Friends will know that my main areas of specialization are moral responsibility and critical disability theory. The following is a draft of my forthcoming entry, “Disability and Moral Responsibility,” for the Philosophy and Theory of Disability area of The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Disability Studies. This pathbreaking project is being curated by Shelley Tremain for the OUP’s Digital Reference Publications. Many thanks to Shelley for her dedication and hard work.

Disability and Moral Responsibility 

Mich Ciurria

Summary

Socially-grounded theories of moral responsibility tend to treat disability as a problem or test case for responsibility. Many philosophers take disability to be a paradigm case of impaired or marginal responsibility. This raises questions about what to ‘do with’ such impaired agents: resent them or pity them, punish them or treat them, incarcerate them or hospitalize them? As disabled people increasingly contribute to these debates, they emphasize that such double-binds merely contribute to their oppression. Indeed, the two sides of the dilemma are more alike than different, insofar as they both contribute to a continuum of ableist segregation.  

Iris Marion Young observes that, throughout the 20^th Century, Republicans and Democrats took two ostensibly different approaches to social policy: one party was ‘tough on crime’ while the other emphasized therapeutic interventions. Yet they both voted to pass legislation that forced welfare applicants to work for social assistance – a policy that was devastating for disabled people, many of whom relied on public funding for survival. The two parties simply offered different reasons: Republicans said that the poor don’t deserve a free handout, whereas Democrats said that work makes poor people more responsible. While their rationales were different, their goal was the same: to fund a ‘workfare’ program that would funnel money from the public sector into the private one, enriching their donors and wealthy friends.

Philosophers have echoed this ‘debate’ in various ways. For example, retributivists argue for a more punitive approach to wrongdoing, whereas ‘agency-enhancement’ theorists advocate for clinical and therapeutic interventions aimed at cultivating responsibility. While the second approach may seem kinder and gentler than the former, it is just as easily co-opted – or ‘captured’ – by capitalist elites intent on justifying the forcible institutionalization of ‘defective agents’ in segregated facilities, such as nursing homes and rehabilitation clinics. Arguably, incarceration and compulsory treatment are two sides of the same ableist coin. 

Another distinction without a difference is the question of whether ‘impaired agents’ should be met with resentment or pity, disapproval or compassion. There is by now an abundance of literature critiquing both the resentment of conservatives and the condescending pity of so-called ‘liberal allies’ who want to ‘save’ and ‘heal’ the disabled. Neither approach to disability recognizes our agency, our autonomy, and our right to govern our own lives without the imposition of paternalistic caretaking or unsolicited advice on how to improve ourselves. 

Yet another harmful binary is the classic, yet persistent, distinction between neurotypical adult humans, who are supposed to be paradigmatic cases of moral agency, and all other living beings, who are supposed to be defective, subordinate, or marginal cases of moral agency. This dualism reifies the anthropocentric, neuronormative, adultist logic of capitalist societies, which systematically transfer wealth and power from the many to a privileged few. 

To make progress in the field of moral responsibility, philosophers must stop rehashing familiar debates about what’s ‘wrong’ with ‘impaired agents,’ and start welcoming disabled people, addicts, youths, and other historically-marginalized groups to the table. What do disabled people, and other oppressed groups, think about their own agency? Marginalized philosophers are already changing the conversation by sharing their experiential knowledge. 

Keywords: Disability; responsibility; personhood; agency; ableism

Introduction

On one dominant account, moral responsibility is a practice that structures interpersonal relationships and institutional norms. To hold someone responsible is to see the persons as an appropriate target for certain attitudes – for example, blame and praise – as well as certain institutional responses, such as incarceration or inpatient treatment. Responsibility, as such, plays a central role in structuring society by distributing emotional, social, and institutional resources. 

Disability has always taken a central place in philosophical accounts of responsibility, where it is typically framed as a problem or limiting case. More precisely, philosophers have described disability – especially neurological disability (broadly construed to include non-neurotypicality, Madness, and addiction) – as the (full or partial) absence or negation of responsible agency. Hence, disability and responsibility are framed as binary and oppositional. Philosophers have described neurological disabilities as cases of impaired responsibility, limiting cases of personhood, and objects of government intervention (Strawson 1963; Frankfurt 1971). They have debated whether neurodivergent/disabled people should be blamed or excused, punished or rehabilitated, avoided or treated (e.g., Spirada 2023; Shroeder 2005). They have also framed disability as a risk to be managed and mitigated. 

Disabled, Mad, and addict philosophers are increasingly intervening in these debates to question the received wisdom. The assumptions being called into question include: the idea that responsibility is an individual moral capacity rather than a relational or structural phenomenon (e.g., Tremain 2024; Holroyd 2024); the belief that responsibility is an exclusive or paradigmatic property of neurotypical adult humans (e.g., Whyte 2014; Ranganathan 2023; Shelbi & Smith 2023); the notion that responsibility is a type of risk that requires management, treatment, or curing (e.g., Hall 2023); the presumption of an unconditional responsibility to be nondisabled, healthy, or ‘well’ (Reiheld 2019, 2021; Sheppard 2022); the pretense that disability is a scientific, biological, or natural phenomenon (Jeppsson 2024; Gorman 2024); and the claim that conservative and liberal approaches to responsibility, along with corresponding philosophical debates, are substantively different, rather than complementary parts of an integrated continuum of eugenic control and carceral violence (Young 2014; Murthy 2024; Ciurria 2024b). These challenges will be outlined in what follows. 

Two Dogmas of Disability

In mainstream philosophy, disability is often equated with impairment, pathology, and risk (Tremain 2016; Dolmage 2017; Hall 2016, 2023). As such, disability is viewed as a problem to be managed, treated, trained, rehabilitated, or cured. There are two common responses to the ‘problem of disability.’ On the one hand, conservatives tend to view disability as something to be feared, controlled, or criminalized (viz., Curry 2022). Liberals, on the other hand, tend to see it as an object of pity, compassion, treatment, training, or rehabilitation (viz., Gorman 2024; Jeppsson 2024). Disabled philosophers have pointed out that, while these perspectives differ in spirit, they both de facto contribute to a hierarchy of nondisability over disability, along with a network of social policies and practices that enforce able-bodied privilege (e.g., Ciurria 2024b, 2024c; Young 2014; Murthy 2023). As Virgil Murthy puts it, disabled people are positioned as either ‘insane’ or ‘criminal,’ and this double-bind makes them susceptible to “the clinical-carceral seesaw…, ping-ponging between hospitals and prisons, emerging from one institution only to find oneself entering another” (2014: 9). Ultimately, the carceral and clinical models of responsibility are two sides of the same coin.      

