Disability And Moochers

Meep writes something that I think is very revealing about how our society handles disability:

Apparently AT&T assumes that the only people who would want an iPhone would be hearing people. Now AT&T has announced that they're going to offer a data only plan, but if you check the Text Accessibility Plan page, the PDF form explicitly states that you have to have a certifying agent in order to even get the plan. Why should anyone have to prove they are disabled? I suppose this is their way of separating hearing from deaf so that only "deaf" people can have this option.

We tend to think of accommodating disabilities as making special concessions or exceptions to the rules for disabled people. We think that disabilities constitue an extra burden on some people, so we'll give those people a sort of bonus subsidy to make up for it. Thinking that way sensitizes us to worry about moochers -- people who feign or exaggerate disability in order to get the subsidy without suffering the burden that it's supposed to offset. (Elizabeth Anderson wrote a good article some years back taking to task all the liberal political theorists from Rawls onward for using this sort of "equality defended from moochers" framework.) I would suspect it also *generates* wanna-be moochers, by effectively telling people "hey, there's a special bonus here you could be getting."

The alternative to this is to think not about subsidizing disabled people so that they can be on a level playing field with the normals, but rather about rearranging the options so that suitable options are available for everyone, given the diversity of human brains and bodies. There may be limits at which we'd have to fall back on subsidies-plus-mooching-safeguards, but we're far from reaching them. AT&T's iPhone plans, as described by Meep, could be a good example of the second strategy -- offering various appropriately-priced combinations of voice and data, so that people can pick the one that suits their way of being in the world. In this context, a person who can hear but buys the data-only plan would not be getting some sort of illegitimate bonus. But AT&T is so deeply buried in the subsidies perspective that it assumes that it has some sort of nonsensical need to protect the data-only option from hearing moochers.

This is also a reason to be leery of the argument Harry Brighouse mentions at the end of a long post on whether parents should be allowed to deliberately "design" their children, picking and choosing their genetic endowments. He suggests one possible rule would be that design is OK for correcting defects, but not for giving children extra excellences (e.g. you could take a kid who was going to end up 3'8" and make them 5'4", but you couldn't make them, or their naturally 5'4" sibling, 6'3"). This type of scheme would force the government to officially promulgate a blueprint for what constitutes a "normal" body and mind, and labeling variations from that blueprint (at least in one direction) as defects which is is permissible -- or even potentially mandatory -- to correct. If we had a social system that fully accommodated the breadth of human variability, we wouldn't need to either fix so many genetic "defects" (shortness would no longer be a "defect" if we ended height discrimination), nor to worry that people were going to exploit that fixing process in order to get an unfair advantage.

Resilience

Tim Haab notes that it's becoming increasingly popular to talk about "resilience" as a goal in environmental policy. Resilience refers to the ability of a system to withstand crises. He finds resilience to be a somewhat preposterous proposition, because a resilient system is meant to be able to withstand even unforseeable crises. How, he asks, can we be expected to plan for things we by definition don't know about?

The trick to resilience, and what makes it an important concept, is that we don't need to know the specifics of a crisis in order to know some general things about what will help us deal with it. By looking at what things have been helpful for withstanding past crises (including ones that were major surprises at the time), we can deduce generalized crisis-handling capacities.

For example, one such generalized crisis-handling capacity is resource buffers. A crisis is likely to demand additional resource expenditures to handle, or even to directly attack and reduce the resource base itself -- whereas the reverse is highly unlikely. So if a system limits its resource use to something less than what would be optimal in a crisis-free world, it will, ceteris paribus, be able to weather the crisis better than if it had been straining its resource base to the max.

Democratic information processing is another generalized crisis-handling capacity. It would be easier to handle any crisis -- whatever its nature -- if the system gets an early warning and full information, which we know from past experience is more likely to happen when hierarchies don't restrict the flow and sharing of information.

Diversity -- genetic, cultural, psychological, etc. -- is another useful generalized crisis-handling capacity. An un-diversified system may be optimized for the pre-crisis conditions, but a crisis necessarily changes those conditions. If the system is diverse, there is a greater likelihood that the answer to the crisis is somewhere to be found within the system already

Resilience is always a matter of degree -- no system is perfectly resilient to every possible crisis (though Haab seems to think such a thing is being demanded), and increases in resilience often come with costs (e.g. in the form of foregone profits from leaving a resource buffer). That leaves us with an eminently political question of how much of various types of resilience we want to build into our social system.

PSA

I've gotten several hits recently from people searching for "What to do if your wife uses VAWA." So as a public service announcement, I'd like to recommend that your first course of action should be to stop being violent towards her.

A Real Tro(u/o)per

Here's something non-political for a change. A little while ago loree_borealis linked to a copyediting quiz. I got a perfect score -- luckily, since I earn a living as a copyeditor. But one item stuck out as worthy of further comment. The quiz asked you to find the error in the following sentence:

My hard-working nature and get-it-done attitude inspired a former boss to remark several times that I was a real trooper.

The correct answer was that it should be "a real trouper." But I think "trooper" is an "error" only in the sense of "if the person reading your resume is anal about this kind of stuff, they'll throw you on the reject pile for it." But it's quite likely that "trouper" is an error in the sense of "accurately representing the speaker's meaning."

The expression originated as an analogy to a member of an acting troupe, with their "the show must go on" ethos. But the alternate spelling is, I think, being eggcorned into acceptability. When most people who aren't usage mavens hear the expression, they interpret it as a metaphor for a military trooper. And that interpretation makes sense, since members of the military are also known for their perseverence, as they, well, "soldier on" in the face of adversity. And when such a person -- and I include myself in this group -- turns around and uses the expression at a future date, the military analogy rather than the theater one is what's in their mind. So in that sense, when I (and I assume most other people) utter that set of sounds, what I'm really saying is that someone is a "real trooper," not that they're a "real trouper." My expression just happens to sound the same as one that's spelled differently.

USA! USA! USA! ... no, that's not right

Lauredhel has a roundup of reports on the negative mental health implications of Australia's immigrant detention policies. After a few months, detainess manifest progressively more severe symptoms of depression and self-harm. It's pretty sobering stuff.

Even more sobering is the fact that from what I can tell, Australia's detention conditions are objectively better than the US's. The reports Lauredhel links to call for the demolition of the "jail-like" Stage I building at Villawood -- but in the US, all of our detainees are kept in actual working jails in the same conditions as the convicted murderers and drug dealers (except for the ones in Sheriff Joe's tent city in the Arizona desert). One report comments positively on the improvements in internet access for detainees -- but in the US, detainees are lucky if the jail will let them recieve letters in envelopes. And there are concerns about policies on letting detainees have "excursions," for example when a loved one is hospitalized -- but in the US, detainees are lucky if they get to leave their dozen-cell "pod."