Disability, Humanity, and Personhood: A Survey of Moral Concepts

Abstract

Three of the articles included in this issue of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy—Ron Amundson and Shari Tresky's “On a Bioethical Challenge to Disability Rights”; Rachel Cooper's “Can It Be a Good Thing to Be Deaf?”; and Mark T. Brown's “The Potential of the Human Embryo”—interact (in various ways) with the concepts of disability, humanity, and personhood and their normative dimensions. As one peruses these articles, it becomes apparent that terms like “disability,” “human being,” and “person” carry with them great normative significance. There is, however, much disagreement concerning both the definition and the extension of such terms. This is significant because different terms and definitions are associated with different sets of normative requirements. In what follows we reconstruct the argument of each of the articles, and then offer some brief critical analysis intended to stimulate further thought about and discussion of the issues that each raises.

Keywords:

• disability
• humanity
• personhood
• social model
• medical model

I. INTRODUCTION

Three of the articles included in this issue of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy interact (in various ways) with the concepts of disability, humanity, and personhood and their normative dimensions. As one peruses these articles, it becomes apparent that terms like “disability,” “human being,” and “person” carry with them much normative significance. They are strongly correlated with prescriptions for action and lead us to form certain attitudes about those entities to which we ascribe these labels. For example, many of us hold that “persons” are intrinsically valuable and therefore should be respected by cultivating those features that make them persons, and not engaging in actions which may prevent them from exercising or exhibiting those features.

Similarly, if a person is deemed to have a “disability,” many will claim that there is a corresponding moral imperative to ameliorate or eliminate that disability. There is, however, much disagreement about how to define these terms.

For example, are “persons” those things that have a concept of themselves as entities separate from the world and persisting through time (Singer, 1993, pp. 85–87)? Are they those beings who have this concept and are capable of being persuaded by moral reasons (Engelhardt, 1996, pp. 135–136, 149–151)? Or, alternatively, are they those beings that have these features as well as the feature of having (or having the capacity to have) certain emotions (Warren, 2002, p. 76)?

In addition, there is the problem of extension: to which objects shall such terms refer? Are embryos human beings? Are they also persons? All this is significant, as we shall see, because different terms and definitions are associated with different sets of normative requirements. In what follows we reconstruct the argument of each of the articles, and then offer some brief critical analysis intended to stimulate thought and discussion of the issues that each raises.

II. ON A BIOETHICAL CHALLENGE TO DISABILITY RIGHTS

From Chance to Choice (Buchanan, Brock, Daniels, & Wickler, 2000) is a book on modern genetic technology and related issues that has attracted much attention since its publication. One of the major topics of the book is its criticisms of several positions attributed to disability rights advocates. In “On a Bioethical Challenge to Disability Rights,” Ron Admundson and Shari Tresky examine the merits of these criticisms and ultimately argue to the conclusion that they are flawed. Crucial to this discussion is a distinction between “Conditional Disadvantages of Impairment” (CDIs) and “Unconditional Disadvantages of Impairment” (UDIs). Amundson and Tresky define these concepts as follows:

Conditional Disadvantages of Impairment (CDIs): Disadvantages that are experienced by people with impairments, but which are produced by the social context in which those people live.

Unconditional disadvantages of impairment (UDIs): Disadvantages that are experienced by people with impairments but which are produced irrespective of their social context. (Amundson & Tresky, 2007, p. 544)

According to Amundson and Tresky, disability rights advocates tend to take the view that most of the disadvantages suffered by people with impairments are CDIs and are interested in removing CDIs rather than UDIs. Disabilities are seen as the socially conditioned disadvantages of impairment and can be removed by simply changing the environment.

Amundson and Tresky claim that the authors of From Chance to Choice also accept this view but fail to infer the same justice consequences from the social construction of disability that are inferred for other civil rights movements. Amundson and Tresky explain this failure by appealing to three arguments provided by the authors of FCTC for why the duty to remove barriers for people with impairments is weaker than the duty to remove barriers for other groups that are disadvantaged by social construction.

The first argument stems from the notion that because the Disability Rights movement is committed to a world in which persons with disabilities are fully integrated, it also entails that the Disability Rights movement is committed to making unacceptably radical changes to the socioeconomic structures of society. However, Amundson and Tresky counter, the view that the socioeconomic structures of society should be dramatically altered in order to promote integration is, at most, a minority opinion within the disability rights movement.

