Animal experimentation and experiments on humans

 It's widely accepted that whether medical experiments on animals - not any particular experiment, but the institution at large - is morally justified, completely hinges on whether non-human animals have the same moral status as humans. It's widely believed that if the animal rights people were right, it would follow that animal experimentation would be unjustified. But if the common view on which much of legislation and common-sense morality rest (in my own Sweden and many other countries) is correct - that is, if the moral status of non-human animals is substantial but far less than that of humans - animal experimentation is easily morally justified. We may quibble about particular experiments, but by and large, the benefits for mankind outweighs all the animal suffering. 

Sometimes animal experimentation is argued for by the ridiculously bad argument that scientists who do animal experiments aren't evil, and wouldn't harm animals unless it was absolutely necessary. But of course the disjunction "either scientists are evil, or all their choices are morally optimal" is false. I know very well that scientists who do animal experiments tend to think that what they're doing is necessary and for the best. But just like everyone else, scientists may be morally mistaken.
Sometimes animal experimentation is argued for by the likewise ridiculously bad argument that everyone would want to save their child rather than a rat in an emergency - say, the old philosophy favourite of a burning house, and you only have time to rescue one of the living beings trapped inside before the whole thing collapses. Well, I for one would also want to save my child if I had one - or any child, really - rather than, say, Niklas "Hagamannen" Lindgren from that same burning building (for all you non-Swedes, he committed a series of brutal rapes in the late 1990s/early 00s). I wouldn't flip a coin, I'd try to save the child without a second thought. But I'm not thereby, on pain of inconsistency, forced to embrace the idea of non-consensual harmful medical experiments on convicts. I believe that even Niklas Lindgren, as horrible as he is, should have his basic human rights respected. Non-consensual harmful medical experiments is a completely different beast to "who would you save out of a burning building, if you could only save one?"

Thus, both these pro-vivisection arguments are ridiculously bad. Moreover:

1. LaFolette and Shanks' classic paper - the moral calculation just doesn't check out, even if we accept that non-human animals have far lower moral status than humans

It is widely accepted that animal experiments are easily morally justified on the assumption that animals have lower moral status than humans, despite this decades-old paper by LaFolette and Shanks. Their argument in the paper goes roughly like this: People defend animal experimentation by consequentialist arguments. They argue that since non-human animals have less worth than humans, and their suffering subsequently matters less, then

(animal suffering)<(human health benefits)

- thus, moral justification. But actually, even if we accept the premise that animals have lower moral status, so that, say, a hundred pain units as experienced by mice can be outweighed by only one health benefit unit as experienced by a human being, the calculation is much more complicated than that, and unlikely to check out.

First, on any consequentialist calculation, numbers matter. We have to factor in the enormous number of suffering lab animals.

Also, on any consequentialist calculation - heck, on standard decision-theory! on simple common sense! - probabilities matter. When we harm animals in a medical expeirment, their suffering is certain, but whether humans will benefit from this or that research program is always very uncertain. If we look at heavily funded medical research areas like cancer and Alzeimers, the success rates are abysmal. About 97% of all new cancer drugs that look promising on the animal experimentation stage, and 99% of all new Alzeimer drugs, fail to reach the market for human patients. (There's tons written about the "translation problem" - most of it not from opponents to animal experimentation, who usually focus more on animal rights arguments, but from a general scientific standpoint. Even if you wouldn't give a fuck about animals, this is obviously a big problem.)
Actually, since humans so often react differently to drugs than non-human animals do, it's highly likely that some drugs that were abandoned before going to human trials - because they were harmful for or at least not helpful for the lab animals -  would have been great for human patients.

Moreover, in all other areas of the law and common-sense morality, we treat the distinction between action and omission as extremely important - even more important than the animal-human distinction. We have laws against wanton animal cruelty, but there are no laws against not benefitting random strangers. Even jurisdictions that have "duty to assist" laws only require that people do something - like call the police or an ambulance - when they witness an immediate emergency. No one is legally required to do things that benefit unidentified strangers in the future, such as give money to or work for charity programs. But animal experimentation is all about intentionally harming animals in order to maybe, possibly, benefit unidentified strangers in the future. 

