The aff’s extinction impacts justify violence against the disabled through utilitarianism and ableist logic

What is the relationship between extinction and disability? One of the ways in which we might think about disability and disability studies is as requiring an expansion of conditions of justice; this is how Martha Nussbaum has criticized the liberal tradition of fairness and personhood. We should, she argues, extend considerations of fairness to include those who care for others. If we think about a world that enables human capacities and flourishing, then we need to look beyond autonomous and self-defining individuals. Disability considerations would both enhance and extend the range of political compassion, enabling a notion of persons that is not merely that of the abstract political subject, but a being with capacities and dignity; capacities are richer and more varied than our narrow notion of person currently allows (2006). For Nussbaum we will live in a better world if we expand our notion of capacity and what counts as a flourishing human life. In what follows I want to reverse this relation, and rather than expand capacities and justice to allow for disability (with disability being the secondary consideration), I want to see disability as the primary or transcendental condition from which the supposedly “normal” person derives, and further to see the long history of the “normal” subject as directly intertwined with the accelerated extinction of humans and non-humans. If one considers the subject of capacities from which Nussbaum begins her critique – the liberal person, blessed with reason, autonomy, “favorable” social conditions and an enlightened milieu of political deliberation – one would need to recognize the long history of enslavement (of humans and non-humans), exploitation, appropriation and colonization that made even the thought of the just society possible. Disability is not an added on concern but is precisely what orients, if silently, the problem of extinction. One might say, that “human” existence is constitutively disabled (or, to follow Bernard Stiegler, that its default condition is dependence upon a broad network of technologies and archives that have never been equally distributed (Stiegler 1998, 122). Further, the capacities that enable the “able” person have cost, and continue to cost, the earth. Those lives that are (to borrow from Nick Bostrom [2013]) “technologically immature”, may perhaps not be lamentable and to be avoided at all costs, but perhaps offer a trajectory for life that is not necessarily that of extinction. Even though the specific concepts of extinction and disability are rarely explicitly linked the two concepts are inextricably intertwined in discussions of what counts as a life worth living. Indeed, the grand Socratic notion that the unexamined life is not worth living, is not only normative (which is almost unavoidable) but normalizing: to privilege the life of examination is to open up a history that will generate the individual, reflective, deliberative and rational subject, but to make a claim about a life not worth living is to hint at the long history that will extinguish, eliminate, harness and evaluate unworthy lives, and will do so precisely by way of capacity. Outside explicit work on extinction and outside the rich field of disability studies it is possible to find constant and complex linkages between the question of the worth of life (its capacity or ability) and whether such a life ought to exist. Many such arguments are utilitarian; and while utilitarianism might seem to be but one branch of (analytic) philosophy, part of my argument will be that as a conception of the liberal subject of capacity gains ascendency and takes on increasing value in neo-liberal arguments for autonomy, and as the planet faces accelerated and mass extinction, a utilitarian logic becomes increasingly dominant. Utilitarianism is a motif that will necessarily haunt questions of extinction and capacity: as resources and the capacity to survive become threatened decisions will need to be made regarding the worth of life. Precisely in this respect it is utilitarianism that has also articulated the most offensive position on disability. By offensive, here, I am not referring to an affect or emotion, but rather – as in the manner of a military offensive – a direct and forthright targeting of what has been set aside as “disabled. Here, it might seem that a utilitarian approach is partial, and that there are other ethical paradigms, which of course there are; but I want to argue that the extreme positions that utilitarianism has yielded, bring to the fore what is implicit in a broader history of ethics focused on personhood and a life worth living. One of the objections to calculations of utility would be by way of a deeper or inviolable conception of the person, but this too relies upon distinguishing between what counts as “utility” and what would warrant a mode of “dignity” beyond calculation. For Nussbaum, the key stakes of justice lie in considering what counts as a dignified life, where dignity includes capacities that extend beyond social utility and mutual advantage. Her claim is that dignity should be the basis for social entitlements, and that we attribute dignity not for rational and active powers, but for “our” animal fragility: “bodily need, including the need for care, is a feature of our rationality and our sociability; it is one aspect of our dignity, then, rather than something to be contrasted with it” (2006, 160). This is perhaps why Nussbaum’s title refers to “species membership,” as though feeling and caring for one’s kind (which would, in part, include non-human animals) is not only a recognition of dignity, but dignifies one’s own life. To suffer, to be fragile is to possess a life worth living. Here, Nussbaum refers to the value and enhancement (beyond strict