Wednesday, April 06, 2022

New Essay in Draft: Dehumanizing the Cognitively Disabled: Commentary on Smith's Making Monsters

by Eric Schwitzgebel and Amelia Green[1]

Since the essay is short, we post the entirely of it below. This is a draft. Comments, corrections, and suggestions welcome.

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“No one is doing better work on the psychology of dehumanization than David Livingstone Smith, and he brings to bear an impressive depth and breadth of knowledge in psychology, philosophy, history, and anthropology. Making Monsters is a landmark achievement which will frame all future work on the psychology of dehumanization.” So says Eric Schwitzgebel on the back cover of the book, and we stand by that assessment. Today we aim to extend Smith’s framework to cases of cognitive disability.

According to Smith, “we dehumanize others when we conceive of them as subhuman creatures” (p. 9). However, Smith argues, since it is rarely possible to entirely eradicate our inclination to see other members of our species as fully human, dehumanization typically involves having contradictory beliefs, or at least contradictory representations. On the one hand, the Nazi looks at the Jew, or the southern slaveowner looks at the Black slave, and they can’t help but represent them as human. On the other hand, the Nazi and the slaveowner accept an ideology according to which the Jew and the Black slave are subhuman. The Jew or the Black slave are thus, on Smith’s view, cognitively threatening. They are experienced as confusing and creepy. They seem to transgress the boundaries between human and non-human, violating the natural order. Smith briefly discusses disabled people. Sometimes, disabled people appear to be dehumanized in Smith’s sense. Smith quotes the Nazi doctor Wilhelm Bayer as saying that the fifty-six disabled children he euthanized “could not be qualified as ‘human beings’” (p. 250). Perhaps more commonly, however, people guilty of ableism regard disabled people as humans, but humans who are “chronically defective, incomplete, or deformed” (p. 261). Even in the notorious tract which set the stage for the Nazi euthanasia program, “Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life”, Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche describe those they seek to destroy as “human” (Menschen).

However, we recommend not relying exclusively on explicit language in thinking about dehumanization of people with disabilities. It is entirely possible to represent people as subhuman while still verbally describing them as “human” when explicitly asked. Dehumanization in Smith’s sense involves powerful conflicting representations of the other as both human and subhuman. Verbal evidence is important (and we will use it ourselves), but dehumanization does not require that both representations be verbalized.

We focus on the case of adults with severe cognitive disabilities. Amelie Green is the daughter of Filipino immigrants who worked as live-in caregivers in a small residential home for severely cognitively disabled “clients”. Throughout her childhood and early adulthood, Amelie witnessed the repeated abuse of cognitively disabled people at the hands of caregivers. This includes psychological abuse, physical assault, gross overmedication, needless binding, and nutritional deprivation, directly contrary to law and any reasonable ethical standard. This abuse is possible because the monitoring of these institutions is extremely lax. Surprise visits by regulators rarely occur. Typically, inspections are scheduled weeks or months in advance, giving residential institutions ample time to create the appearance of humane conditions in a brief, pleasing show for regulators. Since the clients are severely cognitively disabled, few are able to communicate their abuse to regulators. Many do not even recognize that they are being abused.

We’ll describe one episode as Amelie recorded it – far from the worst that Amelie has witnessed – to give the flavor and as a target for analysis. The client’s name has been changed for confidentiality.

As I stepped out of the kitchen, I heard a sharp scream, followed by a light thud. The screams continued, and, out of curiosity, I found myself walking towards the back of the house, drawn to two individuals shouting. Halfway towards the commotion, I stopped. I witnessed a caregiver strenuously invert an ambulatory woman strapped to her wheelchair. Both of the patient’s legs pointed towards the ceiling, and her hands clutched the wheelchair’s sidearm handles. As the wailing grew louder, the caregiver proceeded to wedge the patient’s left shoe inside her mouth, muffling the screams.

