## 1. Disability Studies and the Philosophy of Disability




Disability studies has steadily gained prominence over the past half
century, moving expeditiously (at least in the United States) into the mainstream in
historical and literary scholarship, but not so quickly in philosophy. In
the former fields, the components of disability studies are (mainly)
two. There are analyses of the real histories of individuals or
groups of individuals with disabilities, and there also are readings of
representations of disabled people as they appear in literature,
cinema, and similar creative work. Integrated with the accounts of real
or invented disabled people are interpretations of the social or
cultural forces that shaped their lives (in the case of actual
individuals with disabilities), or else that shaped their
representations in texts, film, and similar symbolic media.




Conducting disability studies in these disciplines has to a large
degree been a matter of applying well-known interpretive techniques to
subjects whom historical and literary scholarship previously
ignored. Thus, for example, most historical scholarship about
disability has aimed at reporting about the marginalized lives of
individuals with physical, cognitive, or psychological impairments.
Historical accounts of how such individuals fared in a particular
society and a particular era are informed by familiar theories about
the political function of social roles, applied to the status to which
disabled people in that historical period were assigned. (To sample a
disability studies approach to intellectual history, see Kudlick and
Longmore 2006, on how disability shaped Habermas's philosophy.)
Similarly, studies of symbolic presentations of disability mostly
interpret representations (either fictional or biographical) of
individuals whose characterization is inflected by attribution of one
or another impairment. Scholarship about what such representations mean
in a particular creative work usually is propelled by one or another
familiar theory about the aesthetic, psychological, political or other
function of symbolic roles, applied to disabled characters and
characterizations of their disabilities. (See Silvers 2000 for a
discussion of literary theory in disability studies.)




In these disciplines and related ones, consequently, engaging with
disability has involved invoking mainstream theoretical
presuppositions and principles to explore phenomena associated with
certain previously under-theorized or otherwise ignored groups. Not so
in philosophy, however, where disability, deformity and illness have
appeared to defy application of familiar theoretical presumptions and
practices. Examples of the resistance of disability to being subsumed
under philosophical theories turn up throughout the discipline's
history, from Plato's uncharacteristic emphasis on fleshly ideals in
settling the fate of infants with deformities (Garland 1995, 15) to
Hume's setting aside the testimony of individuals with illnesses as
pertinent to theories of perception (Hume 1757) to Rawls's declaration
that justice for disability is a detour that cannot be addressed when
basic principles of justice are formulated and therefore must wait for
the later, legislative stage.
(See Sen 2004 for an analysis of how Rawls's theory fails to
respond to the facts of disability, but see also Becker 2005.)




Feminist philosophy, with its methodological reluctance to adopt
philosophy's traditional presuppositions without scrutinizing
them, initially was the most prominent area within the discipline where
disability is taken to be a serious subject for philosophical
investigation. According philosophical significance to the state
of being disabled is one of the innovations feminist theory has
introduced into philosophy. This article therefore explores affinities
between feminist philosophy, which is aimed at expanding philosophical
inquiry so that it adequately addresses women and their perspectives,
and philosophical work with similar aspirations in regard to people
with disabilities.




In some respects, disability presents the instances or issues that
most intensely and interestingly challenge those traditional
philosophical presuppositions and principles against which feminist
thought has been inclined to protest. Nevertheless,
feminist interests do not always coincide with disability perspectives,
and unresolved tensions between feminist philosophy and the philosophy
of disability remain. Consequently, this article also explores
disability perspectives on feminist philosophy as much as it reports
feminist perspectives on disability.


## 2. The Importance and Relevance of Feminist Philosophy




The attitudes and aims that have informed and propelled feminist
philosophy have been consequential for the study of disability in
philosophy. Asking why women have been excluded from the philosophical
tradition, feminist thinkers explicitly have intended to remedy
philosophy's prevailing indifference to the way the world is
experienced by women, including women with disabilities. (But see
Wendell 1989 and 1996 for concerns about feminist theory's disregard
of women with disabilities. Despite this criticism, Wendell's remedy
for such neglect is propelled by feminist precepts.) In doing so, they
have made interventions that have altered the course of
philosophy.




Some have argued, for example, that the universality to which
philosophical theories traditionally have aspired cannot embrace women
without erasing them. Some have questioned whether such a
standard discerns, or instead disregards, important dimensions and
textures of women's lives. Some also have affirmed differences
among different kinds of women that they take to be, if not essential,
at least as philosophically significant as the differences between
women and men. (See, for example, Spelman 1988, Fuss 1989 and Crenshaw
1991, among many others, for discussions of these matters.)




Such divergence from standard philosophical views invites expanding
philosophical theorizing on various topics, including ways of knowing,
kinds of being (especially the ontological implications of embodiment and
the relationship between body and mind), principles of conduct,
intrinsically valuable human properties and ways of life,
conceptualization of personal and social identity, and other
traditional philosophical topics, by attending to differences
occasioned by or associated with disability. Further, biased
pretextual and other unjust treatment of women has been traced by some
feminist philosophers to their being viewed as impaired and thereby
subjected to the usual social practice of devaluing disability and
people who are disabled. Some of the initial philosophically
influential discussions of disability have to do with how women's
physical realities are judged to be inferior because they do not match
performances paradigmatic of healthy males. One example is Iris Marion
Young's 1980 essay "Throwing Like a Girl," about the
prevailing masculinized rendering of women's embodiment that
stigmatizes feminine physicality, wrongly construing the female body as
fragile and burdensome. As a result, women are inhibited from
confidently embracing their own experienced spatial orientation and are
induced instead to underestimate their physical capabilities and to
deform their gestures and their movements through space. Another
is Susan Wendell's 1989 *Hypatia* article "Toward a
feminist theory of disability," wherein feminist
philosophy's uncritical, unreflective conflation of healthiness
with happiness and productivity is criticized. 




In a conceptual climate that affords men's modes of bodily
performance ascendancy, women are at heightened risk of being
segregated and disrespected in virtue of being deemed deficient in
physical or mental strength or health. Also consequential in the
development of feminist philosophical treatments of disability has been
the high frequency of assignment of women (rather than men) to the
caretaking of individuals with disabilities, a social arrangement that
usually burdens and frequently fails to recognize or materially reward
those who must occupy this role and therefore one that unfairly
disadvantages women. Considerations like these helped tie
liberatory feminist philosophical work to the development of an
insightful philosophy of disability.




Pervading the practice of philosophy, feminists found, are traces of
bias that disregards women's interests and oppressively occludes
their opportunities. Illuminating the significance of women's
experiences of limitation is one of feminism's prominent contributions
to philosophy. Early philosophical study of women by feminist
scholars examined the limitations that hampered their own lives, and
the lives of women generally, asking whether these resulted from
alterable social arrangement or immutable biological destiny.
(See Section 2.2, "Normative and Descriptive Components,"
of SEP entry on "Topics in Feminism" for references to
scholars who advance variations of these positions on the source(s) of
women's subordination.) On the whole (although not for
everybody), feminist theory has moved past this issue and now seems to
regard the debate about biology versus society as the source of
women's limitation as either irresolvable or unimportant.





