Center for Bioethics, Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland, OH, USA.
Theor Med Bioeth. 2022 Aug;43(4):209-220. doi: 10.1007/s11017-022-09575-2. Epub 2022 Aug 20.
Robert Veatch's The Foundations of Justice: Why the Retarded and the Rest of Us Have Claims to Equality (1986) delves into deep questions of justice through the case of a child with disabilities. I describe what is basically right about this vision, as well as what is problematic from the standpoint of contemporary disability bioethics. From there, I dive into the notion of vulnerability that is at play in his work. He describes disability as necessarily a condition of weakness, lesser-than existence, and neediness. When disability is viewed in this way as an inherently vulnerable state of being, the essential sociopolitical dimensions of disability receive inadequate attention, which, in turn, makes it impossible to identify injustices correctly. I connect these points to concrete challenges faced by disability communities during the COVID-19 pandemic, which have raised profound questions about the just use of scarce critical care resources. Any case drawn from the pandemic is a very different kind of case than that of the child in Veatch's book, but a commonality is the question of who should get what limited resources when needs and urgency vary.
罗伯特·维特的《正义基础：为何智障者和我们其他人都有平等的诉求》（1986 年）通过一个残疾儿童的案例深入探讨了正义的深刻问题。我描述了这种观点的基本正确性，以及从当代残疾生物伦理学的角度来看存在的问题。由此，我深入探讨了他的作品中所涉及的脆弱性概念。他将残疾描述为必然的弱势、次等存在和需要状态。当残疾被视为一种内在脆弱的存在状态时，残疾的基本社会政治维度就得不到足够的关注，这反过来又使得正确识别不公正现象变得不可能。我将这些观点与残疾社区在 COVID-19 大流行期间所面临的具体挑战联系起来，这些挑战引发了关于稀缺重症监护资源的正确使用的深刻问题。从大流行中得出的任何案例都与维特书中的儿童案例截然不同，但共同点是，当需求和紧迫性不同时，谁应该获得有限的资源。
