The Faces of Intellectual Disability: Philosophical Reflections

Notes

Notes Introduction The first epigraph is from Michel Foucault, “The Masked Philosopher,” in Foucault Live, Interviews (1966–84), ed. Sylvere Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996), 198–99. 1. Alisdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals (Chicago: Open Court, 1999); Martha Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, and Species Membership (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 2006); Eva Kittay, Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality , and Dependency (New York: Routledge, 1999); Ian Hacking, Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999). A 2008 conference, Cognitive Disability: A Challenge to Moral Philosophy (held at Stony Brook University, Manhattan), assembled a number of prominent philosophers and bioethicists, and is evidence of the growing attention being paid to intellectual disability. A collection of papers from this event can be found in Licia Carlson and Eva Kittay, eds., Cognitive Disability and Its Challenge to Moral Philosophy (forthcoming). 2. Peter Singer, op-ed, New York Times, January 26, 2007. 3. Henri Stiker, A History of Disability, trans. William Sayers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 15. 4. Georgina Kleege, Sight Unseen (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), 57. 5. See, for example, Anita Silvers, “(In)Equality, (Ab)Normality, and the Americans with Disabilities Act,” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 21 (1996): 102–11; Silvers, “On Not Iterating Women’s Disability,” in Embodying Bioethics, ed. Laura M. Donchin and Anne Purdy (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 177–202; Ron Amundson, “Disability, Handicap, and the Environment,” Journal of Social Philosophy 23, no. 1 (1992). This brief listing does not begin to capture the extensive literature in this area. 6. See Michael Oliver, The Politics of Disablement (London: Macmillan, 1990); Susan Wendell, “Toward a Feminist Theory of Disability,” Hypatia 4, no. 2 (Summer 1989); 210 Notes to pages 6–7 Wendell, The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability (New York: Routledge, 1996); Harlan Lane, “Constructions of Deafness,” Disability and Society 10, no. 2 (1995); Michelle Fine and Adrienne Asch, eds., Women with Disabilities (Philadelphia : Temple University Press, 1988); Jenny Morris, Pride and Prejudice: Transforming Attitudes to Disability (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1991); Lennard Davis, ed., The Disability Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 1997); Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Susan Browne, Debra Conners, and Nanci Stern, eds., With the Power of Each Breath: A Disabled Women’s Anthology (Pittsburgh: Cleis, 1985); Francis and Silvers, Americans with Disabilities. This list is hardly complete, as there are far too many discussions of the social model to include in this list. 7. Francis and Silvers, Americans with Disabilities, 210. 8. Peter Mittler, “International Perspectives,” in The Human Rights of Persons with Intellectual Disabilities: Different but Equal, ed. Stanley Herr, Lawrence O. Gostin, and Harold Hongju Koh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 25–48, 29. 9. It was founded in 1876, originally called the Association of Medical Officers of American Institutions for Idiotic and Feeble-minded Persons. In 1933 it was renamed the American Association on Mental Deficiency, and in 1988 changed the term “mental deficiency” to “mental retardation.” See William Sloan and Harvey A. Stevens, A Century of Concern: A History of the American Association on Mental Deficiency, 1876–1976 (Washington, D.C.: American Association on Mental Deficiency, 1976). Just this past year it changed its name from the American Association on Mental Retardation to the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities. See www.aaidd.org. 10. Ruth Luckasson et al., Mental Retardation: Definition, Classification, and Systems of Supports, 9th ed. (Washington D.C.: American Association on Mental Retardation , 1992), x. 11. Ibid., 1. 12. Ibid., 13. 13. Ibid., x. This is a departure from clinical definitions that still portray mental retardation as a pathological condition. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-IV defines mental retardation as “significantly subaverage general intellectual functioning that is accompanied by significant limitations in adaptive functioning . . . . The onset must occur before age 18 years” (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Press, 1994), 39. The ICD-10: International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems defines it as “a reduced level of intellectual functioning resulting in diminished ability to adapt to the daily demands of the normal social environment” (Geneva: World Health Organization, 1994), 227. Both the DSM-IV and the ICD-10 divide the category into subclassifications of mild, moderate, severe, profound , and severity unspecified. 14. American Association on Mental Retardation, 2002. 15. See James W. Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Retardation in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994...