Nevertheless, the nature of the (in)justice of limitations associated
with physical or cognitive impairment remains a concern in the
philosophy of disability, including feminist disability
theory. Biological difference is a central and undeniable fact of
disability, but the impact of biology on the kinds of experiences
characteristic of being disabled is much more controversial. There is
debate as to whether the functional limitations associated with
disability result mainly from biology's going awry and whether, if
disability is disadvantageous, it is naturally and immutably so. Or
instead whether disabled people's functional limitation should be laid
at the door of flawed social practice which rewards the
species-typical functioning of so-called normal people and punishes
the anomalous functioning of disabled people (Wendell 1996). 


## 3. Feminist Epistemology and Disability Standpoints




Feminist philosophical work has aimed at repairing the imbalance
between men's and women's concerns and rectifying the negative
depictions of traits viewed as female that are found in traditional
philosophical positions, paradigms and methodologies. Feminists have
tried to remedy a pervasive narrowness in the usual ways of framing
those issues philosophers have considered important enough to command
philosophical attention and work--that is, in the benchmarks that
signal philosophical considerability. To induce change, feminist
philosophers have crafted approaches that draw upon the very
limitations they encounter when attempting to pursue women's interests
within philosophy. This effort has supplied stimulating ideas to
philosophers seeking to import the singular insights and different
perspectives of other subordinated groups, such as the disabled, into
contemporary philosophy to improve its inclusiveness and extend its
scope. Specifically, disabled people's philosophical interests find
ready-made conveyances in several of feminist thinking's signature
reforms.




For example, feminist epistemology is a philosophically innovative
reform movement that can serve as a beacon for the philosophical
investigation of disability, although as of this writing the
significance of disability for an adequate epistemology has not been
much explored in disability scholarship, neither in the philosophical
study of disability or in disability studies generally. Some
feminist philosophers (and some feminist psychologists as well) have
argued that women have ways of knowing that differ from men's.
(For psychologists, see Belenky et al. 1986 and Tannen 1990; for
philosophers, see Code 1991 and Ruddick 1989) Tannen, for
example, adduces evidence from sociolinguistic research to argue that
environments conducive to women's learning differ from those
appropriate for men. More generally, some theorists influenced by
such accounts have characterized women as being alienated, unsatisfied,
and unconvinced when held to traditional epistemology's paradigm of the
isolated knower, with its detached, universalizing, and controlling
approach to knowledge. Dissatisfaction with this kind of view has
prompted feminist epistemological insights about the possibilities for
achieving objectivity without insisting that cognition works or should
work the same way for everyone, as well as about the importance of
situating, contextualizing, and nuancing truths, and about the benefits of
collaborative practices of achieving knowledge. (See section 2.
"Social Models of Knowers" in SEP entry on Feminist Social
Epistemology for references.)




In developing their insights, feminist epistemologists have addressed
the influence on knowledge of the social situations of
knowers. Situatedness cannot be just a matter of the social
positioning of knowers, however, or of their histories or
cultures. What we know is modulated by how we acquire the elements of
knowledge, and these processes are shaped by the condition of the body
as well as by social conditions. Cognitive skills are expressions of
development in various areas of the brain, which in turn is responsive
to the rest of the body. We therefore may expect that people with
disabilities, whose bodies diverge from the species-typical kind, also
sometimes will develop cognitive approaches and abilities that differ
from most other people's. Parenthetically, in one of the exceedingly
rare instances of a philosopher treating an impairment as something
other than a deficit, the 18th century experimentalist philosopher
Denis Diderot investigated blind people's ways of knowing (Diderot
1999 [1749], Curran 2013). Taking a stance that resembles, if not
prefigures, recent feminist criticisms of Descartes, Diderot, in his
"Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See," describes how
blind people know about the world to show the short-comings of
Cartesian over-reliance on metaphors that associate reason with light
or sight and Cartesian reliance on visual rather than tactile ways of
knowing.




Traditionally, of course, philosophers have dismissed disabled people's
claims to knowledge about subjects touched by the limitations of their
particular impairments. A telling illustration is given in the
correspondence between philosophers Bryan Magee and Martin Milligan, in
which Magee simply dismisses, absent argument, Milligan's report
and arguments that, although blind almost from birth and without visual
memories of experiencing specific colors, he fully understands the
meaning of "red" (Magee and Milligan 1996). Here
Magee portrays Milligan as a defective knower because of his blindness,
a conclusion Magee advances with assertions that Milligan's
experiences with redness are not exactly like Magee's own. Yet it
is tendentious to point out that blind-from-birth individuals do not
develop visual processing skills, and then to intimate that they must
be epistemologically inferior to, or that their modes of knowing cannot
rise to the epistemological significance of, sighted people. To
the contrary, in some born-blind people, for instance, the area of the
brain associated in most other people with visual processing appears
instead to be a site for aural processing, meaning that a much larger
part of the brain is available for dealing with information obtained
through hearing than is the case for sighted people. This
biological difference is thought to explain why in many cultures blind
individuals are taken to be endowed with legendary skills for
remembering and transmitting the spoken word accurately and with
heightened understanding of orally transmitted texts, Thus blind bards
who preserve and perform lengthy gospels or narratives from an
authoritative standpoint are familiar figures in the history of many
cultures (O'Neil 2003).




There are other blind people who know objects in their physical
environment by echolocation, having cultivated the skill of making
clicking noises with their tongues and identifying the different
qualities of sounds bounced back toward them (Tresniowski and Arias
2006 [in Other Internet Resources]; see also "Shattering
Barriers" at the World Access for the Blind website, in Other
Internet Resources). Belgium's police force includes blind detectives
who can listen to criminals' recorded conversations and by the
reverberations of sound identify what kind of room they occupy,
whether they are using a landline or cell phone, and even what kind of
car they are traveling in or whether the suspect's Flemish carries an
Albanian rather than a Moroccan accent (Soares 2007). Sighted people's
typical lack of functional ability to navigate by reverberated sound,
and thus their inferior way of knowing the absorption/reflection
properties of the physical objects that surround them, and their
deafness to nuances of spoken sound, surely should be recognized as a
disadvantage. Yet this is almost never so, even where sighted people
must find their way in the dark or distinguish among interlocutors
beyond their vision.




The experiences of people diagnosed with cognitive impairments also
usually are dismissed as epistemologically defective, judged against
the philosophical ideal of the rational thinker. Some people
described as cognitively impaired have anomalous patterns of cognitive
skills, in some ways failing to attain, but in other ways exceeding,
levels typical for the species. For example, individuals with Down
Syndrome, who think abstractly only with difficulty or not at all,
sometimes have greater than usual skills in perceiving, and
remembering, the concrete details of what they see or hear. And people
with Williams Syndrome quite often have greater social and emotional
intelligence than is species-typical for humans, as well as unusual
musical facility. This is not even to mention the innovative
insightfulness and creativity achieved by individuals with diagnoses of
various kinds of psychoses and similar so-called mental disabilities,
conditions experienced by many famed artists, writers and
musicians.




