[content warning: ableism, rape apologism, bestiality, rape of children]
Anna Stubblefield has succeeded at the dubious achievement of simultaneously being a rapist three different ways at the same time.
First, Stubblefield used facilitated communication, a discredited way of communicating with nonverbal disabled people, to speak with DJ. Assuming for the sake of argument that facilitated communication works, she was literally his only means of communicating with the outside world; DJ did not successfully use facilitated communication with his family. His ability to get a GED, read books, even say what he wanted for dinner, was entirely dependent on her continued support. This creates a power imbalance in which sex cannot happen ethically. If she had been responsible, she would have said “I have feelings for you too, but we can’t explore them until you have another long-term facilitator who’s able to work with you.” (She would have also checked his desire for sex with her with another, naive facilitator, as is done when a disabled person who uses facilitated communication accuses someone of sexual abuse.)
Of course, facilitated communication does not work; according to the best scientific evidence, facilitated communication works something like a Oujia board, and what you get out of it is what the facilitator put in. So she raped him in a second fashion, by having sex with a nonverbal disabled person without taking the appropriate measures to ensure that he fully consented, instead relying on a pseudoscientific communication technique.
The third way that Stubblefield raped DJ is by ignoring his nonverbal communication: when she kissed him, he sat up, left the bed, and scooted out of the room. She then proceeded to perform oral sex on him. While she believed this was okay because his facilitated communication said he consented, given that facilitated communication does not work, our only means of understanding his preferences implies he did not want this.
Peter Singer has written a controversial editorial about Stubblefield’s case. Several parts of this editorial have been condemned throughout the effective altruist community: for instance, Singer’s defense of the pseudoscientific facilitated communication technique and his failure to mention either the first or the third ways in which Stubblefield raped DJ. However, one passage from his editorial has led to a great deal of argumentation:
A central issue in the trial was whether D.J. is profoundly cognitively impaired, as the prosecution contended and the court seemed to accept, or is competent cognitively but unable to communicate his thoughts without highly skilled assistance, as the defense contended. If we assume that he is profoundly cognitively impaired, we should concede that he cannot understand the normal significance of sexual relations between persons or the meaning and significance of sexual violation. These are, after all, difficult to articulate even for persons of normal cognitive capacity. In that case, he is incapable of giving or withholding informed consent to sexual relations; indeed, he may lack the concept of consent altogether.
This does not exclude the possibility that he was wronged by Stubblefield, but it makes it less clear what the nature of the wrong might be. It seems reasonable to assume that the experience was pleasurable to him; for even if he is cognitively impaired, he was capable of struggling to resist, and, for reasons we will note shortly, it is implausible to suppose that Stubblefield forcibly subdued him. On the assumption that he is profoundly cognitively impaired, therefore, it seems that if Stubblefield wronged or harmed him, it must have been in a way that he is incapable of understanding and that affected his experience only pleasurably.
This is not exactly what one would call the most lucidly written passage. Several people I respect, including Kelsey and Scott Alexander, have interpreted it differently than I do; they believe the passage says that it is theoretically possible for disabled people who can’t use language to consent to sex. I certainly hope that Singer was trying to say that and failing miserably, and I hope that he edits the article to clarify given the controversy he has engendered.
However, in the overall context of Singer’s work, I believe that a more reasonable and charitable (in that it accurately reflects Singer’s beliefs) interpretation is that Singer believes there is nothing wrong with having sex with a disabled person who can’t use language, regardless of their consent, as long as violence is not used.
Peter Singer regularly compares severely disabled people to animals; one of his most commonly used arguments in favor of animal welfare is that one would not torture a severely disabled person with the cognitive capacities of a chicken, and therefore one should not torture a chicken. He has repeatedly spoken out against speciesism, the belief that one should treat beings of equivalent capacities differently based on their species. Therefore, given that he believes that many non-language-using disabled people have similar capacities to animals, and that it is unethical to treat beings of similar capacities differently based on species, we can use his beliefs about bestiality to enlighten us about what this passage means.
Singer has written in the past about bestiality. He has explicitly outlined forms of bestiality he considers unacceptable:
Soyka’s suggestion indicates one good reason why some of the acts described in Dekkers book are clearly wrong, and should remain crimes. Some men use hens as a sexual object, inserting their penis into the cloaca, an all-purpose channel for wastes and for the passage of the egg. This is usually fatal to the hen, and in some cases she will be deliberately decapitated just before ejaculation in order to intensify the convulsions of its sphincter. This is cruelty, clear and simple. (But is it worse for the hen than living for a year or more crowded with four or five other hens in barren wire cage so small that they can never stretch their wings, and then being stuffed into crates to be taken to the slaughterhouse, strung upside down on a conveyor belt and killed? If not, then it is no worse than what egg producers do to their hens all the time.)
