BOOK REVIEWS

Barnes, Elizabeth. The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability.

New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. 160. $45.00 (cloth).

Elizabeth Barnes has written an interesting and important book about disability.
It is a sustained defense of what she calls “the mere-difference thesis”: the idea
that disability is something that does not in itself make a life worse. The basic idea
is not new, but has been an important part of disability activism for some time.
Barnes has brought a new level of precision to a popular slogan and has then
set about defending it with all the familiar tools of contemporary analytic philos-
ophy. It is important to note that Barnes limits the scope of her claim in a way that
disability activists have not always done. She is explicit that she is only interested
in defending the mere-difference view for physical disabilities (for the rest of this
review “disability” will mean physical disability).
She begins in chapter 1 by developing an account of what physical disability
is. After rejecting various traditional models, she argues that disability is not a nat-
ural kind, but is instead a social category, one that lumps together some (but not
all) bodies that vary in some way from statistical norms. The label is “social” only
in the sense that there is no natural property (or set of properties) such that all
and only things with that property (or properties) count. The odd grouping
has to be explained in terms of human interests. But it is not “social” in a stronger
sense: disability still refers to actual features of real bodies (as opposed to the ways
that others perceive them). To be disabled is to have a body at odds with one or
more of the norms that underlie the design of our shared physical environment,
such that one will encounter obstacles that most others do not. For this reason,
being disabled in our current world can have an impact on one’s welfare even
if others are unaware that one is disabled. Barnes arrives at her account by looking
to the disability rights movement, which has for some time worked implicitly with
a loose cluster concept, one that counts something as a disability if it meets several
of a list of criteria. Her suggestion is that we adopt their notion of disability, count-
ing as a physical disability whatever falls under this cluster concept. This has the
result that “disability” turns out to have an extension roughly equal to what most
people generally take it to have.
In chapter 2 she turns her attention to clarifying the thesis she wants to de-
fend and the one she wants to reject, which she labels “bad-difference.” Unfortu-
nately, she tells us, there is no simple or easy way to define bad-difference views
that will satisfy everyone. She presents five closely related claims, all of which in-
tuitively express the idea that disability has a negative impact on welfare. On her
view, acceptance of any one of the five counts as sufficient for accepting a bad-
difference view.

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 Book Reviews 463
The most important point to emerge from this chapter is that mere-difference
is primarily a claim about the contribution disability makes to the overall value
of a life. There are two different senses in which philosophers talk about a good life.
Sometimes a life is called “good” if it has net positive value, where this means that it
is a life worth living. But there is a stronger sense of “good,” in which a good life is
one that is better than most, or above a certain threshold. This is the sense in which
we aspire to have good lives. Such lives have a high degree of net positive value. Most
disabled individuals clearly have lives that are good in the first sense (worth living),
though many ableists doubt that they have (or often have) good lives in the second
sense. But whichever meaning you adopt, if your account of value is additive, then a
life which contains a negative element can only be good (in either sense) if it con-
tains enough other goods to outweigh the negative.
As I understand it, the mere-difference thesis is the claim that disability does
not make a negative contribution to overall value. A disabled life might for vari-
ous reasons turn out to be an overall bad life (either in the sense of being not
worth living or in the more moderate sense of being good but not enviable).
But when this is so, the explanation of this fact is rarely the presence of disability.
Likewise, a disabled life might for various reasons turn out to be overall good (in
either of the two senses). But when this is the case, this is not because numerous
other positives in the life have managed to compensate for, or outweigh, the pure
negative of being disabled. Disability is not such a negative. Thus, when disabled
people live good lives, we need not understand this in compensatory terms.
This way of stating mere-difference fits well with the first of her five formula-
tions of bad-difference, according to which “disability is something that is an au-
tomatic or intrinsic cost to your well-being.” However, Barnes doesn’t stop with
this formulation, because she recognizes that it will not satisfy, for example, the-
orists who maintain that the only intrinsic bearers of welfare value are instances of
pleasure or instances of desire satisfaction. Although her attempt to formulate
the thesis in ways that respect the complicated terrain of welfare theories is admi-
rable, I will not try to replicate it here. In what follows I shall simply take mere-
difference to be the view I described above and bad-difference its rejection.
Chapters 3 and 4 are the heart of the book, where the arguments for mere-
difference occur. In chapter 3 Barnes introduces what she calls “the value neutral
model of disability.” This is best understood as a set of distinctions intended to
help us talk more fruitfully about the structure of welfare and about the evaluative
contribution various items make to the goodness or badness of a life.
There are three key elements to this framework. First, Barnes claims that an
item in a life might be thought of as good, bad, or neutral simpliciter. Something
that is good simpliciter always makes a positive contribution to a life. On many
views, pleasure is good in this sense: it is always a positive addition to a life. More-
over, the contribution of pleasure is the same across lives and does not depend on
context. Barnes acknowledges that, intuitively, there are not many things that are
good or bad simpliciter. Most things are better viewed as neutral simpliciter. And
disability is one of these.
As best I can tell, she is at this point speaking of disability in a very abstract
sense—pointing to the particular physical features of bodies in virtue of which
they are categorized as “disabled.” If I’m correct, then the point is simply that
we know nothing about welfare if all we know is that a person has these physical

