Liberal Ethics and Well-being Promotion in the Disability Rights Movement, Disability Policy, and Welfare Practice

Abstract

The disability rights movement (DRM) has often been closely associated with the liberal values of individual choice and independence, or the ‘ethics of agency’, where enhancing the capacity to make autonomous decisions in various policy and practice-based contexts is said to facilitate disabled people's well-being. Nevertheless, other liberal values are derived from what will be termed here the ‘ethics of self-acceptance’. The latter is more disguised in liberalism and the DRM, as rather than emphasising the capacity to make autonomous decisions, self-acceptance focuses on the positive acceptance of individual limitations, but again to enhance well-being. The further argument is that while the ethics of agency and self-acceptance often logically cohere and overlap, through promoting the values of self-respect and relational autonomy, dilemmas arise from our asymmetrical, or uneven, dispositions towards time, and present and future lives and experiences. For example, positively accepting individual limitations allows for a present-oriented immersion in ‘the moment’, but which often requires some suspension of future-oriented goals and aspirations. Understanding some of the implications of this asymmetry, and the dilemmas arising from it, provide important insights concerning approaches to physical and intellectual impairments and the subsequent debates within the DRM, social policy and welfare practice.

Keywords:

• Agency
• Liberalism
• Well-being
• Disability
• Self-acceptance
• Disability Rights

Notes

¹This list, although to some extent arbitrary, represents a range of liberal philosophers who have (a) been very influential, and (b) reflect contrasting strands within liberalism—most notably the utilitarianism of Mill, Sumner, and Griffin, contrasting with the Kantianism and/or non-utilitarianism of Rawls and Raz.

²Certainly, this translation rides roughshod over the complex and unsettled relationship between happiness and well-being explored in various literatures, theoretical and empirical (see, for example, Eid & Larsen 2008; Haybron 2008); but, given Rawls's discussion of happiness (see below), it is sufficient for the argument here that these are viewed as roughly equivalent. Put briefly, the production of happiness, for Rawls at least, must centrally include the exercise of agency and the successful execution of valued plans. This execution helps determine how well a person's life is going, so defining the parameters of her well-being.

³These limitations can occur in various forms, reflecting particular physical, intellectual and social constraints, but also in the universally shared vulnerability and finiteness of the human condition. For an insightful philosophical and empirical investigation of how recognising and accommodating these limits, and others beside, can contribute to a person's well-being and her ‘living wisely’, see Tiberius (2008).

⁴Although Morris, more recently, has criticised the DRM's over-focus on promoting individual choice and control, which, she now argues, has left disabled people vulnerable when governments administer welfare cuts during economic downturns (Morris 2011).

⁵This claim could therefore extend to all social movements which struggle with what might be termed ‘identity exclusion’, and the experience of being defined as an ‘outsider’.

⁶This caveat is not implying that all aspect of impairment are valuable, rather that some are, but that the latter can often outweigh the former.

⁷For a discussion of the complex and difficult questions which arise from using objective and subjective measurements of Quality of Life (QoL) for those with intellectual disabilities, see Townsend-White et al. (2012).

⁸See also Parfit (1987, pp. 149–86) for an interesting exploration of our asymmetrical attitudes to time.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Steven R. Smith

Steven Smith has published extensively in academic journals, is author of three book-length research monographs, and has contributed to a number of collections concerning liberal egalitarian political philosophy, Continental philosophy, and the application of theory and philosophical reflection to policy and practice