My initial reaction was to walk away from the scene to compose my thoughts quickly. Upon reflection, I assumed that the soft thud I heard was the impact of Anna’s wheelchair. Anna’s refusal to stop crying must have prompted the caregiver to stuff a shoe inside Anna’s mouth. I assumed that Anna was punished for complaining. After some thought, I noticed that I involuntarily defended the act of physical abuse by conceptualizing the caregiver’s response as a “punishment,” insinuating my biased perspective in favor of the workers. From afar, I caught the female staff outwardly explaining to Anna that she would continue to physically harm her if she made “too much loud noise.” From personal observation, Anna struggled to control her crying spells, oblivious of the commotion she was creating. Nonetheless, Anna involuntarily continued screaming, and the female staff thrust the shoe deeper.

Amelie has witnessed staff members kicking clients in the head; binding them to their beds with little cause; feeding a diabetic client large amounts of sugary drinks with the explicit aim of harming them; eating clients’ attractive food, leaving the clients with a daily diet of mostly salads, eggs, and prunes; falsifying time stamps for medication and feeding; and attempting to control clients by dosing them with psychiatric medications intended for other clients, against medical recommendations. It is not just a few caregivers who engage in such abusive behaviors. In Amelie’s experience, a majority of caregivers are abusive, though to different degrees.

Why do caregivers of the severely cognitive disabled so frequently behave like this? We have three hypotheses.

Convenience. Abuse might be the easiest or most effective means of achieving some practical goal. For example, striking or humiliating a client might keep them obedient, easier to manage than would be possible with a more humane approach. Although humane techniques exist for managing people with cognitive disabilities, they might work more slowly or require more effort from caregivers, who might understandably feel overtaxed in their jobs and frustrated by clients’ unruly behavior. Poorly paid workers might also steal attractive food that would otherwise not be easy for them to afford, justifying it with the thought that the clients won’t know the difference.

Sadism. According to the clinical psychologist Erich Fromm (1974), sadistic acts are acts performed on helpless others that aim at exerting maximum control over those helpless others, usually by inflicting harm on them but also by subjecting those others to arbitrary rules or forcing them to do pointless activities. It is crucial to sadistic control that it lack practical value, since power is best manifested when the chosen action is arbitrary. People typically enact sadism, according to Fromm, when they feel powerless in their own lives. Picture the man who feels frustrated and powerless at work who then comes home and kicks his dog. Cognitively disabled adults might be particularly attractive targets for frustrated workers’ sadistic impulses, since they are mostly powerless to resist and cannot report abuse.

Dehumanization. Abuse might arise from metaphysical discomfort of the sort Smith sees in racial dehumanization. The cognitively disabled might be seen as unnatural and metaphysically threatening. The cognitively disabled might seem creepy, occupying a gray area that defies familiar categories, at once both human and subhuman. Caregivers with conflicting representations of cognitively disabled people both as human and as subhuman might attempt to resolve that conflict by symbolically degrading their clients – implicitly asserting their clients’ subhumanity as a means of resolving this felt tension in favor of the subhuman. If the caregivers have already been mistreating the clients due to convenience or sadism, symbolic degradation might be even more attractive. If they can reinforce their representation of the client as subhuman, sadistic abuse or mistreatment for sake of convenience will seem to matter less.

Consider the example of Anna. To the extent the caregiver’s motivation is convenience, she might be hoping that inverting Anna in the wheelchair and shoving a shoe in her mouth will be an effective punishment that will encourage Anna not to cry so much or so loudly in the future. To the extent the motivation is sadism, the caregiver might be acting out of frustration and a feeling of powerlessness, either in general in her working life or specifically regarding her inability to prevent Anna from crying or both. By inverting Anna and shoving a shoe in her mouth, the caregiver can feel powerful instead of powerless, exerting sadistic control over a helpless other. To the extent the motivation is dehumanization, the worker is symbolically removing Anna’s humanity by literally physically turning her upside-down, into a position that human beings don’t typically occupy. Dogs bite shoes, and humans typically do not, and so arguably Anna is symbolically transformed into a dog. Furthermore, the shoe symbolically and perhaps actually prevents Anna from using her mouth to make humanlike sounds.