What we have here isn't (animal suffering) vs (human health benefits). It's 

(animal suffering)X(huge number)X(100%certainty)X(the moral seriousness of acting)
vs
(human health benefits)X(some much lower number)X(some low probability)X(the lower moral seriousness of omission)

- it's just highly implausible that the calculation checks out - i.e., that multiplying everything on the animal side will yield a lower total score than when we multiply everything on the human side - even if we accept the premise that animals have much lower moral status than humans. 

2. The alternative timeline

 In addition to the above, it's a mistake to look at all the medicines and medical procedures we have and declare that we would have none of them without animal experiments. It's a huge mistake to say that we would have been stuck with early twentieth century medicine still, if early twentieth century protests against animal experiments had succeeded in getting these practices banned. 

Compare: In the early twentieth century, there were both electric cars and fossile-fuel cars around. For various reasons, car manufacturers then went with fossile-fuel cars. The developtment of electric cars got stalled, and didn't pick up again until we got a serious debate about fossile fuels and the greenhouse effect.
Suppose someone had said, twenty years ago: "Okay, fossile fuels are bad for the climate. Still though, I'm happy that car manufactorers put all these resources into developing good petrol cars. Otherwise, we would be stuck with electric cars only, and they are so crap! There are so few of them for starters, extremely difficult to even buy one if you want to. There's almost nowhere you can charge them, and you can only drive them for very very short distances before you need to recharge. So I'm really glad we have fossile fuel cars to drive!"
That person would be seriously confused, because if car manufacturers had gone all in with electric cars in the early twentieth century, clearly those would have been pretty good at the turn of the millenium. We don't know how good, exactly, but much better in this alternative timeline than they were in the real world. 

Although we don't know what the state of medicine would be in the alternative scenario in which animal experimentation got banned in the early twentieth century, we can be pretty certain advances would still have been made. Scientists and doctors wouldn't just have shrugged and given up completely because they couldn't experiment on animals. 

Moreover, this makes the above calculation even more complicated. On the human benefit side, we should actually put only those human benefits that we couldn't get by any other method. Now, someone might say that no one would do animal experiments if there was any other way, so this is a moot point - but see above. Just because scientists aren't evil and relish in tormenting animals, this doesn't mean that they make optimal choices all the time. All researchers in all fields have a tendency to continue using established methods which aren't necessarily perfect.

 3. Animal experiments to save poor marginalized humans?

Some people argue that we should have animal experiments because otherwise, medical scientists will surely torment poor marginalized humans instead. Sometimes people then proceed to list Doctor Mengele's concentration camp experiments, the Tuskagee syphilis study, or, in a Swedish context, the Vipeholm dental health study. However, none of these terrible experiments or studies took place because animal experiments had been banned. These researchers didn't reluctantly harm humans because they couldn't harm animals - on the contrary, animal experiments were less regulated back then than they are now. 

Researchers have experimented on disabled and otherewise oppressed and marginalized humans either for purely sadistic reasons, or because they can get human data that way. As I pointed out above, very little of what works for lab animals end up working for humans. 

Rules and legislation for animal experimentation explicitly embraces the view that it is morally right to harm and kill those who have lower moral status if there's some chance that doing so might benefit those with higher moral status. This isn't supposed to threaten disabled and marginalized people, because we're supposed to have the same moral status as all other humans, all humans are supposed to be equal. 

HOWEVER.

Disability activists have seriously questioned whether this really is the case. For instance, psychology professor Dick Sobsey wrote this important article on the murder of Tracy Latimer, who was killed by her own father. He shut her in the family car, started the engine and lead the exhaust fumes in to her until she died. The father initially tried to get away with the murder, changed his story multiple times, but eventually claimed that he had carbon-monoxide-poisoned Tracy for her own good, because she had cerebral palsy and suffered so. Despite the fact that even his final story contained many claims that were weird from a purely medical perspective about Tracy’s condition and her suffering, both mainstream media and famous philosophy professor James Rachels bought his story wholesale, and considered it outrageous that he was sentenced to prison when he only wanted what was best for his daughter.
This is nothing unique when it comes to murders of disabled people, which Sobsey discusses further in the article. It's often assumed that the murder was for the best, that the murderer tells the truth when he calls it a "mercy killing", even if there's no other evidence whatsoever that the victim wanted to die.
There are several cases of disabled patients in countries with legalized active euthanasia who testify that clinicians have tried to pressure them into choosing death, like CanadianRoger Foley. Movies, TV shows and books frequently portray disabled people's death as bittersweet rather than wholly tragic - so sad, but they're finally free of their terrible existence! And there are many, many blogs and social media accounts which collect anecdotes from disabled people, or parents of disabled people, who's heard the most terrible comments from others who may not perceive themselves as hateful at all, but rather as compassionate and well-meaning. 

