Jeff Brown: Disability, Equality, and the Minority Group Model

This past Friday saw the first time WPES had a graduate student present this semester.  Jeff Brown of WUSTL Philosophy wrote a thought-provoking paper on equality and disability.  The paper will eventually be a part of his broader dissertation on disabilities, which is a positive and normative discussion on the “ideal of equality and the fact of disability.”

Brown begins by tracing historical thinking on disability.  The traditional paradigm has been the medical model, wherein individuals have a medical problem, which causes their disability.  The new paradigm, which is broadly favored by social advocates for the disabled, views disability as a consequence of discrimination.  In this model, referred to as the minority group model, it is not the individual's physical need for wheelchairs that causes disability: it is society's lack of ramps.  Disability, in other words, is a social construct.

As a piece of rigorous analytic philosophy, navigation of Brown’s paper requires some introduction of ideas and terminology.  Luckily, the respondent on Friday was none other than WPES director Frank Lovett. (Professor Ian MacMullen of Political Science generously ran the discussion in Dr. Lovett's place).  I’ll try to summarize the paper and necessary background as concisely as Dr. Lovett did on Friday:

To illustrate the failings of both the minority group model and the medical model, Brown contrasts two different versions of an equality ideal: The first is "formal equality of opportunity," which defines equal treatment as when there is no active or intended discrimination based on morally irrelevant characteristics (e.g. ethnicity).  The second is fair equality of opportunity, which holds that equal treatment is satisfied when people with roughly similar abilities are able to achieve roughly similar rewards.

Brown points out that a racist society could quite easily meet the employment requirements of the formal equality model by limiting its discrimination to before the hiring process, e.g. if racial minorities are prevented from receiving an education, they will be objectively unqualified when applying for jobs. 

Brown argues the disabled situation parallels the racial one because their opportunities to gain experience and qualifications are limited due to the material and social conditions of society.  Even in the absence of formal discrimination, serious disadvantages remain.  Thus “appealing to a fair equality of opportunity justifies a reasonable accommodation.”

However, Brown makes two major criticisms of the formal equality of opportunity model.  First, it’s standards for equality are too stringent and may require the provision of material aids to the disabled even beyond “a reasonable accommodation,” and second, the model doesn’t adequately account for those severe disabilities which no amount of societal intervention can fully compensate for.  For instance, there currently seems to be no way to build planes that can be flown by the blind.

The general discussion was a particularly lively one on Friday, evidence no doubt of an interesting topic.  Here are some of the highlights:

Professor Larry May raised the issue of where one draws the line constituting objectively “disabled.”  Could Dr. May, for instance, be considered disabled relative to a pro baseball player if it would take him $100,000 worth of surgery to get his fastball up to speed?  More plausibly, what if his memory just isn’t that good, but he wants to be a lawyer or hold some other profession that demands a strong memory?

Professor Chad Flanders of SLU Law asked an interesting question about the moral implications of the cause of any particular disability: should the person whose legs are disabled from birth be on the same moral standing as someone whose legs are ruined by their own drunk driving?

I myself was curious as to how Brown’s view that equality requires reasonable accommodation might be affected by those “disabled” groups’ views.  For example,  many members of the Deaf community view cochlear hearing implants as immoral and even cultural genocide.  Would reasonable accommodation require making only those changes that accord with the Deaf person’s cultural views?

As always, it was an interesting and engaging workshop.  If you'd like to share your own thoughts on the discussion or Brown's paper, please use the comments section.

-Greg Allen