But sex with animals does not always involve cruelty. Who has not been at a social occasion disrupted by the household dog gripping the legs of a visitor and vigorously rubbing its penis against them? The host usually discourages such activities, but in private not everyone objects to being used by her or his dog in this way, and occasionally mutually satisfying activities may develop. Soyka would presumably have thought this within the range of human sexual variety.
This suggests that Singer may believe that bestiality is morally okay as long as it is mutually satisfying, and that all cases in which the animal initiates are certainly mutually satisfying. However, there is an intermediate case: the case in which the animal is not particularly interested in sex, but is having sex for some other reason. Singer writes:
[Rural men] may also take advantage of the sucking reflex of calves to get them to do a blowjob…
For three-quarters of the women who told Kinsey that they had had sexual contact with an animal, the animal involved was a dog, and actual sexual intercourse was rare. More commonly the woman limited themselves to touching and masturbating the animal, or having their genitals licked by it.
In this case, the animal does not desire sex. The calves are sucking as a reflex action; the dogs are presumably not licking human genitals out of a passionate desire to perform cunnilingus. (My understanding is that people who practice bestiality often put a food, such as peanut butter, on their genitals to induce the dog to lick them.) Singer does not appear to have clarified whether he considers this form of sex to be acceptable. However, given the fact that he mentions it as evidence that bestiality is quite common and does not condemn it, it seems to me that the correct way of interpreting Singer’s belief is that this too is acceptable. In short, it appears that Singer’s view is that it is always okay to have sex with an animal as long as the sex does not involve injury or pain to the animal, particularly if the animal experiences something that is prima facie rewarding (as sucking is to calves and food is to dogs).
Extending this to DJ’s case, I believe that Singer’s passage above means that as long as no injury or pain was done to DJ, and DJ experiences something that is prima facie rewarding (as oral sex is to humans), then sex with him is ethical.
Further evidence is that this explains an otherwise puzzling omission on Singer’s part. Singer says that “[DJ] was capable of struggling to resist, and, for reasons we will note shortly, it is implausible to suppose that Stubblefield forcibly subdued him.” But DJ did, in fact, resist: he attempted to leave. It’s possible that Singer is ignorant of this basic fact of the case. However, Singer himself says he has “stud[ied] the evidence advanced by Stubblefield’s attorney in support of her appeal.” When I searched Google for “anna stubblefield” on incognito mode, the above article was the second result. (The first was Singer’s own.) This is readily available information for anyone who wishes to read about the Stubblefield case. Unless we’re assuming that Singer is both a liar and grossly negligent, we should assume that he is aware of these publicly available facts of the case.
Therefore, the most logical conclusion is that Peter Singer does not consider DJ’s attempt to leave to be a sign of resistance. The idea that, in general, trying to leave isn’t a revocation of consent to sex is absurd rape apologism and I would not slander Singer by claiming he believed it. However, if Singer believes that violence or pain is what makes sex with DJ unethical, then it makes sense for him to point out that there wasn’t any violence or pain. In this context, Singer’s statement makes perfect sense.
The bestiality case illustrates this clearly. One can imagine a situation where you intend to have a calf give you a blowjob, the calf wanders off, you wait a bit for it to stay still, and then you have it give you a blowjob. It seems to me that if bestiality is unethical, this situation is unethical, and if bestiality is ethical, this situation is ethical.
The difference is that calves do not have an abstract, conceptual understanding of sex, because calves do not have an abstract, conceptual understanding of much of anything. A calf is not thinking “I have a consistent preference over time to not have that guy’s penis in my mouth and I’m going to try to communicate this preference through walking out the barn door. Oh, okay, it looks like he’s not going to give in, so I’m going to lie back and think of England.” A calf is thinking “I want to go investigate that sunbeam. Ooh! A thing to suck on!”
However, while I’m sympathetic to this model when we’re talking about sex with calves, I am very unsympathetic when we’re talking about sex with non-language-using humans. Calves have known capacities; severely disabled humans do not. To pick a very clear example: it is vanishingly unlikely that calves are capable of receptive and expressive language, with vocabularies of hundreds of thousands of words, and the only reason they’re not writing poetry to rival William Shakespeare’s is that their vocal cords aren’t shaped right. Receptive and expressive language are complex capacities and there would be absolutely no reason for them to evolve in a species without vocal cords that can produce speech.
