ABSTRACT

Not surprisingly, the academic literature generally endorses this assumption. When philosophers need an example of something that makes a life go worse, they frequently choose a health problem. In discussing the non-identity problem, for example, Kavka uses the example of a handicapped child (1982: 98; cf. Parfit 1984: 367-369), and Harman (2004) a deaf child. In contexts where health and well-being are more direct topics of discussion, the same assumption is stated more explicitly:

To be disabled in any sense is not the same as being differently abled. Being deaf for example is . . . a condition which harms the individual relative to freedom from deafness.