Hello All, The following article follows some of the arguments made here on Pen-L about Singer and the ethics of killing disabled babies. I'll let the activist speak for herself. She admits to being caught out to racist views at one point in her article, so let's not pretend that being disabled is free from prejudice, nor forgive prejudice when it appears.
I want to put forward a brief comment about disability rights though. The most difficult area for disability rights has been and will continue for some time to be cognitive disabilities. Learning disabilities like attention deficit disorder are making some headway in the public access, but severe developmental disabilities remain the area where people like Singer can argue about the ethics of killing disabled people. Singer means society has a right to execute the disabled in various free floating categories as infants, teenagers, and adults. See the magazine article below. The critical juncture is human attention related to developmental disabilities that at this moment the disability rights movement struggles with. In psychology the research in how human beings acquire language is called 'joint attention'. Meaning that most people share their attention with each other in particular ways through language. Many people with cognitive disabilities have difficulties with sharing attention. For example autistics are famous for their inability to theorize what another mind is. Yet autistics have phenomenal ability to focus their attention if not share that attention. Which implies that the work done with attention is much more than what we get out of able bodied shared attention. That the cognitive work of attention is hardly plumbed by the standards of able bodied shared attention. So building a society that is more inclusive for disabled people requires considerable development of how attention structure is shareable between people and the sort of cognitive work that might be related to a new system of attention structure work in language like sharing. For some people we must build an attention structure into the established communication structure that accommodates to their attentional needs. The basic concept is find attention structure in a cognitive disability and attach a communications channel to that attention structure so that the cognitively disabled person can 'share' attention with the society we are building. Though what they produce may be of an order of magnitude different from what most people want or expect. NY times article selected quotes is pasted below. thanks, Doyle Saylor http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/16/magazine/16DISABLED.html?pagewanted=print&; position=top February 16, 2003 Unspeakable Conversations By HARRIET McBRYDE JOHNSON He insists he doesn't want to kill me. He simply thinks it would have been better, all things considered, to have given my parents the option of killing the baby I once was, and to let other parents kill similar babies as they come along and thereby avoid the suffering that comes with lives like mine and satisfy the reasonable preferences of parents for a different kind of child. It has nothing to do with me. I should not feel threatened. Whenever I try to wrap my head around his tight string of syllogisms, my brain gets so fried it's . . . almost fun. Mercy! It's like ''Alice in Wonderland.'' ... He also says he believes that it should be lawful under some circumstances to kill, at any age, individuals with cognitive impairments so severe that he doesn't consider them ''persons.'' What does it take to be a person? Awareness of your own existence in time. The capacity to harbor preferences as to the future, including the preference for continuing to live. ... Q: Was he totally grossed out by your physical appearance? A: He gave no sign of it. None whatsoever. Q: How did he handle having to interact with someone like you? A: He behaved in every way appropriately, treated me as a respected professional acquaintance and was a gracious and accommodating host. Q: Was it emotionally difficult for you to take part in a public discussion of whether your life should have happened? A: It was very difficult. And horribly easy. Q: Did he get that job at Princeton because they like his ideas on killing disabled babies? A: It apparently didn't hurt, but he's most famous for animal rights. He's the author of ''Animal Liberation.'' Q: How can he put so much value on animal life and so little value on human life? That last question is the only one I avoid. I used to say I don't know; it doesn't make sense. But now I've read some of Singer's writing, and I admit it does make sense -- within the conceptual world of Peter Singer. But I don't want to go there. Or at least not for long. ... Then, 2001. Singer has been invited to the College of Charleston, not two blocks from my house. He is to lecture on ''Rethinking Life and Death.'' I have been dispatched by Not Dead Yet, the national organization leading the disability-rights opposition to legalized assisted suicide and disability-based killing. I am to put out a leaflet and do something during the Q. and A. ... I hesitate. I