Disability Rhetoric

Summary:

“Unspeakable Conversations”, the first chapter of Disability Visibility, concerns the correspondences of its author (and attorney) Harriet McBryde Johnson and Australian philosopher Peter Singer. Over the course of the chapter, the two professionally debate ethics in infanticide, how truly “bad off” (page 21) someone with a disability can really be, and whether that ultimately puts their right to live in the balance through assisted suicide programs. Their debate began in 2001 at Charleston during Singer’s lecture “Rethinking Life and Death” (page 25), where Harriet represented a disability rights organization called Not Dead Yet, and challenged his views. The unofficial debate continued over email until their next meeting at Princeton in 2002, where Singer presented his lecture once more, arguing for a ‘humane’ infanticide of those who would be deemed a burden on society to let live, claiming that such individuals are not actually ‘people’ at all. Johnson writes on page 21 that according to Singer, qualifying as a person requires “Awareness of your own existence in time. The capacity to harbor preferences as to the future, including the preference for continuing to live.” How are such preferences even measured; how is this awareness detected? Unknown so far to science. Not to mention that millions of sentient people (for example those in a coma, nonverbal autistic people, or those with locked-in syndrome), would lose their right to life. This would, at birth, include the author, who could not speak for herself if an institution deemed it just to put an end to what they might see as a societal liability, as if some abled version of herself could exist as a theoretical alternative. As if she is incapable of a happy life from birth. And how are those left to live disabled lives supposed to feel? That they should not exist, that their joy is a glitch in a life that otherwise is just “bad off”? No.

Quote Bank:

“In the lecture hall that afternoon, Singer lays it all out. The ‘illogic’ of allowing abortion but not infanticide, of allowing withdrawal of life support but not active killing. Applying the basic assumptions of preference utilitarianism, he spins out his bone-chilling argument for letting parents kill disabled babies and replace them with nondisabled babies who have a greater chance at happiness. It is all about allowing as many individuals as possible to fulfill as many of their preferences as possible.” – Page 27

“Yes, I am shaking, furious, enraged—but it’s for the big room, two hundred of my fellow Charlestonians who have listened with polite interest, when in decency they should have run him out of town on a rail.” – Page 28

“I’m engaged for a day of discussion, not a picket line. It is not in my power to marginalize Singer at Princeton; nothing would be accomplished by displays of personal disrespect.” – Page 31

Reflection:

I greatly enjoyed the way that Johnson brought bold professionalism to a tired debate, and recentered the marginalized voices that Singer’s rhetoric directly insults and harms. To the reader, please take my reading of this chapter with a grain of salt, because I admire Johnson’s cause, and stand by her efforts to disrupt dominant ableist rhetoric at the heart of where it lives (academic institutions being one of these spaces). 

What I dislike is Johnson’s seeming gratification in confronting Peter Singer. She appears somewhat pressed to “win”, and while I understand she is essentially arguing for her right to exist, I feel that her agenda in doing so precedes her thinking somewhat. Take for example this quote from page 36: “Singer joins the discussion until he elicits a comment from me that he can characterize as racist. He scores a point, but that’s all right. I’ve never claimed to be free of prejudice, just struggling with it.” I completely understand that erasing prejudice is a process, but the issue with making racially offensive comments is not that they ‘score points’ for the opposing side of a tangentially related argument. So, I think an additional sentence of reflection from the author is needed here, at least. Some instance of connection between Singer’s misunderstanding of disability and her alleged mischaracterization that could humanize the discussion a little. Obviously, if Singer doesn’t understand how a child with a mobility impairment might have fun at the beach, he needs some education! That said it all for me. And while yes, it’s a problem that he takes up media space with his rhetoric, maybe he shouldn’t be referred to as “the Evil One” (page 26) in public print; it just seems immature and delegitimizes professional discussion. I saw similar disregard in the following quote from page 40: “when a student asks me a question […] The words are all familiar, but they’re strung together in a way so meaningless that I can’t even retain them—it’s like a long sentence in Tagalog.” So, Tagalog is analogous to meaningless? I found this to be an extremely poor choice of language. I live with a Vietnamese speaker, and it’s not uncommon that my family members will mock his conversations with his mom as gibberish, so to me the Tagalog comment was honestly trashy.

One other example of this behavior that I find problematic and somewhat ironic is on page 27, as Johnson writes: “As an atheist, I object to [Singer] using religious terms (‘the doctrine of the sanctity of human life’) to characterize his critics”, already demonstrating an intolerance for religious beliefs on page 25 “In fact, no god put anyone anywhere for any reason, if you want to know”, but simultaneously bemoaning the fact that “they don’t want to know. They think they know everything there is to know, just by looking at me. That’s how stereotypes work. They don’t know that they’re confused[…]” later on that same page. I wish that Johnson would be as compassionate towards others’ ‘struggle’ against prejudice as she is to herself, because I found her absolute assertion that God is not real, next to a call for open-mindedness, to be hypocritical. And I’m an atheist, too. But I admire more than anything her bold stand for the recognition of damaging and dominant cultural rhetoric, and found the chapter to be well-paced and impactful.