Disability, Status Enhancement, Personal Enhancement and Resource Allocation

It often appears that the most appropriate form of addressing disadvantage related to disability is through policies that can be called ‘status enhancements’: changes to the social, cultural and material environment so that the difficulties experienced by those with impairments are reduced, even eradicated. However, status enhancements can also have their limitations. This paper compares the relative merits of policies of status enhancement and ‘personal enhancement’: changes to the disabled person. It then takes up the question of how to assess the priority of the claims of disabled people in the face of scarcity of resources for which there can be many competing social claims, arguing for the theory of ‘declustering disadvantage’.