Conversely, nearly all humans have receptive and expressive language capacities. We know that some humans retain receptive and expressive language, even if they have lost the ability to speak. For instance, many humans with cerebral palsy have difficulty controlling their mouth muscles, so they can’t speak, but they can communicate with augmentative and auxiliary communication technology. Some autistic humans are intermittently incapable of speech under stress. Therefore, a non-language-using human may lack the capacity to use language altogether, or they may understand language but have such large difficulties using it that (unlike in the case of many humans with cerebral palsy or autism) we can’t tell that they have that capacity.
Of course, language use is not a morally relevant capacity. But the same thing does apply to morally relevant capacities. How are you supposed to tell whether a person who can’t use language understands the normal significance of sexual relations between persons or the meaning and significance of sexual violation? I mean, it’s not like you can ask him.
We don’t even have a good sense of the probabilities here. It could be that every non-language-using disabled person has the cognitive abilities of a calf. It could be that every single one of them understands sexual violation. We have no way of distinguishing these two worlds.
I note that Peter Singer agrees with this argument. Inexplicably, he seems to believe that DJ can have the ability to understand sexual violation if and only if facilitated communication works as a way of communicating with him. Since presumably DJ had those capacities (if he does) before he ever met a facilitator, he could also presumably have those capacities even if he cannot communicate them.
Furthermore, it does not seem like the ability to be sexually traumatized is as complicated as all that. One-year-olds in general have a very poor understanding of consent, as one can see by their tendency to hit other toddlers to hear the interesting noises the other toddler makes, but I would expect that fucking a one-year-old would cause them no small amount of emotional harm both in the short and the long run. It certainly seems like a bad idea to decriminalize sex with toddlers on the grounds that they are incapable of giving or withholding consent.
The safest course, I believe, is to assume that DJ is a person (albeit a person with certain diminished capacities). As a person, he is capable of being sexually traumatized. This does not necessarily mean he should be consigned to celibacy. I personally agree with Scott’s proposal:
I wish there were a system in place to protect disabled people from sexual abuse while not banning all sexuality entirely. If you want to do surgery on a disabled person who can’t consent, lots of doctors and lawyers and friends and family get together and do some legal stuff and try to elicit information from the patient as best they can and eventually come to a conclusion. The result isn’t perfect, but it’s a heck of a lot better than either “no one can ever operate on a disabled person” or “any surgeon who wants can grab a disabled person off the street and do whatever operation they feel like”. If there were some process like this for sex, and they decided that DJ wanted to have sex with Anna, then (again ignoring the power dynamics issue) I think this would be better than either banning him from all sex forever, or letting her have sex with whoever she wants as long as she can make up convincing enough pseudoscience.
Notably, this does seem to not have happened here even in an unofficial way, as one can tell by the fact that the family’s response to Anna revealing that she had sex with DJ was not “woohoo, finally” but “what the FUCK?” and trying to get her to go to jail for twelve years. Which is the second reason that I’ve claimed she’s a rapist.
(The fact that Peter Singer did not say something like “while good consent practices were not used in this case and Stubblefield is a rapist, I want to be clear that it is possible for a neurotypical person to have enjoyable and enriching sex with a non-language-using person if proper care is taken to ensure that they consent” seems to me to be further evidence that my claim about what Singer means is right and he in fact thinks that Stubblefield’s actual behavior is morally acceptable.)
Finally, I’d like to address the issue of abstracting away specific details of the case to talk about underlying philosophical issues. Clearly, it should be acceptable to talk about under what circumstances it is okay for non-language-using people to have sex; clearly, the routine desexualization of intellectually and developmentally disabled people is a grave harm to them.
However, let’s imagine that Peter Singer had instead written an article entitled Who Is The Victim In The Brock Turner Case? In this article, in addition to using pseudoscience to claim that Brock Turner’s victim actually consented, Singer writes that it’s a mistake to assume that sex with unconscious people is unethical just because they can’t verbally revoke consent.
