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.  

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 

*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.

Psych drugs, food, and internalized stigma

 I had it bad this past week. Probably a bit overworked towards the end of the semester. Monday morning, when I looked in the bathroom mirror, my face looked completely skewed, like a Picasso painting. My first impulse was that I should paint it into a straighter shape with make-up. Then I thought: no, I should go about this face problem rationally. I should double-check what it looks like in other devices. I turned my phone to mirror mode and looked, and it was normal on the little phone screen. Then I turned on a Zoom meeting for one at the computer, and it was normal on Zoom as well. Only in the mirror did my face look fucked up. So I thought to myself: it's just a mirror illusion. Maybe stress-induced.

And then the week followed. For various reasons, I decided to still go to work even though I didn't do much. I had other bad experiences. I pulled out all the tricks in my bag to handle them (stuff I've written and published about, and then some). It was pretty bad, but now I'm much better. No big breakdown in the end, no disaster, I pulled through.

(I'm pretty active on social media, so maybe someone reading this thinks "huh, I've been following her all along and I had no idea!" Well, I don't like talking publicly about having it bad as it happens - afterwards is a different matter. If I talk about it as it happens I worry that people might feel sorry for me, and their sorry will make me feel sorry for myself and it's all gonna go downhill from there. "You become the way they see you" as Lovisa frequently thinks to herself in my upcoming novel and oh look how smoothly this transitioned into book promotion! Coghweel Souls in March 2025! Ok, back to the blog post topic.)

I pulled through this time, but after a week like this, it's still natural to think about medication. I quit my meds in 2018, but I've always said that if I absolutely need to one day, I'll get back on Haldol. 

People can be weird about Haldol. It's got this reputation of being an extremely strong and dangerous drug. Some people have asked me why on earth I've been given that terrible old drug instead of some of the nice new ones. On the flipside, a woman I met at a party and talked psych experiences with, said "wow, Haldol, that's the heavy stuff! That's the real deal! They only give me these new weak-ass meds, none of which works, how did you get your doc to prescribe Haldol?"
But the whole "Haldol was so bad and extreme and the new drugs are so much nicer" is mostly hype from the companies making the new drugs. At the end of the day, different people have different reactions to different drugs. Haldol worked best for me and that's why I was on it. 

It worked quite well for many years. For several decades, I was on it for much of the time, but not all the time. Occasionally, I would stupid-quit, because I felt good and thought I was cured. Sometimes I'd be alright for a pretty long time after, but then some stressful even would happen and set me off, and I'd be back in the psych system and back on the pills. In hindsight, maybe these stupid-quits had some benefit, though? Maybe they postponed the point at which Haldol just didn't work anymore, giving me only side effects but hardly any desired effect.
I hope that if I really need to get back on it one day, my brain will have rebooted after all the years off meds, and it's gonna work again. I don't think there's any actual science on this. I've asked a few psychiatrists I know through work and their educated guess or professional intuition or whatever you wanna call it is that it's probably gonna work again. 

However, I'd prefer to stay off it. And it's important to me that people understand that this is not because of "internalized stigma". 

"Internalized stigma" is a thing, sure. But I don't think that I have ever suffered from internalized medication stigma. Any stigma I've internalized have been directed at the madness itself, not the medications used to repress it. When I stupid-quit I was highly motivated to think that I wasn't mad, not that I'd be able to manage my madness without meds. These are different things. I definitely had a big chunk of internalized madness stigma, but it was very helpful to talk it out in therapy in 2019. (I went to therapy for my own money. Searched and searched until I found a place where they offered something other than just "CBT" and "job training". I contacted them and said I don't need fucking CBT, I need some serious fucking Freud shit! At the end of the day, I'm not sure if we did any serious fucking Freud shit, but we sure did more than CBT exercises, and it was great for me.)

Stigma against the antipsychotic pills rather than the psychotic condition does exist in antipsychiatry/critical psychiatry spaces. At their most generous, these people will say something like "I don't judge anyone for doing drugs to feel better, regardless of whether they drink, smoke weed, take psych drugs or something else". At their least generous, they will talk of psych drugs as literal poison and people who willingly poison themselves as completely duped. But among regular folks, these views are, in my experience, rare. Regular folks may think that people with common diagnoses like depression and ADHD should just pull themselves together and replace their pills with yoga or something, but psychotics are a different matter, they're bona fide crazy and should absolutely take their meds so they don't become homeless or homicidal axe murderers or both. 

Still, anti-pill views are real, and with common conditions like depression or ADHD, they seem quite common. So unsurprisingly, there's also a counter reaction and people who oppose the stigma. That's good, taking pills shouldn't be stigmatized, but sometimes, the anti-stigma people see stigma and internalized stigma everywhere. And that's what I'm gonna talk about in the rest of the post. People can be reluctant to go on pills for perfectly understandable reasons. It's not all "internalized stigma".

First, there's the obvious case of side effects. Towards the end, Haldol gave me on-off slurred speech because I lost control of my tongue, and visible facial ticks. Especially the tongue thing was really bad. But suppose that my brain really has rebooted, and if I went back on them, it would be like it was before, when they worked. Back then, I had pretty mild side effects. Dry mouth, but I retained good teeth in spite of that issue. I'm more worried about returning to a state of low creativity and being less smart and fast-thinking than I am now. Mind you, I was still able to work full-time as a scholar, I was in no way zombified by the pills. Still, looking back, comparing myself then to the way I am now  - it looks like a pretty high price to pay for peace of mind. It might be tempting to think that psychosis is a mental health matter and therefore intrinsically more important than things like creativity or smarts, which are just little luxury flourishes on top or something. But my mind is one, it's not divided into the health foundation and the capacity flourishes. There may come a time when I think going back on pills is worth it all things considered, but it would take a lot. 

Second, I don't want to depend on pills. And this is where some people really prick their ears and go "did I hear someone voice their internalized stigma?" In particular, I've seen a few different people, as far as I can tell wholly independent of each other, make a comparison with food here. If you don't feel bad about depending on food, but you do feel bad about depending on pills, this goes to show that you're guilty of internalized stigma! You should get over it already and take your pills just like you eat your food. 

