Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain. I would like to welcome you to the one hundred and first installment of Dialogues on Disability, the series of interviews that I am conducting with disabled philosophers and post to BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY on the third Wednesday of each month. The series is designed to provide a public venue for discussion with disabled philosophers about a range of topics, including their philosophical work on disability; the place of philosophy of disability vis-à-vis the discipline and profession; their experiences of institutional discrimination and exclusion, as well as personal and structural gaslighting in philosophy in particular and in academia more generally; resistance to ableism, racism, sexism, and other apparatuses of power; accessibility; and anti-oppressive pedagogy.

The land on which on which I sit to conduct these interviews is the traditional ancestral territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabeg nations. The territory was the subject of the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, an agreement between the Iroquois Confederacy and the Ojibwe and allied nations around the Great Lakes. As a settler, I offer these interviews with respect for and in solidarity with Indigenous peoples of so-called Canada and other settler states who, for thousands of years, have held sacred the land, water, air, and sky, as well as their inhabitants, and who, for centuries, have struggled to protect them from the ravages and degradation of colonization and expropriation.

My guest today is August Gorman. August is an assistant professor of philosophy at Oakland University. His work brings a disability lens to each of his areas of specialization, which include ethics (and bioethics), free will and moral responsibility, and philosophy of death. His recent and forthcoming publications include: “Against Neuronormativity in Moral Responsibility” in Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, “Neurodiversity and the Ethics of Access” in The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability, and “What is the Difference Between Weakness of Will and Compulsion?” in the Journal of the APA. Outside of work, August enjoys singing with PRISM Gay Men’s Choir, painting, and spending time with his chosen family.

Welcome back to Dialogues on Disability, August! You and I did an interview for the series in March 2019. Since that time, momentous events and changes have taken place in both professional and personal aspects of your life. Please share with our readers and listeners what has happened for you since your previous interview.

Thank you, Shelley. I’m really delighted to be back.

[Description of image below: close-up photo of August who is wearing steel-framed glasses, face jewelry, and a mischievous smile. His head is turned to the right and he looking to the left into the lens. In the background of the shot, tall brick buildings, a dock, and a body of water can be seen.]

In many ways, March 2019 feels to me like a lifetime ago. At that time, I had just graduated from my Ph.D. program and was at a somewhat unique postdoc position at Georgetown University. While my job functioned in part like a 9-5 position that involved meetings with people from outside the academy, grant-writing, and organizing pedagogy projects, I was also busy trying to remain a viable candidate on the traditional philosophy job market. It was a time when I was really grappling with my professional identity in ways that were equal parts exciting and difficult.

After years of working on a dissertation–which can have a tendency to silo you into a rather narrow conception of what it is that you do, how you characterize your work, and who you are–this non-traditional position was a breath of fresh air. Being able to engage in genuinely interdisciplinary projects with other people who were as enthusiastic as me about experimenting with what an ethics class could look like was very exciting. And, interestingly, as a trans man who, at the time, had only recently come out publicly after years of being closeted, the somewhat business-like atmosphere of this position gave me a greater sense of security in starting my physical gender transition than I had felt from the philosophy profession at large.

One of the challenges was that I increasingly found myself severely boredom-intolerant; after a long and heavily structured day at my office at Georgetown, I would struggle with routine tasks at home, to the point where I would feel almost completely frozen, crying over the need to send an email or to get up and brush my teeth. I still struggle to process exactly what was going on for me at this time. But some combination of feeling overwhelmed and under-stimulated by things that did not seem to affect anyone else started me down the path towards getting diagnosed with ADHD and generalized anxiety.

For the most part, I have come to find my ADHD diagnosis deeply explanatory and liberating. With the help of a therapist who also has ADHD, I have come to shed a lot of the shame that had subconsciously woven itself into various aspects of my self-concept. ADHD medication helps me to do things that I find useful; I will never forget the sudden ease with which I could, when I took Adderall for the first time, get up and unpack a moving box that I had stared at for months, wondering if other people get things done with such ease all the time. That said, I regard my ADHD-related traits as central to the kind of person that I am and to the kind of philosopher that I am: creative, empathetic, passionate, and a big-picture thinker.

