The Right to Ontological Coexistence - Neurodivergent Forms of Existence Beyond Illness, Function, and Integration - A Foundational Text for the Further Development of International Human Rights Standards

The increasing visibility of neurodivergent forms of existence—particularly autistic and ADHD-shaped ways of living—confronts existing legal, social, and epistemic systems with a fundamental structural problem. These systems rest implicitly on the assumption of a uniform human mode of existence, whose perception, self-regulation, communication, and productivity are treated as general standards. Deviations from these standards are legally addressed predominantly either as illness or as functional deviation to be corrected through adaptation, activation, or therapy.This paper argues that, under conditions of ontological diversity, this order is not merely inadequate but structurally violent. The dichotomy “ill or capable of work” operates as a coercive architecture that either pathologizes neurodivergent people or forces them to adapt to neurotypical norms. An autonomous form of existence that is neither pathologized nor simultaneously rendered economically exploitable is largely not provided for within current law. The resulting phenomena—enforced masking, chronic exhaustion, health destabilization, institutional escalation, and social marginalization—are not recognized as systemic effects but are individualized and medicalized.Starting from an ontological determination of neurodivergent existence as autonomous, stable, and non-reducible modes of human world- and meaning-relation, the paper develops the concept of the right to ontological coexistence. This right denotes the claim of different human forms of existence to exist in legal equal worth without subordination, normalization, pathologization, or coercive valorization. Equal worth is explicitly not understood as uniformity, but as protection against being forced into integration within a structurally incompatible order.The paper demonstrates that existing concepts of inclusion and participation reach their limits where participation in fact demands normalization, and that a purely medical framing of neurodivergent forms of existence individualizes structural responsibility. Medicine is responsible for suffering, not for existence. Where ontological variants of human being are treated as clinical deviations, iatrogenic harm emerges.In legal terms, the paper derives central consequences from the right to ontological coexistence: the inadmissibility of abstract standards of reasonableness, the legal qualification of subsistence-conditioned adaptation requirements as coercion, institutional responsibility for masking-related harms, preventive protective duties independent of visible breakdown, and a two-tiered state obligation toward systemic transformation or—where this does not (yet) occur in fact—toward subsistence-securing compensation without pathologization, activation compulsion, or psychiatric dominance.The paper understands itself as a foundational text for the necessary further development of international human rights standards, in connection with existing instruments such as the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, yet going beyond their current application. It is addressed to courts, human rights bodies, legislators, and civil society actors, and aims to establish a new legal standard of review under conditions of real ontological diversity.