Reasonable people generally agree that accessibility for the disabled is a good thing. Nobody except the most bigoted jerk would suggest that disabled people shouldn't be able to visit tourist attractions, use public restrooms, or move freely within their own homes.
Practically, however, this ideal is difficult to meet, and it raises a number of thorny philosophical problems that are only becoming more pressing as time goes on.
Cultural relics: some case studies
When I went to France last summer, I visited the twelfth-century Basilique de St. Denis, the oldest church within the city limits of Paris. They were in the process of constructing an elevator so that disabled visitors could reach the catacombs in the basement. The mairie, or district, published brochures that explained how it had researched ways to build this elevator that would not compromise the structure of the building. This research cost many thousands of euros -- that, of course, over and above the cost of the elevator itself.
This is an excellent undertaking and it is thrilling to see this kind of attention to a community that has been marginalized for much too long. Nevertheless, it raises some uncomfortable questions. Is it part of a government's mandate to pay for these constructions? How much research is "enough" to conclude that a construction will not ruin an ancient building? Is permitting a disabled visitor to tour St. Denis today worth preventing her great-granddaughter from seeing the site half a century from now? Come to think of it, when it comes to making life better for the disabled, are there no better ways to spend government funds than to build an elevator so they can look at the tombs of some dead kings up close?
In the case of St. Denis, these sorts of questions are arguably a little easier to answer, since the basilica is the mairie's major tourist attraction and the local government has self-serving reasons to want to make it as desirable as possible to as wide a population as possible. Put more uncharitably, the mairie of St. Denis (a distant suburb of Paris) doesn't have much else to spend its money on, and it wants to make its prize attraction look good. The more organizations are forced to feed from the same government trough, the more troublesome the issues become, since we need to parcel out more and more limited funding to more and more sites.
At any rate, digging under the foundations of a medieval church poses a risk to the building, as the brochures themselves admitted. The researchers minimized the risk as best they could, but the very existence of that risk forces us to think about what each individual visitor to the historical site is "worth" in comparison to the "worth" of the site itself. This doesn't just go for disabled visitors or elevator riders, either: in Italy I went to archaeological sites that required a government permit to visit, since they were declared to be too fragile for tourist traffic. (I also went to some sites that probably should have been closed off to tourist traffic, given how badly damaged they were.) In other words, in the case of cultural capital like old churches, we are not just measuring the "worth" of different types of visitors today, but also trying to balance today's visits against future ones. (Even the "today's visits" part of that equation is complex: for months, nobody could go into the St. Denis catacombs... because of the construction!)
What do we do with another famous French church, Notre Dame, whose thirteenth-century stairwells are too narrow even for an able-bodied visitor to ascend comfortably? Putting ramps in those towers would literally require a dismantling and rebuilding of the entire church; such projects have been undertaken before, but with no small amount of controversy and at great financial cost.
Furthermore, if the ideal of accessibility requires that Notre Dame's bell tower be accessible to all, then we need to start worrying not just about people in wheelchairs, but asthmatics and acrophobes too. What exactly do we mean when we say "accessibility" or "all", anyway? If a man with a weak heart wants to meet the gargoyles who live at the top of Notre Dame, must we stop him for fear that he will hurt himself on the climb? Must we help him up there so that he can see the gargoyles without hurting himself? Must we just shrug and send him away?
Public or private?
In the United States, issues of preservation are not quite as acute; it is a young country, and (for better or for worse) there is not as much attachment to a certain kind of cultural heritage. But the funding of accessibility constructions raises other questions that are not asked so often in Europe.
Many tourist attractions in the U.S. are privately-owned. What are the implications of requiring the owner of, say, The World's Largest Ball of Twine, to build wheelchair ramps or a boardwalk on his or her property? This question is the source of a lot of bitterness in the U.S., where the government is notoriously allergic to spending money for social services, and where individuals (including business owners) tend to want to spend their money however they personally see fit. Though some institutions take accessibility requirements as a given -- a decade ago, university campuses around the country were covered in scaffolding as ramps were installed in every building -- there was a lot of muttering in the bleachers about how much money was being spent just so that a tiny fraction of the population could go to the university bookstore.
If nobody pays for these improvements, they don't get built. And yet, a government that refuses to pay for accessibility but then imposes accessibility requirements on small business owners is simply dodging the social responsibilities that it itself recognizes (or else there wouldn't be such requirements at all). Now I'm deliberately oversimplifying the situation to make my case: the government does subsidize accessibility improvements, including for private owners in certain circumstances. But I detect a profound ambivalence on the part of the U.S. government on this issue, and an even more profound resistance among people who think that the disabled just aren't a big enough population to worry about so much.
Indeed, if one is a straight-up utilitarian, the cost of these measures starts to look outrageous, at least in proportion to the number of people who would benefit from them. But anyone who asserts that all people "should" have access to all sites needs to develop a policy about accessibility that will be forced to take utilitarian issues into account. Until we can afford to build private helicopters to airlift people to Notre Dame's bell tower, we have to choose whom to exclude from the beauties and the conveniences of our built world. I've pitched this writeup in such a way as to make it seem that the elevator in St. Denis is a good investment, while helicopters for Notre Dame are not. But I cannot philosophically defend that distinction at all: neither on utilitarian grounds nor on Kantian ones.
The politics of exclusion
In the choices that have been made in our built world so far, until very, very recently, the handicapped have always gotten the shaft. It seems suspicious that we tend to exclude the same group of people over and over again in our building projects and funding decisions. The answers to the questions of who is "important enough" to include have been answered in disturbingly consistent ways. It is easy to declare that a certain improvement "costs too much." It is harder to consider what that says about the worth of certain categories of people to the ones who make those decisions.