Animal experimentation and experiments on humans

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

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

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

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

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

(animal suffering)<(human health benefits)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. The alternative timeline

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

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

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

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

 3. Animal experiments to save poor marginalized humans?

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

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

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

HOWEVER.

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

1. The fake criticism of the Mattel Company

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

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

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

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

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

2. The extreme gender essentialism

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

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

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

3. The terrible treatment of Ken

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

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

So here's how Ken's story goes: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The animal rights trilemma for companion animals

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

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

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

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

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

All of the following three options are morally problematic:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Antipsychiatry

I debated whether to call this post "antipsychiatry" or "critical psychiatry". Hardly anyone label themselves "antipsychiatrist", at least not these days. It's mostly a term very conservative psychiatrists and psychologists use to smear everyone who disagrees with them. But "critical psychiatry", which is something people do use about their own work, seems a bit too broad. We can think of "criticism" as existing on a scale from those who see systematic problems in psychiatry and the need for some reforms, over those who see the need for very extensive reforms, to those who basically want to tear the whole system down and can properly be called "anti". I want to look at those who are more towards the "anti" end of the scale in this post.

Psychiatry needs criticizing

1. Bad doctors 

Psychiatry absolutely needs criticizing, and there are absolutely systematic problems in the field that cannot be explained away as isolated incidents. I've met some wonderful doctors both as a patient and as a scholar, but there are also many who treat their patients badly, not just "a few bad apples" here and there. 
There are psychiatrists who think that there's no need to listen to their patients or take seriously what they say since they're crazy anyway. Some may have an okay attitude to some patient groups, while being horribly dismissive to, e.g., BPD patients and people with schizo diagnoses. Many psychiatrists serving in mental health tribunals believe that any patient who disagrees in any way whatsoever with their doctor thereby exhibits "lack of insight" (Susanna Radovic has done research on this). Psychiatrists can be very dismissive of patient complaints about medication side effects, even when these cause terrible suffering. Patients may get more and more diagnoses and more and more meds prescribed until they're basically zombies.

The last problem - loads of diagnoses, loads of meds - need not stem from dismissive attitudes towards patients, but an honest desire to help. A psychiatrist once told me that he suspected something like this often goes on: the psychiatrist tries one treatment after the other for the initial diagnosis, but none helps. Both doctor and patient feel frustrated and desperate. When the doctor tells the patient "hey, I think the problem might be that you actually have X in addition to Y! I'm gonna prescribe you a medication for X too!" both of them feel better and more hopeful. But after a while, when the patient still hasn't improved, they feel frustrated and desperate again ... until the doctor once again goes "hey, I think the problem might be that you actually have Z in addition to X and Y!" and they feel momentarily better. And so the vicious circle continues.
Moreover, present-day diagnostic manuals stress what's most unique about each diagnosis, rather than what's most typical. (Mads Henriksen held an interesting presentation about this at a conference I attended earlier this summer.) It is, for instance, very common and typical for schizophrenia patients to suffer from anxiety. But anxiety is hardly unique for schizophrenia - diagnostic criteria instead stress more unusual symptoms like hallucinations. Therefore, psychiatrists might think that a schizophrenia patient who suffers from anxiety has an additional condition - an anxiety disorder - which requires additional medication. Similarly, it's very common and typical for schizophrenia patients to have difficulties with focus and motivation. But psychiatrists may think this means that the patient also has ADHD, and should get ADHD meds on top of the antipsychotics (that is, a medication designed to increase dopamine flow in the brain in addition to a medication designed to block dopamine flow ...). 

There are also common problems with how psychiatry is depicted in mainstream media and social media. 

2. The modern humor theory

There is legit research on how various psychiatric symptoms may be connected to various brain phenomena and brain events involving various neurotransmitters, but it's all very complicated. However, in popular media and social media, we often encounter a kind of updated humor theory of mental disorders.
In antiquity and the middle ages, people believed that the body has four primary fluids or humors - blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile. When these are properly balanced, you're healthy, but imbalances lead to both physical and mental problems. Today, people talk about serotonin, dopamine, perhaps oxytocin and adrenaline too. They must be balanced - if they're imbalanced, mental problems result. The role of the psychiatrist is presumably to prescribe medications that rebalance the different neurotransmitters in the brain. Related to this is the bullshit analogy between diabetes and depression, and insulin and antidepressants.
Many psychiatric patients (perhaps mostly depression patients and people who take meds for ADHD) embrace and spread this modern humor theory because they've been told that they're just lazy and should pull themselves together - saying that they have a chemical imbalance in their brains which is comparable to diabetes is their way of pushing back against the laziness accusations. However, people who believe this theory and believe that psychotropic drugs are like insulin for diabetes will also believe that everyone with a psychiatric diagnosis must be on meds, that it's self-destructive not to. This isn't great either. Especially psychosis patients are often pushed to take meds even if the meds don't work, or even if it makes them all-things-considered worse off, and dismissed as too crazy to understand their own good if they object. I'm not saying that people never quit their meds for stupid and ill-considered reasons - in the past, I have myself quit antipsychotics on a number of occassions because tralalala, I feel so good now, I must be cured! But people also quit them for rational reasons, like I did five years ago, after carefully considering the pros and cons and my whole life situation.

