Introduction
In a piece published in 2003 in the New York Times Magazine, the lawyer and disability rights activist Harriet McBryde Johnson writes movingly about a visit to Princeton to debate Peter Singer.Footnote 1 McBryde Johnson takes Singer to be committed to the view that, given the muscle-wasting disease with which she was born, it would have been morally justifiable for her parents to have killed her as a small infant in order to have another child who would have had a better chance of happiness. McBryde Johnson struggles throughout to reconcile her revulsion at Singer's philosophical position (which he continues to defend unapologetically without denying its consequences in McBryde Johnson's case) with his likeable character. Toward the end of the piece, she attempts to sum up her response to his position:
The peculiar drama of my life has placed me in a world that by and large thinks it would be better if people like me did not exist. My fight has been for accommodation, the world to me, and me to the world.
As a disability pariah, I must struggle for a place, for kinship, for community, for connection. I am still seeking acceptance of my humanity; Singer's call to get past species seems a luxury way beyond my reach. My goal isn't to shed the perspective that comes from my particular experience, but to give voice to it. I want to be engaged in the tribal fury that rages when opposing perspectives are let loose.
I can only trust in the fact that, while we struggle, we must live with our theories and with one another. As a shield from the terrible purity of Singer's vision, I'll look to the corruption that comes from interconnectedness. To justify my hopes that Singer's theoretical world—and its entirely logical extensions—won't become real, I'll invoke the muck and mess and undeniable reality of disabled lives well lived. That's the best I can do. (Johnson Reference Johnson2006: 228)
In this paper, I want to try to understand exactly what McBryde Johnson is talking about when she refers to the ‘terrible purity’ of Singer's vision and why she might want to ‘shield’ herself from this purity by returning to ‘the corruption that comes from interconnectedness’. In other words, I want to focus on a critique that I take McBryde Johnson to be making that has less to do with the content of Singer's argument than with its form. Needless to say, McBryde Johnson objects to the content of Singer's argument too, but her objection to its form seems to me to articulate a concern about the aspirations of a certain kind of moral theory that is worth trying to understand in its own right.Footnote 2
The main idea of the paper might be understood in roughly the following way. In the paragraph quoted above, McBryde Johnson draws two important contrasts. First, she juxtaposes Singer's call to ‘get past species’ with her struggle to gain acceptance of her humanity. Second, she juxtaposes Singer's goal of shedding the perspective of particular experience with her desire to give voice to that experience. I want to suggest that these two contrasts are closely connected. To attempt give voice to one's particular experience is part of what it means to seek acceptance of one's humanity. The problem with Singer's ‘theoretical world’—and indeed the theoretical world of much contemporary moral philosophy—is that it leaves no room for someone like Harriet McBryde Johnson to give voice to her particular experience and thus runs the risk of failing to recognize her humanity.
I will do my best to clarify and defend all of these claims in the remainder of the paper, but it is worth offering at least a couple of provisional clarifications here, if only to head off the possibility of some avoidable misunderstandings. Clearly there is no question of Singer failing to recognize Harriet McBryde Johnson's humanity in the sense of failing to recognize her membership in the species Homo sapiens. When McBryde Johnson talks about ‘seeking acceptance of [her] humanity’, I take it that she does not mean ‘humanity’ in the biological sense. Part of the challenge we need to confront if we are to understand McBryde Johnson's critique of Singer is to understand what else might be meant by recognizing someone's humanity if that does not simply mean recognizing that person's status as Homo sapiens.Footnote 3 A further challenge—and one that I will address in more depth later in the paper—is to give a precise sense to the claim that Singer leaves no room for McBryde Johnson to give voice to her ‘particular experience’. Since Singer invites McBryde Johnson to Princeton specifically for the purpose of allowing her to give her perspective on selective infanticide as a disabled person and disability rights activist, the claim here cannot be that Singer literally prevents McBryde Johnson from speaking or that he regards her experience as irrelevant to the issues under discussion. Rather, the thought is that Singer's understanding of the nature of moral reasoning and philosophical conversation prevents him from hearing what McBryde Johnson is really trying to say, and thus he is missing something of deep philosophical importance. My broader claim will be that the problem here is not so much with Singer personally—who, on McBryde Johnson's own account, goes out of his way to treat her with seriousness and respect—but with a very widespread conception of the nature of moral reasoning whose narrowness and inflexibility makes it almost impossible for certain kinds of moral insight to be recognized as such.
1.
