Rawlsian social-contract theory and the severely disabled

Abstract

An issue needing to be addressed. In a series of powerfully argued recent works, Martha C. Nussbaum claims that the social-contract device that John Rawls employs, the Original Position (OP), is ill suited to generating acceptable principles of justice pertaining to the treatment of humans with physical and mental disabilities. Rawls makes no effort to generate such principles himself, she recognizes; instead, he attempts to work out principles for an idealized world in which “all citizens are fully cooperating members of a society over a complete life” (CP 332). His motivation for idealizing so radically in this respect seems to rest - as also in the case of his idealizing assumption that the society to which principles are to apply is closed and isolated - on the hope that “once we have a sound theory for this case, the remaining problems of justice will prove more tractable in the light of it. With suitable modifications such a theory should provide the key for some of these other questions” (TJ 7; PL 183). He recognizes that “care for those with [unusual and costly medical requirements] is a pressing practical question” (PL 332). Although one must admire Rawls's attempt to carve out a workable problem, this verbal recognition of the practically pressing nature of issues about disability does not satisfy Nussbaum, nor should it satisfy us. There are too many general reasons to suspect that confronting the issue of care for those with serious disabilities will require us radically to rethink some of our basic ideas about justice.