Such individuals usually are exempted from philosophy's scope as, for
example, when epistemological theory discounts the judgments of blind
people as irrelevant or unimportant to philosophical accounts of
empirical knowledge, as philosopher Magee dismisses philosopher
Milligan.. And people who lack abstract thinking skills, thereby
diverging from the kind of human capability philosophers themselves
exercise so well and enjoy so greatly, usually are dismissed as
unimportant, that is, as not rising to philosophical considerability.
People whose cognitive anomalies impede them from arriving at and
articulating complex and rationalized accounts of their own good very
often are not accorded full status, and sometimes even are denied
considerability, by moral and political theories, including
pluralistic liberal theories committed to respecting citizens' diverse
values. (See McMahan 2005 and Kittay 2005) Yet, as Francis and Silvers
(Francis and Silvers 2007, Silvers and Francis 2009) have pointed out,
normally autonomous individuals do not arrive at, nor do they express,
notions of their own good in isolation from, or independent of, their
interactions with other people. Conceptualizations of the good of
cognitively impaired people, developed through structurally similar
collaborative interactions between them and others, deserve equal
consideration in moral and political philosophy. 




To account for the misfit between philosophical paradigms and their
realities, the testimony or example of outliers such as blind people,
and people with Down Syndrome or Williams Syndrome, typically is
disallowed on the ground that it must be inherently flawed where it
challenges or deviates from philosophical theory. Yet to disregard the
standpoints, and thereby the performances and reports of the
experienced world, of unusual people impoverishes philosophizing by
diminishing the epistemological adequacy of philosophical accounts.
Further, as an application of Miranda Fricker's analysis of epistemic
injustice shows, the practice of systematically discounting belief
claims made by people with disabilities should be condemned as
testimonial injustice: individuals are wronged based on their
disability status when they when they aspire to roles as knowers (see
Fricker 2009). Nor, to apply a lesson from feminist philosophy of
science, can objective knowledge about disability be produced unless
disabled people, including people with cognitive disabilities, are
fully respected members of the community of inquirers (see Longino
2001). Francis and Silvers have proposed an approach to constructing
ideas of the good with full respect for and inclusion of the
viewpoints of severely disabled persons (Francis and Silvers 2006,
Silvers and Francis 2009).




Like disabled people as a group, women as a group have been dismissed
and displaced, condemned for not complying with biological or social
paradigms and therefore denied authorization for the ways of knowing
that inform their experiences. What they believe they know often has
been rejected as merely epistemologically anomalous. Oppressive
policies traditionally were defended with the rationale that
"nature" has made women physically, intellectually, and
emotionally frail (Miles 1988). In response, feminist epistemology has
welcomed recognition of the legitimate influences of social location
in arriving at knowledge claims, as well as the centrality of
collaborative practices in the pursuit of knowledge. 




What is not so clear is whether feminist epistemology is as
comfortable with the impact on knowing of other bodily differences.
This is a question of whether different biological properties
legitimately define different epistemological standpoints. Especially
in the last part of the 19th and the first part of the
20th centuries, biological determinism was a potent tool
used to oppress women through false testimony that science found them
to be less capable of survival than men.




Wary of promoting such determinism, feminist philosophy has been more
engaged with the social rather than the biological phenomena
identified with women. Feminist standpoint theory has been inclined to
treat differences in cognitive styles as arising from socially induced
gendered identities or roles rather than from biological traits or
conditions that differentiate men from women. Some of its proponents
argue for the superiority of the styles associated with women. In the
main, however, the operative notion for feminist theory is that
epistemic authority is the product of a social award; there is no
natural order in which the cognition of biologically fit individuals
is most attuned to the actualities of the external world and therefore
is superior.




To a significant extent, however, standpoints defined in terms of
disability are associated with characteristic biological differences. This
raises several questions for an epistemology of disability, especially
one modeled on feminist theory, to explore.
First, is characterizing standpoints with reference to biological
differences inherently and onerously deterministic, so that one's
body inescapably delineates one's cognitive destiny?
Second, does granting equal legitimacy to standpoints defined with
reference to biological differences lead to irresolvable and
debilitating epistemological relativism? And, third, will
acknowledging the range of atypical (for humans) ways of knowing reveal
a heretofore unimagined richness in what humans can know the world is
like?


## 4. Identity




The interplay of biological and social identities--whether these be
innate, imposed, or embraced--has become a subject of first-order
importance in disability studies as well as in feminist theory, and
especially in philosophical ventures into disability scholarship.
Feminists have been, by far, the most numerous of philosophical writers
on the topic of disability identity. They have offered a rich
variety of sophisticated approaches to the question of how the
sensibilities and histories of people with very different kinds of
limitations can be collected into a cohesive philosophical
account. Some write from the perspective of a lifelong disability
identity, others describe their transition into the world of
disability, and still others write about disability without having
experienced being disabled themselves.




In view of the relevance of so many different standpoints, feminist
philosophy of disability must meet the challenge of constructing an
account of disability identity that does not invoke or appeal to
"normal" examples of disabled people. Further, no one
should claim to be, or speak as or about, the typical disabled
person. The enormous diversity among disabled people, and the
importance of reflecting all their differences in formulating
disability theory, calls for sensitivity to nuance and context.
(Re)formulations of feminist identity theory that can accommodate the
many ways in which disabled people differ from each other as well as
from nondisabled people are of special importance because they may be
extrapolated beyond disability theory to illuminate issues about
identities shaped by other kinds of differences.




Unlike traditional ideas of race and sex, disability has always been
understood to be a permeable classification. Some
people have lived at length or lifelong with disability, some are newly
so, and others have lived through periods in which they were disabled
but now are not so. A large number of us should expect to become
disabled later in our lives. And many of us find ourselves
intimately involved in the lives of family members or friends who now
are disabled or who face a future of disability. Further, as Eva Kittay
reminds us, social policies that pertain to disabled people also affect
their family members, friends and professional caregivers (Kittay 1998;
Kittay 2001). So feminist disability theory should
recognize that disability affects the identities of many people beyond
the 600 million worldwide who are themselves disabled (Herr, Gostin,
and Kuh 2003).




Disability identity may be claimed for a variety of very different
reasons. Sometimes the objective is to acquire eligibility for assuming
the "sick" role and thereby being relieved of various
productivity-related expectations and responsibilities . Sometimes
being identified as disabled offers access to government benefits of various
kinds. Sometimes being understood to be disabled triggers
acceptance of or accommodation to atypical modes of functioning.
And sometimes disability identity is claimed as an empowering element
of a political process intended to consolidate a group of people
sufficiently numerous and vigorous to challenge stigmatization,
exploitation, and exclusion based on disability. As the reasons
for these disparate purposes for identifying as disabled diverge, so do
the criteria or conditions for judging individuals to be disabled, as
well as the inducements to individuals to understand themselves
primarily in terms relating to disability.




The inclusiveness of the various identity theories promoted in
feminist philosophy is of preeminent and persistent concern to women
with disabilities. Discussing whether women with disabilities can
comfortably be feminists, Anita Silvers has asked whether feminism
privileges the functional capabilities and social roles characteristic
of "normal" women. She has found some feminist theories
guilty of "magnifying these (functional capabilities of typical
women) until they become standards of womanhood against which disabled
women shrink into invisibility" (1998a).




