Luckily, to the best of my knowledge, everyone on the planet is entirely safe from having their views on morality being dictated by thought experiments (be they like bad Star Trek plots or not), as thought experiments are immaterial and thus are incapable of holding a gun to anyone’s head and dictating anything. Every thought experiment I have ever met is so pacifist as to make Gandhi look like a drill sergeant.
And, given that I am not at all worried about thought experiments dictating my morality, I find them useful in thinking about morality and in arguing about it. That’s why I introduced my thought experiment, to describe my discomfort with the Deaf analysis you discussed.

It would be much more morally instructive and healthy to go find some deaf parents who, say, have refused to have their children fitted with cochlear implants and talk to them – see why they made the decision, what factors were important to them. And talk to the children, too, see what they thought about it. Then you are being guided by the real experiences of people who have really faced the issue ….

Firstly, I have read a number of accounts. Secondly, I do have my own disability and I would be quite happy to get rid of it in a second – my experience counts for something too, at least in my estimation, even if you’re not interested in it. Thirdly, it does strike me that there’s a bias in Deaf thought, in that the Deaf culture is very strong so for many Deaf people not being deaf means cutting off a large chunk of their identity. Women will commit FGM on their daughters because of cultural reasons, are we to accept that as another cultural practice?

I deconverted from Christanity despite the advice of many Christians, and with no regrets, I do not see any reason to believe that the advice of people inside a culture is always right.

Thought experiments are intuition pumps, and in this case I think what might be happening is that it’s amplifying your intuition that deafness is bad – which is exactly what the ‘we’re not disabled’ Deaf are trying to get you to question.

Thought experiments are not necessarily intuition pumps – especially if they are posed by other people. To be very obvious about things, I am intentionally questioning the Deaf culture idea that a lack of hearing is not bad. Thank you for taking the time to debate this with me, I have always found written descriptions of the Deaf line of thought a bit frustrating as they don’t address my discomfort.

Having said that, there is a specific reason why your example fails to show us anything about deaf children, and that is simply that generally speaking we find there’s an asymmetry between allowing a situation to occur and causing the same situation to occur.

This is why I specified a scientist choosing to move his children from NZ to Japan to get around that asymmetry. We are not horrified to hear of parents choosing to move their children to another culture, or at least not enough to call for it to be a crime, despite it clearly being a case of causing the situation to occur, we are horrified when we hear of FGM.

(a) being born male versus being born female and your mother operates on you to surgically reassign your gender. (we could translate your example to this one and by parity of reasoning conclude that it’s awful to be male because of our horrified reaction to such gender reassignment)

How odd. Why do you think it would be awful to be male under such circumstances? I don’t like having a disability, but I hardly think it’s awful. And my brother with the brain injury says he wishes it never happened, but he seems about as happy as he was before the accident. Everyone’s life has a few bad things happen in it, and if we live long enough we’re going to wind up losing the bodies of our youth anyway, it seems foolish to me to decide that that makes your whole life awful, that attitude will surely just open you up to more pain down the line. I don’t know of any philosophy or religion that advises an attitude such as your one here.

Leaving aside the oddness of your argument that it would be awful to be male under such circumstances, gender reassignment surgery as I understand it always involves pain and some loss of functioning relative to someone born with the original gender.

Your scenario (b) – we don’t prosecute parents who let their children become very tanned. Sunburnt perhaps, tanned no.

Scenario© – in the Truman show the show producers controlled the life of Truman, eg inducing a trauma of water by killing his father, picking a spouse, etc. Leaving aside that excess control, the movie did strike me as raising interesting questions about how our parents do pick our lives for us by where they bring us up. Sadly I don’t have any interesting answers to said questions.

Thank you again for taking the time to discuss this. As I said, when I first came across the Deaf analysis you describe I found it very mind-opening and it is interesting to be able to pursue this.

I think it’s incredibly dangerous to let your views on morality be dictated by bizarre concocted gedankenexperimenten which read like bad Star Trek plots. It would be much more morally instructive and healthy to go find some deaf parents who, say, have refused to have their children fitted with cochlear implants and talk to them – see why they made the decision, what factors were important to them. And talk to the children, too, see what they thought about it. Then you are being guided by the real experiences of people who have really faced the issue, not by some feeling you have as you pontificate on your B-grade science fiction story in your armchair on a dull sunday evening. Thought experiments are intuition pumps, and in this case I think what might be happening is that it’s amplifying your intuition that deafness is bad – which is exactly what the ‘we’re not disabled’ Deaf are trying to get you to question.

