Essay On Disability Discrimination

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Individuals with disabilities have physical or mental deficiencies that prevent their performing one or more major life functions in the normal way. 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. People tend to target them to get them to go away or to do something they can do as a lack of understanding of the disability. Just as often, however, disability discrimination is the result of thoughtlessness. Practices built on the presumption that only normal people will participate can have a negative, and therefore discriminatory, impact on people with abnormal bodies or minds.
That a practice is discriminatory does not, however, establish for everyone that it is wrong. There are individuals who proclaim a right 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 deprived 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.
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