My article in Mich CIurria’s forthcoming special issue of Feminist Philosophy Quarterly on Feminist Approaches to Moral Responsibility contributes to growing discussions within philosophy about the ways in which and the extent to which philosophers are culpable with respect to the production and perpetuation of unjust social and political arrangements. A central motivational assumption of the article is that moral responsibility theory produces, legitimates, and even magnifies the considerable social injustice that accrues to disabled people insofar as it implicitly and explicitly promotes a depoliticized ontology of disability that materializes disability as a naturally disadvantageous personal characteristic or deleterious property of individuals rather than as an effect of power, an apparatus.

One aim of the article is thus to articulate a transformative social ontology of disability that would counter the prevailing claims about disability that philosophers of moral responsibility theory advance: a social ontology of disability designed to impel the cultural, economic, institutional, philosophical, and political change required to transform the current social situation of disabled people that the prevailing naturalized conception of disability fosters and reinforces. In this regard, the article reprises and expands my call for a conceptual revolution with respect to how philosophers understand the metaphysics of disability; that is, the article calls for a conceptual revolution with respect to how philosophers research, write, and teach about the elements that constitute the ontology and ontological status of disability and, furthermore, it beckons a conceptual uprising with respect to how their philosophical claims about disability should be positioned in relation to the fields of social ontology and responsibility theory themselves.

Indeed, an additional motivational assumption of the article is that the conception of disability that predominates in moral responsibility theory and social metaphysics facilitates both the exclusion of disabled philosophers from the profession of philosophy and the marginalization of critical work on disability from the discipline of philosophy. In short, I aim to show that the ways in which philosophers have employed the methodological tools of analytic philosophy to establish the philosophical domain in which they engage has distinctly detrimental effects on disabled people.

Traditionally, philosophers who work in the area of moral responsibility theory (e.g., Broad 1934; van Inwagen 1983) have disregarded the role that systemic and structural relations of power play in moral decision making, failing to recognize the constitutive nature of relations of social power and offering an analysis of responsibility that purportedly stands apart from the operations of power (see, for instance, Ciurria 2021; 2022, 35). These philosophers have instead been variously preoccupied with debates about freedom and determinism in the context of individual agency and with juridical representations of power that construe the relation between power and moral decision making in terms of negative liberty, that is, construe power in (neo)liberal terms as a repressive entity that subtracts from a given subject’s agency.

Yet a more astute and up-to-date philosophical approach to responsibility would embed moral decision making and its constitutive effects within matrixes of power, whilst conceiving these power relations as productive: they produce (among other things) discursive objects, candidates for truth and falsehood, the historical conditions of possibility under which subjects may act, philosophical positions, and socially situated subjects. For despite the universalism that (analytic) moral responsibility theory presupposes, relations of power produce a diversity of subject positions to which moral responsibility is differentially attributed and distributed. In other words, relations of power have always already put in place the possible options from which diverse subjects may choose to act and the disparate degrees to which they will be rendered responsible for their actions and alleged actions (Tremain 2006, 2010, 2017).

References

Broad, C.D. 1934. Determinism, Indeterminism, and Libertarianism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ciurria, Mich. 2022. Responsibility’s Double Binds: The Reactive Attitudes on Conditions of Oppression. Journal of Applied Philosophy 40 (1): 35-48.

Ciurria, Michelle. 2021. A New Ameliorative Approach to Responsibility. Verifiche L (2): 159-182.

Tremain, Shelley L. 2017. Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Tremain, Shelley. 2010. Biopower, Styles of Reasoning, and What’s Still Missing from the Stem Cell Debates. Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 25 (3): 577-609.

Tremain, Shelley. 2006. Reproductive Freedom, Self-regulation, and the Government of Impairment in Utero. Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 21 (1): 35-53.

van Inwagen, P. 1983. An Essay on Free Will. New York: Oxford University Press.