The modern humor theory is compatible with all kinds of explanations of what causes them to go imbalanced in the first place. However, there's a widespread tendency to think that if your brain humors are imbalanced, that's really just a quirk of your brain. Perhaps environmental factors may play some small role, but it's mostly just about what's inside your skull, not about your environment. This is both very problematic and very unscientific - personal trauma, family dysfunction, abuse, poverty, job stress, being PoC in a racist society, etc., are all important causes of psychiatric problems. There's plenty of research on this, but popular media and social media tend to focus on humors and genes. 

3. Just get help

People often say that those who suffer and struggle should just "seek help", with the implicit assumption that everyone can be helped and get better if only they choose to. But even if you find a wonderful psychiatrist, the meds might not work, you might be a so-called "non-responder", you might be unable to recover because of shitty life circumstances that you and your psychiatrist are equally helpless to do anything about, and so on. And there is absolutely no guarantee that you manage to find a wonderful or even descent psychiatrist - a shitty one might be worse than having no professional mental health care at all.
The assumption that people who continue to struggle and struggle basically have themselves to blame for not "seeking help" - like, don't they know that there is help to get - is harmful.

To sum up: There's plenty to criticize. But.

BUT

1. Antipsychiatry and the problematic contrast between psychiatry and somatic medicine

Antipsychiatrists like to argue that psychiatry is radically unlike all somatic medicine. Whereas all somatic medicine is super scientific and objective, with reliable diagnostic methods, obvious borders between "healthy" and "sick", not value-laden at all, psychiatry is unscentific, subjective, unreliable, and all about society's values.
Robert Chapman has published at length about this, but here goes the short version: No. Somatic medicine is not all that antipsychiatry cracks it up to be. Psychiatry needs criticism, but somatic medicine does too!

"Somatic medicine" has many subfields and deals with many different kinds of conditions. Some areas might fit the description antipsychiatrists give better than others - for instance, if someone has a bacterial infection we might be able to determine exactly which bacteria it is and which antibiotics will kill them. We might be able to draw a definite line between those who suffer from this infection and those who don't. But grey areas between healthy and ill are everywhere. When is a hairline fracture in a bone an actual medical problem? When does a little menstrual pain turn into a medical issue? Debilitating back pain is one of the most common physical medical problems, and also one that we can't reliably diagnose except by talking to the patient about their problems. There are some weak correlations between debilitating back pain and stuff you can see on a spinal X-ray, but only weak ones - just like you can see some weak correlations between certain detectable brain events and psychiatric problems.
Generally, anyone who says that there's a clear-cut, objective and non-value-laden difference between what's healthy and what's pathological in somatic medicine thereby shits on the entire field of disability studies. 

2. Anti-psychiatry and dismissing people's lived experience

People have very different experiences with psychiatry, ranging from terrible and in itself traumatizing to positive, helpful, even life-changing. However, just like painting all of psychiatry as great and helpful dismisses many people's negative experiences, painting all of it as shitty dismisses positive experiences. 

I'm not saying that people can't be mistaken about their own experiences, that they can't be caught up in "false consciousness", that they can't fail to see that some system they're deeply caught up in actually oppresses and hurts them. What I am saying is this: The burden of proof should be placed on the person who wants to dismiss people's own narratives as mistaken. 

This goes for medication too. People can be mistaken about the effect a certain medication has on them, that's why we do double-blind randomized trials. But once again, the burden of proof should be on the person who claims the pill-taker is mistaken about the effects of the pill. If I believe in homeopathy and insists that sugar pills have a dramatic effect on my health because of water memory, I think it's fine to dismiss my story based on science in general. But if I take a pill that we know does stuff to the brain, the burden of proof should be on the person who insists that I'm wrong about how it affects me mentally.

