Em Dobson

This project takes a comprehensive approach to the application of life-value ethics to matters of disability. I overview the philosophical foundation of my approach, life-value ethics, in its different dimensions. I explore the distinction between life-requirements and need-satisfiers. Life-requirements are the fundamental needs shared by all human being whereas need-satisfiers are the tools by which we access our life-requirements in specific circumstances. After exploring this philosophical groundwork, I address the social, medical, and value-neutral models of disability. I support a synthesis of the social and medical models of disability, but I believe that Elizabeth Barnes's value-neutral model in its rejection of the idea that being disabled is necessarily bad helps to overcome the medicalized belief that the only way to fully realize life-value is to eliminate disability. Hence, it is primarily the value-neutral model that I use to show how a life-value approach can address matters of accessibility and accommodation. As a way of demonstrating the merits of a life-value approach, I apply life-value ethics to the recent policies banning single-use plastic straws. Even though plastic straws do not represent the biggest threat to the environment, they are a primary target of environmentalist initiatives to reduce the amount of plastic waste entering our oceans. It can be shown that plastic straws act as need-satisfiers for disabled people with neurological and muscular impairments. In addition, I contend that by using the concept of coherent inclusivity, we can show that making these need-satisfiers accessible to the public will not only avoid causing harm, but will also help to provide alternative need-satisfiers to our ageing population.

A common concern within the disability community are the ways in which negative or misguided representations in media produce stigma. Stigma can be broadly defined to include “problems of knowledge, problems of attitudes, and problems of behaviour,” which means that inadequate or unrealistic representations can cause a variety of damaging effects1. In Narrative Prosthesis, David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder explore the ways in which a broad selection of literature has represented disability as a literary device. Despite an ever growing number of examples of disability in media, the public, and especially many scholars, have forgotten about how many representations actually exist: “a social erasure has been performed even as a representational repertoire has evolved”2. This forgetting has serious consequences, not only on the way disability is socially received, but in framing accessibility problems as either non-existent or not as something in need of significant change. In this way, a critical look at representations of disability is needed in order to not only combat stigma, but to bring disability issues to the forefront of social and political consideration. Using Letitia Meynell’s model of pictures as epistemic devices and Nancy Tuana’s conception of Wilful Ignorance, I argue that the social forgetting that occurs in spite of the numerous examples in media is due to the outcomes of those representations. In addition, I suggest that discussion of Wilful Ignorance should take disability examples into account going forward within the field of Agnotology. When the purpose of a disabled character as a literary device is ultimately to remove or cure the disability itself, it is not surprising that the public ultimately forgets that there was a disabled person there at all.