Enhancement, disability and the riddle of the relevant circumstances

Zohny, Hazem

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Enhancement, disability and the riddle of the relevant circumstances

Zohny, Hazem

Cite this item: Zohny, H. (2016). Enhancement, disability and the riddle of the relevant circumstances. Journal of Medical Ethics. doi:http://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2016/05/13/medethics-2015-103229.short?g=w_jme_ahead_tab

Permanent link to OUR Archive version: http://hdl.handle.net/10523/6466

Date: 2016

Publisher: BMJ

Rights Statement: “The Corresponding Author has the right to grant on behalf of all authors and does grant on behalf of all authors, a worldwide licence to the Publishers and its licensees in perpetuity, in all forms, formats and media (whether known now or created in the future), to i) publish, reproduce, distribute, display and store the Contribution, ii) translate the Contribution into other languages, create adaptations, reprints, include within collections and create summaries, extracts and/or, abstracts of the Contribution, iii) create any other derivative work(s) based on the Contribution, iv) to exploit all subsidiary rights in the Contribution, v) the inclusion of electronic links from the Contribution to third party material where-ever it may be located; and, vi) licence any third party to do any or all of the above.”

Keywords: Enhancement, disability, applied ethics

Research Type: Journal Article

Languages: English

Abstract:

The welfarist account of enhancement and disability holds enhanced and disabled states on a spectrum: the former are biological or psychological states that increase the chances of a person leading a good life in the relevant set of circumstances, while the latter decrease those chances. Here, I focus on a particular issue raised by this account: what should we count as part of an individual's relevant set of circumstances when thinking about enhanced and disabled states? Specifically, is social prejudice relevant to an individual's circumstances in regards to how disabled or enhanced they are? For instance, if an individual is discriminated against on the basis of their skin colour, and this leads to a reduction in their well-being, the welfarist account suggests that their skin colour is a disability. To avoid such a seeming mislabel, Savulescu and Kahane have argued for excluding social prejudice from counting as a relevant circumstance to their welfarist definition of disability. I argue, however, that this exclusion of social prejudice is unsatisfactory and incompatible with the goals of this account.

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