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Abstract
Awaiting execution, Socrates inquires, “Is life worth living with a body that is corrupted and in a bad condition?” “In no way,” replies Crito. My dissertation argues that canonical normative theories have fundamentally misunderstood and mischaracterized the experiences of disability, leading to significant injustices in applied fields such as bioethics. I term this error “the ableist conflation.” This conflation—exemplified in Socrates’ rhetorical question and affirmed unremittingly across philosophical epochs and traditions ranging from Aristotle to Kant, Beauvoir to Foot—presumes that disability is a harm and concomitant with pain and suffering.
Because the goal of ameliorating pain is taken as an ethical and socio-political truism, the ableist conflation leads theorists to preemptively rule out all forms of disability in accounts of human flourishing. It thereby contributes to the contemporary and historical stigmatization of people with disabilities, who are represented as paradigmatically deficient. This is especially disconcerting given that most arguments used to dehumanize and subjugate both people of color and women across the history of philosophy are based in the ableist conflation, whether Aristotle defining females as “mutilated” males or Kant linking black skin directly to intellectual incapacity.
Drawing upon research across the phenomenological tradition—including Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, S. Kay Toombs, and Havi Carel—I develop phenomenological accounts of MS (Multiple Sclerosis) and CRPS (Complex Regional Pain Syndrome). Contrasting these accounts, I develop novel philosophical and diagnostic distinctions between forms of pain and disability. These demonstrate that the ableist conflation is deeply misguided and that the lived experience of people with disabilities, far from being necessarily one of “harm” or “lack,” attests to lives rich in meaning, purpose, and dignity. I conclude by critiquing the ableist conflation at work in contemporary bioethical debates over patients with BIID (Body Integrity Identity Disorder). My research suggests that it is only with a better understanding of the myriad lived experiences of disability that ethicists will construct and apply normative theories that value the full range and experiential worth of human corporeal variation.
