Edited by author 10-19-2005 01:48 PM
Hi Michelle,

Thanks for those links which relate to Carol Gilligan. I didn't know that she was Kohlberg's student and/or research assistant.

I like the ideas of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) on moral philosophy. In his 'Critique of Practical Reason' (1787) he argues that a person's justification for their action is moral if it conforms to the moral law. This he conceptualises as the categorical imperative: the justification for my action, and therefore the action performed in accordance with it, is moral if and only if I want that it should become a universal law.

There are alternative formulations of the categorical imperative. Perhaps the most well-known is "Act in such a way that you treat humanity both in your own person, and in the person of all others, never as a means only but always equally as an end."

Kantianism is an approach to moral questions that is based on Kant's moral philosophy. A basic principle of Kantian ethics is the requirement that we regard each person, including oneself, as possessing inherent dignity and infinite worth. Actions are regarded as right or wrong if (1) they respect or fail to respect the inherent dignity of human persons, including the person who does the action; or because (2) for formal considerations, such as an action being unfair because not everyone is permiited to perform it.

It's good that your "marathon" is mostly "run".

Re the news story you linked to in /m2689. People who read it and don't inform themselves of the truth, will believe that without ABA autistics are violent, and 90% of autistic adults will be institutionalised.

I've always believed that people do have infinite worth, which is why I disagree with Mr Spock's "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few"; if each person's worth is infinite it cannot possibly be outweighed by the worth of others because infinity can't be multiplied any more than it's inherent value.

I'm glad Mr Spock later disagreed with himself when he came to the logical conclusion that the needs of the many are typically more numerous because many is made up of lots of different people. No word from him on infinite worth though.

Edited by author 10-19-2005 01:58 PM
Article in The Guardian yesterday 'I'm afraid that I can see a big increase ahead in homophobic attacks' - http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/00,,1594513,00.html - which is occasioned by the brutal murder last weekend of Jody Dobrowski, a gay man, in London.

Noam Chomsky was voted the world's top public intellectual in the Prospect/Foreign Policy poll. Here are the rsults -http://wwwprospectmagazine.co.uk/intellectuals/results.

Naomi Klein was the top woman, and top Canadian, at number 11. In the list of 100 names, I found two other Canadians: Steven Pinker at number 26, and Michael Ignatieff at number 37.

Re /m2700, the Guardian link doesn't work. The Prosopects link is http://www.prospects-magazine.co,uk/intellectualsdresults

Edited by author 10-19-2005 02:35 PM
Re /m2700, the Prospects intellectuals poll is at http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/intellectuals/results.

The article on homophobic attacks in yesterday's Guardian is at - http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1594513,0.html.

Sorry about my carelessness.

Hi Michelle,

When you get a moment; do you mention that society president's comment about no one dieing from measles in any of your papers here? I can't seem to find it.

Ah hah, found it, never mind.

Edited by author 10-20-2005 12:48 AM
Hi John,

While I mention Carmen Lahaie's statement in "Bettelheim's Worst Crime", I don't source this. The public source (which is referenced in "Is Autism A Plague?") is a story in La Presse. This story is helpfully <sigh> reprinted on the Quebec autism federation (FQATED) website, here http://www.autisme.qc.ca/nouvelles/docView...&noCat=40&noDoc=400

The relevant excerpt is, "N’empêche, la présidente de la Fédération québécoise de l’autisme, Carmen Lahaie, trouve exagéré l’accent placé sur la baisse du taux de vaccination: "Je suis infirmière et, quand j’ai étudié, la rougeole n’était pas une maladie mortelle," dit Mme Lahaie."

Rough translation: Ms Lahaie, who is described as the President of the FQATED, believes concerns about falling levels of vaccination are exaggerated. She then invokes her status and authority as a nurse to say that her training included the fact that measles does not kill anyone (is not fatal).

The title of the article translates into "Specialists fear the return of measles".

