Abstract
Dana Howard addresses whether some emotional responses toward disabled, which are stigmatizing and potentially unwarranted, assume a controversial understanding of disability. Certain conceptions of disability express or reinforce harmful stereotypes of disabled people, cause mistreatment, and make people with disabilities feel isolated or misunderstood. Howard then discusses whether these considerations are the wrong kinds of reasons to inform a conception of disability. Howard replies that these considerations should inform our conceptions of disability, not because certain attitudes toward disability have bad consequences but because they misrepresent disabled people’s experiences.
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Notes
- 1.
These moral reasons should be contrasted from prudential reasons. The idea is not that it is in the parents’ best interest to create children without disabilities, but rather that there is something morally problematic, perhaps even blameworthy, when they refrain from doing what they can to create children who are not disabled.
- 2.
For a discussion of the prudential neutrality view, see Stephen Campbell and Joseph Stramondo (2017).
- 3.
Deborah Kent’s view of her blindness exemplifies this position.
- 4.
On the idea of Wrong Kinds of Reason Arguments more generally, see Wlodek Rabinowitz and Toni Ronnow-Rasmussen (2004).
- 5.
It should be noted that holding the Standard View is taken here to be a necessary but not sufficient condition for someone to feel warranted pity toward people with disabilities. That is, one may have other views both about their own relationship to the pitied person (i.e. that they are superior) and about the extent of the misfortune that a disability brings about in order for pity to be triggered. One may see a friend’s peanut allergy as a misfortune without feeling pity for that person either because they do not take the misfortune to be so dire so as to warrant pity or because they cannot feel pity for a friend who they recognize as an equal. These considerations are orthogonal to the argument that Campbell and Stramondo present. For their argument to work, all they need to do is to presume that viewing disability as a misfortune is a constituent feature of warranted pity , and since the Standard View is false, pity toward people with disability is unwarranted regardless of whether or not the pity would be warranted (or unwarranted) given other factors.
- 6.
This view could be based on aretaic ideals rather than pragmatic considerations that weigh in favor of pride. That is, one could hold this view, not only because being a proud parent has good consequences but just in virtue of what it means to be a good parent. D’Arms and Jacobson argue that moral and pragmatic considerations for holding certain attitudes are often best understood as WKRs.
- 7.
The views expressed in this chapter are the author’s own and do not reflect the view of the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Health and Human Services, or the United States government.
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Howard, D. (2018). Disability, Well-Being, and (In)Apt Emotions. In: Flanigan, J., Price, T. (eds) The Ethics of Ability and Enhancement. Jepson Studies in Leadership. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95303-5_5
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