Disabled people are constrained and limited by their bodies....The simple act is that, disabled or non-disabled, we are all limited and constrained by our bodies. To have a body that is any particular way is to have a body that is limited and constrained in some respects an in comparison to other kinds of bodies. That's just part of what it is to have a body. Some of us are male, some of us are female. Some of us are tall, some of us are short. Some of us are flexible, some of us are stiff. Some of us are stocky, some of us are willowy. There are all sorts of ways that bodies can be. And each way a body can be comes with some limitations and constraints.
We all adapt our preferences due in part to the limitations of our bodies---that's an utterly ordinary thing to do. Elizabeth Barnes (2016) The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability, 132 (emphasis in original).
Recall that at the core of Barnes's book is the idea that all human bodies face constraints. In particular, it is part of the nature of what it is to be a human body that all human bodies are in a position of not being able to do some X; with X being something other human bodies can do (or could be/have or can instantiate), and X being really important to some humans. It is a fairly common conceptual and maybe even phenomenological mistake to think of disability in terms of constraint, but to ignore simultaneously the existence of constraints in the context of (complex) experiences that arise from having other types of bodies (even though those bodies by necessity include all kinds of constraints).
Now one way to understand Barnes's contribution, is that constraints -- or to put it Spinozistically, limitations -- are constitutive of our embodied existence. When states as such it may seem an obvious point, but (i) I doubt it is really properly represented in much philosophical theorizing (despite the growth of embodied cognition), especially in political philosophy (outside some areas of feminism); in particular, (ii) to overlook Barnes's insight (on the constrained nature of human existence) is, when one is discussing, say, human freedom, to contribute to possibility that one may tacitly assume away a whole bunch of constraints because one (tacitly) brackets those as belonging to some image of our biological or (proper) natural functioning.
I think something like (ii) (because of (i)) occurs in political philosophy. (This is also an important place to call attention to Elizabeth Anderson's (1999) important point that much of the literature in luck egalitarianism treats disability as something pitiful and somehow fails to represent what the political aims of minority bodies might be.) Let me give an example from the literature on social freedom; in this scholarship, the Hobbesian conception of freedom (to speak anachronistically) as preference satisfaction is replaced by all kinds of conceptions in which absence of constraints (or counterfactual constraints) are treated as intrinsic to social freedom. Here's an illustration from (2016) Christian List & Laura Valentini:
Freedom as independence: An agent is (socially) free to do X if and only if, robustly, there are no constraints on her doing X. (1067)
I use List & Valentini because they write clearly and offer a nice survey of alternative views (and how to classify them). All these views have absence from constraints (in some sense or another) built into their conception. As they point out, "Liberals, following Isaiah Berlin, define freedom as the absence of constraints on action, where the constraints that matter can be spelled out in various ways. Republicans, especially in Philip Pettit’s influential interpretation, instead argue that freedom requires nondomination: the guaranteed or robust absence of arbitrary constraints." (1044)*
As they unpack freedom as independence, they add the following remark on the nature of constraints:
We have already commented on the availability of different notions of possibility in defining freedom as independence, based on the intended application. The possible freedom-undermining constraints may be social (e.g., legal, political, customary) or purely “natural” (concerning what is possible given the laws of physics and biology), for example. From a social perspective, it makes little sense to describe an agent as “unfree” to jump 1,000 meters in the air, yet from a physical one it does. Once we become aware of these different notions of possibility, we need not accuse those who describe physical inabilities as “unfreedoms” of conceptual confusion. We can more charitably point out that the freedom they are talking about is not “social” freedom—the kind of freedom in which social and political philosophers are interested. (1070)
Now, I have no desire to describe physical inabilities as “unfreedoms,” but I do think that reflection on the existence of minority bodies and the constitutive role of constraints in our existence show that: (a) both the opposition between the social and natural that List/Valentini rely on can't really be sustained [that is, the realm of the 'natural' needs to be drawn much narrower] and (b) that embodied "inabilities" are central to social and political philosophy, even if (c) too many political philosophers have failed to be "interested." I recognize that some readers may wish for a detailed argument here (and it may not be trivial to supply it), but I hope that the point is clear with some reflection.
Before I am misunderstood: I am not denying that 'liberals' and republicans' in the sense used here can talk about the ways in which we organize society inhibits minority bodies and can even be made to reflect that these ways are deplorable and need to be addressed. But I am suggesting that they tend to presuppose an image of normal functioning -- and the Republican version is traditionally gendered in masculine and virile ways -- that does not quite due justice to important features of human existence and treats minority bodies de facto as less free or less capable of being free (because subject to more constraints).+
So, what is needed is, and I suspect I am not the first to notice this, is a conception of freedom with constraints that is not merely preference satisfaction, but that can do justice to the fact that all human bodies are in a position of not being able to do some X; with X being something other human bodies can do (or could be/have or can instantiate), and X being really important to some humans, and that society structures the political and social significance of both X and not X.
*I think there are conceptions of social freedom that are neither Hobbesian nor in the absence of constraint genre and that are properly liberal (e.g., Dennett's treatment in Elbow Room), but that are not properly part of the canonical present presentation of the state of play in political philosophy. But often the 'free will' literature and political philosophy literature occupy different scholarly universes.
+Some other time I'll say something about the role that the so-called "Ordinary-language plausibility: The conception displays an
adequate level of fidelity to ordinary-language use" (1051) plays in all of this.
An image of an upwardly infinite hierarchy of constraints on freedom underlies transhumanism, it seems to me. It doesn't really help with justifying allocation of resources to ameliorate any particular current inequality (eg versus funding a future technological fix).
Posted by: David Duffy | 09/14/2017 at 09:22 AM