The Virtues of Dependence: Design and Disability

On March 6-7, 2025, the Christian Study Center welcomed guest scholar Sara Hendren to give the first two lectures in a two-year series titled Virtue Ethics for the 21st Century. This series of lectures is made possible through our participation in a project led by Upper House, a Christian study center at the University of Wisconsin, and funded by the John Templeton Foundation.

Virtue Ethics for the 21st Century

The philosopher Bernard Williams once observed that we suffer from a “poverty of concepts.” This is true of modern conceptions of ethics and the good life, with consequences for both how we live our lives now, and what we are able to imagine for our future.

Without a better way of thinking about ethics and the good life, we remain trapped within the horizon of possibilities drawn by our reigning set of concepts. With regard to ethics and the good life, our imagination is ensnared by the language of utilitarianism, efficiency, and the cost-benefit analysis.

In order to confront the challenges we face in the 21st century, we need a better way of imagining the moral life. We also need a way to think not just about what is right, but also about how we become the sort of people do what is right. Is there a better way of thinking about ethics and the good life that might sharpen our thinking and equip us to face the challenges of this century?

This series of lectures proposes that the answer to this question lies, at least in part, in the recovery of the virtue ethic tradition.

Sara Hendren

Sara Hendren is an artist, design researcher, writer, and professor at Northeastern University. Her book What Can A Body Do? How We Meet the Built World explores the places where disability shows up in design at all scales: assistive technology, furniture, architecture, urban planning, and more. It was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by NPR and won the 2021 Science in Society Journalism book prize. Her art and design works have been exhibited on the White House lawn under the Obama presidency, at the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Seoul Museum of Art, the Vitra Museum, and many others, and her work is held in the permanent collections at MoMA and the Cooper Hewitt. She has been an NEH Public Scholar and a fellow at New America, and her commentary and criticism have been published in Harper’s, Art in America, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere.

The Virtues of Dependence: Design and Disability

Prosthetics, assistive technologies, and accessible architecture all bridge the gaps between our many bodies and the built world, forming a creative legacy of flexible, generative design. But the paradox of disability under technocratic modernity presents a mixed picture of both the body and personhood. In this talk using stories and examples from all scales of design, Sara Hendren helps us to ask: What is the nature of the dependent body, assisted by its many tools and extensions? How does disability shape all our lives, and the meaning we make in both giving and receiving help?