Having said that, there is a specific reason why your example fails to show us anything about deaf children, and that is simply that generally speaking we find there’s an asymmetry between allowing a situation to occur and causing the same situation to occur. In the case of tampering with childrens’ development, we don’t normally have a problem with children being left as they are (unless we think that it’s a terrible situation that should be corrected, which of course many think about deafness. but it would be begging the question to include this in our reasonings at this stage), but we would be nothing short of horrified to learn that someone had bought about what would otherwise be considered a ‘normal’ condition. And that might be another intuition your thought experiment pumps – our dislike of overly directed and overly artificial interventions in natural development.

I’ll try to be succinct – my first attempt at this got awfully long. But consider:
(a) being born male versus being born female and your mother operates on you to surgically reassign your gender. (we could translate your example to this one and by parity of reasoning conclude that it’s awful to be male because of our horrified reaction to such gender reassignment)
(b) being born with very dark skin versus your father altering your skin to be very dark (because you weren’t dark enough for his liking, maybe).
(c ) growing up in Japan because your parents moved there when you were small, versus growing up in a ‘Truman Show’-like environment constructed by your parents to resemble Japan, with Japanese TV and hired asian actors speaking Japanese to you.

These are gedankenexperimenten themselves, of course, but all but the last are not too far removed from actual things people really do (or have done) to their kids. Even the last one is perhaps not too different from people who deliberately isolate their children almost entirely from the wider society. So in these at least our intuitions are based to some extent on actual cases. Especially if you’ve read about things themselves or talked to someone who has been involved in such things, but even just our horror of this kind of interference is based on our experience, as a society, of these kind of examples, and child-rearing generally, even if you don’t have any kind of direct knowledge of them yourself.

… which always reminds me of the Arthur C Clarke short story, in the form of a message explaining contritely that we are the descendants of alien colonists who contracted a horrifically disfiguring disease, causing the rest of civilisation to sever contact with our world in disgust; but they were now returning, having developed a treatment. “Don’t worry,” it finished. “If any of you are still white, we can cure you.”

Yes, there is some peculiar status anxiety operative here, as if what one did not know how to assimilate, cognitively and physically, into the sacrosanct human ego must be eliminated from the world-picture. Certainly, “stigma” qualifies as such an item, since shame and rage can’t be a part of the human condition, under certain extensions of such a concept. Fate can neither be acknowledged, nor answered to, since that would be a besetting sin of modernity. It would be tantamount to a defiance of logic itself! Better to alleviate human beings of their own existences than to confront the conflicted differences the world imposes.

As for Obama, my gosh, a crack appears in that perfect facade! He reveals, on the Jay Leno show no less, his utter “guyness”. Who woulda thunk it? I guess all those poker games taught him nothing about his worldly ambitions.

Hattie:

Ah, yes, that self-stultifying desire for normality. But then, the self-idealizing identification with normality is one of the prime mechanisms feeding into fascism, no?

For the rest, y’all can go back to discussing amongst yourselves about how freedom = autonomy, (which renders it a fungible quantity).

You might say this is political correctness gone mad, but why should the Deaf, who are at least as readily identifiable as any other subgroup in society and much more cohesive as a community than most, be accorded any less respect than, say, Black Americans, in these matters?

I appreciate that not every deaf person would agree with this, and I don’t really know what to think myself, I’m just pointing out that it’s a pretty difficult issue, involving problems over who gets to speak for whom.

On a personal note, I think I can plausibly regard myself as a fringe member of the Deaf community here, although I’m not myself deaf. I’d have to say that my involvement in the community, meeting deaf friends, and learning NZSL has been a completely enriching experience, one that I would have been much poorer without. It’s also broadened my horizons as to what is possible for humanity.

It’s these facts: that the Deaf don’t (all) want to be ‘cured’ and absorbed into the mainstream, and that they have a lot to offer wider society, that make me very wary about wanting to eliminate these points of difference.