These three hypotheses about caregivers’ motives make different empirically distinguishable predictions about who will be abusive, and to whom, and which abusive acts they tend to choose. To the extent convenience is the explanation, we should expect experienced caregivers to choose effective forms of abuse. They will not engage in abuse with no clear purpose, and if a particular form of abuse seems not to be achieving its goal, they will presumably learn to stop that practice. To the extent sadism is the explanation, we should expect that the caregivers who feel most powerless should engage in it and that they should chose as victims clients who are among the most powerless while still being capable of controllable activity. Sadistic abuse should manifest especially in acts of purposeless cruelty and arbitrary control, almost the opposite of what would be chosen if convenience were the motive. To the extent dehumanization is the motive, we should expect the targets of abuse to be disproportionately the clients who are most cognitively and metaphysically threatening – the ones who, in addition to being cognitively disabled, are perceived as having a “deformed” physical appearance, or who seem to resemble non-human animals in their behavior (for example, crawling instead of upright walking), or who are negatively racialized. Acts manifesting dehumanizing motivations should be acts with symbolic value: treating the person in ways that are associated with the treatment of non-human animals, or symbolically altering or preventing characteristically human features or behaviors such as speech, clothing, upright walking, and dining.

We don’t intend convenience, sadism, and dehumanization as an exhaustive list of motives. People do things for many reasons, including sometimes against their will at the behest of others. Nor do we intend these three motives as exclusive. Indeed, as we have already suggested, they might to some extent support each other: Dehumanizing motives might be more attractive once a caregiver has already abused a client for reasons of convenience or sadism. Also, different caregivers might exhibit these motivations in different proportions.

Convenience alone cannot always be the motive. Caregivers often mistreat clients in ways that, far from making things easier for themselves, require extra effort. Adding extra sugar to a diabetic client’s drink serves no effective purpose and risks creating medical complications that the caregiver would then have to deal with. Another client was regularly told lies about his mother, such as that she had died or that she had forgotten about him, seemingly only to provoke a distressed reaction from him. This same client had a tendency to hunch forward and grunt, and caregivers would imitate his slouching and grunting, mocking him in a way that often flustered and confused him. Also, caregivers would go to substantial lengths to avoid sharing the facility’s elegant dining table with clients, even though there was plenty of room for both workers and clients to eat together at opposite ends. Instead, caregivers would rearrange chairs and tablecloths and a large vase before every meal, forcing clients to eat separately at an old, makeshift table. Relatedly, they meticulously ensured that caregivers’ and clients’ dishes and cutlery were never mixed, cleaning them with separate sponges and drying them in separate racks, as if clients were infectious.

But do caregivers really have dehumanizing representations in Smith’s sense? Here, we follow Smith’s method of examining the caregivers’ words. In Amelie’s experience over the years, she has observed that caregivers frequently refer to their clients as “animals” or “no better than animals”. In abusing them, they say things like, “you have to treat them like the animals they are”. Caregivers also commonly treat clients in a manner associated with dogs – for example, whistling for them to come over, saying “Here [name]!” in the same manner you would call a dog, and feeding them food scraps from the table. (These scraps will often be food officially bought on behalf of the clients but which the caregivers are eating for themselves.) The caregivers Amelie has observed also commonly refer to their clients with the English pronoun “it” instead of “he” or “she”, though of course they are aware of their clients’ gender. Some employ “it” so habitually that they accidentally refer to clients as “it” in front of the client’s relatives, during relatives’ visits. This pronoun is perhaps especially telling, since there is no practical justification for using it, and often no sadistic justification either, since many clients aren’t linguistically capable of understanding pronoun use. The use of “it” appears to emerge from an implicit or explicit dehumanizing representation of the client.

Despite speech patterns suggestive of dehumanization, caregivers also explicitly refer to the clients as human beings. In their reflective moments, Amelie has observed them to say things like “It’s hard to remember sometimes that they’re people. When they behave like this, you sometimes forget.” In Amelie’s judgment, the caregivers typically agree when reminded that the clients are people with rights who should be treated accordingly, though they often seem uncomfortable in acknowledging this.

Although the evidence is ambiguous, given caregivers’ patterns of explicitly referring to their cognitively disabled clients both as people and as non-human animals or “it”s, plus non-verbal behavior that appears to suggested dehumanizing representations, we think it’s reasonable to suppose, in accordance with Smith’s model of dehumanization, that many caregivers have powerful contradictory representations of their clients, seeing them simultaneously as human and as subhuman, finding them confusing, creepy, and in conflict with the natural order of things. If so, then it is plausible that they would feel the same kind of cognitive and metaphysical discomfort that Smith identifies in racial dehumanization, and that this discomfort would sometimes lead to inappropriate behavior of the sort described.