Of course, it is possible to ethically have sex with unconscious people. Many couples enjoy waking each other up with sex. It is very silly for some sex-positive feminists to criticize it for lack of affirmative consent. But it seems to me that making this argument in the context of, you know, an actual rape victim is absurdly offensive and insensitive. Doing so in an article called Who Is The Victim In The Brock Turner Case? in which you argue for clemency for Brock Turner leads one to the conclusion that you’re not just abstractly considering important issues but, in fact, arguing that the particular rape which actually happened is morally unobjectionable and should not be punished.
And it seems to me to be equally objectionable to argue against protests of Who Is The Victim In The Brock Turner Case? by pointing out that it’s harmful to say that waking people up with a blowjob is rape and then saying it’s a shame that Singer didn’t do his homework about the details of the case, whereupon he would realize that Brock Turner did not in fact finger his girlfriend with her previous consent with the intent of allowing her to wake up pleasantly. Brock Turner’s case is clearly and obviously not the same thing as waking up your partner by fingering them, and it is offensive, morally wrong, and worst of all extremely unenlightening to discuss them in the same place.
gazeboist said:
The end of this sentence seems to be missing.
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gazeboist said:
Also here:
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YumAntimatter said:
While she believed this was okay because his facilitated communication said he consented, given that facilitated communication does not work, our only means.
This one too
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jossedley said:
I’m not a Singer fan, and I agree that Stubbenfeld seems to be a rapist, but my guess as to what Singer means by not resisting is a little different from yours.
As I understand it, Stubbenfeld claims that:
(1) She kissed DJ, at which point he sat up, got down on the floor, and scooted away. According to Stubbenfeld, DJ communicated that he was into it, but needed a break.
(2) Then (again according to Stubbenfeld), DJ communicated that he wanted to have sex, and they did.
I agree that the communications are pseudoscience and represent Stubbenfeld’s input, not DJ’s. although I suspect she believed in it.
My read on Singer isn’t that he assumes that all people with DJ’s disability necessarily would enjoy oral sex, but that because DJ allegedly didn’t resist the second encounter, Singer is willing to assume consent.
Which is still creepy and I still don’t like Singer, but I think it’s more “Baby It’s Cold Outside” messed up than “the disabled can’t withhold consent” messed up.
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Deiseach said:
The big problem here is “communicated with Stubblefield” where she is the only person who is capable of communicating with him and all his alleged statements are being translated by her. If we were considering a case where a non-English speaking person was robbed, and the person who usually translates for them was accused of the theft, we would never consider “Okay, let’s get the testimony of this person using the accused to translate!”
We have no idea what DJ is or is not communicating, because it’s Anna Stubblefield’s word alone. It looks like a horrible mess of Saviour Complex and whatever drives women teachers in their twenties and thirties to have sex with their students in ages ranging from 12-18 on her part, and I can see why the family are outraged and freaking out about this. Even granting the best case scenario where she’s not a liar and not delusional and he both is as cognitively able as she claims and he did want a relationship, it’s still exceedingly unprofessional by every level.
Basically, this simply confirms my bad opinion of Peter Singer. I have never understood why he’s hailed as some kind of guru of ethics and frankly I think he’d be six times more concerned if this were a case of “Did Anna Stubblefield intentionally not take her cat to the vet when it was sick or did she genuinely think the animal was okay?” than when it comes to the (warning: slurs) crips and tards. I genuinely get the impression he doesn’t quite regard physically and mentally less able people as fully human or other than a kind of animal, and if it’s a toss-up between an able animal like a lab rat or a disabled human, he’s on the side giving greater rights to the rat.
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jossedley said:
Oh, it’s insane. She seems to have created this ideal disabled person to fall in love with, and convinced herself they were Anne Sullivan and Helen Keller.
DJ couldn’t type when assisted by anyone else or respond to anyone else, but Stubblefeld convinced herself that he was taking college courses and doing the work required (solely through her help), that he was going to get a college degree and become an activist for the disabled (again, intermediated by her).
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jossedley said:
Yikes, I just read the NYT story, and if you approach Stubblefeld with even an ounce of skepticism (and I don’t see how you couldn’t), I can’t see how Singer concluded there was actual consent.
There’s only Stubblefeld to report what happened; even by her account, DJ tried to get away from her kiss, didn’t climax from the oral sex she says he requested, and the one time she tried PIV, it “didn’t work out.”
Stubblefeld relies on the “statements” she attributes to DJ to argue consent, but once you accept those are fantasies, her story of his conduct doesn’t suggest consent at all, but a rapist rationalizing.
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Elizabeth said:
Nitpick: In most cases, when I have sex with someone new, there’s plenty of little bugs like “PIV doesn’t work out” and “someone didn’t climax from oral.” I don’t think those are particular evidence of lack of consent.
