Like a lot of social questions, attitudes toward disability remediation only start getting really nasty when they intersect with people's identities -- which is probably what writers are getting at much of the time when they talk about "disability culture", although I think that's a less than ideal choice of words since cultures intersect only imperfectly with self-image. Now, at this point I could link to "Keep Your Identity Small" and wash my hands of the problem. Certainly that's the advice I'd give to anyone in the unlikely position of making conscious choices about their future relationship with disability. But that's a dodge, and there's enough situations where it's inadequate that I think the question deserves a real answer.
I don't think breaking our response to the identity construction of disability down in medical terms ("they're sick; it's our job to cure them") is going to get us anywhere: the social architecture of medicine makes it poorly suited to navigating scenarios which the patient wouldn't consider dysfunctional. Let's consider our response in sociological terms instead: it has medical consequences when alternatives are or may b...
Increasingly, the attitude of disabled people was that it wasn't inherently bad to be disabled
Same way that many battered spouses have learned to talk about the good points of their abusers, and many mortal people have learned to talk about the good points of mortality, I'm sure that many disabled people have learned to talk about the good points of their disability.
But as for the rest of us, we don't need to treat abuse, or death, or disability as remotely good.
Once again, I bring up the exchange from Gideon's Crossing, where a black doctor advises a deaf woman to give her deaf daughter cochlear implants:
Mother: You're saying that hearing people are better than deaf people!
Doctor: I'm saying it's easier.
Mother: Would your life be easier if you were white?
For those that don't catch the analogy: yes, life might be easier if you were hearing rather than deaf, but gaining the ability to hear would change a fundamental part of your identity and separate you from your "native culture".
Not endorsing this view, just trying to give a better intuition for it.
It's interesting that obvious moral of your anecdote is supposed to be that no black person would want to change into a white person, even though life would be easier. I mean, I agree it's probably true, but it seems mysterious to me, like something that needs to be explained. One explanation is that a single black person changing to white would in a sense be betraying all her black friends, or legitimizing the idea that being black is worse than being white, but I can think of a contrived scenario where those explanations don't seem to apply.
Suppose that we had a machine that could change people's skin color, physical features, and speech patterns, so that people of one race could be turned indistinguishable from people of another. And suppose we wanted to end all racial discrimination forever by making everyone the same race. So we flip a coin to decide whether all white people have to change into black people, or all black people have to change into white people - discrimination disappears either way, and this way we know it's not a power thing where white people are trying to enforce their own norms.
I'm white, and I don't think I would object too much if the coin came up as &q...
But overall I can't think of any really good objections from the white point of view.
Is "my bodily autonomy is more important than your dreams of social justice" just being contrary?
I'd be really interested in hearing from some minority - whether in terms of race or sexual orientation or whatever - who wouldn't want her community to accept a coin toss on the principles described above.
What would such a coin toss look like for sexuality? If it comes up heads, everyone becomes straight, and if tails everyone becomes gay? That would have significant extinction concerns. Everyone becoming bisexual on tails is more reasonable, but it doesn't map onto the same sort of concerns, because now it's asymmetric: straight guys who become bisexual can still be attracted to women, but gay guys who become straight can't still be attracted to men. So maybe heads is everyone stays the same? But that's just odd- "we have this option, and either we'll do it or we won't."
I wouldn't mind moving from gay to bisexual, and I wouldn't mind gay culture disappearing. I suspect that everyone becoming bisexual would lead to a net social loss, though, even though I might be better off.
Are you the sort of person who views every member of your preferred attraction-category by sex as a potential romance? If so, this says a lot more about you than human nature.
I have no doubt that I unconsciously evaluate every person I interact with; where else would the label "cute" come from?
Options: Non-monogamy.
The question was what would happen if everyone became bisexual; I presumed everything else would stay constant. That is, many people would choose many varieties of non-monogamy, and the existence of jealousy would complicate those choices.
People could also learn to, you know, deal with those. It's not like unrequited attraction is new.
Sure. But remember that policy debates should not appear one-sided. Having to deal with unrequited attractions is a cost, even if people get good at doing so. The question about net loss or net gain is about balancing losses and gains. There are a number of benefits to everyone becoming bisexual, but also a number of costs, and when I eyeball them I reckon the costs as larger than the benefits.
