I've seen similar arguments from the deaf community about hearing restoration as "correcting" something when nothing is "wrong".
FWIW I think this invention is awesome.
2) In any event the deaf community is rather unique compared with other disabled groups in general. A substantial number of deaf/hearing impaired people are born that way and grow up in a community with its own language and culture, a community that would be for better or worse disrupted by a "cure." Other disabled groups tend not to have a separate strong cultural identity as such. It is true that there are instances of individual blind people who were "cured" of blindness and found the experience so disorienting that they fell into a deep depression [0], but as far as I know, they didn't advocate for an end to blindness research.
The only time I've heard these types of questions are around people who are deaf. I suspect that the issue is a complex one of language and community. My understanding is that (some?) deaf people consider sign language their primary language, not the native tongue of their country.
It's too bad that the hn downvoters are hitting your post so hard, this could be a useful, informative discussion. It's hard to talk about this kind of thing without crossing political correctness boundaries though.
It's OK, I don't mind - plenty of karma.
I agree it's worth discussing because it's a bigger topic than a lot of people might realize. There's a lot of these types of ideas making a lot of progress in the university right now and they don't intend on being confined to them as theoretical. And in some cases they may have good points and in others maybe not.
I believe the original ideas around this go back to when a child is born with ambiguous sex organs. Parents and doctors would then choose to "correct" the issue to ensure the baby is either a boy or a girl, when in actuality it may have chromosome's that are not XX or XY. So then this (which is actually a really interesting debate) has cascaded into the greater world of disabilities. So there are currently critical theorists in the universities "theorizing" that looking at disabilities as something that needs to be corrected and not something that is normal puts people with them on the margins of society.
So there is well regarded (by some) literature that fixing deafness is wrong and that society shouldn't see it as a disability - that society should adapt to be seamlessly inclusive for deaf people. And this goes on and on.
In essence, science is racist and it has been white men who have classified what is normal and what is not and who is to say that everyone is normal and "correcting" these things is actually, well, "ableist".
It can get pretty crazy (whoops, that's a naughty word) out there.
So it's just demagoguery.