“Bioethics is much too important to be left to bioethicists.”  So sayeth Michael Bérubé.  Accurately.  And here’s why:  because they argue in bigoted tautologies.  That’s right:  loathsome and intellectually empty.

Digression/throat clearing:  I love reading anything by Michael Bérubé.*  Anything.  I would read the phonebook cover to cover if he wrote it.  One of the beauties of reading his writing is you don’t have to be an expert in cultural studies or criticism to get what he’s talking about (even if not all the references) and to enjoy his attitude of critical good humor.   Armed only with my vintage 1983 BA in linguistics and philosophy, however, the prospect of trying to respond to one of his posts has always felt like trying to jump on a merry-go-round** that’s going by very fast.

I have neither the time nor the skills to master the literature and vocabulary necessary to contribute a coherent comment.  But now I have my own damn blog, where I can say whatever I want without feeling too self-conscious that I’m interrupting a learned conversation.  Here goes.

This post responds to two Bérubé posts, one on Crooked Timber; the other on a site called “On the Human.”

Without attempting to summarize either the posts or the materials he’s criticizing, I’ll jump onto the carousel at the point I’d like to discuss:  the concept of “flourishing.”  Bérubé tees off of a book by Jonathan Glover (Choosing Children: Genes, Disability, and Design), which he is careful to credit with some level of disability consciousness:  

Choosing to have a child without certain disabilities need not come from any idea that disabled people are inferior.  Nor does it entail that the world, or the gene pool, should be cleansed of disabled people”  Id. at 28 (as we cite in the law biz).

But Glover also says

“I think that, other things being equal, it is good if the incidence of disabilities is reduced by parental choices to opt for potentially more flourishing children.”  Id. at 35.

Bérubé’s post then outlines a number of thought experiments designed to … do what I’m not sure.  For example:  you have to choose between two tests, one that detects and cures a disability in utero vs. one that detects the likelihood of disability pre-conception, so the parents can avoid conceiving a disabled child.  I think, in retrospect, that shit like this was why my phil minor focused on philosophy of mathematics.  Rather than discussing who should or shouldn’t be born, we discussed what it meant, in an absolute sense, to measure something.  This has come in freakishly handy in my legal career.  (ADAAG in-joke.  Sorry.)

Anyway, here’s another doozy — Glover quoting Frances Kamm who:

discusses a hypothetical case … of a woman who knows that, if she conceives now, her child will have a life worth living but will be mildly retarded. The woman also knows that, if she waits, she will be able to have a normal child. Frances Kamm accepts that, having a life worth living, the child with mild retardation will not be harmed by being created. But she thinks the woman will still have done wrong by not waiting. … She says “even if she could produce no child except a mildly retarded one, it might be better for her not to produce any” and that the woman “would do wrong to produce a defective child when she could have easily avoided it.”  Id. at 55.

Bérubé attacks these hypotheticals on the legitimate grounds that they make no sense.  “There is no scenario — I repeat, no scenario, none whatsoever — in which any woman knows that, if she foregoes conception now, she will have a normal child later on.”

Here’s where I jump into the middle of this discussion with what I really, truly hope is an obvious point that has been covered extensively in other literature that I’ve been too busy measuring toilets (in the absolute sense) to have read.  And that point is:

WTF*** DO YOU MEAN WHEN YOU SAY “FLOURISH”?

The question of what constitutes flourishing — and what parents do before, during, and after pregnancy to influence the flourishment of their child — is far far broader than whether the child has or does not have a disability.  That is, there are as many ways to flourish and not flourish as there are children, the vast majority of those ways (I would argue) uncorrelated with disability.

At the simplest, non-comparative AND MOST OBVIOUS level, there are multitudes of flourishing disabled people.  I’m tempted at this juncture to list a bunch of awesome pwds I know and know of and contrast them with a bunch of deeply non-flourishing non-disabled people I know and know of.  But that dignifies a question that does not deserve dignity.

