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Disability Among Equals, Jonathan WolffDepartment of PhilosophyUniversity College London j.wolff@ucl.ac.uk July 2004My task in this paper is to ask what we need to do if we are to construct a society in whichpeople are to be treated as equals, whatever their disability status.
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I intend to provide aconceptual framework for posing and approaching this question, and to help clarify somepolicy objectives. My primary reason for taking on this task is that analytical politicalphilosophy seems to have lagged behind social policy on these issues,
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and the treatmentof disability by political philosophers has sometimes seemed insufficiently thoughtthrough. I do not deny that there is a great deal of sensitive and important recent work,
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 yet we seem to lack a systematic, plausible approach to the topic. John Rawls, notoriously,excluded the disabled from the discussion in
 A Theory of Justice
,
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explaining later:I also suppose that everyone has physical needs and psychological capacitieswithin the normal range, so that problems of special health care and how to treatthe mentally defective do not arise. Besides prematurely introducing difficultquestions that may take us beyond the theory of justice, the consideration of thesehard cases can distract our moral perception by leading us to think of people distantfrom us whose fate arouses pity and anxiety. Whereas the first problem of justice
 
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concerns the relations among those in the normal course of things are full andactive participants in society and directly or indirectly associated together over thecourse of a whole life.
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 While Rawls did, nevertheless, leave us with some fruitful clues about how to approachdisability and problems of health care, he did not attempt the detailed work.
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RonaldDworkin, by contrast, has derived an approach for incorporating the disabled into anegalitarian theory of justice,
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but for reasons I discuss below, I do not find it plausible.
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Amore promising path has been developed by Amartya Sen,
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but the issue of disability hasnot been his main concern. This paper, which develops what can be called the ‘securefunctionings’ view, can be viewed as an attempt to travel further down Sen’s path, albeitwith significant deviations.Two questions, it seems, should frame the discussion. First, what is it to have a disability?Second, what should be done to address disability? In the course of this paper it willbecome clear that these are not independent questions. How one conceptualises disabilityand how develops a general approach to address it are different sides of the same coin.What connects them is a view (often implicit) of the human good; of what a valuablehuman life is or would be, and/or of what an attractive human society would be. Theconsequences for social policy turn out to be complex too. A society’s policy on disabilitymust intersect with other calls on its scarce resources (for example education or transportpolicy for those without disability). I raise but do not attempt to settle these issues here forthe main focus of this paper is the manner in which disability should engage egalitarian
 
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concern, and the forms in which it might be addressed. However in eventuallyformulating social policy we cannot avoid the question of the priority of disability amongmany other urgent social claims. Hence I suggest the beginnings, but not the end, of asystematic answer to the question of how a society of equals should address disability.1. Equality, Disability, and CompensationOne powerful tradition within contemporary political theory has been what has beentermed ‘luck egalitarianism’.
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This sees the goal of egalitarian justice as that ofneutralising the effects of good and bad luck on individual fortunes. The method by whichit is proposed to achieve such neutralisation is normally termed ‘compensation’. Withinthis view disability is often regarded as a paradigm of bad luck (either in itself or in itseffects), for which, it would immediately follow, compensation is due.Now it is not always clear what is meant by ‘compensation’.
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Sometimes it appears to belittle more than a placeholder for the idea that ‘something must be done’. But sometimescompensation is viewed in cash terms, or at least in terms of material goods, the provisionof which is regarded as ‘making up for’ something else which is lost or lacking. There aretwo quite separate possible rationales for offering cash compensation, corresponding tothe two major currents in contemporary egalitarianism. According to the first - theapproach based on the idea of welfare - those who are disabled are thought to suffer fromlower levels of welfare (typically preference satisfaction) than others, and so need
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