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labellementeuseYesterday, it being the last day of school and so forth, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sixth_light, lady_larla, and I determined to watch That Movie, you know, the travesty one. We decided to numb the pain with vodka, drinking every time we felt our childhoods had been particularly insulted. This was a lot of fun, but we drank nearly an entire bottle of vodka by the time we were 30 minutes in and decided that we were no longer coherent enough to watch anything at all, so I still don't really know what I think. It'll happen sometime, I suppose.
On that note, recommended morning-after breakfast: sliced strawberries and nectarines tossed with icing sugar and balsamic vinegar (and fresh ground black pepper, if you have it) spooned onto chocolate-chip waffles topped with honey-cured chicken bacon. SO good.
This is the horrible essay I wrote about animal rights. Ugh. I always thank god for the designated reading committee (Lucy, Tas, Meg and Mum) who never fail to be timely and useful, but apart from grammar correction I totally ignored everything they said this time because I just could not face revisiting it.
Therapeutic drugs should not be tested on animals before being given to humans. Experimentation with animals is a longstanding part of the history of medical science. Activism for animal rights is not quite so historied, but awareness of the need to address questions about the treatment of animals both in and out of the lab continues to grow. Simultaneously, leaps and bounds in medical science are pointed to as the fruits of animal experimentation. In Animal Liberation (1990), Peter Singer elaborated on the work he had begun in Practical Ethics, making a convincing case for the rights of animals not to be tested on, on the grounds that their suffering was as worthy of consideration as the suffering of a human, and their interests equally deserving. Perhaps the most often-cited work on animal rights, it is consequently the most hotly contested: I intend to defend Singer's work.
I shall first outline Singer's argument for animals' moral status, and briefly summarise the “trilemma” he poses in Practical Ethics, in which he argues that we must either accept that animal experimentation is unjustified, or accept that experimentation on “marginal” humans is just as justified. I will examine R. G. Frey's analysis of the argument's weakness, and demonstrate why several attempts to resolve the trilemma without conceding the morally equal status of animals and marginal humans fail. Finally, I shall conclude with some remarks about perceived and actual values of animal testing.
In Practical Ethics, Singer calls human indifference to the rights of animals “speciesism” (1979, 55), deliberately equating it with racism and sexism to demonstrate what is, in his view, a fundamental wrong. Both humans and animals, he writes, deserve “equal consideration of interests.” (1979, 55) This does not mean that animal liberationists must activate for a cat's right to vote in the same way that suffragrettes did; a cat is incapable of understanding voting or democracy (2007, 483). Equal consideration does not mean equal treatment: it merely means that an animal's interests are not, inherently, less valuable than the interests of a human only by virtue of species. He bases his consideration of animal interests on a famous passage by Jeremy Bentham: “'The question is not, Can they reason? Nor can they talk? but, Can they suffer?'” The rights of animals are not founded in their relative IQs nor in their abilities or inabilities to speak or to create art or any of the things by which we separate the human from the animal: rather, they are derived from the animal's ability to feel pain.
According to Singer, this ability to feel pain makes the suffering of an animal equal to the suffering of a human with the same capacities. If we accept that physical characteristics, or relative lack of intelligence, ought not change the consideration we give to the interests of human beings, we must (Singer writes) grant the same care to animals (1979, 56). If we do not, we are engaging in the same kinds of arbitrary prejudice exhibited by the people who treat others differently based on their race or gender: not racism or sexism, but speciesism. Singer does not insist that every animal's suffering is the same as the suffering of every human being: there are, he agrees, distinguishing factors such as rationality and imagination that might make some kinds of suffering much worse for the human. The woman who dreads pain even when she is not experiencing it and for whom, say, the spectre of terminal cancer causes great anguish upon diagnosis, is suffering much more than the mouse with the same disease, which cannot possibly understand the ramifications of the illness (1979, 58). In this case, agrees Singer, the human is suffering more: suffering is not equal across species. Singer elaborates on this point with a second example: if one slaps a horse with a certain degree of force, the horse will perhaps be galvanised into motion but is unlikely to feel much pain. Slapping a baby in the same way, however, will cause the infant a great deal of pain. It is wrong to hit a baby like this, but not very wrong to slap a horse into action. However, if we hit a horse very hard with a stick, and cause it the same amount of pain we cause the infant, then – unless we are speciesist – we must consider both actions equally wrong. (59) Once again, equality means equal consideration of interests, not equal treatment.
