Murder and Disability

Two pieces:

- Murder in Australia, with the killer treated sympathetically because the victims were disabled children.

- A Jewish disabled person writes about Aktion T4, when the Nazis killed disabled people before they got around to killing others. This struck me especially hard:

A reading of Hoche and Binding’s “Permitting the Destruction of Unworthy Life” shows the similarity between what they said and what exponents of practical ethics, such as Peter Singer, say about the disabled today. As recently as 2015, Singer, talking with the radio host Aaron Klein on his show, said, “I don’t want my health insurance premiums to be higher so that infants who can experience zero quality of life can have expensive treatments.”

Philosophy, Disability, and The Stone (New York Times)

I have a few requests

ONE: I would like The Stone, the New York Times philosophy column, to sometimes publish philosophers who are disabled and write about the intersections of philosophy and disability rights from that perspective. 

At current time, they have published two essays on disability and philosophy, one advocating that perhaps developmentally disabled people who cannot consent can also not be raped, so long as they enjoy it. 

The other, more recently, came from a grieving father arguing that he should have been able to have his infant disabled son put to death more quickly, with less suffering. More on this latter one below.

Given these two pieces, it's reasonable to suggest that a broader spectrum of philosophy and disability studies might be given some time in this highly public venue. 

TWO: I would like philosophers who want to write about disability to know more about disability. 

This will be long and not entirely organized. It's why it's on my blog and not submitted somewhere formal.

PART ONE: Comstock

Gary Comstock, a philosophy professor at North Carolina State, wrote a searingly painful second-person essay about the need to be able to euthanize suffering babies. It takes you, the reader, step by step through the process of discovering that your baby has trisomy-18 and coming to the decision to disconnect him from the ventilator. Here's a key paragraph.

Some parents choose to use all possible means of continuing their child’s life in the hope that their child will beat the odds and eventually overcome problems. Others choose to let the children die to spare the babies the pain of the ordeal.

Forget the statistics and what others do or don’t do. We would like to know what our Sam’s chances are for reaching the point where his life is valuable to him. But there is no answer to that question. No one can tell you whether your son’s life is worth living from his perspective, or yours. We cannot say whether your son will ever breathe on his own or look at you. We can say only that the literature suggests the odds are stacked heavily against him.

At the end, Sam - the baby -  suffers in his final 20 minutes in this narrative, and the author years later realizes that instead of letting the baby die, it would have been kinder to kill him quickly. He writes:

This thought occurs to you years later, thinking about the gruesome struggle of his last 20 minutes. You are not sure whether it makes sense to talk about his life, because he never seemed to have the things that make a life: thoughts, wants, desires, interests, memories, a future. But supposing that he had thoughts, his strongest thought during those last minutes certainly appeared to be: “This hurts. Can’t someone help it stop?” He didn’t know your name, but if he had, he would have said: “Daddy? Please. Now.”

It seems the medical community has few options to offer parents of newborns likely to die. We can leave our babies on respirators and hope for the best. Or remove the hose and watch the child die a tortured death. Shouldn’t we have another choice? Shouldn’t we be allowed the swift humane option afforded the owners of dogs, a lethal dose of a painkiller?

I find these quoted paragraphs very troubling. The decision that the parents made, faced by suffering and a potentially lethal condition, is not simple. We - the disability community - should not pretend that their decision to let their child die is simple or that we know what we would have done in their place. I, anyway, do know not what I would have done.

But that pathos doesn't mean ignoring the implications of this essay. I am struck by the ease with which agency is given to Sam and then removed within this piece. In the first quote, probabilities govern the decision. In the second quote, the author - again, a grieving father for whom I feel enormous empathy - provides Sam with enough agency to ask to die.

The piece was written in second person, following the rhetoric of the "thought exercise." That's how I reacted to it at first on twitter as I watched disabled friends reel in shock, pain, and horror at seeing their lives compared to that of animals needing to be put down. I've since been "checked" by an ethicist who told me that it's Comstock's real story. I am, it must be said, filled with pain at my mistake. I think back to my son's first minutes and hours after he was diagnosed, just a few minutes after delivery, and imagine that the words were Trisomy 18, not Trisomy 21. I understand why he needs to use his training as a theologian and philosopher to work through the difficult choice he and his wife made. I'm not even going to say that it was the wrong choice. We need, however, to consider for whom else we might want to have empathy.

I feel for Comstock. The question of how to ease death is important and needs good discussion and surely better policy. In America, we tend to die very badly.

I also feel empathy for the child. I feel empathy for disabled people who read this piece. Here's a storify from Alice Wong, featuring Ari Ne'eman's careful disassembly of the piece and its core assumptions. In the efforts to "check me," I haven't seen a response to this. Where is the empathy for the disabled reader who encounters this essay as "Comstock wants to make it easier for me to be killed?" 

What happens in this piece is that the author uses a single story - written as thought exercise, but actually true - in order to abstract generalized principles about making euthanasia more available in cases of trisomy-18 and other potentially lethal or severely disabling natal conditions. It is not, to my reading, based on research into palliative care techniques for suffering infants, but rather the philosophical method of thinking through the ethical and moral implications of the incident. It is rational, except for when it's emotional.

I see this willingness to dismiss the agency, indeed, the humanity, of disabled people as a too frequent consequence of certain strains of ethical and philosophical discourse. We can ... we must ... critique this tendency even as we feel empathy for the author struggling with his past.

PART TWO: Singer

The Comstock essay was published at "The Stone," the philosophy opinion column at the New York Times. It is, to my knowledge, only the second disability piece ever published in "The Stone," the philosophy section of the New York Times op-ed page. The other was, shockingly, by Peter Singer and a co-author, on the case of Anna Stubblefield. As I discussed last April, that essay suggested that if in fact the a person can't consent due to disability, they can't really be raped so long as they enjoy it (no, really, go read the essay). Again, agency is granted only in ways that serve the broader argument about the lack of agency for disabled people.

Shelley Lynn Tremain has written at Disability and Discrimination about her experience pitching "The Stone." She was told that the editor did not want to publish on disability and philosophy, "In part due to my belief that there is not an appropriate platform for writers with disabilities, and writing about disability, I am planning a separate series devoted to it." That separate series has been amazing and important, yet here we still have a "philosophy" site from which disability is excluded ... except when it isn't.

I've received pushback for tweeting that the Comstock essay is indicative of a problem with how philosophy, as a discipline, discusses disability. If I'm wrong, it's due to the intense veneration that Peter Singer still receives. Too many people are willing to regard eugenics and the core humanity of disabled people as a subject for abstract debate, often one isolated from the realities and complexities of real life.

For example, in a link provided me by Tremain (who comments in the post), is Justin Weinberg, an associate professor of philosophy at South Carolina, writing about what an excellent public philosopher Peter Singer is:

“Philosophy always causes offense—perhaps it should cause offense,” says philosopher Peter Singer, Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, in a recent interview, below.
Singer is one of the world’s most well-known living philosophers. Some philosophers are clearly bothered by Singer’s renown, in part because he holds philosophical views that many philosophers disagree with. But, of course, that is something he has in common with every other philosopher.
I think that Singer makes for an excellent famous public philosopher.

But it's not just about the "right to offend." Singer has long based his arguments about disability based on ignorance about disability. He assumes a lack of happiness in situations linked to disability, whether imagining it for himself or his child. Yet every time he encounters real people (see this amazing essay by Harriet McBryde Johnson), he admits maybe disabled people are happy and his assumptions are wrong ... before quickly reverting back to his earlier assumptions. Today, decades after disabled people first engaged him in the spirit of rich philosophical debate, his positions have not especially changed. The assumption that "offensive speech" must be doing something right is.

I am deeply troubled by what I see happening in public philosophy when it comes to disability narratives. I am sure there is much more than what I see, in part because I listen to disabled philosophers. I hope The Stone, and other public spaces, do likewise.

