Eva Kittay

In this paper, the author questions the relations between the definition of a good life and the concept of normality. Her approach, supported by a philosophical reflection rooted in her personal experience as the daughter of Jewish parents who survived the holocaust, then as the mother of a child with a severe cognitive disability, demonstrates that relations between normality and a good life are complex. Being identified as normal seems indeed to be a condition for a good life, as the desire for normality that is in most of us will attest. However, the experience of disability evidences that a happy life is possible outside dominant norms, and leads to rethink both normality and good life. Thus, the author invites to consider normality from the angle of norm construction processes, in a way that fosters establishing alternative norms. Regarding the idea of good life, she stresses that it has to be thought of in the plural and that, for relational beings, good life cannot be reduced to the idea of a rational, reasonable or efficient life, but that it relies much more on the capacity to be and to strike up relationships.

In this chapter, the author revisits her dependency critique of John Rawls’s political theory. She argues that, in conceiving justice in terms of voluntary associations between equals, Rawls neglects the reality of human dependence and interdependence. She argues that there are five areas where Rawls’ conception of equality is inadequate for addressing dependency. First, Rawls mistakenly accepts Hume’s circumstances of justice. Second, Rawls mistakenly accepts the assumption that citizens are all “fully cooperating” members of society. Third, the theory of justice mistakenly presumes that people are free in the sense that they are a “self-originating” source of valid claims. Fourth, the chapter argues that Rawls’s list of primary goods is not adequate for meeting the needs of those giving and receiving care. Fifth, Rawls begins with a concept of social cooperation that presumes equality between those who cooperate. The chapter argues that with each of these assumptions, important concerns about dependency are omitted.

Through a series of essays contributed by clinicians, medical historians, and prominent moral philosophers, _Cognitive Disability and Its Challenge to Moral Philosophy_ addresses the ethical, bio-ethical, epistemological, historical, and meta-philosophical questions raised by cognitive disability Features essays by a prominent clinicians and medical historians of cognitive disability, and prominent contemporary philosophers such as Ian Hacking, Martha Nussbaum, and Peter Singer Represents the first collection that brings together philosophical discussions of Alzheimer's disease, intellectual/developmental disabilities, and autism under the rubric of cognitive disability Offers insights into categories like Alzheimer's, mental retardation, and autism, as well as issues such as care, personhood, justice, agency, and responsibility.

Equal moral status for all human beings does not commit us to the malignant exclusionary practices we find in racism and pernicious nationalism. Racism (like the other harmful “ism”) involves a group that is constituted by appropriating to one’s own “primal group” a set “desirable” intrinsic properties (or traits) and expelling from the primal group those with the undesirable properties through subjugation, exploitation, sterilization, or extermination. The moral harm in racism is practiced by a ‘constituted’ group that must always police its borders with violence and justifications for its privilege. The Nazi’s Project T4, which exterminated mentally disabled children born of German parents, and the subsequent exterminations of racialized groups, in particular the Jews, were regarded as the one process of cleansing Germany and its conquered territories of defective and inferior beings. Rather than being instances of “preferring one’s own,” the racist project was that of constituting the group by appropriating for itself all the desirable traits and expelling all undesirable ones, thus linking ablism and racism.

In this article I examine the proposition that severe cognitive disability is an impediment to moral personhood. Moral personhood, as I understand it here, is articulated in the work of Jeff McMahan as that which confers a special moral status on a person. I rehearse the metaphysical arguments about the nature of personhood that ground McMahan’s claims regarding the moral status of the “congenitally severely mentally retarded” (CSMR for short). These claims, I argue, rest on the view that only intrinsic psychological capacities are relevant to moral personhood: that is, that relational properties are generally not relevant. In addition, McMahan depends on an argument that species membership is irrelevant for moral consideration and a contention that privileging species membership is equivalent to a virulent nationalism (these will be discussed below). In consequence, the CSMR are excluded from moral personhood and their deaths are less significant as their killing is less wrong than that of persons. To throw doubt on McMahan’s conclusions about the moral status and wrongness of killing the CSMR I question the exclusive use of intrinsic properties in the metaphysics of personhood, the dismissal of the moral importance of species membership, and the example of virulent nationalism as an apt analogy. I also have a lot to say about McMahan’s empirical assumptions about the CSMR.

Social policy, broadly understood, is an intervention by government or other public institution designed to promote the well‐being of its members or intended to rectify perceived social problems. Governmental policy can issue from legislative, executive, or judicial actions. Regulations and rules governing major public establishments, such as universities or medical institutions, and directed at promoting the aims of the larger social body can also be considered instruments of social policy. Social policy is sometimes understood more narrowly as interventions of the state in the domain of distribution or redistribution, when action has been thought necessary to correct for the instability inherent in a given social structure or created by pressures for social change. In this sense, it pertains to welfare policies aimed at the poor. In this article, we will deal primarily with social policy in the broad sense, reserving a brief discussion at the end on social policy in the narrow sense, as welfare policy.

I argue that the claim that merely being born of two human beings in a condition that supports life is sufficient for full moral status. Not only ought we not to exclude any human being from full moral status because they lack the possession of what some have deemed to be morally relevant properties, we don’t have a full grasp of what is morally relevant unless we include the many different possible lives humans live in their diverse bodies and minds. Our understanding of how we ought to treat nonhuman beings is not of lesser importance, but it necessarily depends on how we understand what is morally significant in human lives.

The sixteen essays in Gender Struggles address a wide range of issues in gender struggles, from the more familiar ones that, for the last thirty years, have been the mainstay of feminist scholarship, such as motherhood, beauty, and sexual violence, to new topics inspired by post-industrialization and multiculturalism, such as the welfare state, cyberspace, hate speech, and queer politics, and finally to topics that traditionally have not been seen as appropriate subjects for philosophizing, such as adoption, care work, and the home.

In this essay, I recount and examine my response to a genetic diagnosis of my disabled daughter. My daughter was forty‐nine before the diagnosis came. All her disabilities were traceable to a de novo single gene variant on the PURA gene that was discovered only in 2014. I speak of the jolt and the recalibration that this discovery engendered, concluding that, while it seemed that everything had changed, nothing had changed. But my family did discover a community in which Sesha joins other PURA‐perfect sons and daughters and where we as a family acquire a “horizontal identity” marked by a genetic variant.

In this essay, we suggest practical ways to shift the framing of crisis standards of care toward disability justice. We elaborate on the vision statement provided in the 2010 Institute of Medicine (National Academy of Medicine) “Summary of Guidance for Establishing Crisis Standards of Care for Use in Disaster Situations,” which emphasizes fairness; equitable processes; community and provider engagement, education, and communication; and the rule of law. We argue that interpreting these elements through disability justice entails a commitment to both distributive and recognitive justice. The disability rights movement's demand “Nothing about us, without us” requires substantive inclusion of disabled people in decision‐making related to their interests, including in crisis planning before, during, and after a pandemic like Covid‐19.