Dignity may just be the most promiscuous normative abstraction. This article, informed by dignity’s historical variability, political theoretic multipurpose, and conflicting jurisprudence, focuses on a particular but influential invocation of the term: dignity as the normative ground for the ‘capabilities approach’ model of social justice. We ask whether or not the CA, in particular the influential version propounded by philosopher Martha Nussbaum, requires dignity as its foundational premise, and whether or not dignity may be more costly than beneficial for the (...) CA’s vision of a minimally just society. The first section of this article rehearses the warrants of and criticisms against the dignity-basis of Nussbaum’s CA. We canvass the relatively sparse scholarship on dignity within the CA to situate our contribution. The next two sections are case studies, demonstrating dignity’s shortcomings for assessing and regulating sex and abortion, respectively. The fourth section rebuts two possible objections to our criticisms of dignity. The fifth and final section gestures toward another normative abstraction, ‘minimum conditions of individuation’, less polysemic than dignity, which might alternatively ground the CA. (shrink)

In the context of abortion stigma, most abortion stories remain untold. The stories we do tell of abortion are often told to morally recuperate the status of the woman who has an abortion through a recourse to tragedy. Tragedy frames experiences where every choice produces some suffering, so decisions are geared toward maintaining individual integrity rather than adherence to absolute moral truths. This article argues that one dominant tragic abortion narrative, that of the disabled fetus, works to recuperate the moral (...) status of “fit” mothers while actively constructing disabled lives as unlivable and undesirable. The option to stigmatize disability in recuperating the moral status of the woman who has an abortion relies on eugenic logics that also construct a variety of women as illegitimate reproductive subjects. The article analyzes narratives of Sherri Finkbine's 1962 abortion in relation to contemporary narratives of late‐term abortions involving nonviable fetuses to expose how investment in medical judgments of good births enables particular women to make use of tragic narratives to maintain their status as moral mothers without disturbing broader abortion stigma or eugenic logics. (shrink)