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• Reply to response from Levy
  Bennett M Foddy
  Published on: 2 March 2004
• Deaf Children - A Response to Foddy
  Neil Levy
  Published on: 2 February 2004
• Deaf Children – A response to Levy
  Bennett Foddy
  Published on: 21 November 2003

• Published on: 2 March 2004

  Reply to response from Levy

  • Bennett M Foddy, Research Assistant

  Dear Editor

  I very much like Levy’s first argument in his letter of response[1]:

  ‘[I]t is false to think that in all cases in which X is worse off as a result of Y's actions, X has had her rights violated by Y.’

  Levy makes a good point that members of society are not discriminating against the deaf, when they use the spoken word and audible alarms, and so forth, as part of their everyday lives. Nobody...

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  Dear Editor

  I very much like Levy’s first argument in his letter of response[1]:

  ‘[I]t is false to think that in all cases in which X is worse off as a result of Y's actions, X has had her rights violated by Y.’

  Levy makes a good point that members of society are not discriminating against the deaf, when they use the spoken word and audible alarms, and so forth, as part of their everyday lives. Nobody in the hearing community is personally responsible for the everyday difficulties faced by the deaf.

  Levy seems to accept my claim that our society could have developed some other way. Societies develop through the actions of their citizens. We might imagine that X, who is deaf, is worse off than Y because Z, their distant ancestor, helped to spread the use of a spoken language which X cannot use. The failure of Levy’s argument lies in his second claim, which is essentially that Z was justified in establishing this logocentric norm because of the particular usefulness of hearing and the spoken word. Levy’s argument is meant to establish the innocence of both Y and Z, but I think that Z’s innocence is much harder to show.

  It seems to me that it is just false that the primacy of the spoken word ‘reflect[s] the advantages of using all the modes of communication available to us’. We certainly do not use all of the available modes of communication. We do not use smell for signaling, we do not blow air on each other’s faces by way of speech, and we rarely touch to communicate. We do not communicate by dance or by blinking. Each of these modes has its own unique advantages and each could presumably be used as a complex, syntactic language. Though no current society uses these modes of communication, they all happened to develop so that those who cannot smell, blow or taste are not disadvantaged. Certainly, there are some minor advantages to hearing which are irreplaceable by other senses, but this is also true of smell, on which we do not depend at all. If we voluntarily live without sign language, which is uniquely useful in many situations, it is hard to see why we should view the discriminatory use of speech as a justified, non-arbitrary choice.

  Sometimes the mere absence of a sense can have its own advantages, depending on the environment we live in. There are minor advantages to everyone being deaf or blocking their ears - for example, the ability to use deafeningly loud machinery in all places, at all times. Cars would run more efficiently without mufflers. Construction could proceed at night. One could own a Chihuahua. Deaf people could claim that the choice to deafen oneself and run an un-muffled motorbike would simply ‘reflect the advantages’ of being deaf. From this perspective, the natural benefits of hearing offer no justification at all for the elevated position of the spoken word in our society.

  Levy’s claim that ‘our social world is necessarily designed so that certain abilities are rewarded more than others and certain limitations are more constraining’ is probably one of life’s harsh truths. Yet, as seems to admit, it is a contingent, historical fact that the limited, constrained people are the deaf people. Furthermore, as I have discussed, it is not a historical fact which has its basis in any clearly justified choice – unless it is justified by the fact that the deaf are a minority group. Perhaps Levy means to imply that, when building social rules, we may privilege the interests of the majority over the interests of the minority, since this arrangement will result in a lower level of suffering. Then, if deaf people were in the majority, the hearing should be doomed to a life of tinnitus caused by the noisy machinery run by the deaf. Their ‘aural hypersensitivity’ would seem like a necessary limitation, since their suffering would be caused by their social environment. Perhaps this suffering would be ‘simply inevitable’ and not discriminatory at all – but before we agree with that, let us consider the following argument:

  What if it was ‘inevitable’ due to some similarly arbitrary facts of history, that black children were worse off than white children? Suppose we lived in a country where current attitudes were not particularly discriminatory, but where past discrimination, by people who are now dead, had left blacks with a tiny share of the wealth. Suppose we also agree that X, who is wealthy, does not wrong Y, who is poor, when X refuses to give Y his money. This is in line with the common-sense, capitalist morality that constitutes much of our society at present.

  In such a society, the wealthy white majority would not be wronging the poor racial minority, when they simply hold on to their own money. The impoverished black minority would be less well off due to historical misfortune, and not wronged or discriminated against by any living people.

  On Levy’s arguments, and these two premises, we should ‘think much less of’ black parents who do not surrender their children to wealthy infertile whites. We should tell them that, due to the actions of our now-dead forebears, they should not raise children who will be poor like them. I find this conclusion unacceptable, and I think it elucidates the problem with Levy’s argument.

