Disability, Basic Justice, and Habilitation into Basic Good Health

Abstract

Focusing on the human necessity of habilitation leads to a more inclusive and adequate account of the circumstances of justice. Such an account involves paying persistent attention to similarities and differences in the physical and psychological abilities of actual human agents. That in turn leads to equally persistent attention to the basic good health (or lack of it) in such agents, and to their inabilities (disabilities) and abilities. Such attention to basic good health then yields a disability-friendly starting point for the construction of normative theories of basic justice generally. It does this by providing a constant undercurrent of attention to the crucial problems of human habilitation and rehabilitation that any plausible normative theory of justice must address. Those problems of justice, moreover, are framed as part of the inescapable project of working around human disabilities, or through them, toward situations in which their salience for basic justice is minimized.