Rationality isn’t bad even though it’s been a pretext for ableism.

The notions of competency and capability have long been used as a means of excluding disabled people from a range of different settings including education, work and leisure activities, as well as denying them access to opportunities such as relationships, parenting and friendships (Goodley Citation2014, 156). The response of much of postconventional disability studies has been to analyse the cultural origins of this exclusion, but whilst this genealogy may explain why this has happened and explore the ideological origins, it fails to unpack carefully why they are wrong. Goodley acknowledges that there is a need for a normative stance but argues that calls for normative judgments run the risk of ‘leaving dis/ability only in the realm of normative [sic] … [and] ignoring the productive potential of dis/ability to crip a whole host of norms that are, in actuality, limiting and stifling’ (Citation2014, 158). These, he suggests, include characteristics such as rationality, capability, responsibility and competency; which he identifies as ableist ideals, part of the modernist humanistic subject (Citation2014, 156). This raises a number of questions such as whether rationality and responsibility are normatively on a par with irrationality and irresponsibility. Surely not. Homophobia, for example, is an irrational and morally harmful mindset. It is based on irrational fears about contagion, divine retribution and so forth, and results in moral harms to sexual minorities such as discrimination, hate speech and hate crime.

How about (ir)responsibility? Imagine Bill is by himself taking care of his infant child at his family’s remote country house and all of a sudden feels an irresistible urge to drink three bottles of wine. Getting intoxicated is, perhaps, a perfectly legitimate interest as such, but in those circumstances it would compromise Bill’s capability to properly supervise his child and thus put the child at risk and in danger. In other words, rationality and responsibility in general are good, irrationality and irresponsibility are bad.

These ideals as such are not the problem; the problem is their application and the way they are used to discriminate against disabled people. For example, parents with intellectual disabilities are too easily labelled as incompetent and irresponsible because of their cognitive capacities, as Goodley (Citation2014, 156) points out. But judging whether someone is fit to raise children does not necessarily need to involve disablism of any kind. Parents who neglect or maltreat their children for whatever reason may do so despite excellent support. In these kinds of undoubtedly very difficult cases, society has not just a right to intervene and take their children into custody, but actually a duty. Things like child protection as such are not about, for example, disability or drug abuse, they are about promoting children’s well-being (we are, of course, fully aware that in practice child protection does too often include disablism and other forms of prejudice). Thus, we should be careful not to throw out the baby with the water and we should not abandon a perfectly legitimate ideal due its occasional misplaced application. Removing disablism or ableism from the equation will not resolve all ethical issues related to disability.