DISABILITY AND ADAPTIVE PREFERENCE¹

Designing from a Disabled Body: The Case of Architect Marta Bordas Eddy

“…The aim of adapting one's preferences is to reduce the emotional affect (i.e., tension or frustration) one feels in having wants that cannot be satisfied. Yet, others argue that not all adaptive preferences are necessarily irrational and consider Elster's constraints too narrowly focused [48][49][50][51]. Martha Nussbaum maintains that over the course of our lives, we all adapt our preferences, not because we are acting irrationally, but because we adjust to feasible options through experience.…”

Is Disability a Neutral Condition?

“…We also have reasons to be skeptical of the thought that we ought to reject the considered judgments of people with disabilities because they are in an irrational state of denial about their condition or they suffer from adaptive preference formation (Elster ). As other scholars have pointed out, rejecting the careful judgments of people with disabilities is problematic (Amundson , 112; Barnes ; Moller , 194). It's not clear why the epistemic standing of those who are disabled should be discounted or ignored, especially when disabled lives are not obviously analogous to those of people whose preferences have been shaped by oppressive circumstances, and when disabled people seem to be best situated to assess whether the effects of disability are such that no one would choose to live with them.…”

Three Aristotelian Accounts of Disease and Disability

“…73 Elizabeth Barnes, on related grounds, calls for acute caution in invoking adaptive preference, pointing out that its diagnosis is both question-begging (since it simply assumes that the conditions in question are sub-optimal and thus apt to cause preference-adaptation) and prone to over-generalisation (since it can be applied mutatis mutandi to, for instance, gay people with clearly absurd results). 74 At some point, in other words, bullets must be bitten. We can attempt to reduce adaptive preference by constantly striving to maximise the information available to participants in the public dialogue, and to ensure that disabled or disadvantaged individuals never lose sight of the full range of possibilities available to them, as well as that the comparatively advantaged are fully informed about the ways in which the lives of others are restricted, and the ways in which those restrictions may be alleviated or redressed.…”