“Unspeakable Conversations” by Harriet McBryde Johnson
Summary:
This piece is about Harriet McBryde Johnson, who was an American author, attorney, and disability rights activist. She details a particular struggle with a well-known Australian moral philosopher Peter Albert David Singer, who is currently the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. Despite protests from Johnson’s activist peers, she decided to debate with Singer multiple times in public forums and maintain respectful contact with him through email. As a strong proponent for genocide, Singer exhibits a great threat to the disabled community because of his large platform, status, and speaking skills. Throughout the piece, Johnson remarks on how kind and respectful he is to her despite his belief that she should have been killed as an infant so as to not burden her parents. Johnson grapples with the fact that people can hold incredibly dehumanizing and dangerous beliefs and still be pleasant people to be around. She also grapples with the issue of whether she should engage with a man like singer in any way, because speaking with him could give the sense to the public that she is legitimizing his standpoint as one that is worthy of consideration. During her experience of debating with Singer and maintaining a respectful professional relationship she highlighted many various accessibility obstacles, showing that much of our culture’s infrastructure agrees with Singer’s ideas.
Quotes:
-“He insists he doesn’t want to kill me. He simply thinks it would have been better, all things considered, to have given my parents the option of killing the baby I once was….” (Wong, 3).
-“We shouldn’t offer assistance with suicide until we all have the assistance we need to get out of bed in the morning and live a good life” (Wong, 20-21).
“If I decline, Singer can make some hay: ‘I offered them a platform, but they refused rational discussion” (Wong, 11).
Reflection/Response:
Something I really appreciated about this piece was how Johnson expressed some of her major counterpoints to Singer’s ideas, specifically the one about assisted suicide. Singer believes that disabled and terminally ill people should be able to access assisted suicide, and doesn’t understand why she disagrees, because isn’t disability activism about providing more choices and access to disabled people. However, she counters that idea by saying that if we fixed the accessibility problems in the world, many disabled people would not want to commit suicide because then they would be able to function the way the want to in our culture. This point really struck me, because I had been on the fence about assisted suicide and now I’m unequivocally against it. This piece really made me think about how we define good and evil in the world, because as shown with Singer, evil people usually believe they are doing good in the world. It also made me think about how our culture so heavily focuses on social norms of respect and kindness to the point where Johnson was never truly able to express her hatred of him for fear of delegitimatizing herself as a professional, intellectual speaker.