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antigonus comments on Disability Culture Meets the Transhumanist Condition - Less Wrong Discussion
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You're conflating being better at something with being better. "In at least one sense, white people ARE better than black people. All other things being equal, they can pursue more opportunities with less discrimination." How is that a useful observation?
Deaf people's disadvantage is an innate property of being deaf. Black people's disadvantage comes about because a lot of people, at least implicitly, believe (possibly correctly) that being black correlates with other traits that are undesirable in and of themselves.
I disagree that there can be innate disadvantages, except for to the extent the utility function addresses those properties directly. See:
Can you explain why you believe that makes a moral difference?
No, what you are doing is confusing a claim of moral superiority with a claim of superior ability -- a confusion arising because English has the inconvenient fact that it uses the word "good" to mean moral worth (he's a good person), and great ability (a good musician).
Well, here we tend to be a group of people that prefer the world to be improved, because we currently believe it's highly subpoptimal. Does that make it clear to you why we don't want people to be forced to stay blind or deaf or mute?
I don't think I'm doing that. In the instrumental sense that "ceteris paribus, hearing people can do more than deaf people," it's also true that "ceteris paribus, white people can do more than black people (due to discrimination curtailing opportunities)." Both are purely instrumental claims, and both are fairly trivial in themselves. In the deaf case and in the racial case, all else is not equal. Otherwise, we'd want to specially encourage black parents to adopt white babies instead of conceiving. I'm not necessarily disagreeing with your conclusions, just pointing out that the reasons given are incomplete.
Arguments about how things would be ceteris paribus don't translate well into policy suggestions.
They can still be relevant when we're not talking about any particular person, though. They're especially relevant when we're discussing future people, who we can't come to a good understanding of but must decide whether or not to affect anyway.
Which isn't to say that we can't take other factors into account too.
Do you know of a way where something like this could be practically done and be successful? If so, then we might discuss the pros and cons of such a scheme.
If you don't know any such way, then this is a mere distraction and diversion at best -- or worse yet, an attempt to use the taboo topics of racial politics in an attempt to mind-kill.
This is a moral question. It might be the case that we don't have any practical ways of convincing people that death is bad, but that doesn't mean that death isn't bad.
Silas Barta introduced an anology between the deaf case and the hearing case. Atorm responded with a potential disanalogy, and I responded to him by saying that the disanalogy he provided didn't straightforwardly work. Do you seriously think I'm trying to "mind-kill" anything? I feel you're being unfair.
I don't see a question mark anywhere in your comment. What is this moral question? "Why don't we encourage black people of adopting white children instead of conceiving?" "How is this different from encouraging black people of adopting white children instead of conceiving?"
Make exact what this moral question is for me -- but let me warn you that your analogy is currently much more likely to convince me that we should discourage black people of conceiving, than that deaf people have the moral right to force their children to remain deaf even if there's a cheap safe method to restore said hearing.
So it's bad for deaf people to impair their children's hearing abilities, because all else being equal, hearing people can do more. By the same token, is it also bad for us to create black rather than white children, since "all else being equal," discrimination allows white people to do more?
More generally, how do we figure out what to hold fixed - that is, what precisely the "else" is to hold "equal" - when comparing the worthiness of two lives?
"Us"? I've not created any black children, and most black people don't have the capacity to create white children. And child-creation hasn't been collectivized yet, it's still an individual process.
If someone deliberately created a child with the explicit desire of having it be socially disadvantaged enough that they'd need to partake in the culture its parents belong to, instead of having more options available, that'd be evil.
What does worthiness have to do with anything? This is about allowing children to hear, not about who is "worth" what. About quality of life, not about justice.
I think you're missing the point. Please substitute the word "you" with whoever would be faced with such a situation (a black couple deciding whether or not to conceive of a black baby, a deaf couple deciding whether or not to conceive of a deaf baby, etc.).
I am using "worthiness" to refer to an informal measure of how much we should actualize certain lives relative to others, which includes considerations like quality of life. Maybe "choiceworthiness" would've been a better word.
You mean a black couple that were given the choice to conceive a black baby or a white baby, and choosing "black" instead of "white"?
I guess that depends on their motivations for this choice, and whether it's for the perceived benefit of the child or the perceived disadvantage of the child. If they perceived blackness as an inherent disability on the level of deafness, that'd be wrong, yes.
edit to explain: I slightly edited the post shortly after I posted it, which explains the small discrepancy before the current text of the comment, and the quoted text in the response to it.