In order to understand the encounter between Singer and McBryde Johnson, it is important to understand the basic lines of the debate underlying it. Singer holds that infanticide could be morally justified in cases where the child is born with a disability serious enough both to affect her quality of life and to make it unlikely that any prospective parents would come forward to adopt her. In such a case, Singer argues, it would be morally justifiable to end the life of the child if doing so would give the parents the opportunity to have another (nondisabled) child whose quality of life would be likely to be higher. I do not intend to discuss the many objections that have been raised against this argument here but rather to focus on Harriet McBryde Johnson's response to it.Footnote 4 When Singer and McBryde Johnson first meet, at a talk he gives in her home city of Charleston, she quickly identifies the main premise with which she disagrees—that is, the claim that disability makes a person worse off. She argues that she and other disabled people ‘enjoy pleasures that other people enjoy, and pleasures peculiarly our own’ (Johnson Reference Johnson2006: 208). Disabled people, she writes, ‘have something the world needs’ (Johnson Reference Johnson2006: 208). In their subsequent email exchange, Singer offers the case of a disabled child on the beach, watching the other children play. Isn't it reasonable to think that this child's disability makes her worse off? McBryde Johnson's reaction to this thought experiment is worth quoting in full:
It's right out of the telethon. [McBryde Johnson protested the Jerry Lewis muscular dystrophy telethon for years, arguing that it presented disabled people as mere objects of pity.] I had expected something more sophisticated from a professional thinker. I respond: ‘As a little girl playing on the beach, I was already aware that some people felt sorry for me, that I wasn't frolicking with the same level of frenzy as other children. This annoyed me, and still does’. I take the time to write a detailed description of how I, in fact, had fun playing on the beach, without the need of standing, walking, or running. But, I've had enough. I suggest that we've exhausted our topic and I'll be back in touch when I get around to writing about him. (Johnson Reference Johnson2006: 208)
This exchange, I think, begins to give us some sense of what McBryde Johnson is getting at when she contrasts Singer's ‘theoretical world’ with her own desire to give voice to her particular experience. As Singer sees it, McBryde Johnson is part of a general category of people—the disabled—whose quality of life is diminished by their disability. McBryde Johnson feels that this generalization bears no relation to the reality of her own experience as a disabled person and responds by offering a detailed narrative of what that experience actually looks like. It is significant, however, that immediately after offering this narrative McBryde Johnson feels that she has ‘had enough’ and tells Singer that they have exhausted their topic. It is almost as if she is aware that offering her personal testimony, although it is the only possible way for her to respond, is not likely to make much difference to the conversation. What I want to suggest here is that this pessimism is perfectly understandable because the kind of conversation that she is trying to engage in by offering her own personal testimony is not the same kind of conversation that Singer takes himself to be engaged in. McBryde Johnson and Singer are not merely separated by their different opinions on the same moral issue; they are separated by fundamentally different ways of approaching the business of moral reasoning itself.
In order to understand the difference between the forms of moral reasoning in which Singer and McBryde Johnson are engaged, it is worth thinking about precisely what kind of problem her personal narrative poses to his argument. On an initial reading, her objection looks like it ought to be an extremely powerful one: he is claiming that a disabled child cannot take as much pleasure from a day at the beach as a nondisabled child, and she, as a person who has actually been a disabled child at the beach, is saying that she can. It is tempting to think that McBryde Johnson must have knocked a hole in Singer's argument here, but Singer might want to resist this conclusion. He doesn't need to deny the claim that McBryde Johnson had fun at the beach, and he could even go so far as to grant that she had just as much fun as the other children. His argument does not rest on the strong claim that no disabled person has ever had fun at the beach or that it is impossible for disabled persons ever to enjoy themselves just as much as nondisabled persons. His argument works on a much more general level. All that he needs to establish is that, all things being equal, disability tends to make people worse off. As long as the argument is conducted at this level of generality, Singer looks to be on much firmer ground. In Practical Ethics, he notes that some disability rights activists (presumably McBryde Johnson is one of the people he has in mind here) have denied that disability makes a person worse off. In response, he cites the case of babies born without arms or legs because of the drug thalidomide:
If we really believed that there is no reason to think the life of a disabled person is likely to be any worse than that of a normal person, we would not have regarded the use of thalidomide by pregnant women as a tragedy. No compensation would have been sought by parents or awarded by the courts. The children would merely have been ‘different’. We could even have left the drug on the market, so that women who found it a useful sleeping pill could continue to take it. If this sounds grotesque, it is only because we are all in no doubt at all that it is better to be born with limbs than without them. To believe this involves no disrespect at all for those who are lacking limbs; it simply recognizes the reality of the difficulties they face. (Singer Reference Singer2011: 165)
Singer is not attempting to say anything about the experience of particular individuals here—he is simply asking us to consider what we would say about a whole class of cases considered together. The impact of individual testimony on arguments of this form is difficult to assess. If someone born with shortened limbs as a result of thalidomide were to present a testimony like Harriet McBryde Johnson's, denying that he or she considered himself or herself to be worse off for this disability, what kind of damage would that do to Singer's argument? It seems unlikely that Singer would accept that his argument had been defeated by any such testimony, no matter how powerful. He could listen respectfully to the testimony, then simply restate the question on the general level: do we think that the use of thalidomide by pregnant women was a tragedy or not? Do we think that parents had a right to demand compensation? If we do, then presumably we are still committed to the view that disability makes people worse off, even if disabled people don't necessarily always feel that way themselves. This, I think, is part of the reason why McBryde Johnson declares herself to have ‘had enough’—she already knows that no amount of personal testimony is likely to make a dent in Singer's argument.
If this analysis gets the rough shape of the debate right, I think it helps us begin to make sense of why McBryde Johnson might be led to object not merely to the content of Singer's argument, but also to its form. From McBryde Johnson's point of view, the conversation proceeds in something like the following way. Singer begins by making a claim that cuts right to the core of her being—that is, that her parents could have been morally justified in killing her when she was a newborn infant—and he supports that claim with reference to an imaginary example of a disabled child on the beach, unable to experience the same kind of pleasure as the other children. McBryde Johnson, who has actually been a disabled child on a beach, finds Singer's description of the example to be completely out of touch with reality and responds with a detailed description of her own experience. Singer translates that testimony into a general claim—namely, that disabled people are not worse off for their disabilities—that he then attempts to refute by using it to derive ‘grotesque’ conclusions (for example, that it would be morally unproblematic to continue to prescribe thalidomide to pregnant women). McBryde Johnson finds herself caught on the horns of an unenviable dilemma: either remain silent about her experience and tacitly consent to a set of generalizations that seem wildly out of touch with reality or give voice to her experience and see it used to derive grotesque conclusions to which she could not possibly assent.