Hi Michelle,

Thanks for the reference. I am doing some work on this right now, for fun (sigh..).

She seems to be slightly incorrect, actually quite a bit (and unexcusably) incorrect.

Thanks Bart, and congratulations for getting through 33 years. I generally agree about management's behaviour, though the usual labour/management hassles sort of faded into total insignificance in comparison to what happened to me in the years after I disclosed my diagnosis. And while I'm never surprised when Canada Post disrespects me, I suppose I naively (and, as it turned out, idiotically) expected that they would have some motivation not to misbehave at the Tribunal level.

Edited by author 10-20-2005 05:55 AM
As one would expect there is an autism angle to this news story: "Hormone Linked to Aggression in Mice" - http://news.yahoo.com/s/hsn/20051019/hl_hs...dtoaggressioninmice.

In this research mice were bred without the ability to process the hormone, oxytocin. The males became highly aggressive and the females often forgot to take care of their babies.

"New research with mice offers more evidence that a specific hormone plays a major role in people's ability to take care of others and avoid conflict."

"If the findings hold true for humans scientists might get one step closer to a treatment for people with autism because they often lack an essential sense of empathy, researchers said."

It seems that our supposed lack of empathy is due to a deficiency of oxytocin. But then we are not more aggressive than non-autistics.

There is a well-informed discussion about it on the Asperger Syndrome Community Journal, here - http://www.livejournal.com/community/asperger/810940.html.

Oh my god of course! That's why my Tamogotchi keeps dying! I need more Oxytocin!

Sounds like a good acne cream too.

Edited by author 10-20-2005 11:34 AM
Hi Michelle,

I've found this web page about the video you made - http://www.cnasm.prd.fr/cnasm/fiche.asp?ID=1873.

I notice that the description states that (I am translating into English) the parents in the Auton case wanted IBI therapy which aims to suppress autistic differences, to be judged "medically necessary".

Edited by author 10-20-2005 05:49 PM
Hi again John,

I've found one instance of Dr Oyama mentioning autism (don't ask me how)--and this is in the book you read. Page 15:

"In Chapter 7 I mention the move in some feminist thought from denying fundamental difference to celebrating it. It seems probable that such realignments will increase in the area of sexual orientation (itself a live and still divisive issue in feminism) as well as with respect to human difference and disability in general--as already seems to be the case for certain kinds of deafness and autism."

Whatever else I might think about her work, I wouldn't dispute her alertness.

But I would sure like the name of the hapless theorist who flunked emotion-description. Also, I've noticed that while Dr Oyama gets upset when "Lamarck" is flourished as an insult, she has no trouble using "preformationist" as a similar all-purpose put-down.

I'm afraid I still don't quite understand how her ideas look in real life, or why her world view (which is "reliable") is any less deterministic for any individual than Skinner's or Pinker's.

I figured behaviourists would like her because, so far as I can tell (and keeping in mind that if I were 100 times more sophisticated, I still wouldn't understand what she's saying), she seems to be big on errors of reification, and discards the idea that there is anything innate (this is why I wondered about her position re John Money--and she does cite his work). I also wonder to what extent she would want people to act on her ideas, and what exactly this would entail.

Re free will, I checked carefully, and I don't think I proposed that free will could be surgically removed then re-implanted...

Even if you have a 100% ability to speak, you may not necessarily speak in all situations in which speaking is possible. This doesn't mean that your ability to speak has disappeared, only to mysteriously reappear (perhaps via lightning surgical interventions). It means you have an ability which is not constantly exercised, even when there is no coercion involved. You can, for example, refuse to speak, even if no one has physically or otherwise prevented you from speaking and there is no apparent reason for this refusal. As I wrote before, people who have the ability to walk don't always walk, and may refuse to walk when it is perfectly possible to walk and may even be necessary to walk.

