Aug 1 JDN 2459428
There is a common phrase Christians like to say: “Love the sinner, hate the sin.” This seems to be honored more in the breach than the observance, and many of the things that most Christians consider “sins” are utterly harmless or even good; but the principle is actually quite sound. You can disagree with someone or even believe that what they are doing is wrong while still respecting them as a human being. Indeed, my attitude toward religion is very much “Love the believer, hate the belief.” (Though somehow they don’t seem to like that one so much….)
Yet while ethically this is often the correct attitude, psychologically it can be very difficult for people to maintain. The Halo Effect is a powerful bias, and most people recoil instinctively from saying anything good about someone bad or anything bad about someone good. This can make it uncomfortable to simply state objective facts like “Hitler was a charismatic leader” or “Stalin was a competent administrator”—how dare you say something good about someone so evil? Yet in fact Hitler and Stalin could never have accomplished so much evil if they didn’t have these positive attributes—if we want to understand how such atrocities can occur and prevent them in the future, we need to recognize that evil people can also be charismatic and competent.
Halo Effect also makes it difficult for people to understand the complexities of historical figures who have facets of both great good and great evil: Thomas Jefferson led the charge on inventing modern democracy—but he also owned and raped slaves. Lately it seems like the left wants to deny the former and the right wants to deny the latter; but both are historical truths that important to know.
Halo Effect is the best explanation I have for why so many disability activists want to deny that disabilities are inherently bad. They can’t keep in their head the basic principle of “Love the disabled, hate the disability.”
There is a large community of deaf people who say that being deaf isn’t bad. There are even some blind people who say that being blind isn’t bad—though they’re considerably rarer.
Is music valuable? Is art valuable? Is the world better off because Mozart’s symphonies and the Mona Lisa exist? Yes. It follows that being unable to experience these things is bad. Therefore blindness and deafness are bad. QED.
No human being is made better of by not being able to do something. More capability is better than less capability. More freedom is better than less freedom. Less pain is better than more pain.
(Actually there are a few exceptions to “less pain is better than more pain”: People with CIPA are incapable of feeling pain even when injured, which is very dangerous.)
From this, it follows immediately that disabilities are bad and we should be trying to fix them.
And frankly this seems so utterly obvious to me that it’s hard for me to understand why anyone could possibly disagree. Maybe people who are blind or deaf simply don’t know what they’re missing? Even that isn’t a complete explanation, because I don’t know what it would be like to experience four dimensions or see ultraviolet—yet I still think that I’d be better off if I could. If there were people who had these experiences telling me how great they are, I’d be certain of it.
Don’t get me wrong: A lot of ableist discrimination does exist, and much of it seems to come from the same psychological attitude: Since being disabled is bad, they think that disabled people must be bad and we shouldn’t do anything to make them better off because they are bad. Stated outright this sounds ludicrous; but most people who think this way don’t consciously reflect on it. They just have a general sense of badness related to disability which then rubs off on their attitudes toward disabled people as well.
Yet it makes hardly any more sense to go the other way: Disabled people are human beings of value, they are good; therefore their disabilities are good? Therefore this thing that harms and limits them is good?
It’s certainly true that most disabilities would be more manageable with better accommodations, and many of those accommodations would be astonishingly easy and cheap to implement. It’s terrible that we often fail to do this. Yet the fact remains: The best-case scenario would be not needing accommodations because we can simply cure the disability.
It never ceases to baffle me that disability activists will say things like this:
No, the problem is pretty clearly the fact that she can’t walk. There are various ways that we could make society more accessible to people in wheelchairs—and we should do those things—but there are inherently certain things you simply cannot do if you can’t walk, and that has nothing to do with anything society does. You would be better off if society were more accommodating, but you’d be better off still if you could simply walk again.
Perhaps my perspective on this is skewed, because my major disability—chronic migraine—involves agonizing, debilitating chronic pain. Perhaps people whose disabilities don’t cause them continual agony can convince themselves that there’s nothing wrong with them. But it seems pretty obvious to me that I would be better off without migraines.
Indeed, it’s utterly alien to my experience to hear people say things like this: “We’re not suffering. We’re just living our lives in a different way.” I’m definitely suffering, thank you very much. Maybe not everyone with disabilities is suffering—but a lot of us definitely are. Every single day I have to maintain specific habits and avoid triggers, and I still get severe headaches twice a week. I had a particularly nasty one just this morning.
There are some more ambiguous cases, to be sure: Neurodivergences like autism and ADHD that exist on a spectrum, where the most extreme forms are utterly debilitating but the mildest forms are simply ordinary variation. It can be difficult to draw the line at when we should be willing to treat and when we shouldn’t; but this isn’t fundamentally different from the sort of question psychiatrists deal with all the time, regarding the difference between normal sadness and nervousness versus pathological depression and anxiety disorders.
Of course there is natural variation in almost all human traits, and one can have less of something good without it being pathological. Some things we call disabilities could just be considered below-average capabilities within ordinary variation. Yet even then, if we could make everyone healthier, stronger, faster, tougher, and smarter than they currently are, I have trouble seeing why we wouldn’t want to do that. I don’t even see any particular reason to think that the current human average—or even the current human maximum—is in any way optimal. Better is better. If we have the option to become transhuman gods, why wouldn’t we?
Another way to see this is to think about how utterly insane it would be to actively try to create disabilities. If there’s nothing wrong with being deaf, why not intentionally deafen yourself? If being bound to a wheelchair is not a bad thing, why not go get your legs paralyzed? If being blind isn’t so bad, why not stare into a welding torth? In these cases you’d even have consented—which is absolutely not the case for an innate disability. I never consented to these migraines and never would have.
I respect individual autonomy, so I would never force someone to get treatment for their disability. I even recognize that society can pressure people to do things they wouldn’t want to, and so maybe occasionally people really are better off being unable to do something so that nobody can pressure them into it. But it still seems utterly baffling to me that there are people who argue that we’d be better off not even having the option to make our bodies work better.
I think this is actually a major reason why disability activism hasn’t been more effective; the most vocal activists are the ones saying ridiculous things like “the problem isn’t my disability, it’s your lack of accommodations” or “there’s nothing wrong with being unable to hear”. If there is anything you’d be able to do if your disability didn’t exist that you can’t do even with accommodations, that isn’t true—and there basically always is.
Human Economics 