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 464 Ethics January 2018
features. Only when these features are combined with other features of the life—
in particular, features of the environment (broadly construed) and features of the
individual herself—do we get emergent facts about welfare. So, for example,
knowing only that an individual has legs that cannot support her weight and noth-
ing else tells us nothing about her welfare. On the other hand, knowing that this
description applies to Maria and knowing some facts about both Maria’s circum-
stances and her particular psychology would allow us to begin to form a picture of
how disability figures in her life.
Second, Barnes introduces the idea that something that is overall good may
nonetheless have some negative features. She uses the terms “local” and “global”
goods. The example she gives to illustrate the idea is running, and in particular,
her sister’s practice of running regularly. In her sister’s life running is an overall
(global) good. Still, at times it is unpleasant. And it has some undesirable imme-
diate consequences like sore feet. But because it has far more good features than
bad, it is an overall good in her sister’s life. In my preferred language running is a
package, and in this case it is an overall positive package. Some packages, however,
are not so good. Barnes makes it clear that she sees disability as like running. It
can have some negative features, but it need not be an overall bad and might
be an overall good.
However, readers will no doubt be puzzled about how to combine this claim
with the idea that disability is, in itself, entirely neutral. For example, how can
something that is neutral have negative (or positive) features (unless the view
is that the negative and positive features always cancel out)? As I interpret Barnes,
she is talking now in a very different way, not about disability in the abstract, but
about disability as a lived experience. Just as we can talk about her sister’s overall
experience of being a runner (and conclude that this is a positive package), so
can we talk about Maria’s experience of being unable to walk. And the point is
that Maria’s experience of disability may still be an overall positive package, de-
spite the fact that it has (as she experiences it) a few negative features. Moreover,
although it might be a positive overall package for Maria, the very same type of
disability might not be a positive package for someone else with a very different
temperament or personality. One virtue of Barnes’s account is that she leaves
room for a range of experiences and does not want to insist that all people expe-
rience disability the same way. The sense in which disability is neutral is the sense
in which it is true in the abstract that particular physical features that can be had
by different individuals do not in themselves predict anything about welfare. But
disability as lived is a complex package that for some people is overall positive and
for some is overall negative.
The final important part of the model is the distinction between valuing dis-
ability for purely instrumental reasons and valuing it for itself. Again, talk of
“packages” can be helpful here, for I want to distinguish between, on the one
hand, complex elements of a life (such as being a runner or having a particular
disability) that may have positive and negative features and, on the other hand,
the downstream consequences of these elements, which can also figure (though
in a different way) in a determination of global good. If the overall value of a pack-
age (like being a runner) is positive, then all by itself it constitutes a positive fea-
ture of the life. It is valuable in itself and apart from any other positive conse-