After my time at Georgetown, I moved into a somewhat more traditional postdoc position as a Values and Public Policy fellow at Princeton University. I was initially meant to hold the position from 2019-2021, but it was extended through the summer of 2022 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It was a blessing that this job brought me back closer to my family who live in New Jersey because, at the height of the pandemic, my 59-year-old mother started acting strangely and an MRI revealed that she had a rapidly growing brain tumor. My dad called me after dropping her off at a hospital where no visitors were allowed, neither of us knowing if we would ever see her again. We did see her again, but even after a successful brain surgery, physiotherapy, radiation, and chemotherapy, glioblastoma brain cancer took her life within six months.

The narrative that we are taught to expect is that we will miss our loved ones from the before-times, that the interactions with my-mom-with-brain-cancer would be just a sad afterthought in a story that ends with diagnosis and the whispered remark that “she was never herself again.” That’s not how I feel at all. Those six months with my mother, when much of the rest of the world was on pause, were surreal; and I miss that version of her too. Though I had written my dissertation on agency and the Deep Self, no dissertation could ever have prepared me for the complexities of interacting with and taking care of the person before me who both was every bit my mother but also somehow someone quite different. It was humbling. What I can say is that some of her best traits were amplified—her sharp wit and her congenial nature were on full display, and she faced her condition with a remarkable sense of grace. The period of time during which I helped take care of her was unpredictable, funny, profound, challenging, and meaningful.

Quite independently from all of this though, the time was also marked by severe isolation: through difficult decision-making; through navigating COVID risk around an immunocompromised person with a terminal diagnosis; through attempting to acquire the kinds of care for my mother that she deserved. This time was excruciatingly difficult, not because my mother was changing but rather because of things such as: having no one who would reliably help my mom plug in her cellphone in her inpatient rehab facility after her brain surgery; having to demand that I be allowed to accompany my mom to the ER as a support person after she had her first seizure; trying to individually source items to make my mom’s activities of daily living accessible during COVID-related shipping restrictions. I wrote about some of this difficulty in “Tragic Life Endings and COVID-19 Policy,” a piece that I published in the November 2020 issue of The Philosopher’s Magazine. Nevertheless, I really feel like this is, in principle, separable from the raw, complicated, and at times beautiful experience of caring for my newly mentally and physically disabled mother, an experience that I cherish.

Despite continued unsuccessful attempts at the tenure-track job market and no real back-up plan for my career, my mother’s death put having a baby at the front of my mind. This idea became even more appealing when Princeton established a new set of employee benefits as part of a move to promote equity at the university in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, including one meant to significantly defray the cost of adoption.

The private infant adoption process in the United States really put the values that my partner and I hold to the test: we wanted birth parents to be able to choose parents for their baby, but did we want to hold on to this principle even though it might mean losing forty thousand dollars of potential financial support–which, by the way, only partially covers the cost of infant adoption in the U.S.–waiting around for someone to think that two trans people would make suitable parents? In the end, we chose an agency that was birthparent and adoptee-centered, which entailed waiting and forfeiting the Princeton benefit once my contract lapsed. I was lucky enough to begin a tenure-track job at the wonderfully supportive philosophy department at Oakland University before we were finally enthusiastically chosen to raise our beautiful child Sage, who is now four months old and whose gender-neutral name was picked ahead of time by my mother before her death.

August, you contributed to the centennial edition of the Dialogues on Disability series that I posted to BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY last month. In your contribution to the installment, you indicated that the series has enabled you to gain a sense of solidarity with other disabled philosophers and develop your identity as a disabled philosopher of disability. Your remarks in that context were brief. Would you like to expand upon them?

Congratulations, again, on 100 installments! Getting to see that there are other disabled philosophers navigating the world of professional philosophy alongside me has really been invaluable to me. I have always taken one of the foundational insights of disability studies to be that our range of possibilities for what we do, how we envision ourselves, and who we become is in large part a product of others. I dictated most of the first draft of “Neurodiversity and the Ethics of Access” to my spouse while undergoing a bout of anemia during which I could not sit up or keep my eyes open for an extended period of time. Without having spent time considering others’ experiences of fatigue and chronic illness, I might have felt like I just could not hack it. Instead, I was able to see that this is just another way that one can be a philosopher. Reading your interview series has been such a catalyst for me to network with other disabled philosophers with whom I have been able to find a sense of belonging within this field.

