Species of Disability

What are the limits of care? How do the ethics of care relate to the idea of human dignity, and how might multiple foundations for dignity affect the construction of the boundaries of the ethical community? Does the call to love thy neighbor as thyself invite us to a more open-ended conception of the definition of neighbor, perhaps up to the inclusion of walruses, por poises, or spiders within its ambit? I was prompted to ask these questions after reading Barbara Arneil's thoughtful and provocative Disability, Self Image, and Modern Political Theory in the April 2009 issue of Political Theory.1 In her essay she ably argues that the 'rational' or 'person' that has grounded modern political thought from Locke to Rawls has been defined in direct contrast to a disabled other, rendering the inclusion of disability into contemporary political theory highly problematic.2 The upshot, for her, is that the disabled should not simply be included or incorporated into the existing paradigms of Liberalism or Republicanism, but rather that a new framework based in the literature of care and dependency termed by Arneil inter dependency theory, is required. There is much to admire in Arneil's decon structive account of these twin strands of our modern state. The idea of interdependency is particularly fruitful, though later in this essay I will sug gest one problem that seems especially troubling to a difference-based theory (as I take it Arneil's is, at least in part). But Arneil is right to insist on the critique of the conceit of autonomy that underlies the traditional view of the citizen. We are, none of us, wholly or partially independent of the care of oth ers, and in addition to simply getting the facts wrong about our situated and dependent natures, it is also the case that the rational citizen account tends

Political science · Sociology · Political Philosophy and Ethics

• Disability, Self Image, and Modern Political Theory

  Open Access•Barbara Arneil•Political Theory•2009

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