This chapter addresses the questions:

• • What are the implications of the ideas about a good life for the lives of people with intellectual disabilities?

• • What values relevant to defining a good life underpin current disability theories, ideas and discourses?

• • What contribution have these values made to the lives of people with intellectual disabilities?

One of the strands of a good life identified in Chapter Two is that it is a life that balances virtue with pleasure, and duty with commitment; where human needs for work/purposeful activity and love/meaningful relationships are fulfilled. Fundamentally, it is a life lived with and for others. How are these to be achieved by and for people with intellectual disabilities? Faith has been placed in two concepts, ‘community’ and ‘inclusion’. In this chapter we review these as mechanisms for achieving a better life, and find them wanting. We propose instead that ‘belonging’ and relationship-building may offer more tangible ideas to inform the journey to a good life.

The dream of community

In the context of economic crises Cardinal O’Connor addresses what he sees as a breakdown in ‘community’. His advocacy for a new approach is based on a view that has been advanced by a number of theorists (Lasch, 1995; Bauman, 2001) that we have lost something that we should value, a sense of connection with each other. Essentially the Cardinal advances a nostalgic view of community that seems to be based on geographical proximity. It reminds us of an idealised world that is now largely seen in sitcoms or 19th-century novels where neighbours knew each other and were intimately involved with each other's lives. Perhaps it is the setting for the ‘ordinary life’, or a life like any other (Chapter Four).

It is ironic that at a time when geographical communities are in decline, the stuff of nostalgia, people with intellectual disabilities are expected to find a life like any other in ‘community’.