‘Doing’ normativity in disability studies: soft suggestions towards an empirical ethics of disability

Abstract

As a field concerned with improving the lives of disabled people, disability studies has always been a normative field of inquiry. For this reason, Vehmas and Watson (2016) urge disability scholars to engage with normativity more explicitly. This article builds on Vehmas and Watson to consider how disability scholars can ‘do’ normativity so as to arrive at normative insights attuned to the lives of disabled people themselves. The article has two aims. The first is to examine how normativity has been ‘done’ in disability studies research up to the present. Here, the article locates three problems that hinder the pursuit of normative insights that have sufficient bearing on disability experiences. The second is to make some suggestions for more reflexively ‘doing’ normativity in disability studies in a way that does yield insights of this kind. For this latter goal, the article draws on ideas from the field of empirical ethics.Points of interestThis article regards disability studies as a field that seeks to improve the lives of disabled people. It is therefore a ‘normative’ field of study.The article asks how disability scholars can gain insights to improve disabled people’s lives in a way that responds to the lived experience of disabled people themselves. The article refers to this as ‘doing normativity’.The article finds three problems in how disability scholars usually ‘do’ normativity to gain insights of this kind.To work on these problems, the article introduces three insights from a field of research known as ‘empirical ethics’.

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