Ashley E. Taylor

The growing field of feminist disability studies explores how human bodies are interpreted through cultural values and expectations surrounding physical and mental ability. This paper contributes to and expands upon this conversation by examining how the ideal of “able-mindedness” functions to maintain racial divisions and inequalities through attributions of cognitive and psychiatric disability to bodies of color. Drawing upon contemporary examples from popular social media, public policy, and academic discourse, the author shows how racialized and nonnormatively gendered bodies are identified and interpreted through norms of able-mindedness and used as markers against which the ideal of the able mind is upheld. This “discourse of pathology” operates insidiously within academic theorizing by remaining largely invisible because it tracks our deeply ingrained assumptions about the undesirability of cognitive and psychiatric disability. The author argues that because of the entanglement of race with disability, so long as the normalizing and privileging of the ideal of able-mindedness goes unchallenged and we maintain the myth that there exists a normal mental state, both racism and ableism remain very much alive, including within the academy

In this thesis I explore an alternative formulation of the circumstances of justice. The circumstances of justice are the circumstances that make human cooperation necessary and possible, and because human cooperation is necessary to justice, they make justice both necessary and possible. For constructivists, principles of justice respond to these circumstances. Standard accounts of the circumstances of justice can be found in Hobbes, Hume, and Rawls, and many contemporary theorists rely on these accounts. My dissertation rejects these standard accounts of the circumstances of justice—on the grounds of exclusion and trust—and defends an alternative account. A core idea of my proposed alternative is that the circumstances of justice must be understood in terms of solidarity. A proper understanding of the role of solidarity in an adequate characterization of the circumstances of justice requires a good grasp of the nature of solidarity itself. To that end I offer a novel account of solidarity which I argue improves existing theories of solidarity. In the first part of this project I explain the role and importance of the circumstances of justice. I then offer a full description of solidarity and its normative character. In the second half of the project I offer my new account of the circumstances of justice, including an explanation and examples of how broad the scope of this reformulation is. I conclude the project by applying my new account of the circumstances of justice to the problem of climate change, and ask whether we can now construe the coordination of resources between generations as a problem of justice.