Abstract

According to Elizabeth Barnes’s minority body view, to say that a disability is value neutral is to say that it is neither automatically good nor bad, but rather can become good or bad depending on what it is combined with (including ableism and one’s aspirations, goals, and desires). Most people view dementia as intrinsically bad, that is, as something that makes one’s life go worse simply by its existence. In this paper, I argue that we are not currently able to decide if dementia is value neutral or intrinsically bad. Arguments that say dementia is intrinsically bad are beset with problems such as negative feedback loops and a reliance on biased empirical evidence. Moreover, there are promising examples of people whose dementia is combined with certain traits that make their dementia good for them, which would undermine the intrinsic badness of dementia.