What is it about?
This book is about the human rights of adults with cognitive disabilities. Cognitive disabilities may be associated with intellectual disability, acquired brain injury, mental health conditions or aged dementia. It explains how the Convention on the Rights of Disabilities can uphold the rights of people with cognitive disabilities who may not have decision making capability to claim their rights directly.
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Why is it important?
It is important because people with cognitive disabilities have historically and are currently frequently excluded from society. Philosophy and law have privileged rationality and cognitive ability as marking our moral and legal personhood. This book proposes a new basis for personhood based on 'five-dimensional dignity'. Five dimensional dignity recognises: 1) the incommensurable value of all of us; 2) the autonomy of those who can exercise autonomy; 3) the embodied nature of personhood; 4) the interrelated and social nature of being human, and 5) the interrelatedness, interdependence and indivisibility of human rights
Perspectives
This book came from my own experiences of working with people with cognitive disabilities who were exposed to multiple disadvantages. They were socially isolated and socio-economically disadvantaged. They had often been survivors of traumatic experiences. Human rights frameworks are often framed as requiring restraint by the state into our personal lives. This book explains how state intervention can be necessary for those who are marginalised to claim their human rights.
Dr Julia Duffy
Queensland University of Technology
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Mental Capacity, Dignity and the Power of International Human Rights, August 2023, Cambridge University Press,
DOI: 10.1017/9781009304481.
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