The Language of Ableism

Hello internet.

This is broadly speaking my reaction to this blog, though some of the thoughts written here have been going around for a while.

I will begin this entry with the admission that I am not completely comfortable with the terms mental illness or even disability because they seem to be making value judgements about people without any real basis. I don't like the idea that the language we use suggests that these features are a bad thing, or that deviation from what people think of as normal is a bad thing. I do understand that people might want to use a very weak sense of the word "bad" to mean a property that creates difficulties for people in the particular social context we are in, but this could be adequately replaced with the something to the effect of "difficulty-generating". From what I have thus far written you may have noticed that I feel quite hesitant and am trying very hard both to effectively put across my thoughts and to avoid using any language which could quite justifiably be taken as offensive by many people.

Here is the argument as I understand it. Some person in our society has a difficulty-generating mental or physical anomoly that significantly make their life worse (I am using the third person plural to try to avoid gender bias). This could be for one of two main reasons: firstly that people within society actively discriminate against people with anomolies like theirs; or secondly that society itself is constituted in such a way that people with anomolies like theirs are at a significant disadvantage. I am using a device I first came accross in the chapter on Feminism in Contemporary Political Philosophy by Will Kymlicka, but it originates elsewhere. The obvious injustice of either state of affairs is supposed to make us feel the need to correct this defect in our society, and suffice to say I find the case quite compelling.

After being part of (and presumably benefitting from) a system which is making some people's lives worse, to then act or speak in a way which is found hurtful by those same people is a terrible thing to do, and so I agree with Diane Shipley that we need to be careful with the language that we use. But as is probably made obvious by my fumbling for words, I don't really know what the correct language to use might be.

I think the explanation in my case might be broadly biographical. I have had almost no exposure to people with any of the kinds of difficulties I am talking about, except what have presumably been relatively mild cases. I am probably both a lot less sensitive to some people's needs than I ought to be, and a lot less informed than I ought to be about the various issues affecting significant numbers of people in our communities. I have no excuse for this, either. It seems to have just happened. This is something which I feel I need to remedy in the near future.

If I was a person like me, and I am, I would be quite careful with what I say and do so as to avoid being hurtful. Yes, it is difficult sometimes to know which words to use, but this is the future now: surely we can be creative.

Caleb

PS I will hopefully talk a bit later about public policy when there is great diversity of this sort for people.