Rem the Bath Boi is an Ableist

Rem the Bath Boi, Twitch’s resident relativist philosophy bro and bloodsports weeb, has a growing list of contradictions and hypocrisies to his name, but one of the most puzzling ones has to be his complaints of ableism from others while Rem himself is more ableist than most people. For the former, I’m referring to Relativist Rem calling out streamers as ableists for using “the r-word” or for pointing out Rem’s NEETisms, genuine toxic behavior, or lack of empathy. For the latter, I’m referring to Rem’s belief that it’s okay to torture and kill Down syndrome people for fun because they are not rational.

Now, maybe one thinks this is a bit of an exaggeration of something Rem has said before. His lack of empathy, posturing, condescension, and all around toxic, asshole behavior don’t require a demonstration here—it’s readily apparent in many of Rem’s appearances online. But one might ask where I’m getting Rem’s ableist view of people with Down syndrome, where he excludes them from the moral community and denies their moral status. Well, Rem explicitly gave this ableist view in a recent exchange we had about the argument from marginal cases (in which he quickly blocked me over).

To recap this exchange, Relativist Rem stepped far out of his comfort zone (surprise surprise) and pompously declared the argument from marginal cases as being “ineffective” and “weak” after not having read the literature he supposedly cares about. The argument from marginal cases holds that there is no morally relevant difference between all humans and all non-human animals that permits exploiting the latter and not the former. Many differences have been cited by philosophers before (e.g., intelligence, language, self-awareness, etc.) and, if we go off Thinkers and Theories in Ethics, none have “won general acceptance” (p. 161). It’s been a hotly debated argument within analytic philosophy since at least the 1970s, and professional philosophers in animal ethics often cite it in defense of non-human animals. Funnily enough, Rem thinks arguments from authority aren’t fallacious, but he didn’t bother to actually look at any authorities on this topic. At bottom, Rem’s response to the argument from marginal cases admitted to bullet biting and an airing of prejudice rather than any sort of serious moral philosophy.

So why does Rem think the argument from marginal cases is “ineffective” and “weak,” and why is Rem an ableist? Well, the two questions have the same answer. Rem’s “complete rebuttal” (his words) of the argument goes as follows: The morally relevant difference between humans and non-human animals is the possession of rationality or a reasonable chance of becoming rational. Yep. You heard it right. Possibly one of the most common and oft-shellacked answers is what Rem put all of his smug chips behind. According to Rem’s limp, arbitrary account of moral value: An individual who is not rational or has a reasonable chance of becoming rational is not owed any direct duty to not be tortured or killed for fun.

Babies and Beasts: The Argument From Marginal Cases, p. 129

Pretty quickly, counterexamples to Rem’s ableist criterion begin to arise in one’s mind. Here are three that myself and Vespine gave in our previous blog post:

1. With Rem’s criterion, someone who is severely mentally enfeebled and only has six months left to live would be excluded from the moral community. After all, this person would not be rational, and there would be no chance of this person becoming rational. This last stipulation is made because Rem, by doubling down, bizarrely relies on the possibility of inventing brain pills in the future to secure the moral status of the severely mentally enfeebled; however, and this is a fact that should make us hide the mentally enfeebled from psychopathic Rem, brain pills are not coming in six months (if ever). Therefore, according to Rem, it would be permissible to torture and kill the mentally enfeebled for fun because sci-fi brain surgery and medicine aren’t on the horizon (though Rem believes, without citing anything, that science has “hopes” of achieving such technology and “[subverting] the symptoms [of not being rational]”).
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2. According to Rem, it would have been permissible to torture and kill Down syndrome orphans for fun in the Middle Ages. These children would not be rational and, without Rem’s scientism solution being feasible, they had no reasonable chance of acquiring rationality. So, in Rem’s twisted preconditions of experience, any acts of torture and murder of the mentally enfeebled would have been permissible so long as it didn’t harm rational agents.
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3. Rem’s “complete rebuttal” of the argument from marginal cases entails that, if we lost our capacity for scientific advancement, it would be okay to torture and kill Down syndrome people for fun. The example given in our original post was that of a post-apocalyptic world. In response and without hesitation, Rem bit the bullet.
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After being faced with these counterexamples, here was Rem’s response and endorsement of ableism:

July 2020 update: Rem has arguably landed himself further in ableist territory after he joined in with a Twitter mob to insult fellow Twitch streamer Reckful. Unfortunately, Reckful (real name Byron Bernstein) had been struggling with depression and took his own life shortly after Rem’s remarks.