Superbaby and Eugenics: He called my daughter lightning

The parent essay or memoir on discovering one's child is not typical in some fashion is at once among the most common disability-related genre and one of the most difficult to do well. Of necessity, the essay has to move through ableist ideas about normality, encounter the challenges of having a disabled child, and then come out the other side of that encounter with ... wisdom? Hopefully, wisdom. Often, such pieces just turn into gripe sessions about how hard it is to parent. Often, such pieces end up stigmatizing even when they plead for acceptance. Writing about radical transformations of one's epistemology of the normal is hard to do well!

In Vela, Heather Kirn Lanier has written "Superbabies don't cry." It's one of the best pieces of writing about parenting, let along parenting and disability, that it's been my pleasure to encounter. It's long but clear a little time and sit with this one. READ THE WHOLE THING. An excerpt [my emphasis]:

What would happen if we all created SuperBabies? Would we make a SuperRace? Fleets of SuperAdults so smart and wise and strong and nontoxic that they would never get cancer? (But they would of course discover its cure.) By age fifteen, they would teach their teachers. They would outrun all world records. They would eradicate every harmful chemical or they would somehow render all chemicals harmless to SuperBodies. They would, each one, win prestigious awards in their fields, twisting the bell curve into a radiant point of light from which would emanate their stellar, star-like performance. They would never know rejection. They would not know depression. They would not cry, or if they did cry, they would shed tears of existential meaning and fulfillment, reflecting on their infinite successes...

We want a SuperRace because we want to eradicate absolutely everything that terrifies us. We want SuperHumans so we can transcend that thing we are: human. But a SuperHuman would lack that crack in everything through which, as Leonard Cohen sang, the light gets in. There’s something in our suffering that we need. We’ve known this for millennia, and we make it clear in the stories we keep telling. The Buddha gave up his palace and meditated beneath a tree for a week. Jesus of Nazareth said yes to a cross. Our ache is our unfortunate, undeniable doorway. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, says the copper lady with the torch. When we walk into our pain, we sometimes find ourselves on the other side, freed of what we once thought we needed to feel free.

The key to this essay, I think, is tone. It's light, self-mocking, and then moves that self-mockery into a thorough critique of modern parenting discourse, and then to modern disability/health discourse more broadly, with the knockout:

Culturally, we fear disability and try to push it away. The evidence is in both the personal and the public. [my emphasis]

Women around me worry about getting pregnant by X age or else they risk having a child with chromosomal anomalies. On a podcast, a bestselling author says that holding onto anger and resentment will give you cancer. Kids with amputations are turned into poster children, and we raise money to try to prevent bodies like theirs from existing. “Don’t worry,” a pediatrician said after examining my second child just hours after I’d birthed her. “Lightning didn’t strike twice.” Let me reiterate: he called my daughter lightning. “How did this happen to you?” strangers ask the amputee, the blind man, anybody with a different body, and the interviewee will tell you: It often feels like a coded way of asking How can this not happen to me? When I was in elementary school, the kids in wheelchairs learned in a separate wing of the building. We—the able-bodied kids—never saw them. Hollywood storylines typically assign suicidal tendencies to quadriplegic people (see bestselling novel turned blockbuster hit, Me Before You) despite the fact that the vast majority of people with spinal cord injuries report good qualities of life.

This response to disability is so pronounced in our culture that Princeton ethicist Peter Singer can still keep his job when he argues that children born with disabilities can ethically be killed before a certain age. Even babies with hemophilia. Why? Because, he says, they suffer and cause suffering: [T]he total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed.

As always when I share a piece like this, my advice is to READ THE WHOLE THING.

Singer on Stubblefield

A year ago I wrote on the case of Anna Stubblefield for the Los Angeles Review of Books. Here's a long excerpt, stay with me:

Michael Gill has just published Already Doing It: Intellectual Disability and Sexual Agency (University of Minnesota Press, 2015). Gill’s book emphasizes the prevalence of sexual ableism, a “denial of ability to be sexual (or desexualization) for individuals with intellectual disabilities.” While much of the book focuses on sexual education, media representation, and other issues that may not be directly relevant to the Stubblefield trial, Gill’s overall framing of the project matters. In the opening of Already Doing It, Gill draws on Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s aphorism, as recorded in this TED talk, about “the danger of a single story.” Adichie, focusing on race and perceptions of Africa, argued that reducing people to one aspect “makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult.” When it comes to sex and intellectual disability, Gill suggests, we pursue a single story of victimhood, unaware of the multiplicity of possible narratives.

