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Article Excerpt
Perhaps the most obvious way of linking the concepts of civic virtue and social diversity is to ask what civic virtues are appropriate to a polity characterized by social diversity. Civic virtue can seem most at home in small, homogenous republics, and, indeed, it is in thinking about the conditions for the possibility of such republics that the concept of civic virtue was first articulated. But extensive, pluralistic democracies like the United States may also require certain character excellences of their citizens if these polities are to survive and flourish. (1) What qualities of character do citizens of a multicultural, multiracial, and religiously pluralistic democracy need in order to support that democracy's flourishing? In this paper, I push the boundaries of this question to ask whether fostering a controversial form of social diversity--diversity in the mental and physical capacity of a nation's citizens--can itself be seen as civically virtuous, and if so, what qualities of character support this end.
In recent years, the question of what liberal states owe disabled persons has received increasing attention from both moral and political philosophers. In a polity committed to treating its members with equal concern and respect, what does equal treatment of the mentally and physically disabled mean? (2) Much of the scholarly engagement with this question has centered on the difficulties created by the explicit marginalization of disabled individuals in the political theory of John Rawls. Because the mentally disabled lack the two "fundamental moral powers"--a sense of justice and a conception of their own good--they are neither participants in nor subjects of deliberation in the original position. The physically disabled are also initially excluded, as the citizens Rawls envisions deliberating on issues of justice have "physical needs and psychological capacities within some normal range." (3) How a society is to provide for their treatment is left for later "real world" discussion and accommodation. Critics of Rawls's position divide between those who believe his theory can be successfully modified to incorporate the disabled in discussions of political justice and those who believe such a rescue mission to be ill-advised and argue instead for the need to develop an approach to the problem of justice beyond or outside of the social contract tradition. (4)
Rather than debate once again the legitimacy of the Rawlsian approach, with its inevitable division of the moral community into normal and abnormal, functional and impaired, I begin by taking a perspective more often found among parents of a disabled child. Parents ask different questions from those of moral philosophers: not "what do I owe this person as a matter of justice?" but "how can I secure for my child the goods and resources she needs to flourish?" What parents of a disabled child want (and here I speak from experience) is a community-wide commitment to the "robust inclusion" of the disabled in community life. This paper examines the virtues that might underlie and support such robust inclusion and asks whether these praiseworthy qualities might be called, in addition, civic virtues.
Robust inclusion of the disabled names a way of life in which individuals without the capacity for normal social functioning (intellectual, physical, or both) are welcomed and accommodated, cared for and socially integrated in a manner that seeks as much as possible to transcend the hierarchy of value that privileges people with normal capacities over those with a range of disabilities. As Mary Robinson writes,
True equality for the disabled means more than access to buildings and methods of transportation [or sheltered workshops and group homes for the mentally retarded]. It mandates a change in attitude in the larger social fabric ... to ensure that they are no longer viewed as problems, but as holders of rights that deserve to be met with the same urgency we afford to our own. (5)
Understood in this way, robust inclusion describes not only a way of structuring a society's institutions so as to maximize the integration of all disabled persons, but also the welcoming mind-set that would accompany such restructuring: an openness to sharing public and private space, political and personal life with the physically and mentally disabled on equal terms.
Perhaps more controversially, I also hold that truly robust inclusion requires us to maintain a welcoming attitude to potential, as well as already existing, disabled lives. While ultimately I do not insist on this position in this paper, I want to say a few words here in its defense. Technically, I suppose, it is possible to support the robust inclusion of all existing disabled persons into one's society while still seeking to minimize the number and kinds of disabilities present in the human population. While securing a commitment to this sort of inclusion would already be a substantial achievement, truly robust inclusion of the disabled must take one step further, remaining at the very least neutral about the conception, gestation, and birth of individuals with genetic differences, accepting and even embracing the parental decision to bear a child with Down syndrome, select for dwarfism, reject a cochlear implant for their deaf child, or refuse surgery for conjoined twins.
As shocking as this strongest version of robust inclusion might sound, it is important to remember that such a welcoming attitude does not imply, as is sometimes absurdly charged, a stoic accommodation or even celebration(!) of all the accidents, disease, attacks, and maltreatment that disable intact individuals every day around the world. Rather, a commitment to radically robust inclusion builds on the recognition that disabilities can be constitutive of individuals' identities as well as imposed on them. Not all disabling conditions can be corrected or ameliorated without doing violence to the person who is partly constituted by her departure from "normal social functioning." Most obviously, in the case of Down syndrome, no procedure exists to change the individual from someone whose genes contain an extra chromosome to someone with the "correct" count. The "cure" for this disorder (still called a "disease" by some medical professionals) is simply the abortion of the fetus diagnosed with the condition. Similar concerns arise in the nonconsensual (because undertaken on infants or minor children) surgical correction of ambiguously gendered individuals, hormonal treatment for dwarfism, and cochlear implants for the deaf. To change fundamental characteristics of a person without her consent is a deep violation of liberal principles. The paternalistic arguments used to justify transforming or simply not bringing to term disabled children sadly presume a level of suffering (or simply distastefulness) accompanying the disability that exists in part because persons with such disabilities are neither welcomed nor accommodated in social life--precisely the difficulty a commitment to robust inclusion would help eliminate. Truly robust inclusion remains open to the presence of the range of human mental and physical disabilities, accommodating persons with noncorrectible genetic disorders and seeking ways for all disabled persons to flourish as they are currently constituted unless and until they personally seek the procedures available to change their conditions. (6) If robust inclusion understood in this way were ever realized on a state-wide basis, "ability diversity" would be as much a reality as the racial, ethnic, and religious diversity that so preoccupies social scientists today.
In the following pages, I seek to explore what personal and civic virtues might support an ideal of robust inclusion (with or without the more radical element of welcoming future disabled lives to which I am ultimately committed). To the extent that a regime is committed to sustaining a particular form of social diversity (here, ability diversity) and securing the equal treatment and full integration of the diversity-giving group, it needs more than good laws and well-constructed social institutions to accomplish this goal: it needs willing and properly disposed citizens. While perhaps not the most rigorous use of the term, I believe we can call the qualities of character that help citizens cope with the sometimes challenging fact of social diversity in their polity civic virtues. What, then, might be the qualities of character required of a citizen to help make robust inclusion a reality--and in what way might these virtues be styled "civic" virtues?
But before embarking on this discussion, we must first confront the fact that ability diversity is a form of social diversity that we might as easily eliminate as promote. Our society must figure out how to get people of different races, religion, and ethnicities to live together. This sort of pluralism is an ineluctable feature of modern polities. But science holds out the possibility of reducing the disabled to such few numbers that coping with this diversity may no longer be a public issue. In other words, why bother with robust inclusion and the virtues that support it, if as a society what we really wish for is a world without disability?
Many advocates for the disabled respond to this line of questioning by pointing out that the disabled will always be with us, through accident, injury, and the substantial percentage of disorders that are either unexplained or not possible to diagnose prenatally. (Autism currently falls into this category, for example.) One does not need to "make the case" for this sort of social diversity, this argument goes. It exists and the question is how the state in its policies and citizens in their actions will respond to it.
While it is important to acknowledge the inevitable persistence of disability, to do so does little to challenge the implicit hierarchy of value that calls into question the value of disabled lives. The observation that "the disabled will always be with us," leaves open the response, "but wouldn't it be nice if they were...
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