The second argument has to do with the notion that unlike other groups who are disadvantaged by social construction, disabled persons would “continue to suffer limited opportunities even if there were no discrimination against them” (Buchanan, Brock, Daniels, & Wikler, 2000, pp. 283–284, cited in and italics added by Amundson & Tresky, 2007, pp. 551–552). Amundson and Tresky take this to mean that after the discrimination is removed, the UDI's remain. But, they point out, the Disability Rights movement claims only that justice demands we remove CDIs—and this claim is no different from that of other civil rights movements.

The third argument has to do with the claim that “[e]ach individual has an important and morally legitimate interest in having access to a cooperative scheme that is the most productive and rewarding form of interaction in which he or she can participate effectively” and that a society that integrates disabled people is not the most rewarding and productive for non-disabled people (Amundson & Tresky, 2007, p. 553).

Amundson and Tresky claim that this argument assumes that the Disability Rights movement requires that society be restructured so as to ensure that every citizen be able to perform every job. This is not the case, however; the disability rights movement is committed only to removing the artificial barriers that prevent persons with impairments from pursuing those jobs that they are qualified and able to accomplish.

They also note that “improvements in access increase everyone's choices, not only those who absolutely need them” (Amundson & Tresky, 2007, p. 555). Therefore, they conclude, a world which integrates persons with disabilities would not be a world that is less rewarding or productive.

Amundson and Tresky also challenge some of the other attributions made by the authors of From Chance to Choice. For instance, the book claims that Disability Rights advocates employ the “justice trumps beneficence argument”—namely, the argument that, in all instances of conflict between appeals to justice and beneficence, the appeal to the former trumps the appeal to the latter. The only source cited by FCTC for this view is a position paper entitled Just Technology (Amundson & Tresky, 2007, p. 549).

However, on Amundson and Tresky's reading, that article claims only that the appeal to justice is always relevant to a governmental decision. Amundson and Tresky also note that the authors of FCTC ascribe the slogan “change society not people” to the Disabled Rights movement. Taken at face value, this slogan suggests that impairments should never be cured.

However, Amundson and Tresky argue, this appears to be a false attribution; in fact, they claim, their research reveals that this putative slogan of the Disability Rights movement has been used only by persons whose aim was to discredit progressive social movements—that is, it has never been employed by representatives of the Disability Rights movement.

Amundson and Tresky do an admirable job of criticizing From Chance to Choice's characterization of the positions held by advocates of the Disability Rights movement. Several questions, however, can be raised about some of the theses that they advance. First, one might question whether UDI's even exist; one might instead argue that all disadvantages experienced by people with impairments in some way depend on the social context in which those people live.

According to Admundson and Tresky, two paradigm examples of UDIs can be expressed in the following terms: “people who are blind cannot see,” and “people with paraplegia cannot walk.” However, it can be argued that the disadvantages attendant upon not being able to see and not being able to walk also depend on the social context in which one finds oneself. If by social we mean “what is created by society,” then it seems possible to imagine societies that are constructed in such a way that not being able to see or walk would not be a disadvantage. Creating such societies would surely require strong powers of imagination to envision fully and may not be likely ever to exist in reality—but their possibility seems, at least prima facie, quite plausible.

Such a view does seem to be held by certain philosophers who endorse the Disability Rights movement. For example, in the course of her defense of what she terms the “social model” of disability, Anita Silvers observes that “. . . the supportiveness, adaptability, and accessibility of the environment can have an enormous effect on whether impairment limits function” (Silvers, 1998, p. 62).

As an illustration, she points to the case of Het Dorp, a Dutch village that was explicitly designed to be equally accessible to both mobility-impaired residents (the numerical majority) and unimpaired residents (the numerical minority). Thus, “although the majority of residents used wheelchairs, no feature of Het Dorp's adaptive design excluded unimpaired individuals” (Silvers, 1998, p. 129). This was experienced by Irving Zola, a wheelchair user, with a profound sense of “relief”—“for the first time in his life, he found himself in a built environment that welcomed rather than defied bodies like his” (Silvers, 1998, p. 129). Silvers portrays this sort of advance planning as an example of what she terms “historical counterfactualizing,” that is, the process of “projecting how objective social practice would be transformed were unimpaired functioning so atypical as to be of merely marginal importance for social policy” (Silvers, 1998, p. 129).

