What Is Right To Do: Disabled Lives, Disabled Futures

Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do. — Justice Potter Stewart

Recently, I had a conversation with someone who strongly identified with and practiced veganism because of their compassion for the animals. Of course I think compassion is important. I also think relating to my food as both once living and from the earth is a way for me to be responsible for the resources, animals, and labor I consume. The conversation was more difficult than I expected.

At one point, the person I was speaking with urged that there is no such thing as humane slaughter. This was a good point for me to think about. Is there? If there is, what am I describing as humane? Is it actually humane? Some of my friends who are vegetarian or vegan engage with this question very plainly. If it is so humane, they propose, they should be able to do it. If they won’t do it, maybe it’s not as humane as they assume. I think this is a responsible engagement with the death of animals, but it still gives me pause. Even if I were willing to kill a chicken, I don’t think I would be strong enough (because I have cerebral palsy) to give a chicken a quick death, and not a drawn-out painful one.

The person said, “I just ask people, ‘Do you want to be slaughtered humanely?’”

Then, everything ground to a halt for me with the next line.

“Maybe when you’re ninety years old.” they said.

I felt my blood run cold and the tension arise in my chest between saying something pastoral and something judgmental.

“Well,” I said, more calmly than I felt, “probably not when you’re ninety either.” I told them about the Eighties Ladies group at my congregation, that has several members in their nineties, women who are still busy living their lives.

If you really believe in humane treatment for animals, then you must also believe in humane treatment for people, but not just treatment as though some people are always at the effect of others, rather a humane existence that arises from a self-determined life.

And yet…

The expectation that an elder might not be able to do anything and thus be at the end of their life is a crystal-clear example of ableism and devaluation of a human because of what they can or cannot do. (There is also significant ageism in the idea that simply because one is ninety, their body doesn’t work anymore. Both of these oppressions magnify each other.)

Once the measure of a human and how much they are worth is based on what a person can do or not do, it is an easy slide to determine that disabled people and chronically ill people and any one else with a body perceived as different or other can or should be humanely slaughtered.

For the record, I do not want to be humanely slaughtered based on the inaccurate perceptions of others placed on my body.

To examine how we end up at that conclusion, we have to, in a way, ask ourselves who is human. The notion of humanity subject to actions labeled as inhuman takes us back to the parameters of chattel slavery, with which we must engage with care so that we do not overwrite history with subjective perceptions of improvement, or what Walter Johnson calls, “simple-minded notions of moral progress.”

To be clear, Johnson isn’t advocating in any way that slavery was better. Nor, was he saying that the cruel treatment enslaved people were subjected to was no problem. Rather, he was saying that simply calling things better doesn’t make them better and that it is squeamishness that has us call the cruel treatment of enslaved folks inhuman. It was cruel treatment of humans by other humans, so that calling it inhuman is hyperbole that deflects the real story.

The control of enslaved people’s bodies, Johnson contends, didn’t rely on dehumanization. Rather, it was their human nature and powers than made them desirable to enslavers and trapped them in an extractive systems. One of the most significant and transformative elements of Johnson’s analysis for me, is that in distinguishing dehumanization as an imperialist framework, he illuminates the fact that analysis of human rights based on identifying dehumanization puts the humans being considered at the effect of always rendering these humans probationary.

I am not a probationary human, pending approval of a performatively able-bodied society. I don’t have to do anything else, make anything else, say anything, or (in shades of Lloyd Dobler) buy or sell anything else, to be fully human. Neither do you.

Johnson quotes Philip Morgan:

“Wherever and whenever masters, whether implicitly or explicitly, recognized the independent will and volition of their slaves, they acknowledged the humanity of their bondpeople. Extracting this admission was, in fact, a form of slave resistance, because slaves thereby opposed the dehumanization inherent in their status.”

Once more: Extracting this admission was, in fact, a form of slave resistance, because slaves thereby opposed the dehumanization inherent in their status.

What does it mean for people, target folks or disabled folks, who are participating in the current United States and other similar countries to move from consideration of the example of chattel slavery to the consideration of what constitutes human rights for every person?

Human-rights thinking has emphasized the universal rights of democratic self-determination, freedom of conscience and expression, protection from political violence and, above all, the anathematization of genocide. (Johnson).

These are all fairly modern concepts; however, even when disabled people are identified as humans, there is usually a way that rejection of their genocide is not complete or even customary. One estimate is that approximately every three days, a disabled person is killed by their parents or caregivers. It is a persistent and fairly unnoticed genocide, murders based on both identity and ability. It is permissible and not anathamatized because the value of disabled people is perceived as low.

Alison Kafer, in her book, Feminist, Queer, Crip, make the assumption of low value clear in two ways. She begins with a quote from James Watson, one of the scientists involved with the discovery of DNA (p.3). Speaking of a child with Down Syndrome, Watson said, “You would have to be crazy to say you wanted one because that child has no future.” Or, at least, Watson supposes, there is no good future. This assumption is based in violent extractive capitalism.

My future doesn’t have to be the same in a predictable way as that of an able-bodied person to be a good future. I am not wrong if I am able to serve my community more than I can serve capitalism.

Kafer further clarifies that the narrative of no future for disabled folks forecloses on their possibility in two ways:

1. “The value of a future that includes disabled people goes unrecognized.” For Unitarian Universalism, one signal of this is the hundreds of inaccessible chancels in the congregations of the movement. There was no imagining, especially considering Unitarianism’s entanglement with eugenics, either that there would be disabled folks active in the movement’s future or that they would would be called from among the people to lead.
2. “The value of a disability-free future is seen as self-evident.” There have been congregations in recent times that make choices that align with this conclusion, even if they do not use it as a starting point. One example is congregations that do not add accessible constructions because they don’t go with their aesthetic. Another example is congregations that could add accessibility, but don’t because it costs too much or they suppose the expenditure to be too costly, given the low number of disabled folks currently in attendance. These are chicken and egg positions. Which causes the conditions? Why do choices matter? What are folks actually choosing?

These are the questions, choices, and conclusions that lead people to express a shallow empathy for disabled and sick folks and folks with changing bodies. These faulty conclusions are the trail that lead to empathy for animals that leads to action, but not empathy for disabled folks that leads to action. They even allow the suggestion that elders could be humanely slaughtered. No. They cannot.

Sometimes people respond to these ideas by saying that they can care about both things at the same time. It turns out that this objection, unless accompanied with actual thought and advocacy (action) is whataboutism — responding to a difficult question by raising a different issue. Whataboutism happens, but it’s not something I can engage with because I can’t have this discussion with people who aren’t engaged in racial equity, environmental protection, and disability justice, especially when they are engaged in arguments that attempt to accord dehumanization to folks with target identities and disabled folks.

Every person brings value to the world by their intrinsic (built-in) value. Every person matters.

Morgan’s independent will and volition belong to disabled folks as much as they belong to anyone else. When they cannot express it, they are not probationary humans, waiting to prove their worth or lacking worth because they can’t prove it. This is what it means to be Unitarian Universalist. Maybe you are a Unitarian Universalist who believes that we should treat animals as kindly as we treat humans. I don’t disagree with that. If you leave the struggle for the existence of disabled folks behind to embrace the struggle for kindness and care for animals, though, you have left behind what is right to do in order to do what you have a right to do.