I was on antipsychotics for many years. We know that their effects vary a lot from person to person (unfortunately for both doctors and patients, since it's tough to go through lengthy trial-and-error periods looking for a medication that does its job without intolerable side effects). I'm sure there's a sizeable portion of the psychotic population for whom all antipsychotics do is numb them down, but I'm also pretty sure that's not everyone.
When Haldol lost its desired effect on me, I desperately compensated by taking more and more Xanax. Xanax, a benzodiazepine, does numb me down. It extingiushes all my worries, and if I took enough, I wasn't scared of my demons anymore. But Haldol, for quite a lot of years, took the demons away with only a little numbing. Actually, I used to think that it didn't bring me down at all, but after I quit them, I realized that wasn't true. I became more energetic, more creative, more fast-thinking, off Haldol than I was on them. Nevertheless, they were very different from Xanax in their effect on me. I could work full-time on Haldol with no demons - whereas getting rid of the demons, or at least the demon fear, with Xanax, required getting pretty damn drugged.
Now, an antipsychiatrist who claims that I am deeply mistaken - actually, Haldol did nothing but numb me as well, anything in addition must be pure placebo effect - should have the burden of proof on their side. If I and others like me, who do experience a different effect from antipsychotics than benzo, couldn't tell the difference between antipsychotics and benzo in a blinded trial, that would be proof. But in the absence of such studies, we should accept patient testimony. For some, antipsychotics only numb them, for others, it has a more targeted effect.

3. Antipsychiatry and the claim that psychiatry "pathologizes" this or that group

Antipsychiatrists can also move far too quickly from "this demographic receives more psychiatric diagnoses than the population at large" to "this demographic is unduly pathologized". This is a bad move. Yes, sometimes groups are unduly pathologized. The often cited example of "draeptomania" - an alleged mental illness that caused nineteenth century American slaves to run away from the plantations - isn't actually illustrative, because even at the time, most doctors thought this was preposterous. But more recent, actual examples include diagnosing political dissidents with schizophrenia in the Soviet Union and afro-Americans fighting for civili rights with paranoia and psychosis in 1970's USA. However, being oppressed and marginalized can actually make people sick too, physically as well as mentally.
For instance, being black in a predominantly white society increases the risk that one will be diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and being black in a predominantly white neighbourhood increases the risk even further (even though it's unlikely that doctors would have more racist prejudice against black people who live in white neighbourhoods than against those who live in mostly black areas). Psychologist Richard Bentall and others have written about this research, and suggests that people who frequently suffers from real racism might have a higher risk of eventually breaking down and becoming clinically paranoid (Bentall thinks there's also an increased risk if you've been bullied, or just generally persecuted in some manner in real life). I don't think this is surprising - but we miss out on how much marginalization and discrimination hurt people if we dismiss any increased frequency of psychiatric diagnoses as due to "pathologization". 

Comparison: Shift workers have an increased risk of cardiovascular problems. Imagine how problematic it would be if we argued that this is only because medicine has a "day job norm", and therefore considers the softer, more open arteries and rythmical heart beats of day workers "normal", whereas the stiffer, closed-up arteries and irregular hearts of shift workers are "pathologized". 

4. Antipsychiatry and being cool

Finally - antipsychiatrists frequently insist that there's no such thing as "psychosis", there's only "trauma". We shouldn't say, according to these people, that trauma can cause psychosis, because that's already wrong and mystifying. Traumatized people are traumatized, that's all there is. There are no psychotics, only trauma victims. 

Well. If someone thinks they've been misdiagnosied as psychotic, when really they were only traumatized, I say we should listen to them - see above on the importance of taking people's own narratives and stories seriously. But don't push that narrative on me!

I may be tragic in some ways. (Or were tragic in some ways, I'm actually quite well off nowadays!) But I'm also kinda cool, I think. Even my most terrifying psychotic experiences have been much more interesting than just "it's trauma" can convey. (Demons! Alternate realities!) I mean, I have experienced plenty of altered states of consciousness without the aid of drugs. That's kinda cool!
So fuck off to anyone who insists that no, you're not cool, you're only tragic and traumatized.

Oppressing the powerful: Why groups can't be compared to individuals

Over at the specfic writing website Mythcreants , Oren Ashkenazi has written a number of posts about "oppressed mages" in fiction and why that concept doesn't work. He's also gotten tons of hate from people who don't like to see their favourite stories critiqued. I think he's making lots of good points in these articles, though I disagree with some of his comparisons. In any case, I'm not just gonna repeat his arguments in my blogpost, that would be pretty pointless. Instead, I'm gonna discuss crucial differences between oppressing a group which is powerful collectively, and oppressing people who are powerful individually.