On this basis, Singer forms an argument that results in a “trilemma.” If an experiment with animals is to be justified, he claims, it must be equally justifiable to perform the same experiment “on orphaned humans with severe and irreversible brain damage.” (67) The capacities that distinguish the suffering of a normal, adult human from that of a normal, adult animal are not present in the case of these marginal or non-paradigm humans. Consequently, he says, either
From this argument, Singer hopes to persuade “our conviction that it would be wrong to treat intellectually disabled humans in this way to be transferred to nonhuman animals... with similar capacities for suffering.” (78)
This is a controversial argument, gaining its strength from the reflexive response that experimentation on marginal humans is wrong. R. G. Frey contends that, even if Singer's argument is accepted, his conclusion – that both kinds of experiments must not be performed – is not entailed by the argument. He formulates Singer's argument in three parts, which I will paraphrase:
This argument is meant to show that experiments on animals are wrong, because of the a priori wrongness of experimentation on marginal humans. However, Frey disagrees. According to him, premiss 2 is not a priori, and it is necessary for Singer to justify his position that marginal humans are rights-holders. (30) He argues that any criterion which includes babies as rights-holders will, by definition, exclude animals; and consequently, if we accept babies as rights-holders (by these exclusive definitions) we are compelled to exclude animals, thereby rendering premiss 1 incorrect; on the other hand, if we cannot justify premiss 2, we may still agree that there is no distinction between babies and animals, but are forced to take the first way out of Singer's trilemma, and accept experimentation on babies and other marginal humans.
Frey expands upon this in his article on vivisection (1999), in which he claims that if vivisectionists believe that painful experimentation on animals is justified by the benefit which accrues, they must believe that these experiments would be equally justified on humans. If they deny this, they must find “some reason for thinking that a human life, no matter how truncated its scope for enrichment, no matter how low its quality, is more valuable than an animal life, no matter what...” (1999, 474). The special attributes that lead us to value human life over animal life, creativity, rationality, love, relationships, society, and so on are not general to every single member of the species; consequently, not every human life can be valued over every animal life. Frey briefly considers, and rejects, a few common arguments to attribute rights to infants, and exclude them from animals. Some thinkers will base their argument on a religious belief that humans have a mortal soul, and animals do not. This may satisfy them, but for Frey and others it is not enough: increasing numbers of atheists, agnostics, and free-thinkers cannot accept dictates on moral behaviour from religions to which they do not subscribe. The “potentiality” argument (1980, 31) argues that babies have the potential to become rational, and in fact are less likely to achieve this if experimented on; animals do not have this potential. This is true enough of babies (although accepting it also requires the acceptance of the rights of the foetus, a far-from-settled matter): however, it does not apply to other sets of marginal humans, including the severely intellectually disabled.
Finally, he examines the “similarity” argument (31), which grants special rights to babies and the intellectually disabled on the grounds that they are physically similar to normal humans, being of the same species. This similarity argument, which perhaps represents the most common instinctive reaction, will be reformulated in different ways later in the essay; however, granting and excluding rights to individuals based on similar or different physical appearances is as arbitrary across species as it is across race or gender. (31-2) If an animal, say a chimpanzee, were to incontrovertibly demonstrate that it was as rational, intelligent, creative and so on as a human, we would be required to treat it as if it were one: rights do not stem from membership in a species.
The particular strength of Frey's articles rests on his arguments about sentience. The capacity to feel pain, by which Singer justifies granting rights to both animals and marginal humans, results in a few curious exclusions: “foetuses, individuals suffering from certain types of nervous damage, and the comatose.” (1980, 35) This second case is easily the most controversial: some individuals, as rational and able as any other human being, nevertheless lack the ability to feel pain. Should they, consequently, be excluded from the class of rights-holders? Frey's point, although good, interestingly makes the same mistake Singer does when he assumes that infants have rights a priori. If infants do not have rights a priori, what reason do we have to think that individuals who cannot feel pain (or foetuses, or the comatose) do? Certainly these individuals deserve equal consideration of interests; but just as a dog's interests do not require the right to vote, an individual who cannot feel pain does not have the right to a painless existence. Indeed, this right is meaningless to her. Of course, mental anguish precludes her being imprisoned or caged as we might a mouse, who is capable of being happy in confinement, and her superior right to life (over that of an animal, as even Singer will concede) remains intact as a function of her humanity: but rather than shying away from suggesting painful experimentation on her, she ought to volunteer. Not only will she suffer less than any normal animal, but predictions made about human reactions based on her (human) reactions will be significantly more accurate. Consequently, Frey's argument, that suffering is not sufficient to outway the benefits accrued from animal experimentation, seems to fail.
