More on MacIntyre and Disabilities

Some Czech children with disabilities are still kept in cages. This forces me back to MacIntyre. So people with disabilities still need a voice in the community; how can they have that voice? Through a proxy. MacIntyre maintains that we speak for people who are unable to speak for themselves, and we do this through friendship. This points out the need for us to attend first to those who are close to us, rather than putting responsibility for them on the government alone. Furthermore, we learn to speak on behalf of another "in the course of learning how to speak for myself, something more complex and more difficult than it is often taken to be." Learning to speak for another, then, and for one's self are tied up together, our ability to speak for ourselves, as we shall see, relies on our ability to speak for others.

Speaking for ourselves and speaking for others are tied up with one another in achieving accountability, or the ability to "assume the other's point of view, so that the concerns to which we respond in giving our account are the ones that are in fact genuinely theirs. If we are successful in so doing, we become able to speak with the voice of the other systematically ... In achieving accountability we will have learned not only how to speak to, but also how to speak for the other. We will ... have become--in one sense of that word--friends. "

And key to acting well in this role, MacIntyre tells us, is truthfulness.

Here we see that MacIntyre is not asking us to step out of ourselves and put ourselves behind a veil of ignorance, making policies based on imagining that we might ourselves be disabled. Rather, MacIntyre asks us to come into conversation and friendship with others, seeing ourselves more clearly in them and learning to know them as an other, in order to be able to accurately articulate their voice when they are unable to speak. We act out of a genuine interest in the other as other, rather than out of a sympathy (which is arguably really selfishness) that we get from imagining ourselves in their shoes.