Duns Scotus on Disability: Teleology, Divine Willing, and Pure Nature

According to the so-called “religio-ethical” model of disability accepted in some sense by Aquinas, disability is fundamentally a punishment for wrongdoing. Duns Scotus rejects this view and holds that disability could simply have been part of God’s plan, and that its presence could have been explained simply by virtue of God’s finding beauty in some of the bodily configurations of the disabled. I conclude by showing how Scotus’s view relates to the so-called “social” model of disability.

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