Disability and Well-Being

This entry discusses the relationship between disability and well‐being. Disabilities are commonly thought to be unfortunate, but whether this is true is unclear, and, if it is true, it is unclear why it is true. The entry first explains the disability paradox, which is the apparent discrepancy between the level of well‐being that disabled people self‐report, and the level of well‐being that nondisabled people predict disabled people to have. It then turns to an argument that says that disabilities must be bad, because it is wrong to cause them in others. Later sections discuss whether disabilities might be intrinsically bad or even bad by definition. The final section addresses the claim that disabilities are bad only because society discriminates against people with disabilities.