Part Two · The Shared World & Technology · Series 32

Disability & Personhood

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

Forthcoming 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.

The episodes

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

8 of 8 transcripts are readable now — audio is coming.

1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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:

MacIntyreKittay

The question

The episodes

Thinkers

Where it connects