I first stumbled upon your series at a time when I felt quite at sea about who I was and who I wanted to be professionally. It was near the beginning of a grueling five years on the job market. Writing cover letter after cover letter has the tendency to make you imagine different possible future versions of yourself. Nominating myself for an interview was a leap of faith because it was really my first foray into introducing myself publicly as a disabled philosopher. Detailing, in a professional forum or the first time, my experience growing up with misophonia was somewhat terrifying; but, ultimately, quite liberating.

It is not exactly that I was hiding having misophonia professionally: if I picked up a conference speaker from the airport, for instance, I would have to explain why I needed them to spit out their gum before it would be safe for me to drive.  It’s more that there just are not a lot of places where such things come up organically. It’s a bit of a shame, because I think that many of us write about things that have deep personal significance. But I can think of very few other places where I would have a platform to tell this important piece of my personal disability narrative.

On a very practical level, I have found it useful to actually direct people to the interview in order to explain what I really mean by saying that I cannot sit in the same room with a ticking clock or leave open my office door which is near the snack table. On a deeper level, our interview gave me the space to begin to embrace being a disabled philosopher of disability and to develop a professional voice that feels more authentic. In the end, it is ultimately this authenticity that allowed me to regain a sense of place and purpose in this discipline.

Have the changes and events that you’ve mentioned influenced your teaching practices? If so, how have they influenced the way that you teach ethics?

For one, I have truly deepened my empathy for students who are caregivers or are trying to navigate their own medical care as marginalized people because I now am all too familiar with the challenges of dealing with the thankless and isolating onslaught of bureaucracy that comes along with these situations. Beyond that, my experiences dealing with the medical system during my mom’s cancer treatment were honestly a wake-up call to me to see the degree to which human beings are often treated as disposable in the American healthcare system.

I feel more mission-driven in my teaching than ever before to expose the factors that have made these attitudes commonplace and to promote the kind of critical and creative thinking in my students that can help them imagine the system to be otherwise. I teach a class at Oakland called Intro to Ethics for Healthcare Professions that is taken by mostly pre-nursing majors. I consider it at least as important as learning Aristotle and Kant that they practice coming up with ways that groups can stand in solidarity with each other–such as how underpaid long-term care nurses might stand in solidarity with the disabled people with whom they work–and that they learn about eugenics’ role in shaping both the dialectic of bioethics and the way that we structure our healthcare system.

I have continued to be extremely upfront with my students about my disabled identities to destigmatize these kinds of conversations. I find that I am paid back in kind with their vulnerability and willingness to share their struggles and their triumphs. Nevertheless, I continue to be surprised by the degree to which, by-and-large, my students fail to see ableism as akin to other kinds of oppression when it is dressed up with even the thinnest veneer of liberal-sounding language about “choice” and “health.” I consider it an important part of my job to help them to see ableism cloaked in these guises.

In my Public Health Ethics course last semester, I continually posed the question to my students (and to myself) as to why so many atrocities–from anti-immigrant policies, Nazi concentration camps, to forced sterilizations and forced abortions–are carried out under the name of promoting “public health.” About halfway through the course, I started to realize that the problem is that when we think of the health of a population as the primary and singular goal of our enterprise, we start to think that how we go about accomplishing this goal is value neutral. Whether we treat people who are unwell, aim to prevent them from getting unwell, or make it so there are fewer people who are likely to get unwell who exist in the population, we increase the health of the population. This drives home for me just how important it is to get my students to both question the way that we conceptualize health and think very consciously about what else we value and how we might go about manifesting that value.

Your new identities have led you to rethink arguments about moral responsibility. In what ways will these reflections emerge in your writing?

My first publications in moral responsibility were engaged in the project of distinguishing between the parts of one’s psychology for which one could be held responsible and the parts of one’s psychology for which one should not be held responsible because they stand outside of a person’s agency. The upshot of my view–which I call the Minimal Approval view–is that it can explain why Tourettic tics are not behavior for which people should be blamed and it does so without mischaracterizing the lived experience of Tourette syndrome (as some other views do). For a long time, I struggled with how to handle a particular example on my view. It became a bit of a thorn in my side. The case was this: A person with Tourette syndrome who is able to forestall their urge to tic does so in order to avoid saying something that would be perceived as offensive, despite the psychological pain of forestalling their tic. It seems that the person might be praiseworthy for this; but if a tic is a part of your psychology that you’re not responsible for, as I had claimed it was, this seemed hard to make sense of.

