Utilising a phenomenologically informed critical methodology, and drawing on the direct experiences of blind and visually impaired people, the parents of persons with disabilities and professionals working within what is known as the disability sector, this dissertation begins from an intuition that a republican focus on freedom as non-domination has value to bring to the lives of persons with disabilities. Matching this non-domination thesis against the idea (commonly associated with liberalism) that freedom consists in non-interference, the dissertation draws on the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities 2007 (CRPD) and, specifically, its principles and three distinct rights – education, work and employment and living independently and being included in the community - to undergird an argument that republicanism offers a simple, unifying understanding of freedom as an entitlement held in common, across the human community. In this formulation the CRPD is read as of profound relevance to persons with disabilities and to all those who come, or might come, within the porous designation of vulnerable. Presented as a theory for testing and, in particular, drawing on the scholarship of Philip Pettit, republicanism as presented in this dissertation is a politico-legal arrangement of ancient lineage. In its modern idiom, this same republicanism is now positioned as embodying an eminently realizable modern goal, specifically that being in a position to resiliently resist being – or having the potential of being - subject to another’s arbitrary whim or control offers a very full and persuasive account of what it is reasonable to expect of a decent state and a decent civil society, including that disabled people long deprived of their public dignity hold that dignity resiliently.