The easiest way to begin is with the ways to get disability policy wrong. Inhumane treatment in institutions (warning: photos are Pulitzer Prize-winning but deeply disturbing) is one such way, but no longer the most popular. For a more common one, consider Martha Nussbaum:
The parties to the social contract are assumed by John Locke to be “free, equal, and independent.” Contemporary contractarians explicitly adopt such an hypothesis. For David Gauthier, people of unusual need are “not party to the moral relationships grounded by a contractarian theory.”If your political theory depends on any kind of equality more literal than "equal in the eyes of God," the existence of disabled people is going to be for you what children are to Objectivism.
To turn to someone more helpful, here's Lennard Davis (if you only buy one disability studies book this year...):
. . . many Deaf activists do not consider themselves disabled. Rather, the Deaf think of themselves as a linguistic minority like Latinos or Asians, who are defined by their use of a language other than the dominant one in the United States. [...] Likewise, the Deaf and the disabled do not see eye-to-eye on the issue of mainstreaming. Disabled people want to be mainstreamed into the "normal" educational system rather than be segregated in often inferior schools. But for the Deaf, mainstreaming is seen as cultural genocide since residential schools are the breeding ground of Deaf culture.Noah asked for a liberal vision of disability theory and I obviously can't give him one*, but I can point out one reason why he run into trouble in his search. Davis says in the same book, "Wounds are not the result of oppression, but the other way around. Protections are not inherent, endowed by the creator, but created by society at large and administered to all." I know leftists who would disagree very strongly with the first seven words of Davis's statement, even if he moderated it to "not always the result of oppression." (Liberals think life is a comedy; conservatives think life is a tragedy?)
The bottom line: there is no clear distinction between care that is patronizing and care that is compassionate, or between recognizing a disability and calling undue attention to it. I don't really respond to arguments against "reducing someone to their disability" because I don't think it's important that I deal with everyone I meet as a whole person (are you denying your professor's humanity when you use him for his mind during a history lecture?), but, even if I did, that wouldn't be a clear distinction either. All I do is gesture in what I think is the right direction.
I've probably seen a few hundred speeches given on the floor of the Party of the Right, and one of the dozen that I really remember was one Will (not this one) gave on the four kinds of forgiveness**: game theoretical ("I should forgive her because it's to my advantage to live in a world where forgiveness is the norm"); stoic ("I didn't really care in the first place"); seeing oneself in the other person ("I might have done the same thing in her circumstances"); and seeing the face of God in the other person. The distinction between the last two is the important one here.
I can't imagine what it's like to be blind, or mentally retarded, or wheelchair-bound, and they can't imagine what it's like to live without a life-pervading impairment. Any disability theory that depends upon seeing oneself in the face of a child with autism, or that demands that he take seriously the possiblity that his life will ever look like yours, is flawed; far better that we should look for some common ground that is actually universal. I call it "the face of God"; Noah might call it something different.
*Try Bérubé.
**He might have cribbed this from Miroslav Volf; I wouldn't know.
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