While it may be surprising to some, there is a history of persistent, sometimes heated conflict between the profession of bioethics and the disability movement. Namely, the disability movement has engaged mainstream bioethics in an adversarial way because of radically divergent positions on topics such as: prenatal diagnosis, health care rationing, growth attenuation interventions, physician assisted suicide, and euthanasia. In my dissertation, I argue that this tension between the analyses of the disability movement and mainstream bioethics is not merely a conflict between two insular communities of "disability activists" and "bioethicists" but between those who have experienced disability and those who have not. That is, I maintain that it is a mistake to think of this conflict as arising just from a difference in ideology or political commitments, because it represents a much deeper difference---one rooted in moral psychology and epistemology. Analyzing the causes and effects of nuanced differences between the disability movement and field of bioethics' respective moral psychologies and epistemologies---and then suggesting both theoretical and practical changes that might dissolve the conflict produced by these unacknowledged differences---is the key task of my dissertation.
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