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 Book Reviews 465
quences it might have. On the other hand, negative packages can only be valued
(if they are) instrumentally because of good downstream effects. The example
Barnes gives of purely instrumental value is having cancer. Some cancer survi-
vors claim that, overall, having cancer turned out to be a positive feature of their
life because of the insights it brought them and the ways in which their relation-
ships with other people deepened. But Barnes thinks that it would be a mistake to
thereby assume that having cancer is a positive package in the way that being a run-
ner is. Rather, it is a negative package that is valued instrumentally because of its
downstream effects. By contrast, she claims that having a disability is more often like
being a runner than it is like having cancer. Cancer stories are compensation nar-
ratives, but if we pay attention to what disabled people say about their lives, we will
see that they (mostly) reject compensation narratives. They do not (or do not all)
value having their particular disability purely instrumentally (if they value it instru-
mentally at all). Because it is a positive overall package, they value it for itself.
Barnes defends the value neutral model and in particular the idea that dis-
ability is neutral simpliciter by appeal to the testimony of disabled individuals.
Drawing from memoirs, biographies, and the statements of people in the disabil-
ity rights movement, she shows that many disabled individuals not only report do-
ing well overall but also report valuing their disability for itself. For the moment
let’s accept this testimony as reliable. Her argument for the claim that disability is
neutral simpliciter is then roughly as follows:

1. Most of the welfare claims disabled people make about their lives are
true.
2. Many disabled people claim that they experience disability as a positive
package, that is, they value it for itself and reject compensation narra-
tives.
3. Therefore, for at least some disabled people disability is a positive pack-
age valued for itself.
4. The fact that disability is a positive package in the lives of some people
is incompatible with the claim that disability is bad simpliciter. If it were
bad simpliciter, then it could only be valued instrumentally, and this is
not what they say.
5. Equally, the fact that disability is a negative package in the lives of at
least some individuals means that disability is not good simpliciter ei-
ther.
6. Since disability is neither good simpliciter nor bad simpliciter, it must
be neutral simpliciter.

This still leaves us far from having established mere-difference, and this is because
the idea of neutrality is quite weak. At various points Barnes illustrates neutrality
like this: having flat feet is not bad simpliciter, but it can be bad for you if you want
most of all to be a ballet dancer. That seems right. But then all of the interesting
facts will be facts about what the lived experience of disability is like for particular
individuals, and in particular how psychological traits interact with particular
physical features. As I read her, Barnes wants to show more than just that some
individuals experience disability as a positive package. She seems to want to estab-

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 466 Ethics January 2018
lish that many or most disabled individuals experience it this way. But it still seems
possible that disability could, by itself, be neutral simpliciter and yet be experi-
enced negatively by most people. Indeed, if the explanation is largely psycholog-
ical (as opposed to social), that might even be true in the absence of ableism. Such
a conclusion clearly strikes me as bad-difference. To be clear, I am not saying I find
that plausible (for I don’t). I am merely questioning whether Barnes has yet given
us good reason for ruling it out.
Barnes appears to anticipate this kind of worry (99). However, she argues
that the very same testimony that supports the value neutral model also serves
to undermine bad-difference views. Her discussion is too complex to replicate
here, but I will briefly register a remaining worry that I have.
Barnes draws on two different kinds of testimony. On the one hand, she ap-
peals to the personal statements of disabled individuals who have written about
their experiences. Many (though not all) of these people are part of the disability
rights movement or are disability scholars or both. Precisely because they give
more detailed accounts of their lives, it is possible to draw conclusions about
the contributory value of disability in their lives. It is clear not only that they view
their lives in overall positive terms but also that they value disability in a noninstru-
mental way. But this is only a small sample. Barnes also appeals to the much larger
empirical literature on the quality of life of disabled people. This literature clearly
supports the claim that the lives of disabled people are much better overall than
able-bodied people tend to assume (and some studies suggest that both groups
are equal in terms of perceived well-being). Equality of perceived well-being is ev-
idence for the idea that disability is not a negative package for most disabled peo-
ple. But it is not conclusive. It is still possible that individuals experience disability
negatively but other positive factors in their life compensate. In short, it is hard to
derive claims about the way disability is experienced in most lives from claims
about overall welfare.
Chapter 4 defends the claim that we ought to take seriously the claims of dis-
abled people about the quality of their lives. Barnes’s arguments against bad-
difference views depend on this. She points out correctly that many philosophers
have dismissed out of hand the testimony of disabled people about their lives. She
thinks that this is both epistemically and morally problematic, and on that front I
think she is right. She is certainly right to demand better reasons than have gen-
erally been offered for dismissing such testimony. And I think she is also right to
insist that dismissal not be framed in terms of group membership (as claims about
the unreliability of disabled people in particular). Given the history of prejudice
against disabled people, such a move is naturally suspect and could be easily
abused.
However, unless one wishes to embrace the idea that individuals are always
authoritative about their own welfare, one has to admit that people can make mis-
takes in this area. But if people can be mistaken, it is natural to wonder both
(1) how often mistakes occur and (2) whether we have any method for detecting
such mistakes. If we are fairly sure they occur often and we have no clear way of
detecting mistakes, then we are left in a situation where it is entirely unclear what
weight to put on personal testimony about welfare, no matter whose testimony it
is. In such a case, we might have reason to doubt the testimony of disabled people,

