Health Problems: Philosophical Puzzles about the Nature of Health
This book is an exploration of some core philosophical puzzles about the nature of health, as well as a distinctive take on how to approach messy philosophical questions that don't seem to have neat answers.
You can read the Forward, the Introduction (which offers and outline and basic summary), and the Afterword (which summarizes some key themes) if you're curious.
The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability
Here's a brief outline of my first book, if you're interested.
Chapter 1: Constructing Disability - The things we group as 'disabilities' are strikingly heterogenous. The first task of any philosophical theory of disability is thus to argue that there is something unifying these disparate cases to which philosophical analysis can be usefully applied. Many accounts of disability attempt to explain what unifies individual disabilities via reference to specific features of disabled bodies, but I argue that such accounts fail. There is no objective feature(s) of disabled bodies such that all and only bodies with that feature(s) count as disabled.
I argue that disability is socially constructed - but that this is consistent with disability being real, and being determined by objective physical conditions. On my view, we should care about disability as a kind - and care about philosophical analysis of disability - primarily because disability is a way that people have grouped themselves when organizing a civil rights struggle. But the account I offer is importantly different from the more familiar Social Model of disability, as well as from other popular versions of social constructionism, such as the Haslangerian model. My account, for example, is not committed to a distinction between impairment and disability, nor to the idea that all the bad effects of disability are entirely due to prejudice against the disabled - two primary tenets of the Social Model. Moreover, I argue that there might be distinctive features of disability which are independent of the way society treats disabled people.
Chapter 2: Bad-difference vs. Mere-difference - In this chapter, I elaborate on the distinction between what I call the ‘mere-difference’ view of disability and the more familiar ‘bad-difference’ view of disability (which maintains that disability is something inherently bad for you). The distinction is a complex one, because the key issue is the relationship between disability and wellbeing. There are various theories of wellbeing, and no single way of characterizing the bad-difference/mere-difference distinction cuts across them all. Instead of offering a single distinction, I offer multiple ways of characterizing bad-difference and mere-difference views of disability. These characterizations are independent of one another - they each offer sufficient but non-necessary conditions for maintaing bad- and mere-difference views. I argue that these various characterizations combine to form a composite picture of the family of views I am labelling ‘mere-difference’ and ‘bad-difference’. I then further argue against the claim that the bad-difference view should be thought of as the 'default' or 'common sense' view of disability.
Chapter 3: The Neutrality Account - Here I articulate and defend a particular version of the mere-difference view, which I call the ‘neutrality account’ of disability. The goal of this account is to give a model of disability according to which disability is mere-difference, and yet may still be viewed as (in a restricted sense) a harm. Based on this model, I argue that one needn’t say that all the harms associated with being disabled are socially mediated or caused by social injustice (that is, one needn’t deny that disability might involve harms even in an ideal, ableism-free society) in order to maintain a mere-difference view of disability. Likewise, I argue that it’s consistent to think both that disability is not in general something bad and that disability is bad for some people or in some circumstances.
Chapter 4: Taking Their Word For It - The arguments in chapters 2 and 3 rely heavily on the first person testimony of disabled people who claim to value being disabled. This chapter focuses on the epistemological issues surrounding such testimony. It’s sometimes suggested that this sort of testimony is unreliable because it is based on adaptive preference. I argue that this dismissal of disabled people’s testimony is unwarranted, and that discounting the testimony of disabled people in this way is a type of testimonial injustice.
Chapter 5: Causing Disability - This chapter examines two major, interrelated objections to any mere-difference view: that it makes it permissible to cause disability, and that it makes it impermissible to remove disability. I attempt to unpack both these objections. I argue that in neither case does the mere-difference view generate a universal response. That is, it doesn't tell you whether, regardless of the circumstances, it is always permissible to cause disability and impermissible to remove it. I further argue that neither the case of causing nor the case of removing provide effective objections to the mere-difference view
Chapter 6: Disability Pride - In conclusion, I give a philosophical articulation of and defense for the concept of Disability Pride. Again appealing to the influential work on epistemic injustice by Miranda Fricker, I argue that a well-developed notion of Disability Pride is essential to our efforts to promote the welfare of disabled people.