Disability and the Social Contract

Abstract

In Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (“Frontiers of Justice”), philosopher Martha Nussbaum demonstrates the power of her capabilities approach for political theory by proposing to bring three often-disregarded groups safely within the scope of justice. Like animals and economically underdeveloped nations, she contends, people with disabilities are excluded from traditional social contract theory. In its simplest (perhaps oversimplified) form, social contract theory requires recipients to reciprocate for social benefits received, for why would people freely enter into cooperative arrangements with one another if the scheme was not similarly advantageous for all?1 Specifically, why would productive people contract to cooperate with unproductive individuals whose inclusion in the cooperative scheme brings no additional resources to the common store? The implausibility of self-regarding productive people choosing nonproductive ones as cooperators propels the presumption that every party to the contract must have the ability to make real contributions to achieving mutual advantage for all the parties together (p 66). This is one of the many theoretical and practical commonplaces that Nussbaum challenges in her illuminating critique.