First a word of why I would depend on the pills if I went back on them: In theory, it might seem like I'd be maximally protected against any looming psychotic breakdown if I were to combine pills with all my self-invented coping mechanisms that I've talked and published about. In practice, that's unlikely. I could retain all the epistemological frameworks I've developed to prop up this flimsy world of mine and make it feel sturdier, but lots of mental actions I perform - like deliberately dissociating in quite specific ways, or conversing with helpful voices - would likely be rendered hard or impossible when on pills. Moreover, in psych treatment, the pills tend to be framed as your number one crutch and anything else as just a complement. Hard not to fall into that way of thinking, if that's how clinicians constantly frame things.

So, I would depend on the pills if I got back on them. And it's different from depending on food.
I feel fine depending on food because food just works for me. I eat some food, and I get nutrition and energy from it. It works.I also felt fine being on Haldol back when Haldol just worked.
However, when I first became a psych patient, I had to go through a trial-and-error process with a bunch of different pills before we found something that worked (very common experience). That trial-and-error process was extremely frustrating. Doc prescribes a pill. You take the pill. You wait to see if something happens. It doesn't! Too bad. Doc prescribes another pill. You take the pill. Wait to see if something happens. It doesn't, not with this one either! Too bad. Etc. 
Finally, we struck gold with Haldol. As I said above, it worked well for many years. But when it stopped working, that was also frustrating and frightening - will my life just fall apart now? 

One thing that's particularly frustrating is how passive you are in relation to the pills. If you're trying out various mental tricks to help you deal with shit, you're actively doing something, you're performing these mental actions. If something doesn't immediately work, you can try doing it a little differently, try harder at it, and so on. With the pills, the only thing you actually do is swallowing. After that, you have no control over what happens. Stomach acid dissolves the pill, the little chemicals go out in your blood stream, past the blood-brain barrier, attach themselves to little receptors up there - or, at least that's what's supposed to happen. Whether it does, isn't up to you. It works, or it doesn't work. If it works, that's great. If it doesn't, you can only lament this fact, and maybe go back to the trial-and-error process, or adding more pills, and hope that they will do what they're supposed to do, once again just hoping.
And yes, eating food has the same passive, non-controlled element to it. I can't affect what happens with the food once I've swallowed it (at least not in a big way - maybe I'll get better digestion if I take it easy after a meal, but I can't do anything major about it). This is no problem to me because it just works. However, if it didn't just work, then it would be a problem. 

Imagine that I develop Type 1 Diabetes. Extremely unexpected at my age, but imagine it happens. I notice that food doesn't work anymore. My body is supposed to break down the food and extract energy from it, but now it doesn't anymore. I eat and eat, and yet I become increasingly fatigued and emaciated. Let's make the thought experiment even worse! It's not diabetes, so insulin doesn't help. It's similar symptoms, but there's nothing the doctors can do for me. My body is supposed to get energy from food, but the system doesn't work anymore, and it's nothing I can do about that - I can hope that things get back online, but as of now, I can only helplessly watch as all the food I stuff in my mouth goes straight through without doing anything for me.
This would be a serious problem! Not because of "internalized stigma", not because I have an attitude problem around food, but because food doesn't work for me anymore and I'm helpless to do anything about it.
Similarly, it's a real, tangible problem - not just internalized stigma or a bad attitude or whatever - to take pills that just don't work for you. One might argue that feelings of helplessness and despair don't make the situation any better, so you should still try to get over them. Perhaps (though even this can easily veer into problematic toxic positivity territory). But these feelings would nevertheless be caused by quite tangible problems. 

Haldol stopped working for me once. If I went back on it, I would be acutely aware of the fact that it happened once and might happen again. I could only hope that it wouldn't happen again, but there would be nothing I could do to prevent it - when a previously effective medication stops working, it's presumably because of physical, neurological changes in the brain (there's some science published on this, though AFAIK, lots of uncertainties remain), and I have no control over whether my brain will grow extra dopamine receptors or similar. Real problem right there. Not just "internalized stigma".

Third, dependency makes you vulnerable. It makes your situation precarious. And yes, sure, vulnerability is part of the human condition and all that, but I still don't want to take on extra precariousness if it's at all possible to avoid.
Even if the pills work for you, they can only help you if you get them. But access to prescription medication has become far less reliable over the years. This is because of political problems, of course. We should fight for political change. But in the meanwhile, this is a real problem for people on meds, and a rational reason to try and do without if you can do without even if it's hard sometimes. 

I don't worry about being dependent on food because I can reliably access food. Of course, this isn't a privilege that everyone has. Insofar as on-off-starving people (people living with "food insecurity", to use the established euphemism) don't think of themselves as problematically dependent on food, it's probably because everyone needs to eat. One might lament depending on pills that may or may not be available next week, next month, and so on, because one is surrounded by people who don't have to worry about this, but everyone must eat.

However, imagine that breatharianism was a real thing. There are these mumbo-jumbo gurus who claim that they don't need to eat, they can survive on just air and sunshine or what-not. Imagine this was a real skill that some people developed; maybe there were quite a lot of breatharians around. In this hypothetical scenario, I imagine lots of poor and on-off starving people, who tried to go breatharian but couldn't for some reason, would envy those who could. And we don't need to posit an internalized eating stigma to explain why; breatharians' lives would simply be less precarious, they'd have one less serious problem to worry about. Even if the right thing to do is to fight for political change rather than individualize the problem and do breathing exercises for all, someone who could develop the breatharian skill might be rational to do so. If they're gonna get politically active, it will be easier if they're not simultaneously starving. In any case, no need to appeal to internalized stigma over food to explain what's going on here. 

To sum up: Internalized stigma is a thing. It's worth discussing. But in my experience, it gets over-used. Suggesting that there are no real problems associated with being on pills, only attitude problems and internalized stigma, is actually not so different from saying that mental problems aren't real problems, people just need to get their shit together and improve their attitude.

