ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Eric Thomas Weber draws on his experiences as a parent of a child with cognitive disabilities to highlight changes and challenges to his expectations of parenthood. Weber’s experiences confront prejudices and latent assumptions, others’ and his own, about what it means to live a good human life, and what parents ought to hope for and promote for their children. In the midst of these experiences, Weber finds a useful orientation in John Lach’s stoic pragmatism. Stoic pragmatism welds pragmatism’s ameliorative impulse with a stoic appreciation for how contingencies shape ameliorative possibilities. After adopting a stoic pragmatist attitude, Weber finds new resources for confronting the pernicious assumptions about what good human life involves.