There’s another way to reassert the natural order of things, of course. Instead of dehumanizing cognitively disabled clients, you might embrace their humanity. There are two ways of doing this. One involves preserving a certain narrow, traditional sense of the “human” – a sense into which cognitively disabled people don’t easily fit – and then attempting to force the cognitively disabled within that conception. Visiting relatives sometimes seem to do this. One pattern is for a relative to comment with excessive appreciation on a stereotypically human trait that the client has, such as the beauty of their hair – as if to prove to themselves or others that their cognitively disabled relative is a human after all. While this impulse is admirable, it might be rooted in a narrow conception of the human, according to which cognitively disabled people are metaphysical category-straddlers or at best lesser humans.

A different approach to resolving the metaphysical problem – the approach we recommend – involves a more capacious understanding of the human. Plenty of people have disabilities. A person with a missing leg is no less of a human than a person with two legs, nor is the person with a missing leg somehow defective in their humanity. However, our culture appears to have instilled in many of us – perhaps implicitly and even against our better conscious judgment – a tendency to think of high levels of cognitive ability as essential to being fully and non-defectively human. Perhaps historically this has proven to be a useful ideology for eliminating, warehousing, drugging, and binding people who are inconvenient to have around. We suspect that changing this conception would reduce the abuse that caregivers routinely inflict on their cognitively disabled clients.

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[1] "Amelie Green" is a pseudonym chosen to protect Amelie and her family.

15 comments:

Paul D. Van Pelt said...

Over a working lifetime, wherein mental disorder was a concern from a civil rights perspective, I heard many descriptives used to identify persons with disabilities. Some of those labels were ill-conceived from their beginnings, and discarded when found to be less useful than originators may have hoped. I have written about this before, so will not repeat it here. I have some familiarity with Professor Livingston-Smith. My day-to-day activities no longer involve the paralegal sort of duties, once set forth in a job description. And, I understand that language changes, over time.
So, I'm not grinding any axes here. But, I wonder about the term, cognitive disability. Not following new legislation, I freely admit ignorance. What I wonder is, does the term hold a useful purpose, and, if so, for whom?

Arnold said...

One of us in our sixth grade classroom fell to floor and went into convulsions...
...I watched her, the teacher said don't try to move her and we left the classroom...

I have learned, in seventy years since, at times, to watch my thoughts and feelings and to see what I am doing...

Learning or being taught to observe oneself first, in life...
...is towards conscientiousness and away from monterious carelessness...

As to the source of cognitive disablements...
...sympathies to the scientists, medical doctors, philosophers and their representations...

Philosopher Eric said...

Professor,
It seems to me that Smith set you and Amelia up to write a very good paper. What I most appreciate is that you seem not to be demonizing these workers, but rather seeking to descriptively illustrate human function in this regard. Why do humans in these situations tend to abuse the cognitively impaired?

Beyond convenience and sadism, on dehumanization I think I’d go a bit more idealistic. You’ve written before about how the beautiful are treated far better that the opposite of beautiful (and note that here I avoided any words that might be offensive). We evolved such that certain people, with their appearance, facial expressions, cognitive behavior, and so on, tend to make us happy when we’re in there presence. This would be the idealistic object of concern, or a trait that needn’t only reside in a given human. Various domesticated and wild animals may tend to be given more sympathy than a given human. I presume that the patients from Amelia’s past would score quite low on this metric. (Disregard me here if she thinks that high scoring patients were treated with equal abuse.)

As for solutions, changing human perceptions that cognitive ability is what renders us “human” is an admirable goal, though clearly long term. Ultimately I believe that science, aided by an new amoral brand of philosophy, will acknowledge that sentience constitutes value and so validate your prescription academically. Social implementation should take longer. A simple solution today however might be government mandated care home video streaming to interested parties.

Matti Meikäläinen said...

We’ve gone from a discussion of what our ethical response towards fictional (perhaps future) robots should be to a discussion of what our ethical response towards disabled human beings should be.

The juxtaposition of your two essays is fascinating. I think it may give us an opportunity to reflect on the depth and richness of our ethical perspectives in general. You recommend that we cultivate “a more capacious understanding of the human” as a way to overcome our tendency to dehumanize the cognitively disabled. However, you don’t suggest how we could do that.