When we look at the encounter between Singer and McBryde Johnson in this way, I think we can begin to understand why McBryde Johnson might feel that the conversation left no room for her to give voice to her particular experience. What has not yet been established, however, is why exactly we should view this as problematic. Singer's goal of shedding the perspective of particular experience is motivated by a conception of moral reasoning that is (as he points out) not unique to him. In Practical Ethics, Singer (Reference Singer2011) argues that the fundamental idea ‘that ethical conduct is acceptable from a point of view that is somehow universal’ is one that is shared by Moses, Jesus, the Stoics, Kant, Hume, Bentham, Rawls, Habermas, and Jean-Paul Sartre, among others (Singer Reference Singer2011: 10). One might raise questions about some of the names on Singer's list, but he is surely correct that the idea that moral reasoning should be conducted from something like an impartial or universal point of view is very much a mainstream position. Furthermore, the discomfort that McBryde Johnson feels at being forced to consider moral questions in a highly abstract and generalized way bears a remarkable similarity to the discomfort that some of Socrates's interlocutors express in Plato's dialogues. Describing her conversations with Singer, McBryde Johnson writes:
Whenever I try to wrap my head around his tight string of syllogisms, my brain gets so fried it's—almost fun. Mercy! It's like Alice in Wonderland. Now, having leapt down the rabbit hole and landed in this place, I find things becoming curiouser and curiouser. (Johnson Reference Johnson2006: 201)
Compare this with Meno's complaint to Socrates:
Socrates, before I even met you I used to hear that you are always in a state of perplexity and that you bring others to the same state, and now I think you are bewitching and beguiling me, simply putting me under a spell, so that I am quite perplexed. Indeed, if a joke is in order, you seem, in appearance and in every other way, to be like the broad torpedo fish, for it too makes anyone who comes close and touches it feel numb, and you now seem to have had that kind of effect on me, for both my mind and my tongue are numb, and I have no answer to give you. (Plato Reference Cooper and Grube2002: 80a–b)
When we read the Meno and other Socratic dialogues, we recognize the interlocutors’ disorientation, but we do not tend to take seriously the thought that Socrates is actually doing them any kind of injustice. On the contrary, their confusion seems like a necessary point on the road to enlightenment—to a clearer and more rational understanding of the moral contours of their situation. It is quite possible, I think, to imagine someone defending Singer's mode of argument in very much the same way. It is understandable, it might be said, that McBryde Johnson finds it hard to think in general and abstract terms about a topic that concerns her in such a personal way, but in order to engage with questions about infanticide and disability as moral issues, she needs to let go of the desire to speak from her own particular experience or find a way of translating that experience into general and abstract terms.
I think that this view is mistaken, but it is not easy to say precisely why. Singer, as we have already noted, has principled grounds for his insistence on reasoning from a universal point of view. ‘From an ethical perspective’, he writes, ‘it is irrelevant that it is I who benefit from cheating you and you who lose by it. Ethics goes beyond “I” and “you” to the universal law, the universalizable judgment, the standpoint of the impartial spectator or ideal observer or whatever we choose to call it’ (Singer Reference Singer2011: 11). The attraction of this view is clear enough. If I support a proposed policy on the grounds that I will stand to benefit from it, that makes perfect sense, but it does not yet constitute a moral argument for adopting the policy. A moral argument, by its very nature, needs to appeal to more than just my own self-interest—it needs to appeal to the interests of others as well. This basic principle seems unobjectionable enough, but Singer's extension of it has some interesting consequences for our understanding of the nature of moral reasoning. On his view, if he and Harriet McBryde Johnson are debating the killing of disabled infants, it makes absolutely no difference that she was actually born with a disability and he was not. If her personal experience happens to furnish her with some specific data that are relevant to the debate, that is obviously important, but there is no reason in principle why a nondisabled expert could not come to possess the same information. On Singer's view, the only way for McBryde Johnson and himself to engage in moral reasoning about the killing of disabled infants is for them to attempt to ascend to the perspective of an impartial spectator who is neither disabled nor nondisabled and thus able to judge the question with full objectivity.
It is this view of moral reasoning that McBryde Johnson has in mind, I take it, when she refers to Singer's goal of ‘shedding the perspective of particular experience’. It is important to emphasize again that shedding the perspective of particular experience does not mean ignoring what people say about their particular experience. On Singer's view, data about individual experience are likely to be very important. The point is rather that, in the course of our moral reasoning, it doesn't make any difference whether someone is talking about her own experience or the experience of someone else, except to the extent that she might be expected to be more reliable (although certainly not infallible) about her own. The best kind of moral reasoning—indeed, from Singer's point of view, the only kind of moral reasoning—is that which attempts to get as much experiential data as possible on the table then steps back and tries to take up an objective view of the whole. McBryde Johnson's understanding of the nature of moral reasoning is quite clearly different. When she says that she wants to ‘give voice’ to her particular experience, that she wants to be ‘engaged in the tribal fury that comes when opposing perspectives are let loose’, she is explicitly attempting to distance herself from Singer's model of detached theoretical scrutiny. The question I want to pursue here is how exactly to understand the alternative model that she is working with.
