ABSTRACT
In its original usage, a disability is a limitation suffered by individuals because they belong to a class regarded as incompetent to exercise at least some of the RIGHTS people normally enjoy. In response, deaf rights advocates urge that sign language be recognized as the language of a minority community with its own identifiable history and culture, and that deaf people be accorded the same moral and political status as other cultural minorities. Whether doing so isolates, or instead elevates, those who sign rather than speak remains a subject of considerable controversy. For whether the inability to speak to the majority of other people, and not just to a minority similar to one's self, compromises an individual's moral agency turns on whether the spoken word is theorized as being essential, or instead as serendipitous, to whatever dialogical functions are crucial to human flourishing.