And then, of course, we have the philosophers. James Rachels argued in a textbook used by millions of students worldwide that the killing of Tracy Latimer was morally right, we can see this if only we think rationally about the matter and don't get too emotional. Peter Singer argues that non-human animals and disabled people live worse lives than normal people do, that it may be right to kill both disabled people and non-human animals in situations in which it's absolutely not okay to kill normal people, and that illness and death of the disabled or the non-human just don't weigh as heavily in the utilitarian calculation as the death of normal people do.
Other philosophers absolutely don't want to equate disabled people with animals, because they're not some kind of animal liberation extremists like Singer! Of course humans differ, morally, from non-humans! But they still strain really hard to explain why disabled people, intellectually disabled in particular, should be included in the realm of individuals with full moral status. Maybe the disabled could have a kind of honorary human status, despite not being truly fully human? This idea comes up again and again in the literature. 

I really don't think the combination of the rampant ableism that exists in society, and the explicit endorsement of the view that it's right to harm and kill those with lower worth if there's some possible future benefit to be had for those with higher worth, puts disabled people in a very secure position. Experiments on disabled or marginalized humans would be more unthinkable and our situation more secure if society ditched the idea that we can justifiably harm less valuable individuals for the sake of the more valuable ones.

 

The millionth take on the Barbie movie (this philosopher is negative)

 As the last person in the world, I've seen the Barbie movie. If you love Barbie, this post is not for you.

Now, there's no denying that the movie has awesome aesthetics. It starts out in a kind of pink plastic hell, reminisent of Yevgeny Zamyatin's "we" - the houses have no walls, everyone sees each other all the time, everyone has the same opinions, everyone smiles all the time. In Zamyatin's dystopia everyone ate some strange artificial food made of oil (sic), whereas in Barbieland, people don't eat at all - perfectly thin women, still hysterically smiling, go through the motions of eating, but it's just a pantomime. Everything is slightly skewed and off scale - mimicing the scale issues with the toys, cars are too small and hairbrushes are too big, but everyone keeps smiling, keeps moving these hopeless objects around as if they were actually useful. 
Of course I get that it's supposed to be fun and cute - I don't think it is, but whether cute or hellish it does look hella cool, there's no denying that. The 2001 parody is fun, the journey to the real world is delightfully whacky - there's a lot to like here if you watch the movie with your brain turned off.

However, I watched it with my brain turned on, and after having been subjected to tons of hype of this supposedly smart and feminist movie. It did not hold up.

1. The fake criticism of the Mattel Company

Obviously Mattel won't fund a full-length movie commercial for their products only to criticize themselves. This is nothing to be surprised about - but it still annoys the hell out of me that they inserted this fake "criticism" and that so many otherwise smart people swallowed it hook line and sinker; went "oh, Mattel are brave enough to criticize themselves!"

They make fun of "weird" Barbies and Kens that got discontinued, without ever mentioning the elephant in the room: All their dolls have been extremely thin. At one point, they launched a "curvy" Barbie who was a little less slim than the others (still slim, mind you), but it got discontinued when they discovered that little Barbie-loving girls thought this one was a disgustingly fat loser. In the movie, they pretend that down-right fat Barbies are a thing. (Edit: Turns out the somewhat-less-slim Barbies are still sold as "Fashionista Barbies". Anyway, the movie never touches the Barbie weight issue.)

Mattel has received heavy criticism for the horrible conditions their factory workers endure, but there's no slave labour in the movie since toys magically appear in warehouses in response to what happens in Barbieland.