As an initial attempt to characterize an alternative to Singer's model, we might start with the following claim: that it might make a difference to a conversation about ethics if one of the participants is speaking from her own experience. To clarify this claim, we should add that the difference does not simply consist in the likelihood of this person having access to data that the other participants do not have. A person in a wheelchair may be more likely to know that a certain number of buildings on Princeton's campus are wheelchair inaccessible, for example, but this piece of information is one that could equally be contributed by anyone. The thought is rather that we ought to listen in a different way when someone is speaking from her own experience. Once again, however, this claim might be misunderstood. We may sometimes feel that it is necessary to be sensitive to the feelings of those with direct personal experience of the topic under discussion. If someone has just been bereaved, it would probably (perhaps depending on the person in question) be insensitive to launch into a vigorous argument for the impossibility of the afterlife. This is not what I have in mind, however, when I say that we ought to ‘listen in a different way’ when people are speaking from their own experience. The reason that we ought to listen in a different way, I want to suggest, is that someone speaking from her own experience may bring us to see something that we could not possibly have seen in any other way. In the next section, I want to begin to give an account of what this unique kind of insight might look like by considering another moment in the encounter between Singer and McBryde Johnson.
2.
When McBryde Johnson visits Princeton, she engages in a discussion with some of Singer's students. One particular exchange from this discussion stands out:
In the classroom there was a question about keeping alive the unconscious. In response, I told a story about a family I knew as a child who took loving care of a nonresponsive teenage girl, acting out their unconditional commitment to each other, making all the other children, and me as their visitor, feel safe. This doesn't satisfy Singer. ‘Let's assume we can prove, absolutely, that the individual is totally unconscious and that we can know, absolutely, that the individual will never regain consciousness’.
I see no need to state an objection, with no stenographer present to record it; I'll play the game and let him continue.
‘Assuming all that’, he says, ‘don't you think continuing to take care of that individual would be a bit—weird?’
‘No, done right it could be profoundly beautiful’. (Johnson Reference Johnson2006: 215–16)
One might think, on a first reading, that there is little more at issue here than a straightforward clash of intuitions. Singer thinks that it would be ‘a bit weird’ to continue to take care of an individual who we can be sure will never regain consciousness; McBryde Johnson thinks that it could be ‘profoundly beautiful’, and it is hard to see what kind of arguments could convince either of them to change their respective positions. If we pay closer attention to the precise language that is used, however, it becomes clear that McBryde Johnson is thinking about the case in a very different way from Singer. Two points in particular stand out. First, McBryde Johnson says that done right this kind of care could be profoundly beautiful. This suggests not only that there might be a wrong way of doing it (and thus that there is more at issue in this case than the straightforward decision of whether to keep the person alive or not), but also that any judgment would need to be sensitive to the subtle contours of the situation in question. Second, she says that done right this kind of care could be profoundly beautiful. The concept of beauty does not play any significant role in Singer's account of moral reasoning, as McBryde Johnson herself points out. In the classroom at Princeton she talks ‘about justice and even beauty and love. I figure they haven't been getting that kind of talk from Singer’ (Johnson Reference Johnson2006: 214). Singer is not alone here, of course—the concept of beauty is rarely deployed in contemporary moral philosophy. What I want to suggest, however, is that McBryde Johnson's use of the concept provides us with an important insight into the difference between her mode of reasoning and Singer's.
In order to understand the role beauty is playing here, I first want to make a couple of claims about what it is to see an object as beautiful and then think about what it might mean to see a family's care for its nonresponsive daughter in this way. Finally, I want to explore the possibility of using the concept of beauty to help us understand why it might make a difference to our moral reasoning when we speak from our own experience.
About beauty in general, I think that there are three brief observations worth making. First, it is plausible to think that appreciating the beauty in an object requires direct experience of that object. Even if everyone I knew had told me that a certain song was beautiful, there would still be something odd about me telling someone else that it was beautiful if I hadn't actually heard it myself. I could say something like ‘everyone says that it is beautiful’ or ‘apparently it's very beautiful’, but the direct claim ‘it's beautiful’ seems to require some kind of experience on my own part. Second, as Kant famously argues, ‘there can. . . be no rule according to which anyone is to be compelled to recognize anything as beautiful’ (Kant Reference Kant, Walker and Creed Meredith2007: 47). Even if it is true that the rough, unfinished nature of Michelangelo's ‘prisoner’ statues is part of what makes them beautiful, that does not necessarily mean that we are generally going to regard statues as more beautiful for being rough and unfinished. This claim does not imply that judgments of beauty cannot be justified at all, but rather that such justifications may not make sense without direct experience of the object. If I haven't heard the piece of music a critic is describing, I may not know how exactly its ‘eerie, open spaces’ contribute to its beauty, but hearing it in the light of that description may help me to see its beauty in a new way. Third and relatedly, the experience of beauty may lead to a radical revision in our understanding of what is valuable. In the case that I have been describing, it is possible that the critic's description, combined with direct experience of the object, may bring me to see that a quality I had never previously thought of as valuable or even relevant may actually contribute significantly to the beauty of a piece of music.
None of these observations about beauty is entirely uncontroversial, but they are all plausible (for example, see Nehamas [Reference Nehamas2010] for an influential account of beauty that includes all three of the features I have identified here). What I want to suggest here is that these observations also help us to understand the significance of Harriet McBryde Johnson's claim that the family's care for its nonresponsive child could be ‘profoundly beautiful’. When McBryde Johnson says that the family's actions could be beautiful if they were ‘done right’, part of what I take her to be acknowledging is the truth of the first claim I presented above—that judgments of beauty require direct experience of the object. She is careful not to say that any instance of caring for a nonresponsive person would be profoundly beautiful or that such actions would be profoundly beautiful if they met a certain set of criteria. By including the qualifier ‘done right’, she is acknowledging that in order to know that the family's care for its daughter was beautiful, you would actually have to see it in person. No claim of the form ‘this family's care for its daughter was x, y, and z’ would be sufficient to establish the beauty of the family's actions unless it was combined with direct experience of the situation itself.
The necessity of direct experience and the impossibility of bringing the beauty of the family's actions under a set of general criteria lead naturally to a third claim, namely, that firsthand experience of these actions may lead to a radical revision of our understanding of what is valuable. Such an experience could be morally transformative, causing us to reassess the basic terms in which we think about questions of disability, love, and community. Indeed, I think that this is precisely the kind of experience that McBryde Johnson is claiming to have had in her visits to the family of the nonresponsive teenage girl. If the situation had simply been described to her in the way that Singer describes it—a family continues to care for an unconscious child who will never regain consciousness—she might have concurred with his judgment that such actions were ‘a bit weird’. Actually seeing this care in person, however, led her to see a kind of value in the family's actions that would never have been apparent in any abstract description.
Having said all of this, it is important to reemphasize a point that was made implicitly above—that having come to see this particular family's actions as profoundly beautiful need not commit McBryde Johnson to any kind of claim about the value of such actions in general. Just as the claim that the ‘eerie open spaces’ of a particular piece of music contribute to its beauty does not imply that the same quality in other pieces will always have the same effect, so the claim that this particular family's care for the daughter was profoundly beautiful does not imply that someone continuing to care for a nonresponsive relative will always be beautiful in the same way. As McBryde Johnson says, it has to be ‘done right’, and what it means to do it right may not be codifiable into any set of general criteria. In telling Singer and his class about the family she knows, she is not attempting to make a claim of the form ‘continuing to care for an unresponsive person is morally required under x, y, and z conditions’. Instead, she is attempting to get them to see the possibility that actually experiencing that kind of care firsthand may cause them to reassess the basic terms with which they are approaching the question to begin with.
All of this brings us back, I think, to the earlier exchange we discussed above—the conversation about the disabled child on the beach. Part of what McBryde Johnson is trying to do is to get Singer to see that direct personal experience of that kind of situation may cause one to understand abstract questions of disability in a very different way. To that extent, her retelling of her own experience has a similar purpose to her retelling of the story of the family with the nonresponsive teenage daughter. The way she describes the conversation about being a disabled child on the beach, however, suggests that there is a further purpose to her use of personal testimony. She says that she ‘takes the time to write a detailed description’ of what it was like for her to play on the beach. McBryde Johnson is a gifted writer, and one of the most striking aspects of her New York Times article is her ability to describe even the most mundane daily tasks in careful and subtle detail. On the trip to Princeton, McBryde Johnson is accompanied by a personal assistant who helps her with getting dressed, moving around, eating meals, and other daily tasks. The following brief paragraph describes her assistant, Carmen, helping her to do her hair:
I drive to the mirror. I undo yesterday's braid, fix the part, and comb the hair in front. Carmen combs where I can't reach. I divide the mass into three long hanks and start the braid behind my left ear. Section by section, I hand it over to her, and her unimpaired young fingers pull tight, crisscross, until the braid is fully formed. She binds the end with a rubber band and lets it fall past my knees. She hands me my earrings and I poke the wires in. (Johnson Reference Johnson2006: 212)
This description succeeds in the difficult task of bringing out the beauty and intimacy of the moment without romanticizing it. McBryde Johnson's disability is neither hidden nor made light of—the reference to Carmen's ‘unimpaired young fingers’ subtly indicates the limitations of McBryde Johnson's own body. The first sentence of the paragraph acknowledges McBryde Johnson's inability to walk in a way that is also cleverly subversive—‘I drive to the mirror’ locates a familiar source of power and independence (driving) in an unfamiliar context (indoors). On a more fundamental level, the structure of the paragraph itself mirrors the low-key intimacy of the moment. Three of the first four sentences begin with ‘I’, emphasizing McBryde Johnson's control over the situation and her body. These sentences are punctuated by one—‘Carmen combs where I can't reach’—that introduces Carmen as an assistant rather than as a director of operations, quietly standing in where she is needed. The fifth sentence is the center of the paragraph, bringing both women together in a poetic dance of crisscrossing fingers. The final two sentences begin with ‘she’ as Carmen's assistance gradually becomes more essential and end with a reassertion of McBryde Johnson's agency—and the raw physicality of the process of dressing—as she ‘[pokes] the wires in’.
Is this an overanalysis of a simple paragraph? I think that there are at least two good reasons to think that it is not. First, McBryde Johnson is an elegant writer who takes care in her choice of words; almost any of the passages in the New York Times article could be analyzed in the same way. Second, her memoir Too Late to Die Young ends with a meditation on the one aspect of disability that, according to McBryde Johnson, nondisabled people find hardest to accept—‘the possibility of pleasure’:
For decades, little noticed by the larger world, the disability rights movement has been mobilizing people from the back rooms and back wards, along with more privileged people like me, to speak plainly about our needs. We make demands. We litigate. Run for office. Seize the streets. Sit through the meetings. Mark up the drafts. That kind of work has changed the world and we need to continue to do it.
