The Life Worth Living: Disability, Pain, and Morality

by Joel Michael Reynolds

A philosophical challenge to the ableist conflation of disability and pain

  More than 2,000 years ago, Aristotle “let there be a law that no deformed child shall live.” This idea is alive and well today. During the past century, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. argued that the United States can forcibly sterilize intellectually disabled women and philosopher Peter Singer argued for the right of parents to euthanize certain cognitively disabled infants. The Life Worth Living explores how and why such arguments persist by investigating the exclusion of and discrimination against disabled people across the history of Western moral philosophy. Joel Michael Reynolds argues that this history demonstrates a fundamental mischaracterization of the meaning of disability, thanks to the conflation of lived experiences of disability with those of pain and suffering. Building on decades of activism and scholarship in the field, Reynolds shows how longstanding views of disability are misguided and unjust, and he lays out a vision of what an anti-ableist moral future requires. The Life Worth Living is the first sustained examination of disability through the lens of the history of moral philosophy and phenomenology, and it demonstrates how lived experiences of disability demand a far richer account of human flourishing, embodiment, community, and politics in philosophical inquiry and beyond.

Genres: Disability, Philosophy, Nonfiction

216 pages, Paperback

Published May 17, 2022

About the author

Joel Michael Reynolds is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Disability Studies at Georgetown University, Senior Research Scholar in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Senior Bioethics Advisor to and Fellow of The Hastings Center, and Faculty Scholar of The Greenwall Foundation. At Georgetown, they are also core faculty in the Disability Studies Program, affiliated faculty in the Medical Humanities Initiative, a faculty fellow of Ethics Lab, and director of graduate placement in the Department of Philosophy. They are the founder of The Journal of Philosophy of Disability and co-founder of Oxford Studies in Disability, Ethics, and Society, a book series from Oxford University Press.

Reviews

[Jiho Burrows · Rating 4 out of 5]

I plan on writing a more substantial review of this book; I have only finished it now, and this is more to collect some of my immediate impressions. So here is the thing: I really do not like Reynolds's writing and found a lot of sentence structures and phrasing to be annoying and repetitive. However, as Reynolds is a young(er) person, I will let this slide and not affect my rating of the text. What affects my rating, on the other hand, is the posting of other philosophers, as well as Reynolds's own life, to get his argument across. Both of these points I have yet to express properly, but both come from the fact that I myself have a disability and am trying to work with some of the thinkers Reynolds portrays as leading to a dead end. Secondly, at the end of the book, Reynolds describes a phenomenology of care arising out of his own personal experience of being surrounded by sick family members. While I do not think that Reynolds has done anything wrong in how he has cared for his brother and other family members, I do feel that he overlooks the fact that certain types of care can feel condescending to individuals with disabilities and even perpetuate feelings of alienation from the personal experience of having a disability. Again, this is not to say Reynolds has not done anything wrong; rather, this is coming from my own personal experience. My skepticism with Reynolds is in the fact that due to his perceived bounds of family and blood relations, I have experienced "care," which has done more harm than good. This is not care in the form of medical support or being someone dependent, rather this would fall under emotional care. That fact is family members, regardless of their intentions, can misconstrue the subjective experiences of having a disability by means of over-empathizing. While appearing to be the same as condescending or fetishizing disabled adversity, over-empathizing is very mundane and not implicit. Over-empathizing happens when a person with a disability explains a mundane facticity of having a disability. In this case, I mean in almost a neutral way, but something that still needs to be worked through, but that explanation becomes arbitrary because the other attempts to understand another disability and then explain it back to them. I do not mean in cases where someone goes, "Have you tried Colloidal Silver," I mean it as the case when someone says, "Yeah, that must be hard, but you must forget that you have a disability and you are only human." Granted, this evidently is the ableist attitude, but one not explored and even left out due to the lack of disabled voices within philosophy. Despite this, I'd recommend this book to anyone as Reynolds takes clear, necessary steps in progressing the existential-value-ontological importance of understanding disability and, even more so, ability.

[Carlo Tarantino · Rating 5 out of 5]

Common assumptions about Pain, Disability, and Ability need to be challenged. One reason is that those common assumptions conspire together to create a socially/politically harmful view about folks with disabilities: having a disability is bad because it is painful or a form of suffering; and so all things considered a life without a disability would be more valuable or better than a life with a disability. The book argues that this view is completely false and the result of super naive (though super common) beliefs about pain, disability, and ability. Reynolds also gives us improved ways of thinking about those three concepts as well so it’s a useful book in a number of ways. It’s written at a semi-popular, semi-professional level by an academic philosopher, so depending on how familiar you are with philosophical language it might be slow-going in places. Super-duper worth your energies if you’ve got the time and interest for it though!

[Becca Longtin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is remarkable. It explains how ableism misunderstands disability by conflating it with pain and suffering. To unpack this problematic conflation, Reynolds provides an overview of the concept of pain in the history of religious-moral traditions, neurobiology, medicine, humanism, and existential philosophy, as well as first-person descriptions of living with chronic pain. Reynolds then turns to different theories of disability and how they work in practice, before giving a description of what it is like to live with disability. The last section explains different theories of ability and argues that ability is built on care systems. Reynolds provides a detailed and touching account of the care structures his family built to support and insure the survival of his disabled brother Jason, who required 24-hour care, and other members of the family. The book ends with a beautiful vision of a world where communities work together "to make habitable worlds for all." In addition to addressing ableism, disability, and pain from many perspectives, the book is beautifully written. Both intellectually rigorous and deeply moving, this book engages both the mind and heart.

[Jessica Marengo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant.