This paper aims to defend the human variation model of disability (HVM) from a philosophical perspective. The HVM highlights how disability-related disadvantage often arises because social and material environments are designed for a narrower range of human variation than actually exists. Although the model remains central to disability theory, it has received limited philosophical attention since its foundational formulation by Richard K. Scotch and Kay Schriner in the late 1990s. This paper addresses that gap in two ways. First, it presents the HVM, evaluates its strengths and weaknesses, and offers several necessary revisions. Second, it mounts a philosophical defense of the HVM by answering potential objections and comparing it with two recent, related accounts of disability by Alex Gregory, and Katharine Jenkins and Aness Kim Webster, that just like the HVM, also strongly build on the notion of atypicality.

First, I give an account of grasp alienation, which is a distinctive kind of alienation that happens when we cannot map our phenomenal experience of the world onto our cognitive understanding. Second,...

I am Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University.

The concept of gender dysphoria, typically understood as a pathological experienced mismatch between one’s “inner gender identity” and one’s body, has been central to defining and “diagnosing” transness. Gender euphoria, which I define as joy, excitement, or pleasure in one’s gendered embodiment (including the social reception and emplacement of one’s gendered body), is an important notion in trans communities, but it has received little attention from academics, health care systems, or mainstream culture. Beginning from the reality and central importance of euphoria allows us to better understand everyone’s gendered experience and embodiment, and to avoid the substantial conceptual and ethical harms inflicted by a mental health model of trans identity that centers dysphoria. Organizing our understanding of trans identity, desires, and experiences around trans joy is conceptually clarifying; helps ground better medical and legal policy; and is more accurate than when we organize it around trans tragedy and pathology, even while we retain our realism about the fact that trans tragedy and dysphoric suffering are real and important.

In this paper, I offer a Levinasian critique of the moral reasoning within liberal eugenics—specifically, the principle of procreative beneficence. This principle asserts that prospective parents have...

This essay introduces the concept of naturally enhanced capabilities in several types of disability and argues that such instances are best understood as bivalent disabilities, where impairment and en...

Anita Silvers Essay Prize The Society for Philosophy and Disability’s Anita Silvers Essay Prize is awarded to the best unpublished (or published within the last two years) English-language essay in th...

This paper draws on neuroethics and analytic philosophy to critique the relationship between autism, empathy, and morality. Damian Milton’s double-empathy problem presents a problem for empathy resear...