Species of Disability: Response to Arneil

Barbara Arneil , "Disability, Self Image, and Modern Political Theory," Political Theory 37 (2009): 218-42.

Ibid., 228.

Ibid., 234.

Ibid., 233.

Martha Nussbaum , Frontiers of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006).

See Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation ( New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 2001) for one of the classic examples of this argument.

Other kinds of life may not possess such capacities, but there is no reason to necessarily exclude them ab initio (again, based on the criteria set out by Arneil as the bases for ethical significance in interdependency theory). These others life forms need to be considered as well, although their varying capacities/morphologies makes any simple formulation highly problematic. As Jacques Derrida said of the troubling notion that we can include the vast heterogeneity of nonhuman life under a single term, "Animal": "The animal, what a word!" See Derrida’s "The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)," Critical Inquiry 28 (2002), 392.

Aldo Leopold , A Sand County Almanac (New York, NY: Ballantine Books, 1970), 240.

Arneil , "Disability, Self Image," 237.

Plato, Statesman , tr. Benjamin Jowett (Teddington, UK: Echo Press, 2006), 30-31. Jowett’s use of terms like brutes and brute creation is of course part of the problem, but this makes the claim that much more startling and powerful than using a less anthropocentric translation.

Arneil , "Disability, Self Image," 234.

Friedrich Nietzsche , On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York, NY: Vintage, 1989), 24-56.

Val Plumwood , Environmental Culture (London , UK: Routledge, 2002), 164-65.

Plumwood , Environmental Culture, 218-35.