Miklós Zala

This paper aims to defend the human variation model of disability (HVM) from a philosophical perspective. The HVM highlights how disability-related disadvantage often arises because social and material environments are designed for a narrower range of human variation than actually exists. Although the model remains central to disability theory, it has received limited philosophical attention since its foundational formulation by Richard K. Scotch and Kay Schriner in the late 1990s. This paper addresses that gap in two ways. First, it presents the HVM, evaluates its strengths and weaknesses, and offers several necessary revisions. Second, it mounts a philosophical defense of the HVM by answering potential objections and comparing it with two recent, related accounts of disability by Alex Gregory, and Katharine Jenkins and Aness Kim Webster, that just like the HVM, also strongly build on the notion of atypicality.

This paper investigates the relationship between discrimination, epistemic injustice, and social structures as it pertains to the marginalization of disabled people. Doing so, we argue for a new understanding of structural discrimination. While discrimination is often viewed as an agent-centered or rule-based phenomenon, we argue that a broader socio-structural lens is crucial for understanding how it emerges and persists over time. Drawing on the Human Variation Model (HVM) of disability, we analyze three subtypes of epistemic injustice—testimonial injustice, hermeneutical injustice, and non-disabled ignorance—and demonstrate their critical role in perpetuating structural discrimination. Our analysis addresses three gaps in the literature: (1) it clarifies the relationship between epistemic injustice and (structural) discrimination; (2) it highlights how epistemic injustices contribute to discrimination against disabled people; and (3) it allows us to have a better grasp of what structural discrimination is and how it differs from its direct and indirect counterparts.

This review essay critically examines Jessica Begon’s Disability Through the Lens of Justice, with a particular focus on her novel definition of disability. Begon challenges traditional models and offers a normative account that conceptualizes disability as a restriction of entitlements—capabilities that individuals are entitled to as a matter of justice. Her account considers disability as arising from the interaction of impairments with the social and political environment, and she emphasizes that disability is an injustice that restricts valuable opportunities that enable people to control important domains of their lives. This review essay highlights some problems stemming from Begon’s application of a normative conception of disability.

In this paper, I critically analyze Andrea Sangiovanni’s approach to international justice in the EU that he labels Reciprocity-based Internationalism (RBI). I aim to show that the type of reciprocity RBI operates with is not a morally attractive ground for distributive justice because it cannot cope with the case of member states’ inability to reciprocate the production of collective goods at the EU level. I illustrate this with the case of disability. I contrast RBI’s understanding of reciprocity with Christie Hartley’s ‘relationship model’. I argue that the relationship model of reciprocity should characterize the EU, whose two core normative features are fraternity and equal status. The advantage of the relationship model is that it calls for a stronger type of solidarity than RBI does. That not only entails the willingness to support those worse-off members that cannot productively reciprocate other member states’ efforts at the EU level but also calls for a higher redistribution rate within the EU. In the paper, I make three comparisons between RBI’s ‘productive reciprocity’ and the relationship model. The first concerns non-EU-integration-related disadvantages; the second concerns membership cases, such as accession to federations and supranational unions, while the third comparison examines EU-integration-related disadvantages. I argue that the relationship model is a better alternative to RBI in both integration-related and non-integration-related disadvantages. Also, the relationship model can justify accession cases where previous historical ties are relevant, which are outside of the purview of RBI.

In this paper, I critically examine Cécile Laborde’s Liberalism’s Religion and argue that her approach to religious exemptions faces significant difficulties. I first highlight some methodological disagreements with Laborde’s theory. I raise concerns about her theory’s ‘two-pronged’ structure being too narrow. Moreover, Laborde’s ‘disaggregation approach’ promises a context-sensitive, bottom-up theory of exemptions which examines exemption claims on a case-by-case basis, but instead offers a top-down theory that provides an idealized explanation for potentially all religious exemption cases. I argue that a non-ideal approach which does not offer an overarching explanation of exemptions is preferable to Laborde’s. Next, I discuss further problems with Laborde’s theory, which concern her assumption that if there is something ‘ethically salient’ about religious practices, it must be located at the personal level. Laborde claims that if we want to ascertain the ethical salience of a practice, we must focus on the relationship between the person and her commitments. But this individualistic focus cannot always account for why we want to accommodate religious practices. Such practices, I claim, are sometimes accommodated not on an individual, but on a group-based rationale. Finally, I address Laborde’s dismissal of the analogy between religion and disability. Laborde’s view regarding disabilities and the stated analogy is unsatisfactory in two respects: it is based on the medical model of disability and it overlooks the role of the environment in turning physical impairments into disabilities.

This chapter describes how philosophical theorizing about justice can be connected with empirical research in the social sciences. We begin by drawing on some received distinctions between ideal and non-ideal approaches to theorizing justice along several different dimensions, showing how non-ideal approaches are needed to address normative aspects of real-world problems and to provide practical guidance. We argue that there are advantages to a transitional approach to justice focusing on manifest injustices, including the fact that it enables us to set aside some reasonable disagreements about justice. The ‘bottom-up’ approach we advocate, for which we borrow Wolff’s term ‘real-world political philosophy’, is an empirically-informed normative analysis that attends to specific, identifiable injustices, and thus is partial, though not isolationist. We illustrate our approach by considering how different models of the nature of disability suggest different kinds of remedy for injustices faced by persons living with disabilities. We reflect on the nature and significance of vulnerabilities, and we assess the role of public opinion in normative theorizing, suggesting a particular significance for the opinions and experiences of marginalized groups. We finally reflect on the relevance of European legal and institutional frameworks for theorizing justice in Europe.

This chapter describes a philosophical approach to theorizing justice, mapping out some main strands of the tradition leading up to contemporary political philosophy. We first briefly discuss what distinguishes a philosophical approach to justice from other possible approaches to justice, by explaining the normative focus of philosophical theories of justice – that is, a focus on questions not about how things actually are, but about how things ought to be. Next, we explain what sorts of methods philosophers use to justify theories of justice. Following this, in the longest section, we highlight major questions about justice that have drawn the attention of philosophers, and indicate how competing conceptions of justice have arisen from differing answers to these questions. The goal here is not to answer but to elucidate some of the larger questions about justice, as well as to establish a framework for understanding and distinguishing different kinds of claims about justice and some of the relations between them.

This article shows that we can identify a subset of religious and cultural accommodation cases that follow the structure of a particular disability model: the Human Variation Model. According to this model, disadvantageous disability arises because most social arrangements are tailored to the needs of individuals with typical characteristics; people with atypical features are frequently left out from these arrangements. Hence, the latter need personalised resources tailored to them, or their social and/or material environment ought to change according to their atypical characteristics. I argue, however, that not everyone's claim stemming from an atypical characteristic merits accommodation – it would be simply unreasonable to provide personalised resources to everyone or modify the environment to accommodate everyone's needs. In other words, these human variation claimants must be ‘reasonably accommodated’. Nevertheless, members of certain social groups have a justifiable claim to receive such accommodation and those in religious and cultural groups could be among them for two specific sociological reasons.