Introduction

In Part Three we seek to offer some alternative ways of thinking about a ‘good life’ for people with intellectual disabilities, and how we might move forward from the present impasse. We do so with some trepidation, knowing that better minds than ours have wrestled with such questions.

We begin, in Chapter Seven, by looking at a term that is widely used, but rarely unpacked: ‘rights’. People's ‘rights’ are frequently cited, their operationalisation rarely explicated. We explore Martha Nussbaum's capabilities as an adjunct, to help think about what needs to be done if rights are to mean something in practice. In Chapter Eight, we take two more of the empty ‘feel good’ words with which policy is littered: community and inclusion. We ponder the paradox that at a time when geographical communities are the stuff of nostalgic dreams, people with intellectual disabilities are expected to be included in them. We offer in their stead ‘belonging’ as a goal, and explore where that takes us. Finally, in Chapter Nine, we look at the implications for the workforce, paid and unpaid. We deconstruct roles based on thinking about advocacy, and propose what workers paid and unpaid need to know and do if support is to move beyond ‘tending’.

We do not claim to have found new solutions. Indeed, one of our criticisms as we reflect on how we arrived at today's prevailing ideology has been that blanket solutions are never going to be found. ‘Solutions’ are what policy makers crave, perhaps what we would all like, but the lurches we described in Chapter Five are not the answer as they create new doctrinaire prescriptions and rely on besmirching the unenlightened past. Thus have institutions been seen as the villain, rather than a symptom of a deeper challenge, just as institutional solutions had made villains of neglectful families; and just as segregated provision has been seen as the cause of continuing exclusion.

Our thoughts on alternative ways of thinking are grouped into three broad headings:

• • Rights

• • Communities and belonging

• • Relationships

So far in this book we have reflected on how a ‘good life’ has been viewed in Western thought, and how these meanings of a ‘good life’ may apply to the situation of people with intellectual disabilities.