This chapter focuses on the essay “Justice Through Trust,” by Leslie Francis and Anita Silvers, which in my view makes the best contractarian argument to include PSID among the rank of contributing contractors. Silvers and Francis insist on abandoning the misleading metaphor of the social contract as a tit-for-tat exchange. Instead, they argue that society is more accurately conceived of as a complex net of transactions which fundamentally requires a climate of trust in which any being able to trust or be trustworthy can participate. PSID’s contribution to fostering a climate of trust can be said to occur not in spite of their disability and its corollary vulnerability and exploitability, but partly because of it. Although a trust-based conception of contractual justice goes a long way in integrating PWD, I argue that it contains inherent tensions. Certain conceptions of trust may fail to justify the robust moral status of PWD, while others may not be as essentially connected to social contract theory as Silvers and Francis argue. These tensions tend to confirm that contractarian theories have difficulty genuinely accommodating people with particularly severe disabilities.

This chapter assesses five strategies that contractualist thinkers have put forward to conceptualize PSID as active participants to the social contract. These focus on (1) PSID’s talents; (2) their capacity to have a conception of the good; (3) their ability to engage with others or play a part in society; (4) their potential to develop (further) contractual capacities; and (5) their need for assistance by ‘collaborators’ or ‘cognitive prostheses’ in the nurturing and exercising of these capacities. These strategies attempt to ‘normalize’ PSID by modifying the benchmark requirements for counting as a contractor; or by arguing that PSID do meet these requirements, despite appearances to the contrary. While they are promising in terms of its application to less seriously disabled individuals, I find that social support, including ‘mental prostheses,’ is not a plausible solution for many profoundly disabled individuals, unless this support is conceptualized in a way that alters it beyond recognition or takes it beyond the autonomy-based contractualist paradigm to which it purports to be attached.