So far, in examining Peter Singer's trilemma, I have focussed on explicating A and B. However, C: that discriminating between animals and marginal humans is speciesism, has been considered only briefly with reference to R.G. Frey, who concurs with Singer that no criteria for distinguishing the two exist. The search for some criterion, some distinguishing factor, has involved significant efforts from philosophers of ethics. One by one, suggestions are made and then refuted. Perhaps it is our capacity for language, morality or autonomy; and yet, like rationality, these are hardly able to be generalised across the whole species (and indeed, some primates have demonstrated at least some capacity with language.) Sir William Paton offers the human ability to accumulate knowledge: but plenty of marginal humans are unable to do this, and even if they were, what relevance does this have to an animal's capacity for suffering? Carl Cohen and Mary Anne Warren both argue that animals have fewer rights than humans, not because of some criterion (which would be as easily dismissed as those I have already addressed) but because of the nature of human morality. Cohen takes the extreme position, arguing that animals have no rights and defending speciesism on the grounds that animals cannot reciprocate morality, while Warren attempts to reconcile Cohen's views by including some rights for animals but limiting them. These kinds of arguments essentially constitute a defence of position C, speciesism, and are consequently popular; if they hold, they are a good way out of the dilemma.
Cohen's radical article “The Case for the Use of Animals in Biomedical Research” positions him firmly on the side of the speciesists, going so far as to say that not only is it permissable to use animals for research, but necessary. According to Cohen, the moral status of being a rights-holder does not derive from capacity to suffer pain, but from membership in a “community of moral agents.” (504) Rights are claims against members of the community, from members of the community. Animals, who do not have the capacity to behave morally, do not, fact cannot, make these claims; it is consequently nonsensical to speak of animals as having rights since they cannot reciprocate. Animals should not suffer needlessly, true, but this imperative derives not from the rights of animals, but from the obligations of humans (as moral agents) towards animals. (505-6) A dog does not have a right to be walked, but its owner has an obligation to walk it; these obligations may derive from a difference in status. Cohen does not bother to defend his distinction of right and obligation, however. If humans have, in general, the obligation to treat animals well, what makes this obligation different from a basic standard of treatment animals have rights to?
Even if we accept this, however, Cohen's argument continues to appear arbitrary. In the case of marginal humans – who, like animals, cannot be moral agents – he insists that they gain their rights by membership in the human race, which, in general, is a community of moral agents. “The capacity for moral judgement... is not a test to be administered to humans one by one.” (506) Rather, as members of humanity, they are granted a special exemption, allowing them to be members of the moral community even though they do not have moral autonomy. Although this argument is stated a little differently, it is essentially the similarity argument in disguise. Because most humans are rights-holders, all humans should be treated as rights-holders, since moral capacity is part of the definition of human. What Cohen seems to have missed, though, is that if moral autonomy is the definition of human, then it can just as easily be concluded, consistently, that marginal humans are, in fact, not humans at all. Instead ot succeeding in showing that marginal humans ought to be treated differently than animals, Cohen appears to have reduced the status of these marginal humans even more.
In continuing to defend speciesism, Cohen says that Singer's argument depends on the assumption that “all sentient animals have equal moral standing.” (507) This is ridiculous, he says, since surely the suffering of a thinking, rational, normal human being must be considered more important than the suffering of a rat. Speciesism is not on a par with racism, because it is perfectly rational: humans, being morally autonomous, have rights while animals do not. However, Cohen has mis-stated Singer. Singer, in fact, concedes that the suffering of a normal human being ought to take precedence over the suffering of a rat; rats do not have the equal rights as humans, only to equal consideration of interests. We may still conclude that human suffering is more important than animal suffering; but without recoursing to Cohen's false distinction, we cannot rationally conclude that a marginal human, who is not and cannot be morally autonomous, is more important than a normal animal, which has the same moral capacity.
