Intellectual Disability, Choice, and Relational Ethics

In ‘Liberal individualism and Deleuzean Relationality,’ Clegg, Murphy, and Almack argue that the ability to choose has become something of a dogma in the management of intellectual disability, and one that sits badly with the heterogeneity of those with intellectual disabilities. They argue for a move away from choice as the primary ethical category to an ethics of relationality, following from the work of Deleuze and Guattari, to offer a more nuanced and stable form of care. In this commentary, I set out the theoretical considerations that Deleuze and Guattari take to underlie such an ethics, and then briefly question the focus of their uptake of Deleuze and Guattari. Although Deleuze and Guattari may indeed provide the resources to more adequately think of how to care for those with intellectual disabilities, choice remains at the core of their ethics. I argue that the acceptance of heterogeneity (and a metaphysics of the accident) that emerges from taking life rather than the human to be the center of their ethics, nonetheless leaves them better able to deal with the continuity of intellectual disability.

Deleuze writes at one point that ‘Descartes’ famous suggestion that good sense…is of all things the most equally distributed rests upon no more than an old saying, since it amounts to reminding us that men are prepared to complain of a lack of memory, imagination or even hearing, but they always find themselves well served with regard to intelligence and thought’ (Deleuze, 1994, p. 132). Deleuze’s claim here is essentially that Descartes elevates what is merely a prejudice of common sense to a philosophical principle that forms the basis of his philosophy. Descartes is critical of Aristotle’s definition of man as a rational animal:

If, in order to explain what an animal is, he were to reply that it is a ‘living and sentient being’, that a living being is an ‘animate body’, and that a body is a ‘corporeal substance’, you see immediately that these questions would be pure verbiage, which would elucidate nothing and leave us in our original state of ignorance.’

(Descartes, 1984, p. 410)

But although Descartes rejects Aristotle’s definition, he still accepts the idea that man is understood as a being defined by having a certain property: ‘of all the attributes I once claimed as my own there is only one left worth examining, and that is thought’ (p. 415). This metaphysical claim about what is essential to man leads easily to an ethical view of the world that ties together reason with autonomy. Here, we come to the problem of choice that Clegg et al. highlight. The three case studies all show different degrees of intellectual disability, and hence different degrees of ability to reflectively choose their own preferences, ranging from those who are severely impaired, to those capable of coherently expressing preferences. When we derive an ethics of the human from a single characteristic, then we quickly find ourselves in the position where the heterogeneity of human beings means that those at some remove from the norm fit badly, but also that deviation from the norm is understood as deficiency. What seems to be a simple criterion for determining action quickly becomes ambiguous given the complexity of individuals’ situations and abilities and, as the paper shows, even when support services do operate effectively, this is normally in spite of their explicit focus on choice. Deleuze calls the metaphysical basis for this kind of approach to the world, where existence is carved up into entities identified by properties, a ‘sedentary distribution’ (Deleuze, 1994, p. 37).

Much of Deleuze’s work involves attempting to shift the focus of our understanding of the world from an anthropocentric view to a view centered on life. In doing so, Deleuze moves away from an understanding of life divided into species circumscribed by a set of properties towards a view of life as process and relation. At the heart of this model is the notion of ethology developed by the biologist, Jakob von Uexküll as an alternative way of defining different forms of life. For Uexküll, what...