ABSTRACT
What is it to be disabled and what should society provide for people with disabilities? This, quite clearly, is a topic of great importance in the real world. In the UK at present there are over 10 million people with a ‘limiting long term illness, impairment or disability’ (DWP 2010), and a huge amount of financial resources and other forms of support and effort are devoted towards making the lives of people with disabilities better than they otherwise would be. Of course we might wonder whether all these people really are disabled in any significant sense. But obviously very many people do suffer from some form of disability. But do we do enough for people with disabilities? And do we do the right things? It is, of course, well known that until fairly recently it was standard
practice for people labelled as disabled – especially, but not only, those said to have mental disabilities – to spend their lives in special institutions, often in semi-rural settings or on the edges of towns, where they lived with other people in similar conditions, and with those who were there to take care of them. Unless they had first established a life elsewhere they would have been unlikely to have friends outside the institution, and visits from family members would typically have been special occasions, such as weekend afternoons, rather than built into the fabric of everyday life. Such places were often called ‘asylums’ as if they were places of special retreat and protection. In the analysis of some critics, though, the
reverse is true: they allowed members of mainstream society to take refuge from those people who were disturbing to deal with. Thus, it is claimed, the main function of homes for disabled people was to ensure that the rest of us need have little to do with them. In the worst cases they were likened to prisons, with inmates having no rights to leave. This changed during the 1980s with the Conservative government
policy of introducing ‘care in the community’, strengthening individual rights, and closing down many such facilities. No doubt there were economic motives behind such changes, but whether intended or unintended, they have done a certain amount to bring disabled people into contact with broader society. Yet the transition is only half made. In many cases disabled people see few people other than family members, service professionals, and other disabled people at day centres. To some degree, day centres have taken the place of homes for the disabled, in that they keep disabled people occupied, but away from non-disabled people (Duffy 2010). Imagine yourself in the shoes of a person who attends a day centre. It is likely that you will be collected by a coach or minibus, which then winds round town for an hour or two picking up others. On arrival at the day centre there may be a visit from reluctant school children, required to help out as part of a social education programme, or from volunteers or others who will engage on a variety of levels, but often tending towards the patronizing end of the spectrum, while watching television fills the empty spaces. You would be fed a meal of a quality you almost certainly would not have paid for, followed by an afternoon of cursory activities, under the heading of ‘occupational therapy’, which is halfway between nursery school and the hospital ward. Then back into the coach for a couple of hours, before being dropped off to watch some more television in your parents’ home. Are we doing the right things? What else might we do? The
treatment of people with disabilities appears to be a question of justice, and, one might think, contemporary theories of distributive
justice should put the question of what society should do for people with disabilities at the forefront of concern. That is what one might think. The reality is somewhat different.
