Tag Archives: Ethics

Apr4

A difference in perspective.

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“She’s so happy” is what someone just told me about Fey, my cat, who’s visiting me where I’m staying right now.

Actually, while Fey is a lot of things right now, happiness isn’t what I’d summarize it as. She’s glad to see me, but she’s also edgy and scared about being in a new place (and about me not being home yet), angry at me for not being home, annoyed about having been picked up, and frantic in her attempts to get me to do something by nudging my hands and face hard and in rapid succession.

I notice this sort of thing often. I obviously can’t read a cat’s mind and know precisely what she’s thinking about everything, but I can get a pretty good clue through body language of the assorted layers of emotions she’s got going on.

Other people often seem to have a limited template of cat emotions in their heads.

Such as, as I finally deduced today, “Purring means the cat is happy.” Which is a gross oversimplification of the use of purring by cats, and which seems to lead to humans totally ceasing all further observation of what the cat happens to be doing in addition to purring, as well as all comparison of the sound of the purring to all other purring the cat has done.

Then there are more “subtle” things like not knowing the difference between a play-bite and an anger-bite. Which doesn’t seem subtle to me, but after watching a lot of people interact with cats, it seems like many people don’t get it. I’ve seen too many people attempt to “play with” (read: invade the space of) a heavily annoyed cat, only to conclude the cat is “mean” when they get hissed at and scratched. And all too often, even after the hissing and scratching, they might say in a sing-song voice, “You meanie,” and go back for more. Putting themselves at risk of a serious bite and taking every warning sign the cat has to offer as a sign of “playfulness”.

That last one, I had trouble understanding for awhile. I thought the humans doing those things were being cruel themselves. Then I ran across a person who seemed absolutely contradictory: She was very conscientious about most things, but at the same time she seemingly terrorized my cat and then laughed about it.

A friend pointed out that she probably wasn’t able to read feline social cues very well.

And that did turn out to be the problem after all.

But it seems like to many people there’s only one set of nonverbal cues that exist: That of the neurologically standard members of their own species in the culture or cultures they are most familiar with.

Anything beyond that appears less nuanced, but often they conclude that rather than being unable to pick up the nuances of an unfamiliar species, neurotype, or culture, then these nuances don’t exist unless the unfamiliar people in question develop nonverbal cues specifically intended to communicate to the person doing the observing. They might even, if they don’t even manage to learn an abbreviated version of the nonverbal cues in question, conclude that the unfamiliar species, culture, or neurotype has no body language. Which leads to being stereotyped as mysterious, sinister, defective, deficient, or some combination of the above.

I’ve always found it interesting, how if autistic people don’t understand certain things about non-autistic people, it’s because autistic people are disordered (deficient in understanding “nonverbal cues” in general, as if there is only one kind), but if non-autistic people don’t understand autistic people, it’s also because autistic people are disordered (deficient in our ability to produce “nonverbal cues” in general, as if there is only one kind). People seem very resistant to the idea that there are many levels of detail and nuance that they are missing in this regard.

Feb4

When did ‘equality’ become middle ground between ‘extremes’ that all look identical?

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I hear a lot about extremes and middle grounds and the like at times, when it comes to viewpoints in the autistic community (and/or general disability community).

My question is this:

Let’s say there are two viewpoints under discussion (and there are of course more than two, I’m just trying to make a point about the way two of them are often described).

One of them says that all people are of equal value, and ought to be accorded equal rights, including equal access to a society that systematically enables some people (with certain strengths and weaknesses) over others (with different strengths and weaknesses). (Notice that “equal” and “identical” aren’t the same thing — I’m not even going to publish comments on this one that says “But not everyone’s equal because not everyone’s the same.” We’re talking equal value as human beings and identical abilities, that’s two totally unrelated things, comparing them is like comparing apples and dark matter.)

Another of them says that autistic people are superior to non-autistic people, or that disabled people in general are superior to non-disabled people. (And I don’t mean “better at doing certain things”, I’m talking value judgments here.)

Why is the second point of view considered a “more extreme” version of the first?

Why is superiority considered a more extreme version of equality? As far as I can tell, it’s just the exact flipside of the majority view of disabled people, which is to say no more or less extreme than the mainstream views.

I am tired of hearing that people who believe that certain kinds of people are better than others have a more extreme version of my (and many others’) views on equality, and that therefore my (and many others’) views on equality can be considered a midpoint between assorted views on inequality.

Not that either “extreme” or “middle ground” is inherently superior to the other either, it seems more to me that people ought to focus on what is ethical rather than how their ethics compare with the society they live in so that they can either find an extreme or take what they imagine to be the average of several extremes without any thought to whether it actually makes sense to do either one of those things. (I think that a lot of people just use “extreme” as a shorthand for “angry,” “unreasonable,” “heatedly emotional,” or “I don’t like it,” and therefore want to insist that whatever they’re doing isn’t extreme. And then others use “extreme” to mean “cool”, and therefore want to insist that whatever they’re doing is extreme. Whether or not either of those is the case when they take a good look around the society they’re involved in and compare their views to that.)

And also not that autistic and/or disabled supremacists can, regardless of the offensiveness of their views, even do all that much damage in a society that’s so entirely slanted against them. (Making the opposite more of a general threat because autistic supremacy amounts to blowing hot air, whereas non-autistic supremacy is enforced from every direction.)

But seriously.

How is equality a “midpoint” between one form of inequality and another? Is this part of my surrounding culture’s obsession with finding “two sides” to every story and defining everything else as somewhere on the line between them (and this of course passing for objectivity), or what? Because I’m not seeing equality as some kind of middle-ground position between various forms of inequality (whether disability-based or not), it’s off in a completely different direction. Equality is actually pretty extreme compared to the society I actually happen to live in. A society which prefers to always make one sort of person or another inferior so that someone else can be superior, rather than accepting that all people are equal in value and then working to make things happen as close as possible to treating people as if they’re actually equal in value.

(And now back to lying down, I caught a mild (but really annoying) bug. Just because it had to happen.)

Dec19

Naivete

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I was talking to a friend the other day on the phone. And somehow we got into talking about some of my weak points, including what must look like astounding levels of naivete about some things. I remember a staff person I used to know (actually one of the best who ever worked for me) where I wondered whether she was neurologically atypical in some way, because she had a lot of really crappy life experiences at the hands of others, yet still seemed overly trusting of other people in ways that were always getting her in trouble.

I tend to assume in some way that other people have good intentions, and that conversations are happening in good faith, rather than some other kind of motive being involved.

More specifically, I tend to assume that people are interested in exchanging information, and are interested in figuring out what is real and what is right or wrong ethically, beyond whether their pre-existing viewpoints happen to be right or wrong about it.

I tend to especially expect this of adults, possibly because my commitment to that sort of thing became conscious and strengthened when I moved out on my own as a young adult. (This sort of thing is nearly always a gradual process, but there’s a difference between being committed to it even if you screw up, and not caring at all.)

All of which is a somewhat ironic example, of course, of an area in which I’m not always taking in the real world as opposed to what I expect of it. I often even get the gut reaction (and from what I’ve been told, I’ve got a highly accurate gut) that someone is not trustworthy, and yet still continue to treat them as if they are, while trying to remain internally wary. I can’t tell at all if this is a sign of ethics or a sign of extreme foolishness and stupidity.

Anyway, I mentioned all this to my friend, and she told me that she’s noticed this about me for awhile, in a way that sounded like “That’s really obvious.” I just wonder what to do about it.