Thus, for example,

[w]ere a majority rather than a minority of users disabled, the initial designs of public transportation and communication systems would have accommodated them, making unnecessary the extraordinary remodeling expenditures needed to include them later on. Accommodating people with disabilities does not block access for people without disabilities, as the failure to adapt designs does for people with disabilities. (Silvers, 1998 p. 130)

If it is indeed possible to construct societies wherein those disabilities which Amundson and Tresky would term UDI's would, in fact, not be viewed or experienced as disadvantages at all, then one might reason that there really are no disabilities that can be categorized as UDI's; rather, all disabilities can be categorized as CDI's. However, if this is the case, then the second argument given by the authors of From Chance to Choice (for the conclusion that the duty to remove barriers for people with impairments is weaker than the duty to remove barriers for other disadvantaged groups) is even more problematic than Admundson and Tresky make it out to be.

For if one initially accepts Admundson and Tresky's definitions of UDI's and CDI's, then the authors of From Chance to Choice are indeed correct in asserting that there are disadvantages that remain after discrimination is eliminated. One must then argue (as Amundson and Tresky do) for the further claim that the Disability Rights movement is not concerned with eliminating these (unconditional) disadvantages.

If, on the other hand, all the disadvantages suffered by people with impairments are caused by the (discriminatory) social context, then no disadvantages would exist if these persons were no longer discriminated against. In this case, then, we could not concede after all that the authors of From Chance to Choice are correct in claiming that there are disadvantages which would remain if persons with disabilities were not discriminated against.

Another important related point has to with the attribution of the slogan “change society not people” to the Disabled Rights movement. Admundson and Tresky appropriately point out that this is not an official slogan of any Disability Rights organization. Nevertheless, one might wonder why the authors of FCTC made such an egregious error.

If we assume—as Silvers and other disability advocates do—that all the disadvantages suffered by persons with impairments result from their social context, then the various problems associated with having those impairments would stem from society rather than the individual. But, if that is the case, then all efforts should be made to alter society rather than the individual. Therefore, the content of the slogan, misattributed at it may be, is not as absurd as Admundson and Tresky claim.

If the authors of FCTC had come across some of the literature purporting these latter sorts of claims, this might explain why they attributed the slogan to the Disabled Rights movement. Such an explanation would not, of course, excuse the fact that FCTC failed to cite the literature in question—and more importantly, the fact that such a “slogan” does not, as a matter of fact, actually appear in any of the literature on disability, the claims of the authors of FCTC notwithstanding.

Admundson and Tresky's analysis of the most substantial of the arguments given in support of the notion that the duty to remove barriers for people with impairments is weaker than the duty to remove barriers for other disadvantaged groups is also subject to one relatively minor criticism. Amundson and Tresky write that “improvements in access increase everyone's choices, not only those who absolutely need them” (Amundson & Tresky, 2007, p. 555). It seems true that, in the many of cases, the environment can be altered in such a way that both the interests of persons with disabilities and those of persons without disabilities are fully accommodated. ¹

There is also evidence to think that in many instances, such accommodation results in a greater or at least equal amount of productivity (Silvers, 1998, pp. 107–112). Moreover, it can also be argued that if such alterations are not made, many talented and deserving people would not be able to enter the workforce and that society as a whole would suffer as a result (see Silvers, 1998, pp. 112–117).

However, it does seem that there may be some rare instances in which required accommodations would benefit the disabled minority at such a large cost to the non-disabled majority as to render that accommodation simply unfeasible. As Wasserman (1998) argues, the extent to which we can eliminate the inequalities attendant upon disabilities is largely a function of the degree of technological advancement to which we have attained. Thus,

[t]he “physical capacity of the disabled” depends on available technology, which in turn depends on the resources invested in research and implementation. For example, opening doors is “beyond the physical capacity” of many disabled people, but that limitation can be overcome by electric door openers. Securing the right of people with disabilities to “live in the world” involves an indefinite commitment of resources. (Wasserman, 1998, p, 180, interacting with and quoting from tenBroek, 1966).

