ABSTRACT

The moral equality of people with disabilities had previously been greatly doubted in the early years of the Enlightenment, and people with learning disabilities, mental health issues, blind and deaf people were especially thought of as morally uneducable. Despite its roots in the latter years of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment was the name given to a period of philosophy that ran from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. In his influential essay, Lettre sur les aveugles a l’usage de ceux qui voient, published in 1749, Denis Diderot founded a liberal philosophy on the moral condition of deafness and blindness. According to the founders of the Bristol Asylum, its inmates could only achieve religious salvation through reciting passages from the Bible as they performed hard manual labor. Moral treatment as an educational method of teaching people with disabilities evolved in a more reasonable fashion in the decades following the opening of Samuel Howe’s asylums.