The philosophy of moral responsibility partakes in this debate, as exemplified in the influential work of P. F. Strawson (1972). Strawson described disabled people, ranging from “the insane” to those with “less severe forms of psychological disorder,” as lacking in responsible agency, and incapable of participating in the “moral community” of responsible agents. Straddling the conservative-liberal divide, Strawson recommended “training,” “treatment,” and “cur[ing]” of disability, as well as “fear,” “avoidance,” and “management.”  Contemporary philosophers have defended both approaches, but most favor the liberal perspective (as we shall see shortly). Increasingly, however, disabled philosophers have agreed with Murthy’s critique that, in practice, the two sides have more in common than not.  

Indeed, an emerging theme in critical discourse is the notion that mainstream debates about responsibility produce and reinforce a network of ableist double-binds (Ciurria 2023, 2024b, 2024c). Marilyn Fry defines a “double bind” as a situation in which all options lead to oppression; you’re damned if you do, you’re damned if you don’t. Murthy (2023; 2024) highlights that Mad people and addicts are susceptible to such situations not because of their individual choices, but because of their shared situation of neuronormative/ableist oppression, which makes them vulnerable to paternalistic control. These double-binds are reinforced by ideologies that differ in theory but not substance – for example, philosophies about whether addicts and Mad people deserve resentment or sympathy, incarceration or hospitalization. Ultimately, the disagreement between ‘tough-on-crime’ conservatives and liberal ‘allies’ “is a distinction without a difference,” inasmuch as both sides support some form of involuntary institutionalization, whether in a prison or a nursing home, a jail or a rehabilitation clinic (Murthy 2024). Murthy emphasizes that she does not simply want addicts to be more comfortable, happier, or healthier: she wants them to have the same freedoms as other people.

To better understand the problem of ableist double-binds, we can examine two ‘partisan’ narratives about recipients of Medicaid (and equivalent programs in other countries). Medicaid is a health insurance program that provides coverage to U.S. Americans with disabilities, provided they meet income and assets requirements. (In the state of Missouri, for instance, eligible applicants must make less than $1,067 per month, or less than half the amount that would constitute a living wage; and they must hold less than $6,000 in assets, or less than the amount needed to cover the cost of a major emergency [American Council on Aging 2024]). A popular objection from conservatives is that Medicaid applicants are ‘welfare leeches’ or ‘con artists’ trying to steal from hard-working taxpayers; droves of people are pretending to be disabled, or more disabled than they really are, to avoid contributing to society. In response, liberals often counter that disabled people really are incapable of contributing to society due to their tragic impairments, which make them eligible for welfare. Since disabled people can’t contribute to society, they need and deserve public aid.  

Notably, neither narrative recognizes disabled people as responsible citizens who can contribute to society in a meaningful way. Disabled people have two choices: we are either dangerous criminals to be feared and punished, or helpless victims to be rescued and rehabilitated (viz., Ciurria 2024b; Holroyd 2024; Reynolds 2022; Clare 2017). By negating disabled people’s social agency – our ability to contribute to society – these seemingly oppositional narratives mutually support a culture of ableist exclusion. Neither ‘side’ depicts disabled people in a positive or even neutral light. Instead, each defines disability as a type of negation – negation of work ethic of agency, of honesty or personhood, of respect of capacity.

In Responsibility for Justice (2014), Iris Marion Young notes that conservatives and liberals often agree on social policies even if they provide different reasons for their endorsement. In the 1980s, for example, both sides supported a move from no-strings-attached welfare to “workfare” programs that require individuals to do work for an employer, participate in job training, or perform community service in order to receive social benefits such as welfare, food assistance, or disability payments in some cases. Bill Clinton, a liberal politician, introduced the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996, which replaced the previous, less restrictive welfare system with one that imposed strict work requirements and time limits on welfare recipients. Of course, Republicans fully supported the change, as it would cut direct welfare payments to individuals and redirect funds to privatized welfare services, corporate tax cuts, and low-wage labor markets. In their eyes, the policy would divert money away from ‘welfare leeches’ into the hands of ‘responsible’ corporate executives, who would create jobs and drive economic growth. In contrast, Democrats argued that PRWORA was a benevolent policy that would confer job skills, build character, and support or ‘scaffold’ individual responsibility. In reality, both parties were beholden to the corporate executives who financed their campaigns, promised them and their family members high-paying private-sector jobs, and offered other quid pro quo benefits. In other words, the debate between Republicans and Democrats was a distinction without a difference, since both parties simply wanted to funnel money from the public sector into the private one, advancing their own political and economic interests. Put differently, both ‘sides’ supported “disaster capitalism,” a strategy to exploit real or imagined crises to dismantle the public sector and enact neoliberal policies in general (Klein 2007). While Republicans invoked the rhetoric of ‘law and order’ and Democrats appealed to ‘beneficence’ and ‘good will,’ both backed the same corporate agenda – one that sought to defund the welfare system, thus disenfranchising disabled people and other oppressed groups.     

Young notes that by using the rhetoric of ‘personal responsibility’ (which neither party truly cared about), Democrats were able to shift the responsibility for caregiving from the state onto the individual, effectively privatizing care labor. “Workfare” initiated a “shift in the United States from understanding public assistance as entitlement, on the one hand, to an understanding of public assistance as something that recipients should work for, for their own good, on the other hand” (2014: 7). No longer would the state be responsible for providing essential services; individuals were to be responsible for their own care, and if they couldn’t ‘pull themselves up by their own bootstraps,’ they were to blame (or pity!). Using different rhetorical strategies, then, Democrats and Republicans defended the neoliberal ideology of individualism, and the corresponding transfer of responsibility from the collective to the individual. This shift made disabled people susceptible to a range of preventable harms, including stigma, poverty, medical neglect, and suicide. (Tremain’s term for the exploitation of crises for eugenic purposes is “disaster ableism” – a term that can be used to describe the defunding of the welfare state under President Clinton, and subsequent austerity measures [2023]).   

Although Democrats supported workfare, they didn’t necessarily believe that disabled people could work. This is because Democrats and Republicans also tended to agree that (many) disabled people can’t work due to their impaired bodies/minds. Following the example of Ronald Dworkin and John Rawls – two of the 20^th Century’s most famous liberal philosophers – political liberals have depicted disabled people as victims of bad luck, tragic circumstances, or losers of the “natural lottery.’ As Dworkin (2000) saw it, a blind person, unlike a “lazy” person, “should be compensated for his limited earning power, because his situation is simply bad luck” (Young 2014: 31). That is, disabled people deserve welfare not because of oppressive power structures or injurious social conditions, but because of individual impairment. Here, Dworkin differentiates himself from the ‘cold-hearted’ conservative by showing kindness to the tragic ‘cripples’ of the world, whose lives are a sorry accident that, perhaps, should never have materialized. Disability, according to liberal individualism, is a matter of ‘brute luck,’ not a choice, preference, or political circumstance. 

