Arguments
Here, for instance. A moral issue (an issue because some people have made it an issue, though that wasn’t inevitable): a moral issue being discussed with arguments and reasons rather than with invocation of a deity or of Christian/Muslim/Hindu morality.
Last week British scientists announced a revolutionary screening process for inherited diseases in embryos. It will be quicker and more accurate than the existing method and it will detect thousands more genetic defects than previously possible…Those who don’t know about it can perhaps hardly imagine the drawn out suffering of Huntington’s disease or Duchenne muscular dystrophy or Prader-Willi syndrome or Fragile X, both for the people affected and for their families, until death puts an end to it…It will be easier and better in every way to get rid of a tiny collection of cells. This is indeed playing God, as all the usual campaigners were quick to point out last week. But…whatever we may think about playing God and defying nature, we are doing it already and even though we don’t necessarily recognise it, we approve of it…There will always be absolutists, who claim the right to life for even the most infinitesimal scrap of tissue. But there are others who oppose screening on what seem to me to be even more irrational grounds.
Which she proceeds to counter with arguments. Those arguments will fail to convince many – or perhaps all – of the people who oppose screening on irrational grounds. That’s how these things go.
Simone Aspis of the British Council of Disabled People said last week that she was opposed in principle to such screening on the grounds that it sent the signal that being born disabled was a bad thing…It sent a message, she said, particularly to young people with disabilities, that their lives were worth less than everyone else’s. This seems to me to confuse a disability with a person with a disability. (This is a confusion that people with disabilities normally resent, understandably.) To say that a disability is undesirable in itself is not to say that a person with that disability is undesirable in herself, or her life worth less than someone else’s. The disability is not the person. It is to say that her life would be better without that disability.
That seems right to me, but it seems a safe bet that it won’t alter the conviction of Simone Aspis. That’s unfortunate; if people who oppose the screening succeed in blocking it, that’s very unfortunate indeed, as it was (in my view) unfortunate that the assisted suicide bill got postponed again in the House of Lords a few weeks ago. But pointing to god wouldn’t help. All the theists would simply say that their god supported their view and not the other one. That’s how these things go.
The “Disability” lobby, hugging their disabilty to them selves – are sickening.
A few months back, one of them decried possible advances in microelectronics and biotech that would enable permanently-blind people to have partial (dim) sight – with the possibility of ongoing improvements as the technology gets better.
I mean “we PREFER to be blind” ?????
Uh?
Don’t ever underestimate the power of getting a living wage, G. What would lobbyists do if their issues were dealt with? The job centres wouldn’t be able to cope.
While I agree that it’s ridiculous to insist that this kind of screening is discriminating against the disabled, I don’t see how the following statement is supposed to convince anyone:
“To say that a disability is undesirable in itself is not to say that a person with that disability is undesirable in herself, or her life worth less than someone else’s. The disability is not the person. It is to say that her life would be better without that disability.”
I mean, the point of the screening is to remove the *fetus*, not merely the disability, is it? It is supposed to prevent a disabled person from ever coming into *being*, not simply to prevent that person from coming into being disabled, right?
That being said, I do agree that opposing the screening on the basis that it is discriminating against people with the said disability is plain nuts. Is promoting birth control among poor people tantamount to saying that people, who are already alive and poor, are worth less than others? Is asking HIV positive people not to reproduce the same as saying that people who were born with AIDS don’t deserve to live?
In regard to G Tingey’s comment, as someone with a non-genetic visual condition that limits my activities, I would seriously resent that some demented campaigner who didn’t like having their special status taken from them by technology screwed up my chances of a ‘normal’ life.
Fuck them.
“I mean, the point of the screening is to remove the *fetus*, not merely the disability, is it? It is supposed to prevent a disabled person from ever coming into *being*, not simply to prevent that person from coming into being disabled, right?”
