Human Dignity and Bioethics

364 | Martha Nussbaum
exercise these entitlements on their own.
The list of entitlements in that way tracks the idea of the human
species. This is reasonable, because the human community is
the community within which all citizens, with and without various
unusual physical and mental disabilities, live their lives. Sometimes
philosophers make comparisons between human children with mental
retardation and chimpanzees. This comparison is profoundly misleading
for political purposes. A human child with profound mental
retardation has no option of going off to live happily with the chimps
in the forest. Her life will be lived with human beings. Human beings
are her parents, her caregivers. If she ever has a sexual life, it will
be with human beings. If she has children, they will be human children.
Relationships with other species may be very important in her
life (as they are on my capabilities list), but they do not constitute the
overall environment for her life. So, she should have the entitlements
of an equal human being, and that means, I think, all the same ones
that every other human being has.
So, on the “basic capabilities” my approach is flexible and pluralistic,
but on the political goal it is single and demanding. What, then,
becomes of individuals who, after our best efforts, cannot attain the
capabilities on the list because of a disability? Here I insist that they
still have these capabilities, for example the right to vote and the right
to own property, but that these capabilities in some cases will have
to be exercised in a relationship with a guardian. It is always preferable
to use guardians in as few areas of life as possible: thus I defend
a flexible multi-layered approach to legal guardianship. Moreover,
even with guardianship it is always better if the guardian can act
as a facilitator rather than a substitute. Thus, a young woman with
profound mental retardation has a guardian in matters of voting. If
at all possible, the guardian will consult her and try as best she can
to make the choice that coheres with what she knows of the young
woman’s preferences. Where that is simply not knowable, however,
the young woman still gets a vote and the guardian will vote for her
as best she can.
I should add that the species norm also tells us that certain abilities
are not equally valuable in all species. Thus language is an extremely
valuable capacity for life in the human community, and we
should make maximal efforts to teach language to all human children.