Abstract
There is a view that what we owe to other people is explained by the fact that they are human beings who share in a common human life. There are many ways of construing this explanatory idea, and I explore a few of these here; the aim is to look for constructions that contribute to an understanding of what we owe to people with profound and multiple learning difficulties and disabilities (PMLD). In exploring the idea of sharing in a common life I construe ‘sharing’ as ‘participating in’, and ‘common life’ as the social life characteristic of the environment that someone lives in. My principal purpose is to render the idea of sharing in a common life in terms that help explain its eligibility as a ground for establishing the moral status of people with PMLD. The participatory options I examine each make some call on agency, if only as something hoped for in the future, including when hope flies in the face of expectation. Accordingly I look at conceptions of actual and potential participation in social life, and at the idea of treating people as if they have the potential to participate, even when the existence of any such potential is unlikely. I conclude with some thoughts on the relation between participation and the moral status of profoundly disabled people, and about how much, and how little, the argument has achieved.
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Notes
P scales were created in response to a need to assess children who did not attain at least level 1 on the National Curriculum; see Njaji and Tymms (2009).
McMahan has his own reasons for choosing to define ‘radical cognitive impairment’ in the terms he prefers. But other definitions also have their uses: the category of PMLD, referred to here, allows for large differences between the highest and lowest functioning human beings included in this cohort, as indicated by the varying demands at the higher and lower end of the P scales.
There is not space here to explore the distinctions between ‘participation’, ‘sharing’ and ‘reciprocal exchange’ (for more on this see Vorhaus 2007). How any one of these is conceived will have a bearing on how we conceive the others: so, for example, conceptions of reciprocity will inform conceptions of sharing and participation, and conceptions of reciprocity and participation will help determine whether and how other persons are viewed as potential contributors.
For the significance of the causal presuppositions of action for agency, see Graham (2002). Feminist writers have long asserted the importance of dependency as a fact of human life, drawing attention to the element of (ideological) fiction in any account of persons as either altogether dependent or independent (Mackenzie and Stoljar 2000; Kittay 1999; Silvers et al. 1999).
DiSilvestro (2010) offers an ingenious alternative view, according to which if we ‘can conceivably heal [some] individual this shows that they still have certain capacities, and it’s the fact that they have these capacities that gives them moral status’ (DiSilvestro 2010: p. 198. My italics). He suggests, for example, that the possibilities associated with ‘futuristic hypothetical technology’ permit us to consider an anencephalic infant as ‘a human organism with the higher-order capacity to think’ (ibid: p. 196).
The first kind of case is no less important, but questions of trusteeship and surrogacy raise issues beyond the scope of this paper.
It might be said that what matters, principally, is that the first of these demands should be met—that we should specify ‘participation’ in a sense that includes at least most people with PMLD—rather than that it should also exclude non-human animals. This thought warrants more discussion than I can provide here; but it is worth observing that many writers, including those closely related to people with PMLD, object to any suggestion that there is little or nothing to distinguish morally between this group of people and non-human animals. For a strong statement to this effect see Kittay (2010).
If policy is a clumsy tool for distinguishing between persons, it might be thought obvious that we should err on the side of caution, in the sense of inclining towards generous inclusivity, for what could be the harm in doing that? However, even if it is obvious that some caution is warranted, it is not obvious how generously inclusive we should be. Generosity, or over-generosity, might have the effect of granting a status to people who are not only not able to take advantage of it, but may also suffer disadvantage as a result, as when a person is unable to meet the expectations we have of her, or she is not able to exercise the freedoms she has been granted. This may lead to harm, or disappointment—whether her own, or on the part of those closely related to her. Generosity towards humans might also lead to a policy that includes many non-human animals, and whilst there is something to be said in favour of that, it may also have the effect of treating some humans and some non-human animals as having a morally equivalent status, and that is itself controversial (see note 8).
These views are common amongst teachers in special schools for children with profound learning difficulties (Vorhaus 2016).
For evidence on the positive and negative effects of practices that are encouraged amongst people with PMLD see Lacey and Ouvry (2012).
This discussion brings out the importance of two distinctions that I cannot do justice to here: first, the distinction between the question whether a person has the capacity to participate in the relevant sense, and whether and how a society succeeds in recognising that capacity. Second, the relation between recognising the capacity to participate and any propensity for the development of that capacity; recognition may have an encouraging effect just as withheld recognition may have a discouraging or inhibiting effect. The potential to participate, therefore, is not independent of how the participator is perceived and treated by others.
Mulhall’s appeal invites a question that also applies to the argument of this paper; namely to what extent the appeal to participation as a ground for what we owe people with PMLD is consequentialist or deontological. To pursue this question it would be necessary both to determine the nature of any consequentialist appeal, and to determine whether the urgency of any appeal to the effects of our practices and dispositions itself implies or pre-supposes some non-consequentialist appeal to a moral duty or principle. If it should turn out that the case for participation invokes both consequentialist and non-consequentialist considerations there is then a further question about the relation between the two, and whether this can be rendered in terms that resolve any apparent conflict between these approaches to ethics.
I would like to express grateful thanks to the two peer reviewers for their many helpful comments and suggested revisions.
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Vorhaus, J. Sharing in a Common Life: People with Profound and Multiple Learning Difficulties. Res Publica 23, 61–79 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-015-9306-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-015-9306-x