Lawrence C. Becker

Reciprocity, Justice, and Disability*

The adequacy of a theory of distributive justice is now measured partly by its success in dealing with justice for the disabled. It was not always so. Up to and including Rawls, no major theory of justice in the Western philosophical tradition made disability a prominent issue. No doubt that was partly due to the fact that until the last half of the twentieth century, the number of severely disabled people who had any reasonable hope of long-term survival was small, and until recent medical advances, the medical treatment and social arrangements that could help them were limited and relatively cheap. Thus, until recently it was probably

Places for Pluralism

Many of the concerns about pluralism that pervade political theory and bedevil practical politics have their sources in remote regions of ethical theory. Political debates about multicultural education, assimilation, tolerance, political realism, diplomatic pragmatism, and the justification of liberal democracy and its critique by communitarians can all be connected to debates in ethical theory about relativism and realism, about the plurality of values, about the unity of the virtues, about conflicting principles of right conduct, and about divergent accounts of human good and the good life. The connection between political and ethical theory on these matters is direct and potent. It is also complex. Ethical relativism, for example, has been used both as a warrant for liberalism and as a reason for rejecting it. One side asserts that if there are several equally good ways of life, then democratic political institutions must be neutral between them; the other insists that if our way of life is as good as any other, then we are not obligated to change it in order to accommodate new members, new fashions, or new ideas. On June 7-9, 1991, a conference on the topic of pluralism and ethical theory was held at Hollins College, under the auspices of the Hollins Institute for Ethics and Public Policy and the editors of Ethics. Funding for the conference came from the Jessie Ball duPont Fund. The articles in the symposium published here are descendants of some of the papers given at the Hollins conference. Since these papers are (appropriately enough) quite diverse, a word or two of general introduction is in order.

Impartiality and Ethical Theory

In the Euthyphro, Socrates expresses astonishment that a young man would prosecute his own father for murder. The conventional assumption he seems to be making (perhaps disingenuously) is that filial relationships impose special constraints that may override other considerations, even in the gravest matters. For Euthyphro, by contrast, a murder is a murder. The fact that it was committed by his father has no bearing upon what he is required to do about it. He must prosecute his father just as he would a stranger. In the dialogue, the issue is quickly dropped, unresolved. But that brief passage can serve as an emblem of a perplexing range of problems that bedevil ethical theory-problems now typically grouped together under the heading of impartiality. In one way or another, all of these problems concern the way in which modern moral philosophy seems to force detachment from self-interest, privileged personal relationships, the demands of the moment, and a fully situated first-person point of view, in favor of aggregate or common good, equal and universal relationships, long-range considerations, and the point of view of a disinterested, omniscient observer. There are at least three distinct strands that run through these problems. One concerns the substance of moral norms. We grant the powerful and persistent force of self-interest in our lives, and assume that morality must somehow give us reasons for constraining such motives. We grant that rules and principles of conduct will often be useless or counterproductive in purely local or short-range terms, and assume that morality must give us reasons for acting on principle in spite of it. We grant that our favorites and friends have special claims on our attentions, and assume that morality must give us reasons for occasionally denying such claims. In order to provide such reasons, moral theories standardly argue that our selfish, local, and purely personal interests are morally indistinguishable from many others and that reason requires us to treat similar cases similarly. Morality thus requires (at least sometimes) that we not play favorites, or manipulate rules to our personal advantage, or make ad hoc exceptions for ourselves. In that sense it requires us to be impartial.