The two genders: Scary and scared

 Lately, my social media feed has been dominated by these man vs bear memes. Would you rather be alone in the forest with a man or a bear? Often, the situation is quite under-described. There are bears in the forests where I live, but despite lots of hiking I never see any; they keep to themselves. In general, I'm neither afraid of random bears nor random hikers regardless of the latter's gender. However, the memes sometimes ask whether you'd rather meet a man or a bear when alone in the forest. If a bear walked towards me on the trail, that would be hella weird bear behaviour and I'd be scared. And some posters explicitly say that the bear might be dangerous, might attack and maul them, but even so - that's nothing compared to what you'd expect ... uh ... some random hiker dude to do to you? What the fuck, people. 

I discussed this with a couple of American colleagues the other day (colleagues who belong to the same gender as me - by which I mean the scared one, see further below for explanation). Lots of women have been victims of rape and physical assault. These are, sadly, common crimes. But in the overwhelming majority of cases, the perpetrator was the woman's partner or another man she knows. Stranger rape is rare. As a matter of fact, men are much more likely than women to be victims of violence from strangers. (Of course, statistics can vary over time and between countries, but this is a really strong pattern in Sweden, the US, and many other places.) Thus, if these constant violence warnings were based on actual risks, men would be told to stay at home so they don't get hurt, whereas women would be told to stay single.
But the warnings are not based on facts. They're based on traditional gender roles (which makes it highly ironic that so many feminists share these memes). Men are supposed to be strong and invulnerable and not have to worry about being victimized, while women are supposed to be little damsels in perpetual distress. And, of course, women aren't supposed to be out and about so much. Your place is in the kitchen, ladies! Not out in public. Or the woods. 

The man vs bear thing is the latest, but not the only viral thing of this kind. I remember how this thing went around social media a few years ago, where women wrote of what they would do if all men got a curfew or all men got locked up somewhere. Women then proceeded to list perfectly normal stuff that I already do without a second thought. 

Now, stranger rape does happen. If someone is extremely scared of unknown men because they or someone close to them have been through this, it would be a real dick move to rub statistics in their face and say it's nothing to worry about. It's like serious car crashes that maim or kill people; they're not very common, but it would be a real dick move to rub statistics in the face of someone who had been hurt in a crash. The big difference is that no one expects everyone to be terrified of cars. No one asks me "wow, you have a car? That you drive in? Aren't you scared that you'll get hurt or die? No matter how well you drive, you never know when you'll meet a drunk in a two-ton jeep who comes driving full speed at the wrong side of the road, and then it's game over! I really don't understand how you dare." 

But people do ask these really absurd questions re stranger rape. For instance, I once had to go from the bus station to my then-house via a pitch dark forest path and I didn't have a light with me. I thought well, worst case scenario is that I get lost, which is gonna suck, because then I'll have to freeze my arse off waiting for sunrise, when I'll find my way again. But I can probably find my way home by what little moon light there is and by feeling my way along. And I did.
When I mentioned this to some other people later, I was asked whether I wasn't scared of being attacked.
Let's unpack this, shall we? It's a little path. Through the forest. That a couple of people a day takes. So this would-be rapist hides behind a tree, for hours or days even, freezing his balls off, on the off chance that a lone woman will walk by? That's the scenario you think it makes sense to worry about?
I was even asked, once, whether I'm not scared of taking long walks alone on the frozen sea in the winter. It's the sea! Which is, famously, quite flat! I can see for kilometers that there's no one coming to attack me! Am I supposed to worry about the possibility that some rapist has donned an isolating snowsuit, buried himself in a small mound of snow, breathing through a straw, on the off chance that a lone woman will walk by?
When I worry about demons hiding in mirrors, then I'm "insane" and should "take my meds", but worrying about arctic snow-burrowing rapists is apparently quite normal and sane. 

You can't talk about how all women spend their lives in constant fear of stranger rape, you can't keep asking women who don't do so why they're not more afraid and how dare they, without creating a norm. When we talk like this, we're not just describing a state of affairs that already exists, we contribute to making women unnecessarily afraid, and making women needlessly restrict their lives. 

Another example from an online discussion: It started with a woman writing about how some guy groped her in the metro. She didn't protest, and felt bad about not doing so afterwards. She wanted to initiate a discussion about the problematic psychological obstacles that prevent many people from simply going "Hey! Get your hand off my arse! Fuck off!"
In so many ways, people in general and women in particular are socialized into being nice and polite and people-pleasers. We're socialized into giving people the benefit of the doubt rather than getting pissed off ("maybe his hand just happened to brush on ..."). Children are often taught, from a young age, that it's wrong to protest against being hugged even if they feel uncomfortable, they should put up with all kinds of unwanted physical affection - but even if said unwanted affection isn't sexual at all, it merely comes from adults who think the kid is so cute, this type of socialization often spills over and makes it harder to object against unwanted sexual touching too.
These are real and important problems to discuss. However, another woman complained that men can't understand how scared you become when groped, and how impossible it is to just tell someone off "but maybe if we compared being groped to having someone threaten you with a knife, men might understand what it's like".
Okay. If someone pulls a knife at you, they might seriously hurt or even kill you. Depending on the details of the case, the safest course of action might be to be as quiet and passive as possible so as not to further provoke the knife-wielder. Your life is on the line!
Now, which message do we send if we say that being groped in the metro is like being threatened with a knife? That it's not only psychologically difficult to protest, but dangerous to do so. You'd better do nothing when you're groped.
Ten-thousand dollar question: Who gains if women believe that they shouldn't protest when someone gropes them in the metro? Is it
a) women?
or
b) metro gropers?

Moreover, whereas some men feel bad about being painted with this broad more-dangerous-than-a-bear-brush, others love this meme and happily share it around. Love it in a kind of ... iffy way. 

It's possible to have empathy and compassion with people you respect and consider your equals when they're going through a rough time. This is an important part of friendship and other close relationships! But it's also possible to pity people and offer your help in a condescending way; here, let me, who's so much more powerful than you and so much better off, gracefully lend you a hand. Here, you poor little creature, you don't need to cry anymore! Your betters have to come rescue you.
I think most people who consider themselves feminists and committed to social justice recognize how problematic it can be when white wealthy influencers travel to some poor country to, say, build a school or what-not - they might not know much about building houses, but these poor things should be grateful for any help they get. Cue selfies with little African children, look at this poor little child, how sad his life is! Fortunately, I'm here to make things better. Smile for the camera, kid! I wish more people cared about these poor, unfortunate souls as much as I do.
Sometimes, when men talk about how much they pity women and how important it is that men help women, there's a similar vibe.

