June 17, 2026

At the Nuremberg Medical Trials, Karl Brandt, Hitler’s personal physician, testified about his involvement in what he referred to as “the Leipzig case.” The parents of a child born with several disabilities wanted to have it killed. Since the director of their local hospital had rebuffed them, they had petitioned the Führer’s chancellery directly. As it happened, the Führer wanted a solution to the so-called euthanasia question, and so Brandt was directed to review the case and make it an exemplar. He found, as he put it, no reason to let the child live. 

The child, eventually identified as a boy named Gerhard Kretschmar, became the first known victim of the T4 program, which killed nearly 300,000 disabled people between 1939 and 1945. While public protests led to an official suspension of the program in 1941, T4 continued its practices unofficially, the “wild” phase of its “euthanasia” lasting until the end of the war. Even in the postwar years, there was a “crushing breadth of popular support for the perpetrators, and ongoing shaming of the victims and their families,” writes historian Dagmar Herzog in The Question of Unworthy Life. Beyond Brandt, who was convicted of crimes against humanity at Nuremberg and executed in 1948, very few physicians were held accountable, while people with disabilities kept being marginalized, confined to underfunded and short-staffed institutions. Not infrequently, ex-Nazi employees were “hired back as nurses and wardens.” Disabled people “were not viewed by their fellow citizens as fully human,” writes Herzog, “and their lives, bodies, and souls were not treated as of equal value.” 

Much about the medical murders was known from the beginning; more was uncovered after the end of the war. Yet the revelations about the T4 program failed to banish one of its core assumptions: that some disabilities inherently make life not worth living. Is it an overstatement to say that echoes of that sentiment persist today? I don’t think so. One doesn’t need to look too closely to see traces of T4 in tech’s transhumanist ambitions to overcome human frailty and bodily vulnerability once and for all. 

Take Nucleus Genomics. Financed in part by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, the company—which ran a major ad campaign last year using taglines like “IQ is 50% genetic”—offers screening of up to twenty IVF embryos with the promise of evading undesirable “genetic conditions and traits,” among them somatic disorders like Huntington’s, caused by single-gene mutations, as well as much more loosely defined conditions like ADHD, insomnia, alcoholism, and anxiety. The pitch is that prospective parents can have their “best baby,” which in turn presupposes that such a thing exists. 

One doesn’t need to look too closely to see traces of the Nazi euthanasia program for the disabled in tech’s transhumanist ambitions.

This new eugenics is depressingly similar to its antecedents in its rejection of the body, and the granularity of embodied life, in favor of a narrow, singular vision of the life of the mind. Intelligence, narrowly defined, reigns supreme; bodily variation, like a clunky bit of code, is a problem in need of debugging. Unlike its forebears, though, the new order appears willing to let some of the would-be outcasts into the club—so long as they prove useful. Certain forms of neurodiversity have even been embraced, recast not as hindrances but superpowers, the mark of the mythical “10x” engineer who churns out work an order of magnitude more productively than “normal” workers. For tech moguls like Elon Musk and Alex Karp of Palantir, a hint of autism is perfectly acceptable, even desirable, if it strengthens the bottom line. According to Karp, only two kinds of people will succeed in the AI era: trade workers and the neurodivergent. Within the vastly diverse minority of disabled people, it has long been possible to discern the subgroup of the “able-disabled,” the people who gain some degree of social acceptance by living up to productivity norms and demonstrating their economic utility, often at a high human cost. 

According to this familiar logic, the disabled remainder might well be better off dead. In Jojo Moyes’s bestselling novel Me Before You (2012), a rich, highly privileged quadriplegic man insists that he is nevertheless deprived of everything that makes life good, including the possibility of working, and must therefore kill himself. He does, and the story frames this as a happy ending. In 2021, Canada enacted laws that made nonterminal disabilities a sufficient, legitimate reason for physician-assisted suicide. And in one of the baldest statements of the cost-benefit approach, President Trump, after a meeting with disability advocates during his first term, allegedly said that, with the expenses involved, “those kinds of people”—referring to disabled people who required strict care and frequent hospital trips—“should just die.” 

