The Bioethics of Disability and Some Neglected Goods
摘要
Human goods provide the foundations of human fulfillment and a good life; moral principles identify what must, may, and must not be done to promote genuine fulfillment in and through such goods. A sound politics, in turn, identifies the necessary social conditions and principles of justice that protect human goods and human fulfillment in society. The past forty-plus years of natural law ethics has seen sustained attention to a subset of such goods, especially life, knowledge, sociality, and religion. But the literature concerning certain of the other goods is more limited. There is relatively little that could be considered a natural law ethic of beauty, work, or play, and little discussion of the political freedoms, responsibilities, and rights that might be attendant upon these goods. This paper proposes some new directions within a natural law bioethics that is concerned with human disability, namely, that such a bioethics should show a greater concern for the role that beauty, work, and play might manifest in the lives of persons with disabilities (I am grateful to Leye Komolafe and Sara Hendren for helpful discussion and comments.).