They present the made-up problem of Mattel's all-male board (you can Google what it looks like in real life - six men and five women), and for about five hot minutes they use it to make fun of sexist men. Then we learn that Will Ferrell's CEO character, as clueless as he might be, cares about one thing only; making the world a better place for girls. He's not even greedy! Doesn't care about how much money he makes!
I've seen people claim that this movie is both feminist and "as anti-capitalist as a big blockbuster is allowed to be". This is completely baffling! I get where the feminist claim comes from - the movie has lots of women, and human character Gloria gives a Feminism 101 speech at one point. But anti-capitalist?
I recently saw The Meg 2: The Trench. This is a very silly monster movie. At one point, Jason Statham's action hero uses a torn-off helicopter blade as an enormous sword to impale an even more enormous monster shark. If someone asked me if I had any good anti-capitalist movies to recommend, I would not recommend The Meg 2: The Trench. But it still manages to be more anti-capitalist than the Barbie movie, featuring villains who do environmentally destructive drilling on the ocean floor so they can make more money. Whereas in the Barbie movie, we see that capitalists only want to improve the world. At worst, they may be a little clueless!

The closest they get to some real self-criticism is when angry teenager Sasha rants about how Barbie presents an impossible ideal and brings down people's self-esteem. But that rant brings us to the second big issue I had with the movie ...

2. The extreme gender essentialism

When Sasha rants about how Barbie is bad, the movie makes sure to tell us that she's wrong and we shouldn't listen to her. Before the rant, a teenage boy tells Barbie that Sasha is a horrible bully. During the rant, Sasha's croonies gleefully urges her on while she tears down what they think is a mentally unstable woman with Barbie delusions and reduces her to tears. Of course we shouldn't listen to anyone as mean and nasty as Sasha! In addition, she wears - gasp! - loose-fitting unisex clothes at this point. It's not like she looks all butch or anything, she's got long flowing hair for starters, but she doesn't look very feminine either. And this is bad. 

There's a ridiculous trend in shallow internet feminism that equates feminism with femininity and a lack of femininity with internalized misogyny. I think it started when people put a name to the trope "not like other girls". Sometimes, in works of fiction, people talk of how girls generally speaking are terrible, because they're cowardly and shallow and vain. The heroine of the story, however, does not share these traits - she's not like other girls, she's great. This trope is legitimately criticized for being misogynistic. Real-world girls may also pat themselves on the back for not getting along very well with shallow and vain girls, and getting along much better with the supposedly superior male gender. And there's a very narrow conception of "the tomboy" which often gets valorized in fiction for children.
The problem is when shallow internet feminists talk as if there's no pressure at all on girls to be feminine in any way whatsoever. Yes, being cowardly and shallow and vain are often stereotyped as feminine traits and also lambasted, but it's not like we live in a world in which butches like Lea DeLaria are held up as an ideal for all women to emulate. Girls may fail to conform to standards of traditional femininity simply because those standards don't suit them - it doesn't have to be internalized misogyny all the time! Feminism should be about letting go of gender roles, not enforcing them! (It's absurd that this even needs to be said.)
But back to the Barbie movie, Sasha starts out kinda non-feminine, horribly nasty, and yells at one point that "everyone hates women, both men and women hate women" clearly including herself in "everyone". Her arch in the movie is about simultaneously becoming sweet and nice and learning to love Barbie and embracing a feminine style with pink little dresses. 

All the Kens do stereotypically male things after their (ultimately failed) revolution, and we learn that those things are not for women. For instance, one Barbie realizes to her horror that she had spent time discussing Zack Snyder's the Justice League - because she had been brainwashed, you see. Well, guess who's also spent time discussing Snyder's Justice League? Yours truly! Quite recently, even, on a geeky internet forum. I didn't get much in the way of uptake, though. Everyone else kinda went "ugh, Snyder". Which is fine. It would not have been fine if they went "Jeppsson, what's happening? Are you discussing a male movie even though you're a woman? There must be something seriously wrong with you! Have you been brainwashed?" 

3. The terrible treatment of Ken

I've seen people share this meme about how Ken is written the way women are written in most movies. This is blatantly false. The problem with women in many movies is that they get too little to do in the narrative. The plot is driven by male characters, and women's role in the narrative is basically just love interest. But they're usually normal people in-universe, with houses, jobs, friends, etc. The problem with Ken is the exact opposite of this. He's got a very important role in the narrative, but in-universe, he's seen as nothing but Barbie's love interest (whom she doesn't even want).

I don't think for a moment that the terrible treatment of Ken is due to Gerwig and Bumbauch being manhating feminazis. I think it's because they had two ideas for how to make a fun feminist movie:
1. Let's make Barbieland this topsy-turvy place where women are in charge and men are oppressed!
2. Let's use the Kens to parody terrible real-world types like Nice Guys (tm) and mansplainers!
- and then failed to realize that 1 and 2 are incompatible. It's kinda essential to Nice Guys (tm) and mansplainers that they live in a patriarchy and has a patriarchal sense of entitlement. It's so essential that Gloria might have mentioned that in her Feminism 101 speech! 

So here's how Ken's story goes: 

In the beginning, the Kens are second-class citizens in a land ruled by Barbies. The Barbies hold all positions of power and get all the rewards for all the accomplishments. Mind you, all of this is fake - as far as I can tell, they never really do anything. Someone might hold a speech which contains longish words, or fly up into fake space, but whatever they say or do, the result is always the same - the others applaud them, tell them they're pretty and amazing and give them a fake reward. Also, the Kens' homelessness and lack of possessions don't have any negative health impacts like it would in the real world, because they don't need to eat and don't need actual medical care. Still, though. They're very much second-class citizens.

At first, the Kens show no resentment over this. Instead, they just hang around the Barbies, beg for little crumbs of appreciation, beg to be invited to parties in the Barbies' houses, and fight among themselves because they're so competitive about what tiny crumbs of affection and recognition they get from their oppressors. However, after main character Ken has spent a day or so in the real world, things change. He sees men hanging out with other men having a good time. He sees men getting treated with respect. Men having their own houses and possessions. Men riding horses (turns out he loves horses). He asks what all this means, and is told that it's "patriarchy". (It's important to note here that from what we can see, he learns nothing about sexual violence, domestic violence etc - only the above.) He then learns that men in the real world still have it harder than Barbies in Barbieland because they need to go to university and compete with each other and stuff. He then decides to turn Barbieland into a "patriarchal Kendom" - basically, he thinks it's the Kens turn to have what the Barbies used to have.
Who can fucking blame him? Not me. 

Ken goes back to Barbieland and starts a revolution - and somewhat ironically, he's able to do this precisely because he's so marginalized and overlooked that no one pays attention to him until the grand take-over is accomplished! The Kens then tell the Barbies that now it's a patriarchy (even though "five minutes after the second-class citizens successfully overthrew their oppressors" is nothing like "real world patriarchy"), so they're supposed to dress in skimpy outfits and give the Kens beer. The Barbies happily go along with this. Why? You might think it's because their old life was getting, well, old by now (how long can it be fun, really, to repeat to each other that they're pretty and amazing and exchange fake awards?), and this is something new. Of course, handing men beer will get stale pretty soon too, but it's understandable on the face of it that they'd do this for a while.
However, this is a movie that spells everything out in dialogue, so we know that this isn't the intended explanation for the Barbies going along with mini-skirts and beer. Instead, former President Barbie says that it's nice and relaxing not to think for a while. Really? You spent a lot of mental effort before? Then Gloria says something-something-patriarchy is a disease and remember the native American genocide and smallpox? Yeah, me neither. 

Anyway. Main character Barbie discovers that to break patriarchy's hold over someone, you only need to deliver a Feminism 101 speech to them (seriously), because oppression is all in your head or something. Then, the Barbies use their feminine wiles (obviously they use feminine wiles to strike back, gender essentialism and all that) to first flirt with the Kens and then make them jealous and turn them back to in-fighting. 

The Barbies take back power. The now defeated Kens rather sheepishly ask whether they might perhaps get some legal rights? Some, President Barbie declares. But very few. We can't just give everyone equal rights now, can we? Because that would be too radical and change things too fast. The Kens "gotta start somewhere". Yes, seriously. This is the only so-called reason given for why the Kens can't get equal legal rights - it would just be too quick, too radical, change things too fast. 

In the end, the Kens are told that their real problem isn't being second-class citizens - their real problem is how they feel about their second-class citizen status. They should stop obsessing over the Barbie ruling class and how they've got everything and the Kens have nothing - instead, they should work on some much-needed self-improvement. 

The final shot of main character Ken shows him dressed in a shirt with the text "I am Kenough". Presumably, he's also learnt to accept that society is "good kenough". 

R.I.P Revolutionary Ken. This Ken suffers from false consciousness.