Feminist Interpretations of John Rawls

Chapter 5: Rawls, Freedom, and Disability: A Feminist Rereading (Nancy J. Hirschmann)

When political theorists and philosophers take up the question of disability, they generally do so with regard to questions of justice: allocation of resources to disabled people (whether directly through accommodation, subsidy, or health care, or indirectly, say, through scientific research); distribution of resources (which disabilities or illnesses should receive more dollars , which less; how do we decide from which other programs or areas to take resources in order to pay for that?); entitlement to resources (should public buses be fitted for wheelchair lifts if extremely few residents use wheelchairs?); and adequacy of resources (in granting disability payments through Social Security, how much is enough?). Questions of responsibility Thanks to Ruth Abbey and Corey Brettschneider for comments and suggestions. 5 Rawls, Freedom, and Disability A Feminist Rereading Nancy J. Hirschmann 18442-Abbey_FemInterp_Rawls.indd 96 18442-Abbey_FemInterp_Rawls.indd 96 7/25/13 9:43 AM 7/25/13 9:43 AM Rawls, Freedom, and Disability 97 sometimes arise in terms of determining just distribution and entitlement (is a person disabled because of irresponsible action, like driving a motorcycle without a helmet?), but justice is the primary theoretical concept that one encounters in this disciplinary framework. Much of this work revolves around, or was inspired by, the work of John Rawls. TJ captured the imagination of political theorists and philosophers like no other twentieth-century text except Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. Yet Rawls made little mention of disability in TJ; and in subsequent writings—in response to criticisms that he ignored the disabled, as well as women—the gestures he makes toward recognizing disabled people as equally entitled to justice are fairly inadequate. Indeed, he seems somewhat hostile in requiring that parties in the OP be “fully cooperating members of society over a complete life,” which would thereby exclude people with “permanent physical disabilities . . . so severe as to prevent persons from being normal and fully co-operating members of society in the usual sense” (Rawls 1985, 233). More generally, he defines disability in terms of medical conditions that should be treated by health care (PL, 20, 184), thus misunderstanding the perspective of disability scholars and activists who view disabilities as physical differences that are discriminated against and should be accommodated by policy or law. True to the analytic philosophy tradition, Rawls justifies setting aside illness and disability because he believes that if we can establish principles along narrow idealist lines, we may be able to bring in more “complex” cases, which disability supposedly presents, at a later point (PL, 20; Daniels 1990, 278). Is it possible that Rawls ignores disability because, like Habermas, he does not want to acknowledge the disadvantages to which his own disability —a stutter—subjected him? It is interesting that both Habermas’s and Rawls’s disabilities pertained to speech (for Habermas, a cleft palate led to unclear vocalization). According to some accounts, Rawls’s stutter developed later in life, apparently in response to the deaths of two of his brothers , from diphtheria and pneumonia, and thus was highly atypical (Rogers 1999). Rawls never wrote about his stutter or was willing to consider himself “disabled.” Nor did he write about his brothers in any of his brief remarks about health care. A deeper explanation may be that disability poses such a radical challenge to Rawls’s theory that he would have to rethink its fundamentals. As Eva Kittay (1999) suggests, justice requires that we include dependency needs not at a later, legislative stage that distributes resources to solve individual needs, but rather in the OP as a fundamental fact about humanity that must be included in the initial starting point. Martha Nussbaum 18442-Abbey_FemInterp_Rawls.indd 97 18442-Abbey_FemInterp_Rawls.indd 97 7/25/13 9:43 AM 7/25/13 9:43 AM 98 Feminist Interpretations of John Rawls (2006) also identifies fundamental problems with Rawls’s theory that exclude disability from the start. Deploying her “capabilities approach,” Nussbaum maintains that justice requires a distribution of resources that aims at a threshold for developing the capability functioning of severely disabled individuals who are not able to meet Rawls’s contractualist assumptions. Other scholars believe that Rawls’s theory of justice could, with some adjustments, accommodate disability. Cynthia Stark (2007) argues that despite Rawls’s emphasis on reciprocity and cooperation, leading to the apparent exclusion of disabled individuals who, in his view, cannot “cooperate ,” his remarks about the social minimum nevertheless entail their inclusion. Jonathan Wolff...