Better to come up with a solution that works with the disability, rather than force the disability to conform to the tyranny of the majority. When I was struggling with the start time for my job we made my start times more flexible. That was actually better for both myself and Evil Aerospace as I arrived at work in less pain and therefore got more done.

WRT actions and responsibility, I don’t entirely agree.There’s a fairly good example to be had with dyslexia (which is in the same group of disabilities as ADHD). It’s not unreasonable to expect someone with dyslexia to run a spellchecker through their work, but it would be unreasonable to expect them to pick the right correction in every case, and actually counterproductive to try and force them to go through the document time and again. There’s an even clearer example of counter-productive with my own dyspraxia, my handwriting is barely legible at best, trying to force me to write more clearly actually makes it worse, until my hand siezes up entirely. The solution is to accept I can’t write clearly and allow me to use a wordprocessor.

‘Issue X’ was meant to be a stand-in to not trigger anyone who deals with a applicable plight. My explaining this is self-defeating, but I was using ‘Issue X’ instead of, let’s say, Asperger syndrome, because I don’t want anyone to feel singled out.

But my point wasn’t that Child A wasn’t being disciplined, rather that (at least in my life) I’ve seen a lot of free passes given. Where that broken nose isn’t *really* his fault because of Issue X. That to me isn’t acceptable. Issue X is terrible, and I understand it isn’t easy, but Child A needs to understand that THEY, not their issue, are responsible. Understanding accountability is something I saw glazed over far too often with “Issue X” children when I was growing up.

If someone with an AS condition is having a meltdown, they’re having it for a reason. Find the reason. Blame the reason.

“it shouldn’t be an excuse to do nothing. ”

There are tools that can help people cope with being overwhelmed and driven into a meltdown, but those tools may not be accessible to young children. Do we blame them for that? There’s a parallel in learning to count. The ability to count abstractly kicks in somewhere between 3 and 5, if you have a class of 4yos, some will be able to do it, some won’t. Do you blame the kids whose brains aren’t yet capable of abstraction, or acknowledge you’re asking more of them than can reasonably be expected, Similarly for AS.

When Crow and I get into hypotheticals about broken vases or damaged cars, we start talking about financial liability in addition to moral culpability. I think there’s a reasonable and semi-separate question of who has what responsibility to do what to fix harms that have happened and prevent future harms.

To take your hypothetical, if Child A had no control over their actions (or exerted all of their control to avoid it but it happened anyway), and your kid split their lip and needed a couple of stitches, would you sue Child A for your child’s healthcare costs? Would you sue Child A’s parents if they were clearly trying their best but Child A got away from them at the park and they couldn’t catch up in time? Is that a reasonable liability to attach to Child A or their parents if you believe that they weren’t morally culpable?

Those aren’t rhetorical questions; I don’t entirely have an answer for this.

I basically agree.

I think that there’s three sorts of things at work here: moral/ethical culpability, liability for restitution, and the ethics of socialized liability for acts for which no-one is fully liable. I think that the second is directly related to the first and the third is the complement of the second. That is, if someone’s morally culpable for a cause to some degree, they should be liable for for fixing its effects to the same degree. To the degree that they aren’t liable (or are incapable of effecting the fix themselves), we need a social structure for handling the costs.

As for your brother and his friends, there’s some negligence and recklessness to be shared all around there. We roll our eyes and excuse them some of it because teens are not wired like adults and we therefore excuse them of _some_ amount of certain responsibilities, but we still need a method of figuring out who pays _all_ of the medical costs because those aren’t going away. At that point I become somewhat more agnostic, but we as a society generally hold parents liable for their underage children’s behavior. I personally favor allocating these things by ability to pay, but I also lean socialist, so.

Okay, I deleted my original reply because I wrote it while angry, so I’m going to try again and be more nuance.

First, nobody deserves to be bullied in school. Not you, not other disabled students, not able-bodied students, nobody. In a school setting, adults and teachers and aides have a responsibility to prevent bullying before it starts, and if they see it, to immediately try to rectify it.

Secondly, violence in self-defense is not the same thing as violence because someone made someone angry. I’m still unclear in your posts if in your specific situation, the other students physically prevented you from leaving an area, hit you, or were in other ways violent. Pushing past someone to escape is different than punching someone because they insulter the puncher.

