Sufficientarians face a problem of arbitrariness: why place a sufficiency threshold at any particular point? One response is to seek universal goods to justify a threshold. However, this faces difficulties (despite sincere efforts) by either being too low, or failing to accommodate individuals with significant cognitive disabilities. Some sufficientarians have appealed to individuals’ subjective evaluations of their lives. I build on this idea, considering another individualized threshold: ‘tolerability’. I respond to some traditional challenges to individualistic approaches to justice: ‘expensive’ tastes, (...) and adaptive preferences. Finally, I end by offering some suggestions about how this relates to policymaking. (shrink)

This project takes a comprehensive approach to the application of life-value ethics to matters of disability. I overview the philosophical foundation of my approach, life-value ethics, in its different dimensions. I explore the distinction between life-requirements and need-satisfiers. Life-requirements are the fundamental needs shared by all human being whereas need-satisfiers are the tools by which we access our life-requirements in specific circumstances. After exploring this philosophical groundwork, I address the social, medical, and value-neutral models of disability. I support a synthesis (...) of the social and medical models of disability, but I believe that Elizabeth Barnes's value-neutral model in its rejection of the idea that being disabled is necessarily bad helps to overcome the medicalized belief that the only way to fully realize life-value is to eliminate disability. Hence, it is primarily the value-neutral model that I use to show how a life-value approach can address matters of accessibility and accommodation. As a way of demonstrating the merits of a life-value approach, I apply life-value ethics to the recent policies banning single-use plastic straws. Even though plastic straws do not represent the biggest threat to the environment, they are a primary target of environmentalist initiatives to reduce the amount of plastic waste entering our oceans. It can be shown that plastic straws act as need-satisfiers for disabled people with neurological and muscular impairments. In addition, I contend that by using the concept of coherent inclusivity, we can show that making these need-satisfiers accessible to the public will not only avoid causing harm, but will also help to provide alternative need-satisfiers to our ageing population. (shrink)