Prenatal screening can lead to the detection and diagnosis of significantly life-limiting conditions affecting the unborn child. Recognizing the difficulties facing parents who decide to continue the pregnancy, some have proposed perinatal hospice as a new modality of care. Although the medical literature has begun to devote significant attention to these practices, systematic philosophical reflection on perinatal hospice has been relatively limited. Drawing on Alasdair MacIntyre’s account of the virtues of acknowledged dependence, I contend that perinatal hospice manifests and facilitates (...) virtues essential to living well with human dependency and vulnerability. For this reason, perinatal hospice deserves broad support within society. (shrink)

even a brief review of disability narratives shows that many people with disabilities, encompassing a diverse range of impairments, encounter disruptions in their everyday interactions. Individuals with disabilities report that strangers and neighbors alike fail to communicate with them.1 Instead, people defer to friends, partners, and caretakers to offer some command over the interaction. These experiences might be understood as mere annoyances, part of the experience of impairment insofar as it undermines non-disabled individuals’ modes of interaction, leaving them fumbling, seeking (...) assurance that they are handling the situation correctly. But, read less cautiously, these frustrations are emblematic of a... (shrink)

I argue that Alasdair MacIntyre has important resources to provide in the debate over the moral status of severely disabled people. In contrast, Gregory Poore suggests that MacIntyre’s virtue theory cannot account for our responsibilities to severely disabled people. Given that MacIntyre bases his theory around community membership, this charge is made especially severe in the case of severely disabled strangers. I present an interpretation of MacIntyre that accounts for responsibilities to severely disabled strangers. I then argue that Poore is (...) wrong to conclude that MacIntyre does not include severely disabled people in communities. (shrink)