Well…yes and no. Because there is no person to come or not come into being until it has come into being, so if it’s prevented from doing so, there is no disabled person who has been prevented from coming into being. That’s what makes the whole argument so distastefully silly. If people, for instance, receive genetic information that they will inevitably have a severely disabled child if they conceive and decide as a result not to conceive, they haven’t wronged the children they would have conceived if they had in fact conceived, because those children do not exist and never have existed. Nobody owes it to existing disabled people to have lots more disabled children by way of validating their existence.
I recoil whenever I hear the argument “it sends a signal”. It allows you to disregard minor matters like facts, argument and ethics and insist, for example, that laws against homosexual acts are a good thing because changing them would “send the wrong message”. Ditto for needle exchange, embryo screening, drug reform etc etc. A lay down misere for those who want their views to prevail over others.
[since it’s apparently supposed to be nicer to say hearing impaired]
I suspect that if you have to talk with your hands, you value brevity. Presumably (help me out here, Wittgenstein) it would be the work of a minute for those deaf people who disliked the word “deaf” to declare that the sign for “deaf” now meant “hearing impaired”.
Here’s a question that never fails to start a really nasty flamewar; how about a common genetically transmitted condition that is associated with low IQs, early death in males and significant social stigma? I refer of course to having black skin. If someone invented a treatment which would allow black people to have white children, would everyone be completely OK with its widespread use? Even more importantly, if some black people thought that this treatment was disgusting and ought to be banned, would we say that they were *completely irrational* for doing so, and that they were preventing normal families from having a child who would have a much better chance in life than their parents?
(Of course, “being black” isn’t a disability and black people are only different from white people in a minor cosmetic sense that doesn’t make a difference. But the same is true of birthmarks and cleft palates, and foetuses are certainly aborted because of that. The disability rights lobby deserve to be taken a lot more seriously than they are, because on their central point that a lot of the bad things about being disabled have social rather than physical causes, they are right.)
That cleft palate and birthmark thing is just a straw man used by the anti-abortion lobby to be emotive. That whole argument just stinks.
If the disability rights lobby want to be taken seriously, then they should stick to the social campaigning and not make themselves look like nutjobs with issues like this.
Foetuses are aborted because of birthmarks? On what planet?
And cleft palates are emphatically not examples of ‘a minor cosmetic sense that doesn’t make a difference’.
‘because on their central point that a lot of the bad things about being disabled have social rather than physical causes, they are right.’
But that’s a separate issue.
The whole argument that “you cannot play God” is ridiculous; it is human nature to play God. If there was ever any sense to the notion that we are made in God’s image, it is this, that we are creators who change the rules to suit us. We made tools to give us claws sharper than any cat, hides warmer than any bear, wings that could let us fly faster and higher than any bird. We changed the landscape and bred plants and animals to be exactly what we wanted them to be, and we have been doing this for thousands of years. Think about it; the average person in our society plays God half a dozen times before breakfast; this is what it is to be human, and if we don’t do it, we die. The question is not whether we should play God, but how to play God well.
OB has evidently read a different article from the one i read. Ms Marin does not ‘counter with arguments’ objections to genetic screening: she just asserts that to ‘claim right to life’ for ‘infinitesimal scrap of tissue’ is ‘absolutist’ (she doesn’t say what an ‘absolutist’ is but it’s obviously bad). This is not an argument but an ad hominem smear (‘if you oppose me you must be an “absolutist”‘ – perhaps a snake handler or mad mullah?).
Regarding comments on the disability lobby: of course it is better not to have a disability than to have one. But for the individuals in question this is not the available option.
The distinction between ‘disabled person’ and ‘disability’ is a bit specious, given that the purpose of the screening is to prevent disabled people from being born.
OB is right to say that Ms Marin will not convince those who disagree with her on irrational grounds. What about those who disagree on rational grounds?
mike T
“OB has evidently read a different article from the one i read. Ms Marin does not ‘counter with arguments’ objections to genetic screening: she just asserts that to ‘claim right to life’ for ‘infinitesimal scrap of tissue’ is ‘absolutist’ (she doesn’t say what an ‘absolutist’ is but it’s obviously bad).”
