Eva Feder Kittay

• PHD
• Professor Emeritus at Stony Brook University

Having encountered landmines in offering a critique of philosophy based on my experience as the mother of a cognitively disabled daughter, I ask, “Should I continue?” I defend the idea that pursuing this project is of a piece with the invisible care labor that is done by people with disabilities and their families. The value of attempting to influe...

Many bioethicists try to secure a moral requirement to select against disability, while wishing to avoid denigrating disabled people. Dan Brock’s arguments are representative of this attempt. Brock argues that the harm of giving birth to a disabled child when an able child could be had in its stead is a “nonperson-affecting harm.” The harm is creat...

This chapter analyzes the Ashley treatment (AT), named for a case where the parents of a six-year-old girl with severe cognitive impairment and global developmental deficits elected to have her undergo a procedure that involved growth attenuation (GA), along with removal of her breast buds, uterus and appendix. Acknowledging that AT is intended as...

Disability offers a significant challenge to long-held philosophical views of the nature of the good life, what offers meaning in our lives, the importance of care, and the centrality of reason, as well as questions of justice, dignity, and personhood. In Learning from My Daughter , the author claims that living with a daughter who has multiple and...

This book makes an argument for pluralizing political philosophy, thereby focussing specifically on economic and ecological inequalities. By reducing the current marginalization of a range of traditions and approaches in political philosophy, especially as it is practised at universities in the Global North, political philosophy will have access to...

In this chapter, Eva Kittay offers a subtle and nuanced perspective about the role and functioning of institutions. The starting point of this reflection is her experience of living with and caring for her disabled daughter, Sesha, who eventually comes to reside in a facility called the Center for Discovery, contrary to the fears of her parents, se...

A Child is Born, Becoming a Mother The most important thing that happens when a child with disabilities is born is that a child is born. (Ferguson and Asch 1989, 108). When Sesha was born, I, along with Jeffrey, her father and my life-partner, fell madly in love with our baby. It was 1969. I was twenty-three, my husband twenty-five and we were pion...

I argue that the claim that merely being born of two human beings in a condition that supports life is sufficient for full moral status. Not only ought we not to exclude any human being from full moral status because they lack the possession of what some have deemed to be morally relevant properties, we don’t have a full grasp of what is morally re...

In this essay, we suggest practical ways to shift the framing of crisis standards of care toward disability justice. We elaborate on the vision statement provided in the 2010 Institute of Medicine (National Academy of Medicine) “Summary of Guidance for Establishing Crisis Standards of Care for Use in Disaster Situations,” which emphasizes fairness;...

In this essay, I recount and examine my response to a genetic diagnosis of my disabled daughter. My daughter was forty‐nine before the diagnosis came. All her disabilities were traceable to a de novo single gene variant on the PURA gene that was discovered only in 2014. I speak of the jolt and the recalibration that this discovery engendered, concl...

Can people with severe cognitive disabilities be treated as people with the same rights to healthcare as everyone else in a pandemic when it is deemed necessary to triage patients. As a mother of a daughter with such disabilities I fear that even when overt discrimination is prohibited, the negative attitudes toward people such as her will seep in,...

In this chapter, the author revisits her dependency critique of John Rawls’s political theory. She argues that, in conceiving justice in terms of voluntary associations between equals, Rawls neglects the reality of human dependence and interdependence. She argues that there are five areas where Rawls’ conception of equality is inadequate for addres...

The writer responds to the book review essay “Caring for People with Disabilities: An Ethics of Respect,” by Kevin Mintz and David Wasserman, in the January‐February 2020 issue of the Hastings Center Report, which discusses her book Learning from My Daughter: The Value and Care of Disabled Minds.

This new edition of Eva Feder Kittay's feminist classic, Love's La,bor, explores how theories of justice and morality must be reconfigured when intersecting with care and dependency, and the failure of policy towards women who engage in care work. The work is hailed as a major contribution to the development of an ethics of care. Where society is...

Personal and philosophical reflections on discovering that one's daughter has a de novo genetic variation when she is 49.

Intertwining philosophical analysis with personal narrative on parenting a cognitively disabled child, this chapter provides an argument about the moral value of disabled individuals. Through an intimate case study of the author’s daughter Sesha, it argues that the flourishing of disabled persons should be assessed on the basis of those individuals...

Against the pervasive stigmatization of dependency, this chapter argues that dependence on others is crucial aspect of human life. In the realm of care, dependency can engender particular forms of relationality and closeness. While acknowledging the harms of imposed dependency on disabled people, Kittay insists that protecting disabled people’s dem...

