Disability

We exist. That’s the subtitle of a new blog, Disabled Philosophers, a blog which wants to make disabled philosophers more visible. I think this is a great thing to do. Do have a look, and if you feel you fit the description of a disabled philosopher, or a philosopher who cares for/shares their live with a disabled person, do consider submitting your description. I think bringing this out in the open will do a great service to all those who are struggling with these issues, or those who want to know more. In fact, I think a blog like this makes academia (and, by extension, the world) a little bit more humane, since it shows people as they are, not as we imagine them to be.

Well, things have been quiet around my house lately, except of course for the whole-house water filter that exploded two weeks ago while Janet and I were at the movies, drenching the basement with four inches of water (750 gallons, we learned from the nice young man whose powerful machines drained our house).  The water had just gotten within reach of the bottom of the spines of the books in one bookcase (does a book have a coccyx?), leaving a row of thinkers from Marshall Berman to Harold Bloom shrieking for help and drawing their knees up to their chests.  And of course Jamie lost a lot of stuff — Beatles books, art books, crayons, writing pads, pretty much anything that was on the floor (and there were many things on the floor).  But at least it was clean water, not like <a href=”https://crookedtimber.org/2008/01/06/slow-parade/”>last time</a>.  So there’s that.

And now that I’ve spent the weekend putting together new shelving and storage devices and tidying up in general, it’s time to pick a fight!  This time I’m over at the National Humanities Center blog, <a href=”http://onthehuman.org/2011/01/humans-disabilities-humanities/”>On the Human</a>, complaining about bioethicists.  For example (from a discussion of Jonathan Glover’s book Choosing Children:  Genes, Disability, and Design):

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. (And there’s more: because, perhaps, “a disability is harder to bear if you know that people could have prevented it but chose not to do so,” [Derek] Parfit adds that “we assume that those born with the disability do not know they could have been spared it” [48]. Why not assume instead that those born with the disability are given a pony on their fifth birthday?) There simply are no known genetic conditions that present prospective parents with this kind of decision….

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7854 posts in CT’s history, and “virtually none”:https://crookedtimber.org/?s=autism written on autism. I think we are missing an opportunity here, to talk about something most people have no clue about, while chances are real that they have non-diagnosed people with autism in their families, neighbourhoods or professional circles. April 2nd was International Autism Awareness day, but since I was leaving that day for a family holiday, the post that I wanted to write arrives only now.
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A friend alerts me to <a href=”http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/should-down-syndrome-be-cured/”>this recent item</a> in Lisa Belkin’s <i>NYT</i> “Motherlode” blog:

<blockquote><b>Should Down Syndrome Be Cured?</b>

The <a href=”http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/08/a-baby-in-a-snowstorm”>guest post</a> here on Friday — about the birth of Cash Van Rowe during a blizzard, and the jolting news that he had Down syndrome — led many of you to leave comments for his parents, assuring them that the road ahead was a journey they would cherish.

But what if Cash’s Down syndrome could be cured — or, more precisely, be mitigated?

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While I was at LSU talking about disability and stuff, a graduate student asked me about Obama’s “Special Olympics” gaffe on <i>The Tonight Show</i>.  I said more or less what you’d expect: that it was a stunningly foolish and thoughtless remark, and something of a bitter irony that the United States’ first African-American president had become the first president to use “Special Olympics” as a laugh line.  Guess we didn’t see <i>that</i> coming!

Now, of course I know the joke was supposed to be self-deprecating.  But there are much better ways to be self-deprecating!  Obama could have mocked his bowling skills by saying “I brought my Z game,” which would have been Very Funny because it would have been a play on the sports-cliché of bringing one’s A game, you see, and it would not have offended any Z-Americans, since they have notoriously generous senses of humor.

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I started blogging just under five years ago, and for the first few months, I kept marveling at my brand new toy.  The record of this marveling, unfortunately, is still in the blog archives for all to see: there are entire posts that read, <i>Whoa!  Check it out!  Somebody responded to something I wrote!</i> and <i>d00d!  Twenty thousand readers in one month!  Inconceivable! This Inter-net is an amazing thing!</i>  Yes, I really did hyphenate “inter-net.”  It was supposed to be really funny, you see, like something from the early twentieth-century issues of <i>The Onion</i> in <i>Our Dumb Century</i>.  Because whenever I want to suggest in shorthand that someone my age or older is clueless about new technologies, I refer to the “auto hyphen mobile,” after <i>Our Dumb Century</i>’s “auto-mobile,” and . . . oh, never mind.