So those are two very different situations. I believe it would not matter if a bullied person were disabled or not; self-defense and escape are reasonable courses of action for anyone (although adults, at least, are expected to be thoughtful about it). I don’t think it becomes necessary to frame violence in that example as “inevitable” or “not a choice”, because it is, in fact, a reasonable choice to make. Sure, there will still be consequences, but it is not equivalent to attacking someone.

You have been very honest and open about your personal history with disability and school, so please let me be open with mine.

I have a chronic respiratory illness. I also have and anxiety disorder and PTSD. I had to leave school in second and sixth grade, in part because of my physical illness. But, also, in part, because the school refused to accommodate my anxiety disorder (which was not yet diagnosed as PTSD).

I’m not comfortable really sharing the details. But, essentially, another student’s threatening, aggressive behavior was triggering to me, to the point of panic attacks and dissociation. I was seven years old. I used to love school, but suddenly joy, or even attention, became impossible.

It had, against another student, escalated to physical violence. He had, as far as I am aware, no consequences, and the other student he attacked had to switch classes. It is not hyperbole to say that I was terrified.

But, in the end, I was the one who had to leave school. Twice.

If an integration policy makes a classroom situation untenable for a student with anxiety or PTSD, then it is not actually a pro-disability policy. Any policy that excludes the needs of any kind of disabled student is unjust. Any policy that puts the needs of an aggressive student over the needs of a victimized student is cruel.

I didn’t want the other student to be punished. I just wanted him to be not around me. But no other teacher wanted him to be transferred to their class. He wasn’t “qualified” for private tutoring or learning in the library. Neither was I. His parents refused to consider sending him to another school, or homeschooling. I, like many, many victims of bullying, abuse, and violence, was called a liar, or over-sensitive. I was told to get over it.

Message received: my education is not important.

I believe deeply and sincerely in the needs of the group. I believe in making things work for everyone. One thing I learned in therapy is that *I* am part of everyone. My need to have a classroom free of psychological and potentially physical threat is just as valid.

This is why this debate on a webcomic forum is so important to me. In Crow’s situation, there are two children: Child A and Child B. In real life, there is always more than one child–in a classroom, at a party, in a family.

In a Child A/B/C situation, I am always the forgotten child. I am the one whose needs are sacrificed at the expense of the other children. Always. I am always willing to give something up if it helps someone else, but nobody but my closest friends are willing to give things up for me. It’s shameful for me to even ask.

So, yes, I am angry about this. It is personal to me. Why would you assume that I, or my child, did something to deserve physical punishment? That is the first conclusion you jump to, that my child is a bully, when all we know is that she got hit by someone. Why should I, or my child, have to endure a person whose presence makes them unable to learn?

It is exhausting, you know that? It is awful, and I am sick and tired of people saying I need to endure or get out. I’m sick of people saying that TO KIDS. It’s messed up.

So homeschooling a student who makes the classroom psychologically unsafe is discriminatory, but forcing a student to endure an unsafe situation is fair, and if she can’t cut it and *she* has to homeschool, then it’s just proof that she’s a weak person. Do you really believe that’s fair?

When you say, “find the cause, and protect the kid from it by either removing it, or making sure they have the ability to escape it,” that has to apply to ALL students.
–If a student with PTSD needs to escape a triggering student, that needs to be an option
–If the cause of a student’s panic attacks is another student’s behavior, then to protect the anxious student teachers need to remove the triggering student

Even if the triggering thing is a *benign* behavior (most triggers are benign to a non-anxious person), and the triggering student is not a bully, that doesn’t mean than an anxious student is not being triggered.

I apologize for breaking with your intent to avoid specific conditions, but I’d like to bring up a general class of disorders in order to demonstrate a point:

Consider someone with a major motor tic disorder. They may occasionally and unexpectedly lash out with an arm due to a nerve misfiring, with no conscious or subconscious control over their body. They can certainly attempt to warn others, take medication, and try to avoid crowded spaces, but it is very difficult if not impossible to always remain arm’s distance from everyone and everything of value. They can exert perfect control of their circumstances to minimize the chances of accident or injury but still hurt someone. When an incident occurs, the question is “Did they do everything that they reasonably could?” Did they exert the level of control that they had? If so, blaming them for something that they couldn’t do anything more about is no more reasonable than blaming me for it snowing if I can’t control the weather.

