Abstracts
Abstract
It appears that liberal thought pays too little attention to negative affective responses toward people with disabilities. As a result, liberal theories may lack corrective structures to deal with such emotions and theorists themselves may fall prey to their influence. Assuming these troubling suggestions are at least partly well-founded and thereby warrant closer investigation, I examine three hypothetical causes of this state of affairs: the philosophical distrust toward emotions, the failure to attend to anxious reactions toward anomalous bodies, and the fear of vulnerability connected to liberal ideology. Although the causal factors that I discus are difficult to demonstrate empirically, they are nonetheless intuitively compelling.
Keywords:
- emotions,
- affective responses,
- liberalism,
- disability
Résumé
Il semble que la pensée libérale accorde trop peu d'attention aux réactions affectives négatives envers les personnes handicapées. Par conséquent, les théories libérales peuvent manquer de structures correctives pour traiter efficacement ces émotions et les théoricien(ne)s eux-mêmes peuvent devenir la proie de leur influence. En supposant que ces suggestions inquiétantes soient tout au moins partiellement bien fondées et justifient un approfondissement, cet essai examine trois causes hypothétiques relatives à cette situation: la méfiance philosophique envers les émotions, l'échec à reconnaître les réactions d’anxiété que suscitent les anomalies corporelles et la crainte de la vulnérabilité liée à l’idéologie libérale. Bien que ces facteurs de causalité soient difficiles à évaluer, ils sont néanmoins intuitivement convaincants.
Mots-clés :
- émotions,
- réponse affective,
- libéralisme,
- handicap
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