Online research in philosophy

The disability rights movement (DRM) has often been closely associated with the liberal values of individual choice and independence, or the ?ethics of agency?, where enhancing the capacity to make autonomous decisions in various policy and practice-based contexts is said to facilitate disabled people's well-being. Nevertheless, other liberal values are derived from what will be termed here the ?ethics of self-acceptance?. The latter is more disguised in liberalism and the DRM, as rather than emphasising the capacity to make autonomous decisions, (...) self-acceptance focuses on the positive acceptance of individual limitations, but again to enhance well-being. The further argument is that while the ethics of agency and self-acceptance often logically cohere and overlap, through promoting the values of self-respect and relational autonomy, dilemmas arise from our asymmetrical, or uneven, dispositions towards time, and present and future lives and experiences. For example, positively accepting individual limitations allows for a present-oriented immersion in ?the moment?, but which often requires some suspension of future-oriented goals and aspirations. Understanding some of the implications of this asymmetry, and the dilemmas arising from it, provide important insights concerning approaches to physical and intellectual impairments and the subsequent debates within the DRM, social policy and welfare practice. (shrink)

appropriate redistributive principles is a proper part of what justice entails, these principles must also paradoxically include the possibility of an agent-based response to misfortune that transforms adverse contingencies, such that the initial ‘bad luck’ becomes a positive part of the ‘sufferer's’ identity. This neo-Kantian accommodation within theories of justice signifies a ‘deep’ egalitarian empathic connectedness between persons, based on an equal respect for persons as agents (and not simply as passive victims of misfortune). Moreover, it is an accommodation that (...) (a) can promote equality as ‘an end in itself’ rather than as merely a means to the end of enhancing a teleological conception of ‘well-being’ and ‘human flourishing’ and (b) can underpin a more robust Rawlsian conception of ‘justice as reciprocity’ than is usually allowed. (shrink)