ABSTRACT
Over the past few decades, political and social changes coupled with medical advances have opened up new spaces for thinking about physical and mental deviations from the norm. Disability today can be framed as an emancipatory movement and minority-rights issue; a biomedical phenomenon; an emergent political identity; a set of social relationships and practices; and as this collection shows, as a topic of philosophical and ethical inquiry. The reconceptualisation of disability within disability studies has made it possible to study impairment as one form of variation among humans, thus joining the general late-twentieth-century trend of attending to difference as a ‘significant and central axis of subjectivity and social life’ (Corker 1999: 630). Taking disability into consideration does not simply introduce a new analytic focus on a form of marginalised identity, however. As well as expanding our knowledge of impairment and its consequences, disability offers new perspectives on issues such as autonomy, competence, embodiment, wholeness, human perfectibility, finitude and limits, the relationship between the individual and the community, all of them notions that ‘pervade every aspect’ of our lives (Linton 1998: 118), issues with which moral philosophy and bioethics constantly grapple. It recentres the body within philosophical thought.