As you know, I’m a mild dissenter of the position you take in your discussion of robots rights. Perhaps I can relate the argument taken there to this discussion. If we go about cherry-picking a few specific attractive qualities of our favorite fictional (perhaps future) robots in a process of “humanizing” them, do we inadvertently create a justification of a less than charitable attitude toward the cognitively disabled—perhaps even justifying a tendency of some to dehumanize the disabled?

Eric Schwitzgebel said...

Thanks for the comments, folks!

Paul: That’s a difficult issue, for sure. My preference is to default to the standard term used by scholars who support the good treatment of people in this group. “Disability”, though challenged by some activists especially in the 1980s, is now thought to accurately reflect their disadvantages in society as it currently exists.

Phil E: I think I basically agree with all of that, but I think it supplements rather than contradicts our view. Beauty judgments might directly disadvantage some of the cognitively disabled, and they might also indirectly do so thorough amplifying dehumanization.

Matti: Yes, I agree with all of that! Suggestions welcome on ways to implement effective change.

Matti Meikäläinen said...

I appreciate that you seem to agree. Although I’m not so sure. I enjoy assisting in this crowdsourcing of ideas and arguments. I fear, however, it would be too taxing for me to go all the way down the road with the points I tried to make. So, I’ll offer a brief thumbnail sketch.

First, I’m not so sure we truly agree at a fundamental level. I’m recalling our recent discussion of the ethical structure in Toby Ord’s book. At first, you did not see “…so much lack of concern for current human beings in the book, ...” But subsequently you saw my point that there was, as I described, a “dangerous seed” embedded in his longtermism ethics. In short, Ord’s thesis privileges a future evolved human species over ordinary people. I think that dangerous seed is a particular problem with consequentialist based ethics like Toby Ord’s. And I don’t think it’s unreasonable to call this nascent dehumanization just as I previously described the future Soviet man as a form of dehumanization—which, historically, it turned out to be. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn noted that in the old Soviet Union dissidents who were not banished to the Gulag might end up in an insane asylum. After all Marxism was scientific and to resist the inevitable evolving soviet man must be a form of insanity. I noted in that discussion that throughout our history attempts to perfect humankind usually results in killing people.

Likewise, the concern with so-called “robot rights” may also contain a similar dangerous seed. That is, are we concocting arguments to humanize (future) machines which may simultaneously argue for not recognizing the full humanity and even accepting the dehumanization of the cognitively disabled?

I don’t think you can thread this needle by merely suggesting that we develop “a more capacious understanding of the human.” To extend the metaphor, I submit that you have to sort out these other confusing threads first. And It may be that one’s starting ethical assumptions—the basic moral concepts—are a handicap to doing that. For some, including consequentialists, it tends to be.

Do humans have moral standing because they can perform long division? I would hope that most people would say no! Moreover, any similar argument basing moral standing of any set of cherry-picked (even if common) human abilities or properties is similarly suspect.

In the Christian tradition there is a nonnegotiable overarching moral principle—we are all made in the image and likeness of God. It’s a moral trump card—so to speak—given to everyone. Every human being has full moral standing—no ifs, ands, or buts. That proposition has the advantage of divorcing this issue from the issue of robot moral standing as well as the issue of the moral standing of nonhuman animals. But that answer won’t do for many of us obviously. But could there be a philosophical equivalent? I submit that there is. I’m not prepared to articulate how I would reach that result. There are some good moral philosophers who are tapping their way along different paths to this proposition. But, more importantly, I think a path to that result is the only reasonable way out of this moral thicket.

I feel obliged to offer a tiny snippet of my thinking on the matter. Let me just say that we are all situated. Every human being is born into a web of relationships. We are not free individuals in a totally atomistic and unfettered sense as John Rawls and so many modern liberals and libertarians posit. No matter who we are we find ourselves within a complex set of ready-made obligations. We exist within a social reality created by ourselves within our human community. We are “political animals” in a real sense as Aristotle claimed—a term often misunderstood. And that comes with moral obligations

Philosopher Eric said...

