Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-mkpzs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T19:59:04.781Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

3 - The Capacity to Trust as a Contractual Basis for Robust Moral Status

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 March 2021

Jonas-Sébastien Beaudry
Affiliation:
McGill University, Montréal
Get access

Summary

This chapter focuses on the essay “Justice Through Trust,” by Leslie Francis and Anita Silvers, which in my view makes the best contractarian argument to include PSID among the rank of contributing contractors. Silvers and Francis insist on abandoning the misleading metaphor of the social contract as a tit-for-tat exchange. Instead, they argue that society is more accurately conceived of as a complex net of transactions which fundamentally requires a climate of trust in which any being able to trust or be trustworthy can participate. PSID’s contribution to fostering a climate of trust can be said to occur not in spite of their disability and its corollary vulnerability and exploitability, but partly because of it. Although a trust-based conception of contractual justice goes a long way in integrating PWD, I argue that it contains inherent tensions. Certain conceptions of trust may fail to justify the robust moral status of PWD, while others may not be as essentially connected to social contract theory as Silvers and Francis argue. These tensions tend to confirm that contractarian theories have difficulty genuinely accommodating people with particularly severe disabilities.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Disabled Contract
Severe Intellectual Disability, Justice and Morality
, pp. 82 - 127
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×