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jossedley said:
@Elizabeth – that’s a good point. In this case, though, one party is unable to communicate and one of Singer’s alternate arguments is that to the extent DJ is capable of consent, it seems likely that he did, because he didn’t resist. (After the first kiss, that is.)
Given that the only person who can testify about whether he resisted is Stubblefield, the fact that she reports both encounters as unsuccessful IMHO increases the likelihood that DJ actually did resist, and Stubblefield assumed that was his disability, and that his alleged “communications” indicated that he was into it.
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jossedley said:
OK, and I finally read Singer’s editorial (which should be a lesson for me). I think he and his co-author are arguing for all of the following propositions:
1) They allege it was unfair for the judge to exclude some evidence that DJ is in fact capable of communicating through FC and did in fact consent. (Interesting legal question based on the legal filter against unreliable science).
2) They also allege that DJ’s alleged lack of resistance (presumably after the first kiss) makes it reasonable to infer consent.
3) They also argue that if DJ is actually so cognitively impaired that he is not capable of consent, then the damage should be considered lower.
So it was a long twisting road, and a lesson that I should click through and read everything before shooting off my mouth, but I think in light of #3, Ozy was right.
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gazeboist said:
And now for real commentary…
How often does desexualization come up though, especially if we don’t count disability-rights advocates talking to each other? I’m reminded of how the only time America can ever talk about gun control is when there’s a mass murder on the news, or how the only time we can ever talk about reform-focused criminal justice is when someone is about to be sentenced to life imprisonment for a genuinely horrible crime. This makes everything about these conversations awful, because it polarizes them into the most extreme positions available when the answer is usually some sort of compromise / moderate change position.
I don’t really know what to do about the problem, because you’re right that it’s absurdly insensitive to go talking about how less extreme versions of what actually happened shouldn’t be punished when what actually happened is that someone got raped, but I also don’t think anyone would ever talk about the desexualization of the severely intellectually disabled outside of this context. Like, maybe we could wait for the perfect scenario where someone does have consensual sex with a disabled person and is nevertheless prosecuted for it, but I think part of the issue is that that case pretty much can’t happen, because our consent norms currently forbid such people from consenting in the first place, so anyone who *does* have sex with a person who is so disabled that they can’t verbally consent is almost certainly someone who’s going to ignore their lack of consent.
I think the analogy to unconscious sex is hard, precisely because we know that it’s possible to consent to unconscious sex and that people do it all the time (and in this case that did not happen). It makes more sense to analogize it to something like statutory rape, where in theory it’s perfectly possible for a 25-year-old to have consensual sex with a 15-year-old, but our societal norms are set up such that any 25-year-old who actually does so is probably taking advantage of the 15-year-old in *some* way, even if the 15-year-old says yes in the moment.
Peter Singer remains a very smart man with important things to say, who nevertheless insists on being a fucking edgelord all the time.
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ozymandias said:
I mean, I think the actual correct solution to this is to just write things as they occur to you without worrying about whether there’s a news-y hook. News-y hooks are bad for a lot of reasons, including this one, and the NYT does run reporting without a hook attached. Or Peter Singer could have written something more like what Scott wrote, which is fairly clear that Stubbenfield is a rapist.
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gazeboist said:
I’m not totally clear on what you mean by a “news-y hook”. Do you mean a prominent and vaguely related event that prompts your thoughts on the matter, or a clickbait title like “Who is the real victim here?!?” (or a controversial claim made “as hyperbole” in some other way)?
If the second, I agree with you; clickbait is a terrible way to get people thinking about a thing. If the first, my concern is that issues often don’t occur to people without a prompting event, and the prompting event is very likely to be obvious to people reading even if you don’t touch on it. You wind up with the vagueblogging problem, basically.
A potential solution is being super careful to discuss how the event prompts your thoughts and then distance your actual thoughts from statements about the event, like Scott did (or tried to do). With that, though, you run the risk (with P approximately 1) that people* will uncharitably read statements about the event into your piece, *and* that people you’re actually opposed to (eg the people who swung by SSC to “agree” that consent is stupid and/or rape isn’t a real thing) will pop up to congratulate you, thus forcing you onto their side whether you like it or not. I guess the answer is “be really careful and accept that some people suck”, but that makes me sad.
* I don’t think you were uncharitable, as demonstrated by the fact that you showed up to talk to Scott, rather than just declaring him to be a Singerian edgelord.
