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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
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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

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