ABSTRACT
There is little doubt that people with disabilities, even in an affluent country like the United States, are comprehensively disadvantaged. There are however, considerable doubts that wrongful discrimination plays a major role in creating or maintaining that disadvantage. In this chapter, we offer an account of disability discrimination that should help address these doubts. Skepticism about the role of discrimination in producing this state of affairs is based on several claims and assumptions, some more plausible than others. The least tenable is the assumption that attitudes towards people with disabilities are less invidious than those toward other disadvantaged minorities. Disability discrimination, admittedly, does not seem at first glance to fit the paradigm of irrational prejudice or stereotyping associated with other forms of discrimination, particularly racial and ethnic. Resistance to treating disability discrimination as a form of irrationality, even if unwarranted, may suggest that it is better understood simply as a type of distributive injustice.
