People with disabilities sometimes have impairments that manifest in unacceptable and disruptive behavior, such as inappropriate language, angry outbursts, and conflict-generating harassment. Such behavior, which I call “impairment-related misconduct,” often leads to exclusion from work or public places. Notwithstanding the Americans with Disabilities Act’s goal of promoting the full and equal social participation of disabled people, legal challenges to those exclusionary responses have generally failed.
Using cases involving employees with Borderline personality disorder, this article criticizes this outcome as grounded in a conceptual conflation of duty and sympathy, which in turn arises from a tragic view of disability. It also offers an original approach to resolving these cases. Specifically, this article develops a novel category of reasonable accommodations for persons with disabilities. I call them “moral accommodations.” These are duties to tolerate, to various degrees, unacceptable behavior related to an impairment. They involve, for instance, giving people second chances, reassigning them to different positions or service providers, or exempting them from certain rules of conduct. Establishing the theoretical foundations for this new category, I argue that, like other reasonable accommodations moral accommodations are plausibly grounded in various conceptions of justice, most notably egalitarianism and the “capabilities approach.” I also address potential objections, both pragmatic and philosophical. For example, although misconduct causes harm to others, I argue that moral accommodations are nevertheless justifiable. By expanding the duties owed to persons with disabilities, moral accommodations develop our conception of a just society as one in which inappropriate behavior is sometimes tolerated.
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