The alt fails. Ableism is material, not theoretical.

Scholars working in this intellectual tradition typically insinuate how things, as they currently stand, are wrong whilst providing very little practical ethical guidance as to how things ought to be (Sayer Citation2011, 44 and 229; Vehmas and Watson Citation2014). Whilst postconventional disability studies clearly is an ethical and political project, exemplified in many recent works (for example, Goodley, Lawthom, and Runswick-Cole Citation2014; Shildrick Citation2012), these accounts lack an engagement with the normative issues of how things ought to be. Current postconventional normative analysis does not properly articulate the moral and political wrongs disabled people face, and neither does it give us practical guidelines regarding ways to right those wrongs (cf. Lundblad Citation2011, 146).

Goodley and Runswick-Cole (Citation2015), for example, have recently produced an analysis of Big Society ideas in the United Kingdom and how the present neo-liberal agenda has damaged disability services and disabled people’s social status in general in the United Kingdom. They conclude that we should question ableist norms guiding social arrangements, and that we should ‘continue to question, destabilise assumptions that marginalise and exclude bodies and minds that are judged to fail to meet the expectations of ableist normativity’ (Goodley and Runswick-Cole Citation2015, 10). Using the schema developed by Fraser (Citation2013), we would argue that there are two clear claims in the arguments contained in this and other works in postconventional disability studies (see, for example, McRuer Citation2013; Wolbring Citation2008). Firstly, disabled people emerge via regulatory systems and forms of normality, and it is only in these highly ableist regulatory schemas that the contemporary disabled subject is constructed. Disabled people become constituted through the power/discourse formations where all subjectivities are always already culturally constructed (Fraser Citation2013). There is in essence no doer behind the deed.

Secondly, by drawing on the ideas of Foucault, Butler and other poststructuralists, postconventional disability studies implies that the normality-driven practices of subjectification drive subjection. That is, the disabled subject emerges through normative practices that prioritise normality, which serves to exclude and silence ‘the disavowing quality of the normal’ (Goodley Citation2014, 157). It is only through the silencing of others that authorised subjects can emerge, or, as Goodley (Citation2014, 166) puts it, production of the Über-able results in the production of the ultra-disabled.

This is all fine and good but what does this mean in practice? What kind of guidance does it offer in relation, for example, to impairment-related violence, or improving access to goods and services for those who harm themselves or who are at risk? What does this guiding principle imply in terms of social policy or how to best arrange our societies in order to meet people’s needs fairly? We are fully with Goodley and Runswick-Cole (Citation2015, 10) when they argue that ‘theory can help us to create opportunities for the urgent acts of refusal, revision and resistance needed to bring people in from the cold’, but their words leave us in bafflement as they fail to explicate or offer concrete, constructive examples of how to refuse, revise and resist, and on what grounds. If disability is reduced to discursive norms it becomes difficult to see how policies (always being already normative) can emerge. There is little analysis within postconventional disability studies that explores the economic processes, the social relational and organisational life and the material interests and other non-discursive forms of power that create disability.Footnote1

Here we may be accused of committing the ‘fallacy of externalism’, meaning that we criticise postconventional disability studies for failing to accomplish something which these theorists did not set out to pursue in the first place (Baert and Carreira da Silva Citation2010, 9). Is it not the case that postconventional disability studies mainly analyses and describes how certain ideas came about without even attempting to offer any normative guidance of how things ought to be? So is our criticism misguided? No, because postconventional accounts of disability highlight ableist ideas, ideologies, representations, policies and so forth that create and further disabled people’s exclusion, marginalisation and oppression. Thus, these accounts point out moral and social evils which means that normativity is at the heart of their analyses. This being the case, it is only proper to ask whether their theories provide us with any tools to settle the moral and political wrongs they have raised.

Methodological considerations

If we want to say something constructive and valid about whether certain practices or policies are morally right or wrong, we need appropriate analytic tools. Producing sound normative arguments regarding issues to do with, say, health, autonomy, dying and justice is admittedly very difficult. Whilst normative issues cannot be settled once and for all with simple knock-down arguments, it is possible to generate constructive normative arguments – a task that we should not give up entirely to philosophers, who often have very little awareness of the complexities of disability. We are highly sceptical whether poststructuralism offers sufficient tools to unpack such issues properly.

We will now outline briefly an application of the traditional analytic philosophical method which, in our view, provides a useful starting point for addressing ethical issues related to disability (see Tooley Citation1983, 11–18).Footnote2 The first thing to do is to ‘clarify and evaluate statements and terms that are vague or ambiguous’. This point expresses an aspiration for conceptual clarity and logical soundness. For example, some prominent philosophers have argued that intellectual disabilities are relevant factors when considering abortion or infanticide and they have appealed to such vague and ambiguous concepts as ‘recognizably human life’ (Rachels Citation1986, 66), ‘normal life’ (Kuhse and Singer Citation1985, 143) and ‘full human existence’ (Kuhse and Singer Citation1985, 136). Clearly, these kinds of utterances express ideas of what kind of beings human beings ought to be and what kinds of lives they ought to live, but at the same time they are too vague to be used as a basis for normative judgments regarding, for example, end-of-life issues (Vehmas Citation1999). Second is ‘detecting and rejecting unreasonable factual claims of a non-ethical sort’. The use of factual, empirical claims inevitably directs the normative arguments and their conclusions. Thus, in the case of disability it is important to acknowledge in a balanced way relevant environmental (including social and geographical) circumstances, historical and cultural factors as well as individual factors (such as impairment effects) that ultimately give meaning to the phenomenon of disability. Third is ‘detecting inconsistencies in ethical positions’. Avoiding logical confusions is a prerequisite to the production of sound and valid (philosophical) argumentation (for example, Häyry Citation1994, 147–158; Tooley Citation1983, 11–18). Applying this tool to the examination of postconventional accounts of disability is challenging because of their opacity, even obscurity. We are not always certain what the normative premises of their arguments are, let alone the substance and the logic of their arguments.