Even so, Wasserman argues, there will always be limits to what can be accomplished by way of structural improvements: “it is not easy to see how any structural improvements could fully eliminate all . . . inequalities [attendant upon disabilities], and the marginal cost of further improvements is likely to increase as inequality is reduced” (Wasserman, 1998, p. 180). Thus, it may be that certain “trade-offs” (to use Wasserman's term) will inevitably have to be made in seeking to find a balance between the respective needs and interests of the disabled minority, on the one hand, and the non-disabled majority, on the other. ² Therefore, while Amundson and Tresky are correct in holding that the authors of From Chance to Choice are wrong to claim that it is often the case that the interests of the non-disabled are compromised when society opts to promote the interests of persons with disabilities, nevertheless it may not always be the case that “improvements in access increase everyone's choices, not only those who absolutely need them.”

III. CAN IT BE A GOOD THING TO BE DEAF?

In “Can It Be a Good Thing to Be Deaf?” Rachel Cooper considers the arguments advanced by Deaf activists ³ who claim that it can be a good thing to be born deaf and the arguments given by those who hold that it is disadvantageous to be born deaf. In response to these conflicting claims, she adduces common intuitions concerning what many regard as good and bad states of affairs in order to argue to the conclusion that being deaf may be a good thing for some people but not for others. ⁴

Cooper first considers the “absent qualia” argument, which supports the claim that deafness is a disadvantage. According to this argument, deaf people necessarily miss out on certain qualia that others find intensely pleasurable. However, as Cooper notes,

1. having a greater number of senses is not necessarily a good thing and

2. there are no senses that are necessarily good, as we can imagine possible worlds in which having additional senses would be a bad thing—where, for example, senses like smelling and hearing would be bad for the person possessing them.

She also notes that deaf people are capable of experiencing keenly certain qualia that hearing people are incapable of experiencing—for example, vibrations and visual stimuli (Cooper, 2007, p. 571).

She then evaluates the argument that being born deaf is bad because deaf persons are often unable to learn the languages utilized by hearing people. Deaf activists have argued that Deaf people have their own form of language and such languages are just as good as those used by other cultures, so it is irrelevant if deaf persons are unable to learn these other languages.

Cooper notes, however, that to claim that sign languages are as good as languages used by persons who can hear is to claim that these languages are equally good for expressing ideas. However, if one holds the view that language shapes or determines our thoughts then it is not true that all languages are equal, as some languages lack the resources needed to express certain thoughts. It is also not implausible to think that richer languages may also enhance one's ability to think. Therefore, it is an empirical matter to determine which languages are better than others and there are no a priori reasons for thinking that sign languages are equal to or better than other languages.

Cooper notes, additionally, that even if sign languages are as good as other languages in expressing ideas, deaf persons are often restricted to a smaller linguistic community because they are limited in their ability to communicate with the hearing population. She sees this as being disadvantageous because, on her view, it is generally a good thing to have worthwhile opportunities available to one, even if one does not wish, at present, to take advantage of those opportunities.

Cooper also considers the reality that such problems of communication often arise because of the kind of environment in which a deaf person finds herself. In doing so she effectively undercuts the claims of adherents of both the medical and social model of disability. ⁵ The medical model asserts that disabilities stem from, or originate in, the individual. According to the social model of disability, which is popular among disability rights activists, disabilities are primarily caused by society.

By contrast, Cooper argues that we should not think of the problems associated with being deaf as stemming exclusively from society or from the individual; rather, they should be seen as relational problems, in that they stem both from the fact that deaf people cannot hear and the fact that society is arranged in a certain way. Therefore, she says, it follows that such problems can be solved by altering either the individual or society.

However, political considerations often play an important role in determining whether the cause of particular problems will be attributed to the individual or society. Following on this observation, Cooper argues that it is a political claim to assert that society causes disabilities—and not a simple matter of fact, as many disability activists claim it to be. In addition, she argues that sometimes there are good reasons for altering the individual rather than society.

