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...

Scholars have long speculated about what a future affected by gene editing technologies might hold. This article enters current debates over the future of gene editing and the place of disability with...

This paper argues that the field of philosophy, and bioethics spe­cifically, engages in a series of speech acts that identify scholarship advocating for increased philosophical engagement with the exp...

I argue that the claim that merely being born of two human beings in a condition that supports life is sufficient for full moral status. Not only ought we not to exclude any human being from full mor...

Within Western approaches to disability, the expectation for disabled people to ‘prove our disability’ is not only central for receiving access supports, but also for being accepted by those around us...

I am legally entitled to certain accommodations for my visual impairment that I do not always need. Affording me these rights is required by justice even on those rare occasions in which they are not ...

People with cognitive impairments often have difficulties formulating, understanding, or articulating decisions that others judge reasonable. The frequent response shifts decision-making authority to ...

Dehumanization Studies is a burgeoning field that has much to teach Critical Disability Studies and philosophers of disability. Conversely, a critical disability perspective can inform and challenge t...

While some philosophers believe disabilities constitute a “bad-difference,” others think they constitute a “mere-difference” (Barnes 2016). On this latter view, while disabilities may create certain h...

When considering the relation between race, disability, and reproduction, race and disability tend to figure as outcomes of reproduction. It is assumed that one births a child with a certain race and ...

Cissexist perception involves a prejudicial judgment and an unmediated affective response, such as that of disgust, directed at the gendered aspects of another person. In this paper, I advance a view ...

E-mapping technologies are a recent technological intervention promising to promote accessibility for disabled city residents. As part of their promise, they seem to position disabled people as agents...

Mobilizing a “cripistemological” approach that “think[s] from the critical, social, and personal position of disability,” (Johnson and McRuer 2014, 134), this paper engages a fundamental site of Chris...

According to Elizabeth Barnes’s minority body view, to say that a disability is value neutral is to say that it is neither automatically good nor bad, but rather can become good or bad depending on wh...

In this paper, I look for the crip potential at the heart of cis. What would a theory of cisgender look like if that were presumed from the start? I begin by observing that many early endorsers theori...