alt Hacker NewsWhile it's good for society to accommodate those with disabilities as much as possible, we shouldn't pretend it isn't detrimental to be unable to see or hear. You don't need to believe obvious falsehoods in order to accommodate people.
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fwip • last Thursday at 9:18 PM
You've set up a straw man here - nobody in this thread is claiming that it's not detrimental to be missing a sense.
The point is that disability exists within the context of the world we live in, and the society we've built is one that largely assumes people have both sight and hearing.
I’ve always found this semantic argument somewhat silly as being blind or deaf is an obvious disadvantage in natural contexts, but one of the more compelling ideas here is that the fitness boundary isn’t fixed. It would probably be a fitness advantage if I could sense electromagnetic fields, but no one would describe me as disabled for not being able to sense these fields—unless, perhaps, everyone else could.
So what we consider to be a disability does seem to be a function of what we consider to be normal.