By depicting disability as a natural, apolitical feature of individual bodies, Dworkin erased the biopolitical forces that construct disability as a site of political struggle, solidarity, and cultural formation. As Young puts it, Dworkin’s conflation of disability with ‘tragic accident’ obscures the system of “institutionalized rules and social practices that put people in differential positions of power in relation to others, give some people higher status than others, or afford them a wide range of options for their actions as compared to others” (39). The perception of disability as both tragic and accidental is shared by liberals and conservatives alike, although the two may disagree on how best to address the ‘problem.’ 

Critical disability theorists challenge the notion that disability cannot be a (responsible) choice.  Ciurria (2022), for example, demonstrates that some people choose to be disabled in the sense of embracing their disability and the benefits it affords them. For example, cyrborg crips (or “cripborgs”) would rather use mobility devices than not, because these devices confer “transmobility…, the idea that disabled bodies actually have a greater array of options for mobility and movement, providing an impetus for creativity and imagination” (Nelson, Shew, & Stevens 2019). When presented with the option of cochlear implants, many Deaf people choose to remain Deaf, preferring Deaf culture over mainstream society (Sparrow2005). Joshua St. Pierre, Zach Richter, and Erin Schick, creators of the ‘Did I Stutter?’ Project, believe that stutterers have the right to “(1) resist speech assimilation, and (2) advocate for dysfluency pride” (ibid). Compulsory speech fluency denies that stuttering can be a rational and responsible choice, as well as a source of pride and community. Far from being a ‘tragic accident,’ disability is often experienced as a chosen source of responsibility, pride, and culture. 

The disabled community, furthermore, has some degree of choice over the social meaning of disability. This is implied by the “social model” of disability, which views disability as the result of barriers that are created by society and can therefore be dismantled (Oliver 1996; cf. Barnes 2016; Reynolds 2022). Disabled activists have already transformed the built environment – for instance, by amending the law to require ramps and other accessibility features in public buildings, thereby changing the definition of disability itself. The ‘tragic accident’ model denies that disabled people have control and choice over whether to be disabled, and what it means to be disabled. Thus, it denies that we can take responsibility both for choosing disability and for jointly constructing ‘crip’ culture, pride, and solidarity. 

Resentment and Unfreedom 

One can find both sides of the debate (conservative and liberal) on display in one of the 20^th Century’s most influential theories of responsibility, P. F. Strawson’s Freedom and Resentment (1964). This essay is credited with transforming the philosophical conversation about responsibility by shifting the focus from “panicky metaphysics,” in Strawson’s words, to social analysis (Holroyd 2024). More than 70 years after its publication, it remains one of the most cited philosophy papers on moral responsibility, perhaps because it explains (and naturalizes) the way responsibility is distributed across mainstream Western institutions, ranging from the prison to the hospital to the family. This means that if Strawson’s theory is flawed, mainstream institutions are also in need of revision (Ciurria 2024c; Jeppsson 2023).  

Strawson argued that we hold one another responsible by exchanging “reactive attitudes,” such as resentment, gratitude, indignation, approbation, and hurt feelings. Those capable of responding to these attitudes are members of the “moral community.” Strawson believed that most people belong to the moral community, but not all. Exceptions include, in Strawson’s words, “hopeless schizophrenics,” “compulsives,” “the insane,” as well as those with “less severe forms of psychological disorder,” and “young children.” Most people believe that these groups are exempt because they are, as Matthrew Talbert explains, “at least for a time, significantly impaired for normal interpersonal relationships” (2020, citing Strawson 1963).

Toward ‘impaired’ agents, Strawson argued that we should suspend the reactive attitudes and adopt a more “objective” and detached stance – one that may include “repulsion or fear…, pity or even [some kinds of] love,” but not “the range of reactive feelings and attitudes which belong to involvement or participation with others in interpersonal human relationships.” He also suggested that such agents deserve distinct institutional responses, such as being seen “as an object of social policy”; “a subject for…treatment”; “something… to be taken account of…, perhaps precautionary account of; to be managed or handled or cured or trained”; and “perhaps simply to be avoided.” 

We can discern elements of both conservative and liberal discourse in Strawson’s depiction of neurodivergent/disabled people, i.e., those labelled as “insane” and “mentally disordered” in the popular vernacular of the 1960s (prior to the invention of the neurodiversity model). On the one hand, some neurodivergent/disabled people warrant repulsion and fear; on the other hand, some are apt candidates for pity and compassion. While some should be avoided and ‘taken precautionary account of,’ others should be treated, trained, and cured. Strawson seems to be advocating for a law-and-order conservative approach in some cases, and a socially-progressive liberal approach in others. Since the essay’s publication, philosophers have taken sides in the debate, with most favouring liberal progressivism and ‘therapeutic’ interventions. 

On the progressive side, philosophers argue that responsibility should be restorative rather than retributive. Manuel Vargas (2013), Gregg Caruso and Derk Pereboom (2018), Michael McKenna (2011), and Victoria McGeer (2015, 2019) all advocate for forward-looking, agency-enhancing approaches that prioritize moral rehabilitation and repair. To their credit, such approaches could serve as a barrier to the criminalization and mass incarceration of disabled people. Mari Sulebi notes that “disabled people are at a higher risk for incarceration, [and] carceral institutions are disabling” (2024). The criminalization of disability contributes to a culture of mass incarceration (Ben-Moshe 2020; Valles 2023; Davis 2010). Against this backdrop, perhaps it’s best to take a caring, therapeutic, or clinical approach to disability. 

According to critics, however, this is simply the other side of the double-bind. Ben-Moshe, Tremain (2023), Murthy (2023), and others have argued that imprisonment is just one aspect of an integrated carceral system that includes nursing homes, rehabilitation clinics, and other institutions that forcibly confine disabled people for economic gain. As Ben-Moshe (2021) argues, prisons, along with psychiatric hospitals, juvenile detention centers, immigration detention facilities, and other forms of institutionalized confinement, function jointly as a ‘carceral continuum’ that enforces ableist oppression. Tremain similarly describes prisons and ‘care’ facilities as constitutive parts of a ‘carceral archipelago’ that perpetuates eugenics (2021). So-called ‘caring’ techniques are often as oppressive as carceral practices, if not more so. 