But we need to do something else besides, something that may be difficult but is, I think, vital. We need to confront the life-killing stereotype that says we're all about suffering. We need to bear witness to our pleasures. (Johnson Reference Johnson2006: 253)
On McBryde Johnson's own account, one of the principal motivations for her writing is to bear witness to her pleasures. The way in which she does this, I am suggesting, is to describe her day-to-day life in a way that brings out its moments of beauty. One of the principal reasons that someone like Singer is likely to give for the claim that disability makes a person worse off is that it may leave one in the position of requiring assistance with such simple tasks as eating and getting dressed. In her description of getting her hair fixed in the morning, McBryde Johnson succeeds in showing that although requiring assistance with such tasks can be exhausting and invasive, it also opens up the possibility of unique forms of intimacy and community. If McBryde Johnson's writing is a form of art—which there is every reason to think it is—then reading or hearing her stories offers us a way of experiencing the singular beauty of her life as a disabled person.
In this context, the purpose of the detailed description of her experience on the beach that McBryde Johnson emails to Singer becomes clearer. By offering him this description, she is trying to find a way of allowing him to see her life in the way that she (at least sometimes) experiences it—as a thing of beauty. She is bearing witness to her pleasures. In doing this—in giving voice to her particular experience—she is attempting to correct something that she takes to be seriously inadequate in Singer's understanding of disability. His use of the disabled child on the beach as a thought experiment indicates to her that his perceptions of disabled experience are out of touch with reality, in a way that makes it impossible (as far as she is concerned) for him to reason accurately about life-and-death questions concerning disabled people. The problem is that because of Singer's artificially narrow conception of moral reasoning, he has no way of benefitting from what McBryde Johnson is offering him. The only way for him to respond to McBryde Johnson's intervention—as he does in Practical Ethics (Reference Singer2011)—is to restate her response to him as an abstract and generalized claim that can be refuted by reference to examples such as the thalidomide case. If we were to say that Singer and McBryde Johnson were talking past each other, that would be right in one sense, but it would give a misleading impression of equality. McBryde Johnson is capable of understanding and being affected by Singer's arguments, even if she occasionally feels that her brain gets ‘fried’ in doing so. Singer, by contrast, has no way of responding adequately to McBryde Johnson's interventions and so ends up simply ignoring them.
Even if we accept that Singer has no good way of responding to McBryde Johnson, it is worth raising again the question of exactly what he is missing by failing to do so. I have been talking about the radical changes in moral understanding that may be occasioned by an experience of the beauty of another person's life or actions, but a defender of Singer might reasonably ask precisely what kind of change his conversations with McBryde Johnson ought to have brought about in him. Should he have revised his view on the morality of keeping alive the unconscious upon hearing the story of the family with the teenage daughter? Should he have abandoned the claim that disability makes a person worse off upon hearing about McBryde Johnson's day at the beach? What if, the following day, he had spoken to someone with a highly negative experience of being disabled or to parents who had thought long and hard before deciding to end their nonresponsive child's life? Would that have merited a further change in position? If we are trying to come to a principled answer on a question that affects a whole class of people, Singer's defenders may urge, we cannot simply base our arguments on single pieces of testimony. The only way to make any progress with such questions is to treat them in a generalized and abstract way, informed by as much experiential data as possible but without giving any special consideration to the experience of any particular person.
This line of response brings out a point that is fundamental to the set of problems we have been discussing here: that what one takes to be an appropriate form of moral reasoning depends on what one takes the goal of moral reasoning to be. If the goal of moral reasoning is simply to come up with answers to questions posed in a generalized form—Is abortion morally justifiable? Do we have an obligation to keep alive the terminally unconscious?—then it makes sense to say that our reasoning ought to take place on a similarly general level. If, however, we think that moral reasoning has other goals besides arriving at answers to such questions, we may be prepared to entertain the value of forms of reasoning that are not easily translated into general principles. In the final section of this paper, I want to think about what it might be to treat Harriet McBryde Johnson's article as a piece of moral reasoning in its own right and in doing so to raise the question of what kind of goals it is seeking to achieve. The claim I want to put forward is that although McBryde Johnson's article does seek to contribute to a debate about certain general questions, it also has a different goal: to reveal the humanity of both its main protagonists—not only that of McBryde Johnson herself, but also that of Singer.
3.
One of the particularly striking aspects of ‘Unspeakable Conversations’ is the way in which Harriet McBryde Johnson finds herself caught between two sets of people with diametrically opposed views but somewhat similar modes of reasoning. Although the main action takes place in her meetings with Singer, there is a subplot that follows her simultaneous conversations with friends and allies in the disability rights community. Early in the piece, McBryde Johnson is warned against accepting Singer's invitation to Princeton at all, on the grounds that his views are ‘so far beyond the pale that we should not legitimate them with a forum’ (Johnson Reference Johnson2006: 208). The piece opens with a series of questions McBryde Johnson's friends and allies asked her on her return from Princeton; these questions give a sense of their expectations concerning him. ‘Was he totally grossed out by your physical appearance?’ ‘How did he handle having to interact with someone like you?’ (Johnson Reference Johnson2006: 202–203). The expectation is that, given his views on disability, Singer must be a ‘ghoul’ or a ‘monster’ (Johnson Reference Johnson2006: 223). McBryde Johnson is clearly sympathetic to this point of view. On the visit to Princeton, Singer points out the spot where her fellow disability rights activists picketed him on his first week on the job. ‘I'm grateful for the reminder’, McBryde Johnson writes. ‘My brothers and sisters were here before me and behaved far more appropriately than I am doing’ (Johnson Reference Johnson2006: 217). Nevertheless, despite her ambivalence, McBryde Johnson continues to treat Singer with civility and respect.
