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Disability bioethics and the commitment to equality
Robert Veatch’s The Foundations of Justice: Why the Retarded and the Rest of Us Have Claims to Equality (1986) delves into deep questions of justice through the case of a child with disabilities. I describe what is basically right about this vision, as well as what is problematic from the standpoint...
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
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Springer Netherlands
2022
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Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9391207/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35986153 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11017-022-09575-2 |
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author | Guidry-Grimes, Laura |
author_facet | Guidry-Grimes, Laura |
author_sort | Guidry-Grimes, Laura |
collection | PubMed |
description | Robert Veatch’s The Foundations of Justice: Why the Retarded and the Rest of Us Have Claims to Equality (1986) delves into deep questions of justice through the case of a child with disabilities. I describe what is basically right about this vision, as well as what is problematic from the standpoint of contemporary disability bioethics. From there, I dive into the notion of vulnerability that is at play in his work. He describes disability as necessarily a condition of weakness, lesser-than existence, and neediness. When disability is viewed in this way as an inherently vulnerable state of being, the essential sociopolitical dimensions of disability receive inadequate attention, which, in turn, makes it impossible to identify injustices correctly. I connect these points to concrete challenges faced by disability communities during the COVID-19 pandemic, which have raised profound questions about the just use of scarce critical care resources. Any case drawn from the pandemic is a very different kind of case than that of the child in Veatch’s book, but a commonality is the question of who should get what limited resources when needs and urgency vary. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-9391207 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2022 |
publisher | Springer Netherlands |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-93912072022-08-22 Disability bioethics and the commitment to equality Guidry-Grimes, Laura Theor Med Bioeth Article Robert Veatch’s The Foundations of Justice: Why the Retarded and the Rest of Us Have Claims to Equality (1986) delves into deep questions of justice through the case of a child with disabilities. I describe what is basically right about this vision, as well as what is problematic from the standpoint of contemporary disability bioethics. From there, I dive into the notion of vulnerability that is at play in his work. He describes disability as necessarily a condition of weakness, lesser-than existence, and neediness. When disability is viewed in this way as an inherently vulnerable state of being, the essential sociopolitical dimensions of disability receive inadequate attention, which, in turn, makes it impossible to identify injustices correctly. I connect these points to concrete challenges faced by disability communities during the COVID-19 pandemic, which have raised profound questions about the just use of scarce critical care resources. Any case drawn from the pandemic is a very different kind of case than that of the child in Veatch’s book, but a commonality is the question of who should get what limited resources when needs and urgency vary. Springer Netherlands 2022-08-20 2022 /pmc/articles/PMC9391207/ /pubmed/35986153 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11017-022-09575-2 Text en © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2022 This article is made available via the PMC Open Access Subset for unrestricted research re-use and secondary analysis in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for the duration of the World Health Organization (WHO) declaration of COVID-19 as a global pandemic. |
spellingShingle | Article Guidry-Grimes, Laura Disability bioethics and the commitment to equality |
title | Disability bioethics and the commitment to equality |
title_full | Disability bioethics and the commitment to equality |
title_fullStr | Disability bioethics and the commitment to equality |
title_full_unstemmed | Disability bioethics and the commitment to equality |
title_short | Disability bioethics and the commitment to equality |
title_sort | disability bioethics and the commitment to equality |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9391207/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35986153 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11017-022-09575-2 |
work_keys_str_mv | AT guidrygrimeslaura disabilitybioethicsandthecommitmenttoequality |