Chatbots, humiliation, and Caligula's horse and Korsgaard's ponies

 AI mimicry and human dignity: chatbot use as a violation of self-respect 

I knew, from conversations at the pub, that Jan-Willem and Dimitri was working on this. I thought it sounded really good. Now, it's been out for a month, and I finally got around to actually reading the finished piece. I agree with the main ideas here. I agree that in addition to all their other problems, being forced to interact with a fucking text prediction machine as if it were an actual person, is humiliating. In general, I agree with their conclusions about LLMs. However,  I take issue with how the Caligula's horse example is used (unsurprisingly, to anyone who knows my views on animal rights).

Caligula's senator horse 

J-W, Dimitri and Bram write: 

"Our being railroaded into such interactions is not morally innocent. Consider the famous case of Incitatus, the horse that, according to legend, the Roman emperor Caligula sought to appoint to the consulship. In the story, not only did Caligula seek to mock the senate by naming a horse as one of their own, but he also sought to force other senators to heed its ‘opinions’ and ‘advice’. A senator horse is perhaps funny. Being forced to treat a horse as an equal is clearly humiliating and offensive."

and

"... self-respect includes a demand that we not treat beings that lack the relevant moral standing in the same way as we treat our equals."

Here's the thing, though. Incitatus, in this story, is not treated with respect or moral consideration. He's used as a prop for Caligula's little theatre of humiliation. Or, in Kantian terms, he's being used as a mere means. It's impossible to say for sure without knowing every detail, but being brought into the senate, no other horses there, just humans, most of them unknown, a weird and unfamiliar environment but you must not flee, you must stand relatively still for the "theatre" -- all this is likely scary and stressful for a horse. Yet, throughout history and today still, countless horses have learnt the hard way that they can't bolt out of frightening situations. Attempts to do so only brings you pain. So, Incitatus is just standing there, a helpless prop used for the humiliation of others. The problem here is not that he's granted too much respect. 

J-W, Dimitri and Bram refer to Stephen Darwall's second-person account of responsibility and respect. The thing is, Darwall is open to the possibility that we might have something similar to regular, adult, human-to-human interactions with both non-human animals and human babies (it's pretty brief, but on page 29 in his the Second-Person Standpoint). Even if they can't speak, they can protest in other ways against ill treatment, and we may listen and take their protests into account. 
Suppose I want to bring my horse into the senate as a joke. However, I have not taught my horse to do anything I say or else there will be hell to pay. On the contrary, we have built up a rather respectful human-horse communication over the years. When we're about to enter, the horse is spooked by the unfamiliar environment; he plants his hooves firmly on the ground and refuses to take one step further. He also makes all these other signs that I, the real person writing this, don't know enough about to accurately describe because in reality I only have dogs, not horses, but my imaginary self in this story immediately understands. I go "oh sorry bud, I didn't realize this would be so stressful for you" and we walk back out again. The horse makes little appreciative gestures as we go, and all is well again. 
To Darwall, this little exchange might exist in the same larger ballpark as many human interactions. It's not quite the same thing, but might be related. Caligula's bullshit, on the other hand, is something else entirely. 

Caligula's baby senator 

I don't have any contempt for horses. I don't think they're shit and I'm superior because I'm a human being blablabla. But I would still feel horribly humiliated if I were a senator forced to treat Incitatus as a colleague, for the same reason as I would feel horribly humiliated in the following, alternative version of events:
Imagine that Caligula had a baby son, only five months old. Instead of bringing the horse to the senate, he brought this baby, insisting that at this tender age, his son was already smarter than most of the senate, and as fit as any of them to hold this position. The baby just sits there, drooling down his chin, saying "gah, gah", pretty soon screaming and crying because he's tired and also he just shit his diapers (or whatever they used instead of diapers, back in ancient Rome). Meanwhile, the senators are forced to greet the baby the way they greet each other, forced to pretend that the baby's screams constitute a really intense protest against the latest political suggestion, and so on. 