Feminist philosophy validates and valorizes activities women
typically execute and in which they excel, such as theories of maternal
ethics that center on mothering as preeminent moral conduct. But
not all women are admitted to women's roles. Even in the most
progressive contemporary societies, women with disabilities encounter
opposition to their maintaining fertility, or accessing reproductive
medical technology in achieving fertility, or even retaining custody of
the children to which they have given birth. Karin Barron, who
has conducted extensive research on the lives of young women with
disabilities, observes that we place great value on the womanly art of
caring for dependents, but the traditional dependent position of young
women with disabilities prevents them from occupying, and therefore
from demonstrating any aptitude for, this role (1997). We should
be clear that what precluded the young women Barron studied from being
homemakers and mothers was not their lack of potential for serving in
these roles but, instead, their having been assigned to an
alternative social position, one defined in terms of such
dependence that their capacity to nurture others became virtually
inconceivable.




Licia Carlson has shown that a gendered process of conceptualizing
social roles even affected the diagnostic classification of mental
retardation. She has explored the complex interconnections that
characterize the linked history of cognitive disability and gender
oppression. Carlson points out that while superintendents of
institutions that warehoused intellectually disabled people were mostly
male, women were employed to go out and identify cases of
feeblemindedness on the theory that they were more intuitive by nature
and therefore better qualified for the job. This was an era when
normal women were presumed to have a leading role in defending society
against moral weakness of the sorts for which the feebleminded were
feared, based on a notion about women's commitment to maintain
community virtue for protection of the young. While there is value in
acknowledging human vulnerability and dependence, Carlson observes,
feminists should be as concerned about placing persons with
intellectual disabilities in such mirror roles as about making third
world feminism a mirror for Western feminism (Carlson 2009;
also see Narayan 1997). 




Carlson's analysis should compel feminist philosophers to reconsider
their understanding of cognitive disability. Feminist philosophers are
not immunized by their philosophical persuasion against their having
limitations such as ignorance of the lived realities of people with
intellectual disabilities, the nature of intellectual disability, and
the historical basis of this category (Carlson 2009,2010). As
feminists have questioned the privileged status of masculine ways of
thinking, Carlson questions whether some feminists privilege their own
modes and levels of cognition (Carlson 2001). They should, further, ask
whether they have constructed feminist philosophizing in terms that
make intellectual endeavor too central an undertaking. Eva Kittay
makes this point penetrating, poignant, and personal when she
describes the transformative insight occasioned by being told that her
child is congenitally mentally retarded:



> 
> 
> the worst anticipation was that her handicap involved her intellectual
> faculties. .... I was committed to a life of the mind. ...
> How was I to raise a daughter that would have no part of this? If my
> life took its meaning from thought, what kind of meaning would her
> life have? .... [W]e already knew that we had learned
> something. That which we believed we valued, what
> we--I--thought was at the center of humanity--the
> capacity for thought for reason, was not it, not it at all. (Kittay
> 1998, 150)




A somewhat similar dilemma about the preeminent value of intellectual
skills may confront people who acquire a cognitive disability later in
their lives. Kate Lindemann (2001) and Ann Davis (2005) both write
about the effects that experiencing the sequelae of head injuries had
on their beliefs about cognition. Lindemann's critique points to
radical and profound ways in which feminist appreciation of the
diverse workings of mind can enlarge philosophical inquiry. Feminist
theory stands to gain by paying new attention to philosophical issues
that should be rethought to reflect the situation of adults with brain
injuries: personal identity, mind-body dualism, conceptions of the
self, and philosophical psychology.




Recognizing that some individuals have invisible disabilities should
remind us, Davis observes, of the extent to which we always are
epistemologically dependent on people's disclosures of their own
identities. Davis rejects the presumption that we can clearly separate
voluntary from inadvertent limitations. Many cognitive and
psychological limitations cannot be documented by reference to physical
anomalies. Yet, Davis rightly says, experiences of them are no less
real. She rejects the conviction that we can find physical
correlates of anomalous cognitive or psychological functioning.
Policies demanding that these kinds of cognitive and
psychological limitations be documented by public demonstration or
third-party confirmation should be abandoned, for they rely on mere faith in
their having physical causes rather than on factual evidence that they
do.




These personalized experiences of limitation should not be
discounted. The philosophy of disability suggests that we need to
recalibrate our sensibilities to honor the evidence of other people's
senses, especially of their own embodiment. People's testimony
about their own limitations and incapacities deserves respect even if
uncorroborated by biological confirmation. Such experienced limitations
may place the individual at activity-impeding, pain-inducing or
life-threatening risk. As Davis argues eloquently, we improperly
burden people whose limitations we cannot directly see, and aren't
sufficiently knowledgeable to appreciate, by constantly challenging
them to prove their disabilities.


## 5. Embodiment




Feminist scholars have explored how corporeal or biological
distinctiveness mediates daily activities so that self-identification
and social experience act on, and become attuned to, each other.
Feminist research such as that of Susan Sherwin (1992) shows that
medicine has treated women as if they were disabled people, intervening
in their bodies to eliminate or discipline (to use Foucault's term)
those parts that mark their identification with a purportedly inferior
group. Medicine has, in particular, been dismissive of women's
emotional lives. The history of how medicine has addressed disabled
people is similar. It is a history of the repression and
rejection of bodies and minds that diverge from the supposed paradigm
or norm provided by healthy young males.




Enlightened by these parallels with their own history, some early
disability studies scholars rejected medical practices directed at
altering themselves. They characterized the medical model of
disability, which takes disability to be a problem requiring medical
rather than social intervention and as both the prerogative and the
responsibility of medical professionals to fix, as oppressive. They saw
medicine itself as a coercive instrument that subordinates disabled
people, not the least by inducing feelings of inadequacy and self-hate
in them. (See UPIAS 1978; Finkelstein 1980; Oliver 1983.)




Just as biological sex, and the division of humans into two sexes,
initially were taken as givens in feminist theory, so early disability
studies scholars proposed to treat impairments such as being unable to
hear, see, walk, talk, or execute cognitive activities as biological
givens, and disabilities as social interpretations of
impairments. On such accounts, the properties of bodies
(including brains) are supposed to be pre-social. According to
these accounts, it is socially constructed interpretations and
valuations of the powers of neutral corporeal properties that consign
people with various kinds of bodies to advantageous or detrimental
social roles.




Jenny Morris, a leader of the disabled women's movement,
proposes that the social model of disability enables disabled people to
define their own bodies and their differences in terms of personal
experience and self-authorization, free of detached diagnoses imposed
by medical authorities. The social model construes the limitations of
people with disabilities as a social problem rooted in the imposition
of practices that are biased against the disabled. Once
understood as products of bias rather than biology, disabled
people's disadvantages can be remedied through the pursuit of
justice to reform the practices that oppress them. According to Morris,
adopting the social model of disability makes it possible to talk about
addressing the limitations of disabled people's functioning
without condemning, or requiring improvements in, the state of their
bodies (or, for that matter, their minds) (Morris 2001).