Philosophers have also challenged the notion that pity and sympathy (rather than, say, solidarity or recognition) are appropriate responses to disabled/Mad/addicted people. August Gorman, for one, notes that the attitude of “dehumanizing pity on full display” in Strawson is less kind and caring than condescending and “horribly patronizing” (2024: 11). Citing Joseph Stramodo (2010: 132), Gorman explains that “pity reinforces the… construction of disability [as impairment] by not challenging it as contingent” (Gorman, 11). In short, nondisabled people’s pity reifies disability as a biological defect of individual bodies, as per the medical model, rather than recognizing it as a contingent social construct (Oliver 2013), apparatus of power (Tremain 2016), or site of political solidarity (Barnes 2016), as per social-constructionist models. Pity looks down on the ‘poor, unfortunate cripple’ from a position of superiority, creating a mystique of progressivism and allyship, while failing to interrogate liberalism’s complicity with mass incarceration and able-bodied privilege. In response to performative gestures of allyship from liberal philosophers, Stramondo says, “piss on pity!” (ibid).

Pity may also reinforce neuronormativity as a natural, apolitical system of rules and expectations, rather than a political regime that privileges neurotypical elites. When we pity (or punish) neurodivergent/disabled people for ‘failing’ to follow the rules of ‘the moral community,’ we presume that these rules are objectively correct and universally binding. But what if the rules are biased? Gorman suggests that a rigid set of rules is incompatible with the neurodiversity paradigm, which views neurodivergences as natural variations in how people’s brains function. When we judge neurodivergent people by neurotypical standards, we are enforcing a regime of compulsory neurotypicality – one that treats neurotypicality as the default, natural, or superior way of being. (Garson 2022, 2023). Writ large, neuronormativity stifles democratic values of disobedience, playfulness, creativity, and epistemic humility, which protect us against cultural imperialism (e.g., Lugones 1987; McKeown 2022; Ngyuen 2019). 

To illustrate this point, Gorman gives the example of someone with ADHD who arrives late to dinner with a friend because she got distracted – a common feature of ADHD.  According to Angela Smith (2005), being late can indicate a lack of attention and proper concern, which violates a legitimate moral expectation. As a norm-violator, the latecomer might warrant resentment or anger; but given her ADHD, pity might seem like a more compassionate response. But what if neither response is appropriate? Perhaps the neuronormative rules that apply to non-ADHD people don’t necessarily apply to ADHD people, or don’t apply in the same way. (Punctuality, after all, wasn’t strictly enforced until the invention of industrialized labor, when strict schedules allowed employers to regulate productivity, generating surplus capital). Perhaps the latecomer isn’t careless or negligent; she’s just neurodivergent. If so, then pity is no more fitting than blame. The dinner can commence without either reaction. 

Some have suggested that pity may be a useful attitude for neurodivergent/disabled people to adopt toward ourselves, as it may absolve us of the guilt that we would otherwise feel for being unable to follow societal rules and maintain relationships with ‘normal’ people. But Jeppsson argues that this self-reflexive stance is not only unhelpful but untenable, at least in the long run. While “seeing oneself as a victim of faulty neurotransmitters” may offer temporary relief from guilt, it eventually leads to feelings of “helplessness” and hopelessness – feelings that are not only harmful but difficult to sustain over time (Jeppsson 2023: 295). One can regard oneself as a ‘broken machine’ for only so long; eventually, one’s personhood becomes undeniable. Jeppsson observes that when she hallucinates about being chased by demons, she chooses how to respond to the hallucinations: whether to run, call a friend, re-assess her beliefs, or do something else. She can try to do nothing, but even inaction is a choice. Maintaining the ‘objective’ view of herself as a ‘hopeless schizophrenic’ is not feasible for long. This implies that what Strawson described as a humane and  civilized attitude toward schizophrenia may, from a first-person standpoint, be neither of those things.  

Responsibility as Rehabilitation

Strawson’s objective attitude goes hand-in-hand with a therapeutic or rehabilitative approach to ‘impaired agents,’ which has since become the dominant view in philosophy. For Strawson, such agents are apt candidates for management, treatment, and curing. Contemporary philosophers have adopted this therapeutic framing under the guise of ‘moral enhancement,’ ‘scaffolding’ (Vargas 2013; McGeer 2019), or ‘treatment’ (Caruso & Pereboom 2022). It is easy to see this approach as a kinder, gentler alternative to the traditional retributive view, which seeks to punish or deter wrongdoing. But, as discussed above, disabled philosophers have challenged the sharp distinction between carceral systems and caregiving systems, arguing that they often lie on a continuum of disciplinary techniques, rather than representing genuine alternatives (Tremain 2021; Ben-Moshe 2020; Chapman 2023; Glightly 2020). Thus, promoting clinical uses of responsibility may (tacitly if not overtly) contribute to a growing ‘carceral continuum’ that aims to control disabled bodies.   

In this connection, Ciurria (2024b) warns that moral-enhancement accounts of responsibility are ripe for “elite capture,” which Olufemi Taiwo (2022) describes as the process by which privileged groups co-opt political movements, resources, and discourses, redirecting them to serve their own interests rather than the needs of the marginalized communities those movements were originally meant to support. According to Ciurria, the rhetoric of ‘agency enhancement’ is just as susceptible to co-optation as the rhetoric of retributive justice because therapeutic discourse – along with self-help, wellness, and rehabilitation rhetoric – has already been widely co-opted and monetized by corporations and businesspeople who sell self-help books, psychotherapy, pharmacotherapy, wellness apps, diet programs, and other for-profit services. Likewise, ‘therapeutic’ industries, such as rehabilitation clinics and therapeutic boarding schools for teens, often generate enormous profits while offering little to no benefit to service-users. Consequently, arguments for the therapeutic use of responsibility risk legitimizing ableist practices, if they fail to recognize the commodification of ‘treatment.’ 

Ciurria notes further that historical philosophers have failed to register and interrogate the oppressive dimensions of the therapeutic industry. When Strawson published his influential paper, the ‘treatments’ sanctioned (and sometimes mandated) by ‘social policy’ included lobotomy, forced sterilization, ice baths, electroconvulsive therapy, conversation therapy for gay people, and other paternalistic interventions that, paradoxically, inflicted disablement and even death on those being ‘cared for.’ Strawson’s neglect of these ‘cures’ stems from the use of “ideal theory,” which Charles Mills (2017) described as a dominant approach in moral and political philosophy, which abstracts away from real-world injustices, thereby reinforcing them. Strawson’s work, which detaches disability from the context of ableism in which it is instantiated, has been described as a version of ideal theory (Ciurria 2019; Holroyd 2023). Ideal theory disregards the social determinants of disability, including medical neglect, carceral violence, austerity measures, exploitative labor conditions, and disaster capitalism.   