OK so we’ve established that you can flourish with a disability.  But it’s also true that, in many cases, children (disabled and nondisabled) flourish in ways that parents (since that was the original thought experiment) can influence in greater or lesser degrees.  Do children with Down Syndrome, osteogenisis imperfecta, or cerebral palsy whose parents have inexplicably consented to give birth to them flourish more or less than children with parents who are:  drunk; abusive; divorced; helicoptery; rich; poor; strict; lax; human?

Can any child flourish in an abusive family?  How about one so coddling that the child never learns to fend for him or herself?  Can a gay child flourish in a homophobic family?  A curious child in a fundamentalist**** family?

I know, I know — the bioethicists would condemn parents who were alcoholic, abusive, homophobic, or fundamentalist.  BUT THEY WOULD NOT DENY THOSE PARENTS’ CHILDREN THE RIGHT TO EXIST.   They would not say to the homophobes or fundamentalists or overprotective parents:  hold on – your kid’s not going to flourish – don’t get pregnant!  It is bioethically wrong for you to have a child.  We can have whatever discussion we want about good and bad parenting; it’s only when a child might have a disability — with unknown effect on flourishment — that we talk about making sure the kid doesn’t even exist in the first place.

And here is where I’m glad I studied the unhip logical positivist philosophy that I did because what we have here, folks, is a simple problem of definition.  Bioethicists have defined “flourish” in a completely circular fashion.  “Flourishing” doesn’t mean “loving” or “loved” or “happy” or “curious” or even (not my definition, but maybe others’) “blessed” or “sacred.”   It means “physically and mentally typical in a way that bioethicists deem worthy of survival.”  Or it may in fact mean “physically typical with a high IQ” — that is, the sort of person that the average bioethicist would want his or her kid to be.

But the saddest thing of all is:  Bioethicists — or at least Glover — may already know this.  I’m not in fact pointing out something incisive or new.   Despite graciously (sort of) conceding that pwds are not “inferior,” Glover states, “in this book disability has been contrasted with human flourishing.”  Id. at 88.  That is, the entire discussion starts from a point of circularity.   And euphemism.  Instead of saying “parents shouldn’t have babies who are disabled,” which sounds sort of discriminatory, you say, “parents shouldn’t have babies who won’t flourish” and then, to address the fact that you really aren’t talking about, say, your colleague’s fucked up teenager or other mainstream, middle class, ways of not flourishing, you define “flourish” to mean “nondisabled.”

Here is my bioethics:

1. It is never OK to decide for someone else whether that person is flourishing, especially when

2. “flourishing” is defined based on a single, culturally-specific set of values, that excludes disability a priori, and especially when

3. the definition determines who gets to be born.

And here is the list of hard questions I’m ignoring:

1.  When is it OK to cure disability?

2. Is is ever OK to withhold medical treatment without consent, for example, when death is imminent?  (Even I am willing to define “dead” as “not flourishing.”)

3.  And what about war?  And that goddamned trolley?

************

* The only thing about Bérubé that pisses me off — and it *really* pisses me off — is that he stopped blogging.  He used to write at www.michaelberube.com, and if you check out some of his archives, you’ll see what I mean.  I’m guessing that writing 10,000 words a day on top of his professoring duties — not to mention husbanding, dadding, hockeying, lecturing, administering, and apparently wet-vaccing the basement every week or so — got to be a bit overwhelming, but couldn’t he just have cut back to 9,999 or so?  Or even 1,000?  Per week?  They’d still be the most enlightening and entertaining words you’d read all week.

** Why merry-go-round and not train.  I’m not sure, and it’s sort of bugging me.

*** That’s another reason, btw, to blog rather than write journal articles.  Besides the fact that it’s quicker, easier, and intellectually lazier, there is nfw they’d let me write “wtf” in a journal article, however appropriate it was — as it is here — to the point I’m making.

**** I’m going to define my own terms here.  By “fundamentalist” I mean any family that adheres to a single orthodoxy of thought and punishes or ostracizes the child for exploring or adopting other views.