Sesha pushes my head to her neck. I find those sweet tender places at the crease of her neck, soft and warm. And she gurgles with pleasure. My daughter’s body. Its problems, its mystery, its soul. How very difficult it is to convey all that I experience when I am in her presence, the presence of that lovely, somewhat twisted, wheelchair-user body....

This chapter considers the moral status of various arguments in favor of reproductive selection, especially those that claim to accept the expressivist objection, especially that of the bioethicist Dan Brock. It argues that assuming that a disabled life is ceteris paribus a worse life is a poor way to make an argument for the permissibility of repr...

The conclusion I have argued for in chapter 5 is not that it is either permissible or impermissible to select against disability, only that there are some ways that we ought not to argue in favor of selection against disability. Arguments favoring giving birth to a baby without a disabling impairment because this child will have a better life than...

This chapter focuses on the moral considerations involved in prenatal testing and selection. It addresses the expressivist objection from some segments of the disability community, which charges that prenatal testing for and selection against the birth of a disabled child perpetuates the view that a disabled life is not worth living. Highlighting i...

While care has been marginalized within much of the history of moral philosophy, care ethics insists that caring be understood as a form of moral conduct. Arguing that care is a normative rather than solely descriptive category, this chapter articulates care as a moral practice that, when performed in accordance with its regulative ideals, is moral...

CARE, this chapter argues, succeeds normatively, or is “completed,” only when it is received by the cared-for as CARING. On this model, an action will count as CARE if it contributes to the well-being, restoration, or flourishing of a being or a subject. It must also be motivated by concern for the welfare of the cared-for. A carer must thus cultiv...

Camus writes: Art, at least, teaches us that man cannot be explained by history alone and that he also finds a reason for his existence in the order of nature. For him, the great god Pan is not dead. His most instinctive act of rebellion, while it affirms the value and the dignity common to all men, obstinately claims, so as to satisfy its hunger f...

This chapter inquires into the relation between normalcy and the good life. Beginning from a parental desire for a “normal life” for one’s children, it asks in what this desire for normalcy consists, and whether normalcy is necessary for a good life. It argues that the desire for normalcy actually springs from love: one desires to be loved for the...

Inquiring into the relation between reproductive decision-making and the unexpected, this chapter claims that reproductive choices around disability bring out inherent paradoxes of choice in the face of uncertainty. Arguing that reproductive decisions around disability, like all reproductive decisions, must be left to the person carrying the child,...

It is a common error – at least among philosophers - to contrast Mysticism and Morality, and thence to conclude that either Plotinus can have little to say about everyday moral concerns, or else that what he does say is too robust and uncompassionate to convince us now. It is true that, on the one hand, Plotinus seems to suggest that we should deta...

Social policy, broadly understood, is an intervention by government or other public institution designed to promote the well‐being of its members or intended to rectify perceived social problems. Governmental policy can issue from legislative, executive, or judicial actions. Regulations and rules governing major public establishments, such as unive...

The bioethical principle of respect for the autonomy of the patient is in many ways an advance over the paternalism that earlier pervaded medical practice. Yet the normative set of assumptions that accompany the principle of autonomy has its own difficulties. The notion of autonomy, derived primarily from liberal moral and political theories, makes...

Amidst ongoing debate about health care reform, the need for informed analyses of U.S. health policy is greater than ever. The twelve original essays in this volume show that common public debates bypass complex ethical, sociocultural, historical, and political questions about how we should address ideals of justice and equality in health care. Int...

In Moral Failure, Lisa Tessman argues against two principles of moral theory, that ought implies can and that normative theory must be action-guiding. Although Tessman provides a trenchant account of how we are thrust into the misfortune of moral failure, often by our very efforts to act morally, and although she shows, through a discussion well-in...

In this paper, the author questions the relations between the definition of a good life and the concept of normality. Her approach, supported by a philosophical reflection rooted in her personal experience as the daughter of Jewish parents who survived the holocaust, then as the mother of a child with a severe cognitive disability, demonstrates tha...

Eva Feder Kittay reveals how her relationship with her daughter has inspired questions about her philosophical beliefs of cognitive disability and personhood. In this essay, she asserts that it is necessary to reformulate any theory of social justice that would treat her daughter as a nonperson. Any adequate theory of justice must account for the i...

Only a few care theorists have focused on what Noddings has called “the completion of care” and what Joan Tronto called “the reception of care.” I explore the logic of care as an “achievement verb” as a way to argue for the important but neglected idea that actions intended as care require that the individual being cared for accepts them in order f...