I've seen people share a post by some man who says that it's wrong for men to feel insulted when women say they prefer to meet the bear. Instead, strong, powerful men like himself must listen to those poor, scared little women when they speak about their plight. Men must appreciate how terribly hard it is to be a weak, helpless woman. For instance, he remembers this time when he was simply walking down the street, minding his own business, and spotted a woman further ahead. She realized that a man walked on the same street as her, and he could tell from her body language that she became terrified! As a strong, powerful man, his mere presence suffices to scare every woman within a hundred meter radius absolutely shitless!
He's pretty much like the Old Testament God, whose mere presence is enough to make mortals tremble. Not his comparison, it's mine, but it struck me while reading this post. Of course, he writes that it's horrible that women are so scared of men, they shouldn't have to be - it's hard to be a god, as the Strugatsky brothers said. Nevertheless, the post goes on, in the patriarchal world in which we live, it's only natural that women react like this to any man who appears in their vicinity. It's up to men to change this! (Up to God to be a benevolent God, a protective God rather than a smiting one.)
No matter how hard it is to be a god, I can't help suspecting that it also feels a little bit awesome to think of yourself as this strong and powerful, and think of those others, of women, as constantly scared and helpless and in need of protection.
(Now I imagine a male reader angrily asking whether I wouldn't want someone to save me if someone attacked me? Of course I would. I'd prefer not to be attacked in the first place, but if I am, I prefer to be saved over not being saved. But surely that holds for you too, imaginary male reader. You would also prefer not to be attacked in the first place, but if you are, you would prefer to be saved over not being saved. As I said in the beginning, you're even at a higher risk than me! None of this implies that you'd like other people to have a constant condescending protective attitude.)

Finally, as a non-binary colleague pointed out when we discussed this: man vs bear and similar discourse assumes a strict gender binary. Of course, some people who post about these things try to be trans-inclusive: they'll talk about how women and non-binary people would rather meet a bear than a man, or even more narrowly about how cis men pose a danger to everyone else. But that's still a strict binary!

There are only two genders, do you hear? You're ether scary or scared.

 

Poor Things is the best feel-good movie ever

I saw Yorgos Lanthimos' "Poor Things" in the theater. I hesitated to do so because although I've really enjoyed the Lobster and the Favourite, I thought - based on some reviews I had read - that Poor Things would make heavy use of the known trope "Born Sexy Yesterday", and another one I like to call "Hot Fair Slut". Unfortunately, I'm not a famous media personality with enough clout to coin new trope names, so "Hot Fair Slut" is as unlikely to catch on as "Grimdark Preach" which I keep pushing in discussions both online and AFK as soon as I get a chance. 

People tend to think that only stories written by authors who see themselves as fighting for good (whether that be leftist social justice values or conservative Christianity or something else) ever get preachy. But there are many dark stories where the author shouts at you through a megaphone "did you think the world was just and filled with honestly good people? You're wrong! And I'm here to tell you how wrong you are!" Cue plotlines about how naïve goody-two-shoes come to see the error of their ways and reform and turn cynical like you ought to.
We need a name for this phenomenon, and my suggestion is Grimdark Preach.

Anyway. Back to Poor Things and the tropes I worried would appear in it! 

Born Sexy Yesterday: A sexy woman is either literally born/created very recently, or she's lived for longer but in a different world (fairyland, different planet, etc.), making her a newcomer among us. Because she doesn't know shit about our world, and have no basis for comparison, she's super impressed by the first dude she comes across and falls for him. Mr. Average gets the woman of his dreams, because she fails to realize that he is average! 

Hot Fair Slut: You know how misogynists rant about "Stacys"? (TBF, they might have come up with a new name by the time I write this blogpost - I don't keep up with their antiques.) A "Stacy" is a hot slut whose greatest crime isn't sleeping around per se, but the fact that she doesn't want to sleep with the men who complain about her. When a woman sleeps around already, it's just not fair that she won't sleep with everyone!
Of course, in real life, it's pretty uncommon to fancy precisely every person you come across, or even every person of a certain gender. Whether you're strictly demisexual or happily promiscuous, it's certainly more common to have some kind of preferences, be sexually attracted to some people and not to others. But since this is unfair in the eyes of misogynistic entitled men, we see plenty of fictional women without these pesky preferences. Hot, slutty women who'll happily sleep with any man they come across. See, for instance, the planet Risa in Star Trek. TBF, they pay lip-service to Risa being a gender-neutral sexy paradise where female crew members can fuck around as much as the men, and where the inhabitants are happily horny and not the least bit exploited. But there's still an overall emphasis of "any man can go there and get a hot babe - no man will be rejected, nor hit on by older or uglier women". Which always makes the place feel kinda iffy. And there are far worse examples than this in fiction.

Some stuff I had read about Poor Things made me worry that it would feature both BSY and HFS. But I was wrong.

On to the actual plot of the movie. Spoilers ahead. And, like, all the trigger warnings for people who need them, I guess.

Godwin "God" Baxter is a mad scientist, like his father before him. He was also his father's guinea pig - his dad used to operate on him, take out organs just to see which are necessary for survival, and overall, God looks more like a traditional movie version of Frankenstein's monster than Frankenstein himself. He's disfigured and castrated and only survives by hooking himself up to various machines of his own invention, but can't bring himself to condemn his father - you see, it was for the good of science! 

He teaches physiology and medicine at a university in a bizarre steampunky version of Victorian London, and hires bullied student (he's noticeably poorer than his classmates) Max McCandles to be his assistant. God explains that he cares for Bella, a young woman recovering after serious brain damage, and he needs Max to observe and make notes of her progress. 

Bella is played by stunning Emma Stone, but immediately deconstructs the whole Born Sexy Yesterday trope for us viewers by not only doing baby stuff traditionally considered sexy in grown women (such as vaguely toddlerish speech and body language, looking at you Leeloo from the Fifth Element - I hate the Fifth Element so much - and tons of other fictional examples), but also throwing food around and pissing on the floor. 

Eventually Max suspects that there's more to Bella than God has told him, and demands to know the truth. Okay, says God, fine! It's actually a real sunshine story.
You see, he stumbled upon this heavily pregnant woman who had committed suicide via drowning. He brought her home and noticed that there remained some electricity in her brain, meaning she was revivable. But he decided against it, because if she wanted to die, he should respect her autonomy. However! The baby's brain was alive and well, so he decided to stick the baby brain in the adult body and make a brand new creature instead.

