March is National Ethics Month and the last two years have shone an ever more intense light on what ethical practice does – and most notably doesn’t – mean when it comes to working with the wide array of people (and their experiences) that call the disability community home.
Take, for example, the pushback against various New York Times articles focused on the intersection between ethics and disability. An entire slew of pieces on chronic pain without any tangible input from people with chronic pain in 2021 and a 2020 column by the paper’s resident ethicist on whether someone should end their relationship with a disabled partner purely because of their condition – a take that got dismantled online. Across the pond, a mini-documentary on so-called “disability fakers” that was widely decried as harmful and a Nobel Prize for a practice, gene editing, that multiple disability communities – most notably those with dwarfism and Down syndrome – have been sounding the alarm on for years in various forms, as profiled by the Atlantic.
In the business space, we saw companies grappling with how to introduce accessible practices – most notably work from home arrangements – mandated as COVID ebbed and flowed. Conversations about the “great resignation” competed with articles about just how much access was being created through work-from-home arrangements.
Ethical questions about healthcare were abundant as well.
Alabama refused ventilator services related to coronavirus care for persons with disabilities, only recalling the policy after disability advocacy groups raised alarms about the practice. Phillips recalled ventilators and provided little support for long-term users – you can read more about that at Disability Visibility Project. All of these topics, and many more, have called into question society’s personal and professional ethics in arguably the most visible way in recent times.
National Ethics Month asks us to look inward, to identify where our boundaries and procedures can be reinforced to increase access and decrease barriers for those with disabilities. It can be really easy, even as a socially engaged and empathetic person, to believe that you are working at the absolute peak of your accessibility powers. It can be simple, downright enticing, to see your company’s work from home policy, its staff testimonials, its ASL interpreted events, and think that you and your colleagues are done − that battle has been fought, the dragon slain, the town hall rejoicing. But there is much work to do.
To do access work goes beyond reading and research, it goes beyond checking in with our own personal morals, and forces us to continue moving forward in ways that embrace accessibility as a tool for collective creation and – in some circles and ways of knowing – liberation.
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