Notes

Evaluations of Traits Versus
Evaluations of Persons
Some working group members
worried that people in the disability
community sometimes make a conceptual
mistake that may be intimately related
to the very mistake they rightly
accuse the dominant community of making.
For example, Deborah Kent, who is
blind, writes: [P]eople called my parents
“wonderful.” They were praised for raising
me “like a normal child.” . . . I wasn’t
like a normal child—I was normal [Kent,
2000].
What does Kent mean when she
says that she “was normal”? She certainly
is normal in the moral sense that she
deserves the usual, equal respect due to
all persons. Statistically speaking, however,
blindness is not a normal trait.
Moreover, insofar as blindness makes it
impossible to enjoy some wonderful opportunities,
it is not, morally speaking, a
neutral trait. The trait may indeed seem
neutral and insignificant when viewed in
the context of the whole person; but that
is a claim about the person, not the trait.
As suggested above, discrimination
against people with disabilities often involves
a tendency to allow the part to
stand in for the whole, to allow the trait
to stand in for the person. Erik Parens
suggested that members of the disability
community sometimes succumb to a
similar, equally problematic error. The
majority community sometimes uses the
trait to deny the moral significance of the
person; the disability community sometimes
uses the moral significance of the
person to deny the significance of the
trait. The majority community slips from
an observation about a trait to a claim
about a person; the disability community
slips from an observation about a person
to a claim about a trait. At important
moments, both groups fail to distinguish
evaluations of traits from evaluations of
persons.
In the end, our working group did
not reach a consensus about whether
Parens was right in claiming that members
of the disability and dominant communities
were equally guilty of “slipping”
between different kinds of observations.
There was consensus, however, about
the importance of getting genetics professionals
to help parents think harder and
better about what having a child with a
disability would really mean for their
lives together.