Other people may have disorders that take away less control. They bear proportionally greater responsibility. Someone who has full control bears full responsibility.

It may be that, sometimes, people get complete free passes—zero culpability attributed to them—when they shouldn’t. Ignoring for a second whether mercy and assuming good faith are valuable propositions in this context, those cases do not mean that such passes are never appropriate, just that they were inappropriate in those instances. Nor do those cases mean that someone’s culpability can’t be eliminated by their choosing to take every reasonably available measure that they can to control the situation. More generally, those cases don’t mean that attributing partially-diminished culpability to someone is never reasonable.

I like to frame my points by finding extremes that I think we can agree on before discussing the grey areas. So that was an extreme that I thought that we could agree on. Clearly I was wrong.

If I understand your statement correctly, you think that Tina is responsible for something over which she had no control but did involve an act performed by her body against her wishes. I think that as long as Tina chose to exercise all reasonable caution, she has no moral culpability for anything that happened despite her best efforts because she did not make an immoral decision. More absolutely, I don’t think that she’s responsible for anything over which she has no control.

Let me pose a more extreme hypothetical to see if I can find common ground before we discuss cases with nuance:

If I park my car in the proper place and go inside my house, and a tornado throws my car into a neighbor’s car, am I morally or financially responsible for the damage that my car did? After all, it’s my car that did the damage. If it hadn’t been there, my neighbor’s car might have been just fine. (Tornadoes can be weird like that.) If doing everything you reasonably could to prevent harm and act correctly and the damage being because of circumstances beyond your control doesn’t exculpate and indemnify Tina, why should it exculpate and indemnify me?

And yet to me this is an absurd result. To me, the only difference between me and Tina is that it was my car and Tina’s arm, but we had equally little control and took equally reasonable steps to prevent harm. (After all, I did not park my car in the middle of traffic or improperly park it on a slope, where a collision would have been both predictable and preventable.) How are you distinguishing the two, or do you think that I’m culpable even in this example?

This does get into an area where I think we have expressed agreement, if not in quite the same words. That is, I think that we agree that there is a difference between moral culpability for an event happening and the social/financial liability for repairing the consequences of that event.* Am I right that we agree on that much, at least?

*Emphasis added to indicate the words I’m using as shorthand for these concepts elsewhere.

That being said, an Act of God is generally defined as an uncontrollable event. By contrast, anything else must be controllable. If you truly take the Act of God out of the scenario, then the result must have been controllable. But this line of hypotheticals is explicitly about circumstances which could not be controlled. I’m not sure if you intend it, but I read that as you attempting to assign a person as the controller of something over which they had no control. Or, at least, that you want to pick someone to blame and treat them identically regardless of whether or not they had any control over whatever caused the incident, and while I recognize that culpability and liability are different issues, I don’t think that they’re totally unrelated.

I’ve avoided the question of insurance because mandatory liability insurance is a method of socializing risk. The answer to the question of “Who pays for this damage?” is “All drivers, especially the ‘good’ ones whose premiums go entirely to paying for the ‘bad’ drivers’ liabilities.” So I don’t think that’s a great example, but let’s skip over that and just look at whose insurance would or would not end up paying in your revision of my hypothetical.

Liability insurance only pays out if the person being insured—the driver in this case—is held liable for fixing the damages. There’s a few ways that this can be calculated, which vary state, but they fall into two major categories:

Some states are “no-fault” states, which have simplified the rules for who pays because determination of fault involves lawsuits that are more trouble than they’re worth. Let’s ignore those, because like mandatory insurance, that’s just an accounting trick that ignores the issue that we’re arguing over.

Most states are “fault” states, which only consider someone liable if they are also at fault. In other words, in your example, the driver would only be financially liable if they were also morally culpable. Generally, states do this via apportioning fault by percentages, recognizing that there can be shared culpability or that conditions beyond anyone’s control might be partially at fault and thus the individuals less at fault.