  The passage of history may absolve current individuals of discriminations from which they benefit. But it does not mean that the society is a just and non-discriminatory one. We have a discriminatory society comprised of non-discriminating individuals, clinging justly to their inherited lot. That is the problem for the deaf. Their children will be worse off as a result of some unjustified historical choices, and not their own reproductive choices. We should not require them to make reproductive choices which validate some historical injustice, no matter how prudent those choices are.

  When we tell the deaf that their deaf children will be worse off, we are using the injustice of our society as a coercive tool, as an ultimatum. When we do this, we become responsible for the discriminatory nature of our society, and we wrong the deaf, just as we wrong a person when we hold them at gunpoint. Thus, the situation is in some ways unlike Levy’s description of the crazed gunman in the park – perhaps a more enlightening description would be this:

  “Today there was a crazed gunman in the park who shot at everyone he saw. Nonetheless, some parents came to the park and their child was shot. The gunman thought much less of the parents whose child he had killed”.

  Reference

  (1) Levy N. Deaf Children - A Response to Foddy [electronic response to N Levy; Deafness, culture, and choice] medethics.com 2004http://jme.bmjjournals.com/cgi/eletters/28/5/284#110

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  Conflict of Interest:
  None declared.

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• Published on: 2 February 2004

  Deaf Children - A Response to Foddy

  • Neil Levy, Research Fellow

  Dear Editor

  Bennett Foddy interprets the view I express in 'Deafness, culture, and choice' (JME 2002: 28) correctly: deaf children are contingently, and not necessarily, worse off as a result of their disability. Indeed, this claims seems almost tautological: to be better or worse off is inherently relational, so it is easy to imagine worlds in which the deaf would not be worse off. A world in which everyone was de...

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  Dear Editor

  Bennett Foddy interprets the view I express in 'Deafness, culture, and choice' (JME 2002: 28) correctly: deaf children are contingently, and not necessarily, worse off as a result of their disability. Indeed, this claims seems almost tautological: to be better or worse off is inherently relational, so it is easy to imagine worlds in which the deaf would not be worse off. A world in which everyone was deaf is one obvious case.

  But Foddy's claim that this fact shows the deaf have a right to ensure that their children are also deaf is false. His argument seems to have two premises. First, he argues that if the deaf are only contingently worse off than the hearing, then this must be because they are discriminated against. "[T]heir deafness is a constraint only because our society discriminates against those who cannot hear", he writes. Second, he implies that since their lives are constrained only as a result of discrimination, we have no right to object to their parents' choices to ensure that they are deaf. Both claims are false.

  First, it is false to think that in all cases in which X is worse off as a result of Y's actions, X has had her rights violated by Y. Y might have been justified in acting as she did, even in cases in which X is an innocent bystander. Every person has different abilities and limitations, but our social world is necessarily designed so that certain abilities are rewarded more than others and certain limitations are more constraining. This is simply a result of the fact that choices must be made: buildings must be designed, systems of communication chosen, modes of transport developed, and so on. Some people are worse off as a consequence of these choices, through no fault of their own. This is simply inevitable.

  This kind of situation prevails with regard to the deaf. Moreover, our choices here are not arbitrary, but instead reflect the advantages of using using all the modes of communication available to us. Foddy thinks that the only good argument which might be advanced for the universal abandonment of sound as a means of communication and entertainment would turn on the transition costs of moving to a soundless society, but this is false. Sound has qualities which vision does not. It is not limited by the direction of the gaze of individuals, it is able to wake sleeping people (think of the difficulty of replacing fire alarms with lights which would be as effective), and so on. In choosing a world in which sound is important, we make a justified choice. As a result, the deaf are worse off. But they are not discriminated against, because their rights are not infringed (which isn't to say that the deaf are not discriminated against in many other ways, of course).

  So Foddy's first premise is straightforwardly false. His second premise is also disputable, if not as obviously wrong as the first. Suppose the disadvantages of the deaf were entirely a product of discrimination. Would it not still be the case that the choice of deaf parents to ensure that their children would be worse off than they would otherwise be is, at least, questionable? Of course, all of us, who (in this scenario) are responsible for the discrimination against the deaf would bear a significant portion of the blame for the disadvantages of such deaf children. But this would not exonerate the deaf parent entirely. Suppose you knew that a crazed gunman would shoot indiscriminately at every person he saw in the park today. If you nevertheless took your child to the park, we would think much less of you, despite the fact that the risks faced by your child were produced by the evil actions of the gunman. The fact that a harm is a product of wrongful actions does not give a parent the right to place their child in its way.

  The desire of deaf parents to have children who resemble them and who identify with their culture is understandable. Nevertheless, there are powerful reasons to think that, all things considered, this is a desire upon which they ought not to act.

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  Conflict of Interest:
  None declared.