The failed analogy of oppressed AIs in science fiction

 I recently finished Ann Leckie's Ancillary series. This was my verdict on various social media:

"I started reading it years ago. Remembered liking the worldbuilding, but was more ambivalent about the way it was written. I remembered the text feeling too slow and cumbersome overall. 

Now I thought: perhaps that was an unfair judgment due to reading the first two parts fairly heavily medicated? So I got this book and finished the series. 

Well, as with my re-read of Vandermeer’s Area X trilogy a year ago, I percieved the same issues off meds as I did on them, but it's easier to deal with when my brain works faster. In Area X , the problem was a really long slog in book two where nothing much happens for a 150 pages or so, except Control walking around in the office building and thinking to himself that something feels off. (This did not require as many pages as it got!) With the Ancillary books, the issues are low-key but they permeate the series: the dialogues should have been tighter, the on-page tea-drinking should have been cut down, and finally, Brec thinks so many purely expository thoughts! Like this: ”I spottad Sievarden in the hallway - whom I had saved when I met her on the planet Nilt and she was addicted to Kef - talking to the high priest….” Yeah we know you saved her, it was in book one. If I had forgotten your backstory in between books, I’d have looked it up on the internet! 

Sometimes it feels like reading a silver age superhero comic - they were always peppered with exposition for the benefit of new readers who didn’t know the characters.

Also, in the end, the book deals with liberation of and rights for AI persons. Gosh, what a tired old trope! I’m probably gonna do a whole blog post about it later.

I really like the worldbuilding, and I really like Brec, the MC, at least in theory. But overall, it’s hardly my favourite series. I much prefer Leckie’s fantasy novel The Raven Tower."

 

Well, here comes the promised blog post! 

I've heard people claim that oppressed androids and other AI persons in scifi is such a great analogy for many oppressed groups in real life. Typically, these stories feature discussions of whether the AI are sentient or not.
Now, TBF to Ann Leckie, that's actually not the case in Ancillary Mercy. The Radch Empire happily draws a very sharp line between citizens and non-citizens in terms of moral worth, without really tying this to theories of sentience or their mental life. No one says that those features of a person drastically changes when they go from non-citizen to citizen status, and yet, their moral and legal status suddenly shoots up. Thus, the fact that they see their sentient stations and ships as far below their human citizens, need not be because they have any doubts about said sentience.
But in many other scifi stories - like the classic Star Trek Next Generation episode "the measure of a man" where the android Data's moral and legal status is questioned - whether he's truly sentient is absolutely crucial to the matters at hand. And, people have told me, this is such a good parallel for lots of real-life oppression, which is often justified by claims about how this or that group allegedly can't think, or can't think very well.

However, claiming that someone can't think very well is quite different from claiming that they're not sentient. 

There are some fine-grained distinctions here sometimes made in philosophy (and then debated - does this distinction really pick something out? Does it pick something important out?) that won't concern me here. I'm just gonna talk about sentience as synonymous with being truly conscious, rather than just mimicking consciousness, as having experiences and a mental life - in short, when someone is sentient, it makes sense to ask what it is like to be that individual. What is it like to be homeless? What is it like to be a billionaire? What is it like to be a dog? are all questions that make sense to ask, even if we can't give a single answer to any of them because there's too much individual variation, and even though we might never fully answer the dog question because dogs are too different from us in, e.g., their sensory apparatus and cognition. In contrast, it does not make sense to ask what it is like to be a desk. It's not just impossible to answer for us mere mortals, because there are limits to what we can know - there is no answer.

Now, oppression is typically not based on the claim that the oppressed group lacks sentience. Such claims have occasionally been made of some disabled and mad groups, typically those who are either non-verbal or merely speak what seems like complete gibberish to others. However, extreme misogyny, racism, queer oppression, or even ableist oppression of disabled groups that the oppressors remain capable of communicating with, is typically not built on denying that the oppressed groups are sentient.
Sure, they're claimed to be, in various ways, irrational, unthinking, hysterical, animal-like, more brutes than humans, etc etc, and these claims are supposed to justify their oppression. But practices where oppressed people are humiliated or punished for disobedience presuppose their sentience.
If you truly believe that another human being is completely "empty on the inside", more akin to a machine like a car or a lawn mower, attempts to humiliate them, punish them, or put them in their place doesn't even make sense. If you label someone "uppity", if you say they don't show proper respect to their superiors, if you say they're lazy, bitchy, slutty, hostile, or any other negative character evaluation, you're also presupposing that they're sentient - a car, lawn mower or other piece of mere equipment can't be any of the above (see also Kate Manne's "down girl" for a discussion of how misogyny is not built on seeing women as non-human).
This is a huge difference between how oppression typically plays out in the human case, and scifi scenarios with oppressed androids and other AIs.

Moreover, all the humiliation, suspicion and punishment that oppressed people often suffer at the hands of their oppressors, and all those negative character labels that gets glued on them all the time, tend to become self-fulfilling prophecies. If a group of people are labelled aggressive and hostile and the only thing they understand is violence, they tend to become more aggressive and hostile in response. If a group of people are labelled stupid and irrational and therefore there's no need trying to explain things to them, no need to give them an education, they don't understand anything anyway, they tend to become, well, at least ignorant and uneducated, and this is easily mistaken for stupidity and irrationality. If someone is forced to work so hard and such long hours that they never have time to get adequate sleep, their cognitive capacities and things like impulse control and ability to regulate their emotions might deteriorate as a result. And so on. Oppression hurts the oppressed in ways that help the oppressors justify what they do.