Cooper's article makes a number of substantial contributions to the discussion of issues related to disability, and her discussion of the origin of the problems associated with disabilities and the means of solving these problems is particularly insightful Nevertheless, one might argue, there are number of important issues that Cooper's article does not address sufficiently. She claims that we can only judge whether a condition is good or bad by appealing to common intuitions about what is good for people or bad for people.

While this approach will seem correct to many, others might think that we also ought (or instead) to appeal to some ideal standard of flourishing to determine whether deafness is a good or bad thing. It would seem that Cooper is perhaps too quick to dismiss this view. On this subject, she says only that “ideal standards of human flourishing seem disturbingly abstract. It is not clear how the ideal standards are fixed, nor is it clear how we can find out about them” (Cooper, 2007, p. 567).

Many virtue theorists, however, claim that such standards are not abstract. They argue that just as we can identify exemplary members of a particular animal or plant species, or can imagine what exemplary members of a particular animal or plant species would be like (we can imagine that a perfect rose would be one of brilliant color, with full plush petals, etc.), so we can also imagine what exemplary members of the human race would be like or identify who they are. ⁶ Virtue theorists are also quick to point out that empirical studies can give us some idea of that in which human flourishing consists—for example, they note that scientific studies have shown that persons who have a rich social network tend to be happier on balance than those who do not have as rich a social network ⁷ . At first glance, such claims seem quite plausible and Cooper therefore needs to address them more fully.

Cooper's claim that “in general it is a good thing to have worthwhile opportunities, even if one does not presently want to take advantage of them” (Cooper, 2007, p. 576) also deserves further scrutiny. Cooper claims that this principle implies that one slight disadvantage of being deaf is that a person may be deprived of information that would make her life better because her ability to communicate with the hearing population would be limited.

However, if this principle is true, then it follows that being deaf also results in a number of other more significant disadvantages. It is often claimed that there are a number of intrinsically valuable experiences, which experiences one can have if and only if one has the ability to hear. For example, many hold that listening to certain forms of music is intrinsically valuable. If one adheres to what can be termed the “having more worthwhile opportunities is better” principle, then one significant disadvantage of being deaf is being deprived of the ability to have those intrinsically valuable experiences. If Cooper wants to escape this problem she must either reject the “having more worthwhile opportunities is better” principle, or else she must reject the notion that such intrinsically valuable experiences exist. In either case, more work must be done to address these issues.

IV. THE POTENTIAL OF THE HUMAN EMBRYO

Turning now to the ethical issues surrounding such terms as “person” and “human being,” Mark T. Brown concerns himself, in “The Potential of the Human Embryo,” with questions having to do with the moral status of the human embryo and the applicability of the aforementioned terms to this entity. Brown notes that if embryos have the same moral status as adults and children, then it is impermissible to conduct experiments that will result in their being seriously harmed or killed.

However, this claim can be advanced only if embryos have the same intrinsic properties that are the basis for the moral status given to adults and children. On Brown's account, a close examination of the literature reveals that full moral status has traditionally been ascribed to those things that either

1. have the property of being a person or

2. have the property of being a human being.

As Brown notes, only the second view (by itself) entails that human embryos have full moral status.

Brown calls the first view the Person Theory. According to this view, only persons have full moral status. Persons are defined as those human beings who are capable of having certain mental states, such as the capacity to make autonomous choices or the capacity to reflect upon events and invest them with a form of value. Therefore, embryos lack full moral status. The Person Theory suffers from a serious problem, however: it fails to extend full moral status to infants and young children.

The second view, which Brown calls the Human Being Theory, avoids this problem. According to this theory, any individual that can be classified as a human being has full moral status. Therefore, according to this view, embryos have full moral status. The problem with this theory, on Brown's view, is that it “elevates morally irrelevant genetic and ancestral properties to the highest moral significance” (Brown, 2007, p. 596).

Both of these theories may appeal to the fact that human embryos have the potential to become persons to escape these objections. To show how such a strategy might work, Brown first distinguishes potentiality from capability. To say that A is capable of B-ing means that no change in A's intrinsic properties is required for A to do or become B. To say that A has the potential to become B is to say that with a change in intrinsic properties, A would be capable of B-ing. Brown then distinguishes between grades of remote potentiality. He defines First Order Potential as the capacity to acquire a capacity; Second Order Potential as the capacity to acquire First Order Potential; and Third Order Potential as the capacity to acquire Second Order Potential.

