The Future of the Disabled in Liberal Society
Reinders, Hans S. & Elshtain, Jean Bethke
WHAT COURTS AS A PERSON? The Future of the Disabled in Liberal Society An Ethical Analysis Hans S. Reinders University of Notre Dame Press, $17, 296 pp. Jean Bethke Elshtain This book is a...
...Liberal society, under the dominant Rawlsian model, holds that persons with mental handicaps should be given "access" and should not be discriminated against unjustly...
...The upshot is that liberal democracy is not in a very strong position to sustain solidarity with persons with disabilities and their families...
...This requires that the religious sources of the moral life be given more ample public scope...
...All the forces of popular culture push in the direction of trying to eliminate suffering (given our assumptions about what constitutes suffering), to make life easeful and untroublesorrte...
...Inspired by the course Nouwen taught, Nomura selected a series of desert "sayings" and illustrated them with Japanese ink brush drawings...
...Her most recent book, Who Are We...
...The liberal presupposition which privileges "choice" as the primary category in public life and apogee of human aspiration, together with modern technologies of reproductive and genetic engineering, dictate that it would be far better if human persons who are, by definition, incapable of choosing on the liberal model were not to appear among us...
...She worried about how society will assist persons with disabilities and their families if parents who choose to bring a child with Down syndrome into the world are labeled irresponsible and therefore wholly culpable...
...Jean Bethke Elshtain This book is a sophisticated and welcome contribution to what the author calls "the continuing debate concerning the strengths and weaknesses of liberal morality that dominates contemporary society...
...Because they lack such standing, the barriers to eliminating persons with disabilities begin to wither away...
...The illustrations are a fine match for the sayings, which are also spare and designed to make a deeply meditative point...
...While Nomura's selections will be familiar to readers of those anthologies, what are new and striking are Nomura's pictures...
...There are now no barriers to their elimination prebirth: that is our current policy...
...Its thesis: Despite recent public-policy efforts to ensure equal opportunity and access for all, liberal society cannot sustain equal regard for persons with disabilities...
...The result is a handsome volume which well repays Commonweal 26 September 28,2001...
...Critical Reflections, Hopeful Possibilities (Eerdmans), was awarded the Best Academic Book 2000 by the American Theological Booksellers Association...
...I even took to counting those strokes by which a monk (always depicted in Zen robes), a flower, a broom, or a mountain come to life...
...The rapid proliferation of genetic testing may have discriminatory effects...because it brings the birth of disabled children within the focus of 'reproductive choice,' which makes their parents answerable to the charge of 'irresponsible behavior.'" The mother of a Down syndrome child, responding to a column I had written, expressed her deep foreboding on this very theme...
...For this very reason, it also makes accepting disabled people as human beings in their own right...a difficult task indeed...
...If we continue in our current direction, it seems unlikely...
...Hans S. Reinders, professor of ethics and mental disability at the Vrije University in Amsterdam, cites one of America's leading bioethicists, Tristam Engelhardt: "Not all humans are self-conscious, rational, and able to conceive of the possibility of blaming and praising...
...Reinders makes a real contribution not only to debates in bioethics understood narrowly but to our ongoing exploration of the many ways in which liberal society undermines moral intuitions and capacities that do not mesh with the triumph of that paragon, the sovereign chooser...
...This is not the stuff of science fiction...
...The triumph of "choice" and "self-determination," Reinders concludes, "makes us blind to other dimensions of our existence, such as our lack of control, our vulnerability, and our dependence on other people...
...But the fact that such human beings have rights if they live in our midst does nothing to mitigate the cultural norms that measure progress by how successful we have been at lowering the incidence of births of the disabled...
...Especially intriguing is the economy with which Nomura turns a few brush strokes into a fully realized figure...
...His original intention, when he made his collection, was to have the eminent Buddhist D. T. Suzuki write the introduction...
...dom of the Desert...
...Fetuses, infants, the profoundly mentally retarded, and the hopelessly comatose provide examples of human nonpersons...
...In the sayings of the desert fathers, Thomas Merton saw an analogue of the world of the Zen rnondo and koan...
...This is a sobering book...
...Such economy, of course, testifies to the tremendous discipline of the Japanese calligrapher, whose very art is considered contemplative...
...Alas, the unecumenical spirit of the 1950s made that impossible...
...Commonweal 25 September 28, 2001 Yushi Nomura is a Japanese artist and theologian who was introduced to the wisdom of the desert monks by the late Henri Nouwen while studying at Yale Divinity School on a World Council of Churches fellowship...
...We have turned to certain liberal values—equal opportunity, antidiscrimination—to help eliminate barriers so that the disabled can participate...
...But, at the same time, liberal values push toward what Reinders calls "prevention" undertaken in the assumption that "reproductive choice" cannot be questioned...
...The best overall desert collections remain Benedicta Ward's (Cistercian Publications, o.p...
...I was so taken by his illustrations, I spent more time on them than on the sayings themselves...
...The sayings collected by Nomura make up only a small part of what has come down to us...
...Wouldn't we be a more compassionate, decent, and just society if we moved in this direction...
...Jean Bethke Elshtain is the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics, The University of Chicago...
...Nomura, by contrast, grasps the connection easily...
...To be sure, as Reinders points out, Engelhardt and others observe that, although secular morality "does not grant disabled people moral standing per se, this does not necessarily mean they are deprived of it...
...So strong is the prejudice in this direction that we simply assume that hypothetical unborn children with cognitive disabilities would, if they could, choose not to be born...
...Reinders argues that "people with mental disability and their families have reasons to be worried about their future in liberal society...
...But such barCommonweal 24 September 28,2001 riers, Reinders argues, are under continuous pressure of "secular morality" and are likely to be bulldozed out of the way by the potent machine of biotechnology backed up by medical authority...
...What about accepting life as a gift...
...Given the religious derivation of so much of our ethical thinking, barriers to simply killing persons with disabilities remain...
...What about acknowledging our finitude...
...If we go the direction of Holland and approve physician-assisted (or medicalized) euthanasia, such human nonpersons could be removed from among us after birth...
...The resulting book, originally published in 1982, has been reproduced by Orbis with Nouwen's original introduction and new epilogue based on Nouwen's course notes...
...Over time our capacity to recognize, to welcome, to support, and to care for human persons whose lives seem to us entirely pointless and burdensome will collapse...
...and Thomas Merton's (Norton), both titled The MsDesert Wisdom: Sayings from the Desert Fathers Translation and art by Yushi Nomura Orbis, $15,122 pp...
...They are members of the human species but do not in and of themselves have standing in the secular moral community" (emphasis mine...
...It is the very texture of our ethical lives at this moment...
...Will our hands really be stayed over the long haul...
...This is especially true if the disabilities in question are "mental...
Vol. 128 • September 2001 • No. 16