One moment in the piece is particularly striking in this respect. During a dinner organized at Princeton, McBryde Johnson's elbow slips out from under her as she is eating. Since she is not able to replace the elbow on the table herself and her personal assistant is not seated close enough to be able to do it, McBryde Johnson turns to Singer for help:
Normally I get whoever is on my right hand to do this sort of thing. Why not now? I gesture to Singer. He leans over and I whisper. ‘Grasp this wrist and pull forward one inch, without lifting’. He looks a little surprised but follows my instructions to the letter. He sees that now I can again reach my food with my fork. I get the idea that he may now understand what I was saying a minute ago, that most of the assistance disabled people need does not demand medical training. (Johnson Reference Johnson2006: 221)
The moment is one of genuine beauty and intimacy. Singer's willingness to follow McBryde Johnson's instructions unquestioningly and to the letter, without immediately understanding the purpose of doing so, displays a trust and vulnerability on his part that mirrors the trust and vulnerability McBryde Johnson displays in asking for his help in the first place. When McBryde Johnson later relates the story to her activist friend Laura, who studies power relationships and caregiving, the latter is appalled: ‘How could I put myself in a relationship with Singer that made him appear so human, even kind?’ (Johnson Reference Johnson2006: 223).
This question takes us to the heart of ‘Unspeakable Conversations’. McBryde Johnson never really attempts to counter the arguments made by her allies against engaging with Singer on a human level and even seems to endorse them. As she writes:
I am regularly confronted by people who tell me Singer doesn't deserve my human sympathy. I should take the role of Nemesis and make him an object to be cut off, silenced, destroyed absolutely. And I find myself lacking an argument to the contrary. (Johnson Reference Johnson2006: 225)
The language McBryde Johnson uses here—‘make him an object to be cut off, silenced, destroyed absolutely’—is surely intended to echo the kind of treatment that Singer advocates for disabled infants. On an abstract level, McBryde Johnson never really succeeds in formulating a good argument to counter her allies’ concerns about engaging with Singer. Toward the end of the piece, she imagines a lengthy conversation with her sister Beth, in which she attempts to defend her acceptance of the Princeton invitation. The imaginary version of Beth argues that Singer's basic thought—that the diminished quality of disabled lives justifies treating disabled infants differently from nondisabled infants—would open the door to increasingly horrific marginalization and oppression of disabled people, and although McBryde Johnson continues to argue that it would not, she finds herself left with little more than a statement of faith that such horrific consequences are ‘just not going to happen’. As she immediately admits, this is not much of an argument. Is her willingness to share a platform with Singer based on nothing more than wishful thinking? ‘I don't think so’, she replies. ‘It's less about belief, less about hope, than about a practical need for definitions I can live with’:
If I define Singer's kind of disability prejudice as an ultimate evil, and him as a monster, then I must so define all who believe that disabled lives are inherently likely to be less happy, or that a life without a certain kind of consciousness lacks value. That would make monsters of many of the people with whom I move on the sidewalks, do business, break bread, swap stories, and share the grunt work of politics. The definition would reach some of my family and most of my nondisabled friends, people who show me enormous kindness and who somehow, sometimes manage to love me through their ignorance. I can't live with a definition of ultimate evil that encompasses all of them. I can't refuse the monster-majority basic courtesy, respect, and human sympathy. It's not in my heart to deny every single one of them, categorically, my affection and my love. (Johnson Reference Johnson2006: 227–28)
This kind of reasoning, I think, is what McBryde Johnson has in mind when she talks about ‘the corruption that comes from interconnectedness’. As far as the arguments are concerned, she is convinced that disability prejudice constitutes a serious and damaging form of oppression, that oppression is a form of inhumanity toward others, and that those guilty of serious and damaging inhumanity toward others do not merit affection and love. And yet, she finds herself incapable of withholding her affection and love from those around her, including Singer. One might regard this as little more than emotional weakness, but part of what I have been trying to do in this paper is to show that there is more to it than that. McBryde Johnson's love for the individuals around her is based on a recognition of their humanity, not in the biological sense, but in the sense of seeing others in the light of their human beauty. The problem with this mode of recognition is that—unlike Kantian respect—it cannot necessarily be counted upon to line up with our considered judgments of moral principle. That is why McBryde Johnson refers to it as a form of corruption; it leaves us with something of a mess. The difference between McBryde Johnson's mode of reasoning and Singer's is that this corruption—‘the muck and mess’ of reality—is what her writing is very intentionally designed to represent. ‘Unspeakable Conversations’ is not a streamlined argument for a specific position on any issue that can be stated in general terms although it certainly does contain such arguments. Its status as a unified and coherent piece of moral reasoning is not based upon its ability to establish the strength of a given argument, but on its ability to reveal the humanity of two individuals in all their beauty and contradictions.