utility) of caring for others, and of having social relationships with those whose capacities are not those of the classic rational individual; her approach on capacities “includes the advantage of respecting the dignity of people with mental disabilities and developing their human potential, whether or not this potential is socially “useful” in the narrower sense. It includes, as well, the advantage of understanding humanity and its diversity that comes from associating with mentally disabled people on terms of mutual respect and reciprocity” (2006,147). Nussbaum presents her account as a broadening of theories of human justice by way of a more classical conception of the life worth living, one not reduced to narrow notions of mutual advantage. Even though her discourse and disciplinary terrain might appear to be strictly philosophical, the very mode of posing the question of what we owe to a life is really (ultimately) the question that presses itself upon human civilization now, and always. As “we” look to the future and the sixth great extinction event the question of who and what survives will be imposed upon us. Utilitarian approaches to this question are, as I have already suggested, offensive, but they are because they disclose something offensive – or combative, violent, conquering – in the philosophical tradition of dignified humanity and the life worth living. In this respect, disability is neither a recent nor a local concern: the very formation of the Greek polity is based on the exclusion of those with lesser capacities. Even though, as Lennard Davis (2013) has argued, the notion of the “normal” body is very recent and is quite different from earlier cultures’ conception of an ideal body that no actual member of the species achieves, the exclusion of those who do not possess the proper potentiality of political humanity has been at the basis of the history of the Western polity. When Nussbaum argues for an expanded sense of capacities she nevertheless, and necessarily, maintains the question of the life worth living. This classic philosophical question always and necessarily invokes ability, or, more accurately, disability, and this in two respects. Not only are subjects defined by way of powers (of reason, deliberation and empathy), those capacities in turn are enabled by a history of technologies and archives upon which “able” subjects are increasingly dependent. At the very least, definitions of proper political persons rely upon quite specific capacities that, even in expanded scenarios are not all-inclusive. More importantly, the quite specific concept of the liberal, deliberative, rational and empathetic subject depends upon a history of “enlightenment” that disabled many lives, either by way of exclusion, colonialism, resource depletion, or expropriation. In a world where not all lives matter to the same extent, the concept of disability is precisely what enables political inclusion, privilege and personhood. When Peter Singer argues, in a manner that appears to be exceptional, and exceptionally offensive that rationality and autonomy (and not species membership) are the capacities that would preclude us from being right in killing another human being, he is taking part in a far broader offensive that is definitive of the philosophical epoch oriented around the question of the life worth living. Not only is the question of the life worth living offensive (in its implicit generation of an unworthy life), the life worth living is a life of dependence and incapacity, generated through a history of enlightenment that is a history of appropriation, plundering, brigandry, excessive consumption and energy profligacy. Could we have the able political subject of deliberation and reason without the planet-destructive history of industrialism and globalism that at once enables and disables what has come to be known as humanity? Could there have been a tradition of “the life worth living” without a global industry that generated unworthy and dis-abled lives? And is not the question of the life worth living, the capable life, intertwined essentially with dependence and incapacity? What I want to question here is whether such a question can have any coherence at all in an epoch of extinction: to ask about lives worth living is necessarily to be offensive, asserting some lives over others, and thereby waging violence (however slow) against some forms of life. If, as I would also argue, any epoch of thriving and fecundity takes place at the expense of some lives, then all ages are ages of extinction. What makes our time – the sixth mass extinction – more intense is that questions that have always haunted political personhood are now becoming more explicit. The interrelated problem of capacity and extinction has not only determined the human lives that are deemed to be worth living, but has also generated the liberal political person whose autonomy, productivity, super-intelligence and heightened capacity for urbanity is the “Anthropos” of the Anthropocene, the “man” whose cost to the planet is too exorbitant to reckon (Luke 2015). When (today) utilitarian arguments are explicitly offensive, or make the claim that some lives ought not be lived, they reveal the offensive (combative, polemical, violent, barbaric, sacrificial) nature of what has called itself civilization. If this civilization, today, is facing extinction and therefore pressed – more than ever – to consider ways of “weighing lives,” it may either continue with ever more nuanced and expanded conceptions of the worth of life, or it may regard this question itself as an indictment of the very rationality it seeks to save. Phrased differently, we might say that the problem of disability runs to the very heart of the extinction-logic that enables the political tradition of the person. Both those who assume that the human species – because of certain capacities.