Diseguaglianze nell’eguaglianza. Il ruolo dell’amministrazione pubblica Inequalities in Equality. The Role of Public Administration

In 1971 Julian Tudor Hart formulated the «inverse care law» to highlight how those most in need of medical care, on average, receive less, and to highlight the inequities of many European redistributive systems. Even today, our public administrations fail to reverse this law and the people in greatest need receive less support and fewer services. Phenomena such as increasing ageing, economic crises, migration, increase society’s needs and the number of people at risk of being left without support. In order to understand why public administrations often fail to intercept specifically the needs of the most vulnerable, it may be useful to consider the feminist critique of today’s prevailing theory of justice, that of John Rawls. The essential objection concerns imagining the people who enter into the social contract all as adult, autonomous and independent. This leaves the concept of mutual interdependence out of the justice paradigm and influences the behavior of public administrations. It is therefore necessary to rethink administration differently and in this redesign process feminist thought can provide another important contribution through the theories of the ‘ethic of care’.