Free will (my version) requires effort. This is one of the two reasons I mentioned "informed consent". What does consent mean, when it is not informed? If free will is constant and automatic, "informed" is unnecessary for consent. In my other example, I wondered what the concept of informed consent means to professionals who do not believe in free will. Are these professionals--e.g., behaviour analysts who disagree that free will exists--indulging in a meaningless and misleading charade when asking for informed consent? And what are the consequences of this?

What kind of information do you think is required such that there is genuine informed consent for an ABA/IBI treatment for autism? I haven't <hangs head in shame> tried to find out what an ABA/IBI informed consent form (the one parents would sign) looks like.

I also stand by my statement that reinforcement and learning are different things. Reinforcement isn't learning, it is only reinforcement. If reinforcement and learning were equivalent (even for one kind of learning only), then behaviour analysts would not, e.g., have the "train and pray" problem, which you have mentioned.

I accept your position of rejecting imprecise terms for reinforcement, though I believe other terms are okay and sometimes necessary to describe situations in which reinforcement is deployed. But mostly I was pointing out that the position of the non-lonely-outliers is related to ethics rather than accuracy--and you did emphasize the categorical non-acceptability of "bribe", compared the rather conditional non-acceptability of "reward".

Dr Fombonne doesn't attack Bertrand et al. for being an attempt to identify a "cluster"--he does go after Baron-Cohen for this reason (hello, Texas sharpshooters). Whatever motivated Bertrand et al.'s study, I don't see any way in which its methodology is worse than similar studies which found similar prevalence. The idea of clusters should be noted as yet another instance of autistics being observed inaccurately, regardless of the certainty that certain groups (e.g., parents) are infallible observers of all autistic phenomena.

Edited by author 10-20-2005 08:03 PM
Hi Philip,

Your explanation of Kantian ethics is the clearest and most concise I've ever read, and not coincidentally, the first time I've actually had a good idea of what he was going on about. Thanks, that's very helpful. I've certainly written about "the inherent dignity of our persons", a concept which was used abusively in Auton to demean and dehumanize autistic people.

Also, I now realize that Dick Sobsey was invoking the categorical imperative when he proposed that while, ideally, assisted suicide should remain outlawed, if it did become legal, it should become legal for everyone.

A law that makes assisted suicide legal and available only to sick and disabled people would, he pointed out, seriously lack in the kinds of safeguards which would automatically bristle around any such law applied to non-disabled people. In fact, just thinking about the safeguards required to make assisted suicide legal and available to non-disabled people raises such tremendous ethical issues that the whole project now looks reprehensible. For example, once a person is dead, who can credibly testify that he did not in fact want to be killed.

This use of the categorical imperative makes it obvious that assumptions and decisions are being made about disabled people (e.g., we really don't mind dying and in fact want to die) that would not be made about anyone else.

Thanks for the list of intellectuals; not being an intellectual, there are a lot of people on that list I have not heard of. I have, however, communicated with one of them, with respect to a project which hasn't shown up yet <sigh>. I leave it to you and other TMoB regulars to figure out who this is.

As for the oxytocin study, what I wrote about the efforts to find autism genes applies to this kind of work as well. So long as research amounts to autism cliche-verification, by whatever means (fMRI, mouse models, gene technologies, et al), this research won't uncover anything about autism except by accident. On the other hand, we sure are accumulating a lot of quite consistent data about how non-autistics see us.

'The Secret of Drawing' on BBC television tomorrow night features the autistic artists Richard and William Tyler.

From the preview in the Radio Times:

<< We've all heard of people with autism or other mental conditions also having artistic gifts, such as London-born artist Stephen Wiltshire. It's a subject covered by Andrew Graham-Dixon in 'The Secret of Drawing'...."Their drawings reveal that they have this rich and beautiful interior life; indeed, drawing might be the only way that interior life can be seen," he says. "Unlike conceptual artists or surrealists, say, we can't know their intentions. Their works remain mysterious, beautiful messages from the front line of inner consciousness," >>