On the mere difference view of disability, one isn’t worse off for being disabled as such, though one is worse off due to ableist arrangements in society. A standard observation is that the mere difference view doesn’t work for really big disabilities.
In this post, I want to argue that it doesn’t work for some really tiny disabilities. For instance, about 3-5% of the population without any other brain damage exhibits “musical anhedonia”, an inability to find pleasure in music. I haven’t been diagnosed, but I seem to have something like this condition. With the occasional exception, music is something I either screen out or a minor annoyance. Occasionally I find myself with an emotional response, but I also don’t like having my emotions pulled on by something I don’t understand. When I play a video game, one of the first things I do is turn off all music. If I could easily run TV through a filter that removed music, I would (at least if watching alone). (Maybe movies as well, though I might feel bad about disturbing the artistic integrity of the director.)
On the basis of testimony, however, I know that music can embody immense aesthetic goods which cannot be found in any other medium. I am missing out on these goods. My missing out on them is not a function of ableist assumptions. After all, if the world were structured in accordance with musical anhedonia, there would be no music in it, and I would still miss out on the aesthetic goods of music—it’s just that everybody else would miss out on them as well, which is no benefit to me. I suppose in a world like that more effort would be put into other art forms. The money spent on music in movies might be spent on better editing, say. In church, perhaps, better poetic recitations would be created in place of hymns. However, more poetry and better editing wouldn’t compensate for the loss of music, since having music in addition to other art forms makes for a much greater diversity of art.
Furthermore, presumably, parallel to music anhedonia there are other anhedonias. If to compensate for musical anhedonia we replace music with poetic recitations, then those who have poetic anhedonia (I don’t know if that is a real or a hypothetical condition; I would be surprised, though, if no one suffered from it; I myself don’t appreciate sound-based poetry much, though I do appreciate meaning-based poetry, like Biblical Hebrew poetry or Solzhenitsyn’s “prose poems”) but don’t have musical anhedonia are worse off.
In general, the lack of an ability to appreciate a major artistic modality is surely a loss in one’s life. It need not be a major loss: one can compensate by enjoying other modalities. But it is a loss.
In the case of a more major disability, there can be personal compensations from the intrinsic challenges arising from the disability. But really tiny disabilities need not generate much in the way of such meaningful compensations.
Here’s another argument that musical anhedonia isn’t a mere difference. Suppose that Alice is a normal human being who would be fully able to get pleasure from music. But Alice belongs to a group unjustly discriminated against, and a part of this discrimination is that whenever Alice is in earshot, all music is turned off. As a result, Alice has never enjoyed music. It is clear that Alice was harmed by this. And the bulk of the harm was that she did not have the aesthetic experience of enjoying music—which is precisely the harm that the person with music anhedonia has.
Objection 1: Granted, musical anhedonia is not a mere difference. But it is also not a disability because it does not significantly impact life.
Response 1.1: But music is one of the great cultural accomplishments of the human species.
Response 1.2: Moreover, transpose my argument to a hypothetical society where it is difficult to get by without enjoying music, a society where, for instance, most social interactions involve explicit sharing in the pleasure of music. In that society, musical anhedonia may make one an outcast. It would be a disability. But it would still make one lose out on one of the great forms of art, and hence would still be a really bad thing, rather than a mere difference.
Objection 2: There is a philosophical and a spiritual benefit to me from my musical anhedonia, and it’s not minor. The spiritual benefit is that I look forward to being able to really enjoy music in heaven in a way in which I probably wouldn’t if I already enjoyed it significantly. The philosophical benefit is that music provides me with a nice model of an aesthetic modality that is beyond one’s grasp. Normally, “things beyond one’s grasp” are hard to talk about! But in the case of music, I can lean on the testimony of others, and thus talk about this art form that is beyond my grasp. And this, in turn, provides me with a reason to think that there are likely other goods beyond our current ken, perhaps even goods that we will enjoy in heaven (back to the spiritual). Furthermore, music provides me with a conclusive argument against emotivist theories of beauty. For I think music is beautiful, but I do not have the relevant aesthetic emotional reaction to it. My belief that music is beautiful is largely based on testimony.
Response 2: These kinds of compensating benefits help the mere difference view. Even if one were able to get tenure on the strength of a book on the philosophy of disease inspired by getting a bad case of Covid, the bad case of Covid would be bad and not a mere difference. The mere difference view is about something more intrinsic to the condition.
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