Two longstanding concerns of analytic liberal political philosophy and ethics are how to justify egalitarianism and how a theory of egalitarianism should deal with so-called human variation. These concerns have given rise to questions about what people are owed and what they deserve. Are social inequalities between individuals justified if they occur due to differences between people with respect to their “natural” “talents” and “capacities”? Should societies “compensate” disabled people who “lack” these so-called natural talents? Does a meritocracy most appropriately recognize the moral character of human variation with respect to talents? Or, are talents and capacities morally arbitrary? Are they products of luck? To what extent should a theory of justice incorporate a notion of luck?

These sorts of questions have dominated discussions about disability in liberal political philosophy/ethics since shortly after the publication of John Rawls’s Theory of Justice in 1971, with early contributions to this dialogue from Ronald Dworkin, Martha Nussbaum, and Amartya Sen, among others. Not merely the venue of rhetorical stances, this discourse and the claims and assumptions therein continue to have looping effects for the constitution of the profession of philosophy itself, both constituting and reproducing the distribution and demographics of jobs in philosophy.

Despite the work of Iris Young and others on the limits of liberal theories of justice and their inexorable allegiances to ableism, racial capitalism, speciesism, and imperialism, liberal feminist philosophers have adopted many of the (tedious) core tenets and distinctions of their mainstream counterparts and the assumptions about natural talents and capacities of this discussion in particular. In doing so, they have to varying degrees reconstituted the ways in which the discourse of talents vs. luck, and liberalism more broadly, obscure structural oppressions and forms of power that put in place the limits of possible action for people, consolidating systems of advantage and disadvantage.

Indeed, liberal feminist philosophy (and liberal feminist philosophers) routinely avails itself of the strategies of structural gaslighting in which (mainstream) liberal political philosophy traffics. The growing tendency of nondisabled white women (liberal) philosophers to appeal to a “first-generation” background in order to diminish the considerable status and privilege that obtains to them in philosophy and society more generally is a case in point.

Some of these liberal feminists emphasize the ways in which their incredibly hard work, effort, and resilience have enabled them to surmount obstacles that their modest upbringings endowed to them. Thus these feminists fall squarely in the camp of philosophers who argue that positions in philosophy should be distributed according to merit and personal achievements. Recently, nevertheless, other liberal feminists have questioned this commitment to meritocracy, eschewing the combination of natural talent and perseverance in favour of claims according to which their status and achievements should be attributed to luck, pure and simple. Notice, however, that the attribution of luck as the lever for success in the profession is as naturalizing and individualizing as appeals to (the development of) natural talents and merit.

In short, regardless of which of the two routes that nondisabled white liberal feminist philosophers take to legitimize and rationalize their considerable privilege and unequal status in the profession, they make recourse to the production of a form of structural gaslighting that naturalizes and individualizes the powerful overlapping and crisscrossing mechanisms within the profession that inordinately benefit them. In doing so, these privileged feminist philosophers further marginalize and obfuscate disabled philosophers and members of other subordinated groups in the profession, as well as diminish and even invalidate the enormous efforts (arguments, articles, books, and so on) in which the latter groups are persistently engaged to change the current state of affairs in philosophy.