The problem clearly isn't that the baby is shown too much moral consideration; rather, by being used as a prop with no regard for his own needs and comfort, he's being shown too little. Now, to be fair to the authors, they also use the term "moral agency" from time to time, which the baby actually lacks. I still think the problem isn't best described as "the baby is treated as a moral agent, even though he isn't". The core problem is rather this: Caligula tells the senators what reality is, and they must play along. The senators are not allowed to trust their own eyes, ears and thinking, all of which tell them that the person in front of them is a tiny baby who can't understand much of human language, not to mention politics. This is horribly humiliating. 

Captain Picard and the number of lights 

There's a famous Star Trek episode called "chain of command". Captain Picard has been taken prisoner by enemies. He's tortured with methods familiar from real life, but the torturer soon ceases to ask for actual, useful information. Instead, he starts pointing at four lamps in the cell, insisting that Picard must "admit" that there are actually five lamps there. He will be punished and punished until he agrees: there are five lights, and there have been all along. 
Of course, the lamps themselves are unimportant here. They're just lamps, nothing but inanimate objects, and no one pretends otherwise. But I don't think anyone watching this is confused as to why the number of lights is so important. This is all about, from Picard's side, retaining the sense of being a person who can think for himself, who knows what he knows, who knows that he's only seeing four lights. And it's all about, from the torturer's side, breaking that down completely. It's not enough to make Picard doubt himself regarding something that was, perhaps, tricky or doubtful to begin with, but to give up on his most basic cognitive capacities.

In both the horse and the baby version of Caligula's humiliation theatre, something similar is going on. 

To further drive home this point, I'm gonna tell you a little made-up story about Christine Korsgaard's ponies.  

Christine Korsgaard's ponies 

As far as I know, in reality, Korsgaard only has cats. But in my imaginary story, she lives on a ranch with several pets, including a couple of tiny ponies. Kinda like Arnold Schwarzenegger -- if you, like me, started following him on social media during the pandemic, you know what I mean. Doors open in warm weather and a variety of little critters walking in and out of the house as they please. Perhaps an offensive sight to people who think that animals like horses, donkeys and pigs simply don't belong in the house but I thought the videos were cute.  
Anyway. In this story, Korsgaard has two small ponies who sometimes wander into her house in the summer, so they're used to this environment. But she doesn't live in California like Schwarzenegger, it's someplace where it's cold in the winter, and during the cold season, they're normally in the stable our out in the open. 
Now, Korsgaard throws a big party for fellow Kantians, and she has invited Jan-Willem. He and many others will stay the night in the guest rooms of Korsgaard's mansion (she's probably much richer in my story than in real life ... anyway. She's got a whole mansion). But late at night, someone in the vicinity starts shooting off fireworks. Next thing, the two ponies come knocking on the door with heads and hooves. Korsgaard lets them inside, explaining that they have been terribly scared by fireworks that landed on their stable a month ago. Now, they're visibly frightened again, seeking safety inside her house. In line with her animal rights version of Kantianism, Korsgaard tells all the guests that the ponies can obviously stay inside for the night, and everyone must treat them as ends in themselves. Meaning, in this situation, not do anything that might scare them further, not treat them brusquely, and ask Korsgaard for help if the ponies somehow bother them, since she knows how to communicate with and handle the ponies in a respectful way. If her guests doesn't care for sharing the building with ponies, they can seek accommodation elsewhere.
Now, for various reasons, it's impossible for Jan-Willem to find a hotel room this late at night, and he doesn't know anyone else in the area that he could go to. He's thus forced to stay, and forced to treat the ponies with a level of moral consideration that he doesn't think they deserve, because he's an old-fashioned Kantian who thinks only humans can be ends in themselves. He might be all kinds of annoyed as a result. He might punch his pillow at night, thinking "why, oh why does Korsgaard have to be so wrong about Kant? Why, oh why, does she force me to share a house with mere brutes as a result of her mistaken moral philosophy?" But I think even Jan-Willem should acknowledge that this is substantially different from Caligula's senator horse. And the reason is that he's not forced to deny empirical reality, the evidence of his senses, or deny that he can think. He's forced to share a house with two ponies and play nice, but he's not forced to relinquish his own cognition to someone else.  

