DISABILITY DISCRIMINATION

Disability Discrimination

Disability Discrimination

When an individual, who has disabilities, or thought to have disabilities, is for this reason treated less well than other people, or excluded from opportunities most others enjoy, that person has been subjected to disability discrimination. Often such discriminatory practice intentionally targets individuals with disabilities with the aim of ensuring that others need not suffer their presence nor have to interact with them. Just as often, however, disability discrimination is the result of thoughtlessness. Practices built on the presumption that only species-typical people will participate can have a disparately negative, and therefore discriminatory, impact on people with anomalous bodies or minds (Funk, 2007).

That a practice is discriminatory does not, however, establish for everyone that it is wrong. There are individuals who advance a moral claim to freedom of choice of their associates, which they understand as a right to treat some people less well than others, and to remain socially removed from them, on the basis of sex, race, religion, or national origin, or because the people have disabilities. The question this argument provokes is whether the harm of disability discrimination (and of race and sex and other kinds of discrimination as well) resembles the harm absorbed by an unpopular person bereft of invitations to dance or play or join the group for lunch, or whether the harm is of a more profound kind that commands moral consideration. That the harm caused by disability discrimination rises to the level of injustice has not been a commonplace view in the past, nor does this view command universal assent today (Francis, 2008).

Instances of thoughtless disability discrimination vastly outnumber intentional discrimination, however. The historically embedded expectation that individuals with disabilities should not engage in commerce nor present themselves to work invites inattention to the existence of barriers to their participation. Examples of such barriers include construction practices that assume all customers are able to walk up stairs, informational practices that rely on broadcast announcements, and scheduling practices that ignore the regularity with which people with diabetes must ingest food (Burgdorf, 2006).

Such practices that disparately disadvantage people with disabilities discriminate against them, and failure to remedy the resulting barriers may expose businesses to legal action unless the remedy is unreasonably costly, measured against the business's overall operating costs. That other customers may retreat from mingling with people with disabilities, or other employees resent working alongside a colleague with disabilities, is never a ...