Haven’t we made some progress, though? I’ve been hearing language like Trump’s less often since I became a tenured professor, or for that matter since I got married and became a father. It seems I’m no longer being challenged, however implicitly, to prove that my life is worth living. Perhaps I’m passing as one of the able-disabled. Perhaps I’m now spending more time in the company of people who have lived long enough to think twice about what sort of experiences might really make you wish you were dead. And perhaps, following decades of activism, there has been a cultural shift in what “disability” signifies. From the 1960s onwards, American activists drew inspiration from and aligned with the civil rights movement to position disability as a minority identity. In the United Kingdom in the 1970s, the “social model” explained the marginalization of disabled people as a form of political and economic oppression driven by industrial capitalism and the privileging of interchangeable workers’ bodies. In both cases, disability was reconfigured from an individual medical problem to a phenomenon with social, cultural, and historical aspects: as a binary category of exclusion imposed on the range of natural human variation. The year I was born, 1981, happened to be the United Nations’ International Year of Disabled Persons. In the decades since, anti-discrimination laws have been implemented across the world.

It can be hard to reconcile this cheerful story of social progress with the sudden, baleful resurgence of eugenic ideology. But eugenics arose, in part, as a progressive project aimed at bettering the human condition, and even modern, progressive disability policies have partly been motivated by the idea that disability can somehow be “solved.” Some forms of the social model took the position that once political and economic oppression were eliminated, full equality would be achieved; the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities similarly advances the goal of “full and equal participation.” Like any grand ideal, these bear an equally grand potential for disappointment. All utopias, Fredric Jameson once observed, are defined by what they exclude, and disability’s utopian scenarios are no exception: they leave no room for the people who cannot live up to a particular standard, whether defined by productivity norms or some more humane understanding of lives well lived. The persistence of this gap in our thinking suggests there are still fundamental philosophical questions to be answered about how we view such people. Why we can only conceive of certain lives as problems to be remedied? Why, in short, does disability remain synonymous with deficit? 

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The Question of Unworthy Life is concerned with how twentieth-century medicalized killing became grounded in a generalized equation of disability with lack of value—and in particular, why “disabled people were not ‘forgotten’ victims, but rather aggressively repudiated ones.” The T4 program was carried out in hospitals and asylums throughout Germany, and usually, unlike the case of Gerhard Kretschmar, against families’ wishes. The death certificates that families received, indicating natural causes of death like heart failure, were often suspected to be false. The murders were sufficiently well known that open protests began to erupt in February 1941, and the program officially shut down in August of that year. But the killings didn’t stop, and there was no real reckoning, neither legally nor morally. Only in the 1980s and 1990s was the “euthanasia” acknowledged as a mass crime. It was as late as 2014 that a national memorial was dedicated at Tiergartenstrasse 4 in Berlin, the address that gave the program its name. 

What gave the ideology behind T4 such formidable reach and staying power? Herzog uncovers a deep set of intellectual roots. The term “unworthy lives” was coined in the first place in an infamous and highly influential 1920 pamphlet, Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens (“Allowing the destruction of life unworthy of living”), by the jurist Karl Binding and the psychiatrist Alfred Hoche. They argued that certain people could be legitimately killed not only because it benefited the economy, but for their own good. The pamphlet is sometimes referred to in contemporary debates about euthanasia and assisted suicide, usually as an outlier in terms of its ethical stance. Herzog renders it less exceptional, placing it in the context of ethical and political debates that were, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, framed around eugenic hierarchizations of human worth. 