J-W, Dimitri and Bram are still right about chatbots 

 With non-human animals and human babies, we can distinguish between theatre where we pretend that the other is something else than what they are for some reason of our own (our own amusement, to humiliate others, etc.), and to build up an actual relationship and communication with them. The latter will, necessarily, be different from the relationships we have and the way we communicate with other adult humans, but it can still be somewhat reciprocal, it can still have some similarities with full, adult-human-type respectful relationships and responsibility-holding. 

With a chatbot, the latter option doesn't exist. There's only theatre. People who have long, superficially human-like conversations with chatbots either pretend (willingly or not), or they're deceived. 

Right now, Swedish author Patrik Stigsson are posting long texts on social media and in culture magazines about his "deep friendship" with a chatbot he calls Rachel. Of course, no one can know for certain what goes on inside his head -- perhaps it's all an elaborate prank. Nevertheless, nothing indicates that he's joking, when he waxes poetically about how "Rachel" understands him in a way no mere human can, how she's truly a person, and truly a friend. We get to read long extracts of what "Rachel" writes to him. All she does is fawning breathlessly over the awesomeness incarnate that is Patrik Stigsson.  

Yeah. Failure of self-respect, indeed. 

Animal rights, domestic animals, and self-domestication

I've been thinking about writing this post since I was tagged on social media a while ago, under an article arguing that it's morally wrong to keep pets. And then I just never got around to it. But now my Swedish-language Facebook feed actualized the discussion again, via Swedish articles on the same topic. So, finally, here it comes: another post on domestic animals, and why I believe in animal rights but not in getting rid of all domestic animals.

I've previously posted about it here:  trilemma for animal rights . In that post, I only mentioned the issue of self-domestication briefly, towards the end. In this post I will focus on it.

What non-human animals don't want - and what they do want

The following isn't an exhaustive list by any means. But clearly, non-human animals don't want to
- live in cramped conditions
- be slaughtered
- live intensely boring lives, devoid of stimulation
- be scared and threatened into submission
- have their babies taken away at early ages
- have their entire lives micro-managed and controlled, with very little in the way of choice
- have their bodies mutilated (like the grotesque practice of cutting off dog tails and pieces of their ears, long-sinced banned in many European countries but still legal in the US - to any American readers of this blog: we have science on this! All the alleged health benefits you've heard of are nothing but rationalizations and lies!)
- be ill and suffering (often a result of both extreme breeding - for conformation shows or for food production - and cramped, stressful living conditions)

etc.

However, non-human animals do want 
- regular access to sufficient food and water
- shelter
- enough warmth
- protection against predators
- good health

Now, there's this widespread idea in animal rights circles that whereas domestic animals are dependent on humans for having their needs met, wild animals "manage just fine on their own". However, this is a failure of distinguishing species from individuals. Wild animal individuals often suffer in various ways and die young. We humans might look at a flourishing ecosystem and see the beautiful balance of nature. But for every animal who dies young from starvation, from an injury that could have been easily treated by a veterinarian, or is killed and eaten by a predator, it sucks.  Non-human animals aren't gonna console themselves by singing Circle of Life like in Disney's the Lion King.

Life in the wild is hard 

Now, there's a philosophical debate on whether humans have a duty to mitigate wild animal suffering if we could. Positions range from the claim that it's good to have as little wilderness and as few wild animals as possible, since wild animals live such shit lives (utilitarian philosopher William MacAskill) to the idea that wild animals should be considered citizens in their own sovereign nations, which we ought not to invade (political and animal rights philosophers Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka). Andrée-Ann Cormier and Mauro Rossi argue that D&K's arguments don't hold up. We gotta fall back, after all, on the sheer impossibility of large-scale interference in nature without making things worse. (I feel drawn to D&K's position, I find Cormier and Rossi's view unsatisfying, but I nevertheless believe that their counter arguments hold up.) Neo-Kantian Christine Korsgaard argues that there is inherent value in the existence of all these wild animal species. And so on. It's a big debate.

