Online research in philosophy

Disabled women were absent for many years from the discipline that has become known as women and gender studies. This field of study had its origins in the late 1970s following the second wave of feminism. In the latter decades of the twentieth century, disabled women and their allies introduced the necessary task of exploring disabled women's embodiment to the wider feminist community. A wealth of research now exists that incorporates disabled women's bodies into a range of disciplines: from literature, film, art, social sciences, geography, and the environment to many other areas of scholarship. Indeed, many of the themes covered in this special issue have been addressed in different contexts in the disciplines ..

: My purpose in this essay is to locate disabled women within the women's movement as well as the disability movement in India. While foregrounding the existential realities for disabled women in the Indian scene, I underscore the reasons for their absence from the agenda of Indian feminism. I conclude by reflecting on the possibilities of inclusion within Indian feminist thought.

In this paper we challenge the moral consensus against selection for disability. Our discussion will concern only those disabilities that are compatible with a life worth living from the point of view of the disabled individual. We will argue that an influential, impersonal argument against selection for disability falls to a counterexample. We will then show how the reach of the counterexample can be broadened to make trouble for anyone who objects to selection for disability. If we are right about the problems for objections to selection for disability, why are objections are so widespread? We suggest that intuitions are being skewed against selection for disability by certain quirks in the usual ways of presenting the issue. Nevertheless, we must confess to finding our own result surprising.

"Tell the health professionals why people with disabilities get depressed and suicidal. Tell them about institutions. Let them know the real reasons people with disabilities give up."The disability studies perspective has been consistently marginalized in twentieth-century American bioethical discourse. Like Ralph Ellison's nameless protagonist who is "invisible … simply because people refuse to see me" (Ellison 1995, 3), both disabled people and disability studies perspectives have been conspicuously absent from mainstream contemporary bioethical inquiries. Considerations of provision, accommodation, and institutionalization have been pushed to the periphery of discourse. The lament of Ellison's invisible man—"I ..

Arguments in favor of legalized assisted suicide often center on issues of personal privacy and freedom of choice over one's body. Many disability advocates assert, however, that autonomy arguments neglect the complex sociopolitical determinants of despair for people with disabilities. Specifically, they argue that social approval of suicide for individuals with irreversible conditions is discriminatory and that relaxing restrictions on assisted suicide would jeopardize, not advance, the freedom of persons with disabilities to direct the lives they choose. This paper examines the idea promoted by some proponents of assisted suicide that it is reasonable to be depressed about one's diminished quality of life in cases of irreversible illness or disability and, therefore, such depression should not call into question the individual's competence to request assistance in dying. The concept of rational depression is defined and examined in the context of: four real-life cases involving individuals with disabilities who requested assistance in dying; a set of criteria commonly applied to decision-making to determine rationality; and research bearing on the emotional status of people with disabilities. It is concluded that although disability is associated with particular socially mediated stressors, there is no theoretical or empirical evidence to indicate that depression and its role in the right to die is dynamically different, more natural, or more reasonable for disabled people than for non-disabled people.

The 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act enacted a conceptual shift in the meaning of ‘disability.’ Rather than defining ‘disability’ as a disadvantageous physical or mental deficit of persons, it codifies the understanding of ‘disability’ as a defective state of society which disadvantages these persons. In contrast, the standard medical model incorrectly conceptualizes disabled persons as biologically inferior, and thus confines them to the role of recipients of benevolence or care. Turning to an ethic of caring yields counter-intuitive results that conflict with the conceptual apparatus of the ADA. It is argued that in order to liberate social thought from this medical model and thus move the disabled from being socially marginalized to being socially enabled, one must re-conceptualize current practice by adopting the ADA's conceptual framework. Keywords: caring, disability, equality, ethics, health care polic CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this?

