This book is an exploration. In it we are revisiting ideas and models that may seem to be familiar territory to those working with or advocating for people with intellectual disabilities and trying to see them again from a different perspective. However, we are also seeking to explore new territory by examining how concepts and theories from outside the disability field or on its margins may contribute new understandings and allow us to think about the lives of people with intellectual disabilities differently.

The end of our exploring is to understand better the nature of ‘a good life’ and how theoretical constructions of this idea have been played out in the lives of people with intellectual disabilities. We have chosen ‘a good life’ as a central construct in this book for a number of reasons: it underpins aspirations for all of us in the way we live our lives and philosophers in Western society have explored its possible components for over 2000 years. We know a lot about a good life. However in relation to people with intellectual disabilities it has not really been explicitly central to thinking about their lives. Rather, more modest and, in our view, ill-defined concepts have been used to frame policies and practice. It is salutary to acknowledge that in the UK aspirations and underpinning concepts have been little altered since the publication of the King's Fund's influential An ordinary life in 1980. The principles of such a life were spelt out in the Department of Health's Valuing people (DH, 2001) as independence, rights, choice and inclusion. The aspiration to achieve an ordinary life was reasserted in December 2007, in the Department of Health's consultation on its Valuing People strategy, Valuing people now:

While concepts of what an ‘ordinary life’ consists of may have altered since 1980, something we examine in the book, the need to reassert, 28 years later, using the same words, this modest aspiration suggests a failure of implementation. Is an ordinary life a good life?