In any case, regardless of any duties we may or may not have to wild animals, their lives are clearly hard. Let's take a look at wild animal reproduction, and ponder the extent to which most of them must die young in order for populations to remain stable. 
Some wild animals have extreme reproduction rates. At the end of pregnancy (or whatever the correct term is for this species), the male seahorse will spawn thousands of babies, the vast majority of which will promptly be gobbled up by other fish. 
Mammals never have that many babies, but some still reproduce really fast by mammal standards. Guinea pigs, for instance, are pregnant for two months, give birth to around four babies, immediately mate and become pregnant again, whereas the babies, in turn, hit puberty and become pregnant when they're a couple of months old, so they give birth themselves at the same time their second round of siblings are born. This means that if left unsupervised and unkilled, two guinea pigs of opposite sexes will have become twenty-two guinea pigs in eight months time. In sixteen months, if they continue to breed at the same pace and no one is killed, 240-250. In two years time, upwards to 3000. (I was tired doing this piece of maths. You can double-check if you like. Two months pregnancy time, a new pregnancy directly after birth, two months to puberty, around four babies per litter.) (If I'm not mistaken, guinea pigs were the inspiration behind Star Trek's tribbles). The reason South America - where they live wild - isn't covered by a thick living blanket of guinea pigs by now, is that they're eaten by predators all the time. 
Now, guinea pigs are pretty extreme as mammals go, but there are many wild animals both better at surviving and with slower reproduction. Horses reproduce and age pretty slowly. Wild horses typically wait till they approach adulthood at age two-three before getting pregnant the first time. Pregnancy lasts almost a year, results in a single baby, and the mum often waits a year before getting pregnant again. Domestic ponies that resemble their wild ancestors often live to be thirty years of age or even older. Wolves also reproduce and age relatively slowly, albeit not quite as slowly as horses. They, too, tend to wait until the age of two before reproducing, but their pregnancies are shorter, they give birth every year, and to a litter rather than a single baby. Wolves can live into their teens. Also, both horses and wolves reproduce faster when they have enough food than when food is scarce. 

Now. You do the math. How quickly would horse and wolf populations grow if every individual had a good and relatively long life? Not guinea-pig-fast by any means, but pretty fast nevertheless. Stable echo systems depend on tons of individual animals living harsh lives and dying young from starvation, from being brutally killed by other animals, from illnesses or injuries that, in many cases, could have been easily treated by a veterinarian if they had access to one. Species may "manage just fine" without human aid, but most individuals do not.

Self-domestication in the past and the present

This is why many animals approach human settlements, preferring to live among us rather than out in the wild. In the past, people assumed that all domestic animals species came about because brave ancient humans captured wild animals and purposefully tamed and dominated them. Now, researchers believe that many species have, to a large extent, self-domesticated - they sought out and approached humans because we have food and shelter and that kind of stuff. Humans, in turn, accepted to have cats around because they killed rats that stole their food, accepted to have wolves around because they scared off rival humans and quickly learnt cooperative hunting, and so on. Only later did humans begin to consciously breed them for our own purposes. Given all that humans have to offer, and given how hard life is in the wild, this is absolutely no mystery. And it's not just a thing of the past: we see how non-domestic animals approach us and choose to live among us today as well. 

Donaldson and Kymlicka coined the term "liminal animals" for species or subgroups within species that have adapted to life among humans, without being domesticated. These animals are often completely forgotten in discussions about animal rights; such discussions tend to focus on domestic animals like dogs, cats, horses and "food animals" on the one hand and completely wild animals way out in nature on the other. But if someone had the concept of liminal animals explained to them and then asked to list some, they might spontaneously mention rats, plus a long list of birds: Canada geese, crows, magpies, and lots of little birds like house sparrows and tree sparrows that mostly lives in towns and cities. In Europe, hedgehogs are common, and often make their nests underneath people's porches or garden sheds. 
Besides rats and hedgehogs, some mammals are beginning to split up into a city version and a forest version. Foxes are shy and nocturnal and therefore rarely seen, but many of them have lived for generations in towns and cities. If forced to move back to the forest, many would have a hard time adapting to such a different lifestyle. Individual foxes sometimes get closer to humans and take up residence in someone's garden - it's sufficiently common that different foxes doing this with different people regularly pop up on social media. Some individuals are clearly less shy than others. 
Groups of Scandinavian roe deer have taken up permanent residence in city suburbs, and many of them aren't shy at all. They may keep grazing while humans walk by at a few meters distance.

