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Elizabeth Barnes has written an interesting and important book about disability.
It is a sustained defense of what she calls “the mere-difference thesis”: the idea
that disability is something that does not in itself make a life worse. The basic idea
is not new, but has been an important part of disability activism for some time.
Barnes has brought a new level of precision to a popular slogan and has then
set about defending it with all the familiar tools of contemporary analytic philos-
ophy. It is important to note that Barnes limits the scope of her claim in a way that
disability activists have not always done. She is explicit that she is only interested
in defending the mere-difference view for physical disabilities (for the rest of this
review “disability” will mean physical disability).
She begins in chapter 1 by developing an account of what physical disability
is. After rejecting various traditional models, she argues that disability is not a nat-
ural kind, but is instead a social category, one that lumps together some (but not
all) bodies that vary in some way from statistical norms. The label is “social” only
in the sense that there is no natural property (or set of properties) such that all
and only things with that property (or properties) count. The odd grouping
has to be explained in terms of human interests. But it is not “social” in a stronger
sense: disability still refers to actual features of real bodies (as opposed to the ways
that others perceive them). To be disabled is to have a body at odds with one or
more of the norms that underlie the design of our shared physical environment,
such that one will encounter obstacles that most others do not. For this reason,
being disabled in our current world can have an impact on one’s welfare even
if others are unaware that one is disabled. Barnes arrives at her account by looking
to the disability rights movement, which has for some time worked implicitly with
a loose cluster concept, one that counts something as a disability if it meets several
of a list of criteria. Her suggestion is that we adopt their notion of disability, count-
ing as a physical disability whatever falls under this cluster concept. This has the
result that “disability” turns out to have an extension roughly equal to what most
people generally take it to have.
In chapter 2 she turns her attention to clarifying the thesis she wants to de-
fend and the one she wants to reject, which she labels “bad-difference.” Unfortu-
nately, she tells us, there is no simple or easy way to define bad-difference views
that will satisfy everyone. She presents five closely related claims, all of which in-
tuitively express the idea that disability has a negative impact on welfare. On her
view, acceptance of any one of the five counts as sufficient for accepting a bad-
difference view.
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1. Most of the welfare claims disabled people make about their lives are
true.
2. Many disabled people claim that they experience disability as a positive
package, that is, they value it for itself and reject compensation narra-
tives.
3. Therefore, for at least some disabled people disability is a positive pack-
age valued for itself.
4. The fact that disability is a positive package in the lives of some people
is incompatible with the claim that disability is bad simpliciter. If it were
bad simpliciter, then it could only be valued instrumentally, and this is
not what they say.
5. Equally, the fact that disability is a negative package in the lives of at
least some individuals means that disability is not good simpliciter ei-
ther.
6. Since disability is neither good simpliciter nor bad simpliciter, it must
be neutral simpliciter.
This still leaves us far from having established mere-difference, and this is because
the idea of neutrality is quite weak. At various points Barnes illustrates neutrality
like this: having flat feet is not bad simpliciter, but it can be bad for you if you want
most of all to be a ballet dancer. That seems right. But then all of the interesting
facts will be facts about what the lived experience of disability is like for particular
individuals, and in particular how psychological traits interact with particular
physical features. As I read her, Barnes wants to show more than just that some
individuals experience disability as a positive package. She seems to want to estab-
Jennifer Hawkins
Duke University
In her vitally important new book, Cosmopolitan Peace (henceforth CP), Cécile Fabre
offers a systematic treatment of the problems of ending wars and managing their
aftermath in a manner consistent with principles of cosmopolitan justice.
The idea of ‘jus post bellum’, as it is called in just war theory, has a long history.
In a helpful overview, Fabre traces it back to Cicero and then takes medieval and
early-modern debates forward to Francisco de Vitoria and Hugo Grotius and
thence to the eighteenth-century ‘positivism’ of Christian Wolff and Emer de Vat-
tel and the cosmopolitan theory of Immanuel Kant (13–17). Philosophers typi-
cally date the twentieth-century revival of philosophical interest in just war theory
to Michael Walzer’s seminal Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic, 1977), a work
which continued in the tradition of earlier centuries by giving careful attention to