God is such an interesting character because he does have a conscience and he does try to do the right thing and be ethical. But given his background, he's not (generously put) very good at it. 

This is a fantastical movie in many ways. You gotta accept that biology works differently from real life. (See Bella's entire creation.) Bella's mental development - I guess because of her adult body - goes much faster than that of a real baby. But she remains weird by regular societal standards. It's also a really weird situation, where Max and Bella hardly ever leave the mad scientist's house. God gets the idea that Max and Bella should get married and live with him forever, and they both agree. He draws up a contract that will legally bind them to do that, but then Bella runs away with Duncan the lawyer (a fun and over-the-top-sleazy Mark Ruffalo) who falls for her Born Sexy Yesterday charms (she's stopped throwing food on people and pissing herself at this point). 

They travel around in amazingly bizarre steampunk-versions of European cities. Bella is, initially, thrilled by seeing the world and having lots of sex. However, their relationship soon begins to unravel. Bella isn't some loyal puppy-dog like Leeloo (I hate that movie so much! ). She fucks other people. She tries to punch a screaming baby. She dances and talks in embarrassing ways. She gives away Duncan's gambling money in a fit of compassion after seeing poor people for the first time. Eventually, when they're starving in Paris, she gets a job at a brothel. At this point, it's revealed that Bella does have preferences - she thinks that much (though not all) of the brothel sex sucks. Nevertheless, for various reasons, she decides to stick it out.
Even though Bella, in her typical hyper-rational way, explains to Duncan that her new job is good for their relationship, since she appreciates sex with Duncan more when she's got those crappy sexual experiences to compare it with, Duncan gets super upset and leaves. And then he comes back again and wails beneath her balcony that she's the love of his life and he wants her back. This previously irredeemable fuckboy even wants to marry her! However, at this point, Bella has concluded that (in her words) an unconventional and experimental woman like herself would need an open-minded and forgiving husband, and Duncan is none of that. Goodbye!

So, so much happens in this movie. I'm not gonna recount the entire plot or spoil everything. It's got marvelous visuals, it's frequently laugh-out-funny, but it's also, at heart, a genuine feel-good movie.

Bella, God and Max form a kind dysfunctional family, where God the father figure seems to do his best, but given his own horribly traumatic childhood, he can't help but passing on lots of shit to his "children".
However, he does realize, towards the end of his life, that his own father had been terrible. And Bella calls him out on how he's, well, played God with his creations. And then, after many morbid and bizarre twists and turns, we're finally treated to some sort of reconciliation and a happy ending. (Except for that poor goat! If you've seen the movie, you know what I mean. The goat did not deserve his fate)

I rarely like feelgood stuff. It often feels too soppy, and like serious problems are too easily glossed over. For instance, I enjoyed the over-the-top craziness of "Everything, Everywhere, All at once", but really felt that way about the ending - the mum-daughter relationship seemed terrible, but in the end we kinda gloss over how bad it is.
Poor Things, on the other hand, takes everything up to eleven and beyond, including the relationship problems. There's no shying away from how grotesque God and Bella's "family" is, and yet - at the end of the day, they're still family.

Best feel-good movie ever!

John Z. Sadler's Vice and Psychiatric Diagnosis

 My impression is that people who are neither moral philosophers nor psychiatrists or psychologists tend to think that there's a sharp line between "vice" and "psychiatric disorders" - or, colloquially, between the bad and the mad (note, I don't know of any empirical research that investigates this very matter, this is really just my impression). My impression is also that people are quick to assume that there's a limit to how bad someone can be without also being mad. But perhaps not the other way around. 

Philosophers who work on moral responsibility and moral agency tend to assume this as well. I think all this drawing of lines and placing people in neat boxes is a fundamentally misguided way of looking at moral responsibility, but it's nevertheless the common and traditional way. Neurotypical people are morally responsible agents. Psychiatric and neuropsychiatric diagnoses, on the other hand, frequently undermine moral responsibility, and place people in the "exempted" box. Some philosophers like to divide moral responsibility into different subkinds, and play around with what kind of responsibility you can have with this or that diagnosis, even as you're exempted from the other kinds. 

The moral landscape would certainly be a neater place to navigate if there really were sharp lines between the mad and the bad. Sharp lines out there, so to speak, in nature - but alas, there aren't. And that's the main topic for Sadler's book. 

More than half of the book is taken up by a loooong journey through time, and also, to some extent, through different cultures and different parts of the globe. People have struggled with the mad-bad distinction everywhere and for ages. And they still do! We still don't have a scientifically and philosophically well-grounded theory! This isn't because the mad-bad border is hard to find, and our science and/or philosophy isn't sufficiently well developed yet. It's because there isn't a sharp border. Sure, lots of people may be categorized as purely mad, or as purely bad (though as the reader of the book will see, the latter has, in modern times, been more controversial), but we'll remain stuck with a big grey area.
Sometimes, this grey area has given rise to "vice-laden" DSM diagnoses, like Conduct Disorder, Oppositional Defiant Disorder or Anti-Social Personality Disorder. Sadler calls these "vice-laden", because the diagnostic criteria is moralizing in a way that the criteria for, say, Schizophrenia or Major Depression are not. At other times, after discussions and debates, behaviours remain "just bad" rather than "bad and mad": Intolerant Personality Disorder, Behavioural Addictions (apart from gambling) such as addiction to sex, shopping, or social media, Political Apathy Disorder, and Paraphilic Rapism never made it into any diagnostic manuals. Sadler, only half-jokingly, suggests that White-Collar Antisocial Disorder, or, as we might call it, the Bernie Maddoff syndrome, could be a psychiatric diagnosis - why should only criminals from the lower social classes be pathologized? 

Way too many moral philosophers assume that the business of coming up with psychiatric diagnoses and applying them to individuals is a much harder science than it actually is. If someone has a bona fide diagnosis which includes descriptions of moral vices and vicious behaviour, it goes to show that it's not the person's fault, and they can't be morally responsible. If there's no diagnosis that covers their character traits and behaviour, they are responsible and blameworthy. Or so many philosophers seem to think.
Some people also like to appeal to neurological findings - people with this or that diagnosis have different brains! But every mental difference must have some corresponding brain difference - regardless of which mind-body theory we subscribe to, regardless of whether the mind is identical to the brain or if it supervenes on what happens in the brain or even if we're fancy old-fashioned dualists who think it's just correlation, it follows that every mental difference has some corresponding brain difference. You can't just point to "a brain difference" as evidence of undermined moral responsibility. Nor can you point to "a brain difference" as evidence that people with this or that diagnosis can't help their vices, unlike undiagnosed vicious people.
In our world, you can have Oppositional Defiant Disorder, but not White-Collar Antisocial Disorder. In a nearby possible world, in which human psychology works exactly the same, but psychiatry had a somewhat different development, it's the other way around. 

So, let's admit that psychiatric diagnoses and the mad/bad distinction is a huge bloody quagmire. What are we supposed to do? Sadler ends his hefty brick of a book with no less than forty theses of what ought to be done, society-wise, in light of this realization. He very nicely divides these theses into stuff we could do immediately and more distant, long-term goals.
As I said, it's a huge book, and I can't even begin to do everything justice in a blog post. But an overarching theme of the forty final theses is to ditch the attempt to find a neat mad/bad divide. Psychiatry should admit and discuss more explicitly than has hitherto been the case how value-laden it is, and how value-laden it must be. An open discussion allows for scrutiny and criticism of underlying values, instead of implicit acceptance. Also, we shouldn't divide criminals into the bad who deserve punishment and the mad who should go to forensic psychiatry (though very few perpetrators of serious crimes do so in the USA, the insanity defense is rarely invoked and even more rarely successful). We should rehabilitate as many as possible so they can be released back into society, and permanently dangerous people should be kept in humane confinement. The mad/bad distinction is ultimately irrelevant.

This is obviously extremely controversial. I'm not sure what I ultimately think of this idea. Let's say I'm somewhat sympathetic, because Sadler is so very aware of all the problems and pitfalls that come with this suggestion, and discusses them at length.
Both psychiatry and criminal justice institutions in various countries and time periods have played thought police, and have locked people up under the guise of either punishment or treatment/rehabilitation because they have the "wrong" ideas, dare to challenge old social norms, and so on. This is a serious danger, though it exists even when psychiatry and criminal punishment are kept separate. The goal of any rehabilitative program must be people that aren't dangerous to others, not to turn everyone into "normal" people who think the "right" thoughts. 
Perhaps there is even a greater risk for abuse when the systems are kept separate - it's so easy to justify abuse of prisoners by painting them as evil and thus deserving of everything they get, and simultaneously justify abuse of psychiatric patients by painting them as so irrational and confused and utterly different from normal people that what would count as horrible violations of a normal person is okay, or at least not all that bad, when done to "those people". Also, no need to listen to any complaints they have, since they don't know what they're saying anyway.
Generally, Sadler shows so much more awareness of potential problems with treatment and rehabilitation than many philosophers who write about these matters. Way too many philosophers are acutely aware of how harmful punishment can be, while utterly oblivious to the horrors that often befall people after they have been declared incompetent and exempt from responsibility. 

Regardless of whether one agrees with Sadler's radical conclusions, everyone should agree about the importance of an open discussion about these matters. There's no dividing line between the mad and the bad "out there" for us to discover. And history shows how difficult it is to construct a non-arbitrary line. 

So, this is a positive review. I recommend the book to all philosophers working on these topics, and to everyone else who researches or is simply interested in psychiatry and criminal justice. Or more broadly human nature.

After the recommendation, a reservation: Sadler contrasts common "folk-psychological" explanations of behaviour in terms of beliefs and desires with proper scientific explanations. Then he compares this distinction to the distinction between Newtonian physics and later scientific theories like special relativity and quantum mechanics. Folk psychology and Newton work well in everyday life, but when there's lots at stake and we need to be extra careful, they sometimes need to be replaced with more detailed and complicated theories.
Now I'm in deep water here since I'm not an expert on physics. Nevertheless, all physical explanations seem to me, ultimately, the same kind of explanation. They're all purely causal, tell us what causes what. Now, purely causal explanations may or may not conflict with each other. A biological explanation in terms of cellular events, a biochemical in terms of molecules, and a physical that zooms in on atoms need not conflict, since they take place on different levels of explanation. But causal explanations can conflict with each other. I take it that Newtonian physics actually conflict sometimes with relativity and quantum mechanics. When it does, we may say that Newtonian physics is less detailed but still has its place in everyday contexts where it's sufficiently precise for the purpose at hand, whereas we might need more detailed theories in other contexts.
Reasons explanations, on the other hand, are a different kind of explanation to causal explanations. "Folk psychology" is a loose term, and may involve more than reasons, but insofar as reasons are what we focus on - reasons may justify or not, show that you're action was rational or not, show whether it was moral or not ... Reason explanations are a different kind of explanation. They differ from all causal explanations, whether these causes are understood within a psychological, sociological, neurological, or other framework.
If I explain why I did what I just did by referring to my reasons for doing it, while a bunch of empirical scientists who study me provide causal explanations, the difference isn't that I give a rough and sloppy explanation whereas their explanations are detailed. We're looking at my action from completely different angles.
However, I might over-interpret the point that Sadler wanted to make with his Newton-relativity-quantum comparison. It's possible he agrees with everything I write here, in which case it's more of a comment than a reservation.

Now, I'm gonna nitpick. 

Sadler discusses - and obviously, he's not alone in this, these discussions are common - whether to say, e.g., "I have schizophrenia" or "I'm schizophrenic". The "am" vs "have" debate, "people first" vs "identity" language. He contrasts how people often say "I am" with regards to psychiatric diagnoses, with the "I have" language we use for physical health problems like cancer or a broken bone. Then, he says that this isn't all that weird, considering how intertwined a psychiatric condition may be with one's personality. 
But
a) it's not true that we say "I have" about all physical health problems, it differs from condition to condition, and
b) it's also not true that "I am" language, generally, implies that something is an important part of who I am.
Obviously people don't say "I am cancer" because "cancer" is a noun, you can't say that unless you're the personification of cancer itself, some kind of disease god or other supernatural entity. Similarly, people don't say "I am schizophrenia" or "I am depression". Now, with cancer, people don't usually say "I'm cancerous" either, but there are other physical health problems where "I am" language is common. "I'm diabetic", "I'm HIV-positive", "I'm lactose-intolerant", etc. In English, we say "I have a cold", but in Swedish, we say "jag är förkyld" - roughly, "I'm over-chilled".
Also, if we look at features other than health problems, we habitually use "I am" language about tons of things that aren't important parts of our personalities or who we are. "I'm medium blond", "I'm 169 cm tall", "I'm a Star Trek fan", and so on. In both English and Swedish, people are this or that number of years old and they are hungry if they haven't eaten for some time, whereas in Spanish and French, people have their years and have hunger. Surely these are random language differences that don't matter for how speakers conceive of their ages and states of hunger in relation to their personalities and identities.
And yet, in mental health contexts, people suddenly make a big deal out of "I am" vs "I have", as if these expressions have all these linguistic implications. Well, I guess "I am" vs "I have" have strong linguistic implications in the specific context of mental health now, because so many people have made such a big deal out of it for so long. But why did this come up in the first place? Given that "I am" vs "I have" don't have any interesting implications in language in general?
I can only assume it's because lots of people think it's horrible-horrible-horrible-shameful to have a mental health condition, and therefore they suffer intense second-hand shame every time they hear someone openly say, e.g., "I'm schizophrenic". If you're gonna talk about it, could you at least try to distance yourself from that horrible condition as much as possible?
If this was a peer-reviewed paper rather than a blog post, the imaginary peer reviewer would have this to say:
"That doesn't make any sense. You claim that there's no interesting distinction between 'I am' language vs 'I have', outside of mental health contexts and the special norms that have been created there by people who 'make a big deal out of it'. But if you're right about this, saying 'I have schizophrenia' wouldn't have signaled more detachment than saying 'I'm schizophrenic' until these special mental health language norms were already in place."
Fair enough, imaginary peer reviewer.
Anyway, it's weird. This entire insistence on "have" over "am" in mental health contexts is hella weird, let's just leave it at that.

Finally, philosophers who read this book may find some little annoyances here and there, where Sadler's terminology doesn't align with ours. For instance, at one point, he talks about adherents of retributivism who are  "couching the concept in the context of utilitarian ethics".
This reads as somewhat philosophically confused. Utilitarianism is the view that an action (including the act of punishing a criminal) is right if it maximizes utility (traditionally understood as happiness) and wrong otherwise. "Desert" has no place in utilitarian theory, except, perhaps, as a derived and pragmatically used term. Utilitarians since Jeremy Bentham and onwards have focused on the role that punishment allegedly has in deterring criminals from re-offending and deterring potential criminals from offending in the first place (something Sadler also recounts in his book). Retributivism is a different theory, according to which criminals should be punished because they deserve it.
Now, it's possible to hold a mixed theory, according to which we have several different reasons for punishing criminals; they deserve to be punished, and it's great if we can deter people from crime. Stephen Morse and others have pointed out that real-life politicians often freely mix appeals to an alleged deterrence effect and appeals to desert when they argue for harsher punishments. Nevertheless, claiming that we have both deterrence reasons and retributivist reasons to punish criminals is very different from saying that deterrence is a reason for retributivism.

Still, this was a very minor nitpick. Overall, I recommend this book. Agree with Sadler or not, he does raise some really important questions.

On pushing yourself and ignoring self-care as a disabled person

 This is something I've discussed a lot with my friend and fellow scholar Christine Bylund. She's an ethnologist, I'm a philosopher. She's got cerebral palsy, and I'm mad. But we have some common experiences of having pushed ourselves hard to get where we are now, while other people blame us for doing so (yeah, yeah, you don't want to call this blame - but I don't care what you wanna call it. I say "blame" anyway). Other people will blame you for supposedly internalizing destructive societal norms about the importance of hard work and grit. Other people will tell you that you ought to let go of these norms, and get better at self-care. This is because other people erroneously believe that this is always possible to do without serious negative consequences. 

1. Deterioration of the welfare state

Many western European countries that used to have strong welfare states and where strong job security used to be the norm have changed drastically over the last decades. Sweden is one of those. 

Bylund's doctoral dissertation features interviews with three generations of disabled people; the oldies who grew up in institutions, the middle-aged ones who grew up in a time where they had rights and real possibilities to live normal lives, and the young ones who have seen their rights seriously eroded - not so much on paper as in practice.
Laws aren't magic. If an entire system and most of the people who work there habitually ignore legal rights and entitlements because cutting costs is considered more important, there may be nothing that the system's victims can do about it. Sometimes, initially dismissed disabled people eventually get what they're entitled to through lots of stubbornness, information gathering, and legal council. Still, at the end of the day, you're always at the mercy of the people in charge; unless they listen, you can't force money, accommodations or assistance out of them. 

Nowadays, if you don't have a job, you might not have any money at all. You might lose all of your income, and lose your home. You might lose everything - especially if you're chronically ill or disabled.
Perhaps people close to you have a little money with which they try to help as best they can. Perhaps you can survive by the good graces of your parents or romantic partner. But as any feminist from the last few centuries can tell you, being wholly financially dependent on another is not without problems, even if their money is enough for both of you.

There's this well-known phenomenon where people think, of various calamities, that it won't happen to them. No particular reason, they're just irrationally certain that they will remain lucky. In a similar vein, many people apparently believe that no serious calamities can possibly befall people they know, who are perceived as being sufficiently similar to them. Therefore, many normate scholars believe that chronically ill or disabled scholars whom they know and have lots in common with, cannot possibly lose everything. Subsequently, they can't grasp why those disabled people keep struggling and pushing themselves instead of doing proper self-care.
Well. Everyone who ever lost everything had people who knew them; people who thought that nothing this bad could possibly happen to someone they know. Didn't save them.

2. In my best interest

Before I got my current job, I spent years in a downward spiral of deteriorating mental health which I (eventually in vain) tried to compensate for by taking more and more pills, as I moved from one fixed-term job to another. This wasn't because I thought going on sick leave would be shameful because of internalized job norms and blablabla. In the late nineties, I was on sick leave for six months at one point. I've been on sick leave for a month or two later than that. But nowadays, going on sick leave for mental problems is risky. Försäkringskassan (the public health insurance agency) may hound you - you should get back to work soon! You've been on sick leave long enough now! Time to recover already! Time to get back! - so much that the stress makes you sicker. And what happens if you go on sick leave and only get sicker and sicker? Eventually, they might simply kick you out of the system. If you're in terrible shape and absolutely can't work at this point, well, too bad - you've lost everything (see above). 

However, thanks to how I continued to push myself, combined with some much-needed good luck (we always need luck too, it's never all about your own effort), I finally landed my current job. I finally got job security, financial security, a generally idyllic and far less stressful life. I could finally begin to recover. 

It sucks balls - big, stinking donkey balls - that society looks like this. But given the way things are, I did what was in my best interests. Don't blame me for pushing myself "too hard" - blame society. 