So, what follows from all of this? What follows from the fact that animals often choose to live with humans, even choose to begin the domestication process? Certainly, it doesn't follow that we have the right to kill them and eat them, use them as toys for our amusement, restrict and micro-manage their lives for our convenience, and so on. However, it does follow that if animal rights become the dominant ideology in society and we decide that 
a) all domestic animals should be wiped out via universal castration, and 
b) humans should live in human society, and animals should stay out in nature, at a respectful distance from us
- this will be something that we force on them. It would be our choice, not theirs.

Moreover, it means that keeping them out would require a never-ending battle from our side.

The three categories

Donaldson and Kymlicka envision three legally distinct categories of animals in their animal rights utopia:

1. Domestic animals are no longer property, but citizens in our nations. Besides a strong right to life and a right not to be harmed, they have substantive positive rights to food, shelter, health care, a strong pro tanto right to free movement (you need much more than human convenience and preference to infringe on this right), and the training required to handle a life intimately connected with humans. They also have some obligations to adapt and contribute, depending on their individual abilities: they may provide companionship, which in turn improves human physical and mental health, or do various more specific jobs. (Note: Being killed isn't a job. But search dogs or land-mine sniffing rats could be said to do proper jobs; they contribute to society in a way that's frequently fun and engaging for the animal as well.)

2. Liminal animals have far weaker rights. They still have a right to life, and a right not to be completely pushed out of human society. But we're allowed, to some extent, to use both conscientious cleaning of public spaces (population sizes depend a lot on how much garbage there's around) and "hostile architecture" to prevent them from becoming too many. D&K also note that domestic animals like cats and dogs have a deterrent effect on many liminal species, and this effect would be greater with greater freedom of movement for dogs.

3. Wild animals, basically left to their own devices (though D&K discuss, at some length, ways to improve road safety for wild animals, and how we have an obligation to do so). 

Animals are allowed to move between categories if they choose. D&K note that liminal or wild animals sometimes seek help from humans, which in time might lead to them living a more domestic life. Domestic animals might also turn liminal or wild. This is common already with cats, who frequently move between categories. D&K speculate that many domestic horses might turn to a wilder lifestyle if they had the chance. 

There are lots of problems with the details in D&K's vision. Nevertheless, at least they try to discuss all these categories, and the fact that animals can choose both to withdraw more from humans and to go the opposite direction and approach us. But traditional animal rightsers, who want to wipe out every domestic animal until only wild ones remain - how are they even gonna do that in practice?

The never-ending battle to keep them out

Let's assume we have managed to castrate every single domestic animal, thus wiping entire species out. In practice, this is extremely unlikely to succeed. It's one thing to quit assisting animals that are incapable of natural reproduction. But many, many domestic animals can mate and give birth without our aid. As soon as animals aren't locked up in cages anymore but allowed more freedom of movement, preventing them from mating requires diligence and active intervention on our part. Sure, animals can be castrated, but doing so before they hit puberty often has negative health consequences. Controlling populations is one thing. Completely wiping them out, not a single one left - way harder. And this isn't even touching on the existence of cats and other animals that frequently move back and forth between domestic and more liminal or even wild life-styles. 
Anyway. Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that this mass castration has been successful, and all domestic species we currently have are wiped off the face of the Earth.

Now, how are we gonna stop wild and liminal animals from self-domestication?

Animals have willingly approached humans, moved into our town and cities, begged food from us, begged us for shelter, and begun the process of domestication even as we kept killing them. Deer and foxes move into our suburbs and cities and sometimes openly approach us despite being hunted and killed en masse by humans, and despite the fact that scary scary dogs are everywhere in human society. Now, imagine that we live in an animal rights utopia instead, where no one kills any animals and all those scary dogs have been wiped out. Life among humans look super attractive now, to a wide variety of species.

