Review - Arguing about Disability
Developing a philosophical framework
by Kristjana Kristiansen, Simo Vehmas and Tom Shakespeare (Editors)
Routledge, 2009
Review by Peter Herissone-Kelly, Ph.D.
Nov 24th 2009 (Volume 13, Issue 48)

The editors who have come together to produce this very worthwhile volume represent something of a dream team. Kristiansen has published widely on issues concerning both disability and mental health; Shakespeare, a sociologist by trade, is perhaps the most high-profile commentator on disability matters in the UK; and Vehmas has over the last decade established himself as one of the world's leading writers on the philosophy of disability. It is, then, unsurprising that they have managed to gather together a fine, diverse collection of original articles, most of which are extremely interesting, and some of which are extraordinarily insightful. Some contributions are less strong than others, but that is to be expected as par for the course.

I am less than sure, though, that the book really delivers what it seems to be billed as delivering, though I think that it is in the end none the worse for that. That is, it would seem that, officially, the book's approach is intended to be multi-disciplinary. So, the opening sentence of its Introduction reads "This book is about philosophers encountering disability and disability scholars from various disciplines encountering philosophy". (p. 1) This two-way traffic between philosophers and others working in the field of disability studies is held to be desirable, since (and this is surely true) philosophers tend often to overlook important empirical data on the phenomenon of disability, including, crucially, data about what it is to live with disability. On the other hand, the current field of disability studies, largely informed as it is by sociological rather than philosophical methods, occasionally "lacks essential dimensions of theoretical scrutiny necessary to do justice to the complexity of the phenomenon [of disability]". (p. 1)

Where the sociological approach has turned up trumps, however, is in shifting the dominant conception of disability away from a purely medical view--one in which disability is thought of as simply a matter of something having gone wrong with or in an organism--and towards a view that sees disability as at least in part either a social construct, or caused by the way in which society is organized. (Indeed, throughout this book it seems that the falsity of the medical view is taken as a point of departure.) Nonetheless:

… if disability as a social phenomenon is understood in terms of oppression and discrimination, it would seem vital to make closer analyses of concepts such as health, normality, well-being, discrimination, justice and equality--the kind of concepts that have       long been discussed in philosophy. (p. 3)

The contributors to the book certainly offer such analyses, but, despite the editors' promises, there seems to be comparatively little in the way of empirically based correctives to the theoretical excesses of philosophers. As the collection's subtitle would suggest, the perspectives taken upon the issues addressed, even by those who are not officially philosophers, is primarily philosophical.

The book is divided into three sections, with papers grouped together under the general headings of metaphysics, political philosophy, and ethics. Indeed, these three subject areas are held in the Introduction to constitute "the three major branches of philosophy". This is a bizarre claim, and is straightforwardly untrue. It seems alarmingly Procrustean to try to make the structure of philosophical inquiry fit the structure of the book, while pretending that the book's divisions in fact mirror those of the discipline! That said, for the purposes of the volume, categorization of each paper under one of the three headings works well.

Although the individual contributions are for the most part informative and clearly written, the book as a whole is perhaps best suited to readers with some philosophical background. In the main, I imagine its target audience to be academics and graduate students, though advanced and sufficiently well-informed undergraduates may also profit from it. Quite often, its authors will assume at least some familiarity with the themes addressed. For example, Richard Hull's paper really requires the reader to have at least a cursory knowledge of the works of John Rawls and Isaiah Berlin (something that can fairly be expected of professional philosophers and graduate philosophy students), while Steven R. Smith's chapter relies on our understanding what essentialism is, and why those who incline towards existentialism will disapprove of it. The latter paper, in addition, is not written in a style likely to be enormously accessible to newcomers to the subject.

