Abstract
Perhaps then, a way forward within the inclusion space involves a shift from traditional ethical concerns over determining right and wrong conduct (however loosely we might mean that here) to a greater focus on the language of ‘rights’. It certainly seems that ‘rights’ has a significant role to play, both for structuring the lives and opportunities of people with disabilities, and for organising their relationship with educational institutions – at least in theory. If rights are ‘justified claims upon others’, what kind of claims can citizens reasonably make upon their social institutions, their communities, and their governments?
Part of the problem is that rights come in all shapes and forms. Not only can they mean different things to different people (are they protected choices? interests? trumps?), they often operate in contradictory ways … and then whose rights count? There are also ‘legal rights’ and ‘moral rights’, with a complex relationship to each other. And then when it comes to the contested notion of ‘natural rights’, can we convincingly allocate them to individuals, and from there, forge some basic human rights? And even if we can’t, can we somehow arrive at a set of basic human protections and benefits anyway?
There are a lot of questions here aren’t there. Not all of them have very good answers. As a result, discourses centring upon rights have a number of their own problems and ambiguities – particularly within the field of inclusive education. These problems often centre upon the issues of conflicting rights, the complex contexts in which rights are asked to operate, and the philosophical underpinning of the concept of rights itself. While rights provide an indispensable foundation for an ethics of inclusive education, it will be argued that these difficulties point instead in the direction of the associated concept of ‘justice’.
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Slee, R., Tait, G. (2022). Disability and the Limitations of ‘Rights’. In: Ethics and Inclusive Education. Inclusive Learning and Educational Equity, vol 6. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97435-0_4
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