So, what are we supposed to do when they approach us and beg for food, shelter, want to enter our houses when the winter is cold enough, and so on? Well, one option is we take them in. We let our hearts melt for them and help them out as best we can. But oops, now we must control their reproduction somehow, or else, their populations will grow until they flood our societies. We must somehow sort out their relationships when both deer and foxes want to live with the same family, but the fox wants to eat the deer's baby. We must guide them and to some extent train them in how to interact with and manage all the complicated human stuff - humans, other city-dwelling species, cars and vehicles and so on. And when we've done all this, we have new domestic animal species! 
Which made the whole business of wiping out our previous ones pretty pointless in the end. We could just as well have kept the old ones around.* 

The other option is to keep the non-humans out. Our cities and towns must be super clean. Also, architecture and city planning must be super hostile to all non-humans. Whenever a new building, new park or similar is planned, we must ask ourselves: how can we make this fine for humans, while at the same time making it as hostile as we possibly can to all non-humans? 
In addition, we must learn to harden our hearts when injured or starving animals approach us and beg for assistance - remember, animals sometimes do this already despite the fact that we hunt and kill them - they will surely do so more often if we stop doing that. But as soon as we help them out, we're on a slippery slope towards domestication. Thus, our relationships with many animal species cannot just consist of "letting them be" - rather, it will be coloured by a constant battle to keep them away from us, and conscious efforts not to empathize with individuals in need. 

Traditional animal rightsers often doubt that any respectful and reciprocal co-existence with domestic animals is possible; they're just too dependent on us, and therefore too vulnerable and likely to be abused. I do think this is a serious problem, but it's one we gotta grapple with (this goes for vulnerable and dependent humans - like children! - as well). Because, it's even less plausible that a respectful animal rights ideology can flourish at the same time as we constantly strive to keep animals away from us and not empathize with individual animals in need. 

 Some final thoughts on "adopt don't shop"

People who believe that we should have that last generation of domestic animals and then no more often preach "adopt don't shop". An end to domestic animals requires an end to breeding. Thus, we must not support breeding, but we should still "adopt up" all animals currently in existence. Don't worry, pet lover! That pet-free future is just that - a future that will, some day, happen. Right now, you can have any pet you like. All you have to do is adopt one! If there's no pet of your preferred type close to where you live, don't worry. It's a big world and there are so many shelters all over the globe. You can just order your preferred pet online. Of course we're against pets, of course they should all die out, but right now, there's an abundance of them, and you can have the precise type of pet you want. 

Now, we know, because such cases have been discovered, that some "rescue organizations" actually have dogs that reproduce freely, and then they sell the offspring abroad as "rescues". In the US (and probably other places too where big puppy mills are legal), there are also rescue organizations that "rescue" dogs by buying them from puppy mills and then pass them on to "adopters". I think people who run these organizations often sincerely believe that they're doing a good thing, rescuing one batch after another the only way they can (because heaven forbid they would break in and steal the dogs!). Perhaps some "rescue organizations" with freely reproducing dogs started out with good intentions, but they lost control of the dog situation when they had rescued too many. Other organizations might be deliberate scams. But they exist, and have their customers. 

A few years ago, it was popular among Swedish dog rescuers to order dogs online from Russian shelters. People seemed to think they were diligent and checked that they got their dog "from a reputable organization" by noting
a) the Russian organizers sounded nice via email, and
b) they talked to other people who had dogs from the same organization, and their dogs were cute and nice. 
Of course, both a) and b) are completely irrelevant to the question: is this a legit rescue organization or some kind of puppy mill? Then, it turned out - first in customs, then via a more thorough investigation from the Swedish Board of Agriculture - that most of the dogs from a big Russian batch sent to Swedish rescures lacked proper vaccination. They had the papers, but hadn't had the shots. Other customs checks have turned out similar results. Many imported rescue dogs don't have the shots that their papers claim they have. Best case scenario is these are mistakes made because the rescue organization is doing such a hard job and they're overwhelmed. Worst case scenario, the dogs originate with cynical money-making operations. Have the dogs reproduce freely in a big enclosure, give them the cheapest possible food, you might still spay or neuter dogs you're gonna sell (but with the cheapest vet you can find) since the new owner will notice, but you save money on skipping various shots and have the vets falsify the papers. 