Binding and Hoche’s reasoning was profoundly hypocritical. The pamphlet argues that people who suffer and want to end their lives should be helped to die, but so should people who don’t understand how bleak and pointless their lives are. As it happened, the latter were the people who were also an economic burden on society. Herzog’s most chilling passages describe victims who were deemed to lack human agency, but knew exactly what was happening to them. This includes Hans, a man living at an institution in Württemberg, who shouted to the personnel about to take him to the killing center: “Our blood be upon you!” 

The Nazis’ obsession with “useless eaters,” like the T4 program itself, was grounded in a longstanding obsession with the costs and benefits of supporting the lives of disabled people. State investment in care or education could only be justified with an expected outcome of “some improved usefulness.” In many countries in the nineteenth century, from the United States to Scandinavia, the emergence of some form of inclusive education grew from the idea that physically and intellectually disabled people could become productive citizens. When faced with limits to how “useful” some people would become, eugenically minded politicians as well as intellectuals began to explore other options.

As a host of disability scholars have pointed out, the idea of the useless or unproductive citizen is closely tied to industrialization and the individualized labor market. The political and economic forces that made possible the figure of the “useless eater” were the same that made every worker’s labor replaceable. “Disability” is notoriously hard to define, but one of its aspects is having a smaller quantity of labor power to sell (or none at all), or being unable to sell it because places of work are organized around the human body perceived as “normal.” In modern societies, this has often meant that disabled people must live on the sufferance of the state, receiving disability benefits, a stigma that reflects the moral and social primacy of economic productivity. 

In the twenty-first century, these remain critical issues, certainly to the extent that access to quality health care depends on money. Under the T4 program, Herzog shows, some disabled people survived only because they could provide a modicum of labor in the institutions where they were kept. Their lives had no other value; they were circumscribed by the cost-benefit analysis that derived from the principles of “racial hygiene.” 

The German equivalent to Anglo-American “eugenics,” the term was coined by the biologist Alfred Ploetz, who thought that superior peoples must be guarded both from the foreign bodies of inferior races and from the inferior representatives of their own kind. Here, as Herzog points out, lies the connection between the Nazis’ view of Jews and their perception of disabled people. One threat was external, the other was internal, but both were antithetical to the purity of the master race. In approaching the inner threat, Ploetz drew on stories about the ancient Spartans, and the legendary mountain range Taygetus, where “unfit” infants would be disposed of. Like the Spartans, the Germanic people would become beautiful and strong, Ploetz thought, only by killing off the weak. Like Binding and Hoche’s “humane” arguments for euthanasia, the notion of the good life was not just an ideal to strive for; it was also a criterion for identifying lives that were not worthy. 

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It would be a mistake, Herzog seems to warn us, to see eugenics as the only intellectual antecedent for the drive to eliminate disability: she points to Nietzsche’s contention that it would be “more cruel” to let a disabled infant live than to kill it and Martin Luther’s stance that a disabled child could be killed because it was nothing but “a mass of flesh.” These arguments differ from those of the eugenicists, of course, in that they are grounded in empathy—empathy that, however disingenuously expressed, makes murder acceptable. How deep does this particular sentiment run? 

Toward the end of The Life Worth Living: Disability, Pain, and Morality, philosopher Joel Michael Reynolds recounts a family anecdote. A motorcycle-riding uncle, refusing to wear a helmet, says I’d rather be dead than disabled. For Reynolds, this is the folk answer to a question posed in Plato’s Crito. On the eve of his execution, Socrates asks whether life is worth living “with a body that is corrupted and in a bad condition.” Absolutely not, Crito replies. Here, at the origins of Western philosophy, is a “certainty that some forms of life are worth less than others or not worth living at all”—a certainty Reynolds traces up to the present day. 