Indeed, at one point, a lack of philosophical knowledge on the part of the reader may lead to him or her being rather wrong-footed. In an otherwise excellent paper, which aims to subvert the postmodern claim that physical impairments are every bit as much social constructs as are disabilities, Simo Vehmas and Pekka Mäkelä make important use of a distinction between epistemic subjectivity and objectivity on one hand, and ontological subjectivity and objectivity on the other. However, they do so in rather too simplistic a fashion. In characterizing the former, they write:

A judgment is objective if its truth is settled by facts in the world that are independent of   the maker and hearer of the judgment. In other words, if a statement is objective in the epistemic sense, then there is an objective fact in the world that makes it true.

It seems to me unfair, as well as just incorrect, to tie epistemic objectivity so closely to a correspondence theory of truth, and to that theory's eminently disputable ontology, which sees facts as the worldly counterparts, and truthmakers, of propositions. Deflationists about truth, who reject such an ontology, can nonetheless be epistemic objectivists. Again, Vehmas and Mäkelä, in their account of ontological objectivity and subjectivity tell us that

Objective entities exist independently of any perceiver or mental state, whereas subjective entities are dependent on perceivers and mental states.

A swift perusal of the writings of John McDowell (and in particular his classic article "Values and Secondary Qualities") might shake their confidence in this less than nuanced way of drawing the distinction.

For those with the right level of background knowledge, however, there is much in the volume that is tremendously useful. I was especially impressed with a first-rate paper by Heikki Ikäheimo, which in a sensitive and careful manner sets out and defends a notion of "interpersonal personhood". This notion, it is explained, is linked to but not identical with that of psychological personhood, which philosophers often take to be all there is to someone's qualifying as a person. It involves the recognition of oneself as a person (in the psychological sense) by others, and their responding to one in ways consonant with that recognition. It should be plain that the disabled too often find such recognition unforthcoming, and Ikäheimo uses that fact to clarify the perhaps incompletely understood concepts of exclusion and inclusion. In order to guarantee inclusivity for those with impairments, he argues, it is not sufficient to ensure that they are granted their full complement of legal rights. Inclusion occurs only when hitherto marginalized members of society have full interpersonal personhood conferred upon them; that is, when they are authentically recognized and responded to as persons.

Tuija Takala offers a thoughtful piece identifying the dangers, as well as the advantages, of those with impairments identifying themselves as members of an oppressed group. While such identification carries indisputable benefits, it is also attended by certain risks: it may for instance lead to the development of a "victim mentality" on the part of the group or community's members, as well as to the mistaken assumption that one is to be defined exclusively as a member of that community. There is also, Takala warns, a particularly insidious problem that may accompany political action on the part of any oppressed group. In order to gain political influence, the members of that group need to unite and be recognized as a community, yet it is precisely the characterization of them as members of a homogeneous, unvariegated group that is instrumental in their being oppressed in the first place. 

Also worthy of mention here is Matti Häyry's chapter on the moral permissibility or otherwise of selecting "deaf" embryos. Those familiar with Häyry's work will recognize its standard hallmarks here: complex issues presented with clarity and implacable logic, coupled with a scrupulous fair-mindedness which refuses to find easy answers where there are none.

Other chapters take classic works of philosophy and extend them in imaginative ways to address disability issues, or view them critically in the light of the phenomenon of disability. I have already mentioned that Hull makes use of Rawls and Berlin in this way. In addition, Jackie Leach Scully quite fascinatingly employs the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and later empirical scientific work it inspired, in order to assess the prospects for rooting differing moral understandings in varying modes of embodiment. In similar fashion, Jerome E. Bickenbach takes insights from R.H. Tawney's account of social justice, and uses them to question how it is that the state might have a responsibility to ameliorate impairments, while possessing no corresponding obligation to address the lack of certain talents in its citizens.

All in all, even if this book does not quite do what it advertises itself as doing, what it does is very good indeed. Anyone with any philosophical background who is interested in the field of disability studies, whether or not they count themselves as philosophers, ought to read it, and to engage with its arguments.

© 2009 Peter Herissone-Kelly

Dr Peter Herissone-Kelly, Lecturer in Philosophy, Philosophy Section, International School for Communities, Rights, and Inclusion, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK