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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   38491 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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You made a big leap from left-handedness to missing limb, which is commonly accepted as a disability, and ignored all of the in-between.

Yes, it was deliberate.

Thats my point: OP criticized the very idea of normative categories due to biological deviations but conveniently picks one deviation that most people would now argue falls outside of the category of "disability" (because such people fall within the normative category of "healthy").

It seems to me that even in his attempt to "problematize" such categories he's trying to leverage their assumptions. Presumably because arguing that "health" as such is a meaningless category is a fringe position.

It's only a "leap" once I accept that there is such a thing as health and it doesn't exclude certain minor deviations but excludes larger ones. On the category skeptical view who is to say?

I want to push him to apply his logic consistently, to cases intuitively considered less thorny.

If he doesn't see this as a problem then I refer back to my OPs final paragraph.

I think the mistake is viewing categories as “real” things that exist outside of your mind. Categories aren’t “real”, they’re a fuzzy concept that humans invented. This doesn’t mean that they’re meaningless; they’re an abstraction through which to compress tons of information about a subject, allowing you to make decisions more effectively. Every category is like this, from species to planets to sandwiches to chairs.

So if you ask is “X a disease”, you should be aware that disease isn’t a thing that objectively exists outside of human interpretation. Most cases are clearcut so this doesn’t matter, but occasionally you do have ambiguities, like sickle cell traits which offer resistance against malaria at the cost of other health complications - it’s a disease in the western world, but in some African countries it can literally save your life.

I think the mistake is viewing categories as “real” things that exist outside of your mind. Categories aren’t “real”, they’re a fuzzy concept that humans invented. This doesn’t mean that they’re meaningless; they’re an abstraction through which to compress tons of information about a subject, allowing you to make decisions more effectively. Every category is like this, from species to planets to sandwiches to chairs.

So, if categories do carve reality at the joints sometimes, how does this square with:

The more I've thought about the concept of disease and disability, the more I've become convinced that there isn't actually a good philosophical grounding for talking about variation and difference in normative terms.

You're providing one potential grounding and justification of categories - they are tied to important things that are truth-apt. Why is that not enough for grounding, when OP's own examples seem to quite clearly show implicit use of "meaningful" categories?

I think OP is being inconsistently nihilist. He should either pay the full price of nihilism or accept that he's right there with the rest of us and can't just blithely dismiss categories via edge cases to avoid inconvenient exclusions.

Put it another way: can I use OP's argument to dismiss, I dunno, flesh-eating bacteria as a disease? If not, why not? How does the above argument not prove too much?

So if you ask is “X a disease”, you should be aware that disease isn’t a thing that objectively exists outside of human interpretation.

I don't see how that helps OP. First of all, it's debatable what's objective or not (or what we mean by it). Morality is widely considered objective by ethicists and is even more subject to this criticism.

For another: why does "disease" need to exist outside of humanity? Isn't it enough that OP seems quite clearly able to see that "left-handedness" is only weakly (or not at all) within the disease camp but flesh-eating bacteria would be? Why did he not leverage a more intuitively absurd example? If they know they can't, why do they think they can just dismiss categories when they're quite clearly guiding him?

I don’t agree with OP’s blanket dismissal of categories. “Disease” is a very useful category, my argument is simply to recognise that humans have a tendency to ask “is X a disease” when the real question actually is “should X be cured”, and focusing on whether X is a “really” a disease or not is pointless.

Flesh-eating bacteria neatly fit into the category of “disease”. But, is having sickle cell traits a disease? Is having parasitic worms a disease? You might scoff at the latter - but there’s potential evidence that over-sanitation and elimination of parasites is what is causing the huge spike in auto-immune conditions in the west. So it’s important to ask the real questions, which is “should we cure X”, or “how do we manage X”, not “is X a disease”.

I don’t agree with OP’s blanket dismissal of categories.

Fair enough. TBF it's unclear how far OP will take it themselves.

“Disease” is a very useful category, my argument is simply to recognise that humans have a tendency to ask “is X a disease” when the real question actually is “should X be cured”, and focusing on whether X is a “really” a disease or not is pointless.

The term "disease" has normative implications. The implication that it should be cured is built into debating whether something is a disease.

It's really the same discussion.

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