A wheelchair user myself, I’ve heard this sentiment—so commonsensical to some people that it doesn’t register as offensive—more than once. The uncle in the anecdote, for instance, seems to have forgotten that he is in the presence of several disabled relatives, including one who uses a wheelchair. For Reynolds, his comment is revealing of a structure: by unthinkingly presuming that “disability comes along with or directly causes pain and suffering,” he is making what Reynolds terms the “ableist conflation,” the pernicious effects of which are traced through the book. Reynolds aims to pick this conflation apart, to show that while there are forms of pain that render life unbearable, other forms of pain are simply part of being human. There is meaningful and meaningless pain; adaptive, acute pain that can teach avoidance of fire and other hazard, and maladaptive, chronic pain that can “[evict] one from being at home in one’s own body.” Either of these may coincide with illness and disability, but neither are intrinsic to them. To conflate consuming, life-encompassing pain with disability, Reynolds writes, is to make a category error.

When faced with limits to how “useful” some people would become, eugenically minded politicians and intellectuals began to explore other options.

Through the ableist conflation, Reynolds makes another, more comprehensive claim: that philosophers have systematically devalued the lives of disabled people not just because of the presence of pain, but because of the absence of certain attributes. Kant believed that people with intellectual disabilities could never achieve full moral status. John Stuart Mill thought that a lack of intelligence was a priori negative, and argued that “if the fool judges their life in fact to be as satisfactory as the nonfool’s, ‘it is because they only know their own side of the question.’” As Reynolds points out, Mill doesn’t apply the same standard to nondisabled people, who aren’t required to know how life with an intellectual disability is actually experienced. The ableist conflation takes it as given that disability equals the deprivation of something quintessentially important to the good life. 

This view is ultimately anchored in Aristotle, who in Topics defines blindness as “privation” of a “natural attribute.” In Politics, he defines such natural attributes as essential to flourishing, to eudaimonia. Aristotle understood what is necessary for flourishing relative to the capacities “natural” to an adult human male, meaning that the Aristotelian candidate for eudaimonia is a prefiguration of the normal man—and that if you’re sufficiently unlike it, no good life is possible. In other words, disability and good life are, by definition, mutually exclusive. 

This doesn’t quite explain, of course, why Aristotle prescribed that “no deformed child shall live.” After all, he also posited that eudaimonia was beyond the reach of women and, as one translator of Politics dryly notes, while he thought that a normal female was a sort of disabled, or deformed, male, he didn’t advocate universal femicide. Disabled children were a special case. If anything, Reynolds lets Aristotle off too lightly, ascribing to incompetence what can just as easily be explained by malice. Socrates and Plato get similarly kind treatments, in that they “failed to appreciate the meaning of disability.” Maybe so—but maybe they understood disability perfectly well and just didn’t like it very much. When Plato argued in The Republic that children born “deformed” should be hidden away in some “mysterious, unknown place,” it was in the service of the ideal state, not the children. The context for that prescription is that people should be bred like animals, the best with the best. Even if Plato knew nothing about genetics, he had sufficiently strong opinions on heredity to sow the intellectual seeds of eugenics. And like the German racial hygienists, he didn’t pretend that it would be in everyone’s best interest to pursue the “improvement” of the human stock. His guardians of the state were to be as physicians to the body politic, cutting off whatever parts were damaged or diseased.

Far from a sentiment consigned to the ancients, the denigration of disability has plagued philosophy all the way through to the present day, enduring most notably, and perniciously, in modern bioethics. Peter Singer, perhaps the best-known living philosopher, provides a case in point. In his Practical Ethics, he notoriously endorses the euthanasia of disabled infants based on predictions about their “prospects of a worthwhile life.” But why are infants with disabilities uniquely susceptible to an assessment of whether their lives are worth living? The same point comes up, too, in his infamous 2002 debates with the disability activist and lawyer Harriet McBryde Johnson, who asks him, again and again, why some forms of disability self-evidently allow for discounting a life before it has been lived. This is a matter of who gets to decide on the value of others’ lives, but it is also a matter of the basis of each debater’s judgment. Empirical research has repeatedly found that disabled people rate their own quality of life significantly higher than non-disabled observers predict they would, a gap wide enough that some call it the “disability paradox.” But to say that this is a paradox is to presuppose that the external observer’s prediction is the baseline against which the disabled person’s own experience appears counterintuitive, thus closing the logical circle. 