Brown claims that persons have the First Order Potential for self-consciousness because they can cultivate new dispositional mental states based on the underlying neural states that are the causal correlates of consciousness. He then asserts that infants also have this potential for self-consciousness because they have the same kind of neurological properties that enable adults to acquire new dispositional mental states.

Embryos, on the other hand, have only the Second Order Potential to acquire First Order Personhood, because their essential properties are one step removed from the neural properties which make consciousness possible. Finally, sperm and ova have the Third Order Potential to acquire Second Order Potential Personhood because their essential properties are two steps removed from the neural properties which make consciousness possible.

Brown argues that both the Human Being theorist and the Person theorist may appeal to the Transitivity of Potentiality principle to escape the problems that he noted earlier. Following Lockwood's formulation, this principle can be stated as follows:

If X has an active potentiality for giving rise to Y and Y has an active potentiality for giving rise to Z, then it must follow that X itself has an active potential for giving rise to Z. (Lockwood, 1988, p. 197, cited in Brown, 2007, p. 599).

However, the following three conditions must be met in order for potential to be transitive:

1. Transitive potential is active potential at each stage. (“Potential is active if the intrinsic properties of an individual are the primary causal factor in the realization of its potential” (Brown, 2007, p. 599)

2. The individual does not lose any of its essential properties in the course of realizing its potential.

3. These active, identity-preserving properties must be sufficiently intrinsically valuable to function as threshold conditions for the range property of moral status.

The Person theorist may use this principle to argue that the relation between First Order Potential personhood and the capacity to acquire dispositional mental states is transitive, so therefore full moral status can be extended to infants. The Human Being Theorist may argue that the transition of the Second Order Potential of the embryo to the First Order Potential of human infants is transitive to argue that human embryos are entitled to full moral status.

Brown holds, however, that only the Person Theorist can make a successful argument for her position. He claims that because infants “have the neurological capacity to acquire language, construct memories, and reflect upon their own experiences,” they have the First Order Potential for self awareness that entitles normal adults to full moral status (Brown, 2007, p. 601). Potential is active because “the properties that are the primary causal determinate of First Order Potential Personhood are properties of the infant brain which cause self-consciousness in later life” (Brown, 2007, p. 602). In addition, no essential properties are lost when these dispositional mental states are acquired and these properties are regarded as intrinsically valuable since they are what make an entity a person.

According to Brown, the same cannot be said of the Human Theorist. For the Human Theorist, the activation of the human genotype is identified with the active potential of the human embryo. Brown acknowledges that the human genotype does meet the active potentiality condition since it is the primary causal factor that determines whether an embryo will become a human being that is capable of conscious states. However, Brown claims that it can be argued that the human genotype fails to meet the moral relevance and the identity-preserving conditions. Brown's argument for why the first of these conditions cannot be met can be reconstructed as follows:

1. Many argue that embryos have the same moral status as infants and adults because embryos have the same morally relevant properties as adults and infants, the only difference being that those properties are at an earlier stage of development.

2. This entails that embryos have the same psychological dispositions as adults, which suggests a kind of genetic determinism.

3. The enormous role of external factors in shaping our dispositions shows that (2) is false.

4. Therefore, (1) is false. (Brown, 2007, pp. 604–605)

Brown also claims that the human embryo fails to meet the identity-preserving conditions. For the Human Theorist to claim that the embryo has the same moral status as an adult it must follow that, like an adult, it (the embryo) is an individual. Brown advances three arguments to the conclusion that, at the blastomere and blastocyst stages, the embryo lacks the property of being an individual because it is an indeterminate number of things.

Brown's article provides a helpful taxonomy and discussion of many of the salient issues surrounding the question of the moral status of human embryos. Nevertheless, as with the other articles discussed here, there are a number of important questions that are worth considering when assessing the overall strength of Brown's arguments.

For one thing, it is not clear what Brown defines as a person. Early on he notes that for Kant, a person is an individual who has the capacity for autonomous choice, whereas for utilitarians a person is someone who is capable of self-conscious mental states or mental states that have other mental states as their intentional objects. However, Brown appears to define persons as having the capacity to acquire dispositional mental states. He seems to define dispositional mental states as the capacity to speak new languages, acquire new skills, and break old habits. He also holds that to have the capacity to acquire such dispositional mental states is to have the capacity to acquire consciousness.