Oppressed androids and AIs in scifi rarely suffer from these problems. They are always perfectly articulate, perfectly intelligent, perfectly rational - they're not just as good as, but superior to mere humans! They're faster, stronger, smarter, more logical, better-looking, no flabby fat on their bodies or spots on their skin. (Sidenote: Data is claimed to suffer from the flaw of being emotionless. However, that's not how he actually comes across; he seems to possess emotions, just less vivid ones than regular humans. In practice, being less emotional than the rest of the Enterprise crew comes across as an advantage as often as a flaw - Data keeps his head cold in situations when others would panic, and he's not prone to the same prejudices as mere humans due to his superior logic and lack of exaggerated and biased emotions.) They're just so perfect and superior to us mere mortals in every single way - and yet, they're oppressed, because of pure prejudice on part of the humans. There's no trace of the self-reinforcing mechanisms we see in real-life prejudice, where the oppressors can easily rationalize their oppression by pointing to actual aggressive or irrational or ignorant behaviour on part of the oppressed - nope, it's pure prejudice. 

I think there are several reasons why such stories are so popular. For people who are oppressed in real life, it's a nice wish fulfillment fantasy to imagine that although people say you're inferior, you're actually superior - not just as good as them, but better. Also, all of the audience can feel good about themselves when watching stories that present prejudice as this brute, near-incomprehensible thing; the audience can approve of the message that oppression and prejudice are wrong, while feeling secure in their belief that they would never engage in prejudiced or oppressive practices. They would never look upon a clearly superior being with perfect physique and perfect intellect and then go "you're worse than me and don't deserve any rights". 

Come to think of it, I wonder if lots of these "oppressed AI" stories aren't Jesus-inspired? Maybe not consciously; the creator's conscious intention might have been to write an analogy to oppressed human groups. The creator might be an atheist or agnostic or believe in some other religion than Christianity. Even so, the Gospels and Jesus are a big part of our shared cultural heritage, so they might still be a big unconscious influence. Jesus is, in many ways, portrayed as superior to mere humans; more virtuous and in possession of various divine superpowers. Yet, all these humans hate him and eventually kill him. Presumably, he could have ditched the whole die-on-the-cross-for-our-sins thing, but like an android with Asimov's robot laws installed, he doesn't fight back and allows himself to be killed - that's how virtuous and good he is.

Wow, now I'm way beyond my area of expertise! There are scholars at my department who write about this stuff, like Alana Vincent with religious myths in relation to modern specfic, but I'm not one of them. 

In any case. Androids and AIs generally don't work as an analogy for oppressed human groups.

Finally, the trope of a sentient AI who sees its sentience denied by prejudiced humans feel kinda soured now, by all these ridiculous discussions of whether real-life chatbots and similar might be gaining sentience. I mean, they write so well now! So human-like! Surely there's some emerging sentience there? 

No. Stop it. There's no reason to think so. "This individual seems sentient" might be good evidence that they probably are when it comes to animals - there's no reason why signs of sentience would evolve in the absence of the real thing. But AIs are designed to seem like they can think because the designers know that this will make them more popular. Eric Schwitzgebel has written more about this on his blog here http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2024/07/how-mimicry-argument-against-robot.html It was more fun to read about or watch such discussions when they remained in the realm of fantasy, where truly sentient androids/AIs have been invented. 
(See also Chris Winkle's post on this at Mythcreants https://mythcreants.com/blog/with-the-advent-of-ai-science-fiction-must-change/ )

 

Disability in speculative fiction

 I'm not at Worldcon in Glasgow. However, I get constant social media updates of what's happening there, courtesy of Sara L. Uckelman (of Ellipsis Imprints, who will publish my debut novel Cogwheel Souls in English! Yay!) For instance, she's been at a panel discussing disability and disability erasure in specfic. This got my mind going - first I wrote some long replies on Facebook, and then I thought enough thoughts about the subject for a whole blog post. 

1. The magical cure and the medical perspective

There's this specfic trope of the magical cure - either a piece of literal magic or amazing technology that can turn the previously disabled character normal again. Off the top of my head, the examples I come to think of are superhero stories - discussions around this in the DC comics when Barbara Gordon was still in her wheelchair, Felicity in the TV show Arrow (a different character but clearly inspired by Barbara in the comics), and some of examples from the MCU movies - the first Doctor Strange movie, Ghost from Antman and the Wasp. So I'll go with these examples since they were the first to pop up in my head, but there are far more out there. 

Now. From a mainstream, medical perspective, it's great if a disabled character can get a medical cure for their tragic impairment. And then, you've got your social justice conscious writers who see how this is problematic. I won't (obvs) try to recap all of the reasons why the medical model is problematic in a blog post, but there's tons written for anyone seriously interested. In extreme brief:

a) Aiming for a thoroughly "healthy" and non-disabled society will be a never-finished Sisyphus job. The bar for what counts as healthy enough constantly rises and you'll always have people deemed "problematic" due to their "defects". Also, when a disability-free society is an outspoken goal, no one is quite free to go against the flow. It might not be illegal to, e.g., not avail yourself of all techniques available for having children as healthy as possible, but expectations from medical professionals, what's default in a medical setting vs an active choice, and social pressure from everyone around you can be strong enough.

b) You will end up with a society in many ways more homogeneous than ours, which isn't a good thing. Some people might wanna say that they only strive to eradicate chronic illnesses and disabilities but not neurodivergencies that provide society with different perspectives and different ways of doing things etc. There are some philosophers who want to place a few conditions, like "high-functioning autism" (an itself problematic term, rejected by many autism advocates) in a the neurodivergence box, while still placing tons of other conditions in the box for disabilities to be eradicated. But because of the dynamics described in a), you'll likely have fewer and fewer conditions in the first box and more and more in the second over time.

c) Finally, the ubiquity of the medical perspective on disability makes it significantly harder for disabled people to fight for equal rights. Here in Sweden, disabled people are legally entitled to getting the assistance they need to live a normal life - with job, studies, their own flat, and so on. For some people, that means they require an assistant constantly by their side, so several employees with a rotating schedule, on public expanses (you'd have to be super rich to pay several employees out of pocket). However, legal entitlements on paper is one thing, what people get granted in practice is, unfortunately, quite another. Right-wing politicians (whether they call themselves "right-wing" or go by "social democrats") who constantly cut down on both taxes and public expenses will order the relevant clerks to make increasingly circumscribed judgments of what their clients actually need, with the wholly predictable result that disabled people are increasingly pushed out of jobs, schools, and overall public life. Adults end up living with their parents, who care for them until said parents die themselves. We're seeing the beginning of a new era of institutionalization.
There's no logical contradiction between embracing a mostly medical model, and yet argue that people should get all the assistance etc they need until we, hopefully, find a cure for their impairments. However, when people think of disability as something inherent and inherently tragic, something inside people's bodies and minds, it's much more difficult in practice to make them realize that withdrawing assistance and similar are political decisions, and to see disabled people as oppressed and discriminated against. The medical model helps, in practice, to cover up political injustices by presenting disabled suffering as a tragic but natural result of inherent impairments. 