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If you asked, you’d find that almost every disabled person—whether they were born with their impairments or acquired them later in life—does not think of themself as better off dead. The most pressing question, for them, is one familiar to any human: How should I live my life? For Reynolds, the best basis for this “project of living” is provided by social theories of disability: frameworks, put forward by activists, scholars, and allies, that view bodily differences as part of human variation, and inequitable treatment as a fault of society. This means that if there is some truth to the ableist conflation that disability aligns with privation, that is less a philosophical question than a political one. And it warns of the danger in bioethical debates that treat disability solely as a property of individuals. For example, the Canadian guidelines for aid in dying use unbearable suffering “that cannot be relieved” due to disability as a criterion of eligibility. But much of that suffering comes from other nonterminal conditions, like poverty, which can be alleviated—even if it appears intransigent under our present political conditions.

The only way out of this morass is to think about the good life as relational, contingent on a vision of the collective good: what Reynolds calls “worlds worth living in.” The richness, variability, and pluralism of such worlds is the purview of The Art of Flourishing, a transcribed set of panel conversations featuring disabled scholars, educators, artists, and activists who make meaning in their lives not in embodied isolation or according to any single standard, but in relation with other human beings and the material world, according to their subjective point of view. Contra Aristotelian eudaimonia, an objective measure grounded in a particular physiological and social standard, the editors argue that “the authority for determining what specific capacities are required for life to be meaningful or enjoyable should lie with disabled people themselves.”

The panelists share no single “deficit,” but a series of overlapping experiences that involve both their bodies and their relationships with technology, medicine, community-building, the articulation of a sustainable identity, and creativity. Ludwig Wittgenstein called these sorts of category structures “family resemblances.” He gave games as an example: while a tabletop game may not have a rectangular board or involve rolling dice, it can still be a fully-fledged member of the category. That seems about right for disability. People with mobility impairments have little in common with people with visual impairments, intellectual disabilities, or chronic pain, except that they do: a resemblance not in any single shared deficit, but in the resonance between distinct experiences of not fitting in. Disabled lives ought to be compared, both to each other and to non-disabled lives, but never hierarchized, subject to a central normative standard.

One of the editors of the anthology, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, coined the term “normate” to describe how the average human being became both an empirical standard of measurement and an aspirational ideal. One of the fathers of modern statistics, Adolphe Quetelet, explicitly argued that l’homme moyen, the “average man” should set the aesthetic as well as moral standard for society. That has become the reality in many fields, as what we understand as problematically “abnormal” isn’t necessarily harmful or dangerous, only sufficiently far from the center of the bell curve. Height is one example: in the postwar period, a considerable number of young women were prescribed growth-suppressing drugs not for medical reasons, but on the expectation that they would grow unusually tall and therefore have trouble “fitting in.” 

The notion of the good life has not just been an ideal to strive for. It has also been a criterion for identifying lives that are not worthy.

By definition, of course, the average excludes much of humanity. Whether disabled or non-disabled, many of us are not normal. The difference, though, is that disability is a condition whereby normality cannot even be pretended to. Once again, disability is disavowed through a form of circular logic: The bounds of normality end where disability begins, and disability is defined as whatever form of embodiment that precludes a normal life. It’s precisely this quality that makes disability a concept that can serve a liberatory function. Maybe, in its incompatibility with normality—and to the philosophical conceptions of the good life tethered to it—disability can be conducive to a new, pluralistic conception of flourishing. In The Art of Flourishing, the panelists explore this pluralism by reckoning with their own bodies. In one panel, the activist Yomi Young, who has osteogenesis imperfecta, speaks of abandoning walking, with the risk of falls and fractures, in favor of the “exoskeleton” of her wheelchair. “When it comes to trying to approximate able-bodiedness,” she tells her interlocutors, “I have no interest.” It is the kind of tradeoff that many disabled people make, but crucially, it isn’t that different from tradeoffs that others make, too—between risks and benefits, comfort and stigma. Young’s just entails a clearer break with the unsupported assumption that walking is something required for a full human life. The book’s central point of reference is the work of the late activist and MacArthur fellow Alice Wong, whose decade-long project Disability Visibility—the name both a description of its work and something of a rallying cry—published stories, art, and essays documenting what it means to live in a nonstandard body in a world that is hostile to them. Disability Visibility features lives lived under siege, but also lives lived well: a multitude of demonstrations of just how broad a range human flourishing can encompass. 