As part of a broader critique of capitalism, Robert Chapman suggests that the liberal push for therapy for non-neurotypical (and other ‘abnormal’) people has fueled a billion-dollar ‘normalization industry’ that sells ‘therapeutic’ interventions that mainly benefit corporate elites: 

Outside the prison system, normalisation has increasingly been taken to be obligatory from younger and younger ages as the notion of mental disorder came to be seen as hereditary harmful dysfunction. For instance, with autism, behavioural interventions still focus on using a reward system to normalise neurodivergence. This has grown into a multi­billion­dollar industry with huge schools established, especially across the United States, to help enforce normalisation. Despite the protests of countless autistic activists who argue that such efforts are themselves a harmful and dehumanising form of conversion therapy, behavioural therapies are thus still the most widely used response in the United Kingdom and the United States and are regularly touted as the ‘gold standard’ of autism interventions. (2023: 120)

In mainstream society, there is a presumed responsibility to ‘be normal,’ or adhere to the neuronormative “rules of life” (Muller-Kosmarov 2023). Those who fail to meet this expectation are viewed as socially impaired, unfit for relationships, and a burden to society. The presumption of a ‘responsibility to be normal’ has given rise to a multi-billion-dollar ‘normalization industry’ – a network of self-care, wellness, mindfulness, psychiatric, rehabilitative, and other ‘caregiving’ services that promise to ‘normalize’ people’s behaviour. 

An example given by Chapman is “Applied Behavior Analysis,” which “was designed to use a system of punishments and rewards to try to make autistic children more ‘normal’” (8). This therapy has faced “countless critiques from neurodiversity proponents who see [it] as abusive and a form of conversion therapy,” and yet “its growth [has] continued” under the auspices of the “multi­billion­pound international [normalisation] industry” (ibid). Similarly, self-care products, wellness apps, and short-term counselling sessions appeal to corporate interests because they “help tired people adjust to increasingly long working hours and lower living conditions,” producing an obedient and exploitable work force (Chapman, 120). The normalization industry is thriving because the dominant concept of ‘normalcy’ in neoliberal societies is tied to the ability to meet productivity quotas and increase shareholder value. 

Other disabled philosophers have highlighted the wellness industry’s connection to a presumed ‘responsibility to be well,’ which grounds the right to blame (resent, disapprove of, be mad at), or pity and avoid, unwell individuals. Emma Sheppard writes that the “narrative [of wellness] builds an expectation that the chronically pained person will be cured of their pain – that they can be cured…, that they want to be cured (using the contemporary tools of Western medicine),” and that they ought to be cured (2022: 151). Those who are not ‘cured’ are seen as having failed in their responsibility to be and remain well. As a result, chronically pained people are viewed as chronic failures, perpetually deserving of resentment and/or pity. 

The wellness industry individualizes wellness as a personal responsibility, thereby obscuring the relationship between wellness and “socioeconomic factors – such as race, class, location” (Sheppard 152). Privileged groups have better access to the social determinants of health, such as clean water, air, food, and healthcare (Wolf 2011; Dula 2007; Wilson 2020). When wellness is framed as an individual responsibility, governments can justify denying people essential services, defunding the welfare state, and transferring wealth to the private sector.  

Alison Reiheld calls the so-called ‘responsibility’ to be healthy above all else “healthism” (2019): 

Trying to (as I have done for so long) prove one’s worth by trying to prove one’s health individualizes the way that fat folks are disabled by a world that doesn’t design things to include them and, in addition, presumes that they have no abilities of any worth on any other standards of value. We see this latter presumption happen with employment discrimination and educational discrimination against fat folks. (2019)

Fat people are consistently punished and pitied because of their supposed ‘poor health,’ even though there is no direct correlation between body size and health, nor is there a duty to be either healthy or thin. But the conflation of fatness and illness justifies a range of ableist (micro)aggressions, including resentment, disapproval, pity, and avoidance. The diet industry promotes the illusion of a ‘responsibility to be healthy’ in order to sell weight-loss products and diet regimens, even though these products and services contribute to cultural fatphobia. 

Rodier and Brennan note that fatness is medicalized as “obesity” by “a predatory diet and weight-loss industry,” alongside “ongoing [systems] of imperialism, scientific racism, and colonialism,” which promote fat stigma (2023: 52). While fat studies regards obesity as a social construct, fatness is medically defined as a “natural bodily feature” of sick individuals, justifying the imposition of discipline (e.g., diets, exercise) on fat bodies (ibid). Obesity, furthermore, is often described as a “contagion” that “specifically flourishes within immigrant and racialized groups,” implying that these groups are “drains on society” (53). The diagnostic category of obesity, then, is used to reinforce racial oppression (Strings 2019).

Arguably, another example of exploitation masquerading as therapy is the ‘care’ industry. Shelley Tremain uses the term “nursing-home industrial complex” to describe “nursing homes, assisted-living centers, and other congregate settings in which older people and younger disabled people are placed” (2021: 14). She argues that this complex is not, as philosophers often claim, “a paradigmatic site… of care and love,” but is instead “the linchpin of an industrial complex of governmentality,” which capitalizes on and perpetuates the notion of disability as biological impairment, thereby maintaining the “apparatus of disability” (16). Nursing homes, therefore, function less as caregiving facilities and more as sites of confinement. Like prisons, nursing homes and other ‘care’ institutions profit from the segregation and isolation of oppressed groups, especially “racialized and newcomer senior, elderly, and disabled women,” who “constitute a growing sector of nursing home residents” (15). 

Also akin to prisons, nursing homes have high rates of abuse, neglect, and preventable deaths. Tremain notes that in 2020, the vast majority of deaths related to Covid-19 occurred in nursing homes. During the first wave of the pandemic, a whistle-blower report cited numerous health and safety violations in Canadian nursing homes, including 

cockroach and rodent infestations, verbal abuse of residents, dirty linen or no linen on residents’ beds, inadequate cleaning and sanitizing of residents’ rooms, fecal contamination, inedible food served to residents, force-feeding residents to the point of audible choking, lack of personal protective equipment, lack of hygiene, understaffing, and lack of staff training with respect to infection control. (Tremain: 20)

These violations were not new but were exacerbated by pandemic conditions. Even under ordinary circumstances, ‘care’ facilities involve carceral techniques, such as “scheduled bath days and bowel days, wake-up times and bedtimes, frugal meal planning and food rationing, locked wards, visitor restrictions, and other signposts of carceral logic” (Tremain, 25). As Tremain notes, Foucault coined the term “carceral archipelago” to explain how “entities and sites not usually associated with the prison, with the carceral, and with the punitive, are in fact ‘islands’ of the carceral whose architecture, routines, schedules, and purposes mirror the physical and conceptual design and functions of the prison” (25). The nursing-home industrial complex, in short, mirrors the prison-industrial complex in its reliance on segregation, abuse, neglect, surveillance, and coercion to advance the interests of corporate elites.    