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benquo said:
Thanks for writing this. One thing I think needs to be called out more is how Singer stacked the evidential deck here. For instance, he brings up the fact that Stubblefield’s FC was independently validated – but it was independently validated by another FC fraudster, not by someone using a nondiscredited method. He also claims that if DJ weren’t happy with the situation he would have said something, but this is only a valid argument if FC works. I think this is pretty much lying on Singer’s part, and we have to wonder why someone’s so motivated to say raping disabled people is OK, that they’re willing to stack the deck like this.
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gazeboist said:
I don’t think we have to wonder that; you’re implicitly constructing a false equivalence between “saying that raping disabled people is OK” and “having false beliefs about how disabled people express themselves and/or how consent works”.
Of course, it’s worth wondering why Singer can’t be bothered to investigate this theory that everyone’s been telling him is discredited to figure out *why* people are saying that. And I think the answer is that he’s lived in abstract-utility-land for so long that he can’t be bothered to come back to reality and check his assumptions, so every news story that he can turn into a controversial thought experiment just becomes a set of premises tailored to whatever conclusion he wants to generate.
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gazeboist said:
(and the conclusion is always, without fail, “demolish this fence!”)
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tcheasdfjkl said:
I agree with all of this and all the things you’ve been saving elsewhere about this issue, except for the “lying” part. I think “lying” ordinarily means “saying something which one believes to be untrue”, and I think (a) we have no evidence that this is the case here, (b) it’s a bad idea to switch to an unusual definition unilaterally, (c) the ordinary definition of lying is a good and important concept, and it’s important to keep this concept around in case somebody actually does this, rather than diluting it by using it to mean something like “saying something which one would know to be untrue of one did due diligence” (which is certainly bad behavior, it’s just importantly different bag behavior from “lying” in its normal definition). I don’t think anything is lost by saying “Singer is saying totally false things which he would have known are false if he did the most basic research and thinking on this issue” – that’s plenty damning enough without needing to make unverifiable claims about Singer’s brainstate.
(I know this is kind of off topic, I just wanted to properly register my agreement & disagreement.)
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Deiseach said:
Okay, look, this is crap. There are tests for assessing the intelligence and capacities of severely physically disabled persons. I’m currently working as office support in an early intervention service for children with various additional needs and one of our children has cerebral palsy and you know what? There are assessments for this and you can tell by interacting with him that he’s bright and capable. Now, maybe the American system is fucked up even worse than we think, but it would have to be pretty damn well in the toilet if an assessment carried out in 2004 got things so badly wrong. At the very least, it raises the question of carrying out another assessment now to see if she’s right and he’s not as incapable as first diagnosed. Surely this has happened to see if she’s telling the truth or not?
Anna Stubblefield sounds like she had a major case of believing she was going to be the Annie Sullivan to DJ’s Helen Keller but at least Anne Sullivan didn’t fuck her charge and tell the family “No, you don’t understand, we’re in love and it’s consensual!”
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acandersonsite said:
Holy crap I am raging over this
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anon said:
FC works at least some of the time. I don’t know how often. We know this because people have later developed skills and communicated without facilitation that their facilitated communication was genuine.
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davidmikesimon said:
Anon, that’s fairly weak evidence, ; it seems unwise to put much faith in it over the failures of more direct tests of the method.
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Megaritz said:
The scientific evidence of FC’s general failure is definitely a problem. But Mel Baggs, who is dang smart, claims some people really *have* gone from using FC to *not* using FC, and have then claimed that FC was legitimate for them. (Links at bottom.)
(Ozy, you know Baggs isn’t a pseudosciencey loon. If you’re reading this, can you help us get to the bottom of this? It really bugs me, and I don’t know what to make of it!)
Anecdotal evidence can’t show FC is generally legitimate. But all it takes is one counterexample of FC actually working to say “FC never works” is false. Baggs’ account seems to imply one of the following is true:
A. What those people had wasn’t FC.
B. They remember their experiences wrongly, and *didn’t* actually communicate using FC.
C. Mel Baggs is wrong about what happened.
D. FC sometimes works.
I don’t know enough about the situation to judge between A and D. I find B and C less likely than either A or D. Distressingly, I haven’t seen *any* skeptics of FC *ever* address this in a serious way or investigate how good the evidence is. If it’s wrong, I’d like to see a debunking.
I’m especially interested to find out who some of these people are, and if we have firsthand accounts from them.
