ABSTRACT

What should a viable human body do, how should it function, and how should it appear? To what resources and rights should it obtain? These questions form the foundation for understanding the typical, the norm, their contraries, and disability. The answers are not universal, summoning the need for careful analysis and response, particularly with regard to decisions about moral legitimacy for rights and resources, to those who are deemed to be members of the disability category. This chapter enters that underbelly of human rights and distribution, first by suggesting that reasoning about disability rights joins in the bodies and background valuation approaches to deciding who is worthy of what and who is not. Specific to disability, the degree to which bodies (see below for a definition) adhere to or violate acceptable standards of functioning for rights eligibility, or what we refer to as embodied rights, and accompanying resources is then differentially conferred relative to context-embedded relativist perceptions. The linguistic and theoretical bedrock of disability in itself is complex and dynamic and thus, before our discussion of ethical models, we provide definitions and a brief history for clarification.