Disability Futures

One of the hallmarks of societal attitudes toward disabilities has been a tendency of people without disabilities, including media savvy philosophers, to overestimate the negative aspects and underestimate the positive features of the lives of those who have disabilities. The attitude of "I don't see how you can live with that" -- sometimes expressed more dramatically as "I'd rather be dead than have [X disability]" -- is one that people still shockingly profess openly in encounters with people with disabilities.

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has described the "extremely extensive" negative connotations of disability: "To the fact that a [person with a disability] differs from the norm physically or mentally, people often add a value judgment that such a difference is a big and very negative one." [4] Even without evidence to support this supposition, philosophers like Singer are not immune from this bias. In fact, their views seem to emerge from it when divorced from the reality of the lives that disabled people actually live.

In contrast to Singer’s ivory tower speculations, the United States Supreme Court has acknowledged that "society's accumulated myths and fears about disability are as handicapping as are the physical limitations that flow from actual impairment." [5] Regulations and courts addressing job discrimination based on disability under the ADA and other laws have expressly identified the discrimination that results from misperceptions and unrealistically low expectations of what people with disabilities are able to do. [6]