent about care as well following up on her.
Alison Gopnik: But don't you think in the, maybe we can have this conversation otherwise.
Margaret Levi: It's not mainstream economics. It's not a dominant area, but it certainly has had follow-up.
Alison Gopnik: And it's been more like, let's take the foundational theoretical ideas about economics, like the social contract, and apply them to these cases like, you know.
Margaret Levi: Sometimes it's that and sometimes it's more like what she's doing. And in sociology, you have people like Arlie Hochschild and others thinking about the habits of the heart. And there has been research again that builds on that, though it tends to be single case studies and sort of a certain kind of observational work that's very often hard to scale, or at an extremely abstract level.
Audience Member: Thank you very much for this great discussion. So I'm Stéphane Vincent-Lancrain. I work as an economist of education at the OECD.
And you started the discussion by talking about the importance of the political economy of care. And so my question is, in fact, what you see as the role of governments in that, and the US government in particular, would say that many countries would say that actually they provide incentives for people to care about their children, about their spouses, with a lot of different laws, even to care about nature nowadays. So in the case of the US and you have different models for that.
In Sweden, people care in a very different way than in countries where you have laws that come from Napoleon, for example. So what, in the case of the US what do you see that facilitates care or gets in the way of care and what the governments can do about that?
Anne-Marie Slaughter: How long do you have?
Alison Gopnik: Well, you know, Anne-Marie, I was reading your chapter, and I wanted to ask you about, this was something I was thinking about at 3 o'clock in the morning when I couldn't sleep. You know, markets and states are the models that we have for how we provide goods, and neither of them seems to be a very good fit for care, even though obviously markets and states are playing a big role. So what I was trying to think about is, if it's true that you're thinking about a relation, what's the sort of political economy way of dealing with that, right?
I mean, aside from just saying relations are good, and care is good, and we should encourage it. And my thought is, oddly enough, maybe something like just kind of giving people money, family allowances, the model of you just take people, you say you're a carer, you have responsibilities and privileges, and here's a whole bunch of money for you as an individual, rather than say something that comes through a state. Oddly enough, that seems like a very unsentimental choice, but that might be the right, I mean, that does seem to be a way of saying, you're the individual, it's your relationship that we're supporting, you have autonomy over how you spend this money or what you do with it or how it plays out.
**Margaret Levi:**So you've got two questions now. Is that a good idea, and what’s wrong with America?
Anne-Marie Slaughter: So I’ll just start with the obvious. This is just a horrific place to have a child, relative to any of our peer countries. It's just insane.
Margaret Levi: Or to get old.
Anne-Marie Slaughter: Yeah, well, yes. Care, and I'll come to that in a minute, but childcare for two children costs more than the cost of rent in all 50 states. It's just crazy. Of course, we're driving mostly women still out of the labor force, but it's more than that. You literally find all these couples who say, yes, I'd love to have another child. I cannot afford to do it.
It's a major drag on the employment market. The hodgepodge that we have is just disgraceful. The US government, at least when it comes to kids, when you look at the infrastructure of care, it was child care, elder care, paid family leave, which we still don't have, and various other child supports. So we've got a long way to go. So then what should we do? And here, it isn't always true that institutional care is better.
Hillary Cottom, whom I've written with, who wrote this wonderful book, Radical Help, her point is that the Beverage Report actually said, yes, there should be a state that provides all these supports, but actually that will only work if you also have a tremendous amount of civic activity, so that there was a whole part that reintroduced the human scale into the government.
Margaret Levi: And the cooperation, back to the interdependence and the cooperation.
Anne-Marie Slaughter: So I don't think this is an argument that the state should provide. I think the question of how the state should support, and the state should provide some, it's like health care with a public option. What New America is doing is arguing that families with children under five should be a protected or recognized class like seniors.
Now I turned 65 this year and I have health care and I have social security and I get discounts and I just applied with the New York Metro, I'm going to be able to ride all over the place. We have none of that for families with children under five. And yet from a policy point of view in terms of those children and what happens in the economy, so we think you should find lots of ways not to just give money to individuals but to support strong family relationships.
