Martin Robb

speaker

332 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 1 Jul

Martin Robb’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

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Careful Thinking · Disability, dependency, and care - with Eva Feder Kittay · 1 Jul 2026 podcast

Now now earlier, Eva, you you mentioned your d your debates around reproductive choice and selection in the light of disability and getting I think you got into hot water with some disability activists by

By insisting on choice uh in this area for parents.

And you you you you mentioned your debate with Leo, your son.

I know you've already spoken about that, but I'm I'd be interested to know whether Leo changed your mind at all in the course of your email correspondence.

Thank you.

And I I thought Leo's reflections on how those choices affect the non make the non-disabled child think were really interesting.

So so those those chapters about reproductive choice and selection are kind of at the heart of the book, the philosophical heart of the book in a way, but in the final part of the book you circle back to care ethics under the heading Care in Philosophy, Disability and Ethics.

In which you argue it's particularly critical to have an ethics of care that meets the genuine needs and legitimate wants of people with disabilities in ways that preserve dignity and recognize the equal personhood of all engaged in caring relationships.

And of course, this is against the background of disability activists' wariness of the concept of care, as opposed to an emphasis on rights and independence, and the need to avoid what you call undesired benevolence.

But you respond to this by returning to your insistence on dependency as central to the human condition.

And you highlight the reality that, quote, the demand for independence for disabled people relies heavily on

the availability of caregivers.

Could you say something about your attempt to square that circle, insisting on dependency of as a relation while also respecting disabled people's desire for independence?

Yeah.

You can't get away from that that dialectic, yeah.

Yeah.

They also have an interesting chapter in the book on the completion of care, which I think is partly a response to Joan Tronto's suggestion that care needs to be received to be counted as good or successful care.

You discuss how difficult that is to argue in the case of severely disabled people like your daughter, but you also write about how you eventually came to see that Sasha was in fact receiving your care with graciousness in ways that perhaps weren't initially or immediately obvious.

And you end the discussion, quote, with a surprising implication

that that not only do we sometimes have a duty to care, we also have a duty to receive care graciously, if it's offered with a good will and with the requisite attention and competence insofar as we have the capacity to discharge such a duty.

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