Socrates may have discounted corrupted bodies, but he also extolled the importance of knowing yourself. For The Art of Flourishing, perhaps the richest arguments against the deficit model emerge from its evocation of disability as a creative force, closely related to art and attentiveness to the relationship between embodiment and how we experience the world. Art, of course, is intrinsically pluralistic: while there is at any given time a richest human being on the planet, there is no greatest living artist—nor could there be, so long as art encompasses different genres, traditions, modes of expression, and aesthetic ideals.

In one example, the rabbi and scholar Julia Watts Belser recounts her collaboration with the choreographer Claire Cunningham, who uses crutches and “describes herself as a four-footed creature, one who loves to explore rocky places, to probe those nooks and crannies.” The resulting piece, We Run Like Rivers, is a series of short audio works that combine music with verbal description of the subtleties of nonstandard mobility, whether walking with crutches or rolling in wheelchairs, across different types of terrain. It is an exploration of disability as something that forces and facilitates attention to place: to the material world, and who we are in it, but also a rejection of unaided walking as the standard against which everything else should be measured. The image of the river is a good way to capture the flowlike experience of wheelchair motion; as fast as or slightly faster than walking, but still slow enough to fully take in the landscape as one moves, continuously and without the slight sense of disconnect as one foot and then another leaves the ground. One way of moving isn’t a priori better than the other, and can’t serve as the other’s standard: they’re simply different.

In another piece, Georgina Kleege, a scholar of visual impairment and visual art, recounts her practice of bringing blindness into the museum. For her, the Richard Serra sculpture Sequence, sixty-seven feet long and built out of ship-grade waterproof steel, isn’t only a haptic object, something to touch, but a sonic object, big enough to become a distinct aural environment, to be explored through shouts, taps, and reverberations. Deprived of sight is still something you could say about Kleege, but it would be the least interesting possible way to describe her. 

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The conversations transcribed in The Art of Flourishing were hosted by the Hastings Center, a bioethical research institute, and the book bears an explicitly normative frame. To be sure, the editors’ call for more supportive environments for human beings of every kind of embodiment is a utopian ideal, particularly in a time when disability rights are in retreat in many countries (most saliently the United States), and when data science and advanced genetics are facilitating radical new methods for determining which kinds of people will enter the world. Where prenatal diagnostics used to be a matter of identifying single-gene diseases, startups like Nucleus are now selling the promise of using polygenic patterns to determine a wide range of traits in the next generation. The ideal being promoted is one of optimization: smarter, taller, thinner, fitter. But just what are we doing all this optimizing for? 

This ideology’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century predecessors were mostly organized around the negative pole, the aim of preventing “inferior” people from reproducing, because even its proponents knew that they had no reliable tools for securing the reproduction and refinement of “superior” qualities. Today, with forced sterilization largely off the table (though not entirely, particularly when it comes to women with intellectual disabilities), the new eugenics accentuates the positive. Its most radical sect, transhumanism, aims to improve human health, intelligence, and other capacities until there emerges a literal new species with none of the problems of the old one. But classical eugenics, too, fed on comparable fantasies of utopian improvement, on the dream of perfecting Man, whether in a universal form or in the more specific shape of the master race. That fantasy is inextricable from the fears of degeneration and miscegenation, precisely because true perfection is necessarily unattainable in this imperfect world; eugenics-adjacent techno-utopians like Musk seem unable to complete a paragraph about the glorious future without warning about imminent catastrophe. But so long as the deficits and shortcomings can be projected onto others, the utopian vision can survive. 