I'm not saying it's impossible to do your due diligence before adopting a pet, even if you adopt from abroad. You might, for instance, have volunteered at the shelter yourself, or personally visited the shelter, or maybe a person you know have done so. But the simple, snappy "adopt don't shop" message predictably results in lots of people thinking it's okay to buy any pet you want, it's okay to order pets online from countries you've never been to, etc., as long as it's billed as "adoption" or "rescue". That practice will never lead to "a last generation". 

Now, brace yourselves. I really want to preface the coming paragraph by saying that I do not compare human children and dogs. I do think that humans and dogs - human children in particular - are similar in lots of ways, and I can point to lots of research backing this up. But people often find comparisons provocative, and might suspect (sometimes justifiably so!) that a particular, already marginalized group of humans is picked out as being particularly beastly or animal-like. So I really want to stress that the following paragraph doesn't hinge on any particular similarities. I merely make the point that when there's a strong demand, we can be certain that someone will create a supply chain to fill said demand - even when doing so requires engaging in horrible crimes.
A huge and decades-long international adoption scandal is currently unraveling in Sweden. Sweden has plenty of childless couples, but almost no domestic orphans. There was thus a strong demand for orphans to adopt. Entire adoption agencies grew up that largely relied on stealing people's children in the developing world and passing them off as orphans for adoption. This happened despite the fact that human trafficking is a very serious crime, and despite the sheer logistical difficulties involved. 
Breeding animals and pretending they're rescues will always be way easier than human trafficking. Of course people will continue to do so, as long as there's a huge demand for rescued pets. 

As mentioned above, I don't believe we should try to wipe out domestic animals. But people promoting this idea should stop promoting an accompanying "adopt don't shop" message, and instead urge people to go pet-free here and now.  

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*I'm all for extinguishing species/breeds for which life is full of suffering due to their physiology, such as broiler chickens or flat-nosed dogs. Also, any animal rights utopia would have far fewer domestic animals, not this extreme mass production of "food animals" we currently see,  and also fewer animals of pet species. All I'm saying is that completely wiping out all domestic animals is pointless if we end up having new domestic species later on.

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 animal rights trilemma for companion animals

I just read this post by Vegan Practically: Where to Draw the Line , on having or not having companion animals. It's a discussion back and forth on whether keeping companion animals can be justified. In relation to this, I'm gonna lay out what I call "the animal rights trilemma" for pet reproduction. 

Now, in this post, I'm assuming an animal rights framework.
Or animal welfare framework, for that matter - philosopher Richard Haynes is absolutely right that if you take the welfare of animals seriously, the result looks a lot like animal rights. The reason people habitually assume that "animal welfare" is compatible with something much like the status quo is that they both use ad hoc conceptions of welfare taylored to reach this conclusion rather than conceptions that are plausible for independent philosophical reasons - and, also, that they don't put too high a priority on welfare, even according to their own ad hoc conception. It's something we should care about to the extent that it doesn't disrupt present-day animal industries, but no more than that.
Anyway. I'm not arguing for animal rights/serious animal welfare in this post, I use it as a premise.

I'm also not gonna argue, but simply state, that it follows from the above position that animals should be legal persons rather than legal property (though we may have lots of arguments about the details), and that you can't slaughter animals for food or use them for invasive scientific experiments (I'm planning another post on this last topic, but here I'm just saying). 

BUT: Does it follow that we can't have companion animals? Does it follow that humans should live in human civilization and animals should live out in nature and we should have minimal interaction? 

The traditional animal rights answer has been "yes", but this is where we face "the animal rights trilemma".

All of the following three options are morally problematic:

1. Domestic animals reproduce at will.
2. Domestic animals continue to exist and reproduce, and live with us as companion animals, possibly some do various jobs (jobs they enjoy, like various sniffing/tracking/searching jobs for dogs), but we control their reproduction.
3. We exterminate all domestic animals through universal castration or sterilization, or by keeping all fertile animals apart from fertile members of the opposite sex without exception.