In at least one sense, hearing people ARE better than deaf people. I'm not saying they have more moral worth, I'm saying that, all other things being equal, the hearing person can do things that the deaf person can't. The latest iPhone (to pick a piece of technology with a recognizable progression in quality) is better than the iPhone 3G. It has a faster processor and various other doohickies that improve its function. It's not morally superior, but it IS objectively better, as, as far as I can tell, the ability to hear is objectively better to deafness.
Deaf people's disadvantage is an innate property of being deaf.
I disagree that there can be innate disadvantages, except for to the extent the utility function addresses those properties directly. See:
St Addahad's Symptoms. A small group of symptoms including fleshy growths, nerve clusters and neural pathways which result in a near permanent state of distraction as patterns of air pressure change are translated into thoughts and inserted into the mind with disruptively high priority. "Sounds" from all around, indoors and out, near and far, from nearby footsteps to distant thunderstorms or even one's own bodily functions all combine to make a state of prolonged focus nearly impossible to achieve, though this ability can be regained somewhat with practise.
As with many curses, St Addahad's sufferers describe benefits as well, such as being able to know things are happening without needing to see them, and to know which direction they are happening in, and some even report being able to balance without handholds. These trivial sounding benefits appear so addictive that most refuse to be treated. Efforts are underway to cause the onset of these symptoms by technological means, but there is debate on the moral issue of such experiments on humans as the necessary interventions cannot wait until the age of consent.
I agree that the difference between hearing and deafness is more than just a social construct (although there is a social construct associated with it, and the importance of that is non-negligible); there is also a difference in ability. Hearing people can hear; deaf people can't.
If that is sufficient grounds to conclude that bearing and raising a deaf child is grounds for taking that child away from me (either now, or in our hypothetical transhumanist future), it seems to follow that failing to reconfigure my child to benefit from any technologically achievable augmentation should equally be grounds for doing so.
The endpoint of that reasoning seems to be that in a transhumanist culture, everyone is raised with all available augmentations -- not just as potential options, but as realized capabilities. Any attempt to raise a child without one of those augmentations is grounds for having that child taken away.
I reject that endpoint... but it's not entirely clear to me where along the garden path I want to draw the line, or how I would justify drawing it there.
I'm not sure the question means anything, nor am I sure exactly what it would mean if it did.
An easier thought experiment for me to imagine, which seems to relate to this question, is how I would expect cultural attitudes towards unattractive people to evolve when technology allows individuals to choose their appearances. A still easier one is how I would expect such attitudes to be projected into an online environment where people choose the appearances of their avatars. My intuition is that the "ugly"/"attractive" scale starts to mean very different things in such cultures, and ultimately ceases to mean much of anything at all, and questions like "should I be allowed to choose an ugly avatar?" and "should my avatar be forcibly upgraded to be less ugly?" start to feel like silly questions to which the correct answer is "who cares?". Sure, I may understand intellectually that newcomers to this culture come from a world where attractiveness matters a great deal, and may have a hard time acclimatizing themselves to the idea that my world is different; I may even sympathize with their need to ask such silly questions, but that won't ma...
I remember hearing about people complaining that cochlear implants were damaging deaf culture, or something. A quick google turned this up as the first hit, which seems to be evidence that what I heard was somewhat real.
I'm pretty sure I have heard about people saying that technology for having unimpaired children is in some way 'against' the disabled.
An awful lot of people do not think straight.
You can find audio samples online that attempt to represent what speech and music sound like through a cochlear implant. It ain't pretty.
But it's much more than that. Here's my understanding, based on some ASL classes and reading on the subject. If there is a Deaf person reading this, I hope you'll correct any errors or exaggerations I've made:
Deaf culture is a linguistic minority group as well as a disability minority group. People involved in Deaf culture strongly value their language — sign language. There's a solid reason for this: Many years ago, most schools for the deaf had policies of suppressing the use of sign language and instead forced deaf kids to learn as much oral language, lip-reading, and so forth, as they could. This was called "oralism". And it turns out that oralism inhibits and slows language acquisition to the point that kids don't become competent in any language during the critical early years when the human brain is capable of primary language acquisition.