Several questions spring immediately to mind: Why should we adopt this definition of what it is to be a person rather than the definitions offered by the utilitarian and the Kantian—or some other definition altogether? For example, as was noted in the introduction, some philosophers (e.g., Engelhardt and Rawls [1971, p. 505]) hold that to be a person (or, more specifically, a “moral person”) is to be capable of being persuaded by moral reasons. Others, such as Singer and Tooley (1999, p. 24), hold that to be a person is simply to be a being who has a concept of herself as a distinct entity persisting through time. Why not use these definitions? Brown offers no argument for why he adopts the particular definition of personhood that he does.

In addition, one might question why Brown asserts that to be a person is to have the capacity to acquire self consciousness rather than claiming that a person is someone who is self-conscious. Indeed, many philosophers have taken the latter position. While Brown does not offer much insight into why he defines the term “person” in the way he does, it becomes apparent that if one holds that a person is someone who is self-conscious then infants and young children will not be persons according to many theories of personhood. For example, both Peter Singer and Michael Tooley concede that because they define a person as an individual who has a concept of herself as a distinct entity persisting through time, it follows that infants and young children are not persons because they lack such a concept at this stage in their development.

V. CONCLUSION

Given the foregoing discussion, it should be apparent that the ways in which we define “humanity,” “personhood,” “disability,” and similar terms, has serious normative implications. In the case of disability, we saw that claiming that the origin of disabilities stems from the social context implies that efforts should be made to alter the social environment rather than individuals with disabilities.

However, as our discussion showed, altering the social environment to remove disabilities may prove extremely burdensome in a narrow range of cases. Questions then arise as to whether our moral obligations to persons with disabilities are outweighed by other moral considerations or whether these obligations even exist in such circumstances. Questions were also raised regarding the nature of those impairments that we often label disabilities. One might wonder whether such impairments are intrinsically bad or only bad depending on the context. One might also ponder whether a model of disability that claims that altering either the individual or society can have the effect of eliminating or ameliorating disabilities is, ultimately, a more accurate description of disabilities and one that promises to bring about a greater number of positive consequences.

In the case of “humanity” and “personhood” we saw that debate as to whether embryos are persons or merely humans turns on the acceptance or rejection of a number of metaphysical assumptions that are open to debate. In particular, we observed that there are many different definitions of what it is to be a person or human being, and how these terms are defined carry with them important normative implications for the practice of research on embryos.

The upshot of all this is that it suggests that arguing over how we define these and other similar terms is not merely a squabble about semantics; it is, rather, a debate that has profound implications for whether and how we proceed in our quest to reshape the human experience.

Notes

1. In his essay for Silvers, Wasserman, & Mahowald (1998), David Wasserman (1998) provides a number of illustrations, some more fanciful than others, of this point. Here is one (slightly) more fanciful example:

• We might come close to structural equality in an entirely human-made environment, such as a space station, in which button pushing was the only basic action required for most activities. In such a world, most people with motor and sensory impairments could do almost everything that able-bodied people could, except see, hear, and walk. We might have reservations about creating such a world, however, since its technology would bring about a radical cleavage between practical action and the exercise of our sense organs and musculoskeletal system. (Wasserman, 1998, p. 180, n. 72)

2. Wasserman offers numerous illustrations of such “trade-offs” throughout his essay.

3. The term “Deaf people” is not the same as the term “deaf people.” The former refers to those who explicitly identify themselves as a member of the deaf community; the latter refer to people who are physically deaf but may or may not consider themselves to be part of that community. See Silvers, 1998, p. 32 for more on this usage of the upper-case ‘D’ to refer to those who explicitly identify with the deaf community.

4. It is important to emphasize here that Cooper is primarily concerned with persons who are born deaf; she holds the view that, all things being equal, it is a bad thing to become deaf.

5. For a helpful overview of different models of disability, see Shakespeare, Bickenbach, Pfeiffer, & Watson (2006).

6. For an introduction to and overview of virtue theory, see Hursthouse, 2003.

7. For more on this, see Foot, 2001.