Quote from Baggs:
“My belief is that some facilitated communication is absolutely genuine and that this is proven by the fact that there are people who have gone on to completely independent typing — typing without even someone standing near them, these are people I’ve met. There are also people who have gone on to speech. People who can verify, in speech, in sign language, or in independent typing, that anything they typed while using facilitated communication was genuine, show absolutely that there is such a thing as genuine FC.”
Link to Baggs’ original post:
Link to Baggs’ FC tag with more posts that might be important–I haven’t read the others:
http://withasmoothroundstone.tumblr.com/tagged/FC
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jossedley said:
@Megaritz
I would be curious what Ozy things about Amanda Baggs – she’s pretty controversial.
As to facilitated communication, the biggest problem is that many cases are demonstrably fake, so even if some cases aren’t, we don’t seem to have a reliable filter.
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trentzandrewson said:
…It occurs to me right now that the information I was given to conclude that FC is at least semi-legitimate probably comes from Baggs, and due to recent events I am of the school of thoughts that Baggs is a massive fraud. I think you accidentally made me less pro-FC than I was originally.
We really need to locate those people who progressed from FC to independent typing.
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trentzandrewson said:
(addendum: some of the information. I have other pro-FC information that does not come from Baggs or anyone connected to them.)
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Tacitus said:
@ Trent, what recent events?
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trentzandrewson said:
The video released of them at a…store? bank? something, in which they were clearly not at the support level they describe themself as being.
I know that disabled people can appear ‘higher-functioning’ in certain social contexts than they would otherwise, but one of Baggs’ major claims is that they’re extremely high-support at all times and a video of them talking to a bank teller pretty clearly falsifies that.
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Tacitus said:
Sie has a new video out this decade? Because hir old YouTube still says the last video is nine years old and I don’t think you could mean one of the ones from hir tumblr* so I’m confused. Do you have a link or a search term or anything?
*because if you read hir tumblr, you know sie doesn’t go by she/her anymore.
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trentzandrewson said:
I have read Baggs’ tumblr. Because of a mix of neuroatypicality and moral reasons, I don’t use sie/hir pronouns for them (I’ll use ‘they’ if I must). I’m talking about a video taken by a non-Baggs person on a website Baggs is probably aware of in some way but has not talked about. (I’m not going to link the website here because I strongly anti-endorse it.)
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ozymandias said:
Blog policy is that people must be referred to either with their preferred pronouns or with whatever they prefer of “he”, “she” or “they”, but I don’t know whether Baggs prefers “she” or “they.”
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Tacitus said:
@ Ozy: “Pronouns in order of preference from most to least:
sie hir hir hirs hirself
ze zer zem zers zerself OR xe xyr xem xyrs sense of
they their them theirs themself
If you can’t do any of those, I won’t be offended. Use whichever words you can. I have a disability where pronoun problems (that go way beyond gender) are part of the diagnostic criteria in some editions. I can’t make myself offended if you just can’t do it. My closest friend in the world can only call me her.
But if you’re deliberately misgendering me, that’s another story and I will be pissed.
Also, assigning me any gender at all is misgendering me, please keep that in mind.”
quoted from http://withasmoothroundstone.tumblr.com/post/115187595380/transgender-day-of-visibility-mel-age-34
@ Trent: Disappointed to not have enough information to evaluate your evidence for myself, but I accept your reluctance to link to things you don’t want to give traffic to.
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ozymandias said:
Thanks! Trent, I’m going to edit your comment to say “they.”
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jossedley said:
Ozy – feel free to edit mine as well – sorry for making pronoun assumptions!
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Aapje said:
@Anon
If it does work sometimes, it is rare enough that all of the controlled and double blind studies into FC revealed facilitator influence. There is no reason to assume that even if a ‘handful of FC users have learned to type independently’, these few cases are representative for the far greater number of other cases where FC proponents claim to succeed. The results of the controlled and double blind studies strongly suggest that this is not the case.
It’s not really surprising if FC does actually work in a few cases for people who have so much intelligence and motor control that they can later learn to type independently. I would be able to prevent a FC facilitator from typing out things she made up, as well. So most likely there is a point where the ‘facilitated’ people are so incapable that the biases of the facilitator take over. The studies suggest that this is the case for most applications of FC.
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liskantope said:
Many interesting points here nicely made. I want to read more and think over this issue for a while.
I nominate this as the new greatest Thing of Things out-of-context quote.