We bring our own idea of what that story must be to the facts, warping them to fit our preconceived biases. Gill writes,

When discussing this project, I often encounter a response that imagines the most “severe” case. These responses, a type of single story, seek to discredit any effort to advocate for the sexual and reproductive rights of individuals with intellectual disabilities […].

It was, of course, the prosecutor’s job to present a single story of the worst-case scenario. That’s how trials work. In fact, understanding the Stubblefield case requires simultaneously holding two possible mutually exclusive stories in our minds: both terrible. In the first, Stubblefield used FC to help D.J. communicate with the world for the first time in his life. He and she became close. She helped him enter school and collaborated on an academic publication. Then they became lovers. When they told his family, though, they accused her of sexual assault and took away D.J.’s communication device. In the second, D.J. was never able to communicate, and Stubblefield unknowingly manipulated his communications, deluded herself into believing they were in love, and raped him. In the first, she is going to jail and he is trapped without the power to communicate. In the second, she abused a defenseless individual.

For the judge, only the second story was possible. His rulings on D.J.’s testimony, and the decision of the family in how they presented their son, shaped how the jury might be able to perceive D.J. From the beginning, he was an object, rather than a person.

 Disability advocate Julie Equality, who attended the trial, described how D.J., instead of using “a wheelchair, walker, or crutches,”

was physically supported by his mother. He looked like a baby being guided to take his first steps. […] D.J. was not seated in the courtroom for the trial because he was not considered a conscious person. He was presented only as an exhibit, and I mean that literally, not metaphorically.

The refusal to consider even the possibility that D.J. might be a person, able to move, to communicate, to desire, to consent, solidified the single story of the worst-case scenario. The jury accepted this narrative, grafting their own ideas about the undesirability of disability onto D.J.’s body. Reporter Bill Wichert interviewed a juror who “couldn’t understand” the relationship between Stubblefield and D.J. once she saw D.J. in court. “I was like … ‘You’re going to leave your husband and your kids for someone like this?’”

This unnamed citizen of New Jersey believed that D.J. was unable to consent and so in need of protection. He’s a victim, but not an appealing one, and she puzzled over the reasons that Stubblefield might jeopardize her career, family, and freedom for this unappealing object. To the juror, sexual desire for a disabled body, clad in a diaper (lack of feces control often emerges in narratives intended to minimize agency for disabled adults), is a mark of deviance. So although the purpose of the trial, ostensibly, was to determine whether D.J. required protection and to avenge wrongs done to him, the juror’s determination of guilt depended on disgust. She could not imagine genuine attraction; therefore, the sex acts must have been criminal. The worst-case story won.
Despite the guilty verdict, we still have no idea which one of the stories — both tragic, but only one criminal — is true. As an advocate, caught between the presumption of competence and the desire to protect the vulnerable, I would have made every effort to grant D.J. the agency to testify, trying all possible techniques. That didn’t happen.

I offer you this excerpt because Peter Singer, who routinely opines on the ways that disabled people cause less happiness than normal people, so can be killed (I summarize), has collaborated on a 95% good essay on the Stubblefield case for The New York Times. He and Jeff McMahan, a colleague of Stubblefield's, write about the sentencing of the woman for 12 years, then make two different kinds of arguments. The first is the same as mine about the "single story," albeit marked with language that a disability rights advocate would never use ("mute and spastic").

Rosemary Crossley, the defense’s expert on communicating with people with physical disabilities, assessed D.J.’s ability to communicate, spending 12 hours with him over three days, and found that he “wanted to communicate and was able to communicate, given appropriate strategies.” Her assessment was filmed by cameras in two positions. It was not based on facilitated communication but on methods that could have been viewed and judged by the jurors, such as requiring D.J. to touch, unaided, a “yes” or “no” button on a communication device and to answer multiple-choice questions, most of which he had to read for himself. Under these conditions, D.J. correctly answered 43 of 45 factual questions. The judge refused to allow Crossley to testify about her assessment, claiming that Crossley improperly assisted D.J. during the evaluation. The judge also did not allow the members of the jury to see the videos, which would have enabled them to judge for themselves whether Crossley had influenced the outcome.