It is commonly held that there are both cases in which there is a strong moral reason not to cause the existence of a disabled person and cases in which, although it would be permissible to cause a disabled person to exist, it would be better not to. Yet many disabled people are affronted by the idea that it is sometimes better to prevent people like themselves from existing, precisely because these people would be disabled. One of their grounds for concern, which will be my particular focus in this paper, is that claiming that there are reasons to prevent the existence of disabled people may be expressive of a demeaning and hurtful view of the status of existing disabled people, a view that may encourage discriminatory attitudes towards and treatment of the disabled. I will contend that there can indeed be moral and prudential reasons for preventing the existence of a disabled person. But I will argue that it is less obvious than many people assume what, if anything, the recognition of these reasons expresses about disabled people. And I will contend that, even if the recognition of these reasons does express a perception of disabled people that is potentially hurtful, this effect could be offset by the social expression of a contrary view that I will claim is in fact compatible with and equally valid as the potentially hurtful view. Whether it may be morally objectionable to cause a disabled person to exist depends, in part, on whether the person’s life would be worth living. If it is ever objectionable to cause a disabled person to exist, the objections are surely strongest when the person’s life would be “worth not living” – that is, would have aspects or features that would be bad for the person and that would decisively outweigh those, if any, that would be good. Such cases are, however, quite rare. Indeed, some people question whether there are any disabilities so severe as to cause life to be worth not living. It can be argued that disability involves only the absence of certain abilities and that mere deficits....

Background Regionalised models of health care delivery have important implications for people with disabilities and chronic illnesses yet the ethical issues surrounding disability and regionalisation have not yet been explored. Although there is ethics-related research into disability and chronic illness, studies of regionalisation experiences, and research directed at improving health systems for these patient populations, to our knowledge these streams of research have not been brought together. Using the Canadian province of Ontario as a case study, we address this gap by examining the ethics of regionalisation and the implications for people with disabilities and chronic illnesses. The critical success factors we provide have broad applicability for guiding and/or evaluating new and existing regionalised health care strategies. Discussion Ontario is in the process of implementing fourteen Local Health Integration Networks (LHINs). The implementation of the LHINs provides a rare opportunity to address systematically the unmet diverse care needs of people with disabilities and chronic illnesses. The core of this paper provides a series of composite case vignettes illustrating integration opportunities relevant to these populations, namely: (i) rehabilitation and services for people with disabilities; (ii) chronic illness and cancer care; (iii) senior's health; (iv) community support services; (v) children's health; (vi) health promotion; and (vii) mental health and addiction services. For each vignette, we interpret the governing principles developed by the LHINs – equitable access based on patient need, preserving patient choice, responsiveness to local population health needs, shared accountability and patient-centred care – and describe how they apply. We then offer critical success factors to guide the LHINs in upholding these principles in response to the needs of people with disabilities and chronic illnesses. Summary This paper aims to bridge an important gap in the literature by examining the ethics of a new regionalisation strategy with a focus on the implications for people with disabilities and chronic illnesses across multiple sites of care. While Ontario is used as a case study to contextualize our discussion, the issues we identify, the ethical principles we apply, and the critical success factors we provide have broader applicability for guiding and evaluating the development of – or revisions to – a regionalised health care strategy.

: Disabled women's issues, experiences, and embodiments have been misunderstood, if not largely ignored, by feminist as well as mainstream disability theorists. The reason for this, I argue, is embedded in the use of materialist and constructivist approaches to bodies that do not recognize the interaction between "sex" and "gender" and "impairment" and "disability" as material-semiotic. Until an interactionist paradigm is taken up, we will not be able to uncover fully the intersection between sexist and ableist biases (among others) that form disabled women's oppressions. Relying on the understanding that sexuality is one such material-semiotic phenomenon, I examine the operation of interwoven biases in two disabled women's narratives.

We need a feminist theory of disability, both because 16 percent of women are disabled, and because the oppression of disabled people is closely linked to the cultural oppression of the body. Disability is not a biological given; like gender, it is socially constructed from biologically reality. Our culture idealizes the body and demands that we control it. Thus, although most people will be disabled at some time in their lives, the disabled are made "the other," who symbolize failure of control and the threat of pain, limitation, dependency, and death. If disabled people and their knowledge were fully integrated into society, everyone's relation to her/his real body would be liberated.