Licia Carlson is a philosopher of disability and biomedical ethics who has written extensively on the topic of intellectual disability.1 In her first book, The Faces of Intellectual Disability: Philosophical Reflections (2010), Carlson undertook a Foucauldian excavation of her own discipline and its frequently hostile attitudes toward intellectually disabled persons. Many philosophers, she argued, have had a tendency to invoke intellectual disability in a depersonalized, disembodied manner, such as in thought experiments that probed the outer limits of personhood, species identification, and moral status. Because philosophers prove their worth through their ability to reason, intellectual disability had become a kind of “philosopher’s nightmare”—a site of their anxieties, prejudice, and ignorance. While other philosophers had objectified intellectually disabled persons (sometimes using shockingly cruel and insensitive language), Carlson cast her gaze back on those philosophers and showed how their discourse had failed to account for the “lived experiences of persons with...

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