Thread by @shengokai

My thread on the Singer paper has apparently upset some folks with my characterization of its conclusions and how I associated it with a larger trend of using academic freedom to defend bigotry and marginalization.

I'd like to begin my response with the following:

Having said that, I'm actually going to respond seriously.

I will not be tagging some folks I'm referencing in this thread because they, and their work, do not deserve to be collateral damage in whatever twitter shitstorm emerges from the "partisan language" in this response.

That said, many of the responses are concerned about how the thread "shuts down inquiry" or uses the language of religion to essentially do what Singer and company predicted would be done in their section on "partisan language" and "polarization." This is not a problem for me.

That said, the circulation of research about disabled folks, including the use of disability as a football in bioethics thought experiments, without talking with disabled folks, maintains the construction of disability as a problem to be solved.

Disabled scholars, and a few bioethicists, have made clear in their work on the subject. For example, Shelley Tremain has pointed this out in several of her books on philosophy and disability, the ways that philosophy problematically constructs disability as a problem.

In fact, I would suggest that those pushing back against my concern about the exclusion of disabled philosophers and philosophy from mainstream discourse have a look at Dialogues on Disability, which I've linked below.

biopoliticalphilosophy.com/dialogues-on-d…

Now, where the "stifling of debate" and the "silencing of reasoned inquiry" is concerned, I think this is a bullshit complaint. It is bullshit because the paper sets forth the terms of "reasonable debate" in ways that essentially problematize push back against its claims.

By locating scholarship on disability and by disabled scholars as "activism," by presenting scholarship that makes clear the eugenicist nature of these conversations as "polarization," the paper seeks to undercut the authority of critics in advance of criticism.

That is, the paper positions critics as operating not in the mode of good faith inquiry, but inline with the much maligned agendas of social justice, which it presents as inimical to reasoned inquiry. Still further, it presumed that the end of such criticism is silencing.

This is a mischaracterization of the aims of disabled scholars. Moreover, this mischaracterization ignores the ways that disabled scholars have tried to have "reasoned debate" only to be shut down or told that our concerns are not germaine to the conversation.

In such a situation, the response predicted by folks like Frerie and other scholars of liberation is the exercise of force to check the power of the oppressor so that the situation of oppression can be resolved. This is how I would characterize the current responses.

We're not interested in shutting down debate, we're interested in forcing bioethics to be responsible to the society that it is anchored in. By responsibility, we mean that bioethics need to think about how the work will be taken up and circulated, and what effect it would have.

Further, there are scholars of disability who have done excellent work on what the paper calls "enhancement." Melinda Hall's text on enhancement is the first thing I recommend to students who are interested in the bioethics of enhancement.

Hall's text is worth noting here as it demonstrates how these conversations can be had without rancor and without maintaining structures that reduce disability, and disabled persons, to a problem to be solved. This is something missing from the "eugenics" paper.

Additionally, Sami Schalk's work on race and disability is another entry point into the conversation that neither shuts down debate, nor reproduces the "disability as problem" narrative of contemporary discourse. It further introduces the element of race into the conversation.

Damien Williams, Os Keys, Ashley Shew, Rua Williams, and many other folks have also produced stellar texts on the intersections of disability, technology, and society, which could inform the "reasoned debate" the authors of the paper are looking for, if they just did the reading.

Having said all of that, I want to emphasize a point made by Frerie: any check on the power of the oppressor to oppress feels like oppression by the oppressor. The parallel to academia here should be clear, but allow me to spell it out in clearer terms.

What disabled scholars, activists, and philosophers are asking for is a more careful consideration of bioethics' responsibility to society and how it is having these conversations about "eugenics," "enhancement," or whatever euphemism you care to use.

Asking for this consideration of responsibility has been framed as "limiting debate" or "stifling inquiry," which is experienced as mode of oppression or contravention of academic freedom. Detractors seem to assume that any concern about the effects of scholarship is censorship.

Put simply, when you've had the freedom to run roughshod over the field without concern for the social consequences of your scholarship, any call for social responsibility and consideration of the effects of your scholarship feels like oppression.

Let me repeat: when you've had the unchecked freedom to publish whatever you want, regardless of the effects on marginalized groups, any call for responsibility and consideration of those effects feels like oppression.

Hence, the claim that I am stifling debate.

The only way out of this that I can see is to transform the situation of oppression (academia) such that inquiry happens in dialogue, as recommended by Dewey, Frerie, and other "activist" scholars. However, this transformation would require trusting disabled folks' experience.

Point of fact, the eugenics papers' framing of scholars of disability, their critiques, and the lone text on disability and eugenics they cite indicates a profound lack of trust in the experience of disabled folks specifically, and critiques of eugenics generally.

In such a situation, no transformation can take place, and so we are left with Frerie's statement that force must be used to check the power of the oppressed, to bring them to the table. Call it critique, "cancel culture," or "stifling debate," but this is the recourse we have.

And, it is a recourse made necessary by the very people complaining about the "stifling of debate." They created an untenable situation which has made possible the very responses they're complaining about. If the situation weren't so dire, I would find the irony amusing.

Unfortunately, the situation is that dire, and if the "stifling of debate" is what is necessary to bring people to the table to have a genuine dialogue about our concerns, then so be it. Many of us making this critique have been here before, we know the dance.

And many of us are resolved to fight it out to ACTUALLY accomplish the purported aims of inquiry articulated by the paper, and not just in a mode that maintains inequality.

So there you have it.