I think we’re not going to agree, because you refer to any baby as being the same baby, while I don’t.
Basically, the parents pick a ball from a big bag. Some balls are red (defective) and some are green (not defective). They have the choice between two bags, one with few red balls, one with many red balls.
You contend that any ball drawn is “the ball” and that by choosing the second bag, you gave “the ball” a higher risk of being red. I contend that each ball is a different one, and that their likehood of being red is either 100% or 0%, regardless of whether it’s picked or not.
You contend that choosing a bag full of red balls is the same as choosing a bag full of green balls and then painting the one you picked red. I disagree with that view. Especially since, contrarily to balls with only one ditinctive feature, their coulour, babies come with many distinctive traits, besides being deaf or not.
Basically, you perceive “the baby” as a concept that can be realized by any baby, while I perceive each potential baby as a different entity, determined by his genetic make-up. So, in your view you’re “harming” this “conceptual baby” by picking a defective actual baby rather than a fit one to fill the role, while I think you just picked a completely different baby and took it as it was, with no harm involved.
I think your position is the same as saying that I could have been blonde-haired. I don’t have have blond hair, and there’s no way I could have. I couldn’t be me and have blond hair. The only way for my parents to have a blond haired kid would have been for me not to be born. Even if not being blond was a problem, I couldn’t tell my parents “why didn’t you make sure I would be blond?” because it’s not existing option. The only thing I could tell would be : “Not being blond is so awful that I’d rather not be born”. Then only I could make a reproach to my parents.
It’s basically the same with a deaf kid. He can’t say to his parents “You harmed me by making sure you’d have a deaf kid” except if he thinks he’d rather not be alive. The options from his point of view are “to be or not to be” not “being deaf or not being deaf”.
Fair enough, but I’m still trying to pin this down.
Do you see nothing wrong with, for instance, a mother deliberately trying to find an HIV positive male to breed with because from the child’s point of view, as you see it, the choices are to be born with HIV or not to exist at all?
In France, in a case of medical malpractice that resulted in a hospital failing to tell a pregnant woman that her child could (or would, I’m not sure anymore) be seriously disabled, hence preventing her from choosing to abort, the court had to decide whether the hospital would be liable not only to the mother (who ended up with a disabled baby instead of no baby at all) but also to the child himself. In other word, it had to decide whether the kid should be indemnized for being born.
And, likewise, would you see any problem if the mother had gone to a sperm bank and they neglected to inform her that the donor had any number of heritable diseases/disabilities?
There’s a difference between “seeing no wrong” and “stating that the kid wasn’t harmed”. I already mentionned that I wasn’t making a moral statement about the decision the woman we’re talking about made, I only disputed arguments refring to the baby being “harmed” or “maimed”.
For what it’s worth, I don’t like much the concept of deliberatly breeding deaf children.
And as an aside, nowadays, kids born from HIV positive parents are rarely born infected themselves. A couple of friend, both HIV+, made the choice to have a kid nevertheless (apparently, the risk of the kid being contaminated was roughly 2%, with proper care), and that’s too is a thorny moral issue.
Per claisobar, we basically are, in some sense. You don’t want people to choose to have deaf babies, if they have the choice. But deafness/not deafness is not the only choice that parents have, let alone WILL soon have, in picking their baby’s genetic makeup.
I’m probably the wrong one to ask on this subject, because I’m ambivalent to the existence of the ADA in some respects but not in others, and so on. I don’t think arguing whether or not something is a “disability” has much merit as does whether certain laws should be in place to prevent discrimination and so forth for the good of all society.
The reality is, there is no ideal “normal” human. We live in a society of people with all sorts of different physical and mental capacities, and those differences are only going to increase as time goes on. The question is how to make a functioning society out of that. That’s a pragmatic question for me.
Then perhaps I’m not being clear enough. When I lecture you about essentialism, it’s because you seem to be under the neo-Platonic idea that there is some fundamental difference of “essence” between human beings and dogs and hence it is silly to consider them in the same context of arguments. In my mind, there is no such thing as an essence, and humans and dogs are both just feeling beings with different characteristics and capacities. On several levels, we can say that a dog’s capacities are far below that of a person’s: JUST as we can say the same about the lack of hearing for a deaf person. If is follows that we should not deliberately create beings that lack capacities that “normal” humans, then it seems EXTRA absurd to create beings who are even LESS endowed with so many important capacities.
Of course, if our metric is happiness, then I’ve seen nothing that can suggest that you can’t be happy as a) a dog, b) a deaf person, or c) a hearing person. All these sorts of beings can have happy, fulfilled lives in the right circumstances.