As the mother of a daughter who has and will always require care to meet her most basic needs, I have seen firsthand how critical it is to have adequate means by which to meet those needs—for her sake, mine, and my family’s. Her flourishing life has contributed to enhancing not only our own, but those of all who care for her and who enter our lives...

I explore the ethics of altering the body of a child with severe cognitive disabilities in such a way that keeps the child “forever small.” The parents of Ashley, a girl of six with severe cognitive and developmental disabilities, in collaboration with her physicians and the Hospital Ethics Committee, chose to administer growth hormones that would...

According to the most important theories of justice, personal dignity is closely related to independence, and the care that people with disabilities receive is seen as a way for them to achieve the greatest possible autonomy. However, human beings are naturally subject to periods of dependency, and people without disabilities are only 'temporarily...

The title of this paper deserves an explanation—or rather two explanations, one for the portion preceding the colon, the other for that following as the subtitle. The first part is derived from a short essay by Emily Perl Kingsley, written in 1987 in response to questions she had received about what it is like to raise a child with Down Syndrome. K...

Through a series of essays contributed by clinicians, medical historians, and prominent moral philosophers, Cognitive Disability and Its Challenge to Moral Philosophy addresses the ethical, bio-ethical, epistemological, historical, and meta-philosophical questions raised by cognitive disability • Features essays by a prominent clinicians and medica...

In this paper, I consider some political and moral issues that arise from the increasingly common phenomenon of migrant careworkers who are part of transnational families, often mothers of children who are left behind, but also daughters who leave behind elderly relatives who may need care. This is a phenomenon that Arlie Hochschild calls the “glob...

“The one thing having a child does is make a philosopher out of a parent.” So opens an op-ed piece in the aftermath of the infamous Baby Doe case, an infant with Down syndrome whose parents reluctantly made a decision to let their infant die. If having a child makes every parent a philosopher, having a child with cognitive disabilities makes a phil...

This Introduction to the collection of essays surveys the philosophical literature to date with respect to five central questions: justice, care, agency, metaphilosophical issues regarding the language and representation of cognitive disability, and personhood. These themes are discussed in relation to three specific conditions: intellectual and de...

Care ethics is especially responsive to the actual narratives and practices of care. In the first section of this chapter, I consider why an ethics of care exemplifies a non-idealized ethics. I show that both justice-based theories and care-based theories could be thought of as ideal theory or non-ideal theory—the difference is a question of the po...

Contemporary industrialized societies have been confronted with the fact and consequences of women's increased participation in paid employment. Whether this increase has resulted from women's desire for equality or from changing economic circumstances, women and men have been faced with a crisis in the organization of work that concerns dependents...

Arlie Hochschild glosses the practice of women migrants in poor nations who leave their families behind for extended periods of time to do carework in other wealthier countries as a "global heart transplant" from poor to wealthy nations. Thus she signals the idea of an injustice between nations and a moral harm for the individuals in the practice....

Women's activities and relations to men are persistent metaphors for man's projects. I query the prominence of these and the lack of equivalent metaphors where men are the metaphoric vehicle for women and women's activities. Women's role as metaphor results from her otherness and her relational and mediational importance in men's lives. Otherness,...

What distinguishes ideal theory is the reliance on idealization to the exclusion, or at least marginalization, of the actual. … [I]deal theory either tacitly represents the actual as a simple deviation from the ideal, not worth theorizing in its own right, or claims that starting from the ideal is at least the best way of realizing it. - Charles W....

Denoncant l'impasse a laquelle sont parvenues les theories utilitaristes, les theories deontologiques ou les justifications du vegetarisme en termes de droits et de souffrance, l'A. propose un nouvel argument fonde sur le principe moral selon lequel faire le mal est un mal et sur l'idee selon laquelle tuer des animaux est un mal. Examinant le lien...

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My aim in this paper is to offer an oblique approach to the question of biomedicine and the limits of human existence by discussing the role of a care-based ethic in contemporary discussions of disability. Contemporary discussions of disability have resisted the notion that disability is essentially a matter of biology and medicine – that biomedici...

The desire for normality-not what normality is, but our desire for it-is the subject of this chapter. The various procedures for surgically shaping children that are discussed in this volume all appear to presume that what is normal is desirable, what is not normal is to be avoided. The price of normalcy and the cost of avoiding what is not normal...

In this article I examine the proposition that severe cognitive disability is an impediment to moral personhood. Moral personhood, as I understand it here, is articulated in the work of Jeff McMahan as that which confers a special moral status on a person. I rehearse the metaphysical arguments about the nature of personhood that ground McMahan’s cl...