Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
as well the conduct, of assistive technologists may have the effect of delaying
the maturation of the field, not to mention disrespecting the autonomy of
and deferring justice for disabled people.
The unreflective importation of the values of rehabilitation, which aims
to repair or restore people, making them as normal as possible and ideally
“like new,” is problematic. This is an understandable but unworthy goal for
assistive technologists, whose ethics should be grounded in more innovative
ideas about how people function and society may progress. In what follows
I explain the current sources of assistive technology ethics. Then I argue
that functioning “better than new” is as good a goal for assistive technology
as functioning “like new.” From this it follows that the goal of functioning
“other than like new” is appropriate and acceptable in developing assistive
technology. Assistive technologists should give the value of “functioning as
well as possible” precedence over the value of “functioning normally” and
should not be concerned if the outcome is to give assistive technology users
functional advantage in some respects.
1.2 Fear of Technology and Disability Discrimination
The repugnant intervention of humans who impose technology to corrupt na-
ture's design, or attempt to override naturally imposed limitations by trying
to control and improve the effects of natural processes, has been a powerfully
influential cultural theme at least since the Romantic movement of the nine-
teenth century. The stories of the creation by Frankenstein of an artificial
man, and of Hyde by Jekyl, are well-known progenitors of an enormous num-
ber of works in the romantic genre. Romanticism privileges nature and its
products (regardless of inadequate, unfair or destructive natural processes)
over what humans craft.
While this way of looking at the world dominates our understanding of
the human condition, the idea of the natural usually has been elided with
the standard of the normal. And the identification of normality in humans
usually is reduced to species typicality, so what is typical of humans is equated
with what is normal for us. Thinking in the “romanticist” style thus has
caused enormous harm to individuals who function atypically or anomalously
by making unusual people seem “abnormal” and consequently dangerously
deviant, rather than merely different. Individuals evaluated as abnormal are
too easily supposed to disrupt, threaten or burden the personal or social lives
of normal ones.
Individuals with disabilities often are ostracized because they are imagined
to be less functional and therefore weaker than other people. But a contrary
rationale becomes operative when assistive technology enters the picture.
Societal suspicion of artificially enhanced functioning achieved through tech-
nology sometimes prompts the exclusion of disabled individuals who rely on