She did, however, permit the prosecution to display D.J. to the jury for a few moments in his mute and spastic condition. It is well established in the psychological literature that people tend to infer cognitive disability from severe physical disability, especially when the disabled individual is unable to speak. There is no reason to suppose that the members of the jury were immune to this tendency. Yet fewer than 50 percent of those with cerebral palsy have any degree of cognitive impairment. In an amicus brief, intended to be heard in conjunction with Stubblefield’s appeal, the American Civil Liberties Union, joined by various disability rights organizations, said that in exhibiting D.J. to the jury in this manner, the court had failed to protect his rights. The appellate court, however, has refused to consider the A.C.L.U.’s brief.

This is the "single story." Only DJ as victim is presented, he never gets to be an agent, or even has a chance to have his agency assessed. I'm glad these paragraphs were written, though (see below), I think it contradicts with everything Singer has ever written on disability.

Alas, the essay then turns to rape. Singer will be Singer, so he writes that either DJ could consent, in which case consent ought to be part of the trial, or DJ can't consent, in which case he's not really rapable so long as he's having a good time.

A central issue in the trial was whether D.J. is profoundly cognitively impaired, as the prosecution contended and the court seemed to accept, or is competent cognitively but unable to communicate his thoughts without highly skilled assistance, as the defense contended. If we assume that he is profoundly cognitively impaired, we should concede that he cannot understand the normal significance of sexual relations between persons or the meaning and significance of sexual violation. These are, after all, difficult to articulate even for persons of normal cognitive capacity. In that case, he is incapable of giving or withholding informed consent to sexual relations; indeed, he may lack the concept of consent altogether.

This does not exclude the possibility that he was wronged by Stubblefield, but it makes it less clear what the nature of the wrong might be. It seems reasonable to assume that the experience was pleasurable to him; for even if he is cognitively impaired, he was capable of struggling to resist, and, for reasons we will note shortly, it is implausible to suppose that Stubblefield forcibly subdued him. On the assumption that he is profoundly cognitively impaired, therefore, it seems that if Stubblefield wronged or harmed him, it must have been in a way that he is incapable of understanding and that affected his experience only pleasurably.

Oy. So on the one hand, Singer says that personhood is complex and should always be considered in its complexity. This runs contrary to his decades of anti-disability writing. Did McMahan draft it and Singer just casually pass it over? His attitude towards disability has, in fact, always been slapdash, never engaging the evidence that might push him to rethink his core principles. On the other hand, he suggests that if you're too disabled to consent or not, you might not be rapeable, not really.

On the third hand, there's a Current Affairs write up that uses the Singer piece to attack Facilitated Communication. FC is complex, too. I wrote:

FC has been controversial since its inception in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was hailed at first as a miracle, as the “silent” disabled suddenly could “speak,” but its reputation was quickly tarnished when a number of individuals seemed to use FC to make accusations of sexual abuse against their parents, accusations all later proven false. These accusations say at least as much about the era of broader hysteria over repressed memories of sexual abuse than the specific technique used to unearth such alleged repressed memories. In other, comparable cases of “false memories” elicited through talk therapy, the false accusations have failed to discredit the techniques by which they are elicited. FC, alas, pushes back against ableist norms that presume incompetence in the disabled, absent absolute evidence to the contrary. Its role in eliciting false accusations, therefore, permanently tarred it, for many, as a pseudoscience.