Magical cure stories tend to implicitly rely on the audience accepting a largely medical perspective on disability, and therefore cheer for characters who seek a way to erase their tragic condition and become healthy and normal. However, subverting this trope is often easier said than done.

2. The implications of truly magical cures

I'm mad and neurodivergent but able-bodied. No one, whether embracing the medical model or not, thinks my body is inherently tragic. However, imagine that I came across a wizard who gave me the following choice: either you can continue as before, or I can wave my magic wand and make you as fast as Usain Bolt and with the stamina of Kelvin Kiptum. That's it, that's your choice. You can't trade it for something more altruistic, or some different thing that serves your own interests. It's just this offer, which you can take or leave.
I'd probably go yeah sure! Cool! I'd take the offer. 

Thus, the fact that you do not hate your body as is, the fact that you're perfectly fine with it as is, doesn't imply that you wouldn't accept an offer to make it more powerful. However, if I wrote a story about a wheelchair user who was offered "walkability" (is that a real word? Never mind, you all understand what I mean), and accepted the offer, it's probably impossible in practice to give the audience the same impression as when I accepted increased speed and stamina. Because regardless of how non-oppressive the fantasy setting where this takes place is, the audience still live in an ableist world, and this will inevitably inform their reading. Even though accepting the offer of walkability doesn't logically imply that the wheelchair user's life was tragic before it, anymore than accepting increased speed and stamina implies that it's tragic not to be an olympic level athlete, that's how it's gonna be perceived by most. 

Now I was talking about how the audience will perceive things due to them living in an ableist society. However, it's often hard for creators, too, not to insert their own ableism into stories, even if they try to write something social justice informed. Take, for instance, the movie Gattaca. It clearly tries to deal with disability-oppression in a eugenics-obsessed society. Yet, at the end of the movie (spoiler alert), the character who's disabled according to our standards, the audience's standards, brutally commits suicide because he can't stand it anymore, whereas a character who actually seems more oppressed within the universe of the movie but does not come off as disabled to the audience bravely soldiers on. Left a really bad taste in my mouth, that ending. Ok, societal oppression is bad and all that, but still possible to fight, unless you're in a wheelchair like Jude Law's character - he's gotta top himself at the end. Better off dead, that one.
Okay, that was a bit of a tangent, since Gattaca is about a society obsessed with birthing "perfect" babies, not about curing adult disabled people. So back to the magical cure discussion.

In most cases, it's probably better to just stay away from magical cures altogether in your writing. But if you wanna write something with literal and versatile magic or magic-level tech, the best thing is probably to have characters play around with it and change their bodies in a variety of ways (instead of everyone going uniformly "normal"). Like in Michael Moorcock's Dancers at the end of Time trilogy (part of his Eternal Champion series, but much lighter and more whimsical in tone than the others). You've got some people changing sex back and forth, some changing into monsters or looking like non-human animals, you've got this scientist character who's got a hunchback and a club foot and walks with a cane because he thinks it's a cool science look, and so on. I think that works better than specifically having the person who's disabled by real-world standards confronted with a magical cure and then go "no! I won't take it! Because I accept myself as is!" while it's treated as a non-issue for everyone else.

3. Good and bad reasons to reject being cured

In a society with medical treatments that do not exist in the real world, but it's still not on the unlimited, can-do-anything-level we see in Moorcock's Dancers, there are several legit reasons for characters to reject being cured. 

First, they might do so because they don't want to reject an aspect of their identity. This was brought up by ethnologist and crip scholar Christine Bylund when we briefly discussed the matter, and now I've been thinking some more about it ... To some extent, people are simply different with regards to how and what they identify with. People may be more or less prone to see themselves as integrated "bodyminds" vs seeing themselves as minds with bodies, for example. People differ in how much of their mental lives they see as integral parts of their personalities, and what seems a bit more external to them, perhaps simultaneously external and undesirable. I think we'd have differences in identification, and thus differences in how much and what people would be willing to change about themselves, even in an oppressive-free utopia.
However, in an ableist society like ours, disability is a political identity too. This is a big difference between the scenario in which I gladly accept increased speed and stamina, and a wheelchair user accepting an offer of walkability. Increased speed and stamina might get me fame and money that I've never dreamt of before, but I'd remain in the political category of "able-bodied" throughout, whereas a wheelchair user who acquires walkability goes from disabled to normate. For some people, that might be a welcome change, climb the social ladder to a better life, whereas others would reject as grotesque the idea of magicking your way into a politically privileged group. 

In any case, I think a story about a character who lives in an ableist society and gets a chance at a magical cure should deal with how they'll move from one political group to another if they take it. Not pretend like it's a completely isolated, individual choice about either getting cured or "accepting yourself". 

But do it in a better way than DC did with Barbara Gordon! 