shouldn't shake hands with the Evil One. But he is Herb's guest, and I simply can't snub Herb's guest at the college where Herb teaches. Hereabouts, the rule is that if you're not prepared to shoot on sight, you have to be prepared to shake hands. I give Singer the three fingers on my right hand that still work. ''Good afternoon, Mr. Singer. I'm here for Not Dead Yet.'' I want to think he flinches just a little. Not Dead Yet did everything possible to disrupt his first week at Princeton. I sent a check to the fund for the 14 arrestees, who included comrades in power chairs. But if Singer flinches, he instantly recovers. He answers my questions about the lecture format. When he says he looks forward to an interesting exchange, he seems entirely sincere. ... As soon as he's done, I get the microphone and say I'd like to discuss selective infanticide. As a lawyer, I disagree with his jurisprudential assumptions. Logical inconsistency is not a sufficient reason to change the law. As an atheist, I object to his using religious terms (''the doctrine of the sanctity of human life'') to characterize his critics. Singer takes a note pad out of his pocket and jots down my points, apparently eager to take them on, and I proceed to the heart of my argument: that the presence or absence of a disability doesn't predict quality of life. I question his replacement-baby theory, with its assumption of ''other things equal,'' arguing that people are not fungible. I draw out a comparison of myself and my nondisabled brother Mac (the next-born after me), each of us with a combination of gifts and flaws so peculiar that we can't be measured on the same scale. He responds to each point with clear and lucid counterarguments. He proceeds with the assumption that I am one of the people who might rightly have been killed at birth. He sticks to his guns, conceding just enough to show himself open-minded and flexible. We go back and forth for 10 long minutes. Even as I am horrified by what he says, and by the fact that I have been sucked into a civil discussion of whether I ought to exist, I can't help being dazzled by his verbal facility. He is so respectful, so free of condescension, so focused on the argument, that by the time the show is over, I'm not exactly angry with him. Yes, I am shaking, furious, enraged -- but it's for the big room, 200 of my fellow Charlestonians who have listened with polite interest, when in decency they should have run him out of town on a rail. ... Singer seems curious to learn how someone who is as good an atheist as he is could disagree with his entirely reasonable views. At the same time, I am trying to plumb his theories. What has him so convinced it would be best to allow parents to kill babies with severe disabilities, and not other kinds of babies, if no infant is a ''person'' with a right to life? I learn it is partly that both biological and adoptive parents prefer healthy babies. But I have trouble with basing life-and-death decisions on market considerations when the market is structured by prejudice. I offer a hypothetical comparison: ''What about mixed-race babies, especially when the combination is entirely nonwhite, who I believe are just about as unadoptable as babies with disabilities?'' Wouldn't a law allowing the killing of these undervalued babies validate race prejudice? Singer agrees there is a problem. ''It would be horrible,'' he says, ''to see mixed-race babies being killed because they can't be adopted, whereas white ones could be.'' What's the difference? Preferences based on race are unreasonable. Preferences based on ability are not. Why? To Singer, it's pretty simple: disability makes a person ''worse off.'' Are we ''worse off''? I don't think so. Not in any meaningful sense. There are too many variables. For those of us with congenital conditions, disability shapes all we are. Those disabled later in life adapt. We take constraints that no one would choose and build rich and satisfying lives within them. We enjoy pleasures other people enjoy, and pleasures peculiarly our own. We have something the world needs. ... I realize I must put one more issue on the table: etiquette. I was criticized within the movement when I confessed to shaking Singer's hand in Charleston, and some are appalled that I have agreed to break bread with him in Princeton. I think they have a very good point, but, again, I'm stuck. I'm engaged for a day of discussion, not a picket line. It is not in my power to marginalize Singer at Princeton; nothing would be accomplished by displays of personal disrespect. However, chumminess is clearly inappropriate. I tell Singer that in the lecture hall it can't be Harriet and Peter; it must be Ms. Johnson and Mr. Singer. He seems genuinely nettled. Shouldn't it be Ms. Johnson and Professor Singer, if I want to be formal? To counter, I invoke the ceremonial low-country usage, Attorney Johnson and Professor Singer, but point out that Mr./Ms. is the custom in American political debates and might seem more normal in New Jersey. All right, he says. Ms./Mr. it will be. ... ''That poor, sorry son of a bitch! He has no idea what he's in for.''