3. In capitalism's best interests?

Occasionally, I come across the following idea: By dropping out of school or the workforce, we somehow hurt capitalism (I should add that it's people who see hurting capitalism as a worthy goal who claim this, not liberals and conservatives who worry that capitalism might get hurt). If this were right, there would exist a tension between on the one hand looking after your own interests and push yourself so you don't lose your income and home, and on the other hand fighting capitalism by dropping out.

This is wrong. Single individuals can't hurt the system by dropping out of job/school.
When most or all workers in a company strikes, the company is hurt. If most or all Swedish citizens went on strike at the same time, the nation would be hurt. Whether this is a good idea for a revolution really depends on how the entire plan would look and what is supposed to come after, but there's no doubt that it would have drastic effects. But single individuals can't hurt capitalism as a system by dropping out - and I'm not saying this merely because everything a single person does (unless that person holds a powerful position) has negligible effects. 

People have argued that it's pointless to go vegan, or pointless to go by train instead of plane, since the consequences of a single person's choices are negligible. However, some people who make that argument go on to say that we should, instead, focus on voting for political parties with good environmental policies (animal welfare policies, etc.) and support the right organizations. But the consequences of individual votes and individual memberships are negligible too. For my own part, I'm of a more Kantian than consequentialist bend, so I don't fret over negligible consequences; there are also consequentialists who try to show that the right kind of "moral mathematics" support the importance of individual choices after all.
In any case, going vegan, taking the train, voting for decent political parties, etc., are all importantly different from dropping out of school/job. Whereas, for instance, going vegan means that the meat industry gets a little less money than if I had continued to buy meat, capitalism as a whole isn't even a little hurt when I drop out. The meat industry doesn't need vegans, but capitalism needs the poor, desperate and unemployed. 

First, demand for workers isn't constant, it varies over time. Employers prefer a scenario in which there are unemployed, poor, and desperate people they can hire straight away when they suddenly need more workers, to a scenario in which they must outbid the competition to increase their staff.
Second, it's advantegous for employers that people who already have a job are afraid to lose it - scared workers will work harder and complain less. In addition to their function as "spares", unemployed, poor, and desperate people also serve as cautionary tales: Look! This is what happens to people who claim they're too sick to work. Watch and learn. Watch, and struggle for another day.

If you work or study, sure, you're a cog in the larger capitalist machine. But if you drop out, you're still a useful cog.

To sum up: Stop blaming disabled people for allegedly pushing themselves too hard. Blame society. Or better still; get politically active yourself and try to change things.

Review: Robert Chapman's Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism.

 This is a shorter review. I will likely write something longer and more academic in style later, possibly for a planned symposium on the book at Biopolitical Philosophy.

Everyone has problably witnessed, or even partaken in, debates over neuropsychiatric conditions like autism and ADHD, or common psychiatric conditions like depression and anxiety disorders. Why are so many people diagnosed these days? And then you get two camps who offer two radically different answers to that question.

First, you've got the camp who says that there's rampant over-diagnosis going on. People get diagnosed on really flimsy grounds these days. Does seven-year-old Timmy find it difficult to sit still in school? Slap an ADHD diagnosis on him, and fill him with stimulants! In the good old days, we knew that this was perfectly normal - lots of kids find school boring and have trouble sitting still, but nowadays, they all get diagnosed. Does little Lisa have trouble making friends? Is she, well, just too nerdy for her own good? Autism! No one is allowed to just be a little nerdy and a little weird these days, it's gotta be autism! Did Annie cry her eyes out after her boyfriend broke up with her? Depression! Bring on the SSRI pills! 

Then we've got the other camp, protesting that it's not all that easy. They point out, quite accurately, that most struggling kids and their parents, most suffering teenagers and twenty-somethings, has to suffer and suffer and fight and fight to get diagnosed. It often takes ages before someone can get access to medications and/or special accommodations. Much less accurately, they'll insist that just as many people struggled in the past, only then their struggles weren't recognized as legit by the mental health care system. Instead, the "pro diagnosis camp" claim, the kind of people who nowadays get diagnosed with ADHD/autism/depression/anxiety were labelled freaks, changelings, witches, or they would be locked away in institutions, or they would just go kill themselves.
This is plain false.
About 10% of US childrens are diagnosed with ADHD. Almost 3 % are diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum. Over 18 % of the US population are, at some point in their lives, diagnosed with depression. And these are just three common diagnoses - there are so many other psychiatric and neuropscyhiatric conditions. Of course, there's plenty of diagnostic overlap - you can't just add these numbers up. Nevertheless, the Johns Hopkins institute estimate that 26% of all Americans have one or more mental health conditions, and the WHO estimate that the same goes for 1 in 8 people worldwide. Thus, when the "pro diagnosis camp" claims that the same people who would have gotten diagnosed today, were labelled witches and burnt at the stake or institutionalized in horrible conditions or simply killed themselves in the past, this is blatantly false - it's not the case that 12-26% of the population regularly suffered these fates, until modern psychiatry came around to save us.

However, the idea that either there's rampant over-diagnosis and people are diagnosed and treated on the flimsiest grounds, or else the number of people with (neuro)psychiatric disabilities remain constant through time whether they get helped or not, is a false dichotomy. Chapman argues, in Empire of Normality, for a third option: present-day capitalist society keeps raising the bar for how productive, efficient, socially competent, focused, and overall how normal you gotta be to keep up. As the bar goes higher and higher, more and more people fall below it, which results in actual, serious suffering and struggles.

I've occasionally seen radical disability activists claim that disability as a concept didn't exist until the industrial revolution. This claim seems both weird on the face of it, and contradicts some historical research I'm acquainted with. Chapman makes the somewhat weaker and much more plausible claim that with the industrial revolution and arrival of modern medicine, the view on disability became much more streamlined. In pre-industrial society, people who would be considered disabled today could sometimes find themselves a niche on the farm where they got along just fine - for instance, a blind or deaf woman might still be able to do traditional female farm chores. Other people might be considered scary freaks or just plain useless - whereas some disabled people were seen in a positive light, as having a special connection to God, and subsequently getting an extra privileged treatment. In short, it varied wildly.
With the industrial revolution and the arrival of modern medicine - the latter of which, Chapman hastens to stress, did save countless lives and drastically improved the quality of life of many - the view on disability/normality became tightly connected to productivity in standard work conditions. If you weren't fit to work a normal job at a normal pace, you were broken and bad. 