Terminology

"Mages", in this context, need not refer to literal wizards in a fantasy setting. It can also be mutants with superpowers, or anyone else who's 

a) individually powerful, and

b) whose power doesn't depend on social conventions and other people going along with them.

For instance, Joe Biden, the president of the United States, and Jeff Bezos, one of the world's richest capitalists, are both powerful individuals. But if, hypothetically, everyone in the US decided that Biden shouldn't count as their president, or everyone working for Bezos decided not to take orders from him anymore or allow him to handle money and assets, they would lose their power. This is in contrast to a fictional character like Superman who is enormously strong, physically invulnerable, capable of flying through space at light-speed and so on regardless of what others think of him.

The term "oppressed mages" refers specifically to scenarios in which regular, non-powered people oppress mages as defined above. Scenarios in which one group of mages oppress another don't count. There are some stories in which non-powered people get the upper hand because they have superior tech, like in older X-men stories where regular people use sentinel robots to hunt superpowered mutants. But why don't mages get tech as well? Tech+powers should beat tech only. For a long time, this went unexplained in the X-men (most line-ups include some very rich members; they've even had Forge on the team sometimes, whose superpower is to build amazing tech), until the "House of X" storyline in which it was revealed that the sentinels aren't human creations but cosmic machine gods. This changes the scenario from "oppressed mages" to a "mages vs mages" conflict. (This has probably changed again since I last read the X-men - I'm too old to keep up with superhero comics anymore.)

Anyway. In this post, I focus only on regular humans who oppress mages without the aid of superior tech that the mages (usually for unexplained reasons) lack access to.

In my previous post, I said that you can enjoy flawed stories - we don't have to choose between saying that something is problematic and therefore must be rejected or enjoying it while insisting that it's perfect. Just because there are aspects of, e.g., the X-men, that don't hold up to scrutiny, doesn't mean it's wrong to enjoy the comics or movies - I read the hell out of those comics for years and years.
But lots of people do think you're only allowed to enjoy perfect things, and if they're fans of oppressed mage stories, they desperately insist that it makes sense for regular, non-powered people to oppress superpowered beings.They say that the real world is riddled with examples of small minorities who oppress much larger groups, despite the latter being more powerful in virtue of group size. Now I'm gonna explain why that isn't comparable.

The Gunman Theory of oppression

Imagine you're riding a train in the wild west. Suddenly, the engineer must stop because the rail has been blocked, and a gunman enters the train car. He waves his single revolver wich contains only a handful of bullets at the car full of passangers, and demands that you all throw over your wallets and jewelry. You do as he says, and he takes off with all your belongings. But how could this happen? After all, the whole collective of passengers could have taken him down. At most, he could have shot one or two of you before he was overwhelmed by sheer numbers. 
There's no mystery here. No one wants to die. Even if he could "only" shoot one or two before being overwhelmed, it's a pretty big deal for those who end up dead (and their friends and family). If no one in the car wants to rush him first and be gunned down, everyone's gonna remain seated and do as he says. 

A large group, collectively powerful enough to take out a smaller group of oppressors, might thus need at least a few members who are willing to die for the cause, or risk other serious consequences, in order to get going. In addition, they likely need to coordinate their efforts, and this may be a huge obstacle in itself. 

Suppose you have a society which depends on slavery, with ten times as many slaves as there are slave-owners. If all or most of the slaves rebel at the same time, the rebellion is virtually guaranteed to succeed, even though those who are first in line are likely to be gunned down. But if only a small group rise up, everyone in that group will be killed straight away (or worse), their attempted rebellion fails, and they died for nothing. And the slaves are scattered, unable to plan a simultaneous uprising. If we imagine that they all have cellphones or similar, their prospects look a little better, but they would have to worry about fake calls and spies, or that too many people will chicken out at the last minute.

The Ideology Theory of oppression

In the philosophical literature on oppression, not everyone sticks to the Gunman Theory. Some stress ideology and indoctrination instead. Oppressed people may abstain from rebellion because they have been indoctrinated into thinking their subordinate position is just. They may think that no better society is possible, so there's no choice but to make do with what they've got. They may be so ashamed of belonging to the oppressed group that they wouldn't dream of striking back at their (perceived) betters, etc. 