Better informed, more sophisticated recognition of and reflection on
the facts about sex and gender have complicated the picture for both
feminist and disability scholarship. There are, for example, intersexed
people, born with the biological markers of both female and male.
A socially imposed allegiance to sexual dualism demands they be
submitted to medical intervention that (usually through amputation)
presses their bodies into one or the other sexual mold. Yet
having a woman's body does not necessarily suit a person for feminine
roles, nor do all those with men's bodies find themselves fitting
comfortably into masculine roles. The materiality of
sexual characteristics does not make them unbreachable constants. There
are individuals who adapt with facility to gendered roles that are not
traditional for their particular bodily configurations.




Others, however, find their sexual characteristics too
restricting for the roles they adopt and consequently seek to change
these elements of their bodies through surgical and chemical
intervention. The way transgendered people see themselves in the world
indicates that the body's limitations cannot always be
discounted. While some people do not think their corporeal
alteration is required to comfortably fit into opposite gendered roles,
others seek medical intervention to facilitate their transgendering.
Thus, the experiences of transgendered people suggest that there are
circumstances in which altering one's body to better execute preferred
social roles can be an affirming, rather than a degrading,
choice.




These considerations show not only the error in supposing that the
natural and social dimensions of embodiment can be cleanly
dichotomized, but also the superficiality of thinking that we always
should take bodies as they come. Extrapolating this insight to
disability helps us to see the over-simplification in condemning
medical transformations of the body as being expressions of
self-hatred. There is no phenomenological firewall separating our
awareness of our biological properties from our social experiences. How
our own bodies feel to us is shaped by social discourse.




In a documentary film presenting conversations with leading philosophers, 
feminist theorist Judith Butler learns about the social model of disability
from artist and disability activist Sunaura Taylor (Taylor, 2009). The social
model is compatible with Butler's own theory of embodiment. Butler observes 
that everyone, whether or not disabled, requires support for bodily
activities from various kinds of things that are external to their bodies.
Every body is permeable in the sense of being vulnerable to being impinged
upon by others. People who violently target and victimize the disabled are 
managing their own permeability by abusing individuals who appear to be
more dependent than most and thus more vulnerable. Violent acts against the
disabled foreground their permeability and thereby, according to Butler, give 
the perpetrators the illusion of being themselves exempt from permeability.




Applying Butler's ideas about embodiment, which emphasize the
inconstancy of conceptualizations of bodily kinds, feminist legal
scholar Kathryn Abrams contends that one reason the Americans with
Disabilities Act (ADA) has had trouble in the courts, with most
plaintiffs losing their cases (at least under Title I - Employment),
is because the social model disrupts a premise of mainstream
jurisprudence. The legal norm presumes that human bodies are
biological objects of fixed kinds, whereas on Butler's theory bodies
are contingently constituted by transient social interactions (Abrams
2011:76). However, not all judicial thinking has been so narrow. For
example, in 2006 a pre-surgery transexual individual's denial of
employment suit was allowed to proceed, despite the defendant's claim
that Title VII did not apply because the plaintiff was not a woman; in
supporting the plaintiff, the court invoked the factual complexities
that underlie human sexual identity and explained that these
complexities are occasioned by how biological sexuality interacts with
social, physiological, and legal conceptions of gender
(see *Schroer v. Billington* 2006, 2009).




Our bodies' responses and responsiveness inflect in turn the social as
well as the solitary aspects of our experiences. Nor is social practice
isolated from, or prior to, materiality. An individual's
impairments are no more neutral than her sexual characteristics are,
for they mediate much of the content of her consciousness of the world
with which she interacts. Performing major life functions such as
mobilizing, hearing, seeing, communicating and understanding are such
intimate elements of the fabric of our experience that what we view as
within our reach in the world around us--and thereby what we take as
the objects of our ambition--arises out of the scope and facility of
our biological functioning.




Considering whether the experiences of women are sufficiently
acknowledged in disability studies, Susan Wendell points to masculinist
influences on the field's standard model of disability (1996).
Wendell offers a refreshing look at the disability politics of
promoting an image of the healthy disabled, which is similar to the
feminist politics of excluding disabled women altogether in an effort
to advance more appealing and powerful icons. She argues that the
social model of disability, which until recently has been the
preeminent theoretical inspiration for disability studies, tends to
obscure the frequency with which disability is tied to illness (Wendell
2001).




Opponents of the medical model of disability urged the
disentanglement of disability from illness, pointing out that many
individuals with disabilities are as strong and capable of productivity
as nondisabled people, and therefore should not be consigned to
the limitations of the "sick" role (Amundson 1992). This strategy
also promotes self-reliance over dependence and replaces trust in the
expertise of medical and social service professionals with strategies
to let disabled people take control of their own lives. The useful
point of such emphasis for disabled individuals, Wendell acknowledges,
is that by getting their political position about subordination to
medicalization right, they affirm rather than devalue their own
bodies.




Yet, Wendell adds, political correctness will not always make people
feel right about our bodies or make their bodies feel right.
Illness is itself disabling, and chronically ill individuals constitute
a prominent part of the population considered to be disabled. Making
healthy rather than ill disabled people paradigmatic of the disability
category may obscure some disabled people's important differences.
Worse, doing so may perpetuate our culture's devaluing of dependency
and inflating of the value of self-sufficiency. Wendell argues
for reforming disability studies through a more inclusive feminist
approach to disablement, namely, one that does not exaggerate the value
of strength and independence as she believes masculinist influenced
theorizing tends to do (Wendell 1996).





Wendell also proposes that feminist disability politics consider the
implications of chronic illnesses that mark the unhealthy disabled's
experience of embodiment (Wendell 2001). One such implication concerns
the appropriate reaction to suffering. Many chronically ill people feel
pain, fatigue, feebleness, and disorientation to a degree that
forestalls productivity, saps self-sufficiency, and even may alienate
them from their own bodies or minds. The social response in both
mainstream society and disability circles is to support cures for
chronic illnesses, as though the suffering caused by illnesses renders
these conditions irrelevant to how disabled individuals form their
identities. Yet some disabled individuals, at least, reject medical
interventions aimed at a cure on the ground that they do not wish to
become different from whom they are. To the contrary, Wendell
thinks, an adequate philosophical account of embodiment will appreciate
identities inflected by suffering without glorifying or sugar-coating
the debilitating dimensions of perpetual exhaustion and discomfort.




A related implication concerns the reaction to emotional or
psychiatric suffering. Unlike feminist literary scholarship,
where studies of madness are well represented, feminist philosophers
have shown comparatively little interest in addressing the phenomena of
neurodiversity. Feminist and disability studies theorists who are
undermining the domination of paradigms of youth and health should
extend their efforts so as to liberate psychiatrically disabled people
from the idealization of the neurotypical mind. Andrea Nicki argues
that feminists ordinarily do not think of anger and aggression as being
valuable because they are emotions of competition rather than
cooperation. But, Nicki thinks, these feelings may serve as
morally valuable--because liberating--expressions for some
neurodiverse people, especially for emotionally abused individuals
(2001).