When it comes to FC, simple answers must be avoided. There’s ample evidence of individuals who have moved through FC to independent typing. They describe having been aware and attempting to communicate throughout their lives, including while using FC; therefore, there must be some people who can only communicate through FC, attesting to its validity. At the same time, it’s clearly possible for facilitators to fall prey to what has been called the “ideomotor effect,” unconsciously turning random movements of their clients into speech. Too many people, looking for a perfectly neurotypical mind inside a neurodiverse one, have fooled themselves into finding what they think must be there. Those people who passed through FC to independent communication stand as testimony to the technique’s possibilities, and to the intense and exhausting work required to make progress.

Let's avoid simple answers. Let's not use our avoidance of simple answers to dehumanize disabled people.

Peter Singer: The Milo of Philosophers

I'm not okay with #disability hate being confused with #science https://t.co/fgVSHyi3WC @Lollardfish @stevesilberman @RoseUnwin

— Louise Kinross (@LouiseKinross) February 28, 2017

Thanks to Louise for alerting me to the Journal of Practical Ethics doing a glossy Q&A with Peter Singer. Singer is a bigot. Philosophy embraces him as a titan of the field, letting his ableism slide merrily by under the glamor of robust debate. Yes, yes, #NotAllPhilosophers

At any rate, this is a long "20-questions" feature with Singer, and I, too, have some questions.

December: 20 questions with Peter Singer. I, too, have some questions.

1) What the fuck is wrong with Philosophy? https://t.co/pSSyjfeZPV

— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) February 28, 2017

Singer says, among other things, this incredibly damaging response (there's more in the whole article, but I want to zoom in here):

I was assuming that there are other couples who are unable to have their own child, and who would be happy to adopt a child with Down syndrome. If that is the situation, I don’t see why it is selfish to enable a couple to have a child they want to have, and for my wife and myself to conceive another child, who would be very unlikely to have Down syndrome, and so would give us the child we want to have. For me, the knowledge that my child would not be likely to develop into a person whom I could treat as an equal, in every sense of the word, who would never be able to have children of his or her own, who I could not expect to grow up to be a fully independent adult, and with whom I could expect to have conversations about only a limited range of topics would greatly reduce my joy in raising my child and watching him or her develop. 

“Disability” is a very broad term, and I would not say that, in general, “a life with disability” is of less value than one without disability. Much will depend on the nature of the disability. But let’s turn the question around, and ask why someone would deny that the life of a profoundly intellectually disabled human being is of less value than the life of a normal human being. Most people think that the life of a dog or a pig is of less value than the life of a normal human being. On what basis, then, could they hold that the life of a profoundly intellectually disabled human being with intellectual capacities inferior to those of a dog or a pig is of equal value to the life of a normal human being? This sounds like speciesism to me, and as I said earlier, I have yet to see a plausible defence of speciesism. After looking for more than forty years, I doubt that there is one.

Unpack: 1) He wouldn't love a child less intelligent than he is. 2) He wouldn't be able to have good conversations (Berube took this apart a decade ago). 3) Disabled people are like dogs and pigs (using ableism to attack specieism).

I may do some longer writing around this essay and its problems, but my real concern isn't with Singer, but with Philosophy. I think of Singer like Milo, saying inflammatory things for attention, protesting "free speech" when called out on his hate or when people advocate to no-platform him.

Imagine if Singer - which he surely would have in another era - was using his academic status to push for race science. Can't you imagine him using this argument, based on assumptions of black inferiority, to work for animal rights using racism? I mean, the suffragists famously demanded white women get the vote because black men did. Would race science exile Singer from the halls of respectability?

My son's full humanity is not a position that is worthy debate, any more than my full humanity as a Jew is. Some positions do not deserve platforms.

Perhaps this is not a person who merits your keynotes, features in the press, adulation in the profession. No matter how edgy he is.

Sunday Roundup: Four Important Posts on Disability

I finished a major corporate (disability-related) project this week and am hard at work on a major non-profit (disability-related) project now. That, plus teaching, plus the book, has slowed me down in terms of writing for mainstream media, but I trust that the depth of these bigger projects is more than worth it.

In the meantime, though, instead of blogging less, I'm taking ideas that might have made for publishable essays and placed them here. This week featured four posts that I think matter.