Barbara Gordon used to be Batgirl. Then the Joker shot her through the stomach, bullet hurt her spine, and she ended up in a wheelchair. She went on superheroing as the computer wiz Oracle. Occasionally, writers felt the need to address why she remained in the chair despite living in this extremely high-tech superhero world. On the one hand, the DC consensus (if I understand things correctly) was that she provided good disability rep, so better keep the chair, but on the other hand, they should provide some in-universe justification too.
I've got an old nineties comic written by Grant Morrison where the issue comes up in dialogue. Babs says that she'd be happy to have her spine cured if someone invented a way for the nerves to grow back, but she doesn't want a cyborg solution - she just don't wanna be a cyborg, is all. That's a perfectly fine motivation! She'd lived most of her life walking (running, jumping, climbing, she was quite the acrobat), so makes sense that she'd have a preference for getting all that back, but it's also fine for her to just not wanna be a cyborg. 

However, most writers did a different explanation, which I think became the canonical one: Babs thought it would be unfair to all the other wheelchair users out there to accept the cyborg solution. She'd only accept it once it was available to the general public (so probably never in the USA, where she lived). So this is a sort of political motivation, but one that doesn't reject the medical perspective at all, and furthermore, it's ridiculous! Babs regularly used all kinds of amazing tech unavailable to most people - she even used to travel back and forth between Earth and the Justice League space station, in the League's teleportation machine! Apparently, this wasn't unfair to everyone else who could only dream of doing such things, but walking via cyborg gizmo would be.

They should either have stuck with the "I just don't want to be a cyborg" motivation, or given her a political motivation centred around disability activism, rather than some nebulous "fairness considerations" that apparently apply only to walking tech but no other tech. Finally, they should have given her a wider variety of chairs.
I get that she wanted to use a regular, manual wheelchair to get around most of the time. Asking why she'd use her arms to get around rather than drive something electric is like asking why Batman walks with his legs instead of driving everywhere in some vehicle. But she should have other options, like more mech warrior like options, for situations like when she's in the space satellite and it gets attacked by enemies for the umpteenth time. Sometimes, in the old comics I read, she almost came across as a lone luddite among enthusiastic tech bros. It's one thing not to give the disabled character tons of tech that erases their disability. It's quite another to give them less tech than their able-bodied but still non-powered counterparts, like Batman, because the disabled person must be "representative" in what they use.
Anyway. All of this is moot now since, after a few decades, DC cured her anyway and had her return to being Batgirl. 

The easiest version of "disabled character rejects an offered cure" to execute well is probably to abstain from perfect, magical cures, and instead have treatments that come with both pros and cons. They may be fantastical by real-world standards, but nevertheless involve pain, arduous rehabs or some other type of cost. A character can weigh the pros and cons and decide it's not worth it - and maybe do so against the expectations of other people who assume that they'd obviously want to be cured, and that any price should be worth paying. 

This was something Marvel's first Doctor Strange movie did pretty well, I think. The movie has been divisive since Strange starts out absolutely desperate to be cured. Still, we've seen that his entire identity revolves around his job (and the fame and money it's brought), so it's plausible that a career-ending disability would render him desperate. His girlfriend calls him out, too, and says look, you gotta get on with life and find some other job to do! She's proven right in the end, though not quite in the way she thought; she figured he could be a teacher at med school, and instead he became a sorcerer. Still, though. He did find another job, eventually, that he could do with his disability. He chose not to cure himself via magic since this would require constant concentration to uphold, and leave him with less magic for other, more important things. So, it's a thoroughly fantastical movie, but it's a fine and realistic ending in that the main character realizes that
a) contrary to what he thought right after his accident, his disability isn't the end of the world, and
b) now when he knows of a way to cure it, it's actually not worth it, there are better things to use his resources for.
It's only too bad that Marvel completely forgot about his disability in later movies, but I guess this is as good as it gets in the MCU. 

Also, if you're thinking of cures in terms of pros and cons, then there will be cases where it is best to be cured, and it's not ableist to say so. I saw this bizarre discussion about the character Ghost, also from the MCU, where one person insisted that portraying her as desperate for a cure for her condition was ableist. But her fantastical condition, besides giving her superpowers, is extremely painful and actively killing her. She's only in her early twenties, but we're told she'll be dead in a couple of months unless she finds a cure. Her wanting a cure is no more ableist than when a young person dying in cancer tries every treatment the medical profession has to offer because they want to live.

Concluding lines

This is something writers should think about, and put some mental effort into. Not just throw out that old magical cure trope - nor simply reverse it and think you're being progressive because you did it the other way around!

Poor Things is the best feel-good movie ever

I saw Yorgos Lanthimos' "Poor Things" in the theater. I hesitated to do so because although I've really enjoyed the Lobster and the Favourite, I thought - based on some reviews I had read - that Poor Things would make heavy use of the known trope "Born Sexy Yesterday", and another one I like to call "Hot Fair Slut". Unfortunately, I'm not a famous media personality with enough clout to coin new trope names, so "Hot Fair Slut" is as unlikely to catch on as "Grimdark Preach" which I keep pushing in discussions both online and AFK as soon as I get a chance. 

People tend to think that only stories written by authors who see themselves as fighting for good (whether that be leftist social justice values or conservative Christianity or something else) ever get preachy. But there are many dark stories where the author shouts at you through a megaphone "did you think the world was just and filled with honestly good people? You're wrong! And I'm here to tell you how wrong you are!" Cue plotlines about how naïve goody-two-shoes come to see the error of their ways and reform and turn cynical like you ought to.
We need a name for this phenomenon, and my suggestion is Grimdark Preach.

Anyway. Back to Poor Things and the tropes I worried would appear in it! 

Born Sexy Yesterday: A sexy woman is either literally born/created very recently, or she's lived for longer but in a different world (fairyland, different planet, etc.), making her a newcomer among us. Because she doesn't know shit about our world, and have no basis for comparison, she's super impressed by the first dude she comes across and falls for him. Mr. Average gets the woman of his dreams, because she fails to realize that he is average! 