This dilemma eventually led me down the path of thinking that maybe a person could be morally responsible for delaying, managing, treating, or attempting to resist parts of their psychology for which they are not directly responsible and that, in fact, this aspect of our responsibility practices is important and undertheorized since it differs from responsibility for the more revealing aspects of our psychology. Yet the implication that people with Tourette syndrome are blameworthy for failing to forestall acting on their premonitory urges to tic did not sit right with me. I was preparing to present some of this material for a workshop at Princeton when I had what seemed to me at the time like a lightbulb moment of insight that came out of nowhere.

It was then that I first really questioned the set-up of the case: how did this person find themself in such an inaccessible environment that they could not just disclose that they had Tourette syndrome? In a world where disclosing such disabilities is far from socially cost-free, should we instead expect people to consider, by default, that certain behaviors may be tics? I realized that even if my view implied that a person could be morally assessed, in principle, for not forestalling their ticcing behavior, it does not follow that they should be blamed for it. A just society would not have a social norm that people with Tourette syndrome are expected to constantly control their behavior, while those who do not experience tics never have to question their assessments of the behavior of people with Tourette syndrome. That is a social norm that exists just because we expect people to not have Tourette syndrome.

While it seemed to me at the time that the insight had come out of nowhere, I now recognize it as the result of a slowly growing discontentment that I had with the moral responsibility literature’s naturalization of disability. The more that I looked, the more that I spotted this naturalization everywhere.  For example, philosophers in this literature make all sorts of claims of the form “If an agent cares sufficiently about X, then Y will/ought to follow,” where Y is some sort of impact on that person’s agency involving prioritizing, remembering, being motivated, acting, etc. But general claims like this, more often than not, cannot survive even the slightest bit of scrutiny once we drop the implicit clause that we are only talking about “just us normal, neurotypical agents.” As an ADHDer, I might find something to be really important and care about it quite a lot, but if I cannot get myself to find it interesting as well, then I will have difficulty getting myself motivated by it.

Since the construction of who counts as one of these “normal, neurotypical agents” is a contingent historical matter, and few, if any, of these so-called perfectly “normal” agents even exist, the ableist assumption really threatens the foundation of moral responsibility theorizing, even aside from its negative social and political consequences. My current writing picks up from here. If we drop this unjustifiable assumption, what do we have left? I have come to think that ableist assumptions have been close to the very core of a lot of theorizing about responsibility; so we will need to rebuild, from the ground up, a lot of the ways that we conceptualize moral responsibility.

Please tell us about your current and future research projects.

Currently, my biggest research project is a manuscript for a book tentatively titled, Altering the Fault Lines: How Neurodiversity Reshapes Moral Responsibility. It’s funny how what started as reflection on a single counterexample has become a book-length project. The book argues for a serious reorientation of the way that we theorize about moral responsibility.

Once you drop the ableist assumptions about normalcy, which are at the heart of most theorizing about agency, you have to set new norms for the ethics of behavioral interpretation and appraisal, some of which disadvantage certain minds/agents and advantage others. So, setting the norms requires mediating between conflicts among those agents. In the book, I argue that it is actually impossible to get the ethics of behavioral interpretation and appraisal right without taking up questions of disability access and disability justice. At present, I am working on a part of the book that draws from the wisdom of autistic communities to describe what an alternate, more customized, system of behavioral appraisal that encompasses norms that are more explicitly stated might look like.

Over time, my interest in the book project has shifted a bit from a desire to intervene in theoretical debates, to a desire to illuminate an aspect of disability discrimination that has received very little sustained philosophical attention. Even if we reconfigured our common social life to make physical spaces, education, and the ability to participate in social and political activities maximally accessible across neurotype, neurodivergent people would still be unfairly treated by disproportionately having their behaviors misinterpreted and unfairly appraised.

So, the next steps for me–that is, after I have laid out all of the paradigm shifting that I think needs to be done–will be to try to put the new paradigm to use to answer first-order normative questions that stem from the lived experience of multiply-marginalized neurodivergent people, questions such as: What steps ought we to take to retrain ourselves on the relevance of eye contract or on the level of attentiveness that we take to imply that someone cares? How can we redistribute the hidden labor of learning about and navigating mental difference so that it becomes more of a collaborative project among solidaristic peers? If doing this labor involves grappling with personal trauma or internalized oppression, to what degree are we obligated to take on these challenges?