Mary Anne Warren attempts to reconcile Cohen's arguments with a moral philosophy that does allow some rights to animals, but limits them. She agrees that animals do have a right to consideration of their interests, and points out that in different areas animal and human interests require different levels of consideration; for example, a human has the right to vote but an animal does not, and humans need a greater degree of physical liberty than animals generally do; an animal in a zoo enclosure that significantly resembles its natural habitat does not suffer unduly, while a human in a similar enclosude certainly would. (513-515) Therefore, while both humans and animals have rights, human rights are generally more extensive than animal rights. Perhaps one area in which human and animal rights might be equal is in relation to pain and suffering: “There is little reason to suppose that pain and suffering are any less unpleasant for the higher animals (at least) than they are for us.” (515) So we cannot differentiate an animal's right to freedom from suffering on the same grounds that we use to weaken its right to freedom of movement. Here Warren brings up Cohen's moral autonomy: although autonomy is not a “precondition for possessing moral rights” (516), it may nevertheless be grounds for weakening the rights of animals on a basis of reciprocity.
Warren explicitly founds the human system of morality in the nature of reciprocity. We accept that there are right and wrong ways to behave because of “mutual advantage” (516). We do not take from others because we know that if stealing was morally permissable, others would be free to take from us, and so on. Since animals are fundamentally unable to reciprocate in this kind of relationship, their participation and rights under this theory of morality ought to be restricted. She defends it from claims of speciesism by pointing out that, unlike women or blacks, animals truly are inherently incapable of moral autonomy.
Singer responds to arguments about reciprocity by identifying groups of humans who are unable to reciprocate; slavers, for example, have little reason to refrain from enslaving the poor, since the poor have little or no ability to reciprocate. Even the potential to reciprocate will not work, as the severely intellectually disabled have no such potential. (Singer, 1979, 78-80)
Warren defends her inclusion of “nonparadigm humans” (517) by claiming that, although they do not have moral autonomy, their claim to rights is strengthened by other factors, particularly their importance to morally autonomous humans, such as families. The affections of the family of an intellectually disabled woman require that she is given special consideration above animals.
Warren acknowledges that this is a controversial statement of rights – many non-sentient objects have great importance to morally autonomous individuals (for example, jewelry or paintings) but these objects are not said to have rights. It is not only their importance for others, but also the fact that they have interests which much be considered, which separates marginal humans from animals, she responds. Animals do have the latter, but not the former. (519) However, some intellectually disabled individuals may be orphaned, and consequently not particularly cared for; similarly, many animals are held in great esteem by their owners. Animals have the same potential for being cared for as marginal humans. Perhaps Warren means that marginal humans are held in higher esteem by autonomous humans, who would be disturbed by the notion of treating marginal humans as equal to animals: but this is circular, claiming that marginal humans should have more rights because humans believe that marginal humans have more rights. It may even be mistaken, as animal rights groups become more vocal advocates for the rights of animals. Warren still has not succeeded in refuting Singer, only restricted the group of marginal humans who cannot be distinguished from animals.
Singer's trilemma, which argues that excluding marginal humans from experimentation necessarily requires that animals also be excluded from experimentation, is a powerful argument that still holds against the objections I have outlined. Even Frey's response, which works within the trilemma but reluctantly chooses to include marginal humans for experimentation, rather than exclude the animals, is not successful in refuting Singer's arguments from pain and suffering. However, some may still not accept it. I believe that there is another very good reason to exclude animals from experimentation: that the benefits accrued from animal experimentation can, and should, be obtained in other ways.
The wildly different estimations of the value of animal testing, which vary from paper to paper, are indicative of the fact that it is very difficult to state with certainty exactly what benefits have been gained from animal experimentation that could not have been gained elsewhere. Cohen insists that “[t]he sum of the benefits of [animal] use is utterly beyond quantification” (509); he is quite right, but the uncertainty does not necessarily imply that the benefits are very great, or that they are excusive to tests upon animals. Frey writes that vivisectionists make a “false presumption that the only alternative to not testing [therapeutic drugs]... is to test it upon animals: it could, of course, be tested upon human beings” (Frey, 1990, 473). Proponents of animal testing who insist that the suffering it causes is justified by the benefits it produces rarely consider that the same argument would justify experimentation on humans. If they believe that experimentation on humans is not justified, why then, we return to Singer's trilemma; on the other hand, if they do believe that it justifies testing on humans, it would be better to test therapeutic drugs intended for humans upon humans, as more accurate predictions could be made.