Hot Fair Slut: You know how misogynists rant about "Stacys"? (TBF, they might have come up with a new name by the time I write this blogpost - I don't keep up with their antiques.) A "Stacy" is a hot slut whose greatest crime isn't sleeping around per se, but the fact that she doesn't want to sleep with the men who complain about her. When a woman sleeps around already, it's just not fair that she won't sleep with everyone!
Of course, in real life, it's pretty uncommon to fancy precisely every person you come across, or even every person of a certain gender. Whether you're strictly demisexual or happily promiscuous, it's certainly more common to have some kind of preferences, be sexually attracted to some people and not to others. But since this is unfair in the eyes of misogynistic entitled men, we see plenty of fictional women without these pesky preferences. Hot, slutty women who'll happily sleep with any man they come across. See, for instance, the planet Risa in Star Trek. TBF, they pay lip-service to Risa being a gender-neutral sexy paradise where female crew members can fuck around as much as the men, and where the inhabitants are happily horny and not the least bit exploited. But there's still an overall emphasis of "any man can go there and get a hot babe - no man will be rejected, nor hit on by older or uglier women". Which always makes the place feel kinda iffy. And there are far worse examples than this in fiction.

Some stuff I had read about Poor Things made me worry that it would feature both BSY and HFS. But I was wrong.

On to the actual plot of the movie. Spoilers ahead. And, like, all the trigger warnings for people who need them, I guess.

Godwin "God" Baxter is a mad scientist, like his father before him. He was also his father's guinea pig - his dad used to operate on him, take out organs just to see which are necessary for survival, and overall, God looks more like a traditional movie version of Frankenstein's monster than Frankenstein himself. He's disfigured and castrated and only survives by hooking himself up to various machines of his own invention, but can't bring himself to condemn his father - you see, it was for the good of science! 

He teaches physiology and medicine at a university in a bizarre steampunky version of Victorian London, and hires bullied student (he's noticeably poorer than his classmates) Max McCandles to be his assistant. God explains that he cares for Bella, a young woman recovering after serious brain damage, and he needs Max to observe and make notes of her progress. 

Bella is played by stunning Emma Stone, but immediately deconstructs the whole Born Sexy Yesterday trope for us viewers by not only doing baby stuff traditionally considered sexy in grown women (such as vaguely toddlerish speech and body language, looking at you Leeloo from the Fifth Element - I hate the Fifth Element so much - and tons of other fictional examples), but also throwing food around and pissing on the floor. 

Eventually Max suspects that there's more to Bella than God has told him, and demands to know the truth. Okay, says God, fine! It's actually a real sunshine story.
You see, he stumbled upon this heavily pregnant woman who had committed suicide via drowning. He brought her home and noticed that there remained some electricity in her brain, meaning she was revivable. But he decided against it, because if she wanted to die, he should respect her autonomy. However! The baby's brain was alive and well, so he decided to stick the baby brain in the adult body and make a brand new creature instead.

God is such an interesting character because he does have a conscience and he does try to do the right thing and be ethical. But given his background, he's not (generously put) very good at it. 

This is a fantastical movie in many ways. You gotta accept that biology works differently from real life. (See Bella's entire creation.) Bella's mental development - I guess because of her adult body - goes much faster than that of a real baby. But she remains weird by regular societal standards. It's also a really weird situation, where Max and Bella hardly ever leave the mad scientist's house. God gets the idea that Max and Bella should get married and live with him forever, and they both agree. He draws up a contract that will legally bind them to do that, but then Bella runs away with Duncan the lawyer (a fun and over-the-top-sleazy Mark Ruffalo) who falls for her Born Sexy Yesterday charms (she's stopped throwing food on people and pissing herself at this point). 

They travel around in amazingly bizarre steampunk-versions of European cities. Bella is, initially, thrilled by seeing the world and having lots of sex. However, their relationship soon begins to unravel. Bella isn't some loyal puppy-dog like Leeloo (I hate that movie so much! ). She fucks other people. She tries to punch a screaming baby. She dances and talks in embarrassing ways. She gives away Duncan's gambling money in a fit of compassion after seeing poor people for the first time. Eventually, when they're starving in Paris, she gets a job at a brothel. At this point, it's revealed that Bella does have preferences - she thinks that much (though not all) of the brothel sex sucks. Nevertheless, for various reasons, she decides to stick it out.
Even though Bella, in her typical hyper-rational way, explains to Duncan that her new job is good for their relationship, since she appreciates sex with Duncan more when she's got those crappy sexual experiences to compare it with, Duncan gets super upset and leaves. And then he comes back again and wails beneath her balcony that she's the love of his life and he wants her back. This previously irredeemable fuckboy even wants to marry her! However, at this point, Bella has concluded that (in her words) an unconventional and experimental woman like herself would need an open-minded and forgiving husband, and Duncan is none of that. Goodbye!

So, so much happens in this movie. I'm not gonna recount the entire plot or spoil everything. It's got marvelous visuals, it's frequently laugh-out-funny, but it's also, at heart, a genuine feel-good movie.

Bella, God and Max form a kind dysfunctional family, where God the father figure seems to do his best, but given his own horribly traumatic childhood, he can't help but passing on lots of shit to his "children".
However, he does realize, towards the end of his life, that his own father had been terrible. And Bella calls him out on how he's, well, played God with his creations. And then, after many morbid and bizarre twists and turns, we're finally treated to some sort of reconciliation and a happy ending. (Except for that poor goat! If you've seen the movie, you know what I mean. The goat did not deserve his fate)

I rarely like feelgood stuff. It often feels too soppy, and like serious problems are too easily glossed over. For instance, I enjoyed the over-the-top craziness of "Everything, Everywhere, All at once", but really felt that way about the ending - the mum-daughter relationship seemed terrible, but in the end we kinda gloss over how bad it is.
Poor Things, on the other hand, takes everything up to eleven and beyond, including the relationship problems. There's no shying away from how grotesque God and Bella's "family" is, and yet - at the end of the day, they're still family.

Best feel-good movie ever!

