Disability and Nature-First Constitutivism

Abstract

This essay develops a disability-based epistemic challenge to nature-first constitutivism, a family of views on which standards of excellence and defect for (human) agents are grounded in the nature of (human) agency. The core idea of the challenge is that various culturally prevalent negative assumptions about disability, along with related phenomena such as disability invisibility, introduce ideological distortions into our assessment of what (human) capacities for agency and the associated excellences and “defects” are like, occluding from view the worthwhile hypothesis that some disabled modes of agency might be compatible with agential excellence. Such distortions may be avoidable, but only by seriously interrogating the assumptions about disability that underpin them, as well as specific disabled modes of agency. I develop this challenge in detail by focusing on one disability affecting agency: ADHD. I conclude by outlining related metaphysical questions regarding plural forms of agency, situating these questions within the emerging literature on pluralist constitutivism.