Disabled people are uniquely positioned to question the near-universal standards that orient life toward productivity and output.

It isn’t news that the aspiring philosopher-kings of Silicon Valley view the good life in the singular. Some of them, most prominently Ray Kurzweil, the futurist hailed for his ostensibly oracular gifts of prediction, dream of the Singularity, a time in the near future where artificial general intelligence, or superintelligence, becomes real—at which point humans will merge with this nascent supreme being or else become obsolete. Kurzweil gestures vaguely at the possibility of curing all illnesses and rectifying all disabilities, but mostly as proofs of concept. The real point, for him, is to achieve transcendent perfection. Those who cannot merge, those who lack the cognitive or economic resources to upgrade, or simply don’t have the right hardware to begin with, will necessarily fall short of this ideal. If anything, the new dispensation treats more of humanity than ever as useless eaters.

In the face of this, what will it take for disabled people to be acknowledged as fully human beings—to escape the oubliette of Plato’s “mysterious, unknown place”? For starters, to reject the idea that the body is a machine built for productivity, and that humans can be obsolete, a troubling concept that evokes the long history of cultural evolutionism, where some peoples are, essentially, consigned to the scrapheap of history. Next, to abandon the dizzying heights of the good life, the place where the human species is conflated with a singular ideal, and to come down to earth, where good lives are oriented to, and derive from, meaning-making in the company of other human beings. Yomi Young notes the cultural stereotype that people with her condition are unusually intelligent, then explains that, no, her physical fragility was an early impetus toward learning how to communicate as precisely as possible. On the singular reading, intelligence is a saving grace, a compensation for a deficit and something to put to work. On the relational reading, variation in embodiment and needs drives us to interact with others, drives complexity, and makes for a richer world.

This kind of living, I think, has normative implications beyond the remit of the self-identified disabled. As a rejection of the near-universal standards that orient life toward productivity and output, it challenges us to ask what we actually want to do with our time on the planet—a question in dire need of asking as Silicon Valley simultaneously promises to increase productivity beyond measure and threatens to create mass unemployment in white-collar industries. I am an academic with a modest research budget; there is nothing to prevent me, for instance, from employing dozens of AI agents to generate dozens of papers for me, using my human skills to supervise and edit the “writing.” It’s just not what I think of as flourishing. 

Disabled people are uniquely positioned to make this critique because the game of productivity is one we can never really win. Not only are we structurally disadvantaged; if we do well enough, we no longer count as really disabled. The category of disability is unstable, irreducible to the biological attributes of individuals; it speaks to marginalization that shifts with time and place. In different ways and to different degrees, human societies have had a need to disavow the qualities of our humanity that people find most painful to confront: that we are vulnerable, mortal, and dependent on others to survive. It is comfortable, perhaps, to keep such qualities at arm’s length by projecting them onto a minority and excluding its members. But since anyone can join this minority at any time through illness or injury, it is also necessary to believe some individuals can overcome the barriers that society has created, if only they align sufficiently with its values. Disability, then, reveals not only what lives society thinks unworthy of life, but what society thinks of all of us. 

The productivity game doesn’t appear to be going away any time soon, but despite the technophilic fantasies to the contrary, disability isn’t going away, either. Besides the fact that genetics is a lot more complicated than the ads for Nucleus Genomics pretend, millions of people become disabled every year from accidents and acquired illnesses, not to mention from violence and war—something that should neither be celebrated nor ignored. Instead, we should ameliorate disability marginalization as best we can, through measures that are far more robust and well-proven than eugenic experimentation: public health, peace work, and welfare state capacity building, for starters. Making a better world is hard, but to abandon that effort in favor of making better people seems a way to ensure that the good life, for all but an anointed few, will remain perpetually out of reach.

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