Shelley L Tremain

In “Why Should Liberals Care about Equality?,” Ronald Dworkin distinguishes between two forms of liberalism, one form based on neutrality, and the other one based on equality. As Dworkin explains it, proponents of both forms argue against legal incursion into private morality, and argue in favour of increased sexual, political, racial, and economic equality; however, they disagree about which of these traditionally liberal values is the fundamental one, and which is its derivative. Liberalism based on neutrality takes as its fundamental value that one which holds that government must remain neutral with respect to moral issues, and it supports egalitarian measures only insofar as they can be shown to derive from that constitutive principle. For liberalism based on equality, the fundamental value is that one which holds that government must treat each of its citizens as an equal; egalitarian liberalism insists upon moral neutrality only to the extent that equality requires it.

The second edition of Foucault and the Government of Disability considers the continued relevance of Foucault to disability studies, as well as the growing significance of disability studies to understandings of Foucault. A decade ago, this international collection provocatively responded to Foucault’s call to question what is regarded as natural, inevitable, ethical, and liberating. The book’s contributors draw on Foucault to scrutinize a range of widely endorsed practices and ideas surrounding disability, including rehabilitation, community care, impairment, normality and abnormality, inclusion, prevention, accommodation, and special education. In this revised and expanded edition, four new essays extend and elaborate the lines of inquiry by problematizing (to use Foucault’s term) the epistemological, political, and ethical character of the supercrip, the racialized war on autism, the performativity of intellectual disability, and the potent mixture of neoliberalism and biopolitics in the context of physician-assisted suicide.

Until now, philosophical debate about human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research has largely been limited to its ethical dimensions and implications. Although the importance and urgency of these ethical debates should not be underestimated, the almost undivided attention that mainstream and feminist philosophers have paid to the ethical dimensions of hESC research suggests that the only philosophically interesting questions and concerns about it are by and large ethical in nature. My argument goes some distance to challenge the assumption that ethical considerations alone must be foregrounded in philosophical discussions about hESC research by introducing a critical stance on the epistemological and ontological assumptions that underlie and condition it. A central aim of the paper is to show how Foucault's insights into knowledge-power, taken in combination with Hacking's claims about styles of reasoning, can make these assumptions evident, as well as cast light on their potentially deleterious implications for disabled people. Arguing in this way also enables me to draw out constitutive effects of research on stem cells, that is, to indicate how the discursive practices surrounding research on stem cells, as well as the technology itself, contribute to the constitution of impairment.