Philosophy for Us
Part Two · The Shared World & Technology · Series 32

Disability & Personhood

She's looking right at me, and she doesn't know who I am.

8 episodes ↓ 34 sources ↓ EthicsPolitical & Social

The question

She's looking right at you, and she doesn't know who you are. Your grandmother. Forty years she knew your face before anyone else's in the room, and now there's a polite, frightened smile — the smile you'd give a kind stranger at a bus stop. You sit with her anyway, and the whole time a question you would never say out loud is running underneath the small talk: is she still in there? Not is she alive — obviously she's alive. Is she still a person — the full kind, the kind whose wishes bind you, whose life is owed everything a life is owed — or is the person you loved already gone, and is this tenderness you feel something you're paying to a memory? Notice what you're doing while you sit there: you are running a test — full person or not — and you have a criterion for it, one you've never said out loud. And here is the thought you won't finish: whatever the test returns about her, it just drew a line — this side counts, that side doesn't — and you have no idea, none, which side of it you'll be on the day someone half your age sits across from you and runs the same test. You have been deciding who counts your whole life. You have never checked what you were deciding it with.

What you practise

You can take a test that sorts people and find the point of view hidden inside it. We sort people all the time — who is a full person, whose wishes count — and it feels like reading off a plain fact. Here you learn to ask who set the bar and in whose image, whether the people it sorts were heard, and whether its authors would pass it on a bad day. You also learn why "everyone counts, full stop" ends the thought rather than answers it. You leave able to say where your own line falls, and to admit it may one day be drawn through you.

The episodes

Each episode builds on the one before, and the finale hands the question back to you sharper, not settled.

  1. 01

    Is she still in there?

    A grandmother who no longer knows your face, and a question never said aloud — is she still in there, still the full kind of person? The first episode locates the private test everyone runs on such cases, and observes that no one has ever once examined what the test consists of.

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  2. 02

    The model person

    The word person is not another way of saying human being — companies are legal persons, and human beings have been declared non-persons within living memory. The episode traces the modern criterion to John Locke, whose concept of the person was an instrument built for the courtroom, not a reading of who is human, and gives the bedrock a history.

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  3. 03

    Not all humans, and not only humans

    Peter Singer and Jeff McMahan take the test we already trust — sort by the capacities a being actually has, not the kind it belongs to — and refuse to stop at the easy cases. Run upward without exception, it returns answers that are clear and hard to live with, and the episode asks for the property, not the label, behind any exemption.

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  4. 04

    Everyone fully, or by degrees

    The two ready replies — every human counts, full stop, and standing comes in degrees — are each given the fairest hearing available and followed to where they lead. The first must either name a ground, which readmits the old criterion, or decline to look; the second cannot say where on its spectrum a person stops being owed everything. Neither settles it.

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  5. 05

    What it's like, from the inside

    The people the criterion is applied to speak for themselves — a man living with dementia, and autistic adults on the verdict that they lack a theory of mind, where Damian Milton's double-empathy work suggests the failure of understanding ran both ways. The episode asks what a judgment read off a chart can never reach, and whether the witness was ever consulted.

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  6. 06

    Some mother's child

    Eva Kittay and Alasdair MacIntyre turn the criterion on the people who wrote it — every author of the standard a competent, reasoning, independent adult who looked at himself and called it the human standard. Against that self-portrait stands the fact that everyone was carried for years, and will be again; the line does not run between us and the hard cases.

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  7. 07

    Disabled by the world

    A man at the bottom of a flight of steps, and the question of where the can't resides — in the body, or in concrete poured by someone who never pictured him. Mike Oliver's social model of disability is built at full strength, checked by Tom Shakespeare's objection from inside the movement that some of it no ramp can reach, and joined by Ian Hacking on how a label remakes the people it names. Made, though, does not say which line is right.

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  8. 08

    You draw the line

    The final episode looks directly at what the drawn line has cost — the locked institutions, the lives ruled not to count — and then declines, flatly, to draw it. Three positions remain standing, each with its unpaid bill, and the question is handed back — what fixes full standing, who gets to say, and are you sure the line you need now will never be drawn through you?

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Thinkers

The thinkers and traditions this series draws on:

John LockePeter SingerJeff McMahanDamian MiltonEva KittayAlasdair MacIntyreMike OliverIan Hacking

Related series

Your turn

Your neighbour Dan is thirty-four. He has a learning disability, works mornings at the garden centre, and follows local politics more closely than you do. This year he wants to vote. Where he lives, anyone under a guardianship order must first show a judge that they understand what voting is. In the hearing Dan gets flustered, mixes up the council and the parliament, and is turned down. You know plenty of people who vote and could not have answered either. Nobody asks them.

  1. The test asks whether Dan understands what an election is for. Who set that bar, and in whose image? Would the people who set it pass, nervous, in front of a judge?
  2. How much of Dan's "can't" is in Dan, and how much is in the hearing: the wording, the pace, the room? Did anyone ask him, in his own words, what his vote is for?
  3. If you say everyone votes, full stop, can you say why without slipping a test back in? If you would keep some line, say where it goes and whether you are sure you would always stay on the right side of it.

A good answer names whose standard the test is, says what it would cost you to keep it and what it would cost you to drop it, and still holds if the same test were put to you, nervous, on a bad morning, in front of a judge.

Sources

Written by AI under human direction. This is the reading the series was built from. checked against source means the passage was found in the cited work and a second, independent model checked the episode's use of it; supports in part means that check judged the use a little stronger than the passage alone establishes; passage located means a reader found the passage but it has not had the second check. Unmarked entries are background reading.

Where to start