The ostensible purpose of nursing homes is to make disabled and elderly people more ‘independent,’ as reflected in the euphemism, ‘independent living facility.’ If these facilities genuinely scaffold people’s independence and wellbeing, then their monetary beneficiaries – the suppliers, temp agencies, catering companies, and so on – could take responsibility for contributing to the public good. Likewise, governments could justify funding these industries and taking money from the powerful nursing-home lobby. But if nursing homes are little more than glorified prisons – part of a ‘carceral archipelago’ that renders marginalized populations docile and exploitable – then these corporate entities (and the politicians they bankroll) don’t deserve praise at all. On the contrary, they deserve blame, resentment, protest. 

To avoid blame and liability, governments attempt to shift the responsibility for wellness onto the individual. At the start of the pandemic, the Ford administration told “the people of Ontario… to ‘stay home,’ ‘wear masks,’ ‘practice social distancing,’ and ‘wash their hands,’ effectively downloading to individual Ontarians full responsibility for the catastrophic transmission of the virus in nursing homes” (Tremain, 19, citing Danisch, 2021). As nursing-home captives died en massein deplorable conditions, the government denied any responsibility.    

Like Tremain and others, Andrea Pitts (2023, 2022) questions the distinction drawn between the logic of incarceration and the logic of rehabilitation. Pitts recalls that after 

the formal (legal) ending of slavery in Canada and the US, prisons and jails…began to be considered for their “rehabilitative” effects, rather than serving simply as a means of punishment or deterrence. “Black Codes” in the USA, for example, penalized recently emancipated Black Americans for vagrancy and labor contract violations (e.g., refusing to work in accordance with the terms of a white employer)… The rationale was that prisons and jails, alongside asylums, residential schools, and hospitals, could be used to socially, physically, and emotionally shape those who inhabited these institutions and make them ready to enter the labor force upon release. Such a framing of “rehabilitation” also justified the convict leasing system throughout the US South, a series of programs that treated incarcerated peoples as slaves, and leased incarcerated workers to private companies for pay (2022, p. 240).   

In short, after the abolition of slavery, governments began marketing prisons and other carceral systems as rehabilitation facilities with the stated mission of reforming prisoners’ moral character and benefiting the public. By re-branding prisons as rehabilitative institutions or ‘correctional facilities,’ governments could justify their rapid expansion, along with the introduction of exploitative labor programs such as convict leasing, penal labor, and the ‘workfare’ programming of today. Imprisonment was framed as being not only for the good of society, but for the good of prisoners themselves, who would be morally healed and saved.  

Murthy raises a similar concern about rehabilitation or ‘residential treatment centres’ for addicts. There is a long-standing philosophical debate, largely popularized by Harry Frankfurt (1971), over whether addicts deserve blame or compassion. There are two sides to this debate: “One group, ‘choice theorists,’ tend to think [that addicts are blameworthy]; another, ‘disease theorists,’ think not” (2024: 1). These sides roughly correspond to different policy preferences. If addicts are blameworthy, they deserve punitive treatment, potentially including imprisonment; if they are ‘diseased,’ they deserve compassion, and perhaps rehabilitation or residential treatment. Murthy argues that this distinction is immaterial since both arguments are simply pretexts for addict oppression. Whether addicts are involuntarily incarcerated or involuntarily treated, they are deprived of basic liberties, and exposed to secondary harms such as stigma, police brutality, loss of employment, and the risk of forced sterilization. As such, Murthy suggests that carceral and clinical systems are better understood as a disciplinary continuum rather than separate entities; “An adverse interaction with the carceral system can invite medical oversight: for example, court-mandated treatment (Coviello et al. 2013). It works the opposite way too; medical intervention precipitates police involvement” (2023: 9). Theoretical debates about addict responsibility obscure the real oppression imposed on addicts through the ‘clinical-carceral seesaw’ and other double-binds.

Like addicts, disabled people are highly susceptible to segregation and coercive control, whether in ‘care’ facilities or carceral systems. There are legitimate questions about whether debates over (individual) responsibility can effectively address these structural and institutional harms. Murthy (2024) and Jeppsson (2023) have criticized philosophers for treating disabled/Mad people as fodder for thought experiments, or test cases for their pet theories, rather than real people dealing with real oppression. The classic ‘armchair’ approach objectifies disabled/Mad people and generates “flat stories” that erase the complexity of their lived experiences (Lackey 2024). As Gorman attests, “we have flattened the way we perceive a complex landscape [agency] for theoretical purposes, but in real life, the messy complexity of agential diversity exists nonetheless, and our responsibility norms are simply not flexible enough to account for it” (2024: 6). Talia Mae Bettcher criticizes philosopher for “suppose[ing] that philosophical investigations into race, gender, disability, trans issues, and so forth are no different methodologically from investigations into the question whether tables really exist”; that is, philosophers treat marginalized people as if they were objects, with no stake in the outcome of the conversation (2018). This methodology  contributes to epistemic injustice, or an unfair and prejudiced dismissal of someone’s speech (Fricker 2007; McKinnon 2016; Dembroff 2020; Curry 2019; Charlton 1998), as well as secondary effects such as susceptibility to unemployment, poverty, homelessness, incarceration, and violence.  

This method can also contribute to what Tremain calls “ableist structural gaslighting (2020), which occurs when conceptual analysis “functions to obscure the nonaccidental connections between structures of oppression and the patterns of harm that they produce and license” (Tremain 2020, citing Berenstain 2020). Defining disability solely as impairment erases the structural and political dimensions of disability, constituting structural ableist gaslighting. Structural gaslighting, in turn, distorts the distribution of responsibility by obscuring the systems of oppression in which some people perpetrate, and others resist, ableism. If we cannot discern structural injustices, we cannot accurately assign responsibility within them. 

Responsibility as Risk Management

Another common theme in mainstream discourse is the conflation of disability with risk, which implies responsibilities of management and containment. Melinda Hall argues that disability is often framed as a manageable risk – something individuals have a responsibility to manage, control, and eliminate (2023). For example, the genetic testing service 23andMe is marketed as an opportunity for individuals to assess and manage their risk of developing specific disabilities (Hall, 393). This framing reinforces the medical model, which defines disability as an individual impairment that is unwanted and under one’s individual control. 