Briefly, when a drug is tested on an animal, it will have one of two results: either the drug will work on the animal, or the drug will not work on the animal. However, whichever result obtains, there is a further uncertainty. Extrapolating from the animal case to the human case is fraught with potential error. The oft-quoted example of thalidomide does not lose its strength by virtue of being repeated: extensive, successful tests on animals failed to reveal the drug's consequences for humans. For this reason, clinical trials on humans are also required before a drug is made widely available. Essentially, whenever a drug is tested, four possibilities pertain: either the drug is successful and not harmful on both humans and animals; or it is successful on humans, but harmful or unsuccessful on animals; or it is harmful to humans but successful on animals; or it is harmful to both humans and animals. [footnote: I am indebted to Peter Wenz for this analysis.] Naturally, experimenters on animals hope for the first and last result. However, they cannot tell merely by experimenting on animals whether something is likely to help or hurt humans. This seems counterintuitive, but consider: suppose the drug worked on the animals. It may still fail or succeed with humans. Conversely, should the drug fail with the animals, it may still succeed or fail on humans. Researchers cannot tell which possibility will pertain.
My confidence in this statement stems from Adam Elga's work on self-locating belief, in which he demonstrates that “similar centered worlds deserve equal credence.” (9) In other worlds, an agent who is in a state subjectively indistinguishable from another possible state must divide his credence equally between the possible states. Consequently, having performed a successful test on an animal, a researcher must nevertheless concede that it is just as likely that the test will fail on humans as it is the test will succeed. This is why clinical trials on humans are necessary. Given these uncertainties, experimenting on animals to benefit humans cannot be justified, as they do not truly give any additional information about drugs' efficacy on humans.
It is wrong to test pharmaceutical drugs on animals. The suffering of an animal is as worthy of consideration as the suffering of a human; moreover, alternatives to animal testing are widely available (at the very least, human subjects.) Animals do lack moral autonomy, but this does not entail that their rights are not worth speaking of: only that it is our obligation to speak for them.
Works Cited
Cohen, Carl. “The Case for the Use of Animals in Biomedical Research.” In Thomas A. Mappes and Jane Zembaty, eds. Social Ethics: Morality and Social Policy, 7th Ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007. pp 504-512
Elga, Adam. “Defeating Dr. Evil with self-locating belief.” References taken from the penultimate draft as printed in 2007 UC course reader for PHIL305. Article published in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 69:2, September 2004. pp 383-396
Frey, R. G. Interests and Rights: The Case Against Animals. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. Ch. 3, pp 28-37.
Frey, R. G., and Sir William Paton. “Vivisection, Morals and Medicine: An Exchange.” In Helga Kuhse and Peter Singer, eds. Bioethics: An Anthology. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1999. 58: pp 471-479.
Singer, Peter. Practical Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Ch. 3, pp 55-82.
Singer, Peter. “All Animals Are Equal.” In Thomas A. Mappes and Jane Zembaty, eds. Social Ethics: Morality and Social Policy, 7th Ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007. pp 478-482.
Warren, Mary Anne. “Human and Animal Rights Compared.” In Thomas A. Mappes and Jane Zembaty, eds. Social Ethics: Morality and Social Policy, 7th Ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007. pp 512-518.
If you do read this, and disagree with me, fair enough because I'm not totally sure I agree with me. However! Please, please read the exchange between R. G. Frey and Sir William Paton, "Vivisection, Morals and Medicine" in Bioethics: An Anthology (Ed. Helga Kuhse and Peter Singer, Blackwell 1999). It's a very good article and it summarises what I think is the dilemma that really confronts us, as part of a society that experiments on animals.
Finally, I was going to post about a couple of things lately: the Urewera raids, Yuletide, blah blah. But it all got put to one side, because Dumbledore: gay gay gay! \o/
sixth_light, lady_larla, and I determined to watch That Movie, you know, the travesty one. We decided to numb the pain with vodka, drinking every time we felt our childhoods had been particularly insulted. This was a lot of fun, but we drank nearly an entire bottle of vodka by the time we were 30 minutes in and decided that we were no longer coherent enough to watch anything at all, so I still don't really know what I think. It'll happen sometime, I suppose.On that note, recommended morning-after breakfast: sliced strawberries and nectarines tossed with icing sugar and balsamic vinegar (and fresh ground black pepper, if you have it) spooned onto chocolate-chip waffles topped with honey-cured chicken bacon. SO good.