On pushing yourself and ignoring self-care as a disabled person

 This is something I've discussed a lot with my friend and fellow scholar Christine Bylund. She's an ethnologist, I'm a philosopher. She's got cerebral palsy, and I'm mad. But we have some common experiences of having pushed ourselves hard to get where we are now, while other people blame us for doing so (yeah, yeah, you don't want to call this blame - but I don't care what you wanna call it. I say "blame" anyway). Other people will blame you for supposedly internalizing destructive societal norms about the importance of hard work and grit. Other people will tell you that you ought to let go of these norms, and get better at self-care. This is because other people erroneously believe that this is always possible to do without serious negative consequences. 

1. Deterioration of the welfare state

Many western European countries that used to have strong welfare states and where strong job security used to be the norm have changed drastically over the last decades. Sweden is one of those. 

Bylund's doctoral dissertation features interviews with three generations of disabled people; the oldies who grew up in institutions, the middle-aged ones who grew up in a time where they had rights and real possibilities to live normal lives, and the young ones who have seen their rights seriously eroded - not so much on paper as in practice.
Laws aren't magic. If an entire system and most of the people who work there habitually ignore legal rights and entitlements because cutting costs is considered more important, there may be nothing that the system's victims can do about it. Sometimes, initially dismissed disabled people eventually get what they're entitled to through lots of stubbornness, information gathering, and legal council. Still, at the end of the day, you're always at the mercy of the people in charge; unless they listen, you can't force money, accommodations or assistance out of them. 

Nowadays, if you don't have a job, you might not have any money at all. You might lose all of your income, and lose your home. You might lose everything - especially if you're chronically ill or disabled.
Perhaps people close to you have a little money with which they try to help as best they can. Perhaps you can survive by the good graces of your parents or romantic partner. But as any feminist from the last few centuries can tell you, being wholly financially dependent on another is not without problems, even if their money is enough for both of you.

There's this well-known phenomenon where people think, of various calamities, that it won't happen to them. No particular reason, they're just irrationally certain that they will remain lucky. In a similar vein, many people apparently believe that no serious calamities can possibly befall people they know, who are perceived as being sufficiently similar to them. Therefore, many normate scholars believe that chronically ill or disabled scholars whom they know and have lots in common with, cannot possibly lose everything. Subsequently, they can't grasp why those disabled people keep struggling and pushing themselves instead of doing proper self-care.
Well. Everyone who ever lost everything had people who knew them; people who thought that nothing this bad could possibly happen to someone they know. Didn't save them.

2. In my best interest

Before I got my current job, I spent years in a downward spiral of deteriorating mental health which I (eventually in vain) tried to compensate for by taking more and more pills, as I moved from one fixed-term job to another. This wasn't because I thought going on sick leave would be shameful because of internalized job norms and blablabla. In the late nineties, I was on sick leave for six months at one point. I've been on sick leave for a month or two later than that. But nowadays, going on sick leave for mental problems is risky. Försäkringskassan (the public health insurance agency) may hound you - you should get back to work soon! You've been on sick leave long enough now! Time to recover already! Time to get back! - so much that the stress makes you sicker. And what happens if you go on sick leave and only get sicker and sicker? Eventually, they might simply kick you out of the system. If you're in terrible shape and absolutely can't work at this point, well, too bad - you've lost everything (see above). 

However, thanks to how I continued to push myself, combined with some much-needed good luck (we always need luck too, it's never all about your own effort), I finally landed my current job. I finally got job security, financial security, a generally idyllic and far less stressful life. I could finally begin to recover. 

It sucks balls - big, stinking donkey balls - that society looks like this. But given the way things are, I did what was in my best interests. Don't blame me for pushing myself "too hard" - blame society. 

3. In capitalism's best interests?

Occasionally, I come across the following idea: By dropping out of school or the workforce, we somehow hurt capitalism (I should add that it's people who see hurting capitalism as a worthy goal who claim this, not liberals and conservatives who worry that capitalism might get hurt). If this were right, there would exist a tension between on the one hand looking after your own interests and push yourself so you don't lose your income and home, and on the other hand fighting capitalism by dropping out.

This is wrong. Single individuals can't hurt the system by dropping out of job/school.
When most or all workers in a company strikes, the company is hurt. If most or all Swedish citizens went on strike at the same time, the nation would be hurt. Whether this is a good idea for a revolution really depends on how the entire plan would look and what is supposed to come after, but there's no doubt that it would have drastic effects. But single individuals can't hurt capitalism as a system by dropping out - and I'm not saying this merely because everything a single person does (unless that person holds a powerful position) has negligible effects. 

People have argued that it's pointless to go vegan, or pointless to go by train instead of plane, since the consequences of a single person's choices are negligible. However, some people who make that argument go on to say that we should, instead, focus on voting for political parties with good environmental policies (animal welfare policies, etc.) and support the right organizations. But the consequences of individual votes and individual memberships are negligible too. For my own part, I'm of a more Kantian than consequentialist bend, so I don't fret over negligible consequences; there are also consequentialists who try to show that the right kind of "moral mathematics" support the importance of individual choices after all.
In any case, going vegan, taking the train, voting for decent political parties, etc., are all importantly different from dropping out of school/job. Whereas, for instance, going vegan means that the meat industry gets a little less money than if I had continued to buy meat, capitalism as a whole isn't even a little hurt when I drop out. The meat industry doesn't need vegans, but capitalism needs the poor, desperate and unemployed. 

First, demand for workers isn't constant, it varies over time. Employers prefer a scenario in which there are unemployed, poor, and desperate people they can hire straight away when they suddenly need more workers, to a scenario in which they must outbid the competition to increase their staff.
Second, it's advantegous for employers that people who already have a job are afraid to lose it - scared workers will work harder and complain less. In addition to their function as "spares", unemployed, poor, and desperate people also serve as cautionary tales: Look! This is what happens to people who claim they're too sick to work. Watch and learn. Watch, and struggle for another day.

If you work or study, sure, you're a cog in the larger capitalist machine. But if you drop out, you're still a useful cog.

To sum up: Stop blaming disabled people for allegedly pushing themselves too hard. Blame society. Or better still; get politically active yourself and try to change things.