As a result, deaf people taught through exclusive oralism have lower reading comprehension and even IQ than deaf people taught through sign language. In contrast, those who learn sign language ea...
I think it's reasonable to argue that deafness (just for example) is more fundamentally limiting than having a "nonstandard" sexuality. It's not just a matter of social norms. Choosing to be deaf is one thing, but intentionally having deaf children is problematic. (I can understand the attitude that current medical techniques are a calculated risk, of course.)
There's also the issue that not everyone is comfortable with the way their mind or body happens to be put together (on every side of things). Telling those people that they can't change themselves because somebody thinks that they're "betraying their heritage" or whatever else strikes me as rather the opposite of what transhumanism is all about.
Although I don't use the term "eugenecist" because of its negative social connotations, I consider myself a proponent of eugenics.
I want to vote your article up twice, once for being interesting and thought provoking, and once for being careful to use terms like "hardly anyone would identify emself" rather than "no-one would identify emself". One of the things I like about the Less Wrong community is its devotion to accuracy.
I think that in a world with as many options as the transhumanists think of, some sort of a compulsory rumspringa for every culture/ sub culture might get instituted.
A rumspringa is a brief time where amish young men get to see the world. Similarly, some kind of a rule might be instituted where all young humans are given some time to explore other cultures. But in the case of disabilities, such therapy and re-baselining might take measures that are very expensive from today's perspective.
Interesting analogies and questions, but
It is not useful to ignore the role of disabled people and disability culture in the transhumanist movement. I believe that the future has a lot to offer many people with disabilities, including those who do not want a 'cure.' Transhumanism can encompass interest in diverse AAC methods, and I believe it should.
This reeks of politics - of "you should believe this because of the political gains to a movement associated to a label that might describe you" instead of "you should believe this because ev...
I think that the underlying issue is that different people often make radically different (and sometimes conflicting) qualities a central part of their personal identity. What's worse, some such identifications are regarded as improper while others are enshrined as utterly inviolate, all without any widely agreed upon decision-making metric.
In the case of individuals making their own choices things are usually manageable (one might expect as much or more variance in a transhuman society even without identity politics), but when it comes to propagating iden...
For what it's worth, as a diagnosed autist and a (adult-)lifelong self-identified transhumanist, I can tell you that I never encounter disagreement with the notion of neurodiversity being the ultimate goal of transhumanism, as opposed to forced arbitrary definitions of what is 'superior'. After all; ultimately there is very little difference in the expected utility of providing hearing to the deaf as opposed to finding means of translating sound into other senses they already possess, or even granting senses they do not yet possess in order to process audi...
To further muddy the waters, transablism exists: some people believe that their ideal bodies are ones that have specific disabilities, and are willing to undergo significant trauma to gain those disabilities.
Is this in the spirit of transhumanism? (I want to think so. It's not much different from wanting to improve one's judgement by removing certain less useful circuits, I think?) Is this something that we as a society should allow? (...I have no idea.)
See also Transsexuals and Otherkin.
Not sure if anyone has ever linked to this story before on LW, but it seems appropriate, both in terms of the particular argument happening below in the comments and as a general metaphor for transhumanists' struggles with wider society.
Interesting article, but I think the line
Was the literally non-consensual hysterectomy an eugenicist procedure?
Is pretty much begging people to argue about the definition of eugenicist.
With apologies to Ed Regis.
Modern science has caused humankind to develop better cures and patches for once-debilitating conditions; people often survive maladies which would have killed them not long ago. In the wake of this and of a recently changing attitude regarding how cognitively disabled people might see the world, a disability rights movement came into swing in the 1970s. Increasingly, the attitude of disabled people was that it wasn't inherently bad to be disabled; a disability could be an intrinsic part of a person's self-image. Some people in wheelchairs, for instance, want badly to be able to walk - but some do not, and the mainstream attitude has historically not validated those people's experiences. This is where disability culture intersects the transhumanist movement. If it is possible to identify so strongly with a physical disability as to not want any cure, how does that mesh with believing that it is desirable to improve one's mind and body? Is it possible to identify as a happily disabled transhumanist?