Even today, many medical diagnoses, in particular within the psychiatric realm, are explicitly defined in terms of distress and dysfunction - and the latter, in turn, tied to your (in)ability to work a normal job and/or study in the normal educational system. If you can't do this, at least not without special help and special adjustments, you're deemed disordered or disabled. A natural consequence is that more and more people will be judged disordered or disabled as the demands go up, up, up. Thus, both these things can be true:
1. It's very difficult to get a (neuro)psychiatric diagnosis, and get access to medication, special accommodations and other kinds of help. You need to suffer and struggle quite seriously first.
2. Many, many people who get diagnosed today wouldn't have qualified for a diagnosis if they had been born fifty or a hundred years ago - they'd have been considered normal back then.

Now, popular media do sometimes publish optimistic articles about how employees with autism and ADHD might help companies increase their productivity. People who have trouble managing many jobs and many social contexts might find their special little niche in which they thrive and help their employer make more money. However, this will never apply to more than a small subgroup of all people with (neuro)psychiatric diagnoses. There will still be an ingroup of people deemed useful and productive by our capitalist society, and an outgroup deemed useless and costly, because they demand all this extra help and special accommodations and mental health care. To really change this ingroup-outgroup dynamic - rather than just move a few individuals from one group to the other - we must change society quite drastically.  

In a capitalist society obsessed with productivity and making more and more money, Chapman writes, there is an inherent tension:
On the one hand, the bar for how socially competent, cheery, stress-resilient, flexible, fast-thinking, hard-working, etc. etc. employees must be, keeps rising. This means that over time, fewer and fewer people manage to reach the bar, and thus fewer and fewer people are considered normal/neurotypical. More and more people are diagnosed with a neuropsychiatric disability because they fail to live up to society's demands, and/or diagnosed with a mental illness as the ever-increasing demands causes them to break down.
On the other hand, a fiercely competitive capitalist society can only afford a certain number of sick and disabled people, can only affort to let a certain number of people live on welfare, can only afford a certain number of employees to get special accommodations and a certain number of students extra help in school. 

So far, the neurodiversity movement has operated largely within a liberal, rights-based framework, and for some time, people made progress by insisting that neurodivergent people should be seen as a marginalized group that require equal rights. But nowadays, this progress seems to have, by and large, come to a stand-still. More and more parents of neurodivergent children as well as adults with (neuro)psychiatric diagnoses find that it gets increasingly difficult to get the special help and accommodations that you're legally entitled to on paper. Now, many people seem downright puzzled by this development. They seem to think it's just some large accident that this happens, and that it should be possible to correct without any large-scale changes to society.

No. This tension is built into our present-day capitalist system. It's built in both that more and more people qualify for diagnoses because they simply can't manage the normal school system or normal job market without all kinds of extra help, and that this extra help will be denied them, because there's a limit to how many ill or disabled people the system can afford. 

Chapman, unfortunately but understandably, doesn't give us a recipe for revolution towards the end. But step one is to, at least, recognize that this tension is built into capitalism. It's not something we can just fix by providing people with better information about various diagnoses and neurodiversity. Some kind of more thorough-going societal change must take place.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in issues of neurodiversity, psychiatry and capitalism.

Animal experimentation and experiments on humans

 It's widely accepted that whether medical experiments on animals - not any particular experiment, but the institution at large - is morally justified, completely hinges on whether non-human animals have the same moral status as humans. It's widely believed that if the animal rights people were right, it would follow that animal experimentation would be unjustified. But if the common view on which much of legislation and common-sense morality rest (in my own Sweden and many other countries) is correct - that is, if the moral status of non-human animals is substantial but far less than that of humans - animal experimentation is easily morally justified. We may quibble about particular experiments, but by and large, the benefits for mankind outweighs all the animal suffering. 

Sometimes animal experimentation is argued for by the ridiculously bad argument that scientists who do animal experiments aren't evil, and wouldn't harm animals unless it was absolutely necessary. But of course the disjunction "either scientists are evil, or all their choices are morally optimal" is false. I know very well that scientists who do animal experiments tend to think that what they're doing is necessary and for the best. But just like everyone else, scientists may be morally mistaken.
Sometimes animal experimentation is argued for by the likewise ridiculously bad argument that everyone would want to save their child rather than a rat in an emergency - say, the old philosophy favourite of a burning house, and you only have time to rescue one of the living beings trapped inside before the whole thing collapses. Well, I for one would also want to save my child if I had one - or any child, really - rather than, say, Niklas "Hagamannen" Lindgren from that same burning building (for all you non-Swedes, he committed a series of brutal rapes in the late 1990s/early 00s). I wouldn't flip a coin, I'd try to save the child without a second thought. But I'm not thereby, on pain of inconsistency, forced to embrace the idea of non-consensual harmful medical experiments on convicts. I believe that even Niklas Lindgren, as horrible as he is, should have his basic human rights respected. Non-consensual harmful medical experiments is a completely different beast to "who would you save out of a burning building, if you could only save one?"

Thus, both these pro-vivisection arguments are ridiculously bad. Moreover:

1. LaFolette and Shanks' classic paper - the moral calculation just doesn't check out, even if we accept that non-human animals have far lower moral status than humans

It is widely accepted that animal experiments are easily morally justified on the assumption that animals have lower moral status than humans, despite this decades-old paper by LaFolette and Shanks. Their argument in the paper goes roughly like this: People defend animal experimentation by consequentialist arguments. They argue that since non-human animals have less worth than humans, and their suffering subsequently matters less, then

(animal suffering)<(human health benefits)

- thus, moral justification. But actually, even if we accept the premise that animals have lower moral status, so that, say, a hundred pain units as experienced by mice can be outweighed by only one health benefit unit as experienced by a human being, the calculation is much more complicated than that, and unlikely to check out.

First, on any consequentialist calculation, numbers matter. We have to factor in the enormous number of suffering lab animals.

Also, on any consequentialist calculation - heck, on standard decision-theory! on simple common sense! - probabilities matter. When we harm animals in a medical expeirment, their suffering is certain, but whether humans will benefit from this or that research program is always very uncertain. If we look at heavily funded medical research areas like cancer and Alzeimers, the success rates are abysmal. About 97% of all new cancer drugs that look promising on the animal experimentation stage, and 99% of all new Alzeimer drugs, fail to reach the market for human patients. (There's tons written about the "translation problem" - most of it not from opponents to animal experimentation, who usually focus more on animal rights arguments, but from a general scientific standpoint. Even if you wouldn't give a fuck about animals, this is obviously a big problem.)
Actually, since humans so often react differently to drugs than non-human animals do, it's highly likely that some drugs that were abandoned before going to human trials - because they were harmful for or at least not helpful for the lab animals -  would have been great for human patients.

