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.