In this essay, I argue that certain injustices faced by mentally disabled persons are epistemic injustices by drawing upon epistemic injustice literature, especially as it is developed by Miranda Fricker. First, I explain the terminology and arguments developed by Fricker, Gaile Pohlhaus, Jr., and Kristie Dotson that are useful in theorizing epistemic injustices against mentally disabled people. Second, I consider some specific cases of epistemic injustice to which mentally disabled persons are subject. Third, I turn to a discussion of severely mentally disabled persons who, because they are unable to share information or develop interpretations of shared social experiences, may fall outside Fricker’s discussion of epistemic injustice. Fourth and finally, following arguments given by Kristie Dotson and Christopher Hookway, I define and explain a type of epistemic injustice: intimate hermeneutical injustice that I believe supplements other discussions of epistemic injustice.

I argue that, if it is thought desirable to avoid the collapse of disability into generic social disadvantage, it is necessary to draw a distinction between impairment (a bodily configuration) and disability (the way in which the environment prevents someone with an impairment from undertaking certain kinds of activities), as in social models of disability. I show how to draw such a distinction by utilizing a distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic properties. I argue further that, using this distinction, it is possible to define ‘impairment’ in ways that do not appeal to notions of the normal, and to define ‘disability’ in terms of ‘impairment.’

Equal moral status for all human beings does not commit us to the malignant exclusionary practices we find in racism and pernicious nationalism. Racism (like the other harmful “ism”) involves a group that is constituted by appropriating to one’s own “primal group” a set “desirable” intrinsic properties (or traits) and expelling from the primal group those with the undesirable properties through subjugation, exploitation, sterilization, or extermination. The moral harm in racism is practiced by a ‘constituted’ group that must always police its borders with violence and justifications for its privilege. The Nazi’s Project T4, which exterminated mentally disabled children born of German parents, and the subsequent exterminations of racialized groups, in particular the Jews, were regarded as the one process of cleansing Germany and its conquered territories of defective and inferior beings. Rather than being instances of “preferring one’s own,” the racist project was that of constituting the group by appropriating for itself all the desirable traits and expelling all undesirable ones, thus linking ablism and racism.

This article argues against a leading cognitivist and moral interpretation of shame that is present in the philosophical literature. That standard view holds that shame is the felt-response to a loss of self-esteem, which is the result of negative self-assessment. I hold that shame is a heteronomous and primitive bodily affect that is perceptual rather than judgmental in nature. Shame results from the breakdown and thwarting of our desire for anonymous, unexceptional, and disattentive co-existence with others. I use the sociological theory of Erving Goffman and the theory of shame found in philosophical anthropology to support this view. I also use the cases of shame and chronic shame that often accompany disability to show that shame is separable from negative self-assessment and, instead, emerges as an affective response to a world (of equipment, things, and people) that disallows unburdened and unreflective interpersonal equilibrium.

This paper considers how a number of particular disabilities can impact agency primarily by affecting what psychologists refer to as ‘executive function.’ Some disabilities, I argue, could decrease agency even without fully undermining it. I see this argument as contributing to the growing literature that sees agency as coming in degrees. The first section gives a broad outline of a fairly standard approach to agency. The second section relates that framework to the existing literature, which suggests that agency comes in degrees. The third section considers the psychological literature on executive function with a particular focus on how aspects of executive function contribute to agency. I then consider, in sections 4 and 5, two disabilities that have an impact on an agent’s executive function. Other disabilities will likely involve comparable impacts, although I don’t have time to explore additional disabilities in the present paper.

When trying to find the place of humility amongst the virtues, there is a temptation to assimilate humility into a kind of noblesse oblige as if it were a way of being strong and capable with grace. If one attends to the experience of persons one might describe as humbled by their life experiences, then a very different perspective is afforded. In particular, if one examines the way in which certain disabled persons turn experiences of dependency or limitation in productive directions, one is clued into the way in which humility involves not only a realistic appraisal of one’s capabilities or an aversion to ostentatious display, but also a set of values that reflects the value of relationship and interpersonal presence.

A comprehensive theory of rational prudence would explain how a person should adjudicate among the conflicting interests of her past, present, future and counterfactual selves. For example, when a person is having an identity crisis, perhaps because she has suddenly become disabled, she may be left with no sense of purpose to keep her going. In her despondent state, she may think it prudent to give up on life now even if she would soon adopt a different set of values that would give her a renewed sense of meaning. Yet we may think that, in many cases, it would be irrational for such a person to allow herself to die. My aim is to explain this prudential intuition by developing a partial framework of rational prudence that interprets and applies the idea that a prudent person acts in ways that are justifiable to herself over time.