In your example, there would be a presumption that the driver was acting negligently or recklessly, whether in how they were driving (e.g., they were going too fast for the road conditions) or in the fact that they were driving at all (e.g., they should have stayed home or pulled over until conditions improved). However, it’s possible to show that, in some cases, the driver was acting completely reasonably. In those cases, the driver is not considered to be at fault and thus has no liability. It would be an Act of God (or similar) and their insurance wouldn’t pay because our entire system of justice and equity considers it unjust and unfair to make someone liable for things that weren’t their fault.

Caveat: This is based on U.S. law. I’m inquiring with a friend in the a Canadian car insurance industry for a comparison of laws. Anyone from somewhere else what to offer a different perspective on how we construct law, justice, equity, and liability?

While I really do appreciate the time and research you put into this, my point wasn’t about the specifics of insurance law. I wanted to change from the tornado because I don’t think its related to the argument if you aren’t at the wheel. Even if a condition makes you lose your temper, you are still in that situation and the one who causes damage if you lash out in violence. I’m trying to tie this back into the very initial reference frame of someone losing control and taking an action that harms another. I understand that some issues cause what is essentially an unavoidable reaction that, at least morally, you can’t say the person tried to do.

Here’s where I’m starting to get frustrated. As much as I understand what you’re saying about the lack of control, if you had an issue that caused you to punch me in the face, you have punched me in the face. The fact that the catalyst for that event was out of your control does not change the fact that, and I’m adding emphasis here, you punched me in the face. Whether or not you could control it, you’ve still done something and I will still consider you to be responsible. Your condition didn’t punch me, you did. To say that you share the exact same amount of responsibility for you punching me in the face and someone, somewhere being struck by lighting is such a silly, moot point to me. Though I suppose you have the right to believe it, I have the right to think that you’re wrong. I think we’ve diverted so far from our initial question that we’re both doomed to just talk in circles around it. My parting words would be that someone having a valid reason for doing something does not excuse the consequences of the action they took. AAAGH, this was such a good conversation that ended in me ranting.

Perhaps because it needed derailing? You’re trying to argue that blame attaches to disability where you say it does, no matter the actual reality.

I’m an activist, my activism is pointless unless I can teach people why what they’re saying is a problem. So please, keep asking.

In all of the examples I’ve posited, it’s never been about a ‘right or wrong’ dichotomy. When you frame this situation as me needing to assign blame, that makes me the aggressor. I’ve already made clear that I was allowed to grow up without any disorder that could be diagnosed, and thus, whenever something was broken or someone was hurt, I needed to take responsibility. I didn’t have a ‘get out of jail free card’. And while I understand that it may be an oversimplification, it baffles me that someone can be the reason something was damaged and not be responsible for fixing or replacing it. But I probably sound like a terrible person at this point. It amazes me how I can try to put so much positivity into the community, but one unpopular opinion and I’m the enemy of progress.

This is, for want of a better term, victim blaming. It’s locked into a model that sees Aspergers and the like as ‘bad behaviour’ rather than as a medical condition. If someone is pushed into a meltdown they’re no more able to avoid that meltdown than I’m able to push my wheelchair up a staircase.

So do we blame me for not being able to wheel up stairs? Or look at the environment and identify the real cause?

And similarly for Autism Spectrum conditions like Aspergers. If someone is having a meltdown it’s happening because they’re overloaded and unablle to process it. Don’t blame them, look at the environment in its entirety What’s overloading them? Why don’t they have space to escape it? Do they need a quiet refuge? Help with interpersonal skills? What?

You say that Child B is a victim, and that’s entirely correct. It’s a very important point to remember. I don’t think anyone here would argue with you, but I don’t think that’s what this argument is about. We’re arguing over, in some sense, what Child B is a victim of. There are plenty of times that a person is a victim of a system or a natural event or some confluence of things where blame can and should be apportioned between multiple causes. I’ve argued that Child A’s share of the blame depends on how much control they had over the situation, but that should not, and does not, diminish that Child B is 100% a victim. Thank you for that reminder.

And thank you for the reminder that we shouldn’t paint a false picture of mental or neurological illnesses. That’s a risk that I hadn’t been considering in this context, but it’s another good reason to avoid any too-specific examples that might be based on and perpetuate stereotypes rather than facts. However, I’d like to think that we can talk in broad strokes about unnamed hypotheticals that we accept as simplified models to allow us to grapple with certain underlying concepts.