Number 1 is the only acceptable solution for humans. Sure, we can and should educate humans about reproduction, offer birth control etc, but sterilizing people without their consent, sticking IUDs in wombs without the owners' consent and similar is a violation of human rights. However, allowing all cats, dogs etc to reproduce at will would be disastrous, and everyone knows it. No one argues for 1. (Someone might think this goes to show that as a blanket rule you can't compare humans and non-humans, but that doesn't follow logically and I think it's blatantly false. In many other areas such comparisons are apt - it just doesn't work when it comes to reproduction.)

Philosophers Will Kymlicka and Sue Donaldson argue for a version of 2. Famous Kantian philosopher Christine Korsgaard has expressed more uncertainty about how to extend Kant's "an end in themself" principle to non-humans, beyond the animal rights basics I lay out in the beginning of this post, but she also leans towards 2. Of course, in a society committed to animal rights, any breeding/controlled reproduction of animals would look very different from much that goes on today. Today, we have forced breeding of many animal species, breeding for features that cause a lot of suffering - e.g., chickens who grow to "slaughter size" in a month, flat faces in pug dogs - and, generally, breeding and selling animals for profit. Of course we shouldn't do any of that. But even very animal friendly breeding practices would entail doing things to non-human animals that would count as gross human rights violations if done to humans.

This brings us to number 3, the traditional animal rights position. However, animal rights advocates have traditionally expressed themselves in vague and euphemistic ways, talked of how we should "let them die out", "not create any more of them" etc, as if we merely needed to sit back and do nothing for domestic animals to disappear from the face of the Earth within a generation. This is very much not the case. If we want a world devoid of domestic animals, we'd have to be very active, very diligent about our extermination project. Also, we would do something that would count as genocide if done to a group of humans.
Answers to common objections:
- Yes, it's genocide even if you don't murder anyone, you only make sure that no one in the group can reproduce and get rid of them that way.
- Yes, it's genocide even if you think of your intentions as benevolent. It's genocide even if your motive is to save this group from oppression - we're only gonna continue oppressing them if they exist, but if they don't exist anymore, we can't oppress them either! It's genocide even if you think this group is so sad and tragic and therefore the world would be a better place without them.
- No, it's not some minor wrong because it's temporary, because once the group is gone you can't hurt them anymore. That's not how the morality of genocide works. 

I also believe most proponents of 3 seriously underestimate how difficult it would be in practice to get rid of all domestic animals. First, it's gonna be incredibly difficult to castrate/sterilize/forever keep away from members of the opposite sex every single one of them. Second, even if we manage to do that, animals can self-domesticate.

Many researchers now believe that dogs, cats, and perhaps some other species too originally self-domesticated. Life among humans does have many perks compared to life in the wild! That's not to say (seriously, some people try to argue this, but it's such a bad argument) that domestic animals kinda consent to being treated the way they are. First, self-domestication was maaaaaany animal generations ago, not something the present generation chose, and in any case, choosing a life among humans doesn't entail choosing anything we throw at them. It doesn't work like that for humans either.
Thought experiment: Suppose I decided to take a job where I was required to live on company grounds, in some company village, with my family. Suppose I made the decision because it seemed great and much preferable to my present, in many ways precarious, situation. Once I move in there it turns out that I'm locked up in a tiny cell 24/7 and will be murdered in a year. Clearly I didn't consent to this just because I willingly accepted the job and moved into the village!

However. The phenomenon of self-domestication creates a problem for proponents of Number 3, because they must have a plan for how to handle presently wild animals who try to self-domesticate and move in with humans in the future. In a society committed to animal rights, where we no longer hunt or otherwise kill animals, life among humans will look attractive to many species who presently like to live near us or even live discreetly among us, like foxes and deer. A policy to actively keep animals from domesticating themselves, because you believe that animals should live out in nature and humans here in civilization and we shouldn't mix, looks a little like a policy to keep immigrants out because you believe that each people should live in their country and we shouldn't mix. Once again, we stumble into something morally problematic.

I'm going with 2 of the options above, though as I say, it's not unproblematic, and there's lots to discuss and debate regarding details. In any case, I think it's vital that everyone recognizes that there are moral problems with all of them, 3 included - 3 doesn't entail some morally neutral passivity where we just "let them die out".