Yes professor, what I’ve said here does supplement the position of your paper. And to be sure, this idealistic “beauty” is meant to address traits that are far more broad than facial structure and the like. In a greeting can a subject walk up to you with an appropriate smile, shake your hand, and perhaps even say something that you consider witty? That would get to more of the “idealistic human” that I mean. Mental patients tend to score very low on this metric for a number of reasons. In a sense they might be considered high maintenance pets, though without the capacity to either look after themselves or to be attractive. Therefore if your paper could highlight this deficiency, it seems to me that being forewarned that care workers thus tend to abuse their patients, could also be forearming. The current functional prescription that I offer is to let them know that their activities will be monitored. Similarly, police officers are progressively being required to wear body cameras given that the jobs they do naturally entail trouble.

Then as for long term solutions, my answer is nearly too big to even mention. Matti and I seem to be in a similar spot in this regard, though I suppose with different answers. My own credence lies with scientific reduction, and aided by effective philosophical principles from which to do that science.

So what would a thumbnail sketch be? I think we must psychologically reduce our nature back to its basic components, somewhat as physicists have successfully been doing for a few centuries in their own domain. The main conundrum that impedes psychology, I think, is that it’s difficult to acknowledge that sentience constitutes value, and thus that our moral notions ultimately reduce back to our sentience, when our moral notions themselves tend to discourage us from openly acknowledging that sentience constitutes value! For this paper I don’t expect you to get into any of that, obviously. It is my hope however that someday you will.

Arnold said...

To know cognition affects us, then our questioning can have its place in implementing effective change.

Understanding ourselves as an effect of cognition may get us before semantics, where we can see with more feeling and less thinking-in our daily living...

Do cognitive disablements have to be seen and felt in oneself before in others...
...when/then is the right time to ask this of AI and algorithms...

Paul D. Van Pelt said...

Look,friends. I have no stake, one way or another,in cognitive science or artificial intelligence. No horse; no dog. There is a whole community out there who does. Understood. My thinking and working remains where I have some understanding...where I might hope to offer contribution. Still forming my own notions about truth and reality and their inextricability. Several recent posts in the realm of traditional philosophy have been supportive---or perhaps my notions have supported them? Synergy is an atom of metaphysics. Or even a molecule? Thanks to any, whomever you may be...

Eric Schwitzgebel said...

Thanks for the continuing comments, folks!

Matti: I’m inclined to agree that cherry-picked human traits will tend to yield what I think of as the wrong results for people who lack those traits, unless we pick traits so common that we end up with probably too broad a view of the type of entity that deserves to have human or human-like rights. I also am inclined to agree that relationality has an important role to play (as exemplified by greater duties to fellow community members than distant strangers and to pets than to wild animals. But I also don’t think relationality can be the whole thing. If we found a solitary alien intelligence, for example, we shouldn’t nuke it from orbit before making contact.

Phil E: Constant monitoring (eg wearing cameras) would presumably have some advantages. But of course there’s also the issue of privacy, for both worker and client, and the power relationships between monitor and monitored, which could be toxic. So it’s a tricky issue! I’m inclined to agree that every sentient being has intrinsic value, but I wouldn’t go so far as to equate degree of value with degree of sentience (which you might not be suggesting). I’m inclined yo think we owe something special to fellow citizens that goes beyond what we owe to even a highly sentient wild animal, for example. But again it’s complicated, and I don’t feel that I’ve seen the issue fully through.

Matti Meikäläinen said...

I am, to say the least, befuddled. I was offering only a small snippet (implying other relevant components) of a long argument I would make recognizing the moral standing of each and every member of the human family. I fail to comprehend the apparent non sequitur in your response. How does acknowledging a relationship with all humankind lead to a desire to “nuke [an alien] from orbit before making contact”? The two thoughts are apples and oranges.

Any method that I or anyone else uses to get to that position was not the point of my suggestion. My point was that there are various arguments that justify recognizing the unqualified and full moral standing of each and every human being. And the path to that result is, I suggested, the only reasonable path.

Moreover, I claimed that making that sort of argument divorces the issue of human moral standing from issues of robot moral standing, nonhuman animal moral standing and, I need to add, the moral standing of a solitary alien intelligence attempting to make contact!

Eric Schwitzgebel said...