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 Book Reviews 467
not because they are disabled, but because they are people. We can obviously con-
clude from positive disability testimony that some disabled people live good lives
in which disability plays a positive role. But it isn’t clear to me what more we can
get at this point without further argument.
Chapter 6 concerns disability pride, which is an important topic in its own
right. Those unfamiliar with philosophy of disability sometimes ask why anyone
would be invested in defending mere-difference. If you assume that we should
be working to improve disabled lives, and if you accept (as both parties to this de-
bate do) that, at least for now, social factors continue to have a negative impact on
the welfare of many disabled people, then why not focus on trying to eradicate
these factors? Why argue about what disabled welfare would be like in the absence
of ableism, given that ableism is still so prevalent? As Barnes makes clear, a large
part of the answer to that question has to do with disability pride.
Many disabled individuals want to celebrate disability. But it is hard to com-
municate pride when the dominant culture routinely interprets positive claims
about disability as compensation narratives. If disability can only have value in
the way cancer has value for some cancer survivors, then pity may seem appropri-
ate and pride unintelligible.
Recognizing this link between the current debate and disability pride is im-
portant. And the value neutral model does a good job of explaining how we can
make sense of the various things individuals say about life with a disability without
automatically assuming that this must be a compensation narrative. However, one
might also wonder whether disability pride needs something as strong as a gen-
eral claim about the positive role of disability in the lives of most disabled people.
Shouldn’t it be enough (at least for pride) that disability clearly functions as mere-
difference in the lives of certain individuals? Of course, it remains to be seen where
the debate goes next, but wherever it goes, future discussion will need to engage
with the work of Elizabeth Barnes.

Jennifer Hawkins
Duke University

Fabre, Cécile. Cosmopolitan Peace.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. 368. $70.00 (cloth).

In her vitally important new book, Cosmopolitan Peace (henceforth CP), Cécile Fabre
offers a systematic treatment of the problems of ending wars and managing their
aftermath in a manner consistent with principles of cosmopolitan justice.
The idea of ‘jus post bellum’, as it is called in just war theory, has a long history.
In a helpful overview, Fabre traces it back to Cicero and then takes medieval and
early-modern debates forward to Francisco de Vitoria and Hugo Grotius and
thence to the eighteenth-century ‘positivism’ of Christian Wolff and Emer de Vat-
tel and the cosmopolitan theory of Immanuel Kant (13–17). Philosophers typi-
cally date the twentieth-century revival of philosophical interest in just war theory
to Michael Walzer’s seminal Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic, 1977), a work
which continued in the tradition of earlier centuries by giving careful attention to

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