The Gunman theory and Ideology theory are compatible. Both factors can be in play. Moreover, oppressed people who, at some level, realize that they're in a "gunman type situation", might be motivated to adopt beliefs according to which things are okay the way they are. If they can't change the situation anyway, they might at least feel a little better if they tell themselves that everything is okay.

Now, I'm not gonna try to solve the question of whether "gunman factors" or "ideology" usually play the biggest part in preserving oppression. But I do think you'd be hard-pressed to come up with a real oppressive society that solely relies on ideology/indoctrination to keep the oppressed masses in check. You'd be hard-pressed to think of a real oppressive society in which the oppressed could communicate perfectly and transparently with each other, and the oppressors were unable to punish any individual rebels - but the oppressed still stayed in line, solely due to indoctrination.

This isn't what real-world oppression looks like. Regardless of how much indoctrination the oppressors have at their disposal, they'll also have brute force to back it up.

Mages, gunmen and ideology

If you replace a large group of people which is only collectively strong with individually powerful mages, Gunman-style oppression becomes impossible. Let's replace the group of passangers in the train, collectively strong enough to take out the gunman but one or two will probably be killed, with someone like Wolverine from the X-men, who's individually strong enough to take out the gunman. The gunman can shoot Wolverine and it'll smart a bit, but he'll heal up in seconds and can punch out the gunman without breaking a sweat. Of course he's not just gonna sit there and do as he's told. If we move over to the slave society, but replace the multitude of slaves with just Superman, he's not gonna obey the plantation owners. Sure, they might try to oppress him with ideology alone. "You must do as we say because we have decided that you're inferior and should be ashamed of yourself because your powers make you a freak! That's what we're gonna do to you if you don't obey us - we're gonna yell freak freak freak until you cry!" But how effective is this gonna be, really? 

I guess we can imagine Superman swayed by the "freak" insult if he's been indoctrinated since he was a baby. Even so. Real-life oppressors can be afraid of rebellion - afraid that their victims manage to communicate even though it's hard, and afraid that they'll be willing to risk their lives and die for a better future for their children. But they know that the threshold for rebellion remains quite high, due to everything I wrote under the "Gunman Theory" heading. In the enslaved Superman scenario, all it takes is Superman's anger getting stronger than his shame for a moment, and it's game over for his oppressors. Their situation would be so much more precarious than anything any real-world oppressor has ever experienced. 

Only people utterly devoid of survival instinct and self-interest would try to oppress Superman via indoctrination rather than play nice with him.

But what about sheer numbers?

I've heard the argument that a large enough number of regular people could realistically oppress a small enough number of mages. Let's use the original X-men as an example, since they're not quite as over-powered as many later line-ups. If a bunch of normies attack the X-men, Professor X can fuck with their minds, Marvel Girl telekinetically throw rocks at them, Iceman freeze them, Beast fight them with superhuman agility, Cyclops blast them with eye-lasers, and Angel stomp at their heads or something. But sure - if hundreds of angry humans rush them simultaneously, they're not gonna keep up. They could realistically be beaten to death in that situation. The idea is that this should make the X-men afraid of normies rather than the other way around. 

But this is just the Gunman-on-the-train scenario all over, except the X-men are now placed in the Gunman role and the normies are the passangers. A whole bunch of regular people will be grievously injured or dead before they manage to take the X-men out. (Maybe few deaths and many injuries if the X-men try super hard not to actually kill anyone, but people are generally reluctant to be injured too.) If the X-men were evil oppressors, people might eventually be motivated to risk life and limb to put an end to this horrible oppression - but it's extremely unlikely that pure bigotry would be enough to motivate people to give up their lives. 

If you look at hate-crimes in the real world, they typically play out like this: A bunch of people attack a smaller number, perhaps just one, minority person, or a big and strong hater attack a much smaller and weaker person. We don't see, say, the tiniest homophobes attack enormous muscular Tom-of-Finland-style gay men. We don't see teeny-weeny homophobes get beaten up, attacking again while yelling even more slurs, get beaten up again, fractured, concussed, but they keep yelling, they keep attacking, because their homophobia is just so much stronger than their sense of self-preservation. 

To sum up: A minority may oppress a collectively strong majority. It doesn't follow that regular people would be capable of oppressing individually strong mages.

Wish-fulfilment fantasies and real life

 The following scenario is widely recognized to be a wish-fulfilment fantasy: The heroine in some YA novel mostly read by girls has two hot dudes competing for her affections, and she must choose between them. It's such a common take now to go "they should just go poly and they could all be together", and sure, it would be cool with a wider array of relationships in fiction, but let's set that aside for now. The people involved don't want to have a poly relationship, and the heroine must choose.