I agree that the characters are pretty ridiculous, and I share your outlook that a story where none of the characters are sympathetic usually is a poor story. But one can have sympathy for ridiculous characters: there are many great comedies filled with ridiculous characters that are nevertheless highly sympathetic. Obelix, for example, is pretty ridiculous, and verging on the stereotypical, but quite loveable.

To be sure, most of the characters in Tropic Thunder are essentially one-joke characters. However, (and we’re getting into de gustibus territory here) I actually found myself with a lot of sympathy for both Speedman (Stiller) and Lazarus (Downey) , with their ridiculous goals : Lazarus being intent on being the ultimate method actor, to the point of undergoing an identity crisis, and Speedman just desperately wanting Lazurus’s actorly recognition and an audience that loves him. These goals are expressed in a ridiculous fashion, but they’re exaggerated forms of genuine goals people actually have, and I thought that the story coped with them, and Speedman’s eventual maturation, pretty well given the kind of film it is. I also thought the story of the agent who finally wakes up to the fact that friends are more important than money, and the only person in his life that passes for a friend is his client Speedman, and the only way he can communicate that is by getting Speedman his damned tivo was kind of touching, in a way.

I’m with you about Burn after Reading though. I found the main characters to be venal, shallow, selfish and cold-hearted, which I suppose was the point but as a result I had very little interest in what happened to them. The only characters I found remotely sympathetic was the gym manager guy, and Brad Pitt’s character, the only two people in the film who had any interest in helping anyone but themselves. Pitt was also endearingly vacuous and stupid, and seemed to be just excited to be in a spy novel. I guess I also had sympathy for the FBI agents – they’re bit parts who’s only real role is to be rational observers completely baffled at the bizarre proceedings (I feel like that myself sometimes).

Bit disappointing fare from the Cohen Brothers, though. Normally their entire cast is pretty endearing. I even liked the nihilists.

It doesn’t make sense to me to say that rapists are stigmatized or child molesters are stigmatized. I don’t think that is a stigma. We find people like that repellent but I don’t think stigma accurately describes that reaction. When you say that is a stigma, it implies (to me) that the reaction is unwarranted.

Chris @ 81: I don’t think that when you remove a stigma you fail to recognize the difficulty someone may face with a disability or an illness. The deeper problem with stigma, I think, is that it involves a kind of disrespect for the person—the idea that they are lesser, inferior and so on. It’s a sweeping judgment that they are worth less somehow. Mental illnesses are stigmatized and to say that is a problem is not to say that being mentally ill is somehow special and beautiful, if only people would realize that. To remove the stigma of mental illness is simply to try to do away with some of the assumptions that surround it—that mentally ill people are necessarily incapable of reasoning, that they are scary, freakish, a threat to others, revolting, etc. I think people do valorize certain differences sometimes as a way of combating stigma and you are probably right that in some cases they try to erase the difficulties those differences can bring. But it’s important to separate out the difficulties that come from being stigmatized and the ones that come from the loss of some kinds of goods that disability or illness or other stigmatized traits bring.

I appreciate this perspective. No one wants to be denigrated by others, but I think people go too far when they suggest that everything is a matter of plural ‘abilities.’

My mother was deaf for most of her life. Had she lived to discover that others want to describe her not as handicapped but as differently abled, she would be infuriated. Being deaf was a burden to her, not just an alternative way of experiencing the world. Perhaps this was because she became deaf at about age 7; so, she was acutely aware of having lost something. Perhaps those who are deaf from birth would not have this awareness. Nonetheless, it cannot be wrong to acknowledge that humans are better off when all their senses work, can it?

In the same way – perhaps less precisely – mental disabilities are not as desirable as mental ‘normalcy.’ The standard of normalcy may be vague, but there is meaning to the idea of the normal.

I just want to point out that this popular idea of what the parents/organizers are like at a S. Olympics event isn’t entirely unfair. For better and for worse, one of the explicit goals of the S. Olympics organization is to build self esteem in the competitors (compare this to the Olympics or the Paralympics, where the sense of achievement is somewhat contingent on one’s performance). It’s understandable that the average American might think that praise is lavished rather liberally at a S. Olympics event, and without particular regard to performance.

You forget Bill Frist’s prowess in this dept.