The concept of risk is also racialized and weaponized against marginalized communities. For example, when a Black American is described as a ‘risk’ after being shot by the police, responsibility is shifted onto the victim, justifying the use of state-sanctioned violence. The disablement of Black Americans by police brutality is thus framed as a reasonable response to risk.  

Hall underscores that, while disabled people are expected to ‘manage’ their own disabilities, non-disabled people are positioned as ‘risk managers,’ responsible for ‘helping’ disabled individuals achieve functionality, wellness, and health. Those positioned as risk-managers include healthcare practitioners, police, prison guards, welfare bureaucrats, and other professionals who exercise disproportionate control over disabled people’s lives, ostensibly for their own good, and for the good of society. The conflation of disability with risk renders disabled people vulnerable to coercive forms of what Foucault called “biopower” – the administration, optimization, and regulation of life itself (Hall 2023). Disabled people are treated not as responsible agents but as populations to be monitored, corrected, and controlled through institutionalized surveillance, medical intervention, and bureaucratic oversight. This top-down governance, characteristic of biopower, constructs disability as a threat to be contained rather than a biopolitical construct – a site of contestation and political struggle. 

Perhaps the most extreme form of ‘risk management’ vis-à-vis disability is the elimination of disability altogether, also known as eugenics. Eugenics, in brief, seeks to eliminate disability, and by extension disabled culture, under the guise of improving society or promoting public health. Often, eugenics is defended as being in the best interests of disabled people, based on the assumption that they cannot live ‘good’ (functional, healthy, normal) lives. Tremain argues that the nursing-home industrial complex is an example of “neo-eugenic politics,” subjecting target populations to “segregation” and “mass murder” (2021: 23). Nursing homes ‘manage’ disability by creating segregated, unlivable conditions where people needlessly die. 

Tremain also describes Canada’s expansion of Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) to those whose deaths are not reasonably foreseeable, passed in the first year of the pandemic, as a mechanism of “neoliberal eugenics,” “constitute[ing] a threat to [disabled people’s] collective existence” (2021, 2023). The MAiD expansion was justified as a path to “greater equality for disabled people by further enshrining their rights to autonomy and self-determination,” but Tremain argues that it did the opposite: undermined disabled people’s constitutional rights by making them more susceptible to mass murder. The government used the pandemic to pass the MAiD expansion rather than addressing the social determinants of injury and death. In so doing, they were able to obscure and deflect their own responsibility for eugenic conditions.    

Another example of ‘risk management’ is the use of prenatal screening to test for and eliminate genetic variations perceived as biological impairments, which gives rise to a putative responsibility to terminate a pregnancy with a genetic ‘risk factor,’ or intervene to eliminate a genetic ‘risk’ in utero. Elizabeth Dietz points out that the availability of prenatal screening tests in Denmark has virtually eliminated Down Syndrome, along with the community of Down Syndrome people (2022; Zhang 2020). While prenatal screening is often presented as a value-neutral tool to scaffold parents’ autonomy, Dietz emphasizes that “the way we build scientific systems is not neutral”; the screening tests are often taken to imply that genetic variations coded as disabilities are genetic ‘risks’ that parents ought to eliminate – that is, which they have a responsibility to eliminate. This perception may constrain, rather than enhance, parents’ reproductive autonomy, especially if community support – including the existence of disabled communities – is being eliminated. If everybody chooses to eliminate a foetus with a ‘risk’ of Down Syndrome, then no parent will have the choice to bring a Down Syndrome child into a world with adequate resources and community supports.

Dorothea Roberts worries that the existence of prenatal screening, along with the perception of a duty to eliminate genetic ‘risks,’ will be used by the government to justify the elimination of social services, making it even harder for disabled people to survive: “In the neoliberal future, the state may rely on the expectation that all pregnant women will undergo genetic testing to legitimize not only its refusal to support the care of disabled children but also its denial of broader claims for public provision of health care’ (Roberts 2009, 79). The conflation of disability with ‘manageable risk’ shifts the responsibility for caregiving from the collective onto the individual, justifying the government’s gutting of the welfare system.  

In healthist societies, there is a perceived duty to be well or die. If one cannot be well enough for long enough, then one ought to die – one has a responsibility to die – according to the logic of healthism. Healthism, as such, supports a culture of eugenics that is hostile to disabled people’s existence. This culture blames and/or pities disabled people for their ‘poor health,’ and justifies the use of carceral-clinical interventions to control disabled populations. 

On the other hand, privileged people’s risk-taking is often praised and celebrated. Hall gives the example of “venture capitalists” and “business leaders,” who are lauded for their “risky” economic decisions (2023: 397). Although the risky choices of billionaires are harmful to society, neoliberal discourse reframes those choices as brave, innovative, and socially useful. 

An example of this framing can be seen in a much-cited essay by Bernard Williams on moral luck (1981). Williams asks whether Paul Gauguin’s ‘risky’ decision to travel to Tahiti to pursue his artistic career, leaving behind his wife and children, was morally justified. Williams concludes that Gauguin’s risk-taking was vindicated by his later success as an artist. Rather than blame or resentment, Gaugin deserves praise for taking a risk that paid off. However, this opinion is no longer in vogue. From a modern perspective, there can be little doubt that Gaguin’s risky decision was quite self-serving. As art historian Sasha Grishin succinctly puts it, Gauguin was “a ‘sex tourist,’ who dumped his wife and five children in poverty in Europe and took up residence in French Polynesia, where he married three native children, the youngest 13, the others 14” (Grishin 2024). Guaguin portrayed his victims as “scantily clad submissive very young girls in exotic native huts,” against a backdrop of a ‘primitive’ and ‘simple’ Polynesian culture (ibid). Many museums now refuse to display these paintings because they are so offensive and tasteless. While Gaugin was once praised and celebrated for his risky artistic choices, he is now widely reviled as a pedophilic colonizer.  

Marianna Leventi (2024) adds that Williams’ interpretation of Gauguin depends on a sexist double standard. If a woman had abandoned her husband and children to pursue her artistic career, would society celebrate her ‘risky’ decision? Would a woman be celebrated for painting sexualized images of underaged Tahitian boys? Whether a risk is considered morally justified depends on societal expectations about gender, race, disability, and other political factors (viz., Haulotte 2024; Patrizio 2024). In neoliberal societies, the same risks that are celebrated when taken by wealthy colonizers are blamed and punished when taken by others.

