Article Text
Statistics from Altmetric.com
I am grateful to Philip Reed for his article ‘Expressivism at the Beginning and End of Life’. His piece compellingly demonstrates the import of expanding analyses concerning the expressivist thesis beyond the reproductive sphere to the end-of-life sphere. I hope that his intervention spurns further work on this connection. In what follows, I want to focus on what I take to be moments of slippage in his use of the concept of disability, a slippage to which many disability theorists succumb. In short, I argue that there are crucial moments in his argument where Reed runs together cases of disability that should be kept distinct—at minimum for the context in which he discusses them. Namely, forms of disability the suffering of which justice can eliminate versus those that ‘no amount of accessibility and social justice could eliminate’.1
Disability studies scholars and philosophers of disability have long noted that certain types of disability are often ‘left …
Footnotes
Twitter @joelmreynolds
Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Competing interests None declared.
Patient consent for publication Not required.
Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed.
Linked Articles
Read the full text or download the PDF:
Other content recommended for you
- Hostile environments? Down’s syndrome and genetic screening in contemporary culture
- Moving through capacity space: mapping disability and enhancement
- Inequalities in utilisation of essential antenatal services for women with disabilities in Pakistan: analysis of a cross-sectional demographic and health survey of Pakistan 2017–2018
- Access and quality of maternity care for disabled women during pregnancy, birth and the postnatal period in England: data from a national survey
- Profile of disability in elderly people: estimates from a longitudinal population study
- Graphic illustration of impairment: science fiction, Transmetropolitan and the social model of disability
- Naturalism and the social model of disability: allied or antithetical?
- Trends in the prevalence of common ocular conditions and comparison of ophthalmic outpatient utilisation related to these conditions in children with and without various types of disabilities: analysis of nationwide population-based data from Taiwan, 2014–2019
- The role of psychological factors in the perpetuation of pain intensity and disability in people with chronic shoulder pain: a systematic review
- Disability types, determinants and healthcare utilisation amongst Afghan adults: a secondary analysis of the Model Disability Survey of Afghanistan