This is the horrible essay I wrote about animal rights. Ugh. I always thank god for the designated reading committee (Lucy, Tas, Meg and Mum) who never fail to be timely and useful, but apart from grammar correction I totally ignored everything they said this time because I just could not face revisiting it.
Therapeutic drugs should not be tested on animals before being given to humans. Experimentation with animals is a longstanding part of the history of medical science. Activism for animal rights is not quite so historied, but awareness of the need to address questions about the treatment of animals both in and out of the lab continues to grow. Simultaneously, leaps and bounds in medical science are pointed to as the fruits of animal experimentation. In Animal Liberation (1990), Peter Singer elaborated on the work he had begun in Practical Ethics, making a convincing case for the rights of animals not to be tested on, on the grounds that their suffering was as worthy of consideration as the suffering of a human, and their interests equally deserving. Perhaps the most often-cited work on animal rights, it is consequently the most hotly contested: I intend to defend Singer's work.
I shall first outline Singer's argument for animals' moral status, and briefly summarise the “trilemma” he poses in Practical Ethics, in which he argues that we must either accept that animal experimentation is unjustified, or accept that experimentation on “marginal” humans is just as justified. I will examine R. G. Frey's analysis of the argument's weakness, and demonstrate why several attempts to resolve the trilemma without conceding the morally equal status of animals and marginal humans fail. Finally, I shall conclude with some remarks about perceived and actual values of animal testing.
In Practical Ethics, Singer calls human indifference to the rights of animals “speciesism” (1979, 55), deliberately equating it with racism and sexism to demonstrate what is, in his view, a fundamental wrong. Both humans and animals, he writes, deserve “equal consideration of interests.” (1979, 55) This does not mean that animal liberationists must activate for a cat's right to vote in the same way that suffragrettes did; a cat is incapable of understanding voting or democracy (2007, 483). Equal consideration does not mean equal treatment: it merely means that an animal's interests are not, inherently, less valuable than the interests of a human only by virtue of species. He bases his consideration of animal interests on a famous passage by Jeremy Bentham: “'The question is not, Can they reason? Nor can they talk? but, Can they suffer?'” The rights of animals are not founded in their relative IQs nor in their abilities or inabilities to speak or to create art or any of the things by which we separate the human from the animal: rather, they are derived from the animal's ability to feel pain.
According to Singer, this ability to feel pain makes the suffering of an animal equal to the suffering of a human with the same capacities. If we accept that physical characteristics, or relative lack of intelligence, ought not change the consideration we give to the interests of human beings, we must (Singer writes) grant the same care to animals (1979, 56). If we do not, we are engaging in the same kinds of arbitrary prejudice exhibited by the people who treat others differently based on their race or gender: not racism or sexism, but speciesism. Singer does not insist that every animal's suffering is the same as the suffering of every human being: there are, he agrees, distinguishing factors such as rationality and imagination that might make some kinds of suffering much worse for the human. The woman who dreads pain even when she is not experiencing it and for whom, say, the spectre of terminal cancer causes great anguish upon diagnosis, is suffering much more than the mouse with the same disease, which cannot possibly understand the ramifications of the illness (1979, 58). In this case, agrees Singer, the human is suffering more: suffering is not equal across species. Singer elaborates on this point with a second example: if one slaps a horse with a certain degree of force, the horse will perhaps be galvanised into motion but is unlikely to feel much pain. Slapping a baby in the same way, however, will cause the infant a great deal of pain. It is wrong to hit a baby like this, but not very wrong to slap a horse into action. However, if we hit a horse very hard with a stick, and cause it the same amount of pain we cause the infant, then – unless we are speciesist – we must consider both actions equally wrong. (59) Once again, equality means equal consideration of interests, not equal treatment.
On this basis, Singer forms an argument that results in a “trilemma.” If an experiment with animals is to be justified, he claims, it must be equally justifiable to perform the same experiment “on orphaned humans with severe and irreversible brain damage.” (67) The capacities that distinguish the suffering of a normal, adult human from that of a normal, adult animal are not present in the case of these marginal or non-paradigm humans. Consequently, he says, either
(A) we accept both animal experimentation and experimentation on marginal humans; or
(B) we reject both; or
(C)we are being speciesist, for there is no morally relevant distinction between the suffering of an animal and the suffering of a marginal human.