Since disability is defined as risk, disabled people’s risk-taking is always already stigmatized. Disabled people do not have the same freedom as their nondisabled counterparts to take risks without fear of reprisals. Disabled people’s choices are disproportionally viewed as risky because disability itself is construed as a risk, which constrains disabled people’s autonomy. 

Relational Responsibility 

According to Strawson (and some later proponents of the Strawsonian paradigm), responsibility is a property exclusively or paradigmatically held by neurotypical, adult humans. Consequently, non-neurotypical, non-human, and non-adult beings are excluded from, or marginalized within, the domain of responsibility. Stephanie Jenkins calls this exclusionary principle “the capacities criterion,” which classifies “animals and people with disabilities (especially…. cognitive disabilities)” as “moral patients” and “non-contributing dependents” (2023: 378; cf. Jenkins 2020). As such, the capacities criterion “guarantees an exclusionary ethics that is powerless to question its complicity with discourses of normalcy” (382-383; cf. Carlson 2023). The ‘normal’ person is framed as a privileged, nondisabled, adult human, while everyone else – the vast majority of living beings – is seen as deviant or lesser.

This criterion, adds Jenkins, has engendered “a morality of competition,” whereby disability rights activists and animal rights activists compete to prove that their cause is the most valid. Rather than collaborating to dismantle the continuum of ableist human supremacy, animal and disability rights activists tend to get entangled in debates about whether pigs or human babies, for instance, deserve more rights (Singer 1996; Kittay 2009). This is counterproductive because ableism and human supremacy are part of the same carceral continuum (Gruen 2015; Jenkins, Montford, & Taylor 2020). In fact, Tremain argues that “species” is a social construct, not a natural kind that exists prior to and independent of human classification (2021b). Thus, these conceptual distinctions, and the competitive debates they engender, are a distraction from the goal of dismantling a shared source of oppression: exploitative industries, including nursing homes, rehabilitation clinics, factory farms, animal labs, and other carceral systems that benefit a handful of corporate executives. As Jenkins observes, the capacities criterion, and the “constriction of the moral community” that it entails, has been useful to imperialist regimes, including the Nazis, who constructed a hierarchy of personhood that disenfranchised not only disabled humans and so-called animals, but many other groups (cf. Vetlesen 1994). Rather than an exclusionary ethic, Jenkins calls for “an anti-essentialist, inclusive, embodied ethics that opposes the use of performance criteria [like the capacities criterion] for moral consideration” (385). An inclusive theory of moral agency would challenge and disrupt capitalistic systems that confine, commodify, and consume available bodies, whether human or animal, child or adult.

The capacities criterion – and the corresponding exclusion of non-neurotypical, non-adult, non-human individuals from the moral community – is increasingly being challenged by marginalized philosophers. For example, Shyam Ranganathan contends that Western paradigms of responsibility use the logic of colonialism to justify the oppression of marginalized groups, including nonhuman species, disabled humans, and racialized others (2024). Western philosophy marginalizes and racializes non-Western approaches to responsibility, including Ranganathan’s specialization of South Asian philosophy, by categorizing them as ‘religion’ or ‘mysticism,’ external to the proper sphere of (secular) philosophy. Within South Indian philosophy, it is much more common to find accounts of non-human animals and living ecosystems as moral persons with rights and responsibilities.     

Similarly, Shelbi Meissner and Andrew Smith contend that Western philosophy has marginalised Indigenous standpoints that espouse a more inclusive and less anthropocentric definition of responsibility (2024). Indigenous environmental feminisms, for instance, view responsibility as a property of “extended more-than-human kinship relationships,” encompassing humans as well as “other-than-human beings, spiritual and abiotic entities, and landscapes” (2024: 14-19). Moral responsibility, as such, is a relational property, distributed across networks of relationships that include, but extend far beyond, the human community. 

Kyle Whyte’s work on Indigenous environmental justice illustrates how non-human animals can be appropriate targets of the reactive attitudes. Whyte emphasizes that many Indigenous communities have an “emotional-laden relationship” to “features of the land (like rivers or mountains),” as well as “natural interdependent collectives,” and these relationships ground reciprocal responsibilities between humans, the land, and extended ecosystems (2014: 602). For example, “a community may have a responsibility to care for salmon habitat; salmon, in turn, may provide food and support for other species” (603). If humans fulfil their responsibilities toward the salmon, they can expect generosity in return, and if salmon provide nourishment, they warrant gratitude from their human stewards. In this way, the reactive attitudes play a role in structuring and maintaining relationships of responsibility and respect between humans, nonhuman animals, and the ecosystems on which they all depend. 

These discourses are largely absent from mainstream accounts of responsibility, which tend to assume a Strawsonian, individualist, capacity-based, anthropocentric understanding of moral agency. On the dominant model, people belong to the moral community because of their individual capacities, not because of their interconnectedness with other human and nonhuman persons. In contrast, non-Western (and crip) perspectives tend to view responsibility as relational rather than individual, extending moral agency beyond a subset of humans to all humans, non-human species, and ecological networks like lakes and streams.   

Ciurria adds that Strawson’s exclusion of young children from the moral community is not as self-evident as some would think (2024c). Not only do many relational accounts identify children as moral agents, but youth-rights philosophers and activists maintain that young people are morally disenfranchised when denied relational responsibilities such as the right to participate in electoral politics (Wall 2016, 2021). The National Youth Rights Association (2024) affirms that young people are subject to “adultism,” or “ageism against the young,” which undermines their right “to be full participants in our representative democracy through voting, the right to privacy, the right to be free from physical punishment, the right to make decisions about our own lives,” and other constitutional freedoms. Youth suffragists suggest that recognizing young people as moral persons, capable of fulfilling important relational, civic, and institutional responsibilities, would contribute to the youth rights movement’s goal of dismantling adult supremacy and reducing the prevalence of child abuse (Ciurria 2024c).  

Future Directions

At the time of writing, the carceral continuum is being expanded and intensified through the fortification of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the construction of new immigration detention centres like Alligator Alcatraz, the enlargement of existing concentration camps like the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT), and Trumps’ recent promise to forcibly institutionalize addicted and homeless people in ‘therapeutic’ congregate facilities en masse. These segregation techniques – which disproportionally target disabled people – are defended as either legitimate forms of punishment or therapeutic modes of socialization and treatment. The two justifications appeal to different audiences – one to tough-on-crime conservatives, the other to responsibility-minded liberals who want to ‘enhance people’s agency.’ But both discourses, whatever their theoretical appeal, have been fully co-opted by corporate elites to legitimize the expansion of segregated institutions for the exclusive benefit of the rich. This non-ideal (ableist) dimension of responsibility must be given more attention in philosophical debates. 

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