I don’t see any difference between the two, aside from a matter of direction. One parent might fail to give her developing fetus enough oxygen to allow its brain to develop “properly” thus leading to a “defective” baby. Your parents might have failed to give you enough genetic enhancement drugs like my parents did, thus leading to a defective genius.
But deaf people are, as defined by you, people with birth defects. So generalizing this case (the parents shouldn’t have a deaf baby if they can help it), would imply that there should be no deaf babies: we should strive to prevent them. And that, my friend, IS eugenics, plain and simple. Is that really so off base from what you’ve been arguing? Or were you saying that only THIS couple should not have a deaf baby, and other couples should be able to if they choose?
Postmodern world? Eh?
All I’m asking is that judgement calls be admitted as what they are: judgement calls.
The idea of defect only exists in relation to some value judgement about what should be. Can’t you admit that? I’ve had the same arguments with fundamentalists that are dead-set on the idea that ear peircing is a mutilation of the human body that should not be envisioned because that’s not what they think human bodies should be like, idealy.
Now, if I were saying that all value judgements were of equal worth, then I would be guilty of relatavism. But I’m not saying that: I’m just asking that you not sneak value judgements in the back door without owning up to them and have to defend them.
Again, as clairo pointed out, that’s just not how I see it. You see children as interchangeable. If you don’t like the characteristics of this one, you can always get a better one. But I see each possible being as a different choice, and I don’t see a whole lot of justification for saying that capacity alone can judge whether they should exist or not.
The deaf child these parents will have will not exist if they bring into being a different child that has hearing.
Fair enough. Can you clarify the issue of your not liking deliberately breeding for birth defects? Do you view it as having a moral dimension at all, or not?
Would it change for other birth defects/diseases that parents tried to give to their children?
I’m trying to create an effective vocabulary for discussion, and it is obviously somewhat difficult.
Yes, sorry : the kid was awarded dammages too. Which has been a fairly controversial ruling, at least amongst people who paid any interest in the issue.
I personnally disagree with this ruling.
I would think the same : the mother should be indemnized, the child shouldn’t.
I’m confused a bit here. Is the hypothetical (let’s just go with hypothetical, for the moment) situation in the OP really “deliberately causing a disability” or is it along the lines of “bringing someone into existense who otherwise would not have been born?”
Yes, it has a moral dimension. Actually, it’s entirely a moral issue, and that’s why I can’t clarify my position. Like ** Apos **, when I ponder this problem, I see a thorny moral maze, and whatever intellectual justification I could try to come by raise new problems, and require drawing arbitrary lines in the sand.
It doesn’t disturb me much, though, because I came to accept that my position on essentially all moral issues is ultimately based on my “gut feelings”, the intellectual arguments I use are essentially post-hoc justifications for what I feel rather than the contrary, and their effectiveness mostly rely on other people accepting at least some of my arbitrary premises as valid.
It just happens that on some issues I put some thought in, I’m more able to propose a self-consistent model. In this case, I’m at this moment quite unable to decide where lines should be drawn and why. That’s why I didn’t really took a position, besides “I don’t like much the concept”.
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Would it change for other birth defects/diseases that parents tried to give to their children?
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Yes, most certainly. If the parents were freaks fond of body modifications, wanted to (and could) have a children awfully disfigured and stated that anyway, it wouldn’t be a problem in their community of freaks, I would have a huge issue with this. If they wanted a left-handed kid, I don’t think I would care much.
Generally speaking I don’t like much eugenics. Be it to breed geniuses, aryan-type people, deaf people…
I’ve never seen another Doper cited as an authority
But no, we’re still not. Deaf children would be permitted to exist just fine, and I wouldn’t advise aborting a pregnancy of that sort either. The question is only in terms of selecting a donor.
I can grok your paradigm, but I’d hoped that would help us set something of an objective metric.
Naw. But there certainly is a genetic basis for saying that something is a dog and not a human. And there is certainly a medical basis for saying if something is healthy or not.
Can we agree that there is a non-platonic gentic-based difference between a human and a dog? If not I’m afraid we’re coming from two very different woldviews with no real possibility of even getting our terms to mean the same thing.
Guess that’ll be another point of paradigms which cannot intersect.
Come now, let’s not act as if that’s some definition I made up.
I said that they shouldn’t try to have a deaf baby. And while I do believe that parents should attempt to minimize birth defects (in most circumstances) by doing things like not drinking I do not believe that it is necessary to take ‘extraordinary measures’, I would not say that a hetero deaf couple is under any obligation to use a sperm donor, for instance. There is a difference.
Yeepers.
