Tom Shakespeare: Good enough lives? A disability challenge to procreative beneficence

Julian Savulescu has argued for the duty to create the best children one can. Jeff McMahan has written of the benefits of prenatal diagnosis and selective termination. I suspect that neither has an adequately understanding of what disability is, and whether or not it is compatible with a good life. In this talk, I will outline the empirical evidence about what goes well, and what goes less well, in the lives of disabled people, and which barriers impact on their chance of flourishing. I will accept the right of prospective parents to have prenatal diagnosis, and to terminate affected pregnancies. But I also suggest that there can be no duty to use these technologies, at least in the majority of disability cases, and that the priority is for society to accept and support disabled children.