Disability: A matter of social justice

Abstract

This article presents disability as a Social Justice issue, a moral problem whose understanding is illuminated by the Capabilities Approach (especially in Amartya Sen’s version), which allows us to see ‘disability’ in terms of greater or lesser freedom. A crucial step to understand this greater or lesser freedom is to begin by recognizing the historical character of the socially shared space in which people with disabilities live; in principle the vital space available for the development and expression of human life. At each moment in history, this is a culturally and technologically constituted space and it gives as a differential result the conditions of ‘capacity’ and ‘disability’ in which human beings find themselves to enjoy their freedom. It is of the character of ‘social fact’ that this space finally has that disability emerges as a differential effect of it and becomes a moral problem that must be faced from a normative perspective, that of social justice.