February 13, 2017 - 21:47
Harriet McBryde Johnson’s chapter, Unspeakable Conversations was my favorite reading for this week. In the chapter Johnson recalls her visit at Princeton University when she spoke in opposition to Peter Singer, who is “the most influential philosopher of our time”(201). Peter Singer wants parents to have the right to kill their disabled babies because he doesn’t consider them “persons”. In my last blog post I used the word outraged a lot, and again I’m here to tell you that I’m outraged by 100% of the opinions Peter Singer holds towards disabled people. I was at a loss for words when reading that someone could actually believe that it would be best to kill an individual who has a severe cognitive impairment. I have a hard time understanding how Johnson, who is disabled, was able to meet with Singer and withhold herself from cursing him out or having her assistant punch him in the face. Here I am sitting behind a computer screen, writing a blog post about Johnson’s experience and finding it extremely difficult to hold in my own anger against Singer. However, one of the most important points Johnson makes in her chapter is that by allowing yourself to dehumanize Singer, you are thereby falling into the same web Singer is caught.
Lennard Davis’s Introduction: Normality, Power, and Culture really opened my mind to the idea of norms, and how the world we live in is constructed around the idea of norms. I was intrigued to read Davis’s viewpoint that the use of statistics played an important role in the eugenics movement. I never thought of statistics in this light, and I agree with Davis that statistics is bound up in eugenics. I also found in extremely interesting how Davis noted that Charles Darwin’s notion of evolution laid the foundations for eugenics movement. It seems that a lot of notable figures in the natural science world initiated the eugenics movement. I would love to discuss this further in class.
Overall I really enjoyed all the readings for this week's class!