Disability, Discrimination and Linguistic Justice: A Human Variation Perspective

HUMVAR is a project in applied ethics, and it adopts the framework of a particular disability model, the human variation model (HVM).

The goal of HUMVAR is to advance research on the HVM, and it has three objectives: first, to provide a philosophical defense of the HVM.

HUMVAR’s interpretation of the HVM shows that an important aspect of disability disadvantage is caused by exclusive environments.

This causation story grounds societal responsibility and justifies the provision of more accommodating environments —the favored policy response of social models of disability.

The first objective defends this interpretation against the challenge that social models of disability cannot justify the policy of environmental reconstruction.

HUMVAR’s second objective is to redefine the problem of disability that the model articulates as a special case of discrimination (discrimination-as-human-variation).

Discrimination-as-human-variation is a revisionary account of the HVM, as the original version of the model aims to be an alternative to discrimination-based approaches to disability. This revisionary interpretation explores that disability-as-human-variation is a form of ableism.

The third objective is to expand the idea of human variation to the case of linguistic diversity and justice, showing that the logic of the HVM is present in other spheres of social life beyond disability.

HUMVAR makes the case that minority languages are also disadvantaged by their social environment and vulnerable to discrimination-as-human-variation.

It also examines the case of sign language through the lens of linguistic justice to find a novel answer to why changing individual impairments is problematic from a moral point of view.

HUMVAR's answer is that society’s insistence on changing individual impairments instead of providing accommodating environments is a case of wrongful assimilation.