Abstract
Discussions of the legal rights of the retarded have revealed that retarded people typically have both special privileges and special restrictions in the law. Among the privileges are a legal incompetent’s immunity in contract which, as Glanville Williams has pointed out, is really a liberty not to pay what would otherwise be his contractual debts.1 (Whether that liberty is really an advantage, which is what the term ‘privilege’ usually suggests, is another question.) Among the restrictions in most states is the denial to a legal incompetent of a right to marry. At some time or other, retarded people have been denied the legal right to vote, to decide whether and when to have children, to serve on juries, and the right as children to a free public education. Some of these restrictions are commonplace today. Such legal restrictions have often been criticized,2 or defended,3 by courts and legal writers without an appreciation of the complexity of the moral issues they raise. My purpose in this paper is to examine various assumptions one might make about the moral status of the retarded in order to support a conclusion that they should have certain legal restrictions. The moral arguments for certain legal restrictions are more complex than has been appreciated by proponents or opponents of restrictions in the legal literature.
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Levenbook, B.B. (1984). Examining Legal Restrictions on the Retarded. In: Kopelman, L., Moskop, J.C. (eds) Ethics and Mental Retardation. Philosophy and Medicine, vol 15. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1480-8_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1480-8_16
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