Response to Joel Michael Reynolds, The Life Worth Living: Disability, Pain, and Morality

The Life Worth Living is particularly valuable for its phenomenological approach to disability and pain, which can serve to draw attention to their complexity and multifacetedness, and allows attention to the interweaving of components of experience—embodied, social, relational, and so on. It also points out the ways in which abilities are relational and contextual, and that we depend on a range of caring systems as part of our human being-in-the-world (14). The book’s final chapter and conclusion highlight the role of community, relationship, and care in making “habitable worlds for all” (160). My comments take up Reynolds’s discussion of living with pain and will mostly draw from chapter 2, “A Phenomenology of Chronic Pain.” I then turn to the broader context of reading this book amidst an ongoing pandemic and climate crisis.