Yes, apparently I did read a different article from the one you did, because I read more than one sentence of it. Marin doesn’t “just” assert “that to ‘claim right to life’ for ‘infinitesimal scrap of tissue’ is ‘absolutist'”, she says much more than that, including the passage I quoted, which is indeed an argument.
“Regarding comments on the disability lobby: of course it is better not to have a disability than to have one. But for the individuals in question this is not the available option.”
No of course it’s not, but what does that have to do with anything? What does genetic testing on future embryos have to do with the options ‘the individuals in question’ have?
“The distinction between ‘disabled person’ and ‘disability’ is a bit specious, given that the purpose of the screening is to prevent disabled people from being born.”
No, I don’t think so. I think that’s a tendentious way of putting it – one that gives the impression that there are some disabled people out there, waiting to be born. That’s the (specious) thought that Aspis is playing on. But there are no disabled people out there waiting to be born. The purpose of the screening is to prevent the birth of people who will have disabilities; it is not to prevent the birth of existing disabled people.
‘What about those who disagree on rational grounds?’
For them I think her arguments are more convincing. I daresay you guessed that.
No Mike T read the whole article too.
OB is right to say that Marin presents an argument against the claims of the disability lobby. But on the general question of the moral status of an embryo she assumes all rational people will agree with her and dismisses alternative views as ‘absolutist’. While Marin’s view may or may not be right, I can’t see any argument for it.
I think OB’s distinction between ‘preventing the birth of people who will have disabilities’ and ‘preventing the birth of existing disabled people’ is no more or less tendentious that what I said.
True. She does assume that at least most rational people will agree with her that a few cells in a dish have no moral status.
“I think OB’s distinction between ‘preventing the birth of people who will have disabilities’ and ‘preventing the birth of existing disabled people’ is no more or less tendentious that what I said.”
Yes but I didn’t leave it at that; I gave a reason for why I thought so, which you haven’t addressed.
What i’m saying is: an assumption is not an argument.
OB’s point regarding ‘existing disabled people’ is well made.
“True. She does assume that at least most rational people will agree with her that a few cells in a dish have no moral status.”
Which is not a rational argument. It is identical to saying something like, ‘Anyone with an IQ over 80 would know that invading Iraq was a bad thing,’ or ‘Any decent person would believe in God.’
Hardly statements to be applauded, even if we happen to agree, for example, that a few cells in a dish have no moral status or that all decent people are theists.
I didn’t say it was a rational argument. It was merely a statement. And whatever it is, it’s certainly not “identical” to other statements that are different.
I also didn’t say it was a statement to be applauded.
Now, one could analyze the statement further. “She does assume that at least most rational people will agree with her that a few cells in a dish have no moral status.”
Note that it’s a statement about what Marin assumes, not whether or not she is right to assume it.
But I’ll translate it, or expand it, into a different statement. I think the notion that a few cells in a dish have a moral status is not a rational notion.
That is what I think, actually. I think it’s a moral intuition rather than a rational notion. I think it’s mistaken. But I also think it’s understandable. I think it’s also highly regrettable if it leads on to the notion that it must not be disposed of even if it will develop into a human being with a terrible painful lethal disability; but I still think it’s understandable. Sentimental, but understandable.
‘The notion that a few cells in a dish have a moral status is not a rational notion’ is a different kind of statement from, ‘Rational people do not believe a few cells have a moral status.’
Rational people can hold irrational notions. Our definition of ‘rational person’ is not restricted to people who are 100 per cent rational – if it were, there would be no rational people.
For clarification of the ‘identical’ comment, the statements are identical in form, just like x + y = z is identical in form to a + b = c.
And you are correct – you did not say that it was to be applauded.
“‘The notion that a few cells in a dish have a moral status is not a rational notion’ is a different kind of statement from, ‘Rational people do not believe a few cells have a moral status.'”
I know that, that’s why I said I was translating it or expanding it into a different statement.
That clarification is not a clarification but a correction. If you meant identical in form, you should have said that. You used hyperbole (kind of like saying ‘my head literally exploded’) and said something inaccurate.
True, about rational people, but then again there’s a limit; I’m claiming that thinking a few cells in a dish have the moral status of people is over the limit.