Disability in Practice ― Attitudes, Policies, and Relationships

Everyone is disabled in some respect, at least in the sense that others can do things that we cannot. But significant limitations on pursuing major life activities due to severely limited eyesight, hearing, mobility, cognitive functioning and so on pose special problems that fortunately have been recognized (to some extent) in our public policies. Public policy is important, as are the deliberative frameworks that we use to justify them, and the essays in the second and third sections of this volume have significant implications for public policy and offer new proposals for justifying frameworks. Underlying public policies and their assessment, however, are the attitudes, good and bad, that we bring to them, and our attitudes as well deeply affect our interpersonal relationships. The essays here, especially in the first section, reveal how complex and problematic our attitudes towards persons with disabilities are when we are in relationships with them as care-givers, friends, family members, or briefly encountered strangers. Our attitudes towards ourselves as persons with (or without) disabilities are implicated in these discussions as well. Among the special highlights of this volume are its focus on moral attitudes and relationships involving disabilities and its contributors' recognition of the multi-faceted nature of disability problems. The importance of respect for persons as a necessary complement to beneficence is an underlying theme, and a deeper understanding of respect is made possible by considering closely its implications for relationships with persons with disabilities. Awareness of the common and uncommon human vulnerabilities also makes clear the need for modifying traditional deliberative frameworks for assessing policies, and several essays make constructive proposals for the changes that are needed.

Adam Cureton, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tennessee, works primarily on ethics, Kant, and disability. He co-edited (with Kimberley Brownlee) Disability and Disadvantage (2009) and he is currently co-editing (with David Wasserman) the Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Disability. He is the President of the Society for Philosophy and Disability.

Thomas E. Hill, Jr., Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is author of essays in moral and political philosophy collected in Autonomy and Self-Respect (1991), Dignity and Practical Reason in Kant's Moral Theory (1992), Respect, Pluralism, and Justice (2000), Human Welfare and Moral Worth (2002), and Virtue, Rules, and Justice (2012).