I have never said that this couple should not have a deaf baby, but that they should not try to have a deaf baby.
No standards, nothing objective, no such thing as a birth defect even though it’s medically recognized. Seems rather postmodern to me.
I don’t believe that a metric which judges by all bodily systems working is a judgement call.
I can ‘admit’ that it be seen that way. But we can also look at the results of the human genome project to set a baseline which doesn’t require any religion or value judgement.
Aren’t you though? You’re saying that the ‘value judgement’ that ears which do not work for their evolved function are not a defect is equal to the value judgement that ears which do not work for their evolved function are a defect.
Am I wrong?
Not at all.
My point is that while in the potential child is in abstractionland, the parents had a choice. They chose, deliberately, to create a child with damaged hearing.
What is your view on other instances of that sort. If parents chose a donor who would maximize the chance of congenital heart problems in the child, would that be okay? After all, the child couldn’t have been born any other way, and who is going to make the value judgement that having a heart which works is less of a defect than having a heart which does not. Right?
Personally I believe it’s the latter, although the prospect of the former in pursuit of the latter has some people here wigging out. Hence, Apos’ “culling the herd” comment a few posts back, a prospect so insidious I’ll pass on comment for now.
clairobscur: Thanks for your comments. I somehow missed both your most recent post and Monty’s.
Well, what do you think?
I don’t see how the two are mutually exclusive.
“The parents deliberately caused a disability in their child and most likely would not have had a child had they not been able to cause that specific disability.”
I don’t see this, however, as being any different than parents who were dead set on causing any in a range of damage/birth defects/diseases in a child and wouldn’t have one unless they could cause it.
I don’t see how deliberately selecting a sperm donor in order to produce a child with birth defects is not causing birth defects in that child.
What’s your take?
Well, as I’m trying to pin this issue down, at what point does selectively picking a donor specifically for the chance of passing on a birth defect become “causing a birth defect”? Or is it always a case of simply having a disabled child or no child at all?
I realise I’ve rather missed the weekend’s worth of boats here, but in the case in question I believe the couple acted disgustingly. They went to a sperm bank, refused the sperm offered to them because it did not offer a sufficiently high probability of their child never hearing a beautiful piece of music clearly, sought out other sperm banks whose stock they again refused, and finally sought out a donor solely for his inability to hear clearly. As I said in the Pit thread, I wish the child all the best in seeking out a state-of-the-art cochlear implant when s/he is old enough to defy those selfish parents who deliberately increased the probability of impaired function.
Could they not have accepted the original sperm and been quiet around the resulting child?
This is like saying, “Askia and his wife wanted an African-American sperm donor for their child. But they refused the sperm offered them at the first bank because they did not have African-American genes. Finally they found sperm donors that maximized the chances of them having a child with African-American traits. Why couldn’t they accept the original sperm offered and given the resultant child a sunlamp?”
Is being deaf such an abomination no deaf child should ever be born again? Are people here protesting the actions of this couple because you feel that deafness is such an aberration that should not exist all? Do you feel deaf culture should not evolve, and that those deaf parents should not have the right to have children who are deaf like them? Do you think, ideally, all children MUST be born with five functioning senses, two arms, two legs, ten fingers, ten toes – no more, no less? Or that “more” is okay, but less than a hypothetical mimimum is unsavory?
FinnAgain. As long as you insist on coaching the terminology in language that cannot define deafness as anything other than a disability, “correct” terminology will remain elusive.
This is such an alien viewpoint to me that I can’t even begin to understand it. Senses are good things. Intelligence is a good thing. Sanity is a good thing. Able-bodiedness is a good thing. More sensory information means a clearer picture of the world. That doesn’t mean deaf people are bad or shouldn’t exist. It doesn’t mean I advocate pogroms to wipe out the deaf or anyone I find “unsavory.” Saying that hearing is better than deafness is not a value judgement, it is a fact. I’m nearsighted, legally blind without my contacts actually, but I don’t go around trumpeting how being nearsighted is just as good as being 20/20 and how anyone who would dare call it a problem is being short-sighted (no pun intended). Is there something special about deafness that makes it not a disability while blindness and other physical and mental inadequacies are not? Is it just that they have their own language (one which is NOT closed off to hearing people)?
I just don’t understand how you can think deaf people are not impaired in some way, that they aren’t disabled. This is extreme cultural relativism.
Also, why is nobody talking about the fact that these women are not giving their not-totally-deaf son a hearing aid? If it was a really nearsighted child being born to blind parents, would you support their right to not give their kid contacts or glasses so he can fit in better with blind culture? If it’s different, why?
