The Disabled Contract: A Précis

This chapter presents key arguments made in my book, The Disabled Contract: Severe Intellectual Disability, Justice and Morality. It examines how people with severe intellectual disabilities (PSID) fare within the social contract tradition. More specifically, it contends that even strategies that attempt to integrate disability within the realm of contractual justice and morality are not entirely successful. These strategies cannot ground a robust moral status for PSID; or, if they do so, it is at the cost of making this status merely derivative or contingent. The failure of social contract theory to bring PSID within its purview is significant. At best, it reveals a gap that should impel moral and political theorists to give fiduciary and caring ideals due weight next to contractual ideals. At worst, the tradition is not only incomplete, but necessarily creates and oppresses the “disabled subject.”