> 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
>
>
ravi, I am not familiar with Macintyre's work. Having read through your excerpts I'd say that there are some valuable insights here -- for instance that he foregrounds philosophy as having ignored disablement for the most part and that people are mutually interdependent (he doesn't state it that way but I think that is what he means). Also he is on the mark to remind all that they too can experience impairment. However, he doesn't present a materialist view of disability, which is the view I take. If one sees disability as a part of the environment (physical, political, social, etc) rather than a deficiency in the person as I do, then one looks to ways that society disables impaired persons rather than the impairment being the personal "tragedy" and cause of social outcome . Exclusion and segregation (in employment, education, housing, etc.) of disabled persons are barriers which society has created, and I believe are particularly determined by the economy.
The last graph on the "modern state" is very interesting. The disability movement has called attention to the way that the welfare state has cut disabled persons out of participation in solving our needs. Layers and layers of professionals (social workers, psychologists, rehabilitation professionals and the like) have made careers out of projecting what we need without ever consulting us! This industry (Albrecht calls it the disability industry) has dominated social policy often to our detriment. So while social solutions are needed they have largely gone awry.
A ground breaking work is Michael Oliver's Politics of Disablement (1990). One of the best books on historical materialism and disability is Brendan Gleeson's Geographies of Disability (1999). I have some papers up on the web at www.disweb.org too.
I am just now reading a book which I believe is promising though may not go quite as far in a critque of capitalism as I would. It is called Crippled Justice by Ruth O'Brien. best, marta
> 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."
>
>
>
>