Sorry I managed to befuddle you, Matti! As you say, of course you didn’t offer a full theory. I just wanted to note that theories that rest entirely on existing social relationships have some unattractive consequences. It sound like your theory isn’t of that kind!

Philosopher Eric said...

I agree professor that privacy protection can be a tricky issue to balance given competing interests. Simply educating the public about how the mentally impaired tend to be put into abusive care situations should be helpful, as you and Amelia seem to be doing. If I were to bring a family member into such care I’d now want at least some degree of objective monitoring of daily life to help ensure that they’re treated reasonably. My family would do no less for me I think, and yet many should be less fortunate and so certain government monitoring regulations might indeed be in order.

Actually I would roughly say that the degree of sentience equates with the degree of value, though let’s backup a bit to unpack that luggage. What I mean is that there should ultimately be a single objective physics based element of reality that constitutes the value of existing for anything, anywhere. Clearly the brains of many animals, such as the human variety, have harnessed that physics in order to create sentient beings. Thus existence might be very good here, or utterly horrible, though always given exactly how that physics happens to play out.

Does this mean that a dog, or fish, or even an insect which effectively feels about as good/bad as yourself at a given moment, will have the same level of objective positive to negative value of existing that you do at that time? Yes that’s exactly my position. This is not a species or even communally derived parameter of value, as in the case of our moral notions, but rather a value parameter that’s entirely physics based. Of course that physics has not yet been empirically established, though does seem to exist anyway given that we do feel good/bad and seem to live in a natural world.

Here one might wonder if I’d say it’s morally wrong to kill a line of ants in my house with bug spray if they would thus suffer horribly as they die? That should be morally wrong in certain societies though fine in others given differing social beliefs. I try not be too disrespectful regarding rightness and wrongness speculation given that it’s a social conception that’s only loosely based upon the value of existing itself.

Instead I like to ponder the nature of value directly. Did the sprayed ants suffer horribly as they died? If so then it should have been exactly that horrible for them. Would it be any worse if this were instead experienced by a similar number of humans? No, in that case these same experiences should simply exist for different creatures. But did I not grasp the suffering of these ants as they died and so not feel bad for them? Furthermore was I rewarded by their deaths since now they couldn’t continue defiling my house? If so then the spraying should have promoted the value of existing as me over that period to the degree that I felt better than I otherwise would have. Once we get down to the physics of value itself, welfare should reduce to a matter of standard arithmetic.

I realize that this may seem quite consequentialist and so irk some. I mentioned last time that there’s a conundrum here. It’s difficult for us to acknowledge that sentience constitutes value, and thus that our moral notions ultimately reduce back to our sentience, when our moral notions themselves tend to discourage us from openly acknowledging that sentience constitutes value. I’m sure you’re aware of all sorts of repugnant implications associated with this perspective. I don’t think this is because it leads us astray however, but rather because reality itself can be horribly repugnant. My solution would be for us to begin exploring psychology just as amorally as hard forms of sciences are already explored so that the field might finally become founded well enough to make true progress. Then as we better grasp our nature we should also be able to use these understandings in order to better lead our lives as well as structure our societies.

Arnold said...

Schwitzgebel said: and I don’t feel that I’ve seen the issue fully through...
...Was this question from a philosopher a psychologist a caregiver...

Sometimes I hang on your every word here, this time searching cognitive restraint then self regulation...

I propose you and Amelie also include yourselves in this Issue, myself too...
...I mean actually spell out what you would do-what you do when confronted with cognition and cognitive disabelments...

Then cognition may stand more by itself (in the universe) and self and ourselves might have more standing and a self be less complicated...If this is the Issue...

Paul D. Van Pelt said...

Went back through the comments, because I was confused about where the matter of privacy surfaced. Found it! Then, I considered physics, as it emerged in the later comment. All good. But, I submit that physics is an enabling realm of reality: it did not create living things---only the environment in which life could emerge and evolve.
Water. Air. Well, you know. So, however it was that primordial soup gave rise to something more,it must have taken more than lightning strikes to affect the transition. There were elements, sure---wherever those came from---I mean, did lightning, fire and ice create those,or,given that they did, physics remains enabler, not creator. The notion of God eludes some of us: we just don't 'get' the how of a supreme something that created everything else. So, that is why we have metaphysics?