Moreover, in all other areas of the law and common-sense morality, we treat the distinction between action and omission as extremely important - even more important than the animal-human distinction. We have laws against wanton animal cruelty, but there are no laws against not benefitting random strangers. Even jurisdictions that have "duty to assist" laws only require that people do something - like call the police or an ambulance - when they witness an immediate emergency. No one is legally required to do things that benefit unidentified strangers in the future, such as give money to or work for charity programs. But animal experimentation is all about intentionally harming animals in order to maybe, possibly, benefit unidentified strangers in the future. 

What we have here isn't (animal suffering) vs (human health benefits). It's 

(animal suffering)X(huge number)X(100%certainty)X(the moral seriousness of acting)
vs
(human health benefits)X(some much lower number)X(some low probability)X(the lower moral seriousness of omission)

- it's just highly implausible that the calculation checks out - i.e., that multiplying everything on the animal side will yield a lower total score than when we multiply everything on the human side - even if we accept the premise that animals have much lower moral status than humans. 

2. The alternative timeline

 In addition to the above, it's a mistake to look at all the medicines and medical procedures we have and declare that we would have none of them without animal experiments. It's a huge mistake to say that we would have been stuck with early twentieth century medicine still, if early twentieth century protests against animal experiments had succeeded in getting these practices banned. 

Compare: In the early twentieth century, there were both electric cars and fossile-fuel cars around. For various reasons, car manufacturers then went with fossile-fuel cars. The developtment of electric cars got stalled, and didn't pick up again until we got a serious debate about fossile fuels and the greenhouse effect.
Suppose someone had said, twenty years ago: "Okay, fossile fuels are bad for the climate. Still though, I'm happy that car manufactorers put all these resources into developing good petrol cars. Otherwise, we would be stuck with electric cars only, and they are so crap! There are so few of them for starters, extremely difficult to even buy one if you want to. There's almost nowhere you can charge them, and you can only drive them for very very short distances before you need to recharge. So I'm really glad we have fossile fuel cars to drive!"
That person would be seriously confused, because if car manufacturers had gone all in with electric cars in the early twentieth century, clearly those would have been pretty good at the turn of the millenium. We don't know how good, exactly, but much better in this alternative timeline than they were in the real world. 

Although we don't know what the state of medicine would be in the alternative scenario in which animal experimentation got banned in the early twentieth century, we can be pretty certain advances would still have been made. Scientists and doctors wouldn't just have shrugged and given up completely because they couldn't experiment on animals. 

Moreover, this makes the above calculation even more complicated. On the human benefit side, we should actually put only those human benefits that we couldn't get by any other method. Now, someone might say that no one would do animal experiments if there was any other way, so this is a moot point - but see above. Just because scientists aren't evil and relish in tormenting animals, this doesn't mean that they make optimal choices all the time. All researchers in all fields have a tendency to continue using established methods which aren't necessarily perfect.

 3. Animal experiments to save poor marginalized humans?

Some people argue that we should have animal experiments because otherwise, medical scientists will surely torment poor marginalized humans instead. Sometimes people then proceed to list Doctor Mengele's concentration camp experiments, the Tuskagee syphilis study, or, in a Swedish context, the Vipeholm dental health study. However, none of these terrible experiments or studies took place because animal experiments had been banned. These researchers didn't reluctantly harm humans because they couldn't harm animals - on the contrary, animal experiments were less regulated back then than they are now. 

Researchers have experimented on disabled and otherewise oppressed and marginalized humans either for purely sadistic reasons, or because they can get human data that way. As I pointed out above, very little of what works for lab animals end up working for humans. 

Rules and legislation for animal experimentation explicitly embraces the view that it is morally right to harm and kill those who have lower moral status if there's some chance that doing so might benefit those with higher moral status. This isn't supposed to threaten disabled and marginalized people, because we're supposed to have the same moral status as all other humans, all humans are supposed to be equal. 

HOWEVER.

Disability activists have seriously questioned whether this really is the case. For instance, psychology professor Dick Sobsey wrote this important article on the murder of Tracy Latimer, who was killed by her own father. He shut her in the family car, started the engine and lead the exhaust fumes in to her until she died. The father initially tried to get away with the murder, changed his story multiple times, but eventually claimed that he had carbon-monoxide-poisoned Tracy for her own good, because she had cerebral palsy and suffered so. Despite the fact that even his final story contained many claims that were weird from a purely medical perspective about Tracy’s condition and her suffering, both mainstream media and famous philosophy professor James Rachels bought his story wholesale, and considered it outrageous that he was sentenced to prison when he only wanted what was best for his daughter.
This is nothing unique when it comes to murders of disabled people, which Sobsey discusses further in the article. It's often assumed that the murder was for the best, that the murderer tells the truth when he calls it a "mercy killing", even if there's no other evidence whatsoever that the victim wanted to die.
There are several cases of disabled patients in countries with legalized active euthanasia who testify that clinicians have tried to pressure them into choosing death, like CanadianRoger Foley. Movies, TV shows and books frequently portray disabled people's death as bittersweet rather than wholly tragic - so sad, but they're finally free of their terrible existence! And there are many, many blogs and social media accounts which collect anecdotes from disabled people, or parents of disabled people, who's heard the most terrible comments from others who may not perceive themselves as hateful at all, but rather as compassionate and well-meaning. 

And then, of course, we have the philosophers. James Rachels argued in a textbook used by millions of students worldwide that the killing of Tracy Latimer was morally right, we can see this if only we think rationally about the matter and don't get too emotional. Peter Singer argues that non-human animals and disabled people live worse lives than normal people do, that it may be right to kill both disabled people and non-human animals in situations in which it's absolutely not okay to kill normal people, and that illness and death of the disabled or the non-human just don't weigh as heavily in the utilitarian calculation as the death of normal people do.
Other philosophers absolutely don't want to equate disabled people with animals, because they're not some kind of animal liberation extremists like Singer! Of course humans differ, morally, from non-humans! But they still strain really hard to explain why disabled people, intellectually disabled in particular, should be included in the realm of individuals with full moral status. Maybe the disabled could have a kind of honorary human status, despite not being truly fully human? This idea comes up again and again in the literature. 

I really don't think the combination of the rampant ableism that exists in society, and the explicit endorsement of the view that it's right to harm and kill those with lower worth if there's some possible future benefit to be had for those with higher worth, puts disabled people in a very secure position. Experiments on disabled or marginalized humans would be more unthinkable and our situation more secure if society ditched the idea that we can justifiably harm less valuable individuals for the sake of the more valuable ones.