Elizabeth Barnes’s recently proposed value-neutral model for disability provoked a familiar storm of oft-made objections from philosophers who appear committed to equating being disabled with being intrinsically or inescapably disadvantaged. Their narrow framing of the options for disabled people is influenced, I suggest, by purposes to which “disability” (on my analysis, a term of art) now is put. But there are both epistemic and moral reasons to refrain from importing the normative narrowness imposed by these purposes into our philosophical investigation of disability. Barnes’s ontological account opens up our framing options. Developing a full institutional theory of disability that both rests on and extrapolates from a social ontology of disablement is a promising direction for exploration at the intersect of metaphysics and public policy in the new field of Philosophy and Disability.

Given that many people with disabilities have been excluded from political deliberation and subjected to infantilizing and degrading treatment from others, many members of the disability rights movement are understandably critical of policies and practices that speak on behalf of people with disabilities and presume to know what is really in their best interest. Yet, this analysis argues that a general principle of anti-paternalism is not desirable for disability politics. In particular, people with cognitive disabilities are sometimes unable to make important decisions by themselves, and may require assistance from family members or more cognitively able and verbally fluent citizens to make their political voices and choices heard. Drawing from John Locke and Alasdair MacIntyre, this article reconsiders the relationship between paternalism and autonomy, suggesting that autonomous decisionmaking and expression are best thought of as collaborative processes undertaken between people with a range of capacities.

John Rawls’s use of the “fully cooperating assumption” has been criticized for hindering attempts to address the needs of disabled individuals, or non-cooperators. In response, philosophers sympathetic to Rawls’s project have extended his theory. I assess one such extension by Cynthia Stark, that proposes dropping Rawls’s assumption in the constitutional stage (of his four-stage sequence), and address the needs of non-cooperators via the social minimum. I defend Stark’s proposal against criticisms by Sophia Wong, Christie Hartley, and Elizabeth Edenberg and Marilyn Friedman. Nevertheless, I argue that Stark’s proposal is crucially incomplete. Her formulation of the social minimum lacks accompanying criteria with which the adequacy of the provisions for non-cooperators may be assessed. Despite initial appearances, Stark’s proposal does not fully address the needs of non-cooperators. I conclude by considering two payoffs of identifying this lack of criteria.

Does disability make a person worse off? I argue that the best answer is yes and no, because we can be worse off in two conceptually distinct ways. Disabilities usually make us worse off in one way (typified by facing hassles) but not in the other (typified by facing loneliness). Acknowledging two conceptually distinct ways to be worse off has fundamental implications for philosophical theories of well-being.

This article responds to two ethical conundrums associated with the practice of disability passing. One of these problems is the question of whether or not passing as abled is morally wrong in that it constitutes deception. The other, related difficulty arises from the tendency of the able-bodied in contemporary society to reinforce the activity of passing despite its frequent condemnation as a form of pretense or fraud. We draw upon recent scholarship on transgender and disability passing to criticize and explore some alternatives to the problematic theory of personal identity that is presupposed by the claim that passing as abled always amounts to deceit. We additionally demonstrate the moral indefensibility of society’s reinforcement of disability passing by showing that it may derive, at least in part, from ablest assumptions concerning distributive justice as it relates to disabled individuals.

Cognitively disabled persons routinely face legal and structural barriers to democratic participation. However, as this paper argues, theoretical accounts of democratic participation may also undermine disabled persons’ abilities to participate in and contribute to the political process. I seek to advance an account of participatory parity for cognitively disabled persons, arguing that participatory parity requires access to deliberative spaces, in addition to material and intersubjective conditions. Building the idea of support, or respect for the expressed preferences of the disabled person, into democratic theory, is a prerequisite for inclusive democratic spaces. In line with this emphasis on support, I suggest that the characterization of deliberative interventions as ‘reasonable speech acts’ hinders participatory parity for cognitively disabled persons. I therefore propose a series of enabling strategies intended to expand philosophical understandings of deliberation beyond reasonable speech acts.