1. How Not to Kill Someone in Mental Health Crisis. This is a video, from the UK, of a person with a machete not being killed by London police. It's instructive and important.
2. Disability, Trauma, and the Assault at Spring Valley High - If 25% of all American children have experienced trauma, it means we have to rethink fundamental systems in our schools.
3. Peter Singer's Tells - A controversial philosopher who argues that the correct ethical decision in the case of disability is euthanasia/abortion, reveals that he doesn't think those positions should be such a big deal. To him, they're old news.
4. Adventures in Universal Design: Handwriting Notes and Take-Home Tests - My approach to universal design for learning. We're learning the wrong thing from the research on handwriting.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

Peter Singer's Tells - He thinks his radical opinions on disability are just old news.

Peter Singer came to town to talk about altruism for a humanities festival. Local disability activists (sadly not including me), picketed the event, and the Daily Northwestern covered it. In their interview with Singer, he revealed something new to me.

Singer's extreme utilitarian views has led him to argue many things with which I disagree (i.e. -to be an altruist go work for Wall Street so you can get rich and do more good than if you work for a humanitarian organization; which ignores a culture of Wall Street that undoes whatever good rich individuals who happen to be altruistic do). In my community, though, we fix on his remarks about disability. They are, namely:

• The correct ethical choice is to terminate pregnancies following a diagnosis of disability, because that maximizes "happiness." 
• This has led him to claims about denying healthcare for disabled infants, to maximize resources for society.
• And related claims about euthanasia for disabled adults, especially the elderly, being the correct ethical position.

I lost a friend recently over Singer. I criticized him too broadly, she charged into my mentions to slice and dice my critique, I asked her to stop politely, and it went south. I'd rather not lose any more friends. So let me say ahead of time that I know that both Singer and his defenders would say they aren't actively advocating a Nazi-like murder of the disabled, but just thinking through the problem in a philosophical fashion and that philosophy and ethics should have no conceptual limits.

On the other hand, were he endorsing the elimination of other marginalized segments of the population based on his thought experiments, I am fairly sure he would not be lauded and celebrated around the world as the "most influential" philosopher alive.

One of the criticisms of Singer is that he doesn't know anything about what life with disability is like. He makes assumptions about happiness that don't track with reality, and when confronted with the reality of individuals with disabilities who are happy, he makes them exceptions that prove his theories correct, rather than reconsidering his theories.

That may be changing. From the Daily Northwestern [my emphasis]:

Singer later told The Daily that though protesters don’t confront him often, it has happened before.
“Parents ought to have choices if they give birth to a child with a very severe disability about whether that child lives or not,” he said to Hamilton.
The exchange was similar to one he had in 2001 with former disability rights activist Harriet McBryde Johnson at the College of Charleston, chronicled in a 2003 article in The New York Times magazine. When asked about Johnson, Singer said she helped expand his horizons.
“I accepted that maybe the lives of people with disabilities can be better than I had thought,” he told The Daily. “And certainly I think that Harriet was leading a rich and full life. But it is going to vary a lot with circumstances.”
Singer, who said he stands by his former work, is ready to move on.
“I want to find new and interesting things to say,” he told The Daily. “I wrote about the disability movement in the ’80s. It is a very specific problem that affects a very small number of people. The effective altruism movement has a lot more potential to do good.”

If you're interested in Singer, do go read that New York Times piece. It's amazing.

This little quote reveals a few things. First, that he's actually shifted his thoughts on disability a little. That's news to me.

Second, though, he thinks his ideas from the 80s were so long ago that really people should just leave him alone and let him do his new stuff, and that the disabled are such a small segment of the population that it's really not a big deal he suggested the correct ethical position is termination.

But just last year, on the radio (as detailed by Lawrence Carter-Long at the National Council on Disability), he once again suggested that healthcare laws would be best (because of utilitarianism) if we admitted the "necessity of 'intentionally ending the lives of severely disabled infants.'"

So he has he moved on? I don't think so. He just doesn't think it's a big deal and would like protestors to leave him alone.

I, on the other hand, would like academics to treat him as if ableism were as serious as racism, sexism, or homophobia, and stop inviting him to swanky lectures.