The point is that sometimes, the internet really is an amazing thing, in which you write <a href=”http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/wandering_back_in/”>a blog post</a> that takes issue with Peter Singer’s characterization of the capabilities of people with Down syndrome, and then find, a few weeks later, an email from Peter Singer in your inbox.  Last month, Singer wrote to say he’d come across my post about the <a href=”http://www.stonybrook.edu/sb/cdconference/”>SUNY – Stony Brook Cognitive Disability conference</a>.  He said he was delighted to hear that my son Jamie has a wide range of abilities, intrigued to learn that Jamie understands a range of theories about why humans eat some animals and not others, but sorry that neither Jamie nor I appreciate Woody Allen movies — though he admitted that the recent ones have been disappointing.

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The Cognitive Disability conference at which Michael spoke (and to which he referred here) is now available as a podcast (more or less) in its entirety here. Some of the podcasts come through rather slowly, and, annoyingly, because I heard that it was so much fun, I can’t get the final session to load. Still, Michael’s talk comes through fine.

<i>Cross-posted at <a href=”http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/wandering_back_in/”>some obscure blog</a>.</i>

I recently spoke at <a href=”http://www.stonybrook.edu/sb/cdconference/”>this conference</a>, which was (a) historic and très cool and (b) something I’d been fretting over for months.  (Janet and Jamie came with me, and Nick and his girlfriend Rachel joined us on Saturday.  Fun for the whole family!)  I had a fairly easy assignment: a twenty-minute response to Martha Nussbaum on the opening night.  I’m familiar with some aspects of her work, and I assigned a good chunk of <a href=”http://www.amazon.com/Frontiers-Justice-Disability-Nationality-Membership/dp/0674019172″><i>Frontiers of Justice</i></a> to my disability studies seminar last spring, so the opening few paragraphs of my response simply pointed out that few philosophers have taken up the challenge of cognitive disability so thoroughly and satisfactorily as she.  I briefly summarized Nussbaum’s critique of John Rawls and the social contract tradition; here’s a snippet from that critique.

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I’d like to put an empirical claim on the table for discussion. The claim is that people who have never done a significant amount of informal carework, are extremely likely to underestimate the burdens of care. In this claim I include care for small children, severely disabled people, dependent elderly, or any other human being in need of significant amounts of informal caring. And with burdens of care I mean all sorts of burdens – they can be physical, or psychological, or emotional, or another dimension, or (most likely) a mixture of these.

Now, I am not entirely sure where to look for empirical evidence which can confirm, refute or help me to refine or revise this claim. Perhaps in a psychology or sociology of care literature? I have come across plenty of anecdotal evidence, but haven’t come across a study that has investigated this claim in a qualitatively-grounded quantitative way (or a similar claim, perhaps focusing on just one type of care situation). Anyone suggestions for literature? Anyone views on the plausibility of this claim?

“Nancy Folbre”:http://people.umass.edu/folbre/folbre/, who is widely considered to be one of the most knowledgeable economists on issues of care work, has recently started a new blog, called “Care Talk”:http://blogs.umass.edu/folbre/. It’s a research blog that “aims”:http://blogs.umass.edu/folbre/welcome-to-care-talk/ to bring together interdisciplinary insights on issues of care — child care, care issues related to primary education, elder care, care for disabled, and health care. Care is a neglected issue in several disciplines and subdisciplines, including economics and political philosophy, and I can only applaud this initiative. I hope that this will become a genuine international blog — much can be learnt from looking at how care work is organised and divided in other countries.

Folbre published earlier this year her new book “Valuing Children”:http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/FOLOUR.html which I have here on my desk. I promise our readers a review of that book sometime in June.

I’m reading an interesting book, Eye For An Eye, by William Ian Miller [amazon]. (I don’t know anything about him. I just grabbed this off the shelf.) It’s a discussion of lex talionis style justice systems – a somewhat unsystematic ‘antitheory’ of justice, the author styles it. Lots of quoting from Old Norse stuff and Babylonian stuff and ancient what-not. Very colorful. Here’s a bit that’s interesting, in a subsection on “Paying Gods in Bodies and Blood”. Maybe Kieran will have something to say.
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