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Anonymous said:
Singer’s general barometer for moral harm is the violation of preferences – this is the basis on which he’s supported e.g. infanticide. He believes that for at least some time interval infants are incapable of preferring not to be killed, so no problem (I make no defense of this argument).
I understood the piece in question in this context, and here Singer seems to be doubting that a “profoundly cognitively impaired” DJ could truly prefer not to have sex, EXCEPT to the extent that it might be unpleasant in a very base sense. The scooting away could only be interpreted as a higher-level (meaning higher than something like “this hurts”) preference not to have sex, which Singer apparently thinks impossible, so it doesn’t count as resistance to him.
As you say, this reasoning might make sense for animals, but Singer completely fails to support (or even elucidate, really) his assumptions for disabled humans. I’m basically just agreeing with the post here but wanted to support that you can decode 100% of what Singer says here if you know his underlying principles.
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Walter said:
I don’t know you, so this might be a bit rude. But it kind of feels like you actually have a deontological ‘rape is bad’ rule, and are kind of cramming that into a consequentialist framework?
Like, in the Righteous Mind, where Haidt is talking about giving people hypotheticals with people fucking dead chickens and they struggle to find a consequence to point to in order to justify the actual reason they are squicked.
Like, Singer is a consequentialist, yeah? So he’s got to bite this bullet. Ask him a hypothetical like “I rape a coma patient. I enjoyed it, she didn’t know or care. That’s cool, right?” and see what he says.
Consequentialism relies on people being able to explain their experiences so we can assess the consequences. If you take that mechanism away then the whole thing founders into a morass of interpreting stuff as evidence of inner lives.
Imagine, as the opposite of the coma example, DJ as some sort of genius monk with deep introspection going on, who has taken a vow to never, by word or by deed, allow the outside world any insight into his ponderings. Same shit transpires (Monk!DJ has said by FC, according to Anna, that she is the sole exception to his vow). Is the walk away a breech in this vow? Is it random? What does it mean that Monk!DJ didn’t climax?
Coma!DJ and Monk!DJ are the same, from Singer’s perspective. Suffering that isn’t communicated can’t be taken into account, or we couldn’t walk anywhere in case the ground was resenting us. So he’s gonna side with the rapist, who can certainly verify that she is enjoying herself. It follows from what we know of his ethics, yeah?
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tcheasdfjkl said:
Why on earth should consequentialism limit itself to experiences that can be communicated? I find this suggestion kind of monstrous. I don’t think Singer would even agree with you – if we ignored the experiences of beings that can’t communicate, we would mostly ignore animal suffering. (That said I haven’t actually read Singer on animal suffering so I don’t know the details of his arguments.)
Of course if someone can’t communicate their experience, there is more uncertainty about what their experience is. That doesn’t mean we can’t reason about it at all. To some extent it’s just like other kinds of decision under uncertainty – you shouldn’t drive drunk because there’s too high a chance you’ll crash, and you also shouldn’t have sex with someone you can’t be sure is consenting because there’s too high a chance you’ll traumatize them. (Why? Because humans are frequently traumatized by unwanted sex. Yes, maybe this particular human wouldn’t be, but we don’t really have an actual indication that this is the case.)
We can also try to reduce the uncertainty. Facilitated communication is a bad way of trying to do this. Other ways include psych/neuroscience research and also just observing how a given individual tends to react to things they like and things they don’t like.
I am happily amused by the idea that accusing someone of having a deontological rule is rude. 🙂
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Murphy said:
One item from the singer article jumped out at me a little.
Are these videos available to the public? it kinda would change the situation if D.J. really was able to answer yes/no questions unaided and thus could actually be asked his own opinion of the event…..
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Aapje said:
The judge said that Crossley did assist D.J.
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Murphy said:
I know the judge barred it. I’m curious *how* she assisted if singer said D.J was “unaided” during those tests.
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jossedley said:
I would really love to see the evidentiary motions filed by both sides regarding Crossly and the student who says she assisted DJ in writing book reports, but they might be sealed since they involve DJ’s identity and health details.
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JerseyMom said:
She assisted him by the simple method of holding the targets he was supposed to touch and then moving the targets so that he touched the appropriate one. A very simple test could have been done with non-moving targets, but that wouldn’t have worked. Which is why the judge wouldn’t allow it to be admitted. And a very comprehensive examination of DJ was performed by the trial by one of the foremost experts in communicating with the physically impaired. And he concluded that DJ was profoundly cognitively impaired.
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