It seems to me that you are also saying that some of these arguments could be used in victim-blaming. I agree that there’s a risk that someone might attempt that, but I also feel that it would be a serious twisting of the arguments if someone did so. As I said above, we agree that Child B is 100% a victim regardless of how we apportion culpability and liability. I don’t think that we should let that hypothetical twisting keep us from this discussion so long as we’re careful to avoid any victim-blaming ourselves.

I would like to extend your victim-blaming point with an additional consideration. Let us say that we are dealing with a non-violent matter of social miscommunication and Child A causes Child B emotional pain at least in part because Child A has some sort of social disability. Child B is entirely a victim here. However, Child A could also be seen as a mutual victim of their own disability, especially if alienating their friends and family through frequent, unintentional fuckups is something they don’t want and are trying their best to avoid. Telling Child A that they and they alone, and not their disability, are morally culpable despite their best efforts to the contrary is telling them that they are a terrible, evil person who is doomed to hurt their friends and there is nothing that they can do about it. That is a horrific, destructive thing to do to someone, and at best it’s going to leave them with shredded self-esteem, social anxiety and panic disorders, and eventually the symptoms of long-term psychological trauma. At worst it’s going to make them give up on trying to be good. And that is one reason why I think it’s important to understand how to apportion fault.

I actually agree that some people do get unwarranted free passes. And it’s terrible that this causes them to not be taught useful coping skills and to continue to be victimized and to victimize others.

I’ve also seen plenty of people claim disabilities to get out of the consequences of their actions, some of whom are undoubtedly lying and relying on getting that unwarranted free pass. This is particularly frustrating for me because I actually _do_ have a social disability, but it’s such a trope to claim it on the internet in order to get out of responsibility that I can’t actually mention it without people presuming that I’m one of the lying arses.

So I’m sympathetic to that concern. But Crow’s arguments, to me, get far too far into wanting to make people apologize / pay / &c. for things they were not morally or legally liable for. As they put it, “Whether or not you could control it, you’ve still done something and I will still consider you to be responsible. Your condition didn’t punch me, you did.” And I have a severe reaction to people being held responsible for things beyond their control.

Well, I find abuse apologists to be ‘grossly offensive,” so I guess we’re even.

Everybody has a reason for being abusive or violent interpersonally. None of them, ever, are good.

Also, I explicitly am trying to de-correlate mental illness and violence. I said:

” The majority of people with mental illnesses, especially with Aspergers and Autism, are non-violent. This “don’t blame a violent person if they have a mental illness” only perpetuates the false narrative that mentally ill people are naturally violent and dangerous.”

and I ALSO said:

“mental illness and abuse: not correlated, not mutually exclusive”

You know what, I’m just kinda done here. I don’t have to defend my, or anyone else’s, right to not be hit because I accidentally pissed you off and you “couldn’t help it.” I shouldn’t have to defend the scientifically validated claim that neither ASD (http://www.webmd.com/brain/autism/news/20121218/aspergers-violence#1) nor mental illness:( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2686644/) causes or results in violence.

You seem to be confusing result and responsibility.

The broken nose is the result, that doesn’t change. Responsibility only exists if the child had the ability not to lash out. If they have a disability that means they don’t have that ability, then responsibility doesn’t arise. We have the entire concept of the age of criminal responsibility as a non-disability related parallel.

I’m, to quote a psych, “somewhere in the vicinity of the Autism Spectrum”. When I was a schoolkid the bullies knew I could be pushed until I lost control, so they’d corner me and push and push until they triggered a meltdown. If they got punched as a result, then whose responsibility was it?

So yes, I think that’s a privileged perspective that doesn’t understand the reality

That’s pretty much the Social Model of Disability: “DIsability is the discrimination we face as the result of the failure of society to provide accommodations for our impairments”

oh wow, so many responses.

“I think part of the issue is, some things are really easy to accommodate
if everyone is knowledgable and informed, and some just aren’t”

this is an important concept – and in fact it’s part of how disability law works (in the US at least). there’s a good example on Ask A Manager, where someone had SAD and wanted to get the one window seat in the office to get more light, but was being an ass about it. Commenters pointed out that there are SAD lights the company could buy as an alternative (or if they had multiple people with SAD or whatever). The company was required to make *reasonable* accommodations – so they had to provide a solution, but it didn’t have to be the exact thing the employee liked best. There was another example, iirc, about the conflict between someone who needs a service dog and someone who’s allergic to dogs – if the company was too small to keep them in completely separate areas then they would only be required to accommodate one of them.