Why is this a wish-fulfilment fantasy? After all, it's not a fun situation in real life. She cares about both boys, and when you care about someone, you don't want to see them sad - but inevitably, the one she turns down will be sad and disappointed. Also, even if they try to be all mature about the situation and stay good friends, this is often difficult in practice.
The reason it's still an escapist fantasy that many like to read about (or watch) is that fiction need not treat the situation very realistically and really dig into these problems. Instead, it focuses on how desirable the heroine is. Girls learn from an early age that it's extremely important to be desirable to boys/men, and if you've got two guys who are hot themselves competing for your affections, that means you're super desirable! 

Once we realize that fictional scenarios need not be any fun in real life to provide wish-fulfilment and escapist fantasies to the audience, we can also see that there's so much more fiction that fills this role than just "YA heroine must choose between two hot guys".

Major clarification before I move on: It's possible to really enjoy some piece of fiction and still recognize that it has problematic elements worth criticizing. We don't need to choose between rejecting something, or embracing it while vehemently insisting that it's perfect. I'm gonna talk about Rick and Morty, and I love that show! I've enjoyed the hell out of it from the start! I can still criticize it! "This is perfect" and "this is problematic and therefore terrible and must be rejected" is a false dichotomy!

Okay, here goes: Rick and Morty is a great show but a substantial chunk of the fanbase are made up by terrible people. This shouldn't come as a surprise, since the titular Rick provides wish-fulfilment for nasty people.
Rick is a huge jerk himself, but he's simultaneously the smartest and bestest person in the world (at least in early seasons - later on, he sometimes looks stupid and pathetic, and he doesn't always come out on top anymore). Even when he completely fucks up, like that time he turned the world into a "Cronenberg nightmare" and had to hop over to a different dimension, it's the kind of grand fuck-up only the smartest and the bestest could make. As terrible as he is to other people, their ability to stand up to him and talk back tends to be limited by how inferior they are.
Now, if you're a terrible jerk-ass yourself, this likely has negative consequences for your social life and life in general. But if you're nasty and hateful, you don't want to fantasize about some shiny happy scenario in which you're popular and nice with tons of friends, because you don't like other people, so you don't want to be nice to them or friends with them. Instead, you'll fantasize about being as shitty to others as you like, but they must put up with it, and you get away with it without negative consequences. 

Now, I've seen people argue that douchebags for whom Rick is a wish-fulfilment fantasy haven't paid sufficient attention to the show, because we actually see that he's also lonely and depressed, and even contemplates suicide at one point.
And sure, being depressed or even suicidal isn't fun in real life (duh!). But it can still serve as wish-fulfilment in fiction that doesn't dig into a realistic portrayal of these terrible feelings, but instead just use them as a kind of jerkass license. When Morty feels that he's had enough of Rick's shit and it's time to stand up for himself, Birdperson explicitly says that he mustn't do that. You see, Rick feels bad, and therefore, everyone should keep swallowing all his shit and never talk back. He must be allowed to vent and shit on everyone else as much as he feels like, because he's depressed.
People can fantasize about being the smartest and the bestest in the world, but it's usually obvious that this is never gonna happen to them. But a situation in which everyone around you goes "oh, now I finally understand how hard things are for you! How grand your suffering! I will never again complain about your behaviour - from now on, I will show you nothing but compassion, understanding, and admiration for how well you bear your grand suffering, regardless of what you do or say to me!" might seem like something that could actually happen. So people can absolutely fantasize about, not suffering in itself, but having their suffering recognized as a valid license to be shitty.

This also goes for tragic backstories like murdered parents or a fridged girlfriend. Of course this would be terrible in real life. But if those dead loved ones only fill the narrative function of making the hero cool, dark and brooding and giving him a license to be shitty to others, such deaths can definitely serve a wish-fulfilment purpose. 

So why does any of this even matter? Well, I'm not gonna claim it's super important to be able to spot wish-fulfilment fantasies when you see them. But off the top of my head, I can think of two reasons:

1. If you're a writer, you might want to know whether you write something that works as wish-fulfilment, and if so, for which demographic. That way, you can make conscious choices instead of being taken by surprise by what kind of fans you attract.

2. Also, if you think wish-fulfilment stories are bad and should be criticized - you shouldn't just criticize stuff like Twilight, but stuff like Rick and Morty as well.