Again with Nussbaum

Her book, Justice For Animals, (Simon & Schuster, 2022) continues to irk me. It would not get a high mark if it were being graded. Consider this passage (p 180-181 passim):

More recently, Aysha Akhtar brings a growing body of scientific literature to bear on this question, arguing that we know for sure by now that a lot of animal-based research is unreliable and in that way imposes large costs on humans, through misguided treatments and the abandonment of others that might have proven superior.... In the same special issue [from 14 September 2015] ... Andrew Rowan concludes that the predictive value of animal testng is on average only 50 to 60 percent, but that in rodent studies it falls to below 50 percent, less accurate than a coin toss.

If this new line of argument is correct, research using animals does not pose a tragic dilemma, because nothing is gained from it. [my emphasis] But it seems unlikely that such a sweeping conclusion is correct.

Jeepers. Giving her the benefit of the doubt, maybe this is just a case of extremely poor editing. But the absence of scholarship displayed in the characterization of Akhtar's [important] documentation of the failures of animal models as a "new line of argument" exposes Nussbaum as simply an unread neophyte.

For instance, Henry Salt, in his 1894 Animals' Rights [Macmillan & C.] quotes Lawson Tait, "one of the most eminent surgeons of our time": "The conclusions of vivisection are absolutely worthless."

Antivivisection groups and independent scholars have challenged the purported science underpinning the use of animal models of human illness and drug response for well over a century; how could she, a lauded scholar, not know this? See too: https://web.archive.org/web/20070203114620/http://www.curedisease.com/resources.html