### 5.1 Disruptive Embodiment




The powerfully negative meanings evoked by the prevailing
conceptualization of disability may overwhelm both the equality of
opportunity and the moral respect that disabled people's exercise
of autonomy or independence should command. Thus, even healthy
people with disabilities often are stigmatized because their embodied
modes of functioning strike others as disruptive, however adeptly
adaptive and independent these may be. And individuals with
genetic vulnerabilities that put them at more than species-typical risk
for illness are also at risk of such stigmatization. People who
test positive for alleles associated with disease may encounter
discrimination in employment and other areas of civic and commercial
life, even though they never become symptomatic (Silvers and Stein
2003). Feminist and gender studies already have shown that atypical,
and thereby transgressive, modes of corporeal functioning offer a rich
resource for developing more adequate concepts of the materiality of
human experience and of our personhood (Clare 1999). Yet, whether
in illness or in health, the lives of disabled people largely have been
ignored when these concepts are explored, to the detriment of moral and
political philosophy generally.




People who talk or read with their fingers, walk using their arms
and hands, categorically recoil from other people's touches, or float
through the day on analgesics that suppress waves of pain, often
develop resilient and innovative approaches to fleshly function.
Further, disabled people often are the first to incorporate adaptive
technology into their lives. From machines that write (typewriters were
invented to permit blind people to write) to machines that speak
(computerized speech output was invented to permit blind people to
read), disabled people have piloted the use of mechanical devices that
now are integral to so many lives. Adaptive technology combines with
fleshly effort to secure their basic capabilities: they hear with
amplifiers, breath with respirators, mobilize in wheelchairs that they
guard with more concern than the care they give their bodies.




A supportive intimacy of machine with flesh thus is a feature of
many disabled people's lives, but one that can distance them from the
nondisabled. Alison Kafer criticizes ecofeminism for assuming that
authentic engagements with nature are possible only through purely
natural immersion experiences from which use of manufactured
products, including the assistive and prosthetic devices that
distinguish some disabled people's embodiment, are banned.
Ecofeminism remains bound by the traditional dualism of human artifice
versus nature, Kafer argues, in part because of mistakenly equating
species-typical bodies with naturalness. Species-typicality remains a
presumption of feminism, she says (Kafer 2005). Such a standard
disregards or devalues people with disabilities whose functioning
integrates their fleshly parts with mechanical components or other
technologies. (See Kafer 2013 for a more general theory that intersects 
feminist, disability, and queer theory approached to embodiment.)




Although ordinarily considered unfit to participate in competitive
schemes, when disabled people with prostheses function well, their
supposed cyborgian advantages create another reason for their
being shunned. In a case that went to the United States Supreme
Court, the Professional Golf Association unsuccessfully attempted to
ban an otherwise qualified individual because a physical anomaly
prevented him from walking for a full eighteen holes. The PGA invoked
the specter of a Frankensteinian slippery slope: if an anomalous golfer
could mobilize with a golf cart while normal golfers walked, what would
prevent a future contender, an upper limb amputee, from strapping on a
bionic arm that can drive a golf ball more than two miles (PGA Tour,
Inc. v. Martin (00-24) 532 U.S. 661 (2001) 204 F. 3d 994)?




Lower leg amputees used to be excluded from competitive running
because their prostheses made them run too slowly. Now new materials
and designs have created specially springy sports feet that permit
their wearers, when very skilled and talented, to run as fast as can
be done with fleshly feet. A hit-and-run driver's victim, Dory
Selinger now bicycles with a cleated peg replacing an amputated
foot. Because it does not flex, the peg is more efficient at pedaling
than a fleshly foot. Selinger's best time is only four seconds off the
longstanding world record for "normal" racers
(Squatrighlia 2001).




The South African track star Oscar Pistorius, whose congenitally
anomalous feet were amputated in childhood, uses modern alloy
artificial feet that return almost as much energy as the runner's
weight loads. Racing officials opposed Pistorius's competing against
nondisabled athletes, invoking objections running from fears of his
falling on other athletes, through his violating the rules because he
has no fleshly foot to touch the starting block, to his very presence
corrupting the purity of the sport, and the extravagantly dire
prediction that able-bodied athletes would amputate their own fleshly
feet to gain advantages derived from prosthetics. Pistorius appears to
use about one-fourth less lower leg energy when matched with runners
with fleshly feet because his prosthetic ankles are more efficient
than fleshly ankles, and initially he was banned from the Olympics due
to the claim (subsequently overturned by the International Court of
Arbitration for Sport) that his artificial feet gave him an unfair
advantage. (See Silvers and Wasserman 2000 for a general discussion of
fairness in regard to accommodating people with disabilities in
competitive sport and Silvers 2008 in regard to enhanced
embodiment.)




Arguably, it is unfair to exclude racers with disabilities on the
ground that crude prosthetics render unable to be competitive, and
then also to exclude them when better prosthetics make them highly
competitive. Such a practice of limiting eligibility to typically
embodied competitors narrows social opportunity for whoever does not
conform to the conventional rules of embodiment. And it is precisely
because of the ease with which such rules of competition can be rigged
to favor some so-called normal modes of functioning over other
seemingly anomalous ones that feminists rightly have been suspicious
of invoking rules derived from models of competitive recreation as
relevant to and regulative of social justice.




Traditional approaches to justice often take competition for resources
or position to be fundamental to social and political relationships,
which consequently puts an emphasis on fairly managing socially
bestowed or artificially achieved advantage, somewhat as the rules of
games control the deployment of inside information, equipment,
pharmaceuticals and other such performance enhancers. On the other
hand, feminist theories of justice achieved through inclusiveness,
such as Iris Young's (1990) and Martha Nussbaum's (2006), cast
interdependence rather than rivalry as the social and political
relationship with which justice should be more concerned. In contrast
to traditional justice theory's worries about disruptive embodiment's
impact on practice, policy and principle (for example, see Rawls's
well-known exclusion of disabled people on this ground, 1985 p. 234),
such feminist theories condemn, and try to overcome, the omission or
interdiction from practice, policy and principles of justice of people
with anomalous bodies or minds.


## 6. Ethics and Inclusion




In general, people with physical and mental disabilities have at
least their experiences of social exclusion in common. Exclusion looms
large in many disabled people's lives and shapes their expectations and
aspirations. This is a familiar story in the life
histories of many individuals who are identified with non-dominant
groups.




Presumptions about biological unfitness and burdensomeness often have
been invoked to engineer enforced segregation of parts of the
population. Courts have endorsed the separation of people identified
as being of different races by advancing the rationale that
segregating social schemes merely acknowledge "natural"
affinities among people of the same race and "natural"
antipathies among people of different races. The supposed benefits of
biological separatism also have been cited to deny women employment
that would place them in the company of men. For example, when a state
law denying women the opportunity to be employed as bartenders was
appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court as a violation of the
constitutional guarantee of equal protection, the Court declared the
exclusion to be constitutional because of the "real"
differences between men and women. The majority opinion explicitly
affirmed that women's presence "naturally" incites males
to lust and violence, and that women do not have the physical ability
to impose orderly behavior on the rowdy patrons of a bar (Silvers and
Stein 2002).




