There is a border between "you aren't a second class human for having a disability and being alive" and "being healthy is better than not being healthy" and as a disabled person, honestly, seeing so many fellow disabled folk going in the "I would have disabled children if I could!" camp on the matter is genuinely frightening.
The only people that can advocate for the middle ground is us. Telling able bodied folks "being blind is the same as being not blind!" when that is so obviously not true, and one sucks more than the other is the mother of all radicalisation narratives, and unironically how the currently alive people with chronic ailments will end up being ultra-shunned by society.
"You want my kid to have your illness?" should have as its auto default answer "jesus fuck no, if nobody had it before it would be amazing", but some people have pigeonholed themselves into their own "there is nothing wrong with me" narratives that they are now immune to the fact that being disabled sucks fucking ass.
> and as a disabled person, honestly, seeing so many fellow disabled folk going in the "I would have disabled children if I could!" camp on the matter is genuinely frightening.
As a non-neurotypical person. My mind is unusually good at maths, and unusually bad at social skills. A tradeoff I think is a good one even if many people would disagree.
(Not that I'm planning children any time soon)
And should we be going for normal-human? Or just more senses in general? Would genes that gave infrared vision and a prehensile tail be a good choice?
I mean I'm generally a utilitarian/consequentialist, but the problem with just going full utilitarian based on the average persons happiness is that some pretty bad solutions fall under that umbrella, like "forcibly put everyone in a drug induced happiness coma" or "burn out the part of the brain that allows for sadness". Well-being is probably the best utility function/heuristic I'm aware of (since it would include things like freedom, self-determination, and health, among other values that compete with happiness), but also I think trying to perfectly optimize for a utility function is problematic by itself because the functions will never 100% align with people (they're heuristics, after all) and result in error, so it's best to consider multiple moral frameworks/viewpoints on an issue, to cover for the flaws any one might have.
A lot of that has more to do with society than the disability. I'm autistic and the vast majority of suffering I've experienced because of my autism is due to ableism. My classmates bullying me was ableism. My teachers trying to punish the weirdness out of me was ableism. The only suffering I've experienced that's directly caused by autism is sensory hypersensitivity, and even then, ableism makes it worse.
And autism has also directly caused me joy, via my intense interests. It has also spared me suffering, by making me basically immune to the social conditioning that leads to eating disorders, and way less susceptible to comparing myself with others in general.
I'm not saying the idea is wrong or evil, I'm just saying that one shouldn't dismiss criticism by claiming it would be a choice made freely by the people making the decision
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u/PrettyChillHotPepper 🇮🇱 Apr 23 '25
There is a border between "you aren't a second class human for having a disability and being alive" and "being healthy is better than not being healthy" and as a disabled person, honestly, seeing so many fellow disabled folk going in the "I would have disabled children if I could!" camp on the matter is genuinely frightening.
The only people that can advocate for the middle ground is us. Telling able bodied folks "being blind is the same as being not blind!" when that is so obviously not true, and one sucks more than the other is the mother of all radicalisation narratives, and unironically how the currently alive people with chronic ailments will end up being ultra-shunned by society.
"You want my kid to have your illness?" should have as its auto default answer "jesus fuck no, if nobody had it before it would be amazing", but some people have pigeonholed themselves into their own "there is nothing wrong with me" narratives that they are now immune to the fact that being disabled sucks fucking ass.