Clash link turns alt solvency. Any alternative to plan focus disconnects disability theory from lived experience.

My discussion of these three styles of ‘doing’ normativity has pointed at three problems disability scholars run into in their normative analyses. Let me briefly list them in turn. The first problem resides in the ‘top-down’ style of ethical analysis found in the materialist and critical realist approaches. By ‘applying’ moral principles to arbiter social practices, such analyses threaten to render moral theory static and irresponsive to the complexity of real-life moral tensions and dilemmas, and also leave little room for forms of normativity internal to practice. (Vehmas and Watson’s suggestion to engage with normativity through the analytical philosophical method seems to imply a similar ‘top-down’ style of analysis; hence my reservations about their proposal.) The second problem resides in the separation of ‘fact’ and ‘values’. I traced this problem explicitly in the critical realist approach, but it is in fact not considered carefully in any of the approaches. Here, the problem is that scholars are insufficiently aware that normativity is always already a part of the empirical reality we observe—a point that, if we want to ‘do’ normativity right, ought to be explicated and explored. The third problem has to do with the sort of ethical directives these approaches produce. I noted of the cultural approach that its suspicion of normativity does not allow for constructive normative conclusions, meaning that it has trouble providing meaningful normative guidance. By contrast, the opposite seems true for the materialist and critical realist approaches; their rigid use of moral principles makes it unclear to what extent these approaches can generate normative insights that are sufficiently complex, nuanced, and in tune with practice—and thus, provide insights that can actually help improve the lives of disabled people. In effect, disability scholars are torn between giving too much or too little in the way of normative directives.

My overarching concern in signaling these problems is that the conventional styles of ‘doing’ normativity in disability studies might fall short of what I believe should be their aspiration: that is, to generate normative insights that speak to the nuances and complexities of the lives of disabled people—and hence, that might help to improve these lives in practice. On an analytical level, these problems spring forth from the interaction between ethical ‘theory’ and empirical ‘data’ and the sort of conclusions this interaction can generate. This issue is also at the root of my hesitation regarding the method proposed by Vehmas and Watson (Citation2016), which in my view does not say enough about how empirical knowledge ought to inform moral reasoning.

In this section, I want to offer three suggestions to address these problems, by introducing a number of insights from the corner of moral philosophy known as empirical ethics (Ives, Dunn, and Cribb Citation2017; Landeweer, Molewijk, and Widdershoven Citation2017; Pols Citation2015; Musschenga Citation2005; van der Scheer and Widdershoven Citation2004). This field, which developed in the wake of the ‘empirical turn’ in bioethics and philosophy of science, grew out of a dissatisfaction with the normative insights produced by conventional philosophical methods that had dominated these fields. These insights, empirical ethicists argued, are not sufficiently sensitive to context nor to the reality of lived experience (Hoffmaster Citation1992; Musschenga Citation2005). In response, empirical ethicists began to consider how ethical and social-scientific inquiry might be combined to generate insights ‘more contextually aware and more grounded in the realities of lived experience’ than traditional normative theory (Davies, Ives, and Dunn Citation2015, 1). Normative inquiry, they argued, must involve qualitative research on the views, experiences, and practices of people who actually live with the moral tension or problem being studied. They thus frame their efforts as a correction of the tendency in moral philosophy to simply ‘apply’ moral principles to judge practices. Their methodological inventions for exploring moral tensions and answering moral questions have reinvigorated debates on how to ‘do’ normativity as I have defined it here.

The considerations of empirical ethicists may seem far removed from the field of disability studies, but they are not. After all, the purpose of all this is to generate context-sensitive normative insights about social practice—which is what disability studies, if it is dedicated to improving the lives of disabled people, should want to strive for as well. Some empirical ethicists are drawing on their methods to study issues around disability, mainly on the topic of care and support (Pols, Althoff, and Bransen Citation2017; Winance Citation2010). But these tend to be exceptions for now, and these authors do not typically frame their efforts as disability studies research.

Empirical ethics is a broad field encompassing many methodological approaches. It is not my aim here to rehearse their differences in detail. Rather, I want to highlight some ideas generated in this field that I believe are fruitful for opening up new avenues in disability studies research. I choose these ideas because they respond well to the problems I outlined above. They are not meant to represent the breadth of the field of empirical ethics; rather, they are suggestions that could aid disability studies in developing new styles of ‘doing’ normativity. Again, to demonstrate the benefits of these ideas, I will provide examples. This time, I will take these from empirical-ethical research on dependency and disability, some of which is my own.

Dynamism between ‘theory’ and ‘data’

A main preoccupation of empirical ethicists has been to rethink the relationship between ethical theory (in the form of principles, frameworks, and so on) and empirical reality (in the form of social-scientific empirical findings). Attempting to carve a space between the ‘top-down’ style of deductive reasoning that holds empirical reality to the standard of immutable ethical principles and a kind of particularist relativism that is satisfied with only describing the norms and values found in the field, empirical ethicists have been looking for ways to integrate ethical and empirical inquiry and thus create a more symbiotic relationship between the two. To be sure, a given moral theory or concept can still form the starting point of a normative inquiry; the point is rather that any such theory or concept itself becomes an object of critical interrogation, as the empirical analysis can lead researchers to interpret a given theory or concept anew, or even to reject it in favor of another. Hence, empirical ethicists do not merely allow their moral framework to be enriched or specified with empirical findings. They allow the empirical analysis to fundamentally question the moral framework they bring to the people and practices under study, so as to align normative insights more fundamentally with the vicissitudes of lived experience. There is no consensus as of yet on how this ought to be done, but there are plenty of ideas (see Davies, Ives, and Dunn (Citation2015) for a systematic review). Whatever the precise method, the goal is utilize empirical findings in the (re)shaping of normative ethical theory to produce normative insights that are attuned to practice and lived experience.

To appreciate the kind of work this dynamism between ‘theory’ and ‘data’ can produce, consider again the example of dependency. All authors I discussed above took a normative stance on dependency: Morris one of rejection and Gibson et al. and Shakespeare one of acknowledgement. However, none of them were able to say much about the variation in how care relationships are experienced, or how we might judge different dependency relationships differently, and on what normative basis. Integrating normative and empirical inquiry can allow for a more fine-grained account of dependency and its different normative dimensions.