Stephen M. Campbell: Disability and the Goods of Life

[Original Abstract from Lecture]

Most people assume that, setting aside rare exceptions, having a disability is a bad and unfortunate thing for those who are disabled. In other words, they assume that disabilities always have an adverse affect on well-being. This popular view undergirds a range of significant practices in contemporary life, including the allocation of funding for genetics research initiatives that serve the long-term goal of preventing or reducing disabilities, the practice of giving lower healthcare priority to individuals with disabilities based on their estimated quality of life, and the choice of couples to selectively abort fetuses or avoid the implantation of embryos that are found to have certain genetic traits. In this talk, I will set out to achieve two goals. First, I will argue that the popular view about the badness of disability is false. Second, I will offer a proposal about what can be plausibly said about the relationship between disability and well-being.