Introduction to three commentaries on Professor Hans S. Reinders’The Future of the Disabled in Liberal Society, an Ethical Analysis, University of Notre Dame Press, Indiana, 2000, 280 pp.

History seems to show us that any definition of intellectual disability (ID) including our current one has no timeless, certain validity, and that definitions are made only in ethical contexts. It is difficult to find a terra firma on which to discuss this sceptical claim alongside the claim to certain knowledge assumed in genetics and much of bioethics. Perhaps a transhistorical basis can be found instead in the motives of people constructing ID, and in the substratum of unconditionality in human relationships.