Agency, Self-Acceptance and Well-Being in Disability Policy and Practice

The disability rights movement (DRM) has often been closely associated with the liberal values of individual choice and independence, or the 'ethics of agency', where enhancing the capacity to make autonomous decisions in various policy and practice-based contexts is said to facilitate disabled people's well-being. Nevertheless, other liberal values are derived from what will be termed here the 'ethics of self-acceptance'. The latter is more disguised in liberalism and the DRM, as rather than emphasising the capacity to make autonomous decisions, self-acceptance focuses on the positive acceptance of individual limitations, but again to enhance well-being. The further argument is that while the ethics of agency and self-acceptance, often logically cohere and overlap, through promoting the values of self-respect and relational autonomy, dilemmas arise from our asymmetrical, or uneven, dispositions toward time, and present and future lives and experiences. For example, positively accepting individual limitations, allows for a present-orientated immersion in 'the moment', but which often requires some suspension of future-orientated goals and aspirations. Understanding some of the implications of this asymmetry, and the dilemmas arising from it, provide important insights concerning approaches to physical and intellectual impairments and the subsequent debates within the DRM, social policy and welfare practice.