Welcoming the Unexpected

This chapter proposes that recognizing the lived experience of disability as an informing principle of full moral personhood is essential to understanding what is required for human flourishing, which is a concept that ultimately supports a wide spectrum of human embodied existence. An attitude of humility and welcome toward the human experience of disability can serve to guide practice, policy, world building, and technology making in the world, all of which will enable individuals to flourish in their full distinctiveness rather than within narrowly conceived definitions of physical and genetic traits thought to be advantageous. A bioethics that intentionally and ethically shapes society, instead of shaping bodies, can urge us to create a shared world inhabitable by the widest range of human users, thus also a world that promotes the cultural, political, institutional, and material climate in which people with disabilities can most effectively flourish.