Similarly, people with disabilities have been characterized as being
biologically unfit to execute the responsibilities and thereby to
enjoy the privileges of citizenship, to work and play with nondisabled
people, and to be permitted reproductive freedom. For example, people
with mental retardation, cerebral palsy, blindness, and deafness all
have suffered the state's sterilizing them, removing their
children from their custody based only on their disability, denying
them access to public education on the ground that their presence
harmed other children, and institutionalizing them to protect citizens
who function in species-typical ways from having to have contact with
them (Lombardo, 2008). Similar legally endorsed harm is a familiar
theme in the history of women, racial minorities, native people, and
gays and lesbians.




Searching for ethical grounds to condemn the kinds of exclusions to
which women have been subjected, feminist thinkers have been
disappointed by traditional metaethical, moral and political
analyses. Feminists have found traditional moral philosophy
suspect for inflating typical male behaviors into paradigmatic moral
actions and traditional political philosophy equally suspect for being
bereft of remedies for the moral and political challenges posed by such
biased and pretextual exclusion. Although standard ethical and
political theorizing claims as a matter of principle to embrace
everyone alike, feminist critiques have shown that their presumptions
often exclude devalued kinds of people from significant moral,
political and social roles (for example, Putnam 1993 draws attention to
Rawls' exclusion of people with serious disabilities from the
basic level of formulation of principles of justice).
Consequently, feminist philosophers such as Annette Baier (1986, 1987),
Eva Kittay (1998), Martha Nussbaum (2001, 2006), and Iris Marion Young
(1990a; 1990b) have pioneered the exploration of more inclusive
alternative theories (to mention just a few leading feminists whose
theories have been influenced by a concern to address the
phenomena of disability adequately). They have relocated the search
for an adequate center for moral and political philosophy to, for
example, the ethics and politics of trust and care, the virtues of
dependency, the sustenance of capabilities fundamental to human life, and
the establishment of moralized interconnectedness among people who do
not occupy similar positions in life. Albeit differing from one
another in their approaches to feminist ethical and political theory,
all build in concern for achieving adequate philosophical treatment to
address problematic kinds of interactions between people with
disabilities and the nondisabled, or to illuminate ways of framing
distributive policies that are equal to the situations of both
nondisabled and disabled individuals. (For another explicitly feminist
example of the former, see Mahowald in Silvers, Wasserman and Mahowald
1998 and for a feminism compatible example of the latter, see Becker 2012.)





Two main approaches to addressing the social exclusion of disabled
people have surfaced in the philosophical literature that refers to
them. Some writers focus foremost on procedural justice to open
up disabled people's opportunities for social participation (Young
1992; Silvers 1998b; Anderson 1999; Silvers and Francis 2005).
Anderson urges that everyone be guaranteed effective access to the
social conditions of their freedom in virtue of their equality, not
their inferiority. To illustrate, she notes that what Deaf people
object to is not their lack of hearing but that "everyone else
has rigged the means of communication in ways that leave them out of
the conversation. One can detect this injustice without investigating
anyone's preferences or subjective states" (Anderson 1999, 
334). Silvers proposes a procedure called historical
counterfactualizing to identify practices catering to the nondisabled
majority that unjustly exclude people with disabilities (Silvers
1998b; Hoffman 2003).




Others take the answer to lie first of all in distributive justice to
increase provision of resources to the disabled and to families caring
for the disabled (Kittay 1998; Kittay 2001; Nussbaum 2006). Nussbaum,
for example, begins with a comprehensive idea of the good to guide
justice. She develops a list of capabilities necessary to live with
dignity and holds that people with disabilities deserve support to
achieve threshold levels of these capabilities, if they can do so,
even if more resources must be deployed to assist them than other
people need to reach the same level. Kittay, another example, seeks
supportive conditions for those who interact in dependency relations,
both dependents and their caregivers, arguing that both must be
assisted in order to achieve good care, and therefore justice, for the
dependent. To effect such an outcome through justice, Kittay believes,
requires maintaining a social order that secures care for dependents
as a main purpose of formulating fundamental principles of justice and
a theoretical basis that downgrades the value of independence, at
least for disabled people (Kittay 2011). Although many commentators
endorse the prominence Kittay assigns to (re)organizing society to
provide various kinds of care and to protect care workers, Kittay's
understanding of how her view relates to liberal political has been
questioned. One problem has to do with Kittay's assumptions about how
reciprocity functions in liberal theory, and another is about the role
of reciprocating relationships on her view (Whitney 2011). Another is
abut whether the vulnerability of utter dependents is sufficiently
similar to other kinds of vulnerability, such as that of care workers,
to warrant taking the support relationship needed by utter dependents
as the basic model for social affiliation and obligation (Bhandary
2010).




Neither of these approaches to justice--one foregrounding
procedural reform and the other revising resource distribution -
denies the importance of the other's objectives. In great part, they
diverge on matters of practical priorities, but also on matters of
whether moral priority should be given to agreement about what is
right, or instead about what is good. However, some feminist thinkers
who have questioned the ability of traditional moral theories to take
account of the needs and experiences of both care-receivers and
care-givers are inclined to portray caring conduct as inspired not by
duty but by the compelling recognition of another's need and of one's
own capacity to relieve that person's need. Consequently, they have
criticized rights-based and obligation-catering procedural theories
for abstracting excessively from experienced encounters with
dependents who need protection and support (Kittay, 1998, for
example). Other feminist philosophers, such as Baier and Nussbaum,
have raised a different question about the adequacy of traditional
moral theories to address the phenomena of interdependency. Their
issue is about validation rather than motivation. They have queried
whether approaches centered on independent individuals contracting
freely and reciprocally with one another for mutual benefit can give
plausible accounts of obligations to people who are, temporarily or
permanently, greatly dependent on others for physical, cognitive or
emotional support.




Nussbaum (2006) suggests that the source of political philosophy's
ignoring the disabled lies in a foundational assumption of social
contract theory. She criticizes Rawls for casting citizens in the role
of rough equals who relate because they can benefit each other, saying
"Instead of picturing one another as rough equals making a
bargain, we may be better off thinking of one another as people with
varying degrees of capacity and disability, in a variety of different
relationships of interdependency with one another" (2001,
B9). Construing reciprocal bargaining as the foundational and
therefore paradigmatic social connection among citizens "effaces
the more asymmetrical forms of dependency that human life contains:
the need for care in infancy, extreme age, and periods of severe
illness or a lifetime of severe disability," she objects (2001,
B9).




Nussbaum thinks traditional social contract theory is misguided in
testing basic conceptions of justice against self-regarding reasons,
thereby assigning self-regarding reasons preeminence over
other-regarding ones. And surely it is hard to see how a
conception that derives justice from decisions featuring self-regard
(such as whether particular formulations of principle would benefit
one's self regardless of one's circumstances) can provide
adequately protective principles for each individual in relation to
others, especially in view of the vulnerabilities individuals accept as
the price of being part of cooperative schemes.




