Cognitive disability, misfortune, and justice

Philosophy and Public Affairs

Volumn 25, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 3-35

  McMahan, Jeff ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0038583193     PISSN: 00483915     EISSN: 10884963     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1088-4963.1996.tb00074.x     Document Type: Article

References (36)

1. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 100-101.
2. Allen Buchanan, Dan Brock, Norman Daniels, and Daniel Wikler, In the Shadow of Eugenics: The Human Genome Project and the Limits of Ethical Theory (forthcoming), Chap. 5.
3. Similar claims constitute the core of most contemporary doctrines of equality. See, for example, Richard Arneson, "Equality and Equal Opportunity for Welfare," Philosophical Studies 56 (1989): 85;
4. and Larry Temkin, Inequality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 13.
5. See Buchanan et al., In the Shadow of Eugenics, Chap. 5;
6. and Allen Buchanan, "Equal Opportunity and Genetic Intervention," Social Philosophy and Policy 12 (1995): 105-35.
7. For the sake of brevity, I will often refer to congenitally severely cognitively impaired human beings simply as "the cognitively impaired." But the two omitted adverbs are crucial; unless otherwise specified, references will always be to human beings whose cognitive disabilities are both severe and congenital - by which I mean that their cause is physically present and operative at, or perhaps shortly after, conception. None of my claims applies to the mildly or moderately cognitively impaired.
8. See "Wrongful Life and Restricted Lives."
9. Derek Parfit, Equality of Priority? The 1991 Lindley Lecture (University of Kansas, 1995), p. 19.
10. As Parfit states the Priority View, it applies only to people. If "people" means "human beings," his use of the term may be only a convenience of phrasing rather than a principled restriction to the scope of the view. If, however, "people" means "persons," then Parfit is himself implicitly excluding both animals and the cognitively impaired from the scope of the principle.
11. There may be exceptions. It is said of J.M.E. McTaggart that, if he found his cat sleeping in his favorite armchair, he would forbear from ejecting it, being moved by pity for the cat's misfortune in being a cat rather than a person.
12. See her "Nature, Function, and Capability," Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, suppl. vol. 1 (1988): 145-84;
13. "Human Functioning and Social Justice," Political Theory 20 (1992): 202-46;
14. and "Aristotle on Human Nature and the Foundations of Ethics," in J.E.J. Altham and Ross Harrison, eds., World, Mind, and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 86-131.
15. "Aristotle on Human Nature," p. 91.
16. Compare "Human Functioning," p. 215.
17. "Human Functioning," pp. 215 and 220.
18. "Aristotle on Human Nature," p. 118.
19. On the biological conception of species, see Stephen R. L. Clark, "Apes and the Idea of Kindred," in Paolo Cavalieri and Peter Singer, eds., The Great Ape Project (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993), pp. 113-25.
20. "Human Functioning," p. 227.
21. "Aristotle on Human Nature," pp. 117-18.
22. Compare "Human Functioning," p. 228.
23. In Perfectionism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), Chap. 4, Thomas Hurka develops a theory called "Aristotelian perfectionism" that also excludes the cognitively impaired from the human species, although on this theory the essential properties of human beings are not evaluatively determined.
24. Strictly speaking, the comparison is not with the cognitive capacities an individual might have been congenitally endowed with, but with the highest cognitive capacities the individual might have been congenitally endowed with the potential for.
25. See Jeff McMahan, "The Metaphysics of Brain Death," Bioethics 9 (1995): 91-126.
26. Ethica Eudemia (1215b23), translated by J. Solomon, in W. D. Ross, ed., The Works of Aristotle, Vol. IX (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975).
27. On the distinction between the value of a life and the worth of an individual, see Jeff McMahan, "Killing and Equality," Utilitas 7 (1995): 10-11.
28. I owe this example to Michael Otsuka.
29. Aristotle notes that "much can be taken away and friendship remain, but when one party is removed to a great distance, as God is, the possibility of friendship ceases." (Ethica Nichomachea, 115903-5, trans. W. D. Ross)
30. In conversation, both Walter Feinberg and David Gauthier stressed this difference between the cognitively impaired and otherwise comparable animals.
31. Those principles of equality that hold that inequality is a bad state of affairs imply that the reduction of inequality is good even when it is better for no one. I will ignore these principles here and assume that the comparative argument is based on what Parfit calls a "Deontic" principle of equality. (Equality or Priority?, pp. 8-9.)
32. Allen Buchanan, "Justice as Reciprocity versus Subject-Centered Justice," Philosophy & Public Affairs 19, no. 3 (Summer 1990): Sec. III (pp. 233-36).
33. For further discussion, see McMahan, "Killing and Equality," Secs. IV-VI.
34. I address some of the same issues in greater detail in "The Limits of National Partiality," in Robert McKim and Jeff McMahan, eds., The Morality of Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996);
35. and in Killing at the Margins of Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
36. For an excellent discussion of racial partiality that denies that there are in fact any races, see Kwame Anthony Appiah's Tanner Lectures, a version of which appear in Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann, Color Conscious (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).