This does not intend to suggest that transhumanism is a movement of eugenic warriors; it's hard to imagine anyone suggesting that folks who don't sign up for the "Harmless and easy cure for senescence" shot be sterilized. However, despite the fact that hardly anyone would identify emself as an eugenicist (a fine thing to call yourself once-upon-a-time in America, until the Nazis rendered the term unpopular,) literally eugenic attitudes in society prevail, e.g. the prevalent belief that people with Huntington's disease or schizophrenia who reproduce are cruel for hazarding the inheritance of their condition.
One wonders what disability culture would look like if people who are today in wheelchairs had access to technology that could repair their legs and allow them to walk. I wonder if people with congenital disabilities which would today require a wheelchair would have a choice about being cured, or whether the cure would be implemented in infancy. In 2007, a girl named Ashley who has an unknown brain disorder and cannot communicate or move herself effectively was given a series of radical procedures - hysterectomy, mastectomy and high estrogen doses - intended to make her easier to take care of. Was the literally non-consensual hysterectomy an eugenicist procedure? An immoral one? Was it in the spirit of transhumanism? In a future where Down syndrome can be prevented with a prenatal vaccine, would such a vaccine be moral? How about vaccines for "low-functioning" autism? At that rate, surely it would be possible to vaccinate for Asperger syndrome, depression, and ADHD, conditions which many people dislike and/or dislike having. (As an aside, with all the medically-repudiated yet widespread fear about vaccines causing autism, one can only imagine the panic an autism vaccine would cause.)
I don't have answers to these questions. I have feelings and impressions, but those are not very useful. The issue cannot be solved unilaterally by saying that only those who enthusiastically consent to certain medical procedures should be given them, because many people are incapable of giving clear consent, as in the Ashley treatment. Nor can it be clearly solved by suggesting only prophylactic measures against disabling conditions, because certainly some parents would forego those measures. In a transhuman future, is the birth of a nonverbal autistic a preventable tragedy? Is it less of a tragedy if the child is a savant? Nor can one say that only conditions without an accompanying culture should be eradicated. Even if the definition of 'culture' were not elusive, HIV/AIDS has a definite culture about it, and few people would suggest that HIV should not be eradicated.
It is not useful to ignore the role of disabled people and disability culture in the transhumanist movement. I believe that the future has a lot to offer many people with disabilities, including those who do not want a 'cure.' Transhumanism can encompass interest in diverse AAC methods, and I believe it should. Simple keyboard technology has made it possible for many otherwise nonverbal people to communicate eloquently, as have DynaVox devices and various iPad apps. It would delight me to see widespread discussion about more powerful AAC devices, which could enable us to perceive and act on the desires of those who cannot now communicate.
Nor has technology reached its limits in helping those with physical disabilities; wheelchairs are generally clumsy and heavy, and expensive for people without insurance - nearly inaccessible to people who live without insurance in impoverished areas of the world (or of the United States.) People who, like Stephen Hawking, become paralyzed by motor neuron diseases, do not all possess Stephen Hawking's access to high-tech communications devices (for which prices begin at thousands of dollars.) And people with disabilities like epilepsy or cerebral palsy are still often abused for their "demonic possession" or inaccurately stereotyped as mentally disabled. The transhumanist movement tends to advocate augmentation sans cure as far as physical disabilities are concerned, but there are people with mixed feelings about transhumanism as it applies to disability.
Disability is a hot button topic surrounded by widely varying spectra of beliefs. It directly affects humankind and is not often discussed rationally because of the subjective experiences people have had with varying disabilities. (The mother of a nonverbal autistic says, "There should be a cure for autism; I want my son to say he loves me." A nonverbal autistic communicating by AAC says "There shouldn't be a cure for autism; I want people to learn how I communicate my affection." Their conflicting beliefs do not predict radically different anticipated experiences.) So a rational, clear dialogue about disability is vital - for disabled people, their friends and families, and the world at large - in order to integrate these identities and experiences into the future and present of humankind.