Stimulated by Nussbaum's critique, Silvers and Francis (2005) return
to Baier's insights about the centrality of trust in moral
interaction. They propose extrapolating principles of justice from
practices that facilitate people's relying on, and thereby making
themselves vulnerable to, each other. Practices that nourish such
trust are crucial components of social cooperation. Moreover, unlike
bargaining, which requires strategizing and therefore complex
high-order cognitive skills, trusting is conduct that people without
disabilities and people with almost every kind of disability equally
can engage in. People who cannot articulate their decisions, and who
may not even be able to arrive at decisions, nevertheless may express
bestowal or withdrawal of their trust. As a mode of relating to one
another, trust is *par excellence* suited to facilitating
interactions between individuals who in various respects are
asymmetrically positioned in regard to one another. Silvers and
Francis argue that building trust is a more inclusive process than
bargaining about principles of justice. Building trust therefore
offers a more adequate practice for achieving justice for both
disabled and nondisabled people than the reciprocating exchanges
called for in strategic contracting.


## 7. Applications




By clearing away some biased approaches to moral and political
theorizing, the work of feminist philosophers has greatly and
beneficially influenced the philosophy of disability. Nevertheless,
because feminist philosophy is woman-centered, and most women do not
identify as being disabled themselves, the interests and emphases of
feminist thinkers are not always congruent with those of activists
aspiring to liberate the disabled from oppressive social arrangements
or of scholars formulating liberatory theories that guide and justify
doing so. Two conversations where the alliance between feminist
philosophy and the philosophy of disability is strained relate to
women's liberty to shape their own relationships, and their
liberty to reproduce. Although disability activists and scholars
never deny that women should be thoroughly free, some have concerns
about women's exercising their freedom in ways that curtail or
dismiss disabled people's freedom.


### 7.1 Caregiving




Women are more likely to remain in relationships with ill or
disabled dependents--partners, children, or elders--than are men
(Cohen 1996). Possibly, fewer men than women consider caregiving as a
self-affirming role. Women therefore contribute a very large proportion
of society's caregiving, but may be harmfully confined and
disadvantaged by this role unless their contributions as carers are
adequately acknowledged, appreciated and compensated. Emphasized
in feminist literature and by the women's movement, this issue is
a touchstone for many feminist philosophers in judging the adequacy of
moral and political theories.




Analyses and assessments of the moral dimensions of how caregivers
relate to dependent disabled individuals, as well as to disabled people
who do not need extraordinary levels of care, would benefit from
nuanced collaboration attention by feminist and disability
scholars. Even where helping relationships are voluntary, they
risk being asymmetrically so, with the dependent feeling coerced into
receiving assistance in the proffered rather than in a preferred form,
or the dependency worker feeling imprisoned by the relationship.
Help-givers choose how they will help, but help-takers cannot choose
how they will be helped, for if one's connection to others is as the
recipient of help, rejecting others' choice of proffered help leaves
one solitary (Silvers 1995). Joan Tronto finds that the power
imbalance between care givers and care receivers carries with it a
potential for oppression (Tronto 1987; Tronto 1993).





Nussbaum rightly observes that we must preserve the self-respect of
dependents without exploiting caregivers. Morris argues that the
solution lies in eliminating the presumptions about normate embodiment
and normal functioning that now pervade the way caregivers and care
receivers usually are conceptualized by ethics of care. Proponents of
the ethics of care could profit from recognizing that many disabled
people, men as well as women, are caregivers for themselves and
therefore are crucially positioned to understand how giving care best
connects to receiving it (Morris 2001). Working out better
understanding of the moral, political, and social dimensions of
caregiving relationships is of crucial importance not only to disabled
people themselves, but also to families who are as dependent on
securing care for their dependent members as their dependents are on
them.


### 7.2 Bioethics




Bioethics is another area of applied philosophy where feminist
thinking, while making its mark, at least initially occluded
disability perspectives. Feminist bioethicists most often have aligned
with the principle that women are owed control of their own bodies.
While this idea may appear compatible with the value of
self-determination promoted by much disability philosophy, some
bioethicists, including some who are feminists, have adopted
medicalized views of disability and, in doing so, have argued that the
prospect of bearing a disabled child justifies, or even obligates,
termination of the pregnancy (Purdy 1995; see also McMahan 1998 and
McMahan 2005). A related but not identical position challenges
"Baby Doe" laws that prohibit hospitals from denying
neonates with disabilities effective life-saving treatment, arguing
that parents should be free to decide whether their child's life will
be worth living (Paris et al. 2005). 




Feminist bioethicist Adrienne Asch has carefully distinguished between
a woman's right to terminate her pregnancy and the moral constraints
on her terminating the life of her new-born child. Disability does
not diminish the claims of neonates, nor of other individuals with
disabilities, to the necessities of life (Asch 1990 2002; Asch and
Geller 1996; Asch, Gostin and Johnson 2003; Kittay 2005). Disability
scholars generally have objected to the unfounded presumption that
being disabled makes life not worth living, or at least makes the
lives of people with disabilities less gratifying and valuable than
those of nondisabled people. The social isolation to which disabled
individuals often are condemned results in nondisabled people being
misinformed about their potential for satisfying lives. Terminating a
pregnancy because the resulting child may have an impairment reduces
the individual to the disability, but people with disabilities are as
much a sum of many different strengths and flaws as nondisabled people
are (Parens and Asch 1999). Like Asch, Carlson urges feminists to be
wary of women's being induced to accept social roles in which they
devalue individuals who are disabled. She notes that feminist programs
for the availability of birth control often invoked fears of
perpetuating feeblemindedness to support their case. Carlson warns
that genetic counseling, which also is work done primarily by women,
may function in a similar gatekeeping role (Carlson 2010).




The objectionable presumptive devaluing of life with a disability is
not compatible with a full and equitable commitment to reproductive
liberty. Philosophers as well as policy makers have invoked the
supposed inescapable suffering of disabled people as a reason for
barring deaf women and women with dwarfism from using reproductive
technology (for example, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis) to bear
children like themselves, narrowing these women's reproductive
choices. An additional consistency challenge emerges in regard to
the influence that the prospect of a sad or bad life should have on the
reproductive liberty to bear children who may or will have
disabilities. Feminists condemn the practice of aborting female fetuses
and of female infanticide, even where women lead inescapably miserable
lives. It is difficult to see what, other than the influence of
the prevailing social biases against disability, would lead those who
regard the termination of females this way from extending their
objection to the termination of other devalued kinds of people
(Asch 1999; Asch and Geller 1996).


## 8. Conclusion




For more than two decades, feminist philosophy has had a productive
but sometimes uneasy engagement with the facts and theory of
disability. Some feminists who view feminist theorizing from a
disability perspective, such as Morris and Wendell, are disturbed by
evidence that feminism has not overcome a residual allegiance to
normalcy. And indeed some discussions of disability by feminists seem
to proceed by laying aside feminism's own affiliations with
liberation, self-affirmation, and inclusiveness. In general, however,
philosophy has benefited from applying feminism's theoretical lenses
to better understand disability. Polishing those lenses with the cloth
of which disabled people's lives are made promises to achieve more
finely nuanced and perspicacious philosophical accounts, and theories
broader in scope and farther seeing, than during the centuries when
philosophy overlooked disability.