Beyond this, truth be told, I am not sure exactly what my future research projects will be, but I am becoming increasingly drawn to a set of issues that are loosely clustered around the (ironically) quite social nature of self-understanding, self-narrative, and self-trust. One paper, which is in the early stages of development, critiques a certain kind of suicide intervention effort that fails to engage with the suicidal person’s sense of their own life narrative and makes the person seem to be practically irrational in ways that they are not. The worry is that people who are already feeling misunderstood and lonely can have these feelings exacerbated by these kinds of mischaracterizations.

I am also interested in the kinds of forces that can cause people to reconceptualize the meaning of their gut instincts about what to do in a situation. A common feature of coercive control in cult-like groups is to get followers to conceive of their gut instincts as weaknesses to be suppressed. To a lesser extent, pathologized understandings of one’s own psychology can serve to weaken trust in one’s instincts; and even certain kinds of advice-giving can alter a person’s relationship to how they conceive of their first-inclination motivations. I would like to explore both the ethics of shaping another person’s conceptions of their motivations and questions about the culpability of people who have been taught to systematically undervalue their instincts.

August, would you like to say anything more about what we have discussed in this interview or say anything about something that we have not touched upon? Would you like to recommend any articles or book or other materials to our readers and listeners?

I would like to thank you for the opportunity to be interviewed by you again. It is difficult to focus on the self when you have a newborn baby; so, I have welcomed the opportunity to force myself to do so. I hope that your readers and listeners will find this interview interesting; but it also feels important to me to simply have been able to narrativize the direction in which my life and professional identity as a disabled philosopher of disability have grown over the past four and a half years.

These days, when asked for reading recommendations, my thoughts tend to immediately go to something written by Sofia Jeppsson, who has become an important co-collaborator and an inspiration to me for the way that they integrate personal experience with psychological difference into their writing about moral responsibility. This time, I will recommend their excellent piece “Exemption, Self-Exemption, and Compassionate Self-Excuse” in The International Mad Studies Journal, a revised version of which, as you know, is forthcoming in The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability that you have edited.

I would also like to recommend Michaela McSweeney’s article “Maladjustment” in Philosophical Studies, which is about the interaction between structural injustice and conceptions of mental illness as it plays out in therapeutic encounters.

Eli Clare’s book, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure, which had long been at the top of my to-read list and which I finally read last semester with my seminar students, is equal measures personal, political, and philosophical. It is wonderful, and an especially rich text with which to teach.

On the topic of teaching recommendations, I will never again teach an introductory bioethics class without including this poignant and harrowing animation, detailing the events of the U.S. Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment.

Finally, in keeping with the precedent that I set in my previous interview, I want to recommend something relevant from the musical theatre canon. “Craniotomy,” from the autobiographical musical “A New Brain,” gives a humorous glimpse into the oddness of certain kinds of cold clinical encounters, not unlike the ones that my family experienced in preparing for my mother’s craniotomy.

August, thank you so much for this fascinating and thought-provoking interview. I am sure that readers and listeners of this interview will agree that your insights on a variety of issues offer disabled philosophers cues on how to resist ableism in philosophy and beyond. Personally speaking, the remarks that you made about your last experiences with your mother resonated deeply with me, especially because, for several years, I was a primary caregiver for my father.

Readers/listeners are invited to use the Comments section below to respond to August Gorman’s remarks, ask questions, and so on. Comments will be moderated. As always, although signed comments are preferred, anonymous comments may be permitted.

The entire Dialogues on Disability series is archived on BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY here.

From April 2015 to May 2021, I coordinated, edited, and produced the Dialogues on Disability series without any institutional or other financial support. A Patreon account now supports the series, enabling me to continue to create it. You can add your support for these vital interviews with disabled philosophers at the Dialogues on Disability Patreon account page here.

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Please join me here again on Wednesday, September 20th, 2023, for the 102nd installment of the Dialogues on Disability series and, indeed, on every third Wednesday of the months ahead. I have a fabulous line-up of interviews planned. If you would like to nominate someone to be interviewed (self-nominations are welcomed), please feel free to write me at s.tremain@yahoo.ca. I prioritize diversity with respect to disability, class, race, gender, institutional status, nationality, culture, age, and sexuality in my selection of interviewees and my scheduling of interviews.