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Comment by __s | Hacker News Reader

So a lot of the views she's angry against are because there's a tendency to consider extremes: would it be better for everyone in the world to be disabled, or not?

Surely it's easier to argue that we should have no people without legs rather than no people with legs

But that's not the question at hand. Maybe there's a benefit to diversity of perspectives. In which case the question should be is society better for having 1% (or 10% or 0.001%, anything above 0%) of the population disabled?

& there's the "everyone has different disabilities", some extreme would say I shouldn't've been born because I was diagnosed with ADHD. & the slippery slope of racial eugenics

Which all gets to this premise: we shouldn't be trying to create a world with a population of 10 billion clones

Now whether the natural diversity ratio is too high or too low, I'll reserve comment

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> So a lot of the views she's angry against are because there's a tendency to consider extremes: would it be better for everyone in the world to be disabled, or not?

I assure you this is not the view of either Peter Singer or Jeff McMahan, who are mentioned by name in the article and whose work in this area is deep and influential. Whether this is the view of any philosopher at all I cannot say, but I doubt it.

> Surely it's easier to argue that we should have no people without legs rather than no people with legs

I have never heard anyone be this reductionistic and be serious. that's not at all what the conversation is about.

> Maybe there's a benefit to diversity of perspectives. In which case the question should be is society better for having 1% (or 10% or 0.001%, anything above 0%) of the population disabled?

Pretty much all the elderly are disabled. I guess you're using disabled to refer to the young ones? Not all of us have been disabled since birth, either, there's accidents and diseases.

No, I think the question isn't "are we good for society?" The question is "are we allowed to exist, and can we have rights?"

I'm disabled. I'm extremely talented, I can still work, and I've contributed a lot at work, but I might not be able to keep my job in another five years. I'm still happy to have been born.

My mom was disabled (with a different disorder than me), and my grandfather too (with multiple things.) We'd have been euthanized in Nazi Germany for sure.

Are ethicists okay with me having bio-kids, who might possibly inherit my bad genes? I don't give a shit. Come at me, try and stop me. If I have to fight an ableist world to thrive and reproduce, that just makes me stronger than the abled people who can afford to be lazy.

What if someone offered reliable gene therapy to fix the disability in your kids?

I'd likely take it, but I'd be conflicted. for all I know, those seemingly-defective genes might have contributed to my intelligence. I'm not sure what else I'd be eliminating..

It sounds like your disorder might cut the quality of your life much earlier than people without. I’m taken aback at how cavalier your conclusion is. I don’t think it’s wrong for you to want to have children, but it seems wrong to me to have children when you know that their quality of life will deteriorate much earlier than usual.

I sympathize though. I never wanted to have children because of the inevitable hardships they’ll face in a post-climate catastrophe world. I now find myself pushed by the inertia of life, and beginning to prepare to have kids. There’s some part of me that won’t respond to the rational arguments. I can’t imagine how difficult it would be for people with inheritable disorders to face the choice of having children or not.

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