>
> "Who isn't dependent?" I think the critiquers would say.
>
> I would add that by focusing on disabled children the "caretaker" role is
> determined in a way - these are the parent's experiences. There is a
> paternalism (or maternalism to be more accurate here) tone in the review of
> these books about disabled children -- all children need care.
>
> I prefer to think in terms of disability support as "services" rather than
> "care." Everyone needs care and whether they have it or not in their lives
> depends upon whether they have it from people who they have relationships
> with - disabled or nondisabled. The kind of services that enable disabled
> persons to navigate the world need to be thought of like the need for public
> streets. They need to be there, not determined by whether family or friends
> "care enough" to provide them.
>
marta, i wonder if you have read alasdair macintyre? (see below). i wonder what your thoughts are on his work especially with respect to the content above (not his more general work on morals/virtue and his analysis of the failure of enlightenment in this regard). apologies if this is all old hat,
--ravi
from:
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9910/articles/meilaender.html
MacIntyre emphasizes, in addition, an important feature of our animal nature that has not, in his view, received the philosophical attention it deserves: the disability and vulnerability that mark every period of human life, especially early childhood and old age. (He thinks, in fact, that philosophers have paid almost no heed to human disability and that, when they have, it is almost always to picture the disabled as possible objects of benevolence from other moral agents who are themselves unimpaired. ... To take disability seriously as a natural fact of life means not to exempt any of us from it. MacIntyre wants us to remember that "there is a scale of disability on which we all find ourselves. Disability is a matter of more or less. . . . And at different periods of our lives we find ourselves, often unpredictably, at very different points on that scale."
<...>
Each of us from the outset lives in debtthat is simply a fact embedded in the vulnerability and fragility of human life. We will need therefore not only the virtues that enable us to grow toward independence and help others to do so as well, but also the virtues of "acknowledged dependence." ... With his Aristotle read through the transforming lens of Aquinas, MacIntyre sees in the great-souled man one who suffers from an illusion of self-sufficiency, forgetful of what he has received but eager to remember what he has given.
<...>
The picture of human life that emerges is, thus, one of reciprocal indebtedness. I flourish only insofar as others make my good their own, helping me especially through periods of weakness and disability so that I can acquire the virtues that constitute such flourishing. And to the degree that I acquire them, I become able and willing, in turn, to regard the good of yet others as my own.
<...>
This gives rise to MacIntyre's Aristotelian understanding of politics. In a world where all are reciprocally indebted to each other, we can say neither that the individuals good is subordinated to that of the community nor that the community exists simply to foster the good of individuals.
<...>
So understood, political community exists not to adjust competing interests or to provide goods and services. It exists to make possible the kind of community in which joint deliberation about life can take place within a framework of reciprocal indebtedness and just generosity. And while MacIntyre acknowledges that the modern nationstate does provide certain necessary and important public goods, he believes that it does little more than adjust competing interests and masks its manipulation of our lives with talk of a common good that must necessarily be a sham. "The modern state," as he says in one of the essays in the Reader, "is a large, complex, and often ramshackle set of interlocking institutions, combining none too coherently the ethos of a public utility company with inflated claims to embody ideals of liberty and justice."