Towards disability ethics: a social science perspective

In the social sciences, debates about the discursive and material constitution of subjectivity and identity no longer appear to be at loggerheads. This has important implications for how we are to construct a framework for thinking about disability ethics. Following recent inroads in disability theory and in the sociology of ethics, we would argue that one of the aims of a disability ethics is not to view disability exclusively as a question of impairment, but to reclaim the social aspects of impairment in conjunction with the embodied aspects of disability. We would also suggest that the social and cultural construction of impairment, or abnormal corporeality, cannot be considered apart from the moral and existential relations that exist between disabled and non-disabled persons. The question we want to raise in this discussion is whether thinking disability ethics through a bioethics framework is adequate to this task.