Conclusion
Let us attempt to sum up. I began this paper with a question: what is Harriet McBryde Johnson talking about when she refers to the ‘terrible purity’ of Singer's vision and why might she want to ‘shield’ herself from this purity by returning to ‘the corruption that comes from interconnectedness’? I have suggested that the main problem with Singer's approach to moral philosophy as McBryde Johnson sees it is that it has the effect of denying her humanity and that it does this by preventing her from speaking from her particular experience. In order to explain the importance of speaking from one's particular experience, I made use of an analogy with beauty. Just as the experience of an object of beauty may cause us to reassess our sense of what is valuable in a way that (a) requires direct experience of the object and (b) cannot be conveyed in terms of an abstract set of general criteria, so too the act of listening to someone speaking from her own experience may cause us to reassess our responses to certain moral problems in a way that cannot be captured in terms of easily generalizable arguments. In the preceding section, I argued that Harriet McBryde Johnson's writing provides us with a paradigm of a distinct form of moral reasoning whose primary goal is not to establish general conclusions by means of argument but to reveal the humanity of the individuals it describes by allowing them to be seen in their beauty and particularity. When McBryde Johnson talks about ‘the corruption that comes from interconnectedness’, part of what I think she has in mind is that this form of moral reasoning, since it does not necessarily translate into generalizable conclusions, leaves us in something of a mess. Although she cannot find any flaw in her friends’ arguments against engaging in polite conversation with Singer, McBryde Johnson finds herself incapable of denying him ‘categorically, [her] affection and [her] love’. Unlike Singer's style of doing moral philosophy, which takes consistency as one of its most fundamental virtues, McBryde Johnson ends her piece in an entirely unashamed spirit of contradiction and ambiguity.
Before concluding, it is worth saying a couple of things about the scope of the argument that I have tried to make here. First, my critique of Singer's approach to moral philosophy ought not to be taken as a complete rejection of abstract argument from general principles. We need such arguments when it comes to important matters of public policy, and we are quite rightly wary of people who seek to draw general conclusions from their own personal experience. When McBryde Johnson criticizes the ‘terrible purity’ of Singer's moral vision, I do not take her to be advocating a complete withdrawal from abstract argument. She is, after all, a successful lawyer who is perfectly capable of taking on Singer's arguments (and perhaps a little too self-deprecating when she says that her brain gets ‘fried’ by thinking about them). Equally, when she talks about her own particular experience, she is very clearly not attempting to draw general conclusions from single data points. As I have argued here, the primary purpose of her piece is not to advance general conclusions but rather to reveal the full humanity of the individuals concerned—not only herself but also Singer. What is ‘terrible’ about Singer's approach is not that it relies upon abstract argument, but that it implicitly regards anything that cannot be translated into abstract argument as irrelevant to the business of moral reasoning. It is true that we can achieve a kind of purity by restricting the scope of moral reasoning in this way, but McBryde Johnson's point is that the achievement of such purity may come at the loss of our full humanity.
Assuming we are persuaded that there is something to McBryde Johnson's critique of Singer, what might be the consequences for our understanding of the business of moral philosophy? I want to suggest three briefly. First, we may find ourselves wanting to reassess our assumptions concerning the aims of moral philosophy. It is easy to assume that since much moral philosophy is motivated in the first instance by the consideration of general problems (e.g., ‘is abortion morally justifiable?’), its sole aim must be to arrive at answers to such questions. I want to suggest that if we take a broader view of moral philosophy according to which its purpose is to help us to live better lives, then although seeking answers to general problems will be one part of achieving that purpose, understanding the problems themselves in the light of the full humanity of those concerned will be an equally important part. McBryde Johnson's piece does, I think, have something to contribute to the first project, but its real value consists in its contribution to the second. Having read it, we may find ourselves further from a definitive answer to the debate in which Singer and McBryde Johnson are engaged but considerably closer to a full understanding of the two of them as human beings. What I hope to have given at least some reason to think here is that we should regard such an outcome as a significant form of progress.
My second conclusion concerns the nature of philosophical writing. Whether or not one agrees with his conclusions, Singer's writing is widely accepted as a paradigm of ‘philosophical’ style. I do not want to suggest that it is wrong for us to regard the form of Singer's writing as properly philosophical, but rather to suggest that McBryde Johnson's writing has an equal claim to that label. Again, the question here ultimately comes back to our understanding of the purpose of moral philosophy itself. If we think that the sole purpose of moral philosophy is to advance arguments for general conclusions, then McBryde Johnson's claim to philosophical status (a claim that she never makes for herself, incidentally) will seem marginal at best. If, however, we expand our view of the purpose of moral philosophy to encompass the task of making ourselves better persons, then reading someone like McBryde Johnson begins to look essential.
The final conclusion that I want to suggest goes back to the ending of McBryde Johnson's piece and her invocation of the ‘corruption that comes from interconnectedness’. For someone committed to Singer's style of doing moral philosophy, it is hard to see the embrace of contradiction and ambiguity as anything other than morally culpable. If you see where the argument leads and still refuse to go there, you are either guilty of self-indulgence, squeamishness, or something worse. In many cases, of course, this is precisely what is going on, but it need not always be. In her piece, McBryde Johnson admits that she does not see a good response to the arguments against engaging with Singer; yet she maintains that she is not capable of following this argument to its practical conclusion. What the rest of the article makes clear, however, is that the inability to see the argument through to its conclusion is due neither to self-indulgence nor squeamishness, but to a deep appreciation of Singer's humanity. That this is what is going on is not merely something McBryde Johnson asserts, but something that she shows through the beauty and power of her writing. To see this beautiful and powerful writing—with its unashamed contradictions and ambiguities—as a source of both moral and philosophical insight is to begin to appreciate the possibility of a very different way of thinking about the nature of morality and of moral philosophy itself.
