Disability, Autonomy and Definitions: Between Discrimination and Emancipation
(2023) CEPDISC′23 Conference on Discrimination — Location: Centre for the Experimental-Philosophical Study of Discrimination, Aarhus University (2023.October.12AD)
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- Discrimination against persons with disabilities takes various forms: inaccessibility of places and activities; segregation; non-recognition of legal status; exclusion from education and employment. These forms of discrimination could be addressed by claiming recognition of rights and opening up the question of how to achieve an inclusive society. But there is also a deeper way in which people with disabilities are discriminated against, and it concerns how the concept of 'disability' itself is defined. In fact, one of the most important revolutions made by disability rights activists since the 1970s concerns the very definition of 'disability': not as a medical-biological characteristic of an individual, but as a burden imposed by a society incapable of including people with impairments. The very distinction between 'impairment' and 'disability' marks the emergence of what is referred to as the 'social model of disability' (Oliver 1981), which has been followed by different strategies of definition, or 'models', of disability (Beaudry 2018). In this article, I address the question of how the definition of 'disability' represents an area of struggle against discrimination for people with disabilities. In particular, I focus on the place that the concept of 'autonomy' plays in this field: I will explore some of the ways in which the association between the concept of 'disability' and the concept of 'autonomy' has produced both forms of discrimination and emancipation. The paper addresses this question in two parts. In the first part, I will analyse how the concept of autonomy could be a source of discrimination for people with disabilities. I will take moral and political philosophy as a case study and argue that the concept of autonomy seems to crystallise a way in which people with disabilities have historically been excluded from moral and political personhood recognition on the basis of a lack of autonomy, with autonomy seen as a source of dignity, wellbeing or as a basis for moral status recognition. Adopting the lens of the ethics of care (Kittay 2008; 2011), this process of discrimination will be understood as an anthropology of autonomy and challenged by an anthropology of vulnerability and a relational conception of autonomy (Mackenzie - Stoljar 2000; Mackenzie et al. 2013). In the second part, I consider the shift from autonomy as a source of discrimination to autonomy as a tool for claiming rights. Taking the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006) as a case study, I show how the concept of autonomy has been used by activists to reshape the very definition of 'disability', which ultimately takes the form of a claim to autonomy in the very process of defining disability (Barnes 2016). In conclusion, I raise some questions about the risk that the centrality of the concept of autonomy in the field of disability rights may reiterate a form of discrimination for people with severe forms of cognitive impairment, and consider whether a relational conception of autonomy may help mitigate this risk.
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Boldrini, M. (2023). Disability, Autonomy and Definitions: Between Discrimination and Emancipation. CEPDISC′23 Conference on Discrimination, Centre for the Experimental-Philosophical Study of Discrimination, Aarhus University. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/220505