And then you get into foster care and all the sort of efforts to keep kids in their families and support the families. Why can't you actually pay for a person? If you can pay for a nurse in France to go and be there, why can't you pay for more than the social worker who shows up at intervals?
But I think that that's again why I want to talk about an economy that values relationships and thinks about how to support them.
Audience Member: Hi, I'm Seth Pollack. I'm a psychologist. Hi, everybody. Thank you for kicking this off with such a stimulating and thoughtful discussion. I'm curious, and maybe you've talked about this in prior discussions, when you talk about an adult, a parent has more resources and is supporting goals out of affection and love and all of these things, is there a role for the selfish gene theory in your thinking? That there is a biological or evolutionarily driven selfish investment in making sure our genes do well. And does that fit in with any of the discussions?
Alison Gopnik: My personal story, which is like Sarah's, is if you're talking about mice, it's fairly clear that the set of neural and psychological phenomena that lead us to care for babies, literally being a mammal means that you give calories to your children. It's something that people, I think, don't quite recognize is that, you know, to be a mother is to be in economic conflict with your baby by definition, if you're a mammal or if you're a bird too, but especially if you're a mammal. Then you get these psychological devices that do this rather amazing thing, which is enable you to extend your utilities to another organism.
And obviously to begin with, that's motivated by the fact that you've got selfish genes and the babies are going to survive. But what's interesting is very quickly that exact same framework, even the hormones and the, as you guys know, the hormones in the brains get adapted to have pair bonded fathers. So you have voles who are treating their spouses the same way that the mice moms would treat the babies.
And my just-so story is then you have carnivores who have more complicated social relationships and you have primates who have cooperation. And then you get this exacted use of these basic structures, now in context where they're not about selfish genes at all, now in context where it is really good for a bunch of primates to cooperate, or it's really good for a carnivore pack to help each other to accomplish things until you get to humans where it's good for us as humanity to support the future and to care for each other. So anyway, that's my just-so story about it.
So I do think it starts out being grounded in evolution, but it very quickly becomes a structure that enables, just like social contracts, right? I mean, I think you have a good reason to believe that you start developing these contractual capacities very early, and there's good reasons for doing it. But once you have that structure, then you can use it to do things that you didn't ever do in the context, like have a giant planet-spanning market that you obviously didn't have in the context in which you evolved. But anyway, that's an important, deep question.
Margaret Levi: But there are societies in which people are taking care of other people's children, right? So it's not just about... I mean, that doesn't mean it isn't the selfish gene because you're still perpetuating something that you care about.
Alison Gopnik: No, but that's what I'm saying, Margaret, is if you're not a mouse, then I think it's not just the selfish... It's not just the selfish gene. And as soon as you’re... If Sarah's right, as soon as your home is safe…
Margaret Levi: Sarah Hardy.
Alison Gopnik: Sarah Hardy.
Anne-Marie Slaughter: But Sarah Hardy, I just was reading her book Mother Nature, her original book, right? Where she's... The whole point is to show that some notion of great maternal love and affection just does not hold in the animal kingdom and in the insect kingdom and the avian kingdom, that there are.. Mothers are highly, highly strategic creatures who will actually... That argument is much closer to the selfish gene. And this goes back to Megan's question.
I recognize all that. I also think that at least for humans, there is something very special about the ways in which we attach. I mean, lots of animals mate for life too, but that there's something there that it's in our brains. Caregivers get something as well as giving something. It's deeply satisfying. And those are the pieces I still think we need to tease out.
Margaret Levi: Well, I'm having trouble thinking of it as just biology, that I think it's also the ways in which societies develop themselves and the kinds of norms that they inculcate into the society. So I want to thank both of you, Anne-Marie Slaughter and Alison Gopnik, and all of you who came and participated. So thank you very much.
This was a great way to start our conference.
Narrator: That was Margaret Levi, Alison Gopnik, and Anne-Marie Slaughter discussing the social science of caregiving. As always, you can follow us online or in your podcast app of choice. And if you're interested in learning more about the Center's people, projects, and rich history, you can visit our website at casbs.stanford.edu.
Until next time, from everyone at CASBS and the Human Centered team, thanks for listening.