Understanding Disability Civil Rights Non-Categorically: The Minority Body and the Americans with Disabilities Act

Abstract

Barnes's The Minority Body is a welcome corrective to accounts of disability that judge it to be bad for people with disabilities and that rest claims to social justice on this assumption. It is less successful as a project in ameliorative social metaphysics that defines disability in terms of what a rights movement seeks justice for. We need instead to begin with an account of the discrimination that a rights movement ought to seek to remedy. This is an urgent project, as proponents of disability rights know all too well.