Howard and Aas on Disability

2024-2 Social Ontology

 

1. Howard and Aas present the Social Exclusion Model of disability. What are the main features of this model?     

Howard and Aas present the Social Exclusion Model of disability, defined as follows:

A person S is disabled in a context C, iff:
(i) S is in some bodily or psychological state x [such that]
(ii) x is regularly assumed in the ideology in C to involve an impairment: a dysfunctional bodily state that limits a major life activity,
(iii) in the dominant ideology of C, that someone in x has an impairment explains why they can be appropriately pitied, stigmatized, and excluded from socially valued activities and statuses.
(iv) The fact that S is in this state plays a role in S’s systemic disadvantage: that is (i)–(iii) actually explains why S is involuntarily excluded from certain valued activities or relegated to a marginal status along some significant social dimension.

The main features of the Social Exclusion Model of disability are as follows: first, like Hanslanger and Barnes, Howard and Aas construct their theory in the spirit of ameliorative analysis. The definition “will not solely depend on our folk intuitions…Rather we have to think about what (if anything) the concept of disability is good for.” It is not at all productive to ask philosophical questions about disability per se, since some of these questions, with their baseless underlying assumptions, may contribute to epistemic and hermeneutic injustice. Second, they make a distinction between impairment and disability, arguing that disability is tied to social perceptions that determine which conditions are considered impairments, rather than whether those conditions are really impairments. “Disability... is about an ideology of impairment, not necessarily impairment itself.” Third, they also argue that this distinction shed light on the understanding of Barnes’s counterexample to the naturalistic account of disability—Michael Phelps. In their view, Michael Phelps is not disabled but impaired. The reason people intuitively believe that Michael Phelps is not disabled is that his impairment is not accompanied by social stigmatization. Finally, people are, therefore, considered disabled when the cognitive perception of their impairments potentially or actually produce exclusion, stigma, and pity.

 

2. What do you take to be the strongest objection to the Social Exclusion Model of disability?

I believe that their discussion of the relationship between homosexuality and disability is not satisfactory in both descriptive and ameliorative dimensions. They said: “Homosexuality…was never an impairment. But at one time it was regarded as such; at that time, and in places where that is still true, gay people might have been disabled. To the extent that in the dominant ideology of a society, people whose minds and bodies differ from the norms in such a way that they are regarded as pathological, and consequently as appropriately excluded from valuable social activities, we think there is a case to be made that they are disabled.” So, they leave open the possibility that gay people were indeed disabled in the past. However, isn’t it much more plausible to say that people at that time simply misjudged homosexuality, and that gay people do not belong to the disabled group at all? The fact that homosexuality was regarded as such does not mean it actually was. Gay people are marginalized because of their homosexuality. And connecting this marginalization—not only to impairment itself but also to an ideology of impairment—is exactly what gay people have historically sought to dispel.