David Wasserman, from the National Institutes of Health, will be the virtual guest speaker presenting lecture titled "Bad- vs. Mere-Difference Views of Disability: Where’s the Disagreement?" The Colloquium Series presented by the School of Humanities and Center for Ethics and Health Humanities features relatively informal presentations of current research by the Philosophy and Religion faculty and occasional guest speakers.

About the Lecture:

Despite the vigorous, sometimes heated debate about the evaluation of disability, it is surprisingly hard to identify the claims on which careful proponents and critics of bad-difference views disagree. Both deny that it is always or almost always significantly worse to be disabled than not disabled; both accept that some disabilities are very bad for some people. Is their disagreement mainly about the probability or magnitude of bad outcomes; about the difficulty of generalizing across diverse disabilities; about what environmental and social background is assumed in generalizing; about what counts as a disability “in itself” vs. a contingently-associated condition; about the appropriate account of well-being to use in evaluating disability; or about whose evidence counts and how much? Wasserman will critically survey these possibilities without reaching any firm conclusion.