Beyond autonomy
Subtitle: justifying equality rights for people with severe cognitive disabilities
By: by Marika Dawn Warren.
Published: 2006
Language: eng
Number of pages: 207
ISBN-13: 9780494159026
Description: This dissertation attempts to justify claims to equality rights on the part of people with severe cognitive disabilities, who cannot, no matter how supportive an environment they find themselves in, demonstrate the rational capacities necessary for autonomy. I characterize disability rights as aiming at equality for people with disabilities, and rights are defended as an appropriate means for achieving that equality. I then explore the human rights justification for disability rights, and argue that the notion of dignity cannot adequately explain why human rights should be conferred upon all and only humans. Therefore I find human rights to be lacking as a justification for disability rights claims.I then present models of the structure and function of rights that are compatible with both disability rights claims and the constituency of people with disabilities as right-holders. I next explore how we might justify the moral status necessary for people with severe cognitive disabilities to be considered right-holders. First, I consider an interest-based strategy for generating moral status, which cannot grant moral status to individuals with severe cognitive disabilities who are not sentient. Furthermore, it seems likely to create a hierarchy of rights protections that would leave people with severe cognitive disabilities with a lesser set of rights. I then turn to a Rawlsian approach to generating the requisite moral status, and determine that challenges involving notions of personhood at work on this account render it incapable of providing justification for the moral status of all people with disabilities.This raises the question of whether any liberal account is necessarily incapable of including people with severe cognitive disabilities as right-holders. I argue that this is not necessarily the case, since liberalism is not inherently linked to a requirement that moral subjects be autonomous. I conclude that the challenges encountered in according moral status to people with severe cognitive disabilities point to a need to broaden the notion of personhood being used in contemporary liberal theorizing, as well as a need to amend the requirements that disability rights advocates' arguments impose upon the justification I am trying to provide in this dissertation.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-07, Section: A, page: 2611.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Toronto, 2006.

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