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• Published on: 21 November 2003

  Deaf Children – A response to Levy

  • Bennett Foddy

  Dear Editor

  In his article ‘Deafness, culture and choice’, Neil Levy argues that ‘the deaf will always be cut off from the buzz of conversation, always restricted to a narrower range of jobs, always slightly alienated from the mainstream of political, social, and cultural life.’[1]

  He argues that deaf children will always be somewhat worse off than hearing children, because ‘We are, in many ways, a logocen...

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  Dear Editor

  In his article ‘Deafness, culture and choice’, Neil Levy argues that ‘the deaf will always be cut off from the buzz of conversation, always restricted to a narrower range of jobs, always slightly alienated from the mainstream of political, social, and cultural life.’[1]

  He argues that deaf children will always be somewhat worse off than hearing children, because ‘We are, in many ways, a logocentric culture – one which is centred around the voice’. We can interpret this claim of Levy’s in two ways. One interpretation is that Levy is making a practical argument that this logocentricity is so ingrained that we can predict with certainty that it will always remain central to our culture, and that deaf children will remain worse off. The other is that Levy is making the claim that our culture is necessarily, irrevocably logocentric. Let us consider the latter argument first. Can this really be Levy’s claim? It is not so hard to imagine a world without speech. Try walking through your day mentally, replacing spoken language with sign language. Replace telephones with videophones, and imagine teletext subtitles on television shows. Wave and smile at your co-workers instead of saying hello. Not only is such a world thoroughly possible, it is not obvious that we would be substantially worse off. Some might argue that migrating to sign-language would disadvantage the blind. Yet in the USA, there are fewer people who have trouble reading, than those who have trouble hearing conversation.[2] As a whole, then, our society might be better off if we migrated to sign. Of course, it would require an enormously difficult and painful change to migrate a hearing majority to a silent system of language, and it is this practical difficulty which probably ensures that such a migration will never happen.

  We must assume, therefore, that it is the practical argument which Levy is making. If this is Levy’s goal, then he means to show us that for contingent practical reasons such as the difficulty of migrating to sign language, we can reasonably predict that deaf children will always be constrained by their deafness. It seems to me that this reasoning, if anything, supports the central claim of the Deaf – that their deafness is a constraint only because our society discriminates against those who cannot hear.

  The Deaf are not proposing that we should replace spoken language with sign language, of course. Neither are they arguing that their children will not be disadvantaged by being deaf. They are asking that it be recognised that they are effectively disabled by the hearing majority, not by some difference in their physiology, and that this distinction means that if deaf children are worse off than hearing ones, it is because of society’s discrimination, not because of the actions of the deaf parents. This argument is not vulnerable to practical arguments like Levy’s. If we continually discriminate against deaf people when we build our telephones and engage in our spoken cultural, political and social customs, then it certainly is through our discriminatory actions that they are worse off; this fact is not affected by the difficulties we may face in ridding our culture of its discriminatory structure.

  I have yet to see an argument which faces up to the claims of the Deaf. It seems to me that to establish that the deaf are not discriminated against, or that the discrimination is not wrongful, we would need to show that people whose physiology differs from the mainstream have no right of equal access to our cultural, social, and political life. Perhaps this can be shown, but I doubt it.

  Utilitarian arguments might establish that the discrimination against deaf people is outweighed by the difficulties involved in migrating the mainstream to a deaf-friendly society, but they will never establish on their own that this discrimination does not exist. If it does exist, then it seems to me that the deaf ought to be allowed their claim that their disadvantage is the fault of the selfish hearing population, and it does follow from this that they should be allowed to have their deaf children, while lamenting that the hearing majority has built a world that limits the future of their child. After all, we do allow parents from other minority groups to knowingly have children who will, like them, suffer from discrimination.

  I would suggest that a successful argument against having deaf children would need to involve the claim that deaf children are worse off in ways which cannot be changed, no matter what. These will not be social reasons. Examples might be that deaf children will find it harder to avoid oncoming trains, or that they will never experience the pleasure of listening to the singing of whales. These limitations, whilst much less grievous than the discriminatory social limitations, cannot be changed, and therefore cannot constitute discrimination. Of course, it may be that these minor limitations do not present us with enough reason to prevent deaf parents from having deaf children.

  In either case, it is certainly not enough to merely prove, as Levy does, that deaf children will be worse off than hearing children. Deaf parents know this, as do the parents of female children, black children, poor children, and children of religious minorities. If we wish to deny deaf parents their right to have deaf children, we must either dispute their claim that they are wrongfully discriminated against, or show that they are worse off in some necessary, irreparable way.

  References

  (1) Levy N. Deafness, Culture, and Choice. J Med Ethics 2002;28:284-285

  (2) McNeil J. Americans with disabilities: 1994-95. Current Population Reports, US Census Bureau: Washington DC, 1997: P70-61

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  Conflict of Interest:
  None declared.

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