Racism, sexism, and other forms of injustice are more than just bad attitudes; after all, such injustice involves unfair distributions of goods and resources. But attitudes play a role. How central is that role? Tommie Shelby, among others, argues that racism is an ideology and takes a cognitivist approach suggesting that ideologies consist in false beliefs that arise out of and serve pernicious social conditions. In this paper I argue that racism is better understood as a set of practices, attitudes, social meanings, and material conditions, that systematically reinforce one another. Attitudes play a role, but even the cognitive/affective component of ideologies should include culturally shared habits of mind and action. These habits of mind distort, obscure, and occlude important facts about subordinated groups and result in a failure to recognize their interests. How do we disrupt such practices to achieve greater justice? I argue that this is sometimes, but not always, best achieved by argument or challenging false beliefs, so social movements legitimately seek other means.

Agents are morally responsible for their actions only if they understand what they are doing. This much seems clear, but it is unclear exactly what agents must understand in order to be morally responsible; in other words, the epistemic condition for moral responsibility is difficult to discover. In this paper, I will investigate Aquinas’s discussion of knowledge, voluntariness, and moral responsibility in order to discover his views on this condition. Although he never provides a formal expression of such a condition, I will use his discussions of related issues to construct a three-part epistemic condition for moral responsibility. In the process I will raise and discuss several interpretative difficulties, arguing that while some can be resolved, others, despite recent claims to the contrary, resist resolution. Finally, I will draw out several consequences of his account, noteworthy for a variety of reasons.

Some experiences change who we are in ways we cannot understand until we have that very experience. In this paper I argue that so-called “transformative experiences” can not only bring about new understanding, but can actually be brought out by the gain of understanding itself. Coming to understand something new can change you. I argue that not only is understanding acquisition potentially a kind of transformative experience; given some of the recent philosophy of the phenomenology of understanding, it is a kind that is potentially rare in not being dependent on a particular subjective phenomenology. The goal of this paper threefold. First, I argue that coming to gain cognitive understanding of an academic subject matter can, under some circumstances, itself be a transformative experience. A second, subsidiary goal of this paper is to argue that such transformative understanding merits further study. Finally, I give a rough taxonomy of under what conditions we should expect understanding acquisition to be transformative.

Hope is crucial human agency, but its fragility grounds a substantive challenge to Christian belief. It is not clear how a perfectly loving God could permit despairinducing experiences of divine silence. Drawing upon a distinctively Christian psychology of hope, this paper seeks to address this challenge. I contend that divine silence can act as a corrective to misplaced natural hopes. But there are risks in God’s choice to allow a person to lose all natural hope. Thus, if God is perfectly loving, God ought to find a way to demonstrate goodness to those who are tempted by theological despair. I argue that the Church demonstrates God’s goodness through its merciful care and hope for the afflicted. The local community can act to sustain or recover a person’s capacity to remain open to the gift of hope even in the midst of divine silence.

Both Russell and Donnellan proposed direct, non-descriptive cognitive relations between thinkers and objects. They agreed that such relations couldn’t be initiated in evidence cases, but Donnellan, unlike Russell, thought direct cognitive relations could be transmitted from person to person. Kaplan suggests the issues of initiation and transmission are separable—allowing one to deny that evidence yields direct cognition while believing direct cognition is transmittable. Here, cases involving transmission, evidence, ordinary perception, and perception aided by technology are considered. It is concluded that the same mechanism is at work in each case, and that the initiation issue cannot be separated from the transmission issue since transmission cases are evidence cases. Finally, it is argued that this doesn’t threaten the directness of the cognitive relations involved.

Agent-regret seems to give rise to a philosophical puzzle. If we grant that we are not morally responsible for consequences outside our control (the ‘Standard View’), then agent-regret—which involves self-reproach and a desire to make amends for consequences outside one’s control—appears rationally indefensible. But despite its apparent indefensibility, agent-regret still seems like a reasonable response to bad moral luck. I argue here that the puzzle can be resolved if we appreciate the role that agent-regret plays in a larger social practice that helps us deal with bad moral luck. That agent-regret is a component in a social practice limits the questions that we can reasonably ask about it. While we can ask whether an experience of agent-regret is rational given the norms of this practice, we cannot ask the question that motivates the puzzle of agent-regret, viz. whether agent-regret is rationally defensible according to the Standard View.

The kalām cosmological argument proceeds from the claims that everything with a beginning has a cause of its existence, and that the universe has a beginning. It follows that the universe has a cause of its existence. Presumably, this cause is God. Some defenders of the argument contend that, since we don’t see things randomly coming into existence, we know from experience that everything with a beginning has a cause of its existence. Against this, some critics argue that we may not legitimately move from observations of material things within the universe to conclusions about the universe itself. I argue that these critics are mistaken. We can after all draw cosmic conclusions from everyday experiences in support of the kalām argument.