Michael Berube is bizarrely daft here...

[elfs]

Far be it from me to take on noted philosopher Michael Berube', but it is completely and utterly astonishing for Berube' to take a thwack at bioethicists and write:

This then is yet another version of the classic "trolley problem," in which we are asked to decide whether it is better that people with X disability not be born at all (because the prospective mothers wait two months and have different children altogether) while some people with X disability go "uncured" in utero, or better that people with X disability be "cured" in utero while others are born with the disability because their mothers went untreated.I suppose this is the stuff of which bioethical debates are made, but may I be so rude as to point out that there is no such trolley? This thought experiment may be all well and good if the object is to ask people about the moral difference between foregoing a pregnancy that will result in a fetus with disabilities and treating a disabled fetus in utero (and miraculously "curing" it!). But it does not correspond to any imaginable scenario in the world we inhabit.

To somehow manage to go through all these intellectual peregrinations about pregnancy and prenatal care, without ever once mentioning the word "abortion." Or in-vitro fertilization. Or any of a gazillion other technologies coming.

Berube' also makes the classic mistake of showing how some people somehow turned harsh necessity into some flavor of virtue by embracing that disability about which they could do nothing, and telling others that they have found a beautiful life without it.

Berube' is apparently blissfully unaware of the current research into the hedonic set point, the notion that almost all of us have, much like we have a set weight, a set happiness, and only utterly drastic changes or incessant outside influence can somehow shift that set point. No matter how terrible our circumstances, or how grand, without great effort we are gifted with a certain hedonic state: a mean optimism, a mean chearfulness, to which all our sorrows and joys regress over time. Disability has been one of the hot spots of this research: despite losing sight, or mobility, or speech, in the long term individuals remain unfazed by circumstance. Disability only gives some (but not all, possibly not many) the chance to express their joy in life and garner amazement from others, in a way that the fully abled merely annoy us.

I don't see how Berube's point somehow invalidates the fact that disability is an antonym of ability.

Berube writes: "There is no scenario - I repeat, no scenario, none whatsoever - in which any woman knows that, if she foregoes conception now, she will have a normal child later on." Natural limitations are just those, and they cease to be limitations once our knowledge and technology catch up to desire. There will come a day when any child born with a disability is one whose parents chose to passively sit by and "let nature take its course," arbitrarily chosing what is "natural" and what is not, in the same way that some parents choose now to not vaccinate but enjoy the widespread benefits of public hygiene-- and they will be just as culpable for the suffering, disability, and attenuated lifespand that child consequently endures.

There are damned few disabled people who agree that the world is better off having the blind, the deaf, and the lame, than having procedures that restore site, hearing, and mobility. Leon Kass once wrote that the disabled, the suffering, and the dying are moral tonics for the rest of us, and a world without them would be a smaller, darker world. I think a world with suffering is small and dark enough as it is, thank you; my responsibility is to alleviate it. Berube' stands uncomfortably close to Kass in this latest missive, and I can't stand there with him.

Comments

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Leon Kass is a subscriber to a particular world-view that I find abhorrent: the idea that suffering confers dignity, combined with a curious body-phobia that he seems to derive from orthodox jewish scholarship but which verges on nihilism. The man is, in my opinion, several screws short of a full set.

[kengr]

There are damned few disabled people who agree that the world is better off having the blind, the deaf, and the lame, than having procedures that restore site, hearing, and mobility.

Apparently you are unaware of the rather significant number of deaf people who are against things like cochlear implants.

And those who rant about the extermination of the deaf culture.

For that matter, consider what the autistic community has to say about "cures". And the mindset that says they need to be made "normal".

ETA: Autistics are, in a lot of ways, aliens who happen to look human. Their minds really *do* work differently. They fit the late john W. Campbell, jr's dictum "show me a creature that thinks as well as a human, but not *like* a human".

And as far as they are concerned "curing" them is the same as solving the race problem by making everybody white.

[kengr]

See my comments above about the autistic community. And read up on a lot of the "cures".

Essentially, their minds really do work differently. And the only thing wrong (with at least the "high functioning" ones) is that because of this "acting normal" requires all most all of their *conscious* attention. And is very *unnatural* for them.

It's incredibly tiring, and for some thing such as looking people in the eye while talking to them, it requires fighting *reflexes*. Hard-wired behaviors. About like having to stand on a narrow ledges over a big drop.

And the methods used to "train" them to "act normal" would be considered *serious* child abuse if done to non-autistics.

ETA: and all this so that they don't make neurotypicals feel uncomfortable.

[(Anonymous)]

I have a (mostly) deaf friend who lives in Israel, and she tells me that all the "deaf culture" stuff is pretty much an American phenomenon. I don't know if that's true, but it would be interesting if it were.

Number 127

[kengr]

Another point. Consider that many would consider being gay to be a disability, and if a genetic test was discovered, would push to have it used to avoid any more gays being born.

Yes, there's a line between "missing limbs" and "gay". But where is that line. And just how fuzzy is it?

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

If you'd like to engage with Berube (and seriously, I think your knee is jerking strongly here, and you are consequently pretty direly misreading his argument), he has the article reposted on his personal blog, which allows comments.

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

Er, pardon me, it's mirrored (and commentable) at Crooked Timber (http://crookedtimber.org/2011/01/17/about-being-born-2/).

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

Odd. I read the stuff that you quoted, but got the sense that Berube is saying, "Such-and-such-argument is a complete straw-man. Here's why…" I didn't get the sense that he was in support of one side of the argument or the other.