When someone’s disability is severe enough that there aren’t any reasonable accommodations in *any* job, though, it kinda falls apart. You’d think that government would pick up the slack, but up here in canada, I’m too sick to work (last I checked I could handle about 10 hours of chores a week) but chronic pain doesn’t count as a disability. If it wasn’t for family, friends etc. I’d probably be on the street or dead by now. (given the weather outside… there might not be much difference between the two tonight :/ )

Back to my previous comment about responsibility – it does conflict with the idea of accommodations. I hadn’t thought about that. ADHD is especially tricky because it’s not a clear-cut case of “I can’t do that”; it’s more “it would cost me an obscene amount of energy to get the odds of me doing that over 80%”. it’s all statistical and fuzzy, and my perfectionism hates it. People can’t tell if I could have done the thing if I’d tried a little harder; they can’t tell the difference between me having a high-adhd day and me just slacking off. Even *I* can’t tell the difference half the time. I’m still trying to figure out what’s reasonable to expect of myself… I do know that I care about not acting like a jerk when I need accommodations, and that might be where I got the “responsibility vs fault” idea – I was thinking more about apologising for minor inconveniences, not big scary things like my complete (and probably permanent) lack of income.

In this situation the reasonable adjustment/accomodation would probably be reduced hours. I actually worked around a similar issue by doing catch-up on Saturdays. People assumed I was doing overtime, but I wasn’t actually claiming it, I was just doing the hours I’d missed through the week. Evil Aerospace weren’t happy about it when they found out, but I’d gotten the job done without complaint for several years before that happened.

Hey.

A comparison between what? You were the one to say these people with disorders have no sentience, that’s exactly what being a p-zombie is, not something comparable.

And it’s also wildly inaccurate. Imagining that I don’t feel is easy enough sure, since I don’t, but I’m going to submit the thought (wink wink) that you didn’t realize “no sentience” means there’s no thinking too.

I edited my comment, for the record. Again, my apologies.

Although, “an instinctive knowledge of right and wrong”? That’s so not a real thing.

I don’t like that one either, it sounds like I’m born a lesser philosopher than my peers.
How about an instinctive easy understanding of the cultural incentive structures to cooperate, essentially leading to the establishment of these ethics?

I feel like the difference between you and me is just that many things that come naturally to you I found really really difficult to grasp.

I’m… still miffed by that definition somewhat.

But maybe there’s no need to be. I’m not satisfied by that because I’m irked by “instinctive” to define what was to me a very logic process, but maybe you don’t make the same distinction between the two. I certainly wasn’t born knowing stealing was wrong but the concept wasn’t difficult to assess by simple deduction is what I’m saying, and I would tend to think it was the same for you? And, like, for everybody?

Maybe the normals get all tingly in their eighth sense (seventh being cosmos of course) when they do wrong things whereas it just made sense to me and I was never told about that one.

I like intuitive better, the thing is in this case it doesn’t work anymore because me and all the sociopaths I know have had these intuitions growing up. So where then comes the discrepancy between the moral sense of normals and mine, the mainstream idea of what nihilist demons we are?

For my money, it’s mostly a self-perpetuating prophecy, boosted by social ostrarcization. There are other things of course, but no empathy doesn’t necessarily means it’s not dearly missed.

Ha! No apology needed. I have many books on the history of the English language and tend to use terms in their less-common meanings and confuse everyone. 🙂

In this case, the same word is used in Latin for both, so to discriminate I should really have said, “conscientia moralis,” or “moral conscience.”

I think you’re probably right.

I mean, you can be insulted I guess? But headcannons are a pretty normal part of fandom, so I don’t think speculation about any character is rude. Anyway, pointing out that a fictional character is fictional is condescending, nobody is delusional here. It’s pretty normal to suspend disbelief and pretend a character is real when talking about a character’s motivations.

