Ableist assumptions in Foot’s “Moral Beliefs”?

Foot introduces an opponent claim that the word ‘injury’ is prescriptive or ‘action-guiding’ only when the speaker applies the word to “something [she] intends to avoid.”¹ Take the expression “injury to a hand” for example. The opponent will not grant that it is logically or by definition prescriptive because one can speak of injuries without intending to dissuade anyone.

Now Foot asks us to “look carefully at the crucial move in the argument, and query the suggestion that someone might happen not to want anything for which he would need the use of hands or eyes.” Foot then continues: “Hands and eyes, like ears and legs, play a part in so many operations that a man could only be said not to need them if he had no wants at all. That such people exist, in asylums, is not to the present purpose at all; the proper use of his limbs is something a man has reason to want if he wants anything.”

I was surprised and a bit offended upon reading the above part, because Foot seems to be saying here, “Who does not need hands and eyes? Who would not, if not crazy, want to have hands, eyes, ears, and legs?” Well, yes, it might be much better off to have hands and eyes, because not having hands and eyes counts in our society as is now as deformation or disability, and our society now is just not for people with disability. Yet I think it is our society, not their disability per se, that makes their lives hard ones to live. So Foot’s comment almost seems to trivialize different ways of life in which people with disability live or may fight and choose to live — they can lead healthy and happy lives without wanting to have hands or eyes.

Foot’s argument, when charitably read, may involve no ableist assumptions as I suspect. For the whole point is that you cannot make something really injurious, harmful, or bad just by saying so; that you must point out what is really injurious, harmful, or bad about that something in light of human conditions of life (what we want, what we deem important, what we need and what we must avoid to sustain our lives, and so on).

But then Foot would need to appeal to non-ableist sense of human good if he wants to point out how exactly the words like “good”, “justice”, or “injury” relate to our specific needs as human beings. I am not sure how Foot would respond to this new call. (Maybe my comment is irrelevant to Foot’s main argument.) Yet I have a strong intuition that either Foot will have to specify human conditions that are universal enough to relate every form of life to human good, or he will have to step back and see that his previous assumptions about “human good” may be just another pending prescription whose ground remains unclear.

1. Foot, “Moral Beliefs”, Theories of Ethics (1977), pp. 83-100. ↩