The question “can Patrick be held responsible for his actions?” Is a pretty reasonable question for readers to ask and talk about, given that he’s Alison’ s main foil. Someone brought up that real mental differences (or fictional mental differences, like Patrick’s power) might make a person *not* responsible for their actions.

Also, there are plenty of characters who fans speculate have PTSD, or are asexual, to choose two examplesthat affect me, even if the text never says “this person is this” and even if the character themselves *doesn’t know*, because that’s often how things play out.

“So…I mean, I just didn’t get a 9-5 job.”

Ultimately that’s allowing society to constrain our careers by refusing to provide reasonable adjustments to our disabilities. In the UK, it’s been established for quite a few years that disability related sickness must be considered separately (and individually) from standard sickness. Of course getting employers to acknowledge that is difficult, but that is the law. I’m not sure anyone’s managed a similar argument in the States, but ADA does contain a parallel to the Equality Act’s reasonable adjustment provisions.

Of course not working 9-5 may well be best for your individual health (I’m doing that myself), but the Social Model of DIsability puts the onus on society to adapt to our disabilities, not us to adapt to society.

“it’s unfair for me to ask someone else to do extra work to accommodate me”

The entire basis of ADA and the Equality Act is requiring society to make reasonable adjustments to allow disabled people to participate equally in society. If we can’t participate as equals, than that is a far greater ‘unfair’.

In fact it turns out the typical adjustment/accomodation is generally very low cost, or even free. It cost my ex-employer literally nothing to say they would be flexible with regard to my hours, and that meant they actually got more productivity from me – the accommodation actually earned them money. That won’t be true of all disabled people, but that’s why we have state support schemes such as Access to Work to ensure the cost falls on the state rather than the individual or the employer (of course AtW is a grossly underfunded mess, but the principle stands).

The overall reality is that disabled people take fewer sick days than non-disabled. That’s not a good thing, it’s actually a consequence of discrimination in the job market leading to disabled people being too scared to take sick days. But within that reality, if someone’s disability leads to them taking more sick days than average, then I think it’s on the employers to live with it. If they want to complain, set their own house in order first.

People typically raise issues like the blind pilot when discussing disability employment rights, but it’s a red herring. The only exception that the Equality Act allows when stating that disability can not be considered in deciding whether to offer employment is on safety grounds. But even with that proviso, 86% of non-disabled people of working age in the UK are employed, for disabled people that’s only 54%. I’m not sure what the figures are for the States, but they’re regularly noted as being worse than in the UK. Ideas like the blind pilot distract us from the reality of rampant and unrepentant discrimination in the employment of disabled people.

You’re making some assumptions here. Let me clarify a few things.

I haven’t worked in 8 years because my household name multinational employer spent 4 years trying to drive me out of the company over my disability – that’s why I call them Evil Aerospace. It took 4 years because I totally destroyed their first two attempts. When they finally got rid of me, by moving me into a group where they had redundancies planned and sweeping me up in that, their outsourcing consultant took me aside and warned me that I had next to no chance of getting another job with my then level of disability. He was right. All the time that was going on I was talking to other disabled people in similar situations. At this point I don’t really see any potential of me returning to the conventional workforce.

Nowadays, amongst other activism, I’m prominent in attacking the UK government’s Disability Confident scheme, which is supposed to assure disabled people an employer will support them, but where some analysis I just published has shown you can reach the highest level of the scheme with zero disabled employees and inaccessible premises.

One of the points I make repeatedly is that the government needs to stop equating working with being a valued member of society. That’s an important point, particularly when you’re also campaigning for increased disability employment, as the government likes to associate work and being a valued member of society in order to obscure the reality that many disabled people will never be able to work and allow it to paint disabled people as scroungers.

The Social Model of Disability is valuable on two fronts, 1) revealing how society fails to allow us equal opportunity, 2) as a model of how a society might avoid that. WRT the cost of that, I believe absorbing such costs is the whole point of why we have a society in the first place.

Some of my friends are involved in campaigning in favour of a basic income – one given to everyone, and which would allow them to survive whether they work or not. It’s interesting because it removes the reason for abusive work capability testing of disabled people. It’s not an area I have the energy to be active in, but it’s one I have no objection to.

TLDR: No illusions about what it’s like for disabled people in the job market. Trying to make it better, whether you can work, or can’t.