From this argument, Singer hopes to persuade “our conviction that it would be wrong to treat intellectually disabled humans in this way to be transferred to nonhuman animals... with similar capacities for suffering.” (78)
This is a controversial argument, gaining its strength from the reflexive response that experimentation on marginal humans is wrong. R. G. Frey contends that, even if Singer's argument is accepted, his conclusion – that both kinds of experiments must not be performed – is not entailed by the argument. He formulates Singer's argument in three parts, which I will paraphrase:
1.Criteria which exclude animals from being rights-holders, and hence allow them to be experimented on, also exclude these marginal humans such as infants and the severely intellectually disabled.
2.However, babies and other marginal humans are rights-holders.
3.Therefore, there is no morally relevant distinction between babies and animals; the criteria which exclude animals from being rights-holders must be rejected as criteria for the possession of rights.
(Frey, 1980, 28-9)
This argument is meant to show that experiments on animals are wrong, because of the a priori wrongness of experimentation on marginal humans. However, Frey disagrees. According to him, premiss 2 is not a priori, and it is necessary for Singer to justify his position that marginal humans are rights-holders. (30) He argues that any criterion which includes babies as rights-holders will, by definition, exclude animals; and consequently, if we accept babies as rights-holders (by these exclusive definitions) we are compelled to exclude animals, thereby rendering premiss 1 incorrect; on the other hand, if we cannot justify premiss 2, we may still agree that there is no distinction between babies and animals, but are forced to take the first way out of Singer's trilemma, and accept experimentation on babies and other marginal humans.
Frey expands upon this in his article on vivisection (1999), in which he claims that if vivisectionists believe that painful experimentation on animals is justified by the benefit which accrues, they must believe that these experiments would be equally justified on humans. If they deny this, they must find “some reason for thinking that a human life, no matter how truncated its scope for enrichment, no matter how low its quality, is more valuable than an animal life, no matter what...” (1999, 474). The special attributes that lead us to value human life over animal life, creativity, rationality, love, relationships, society, and so on are not general to every single member of the species; consequently, not every human life can be valued over every animal life. Frey briefly considers, and rejects, a few common arguments to attribute rights to infants, and exclude them from animals. Some thinkers will base their argument on a religious belief that humans have a mortal soul, and animals do not. This may satisfy them, but for Frey and others it is not enough: increasing numbers of atheists, agnostics, and free-thinkers cannot accept dictates on moral behaviour from religions to which they do not subscribe. The “potentiality” argument (1980, 31) argues that babies have the potential to become rational, and in fact are less likely to achieve this if experimented on; animals do not have this potential. This is true enough of babies (although accepting it also requires the acceptance of the rights of the foetus, a far-from-settled matter): however, it does not apply to other sets of marginal humans, including the severely intellectually disabled.
Finally, he examines the “similarity” argument (31), which grants special rights to babies and the intellectually disabled on the grounds that they are physically similar to normal humans, being of the same species. This similarity argument, which perhaps represents the most common instinctive reaction, will be reformulated in different ways later in the essay; however, granting and excluding rights to individuals based on similar or different physical appearances is as arbitrary across species as it is across race or gender. (31-2) If an animal, say a chimpanzee, were to incontrovertibly demonstrate that it was as rational, intelligent, creative and so on as a human, we would be required to treat it as if it were one: rights do not stem from membership in a species.
The particular strength of Frey's articles rests on his arguments about sentience. The capacity to feel pain, by which Singer justifies granting rights to both animals and marginal humans, results in a few curious exclusions: “foetuses, individuals suffering from certain types of nervous damage, and the comatose.” (1980, 35) This second case is easily the most controversial: some individuals, as rational and able as any other human being, nevertheless lack the ability to feel pain. Should they, consequently, be excluded from the class of rights-holders? Frey's point, although good, interestingly makes the same mistake Singer does when he assumes that infants have rights a priori. If infants do not have rights a priori, what reason do we have to think that individuals who cannot feel pain (or foetuses, or the comatose) do? Certainly these individuals deserve equal consideration of interests; but just as a dog's interests do not require the right to vote, an individual who cannot feel pain does not have the right to a painless existence. Indeed, this right is meaningless to her. Of course, mental anguish precludes her being imprisoned or caged as we might a mouse, who is capable of being happy in confinement, and her superior right to life (over that of an animal, as even Singer will concede) remains intact as a function of her humanity: but rather than shying away from suggesting painful experimentation on her, she ought to volunteer. Not only will she suffer less than any normal animal, but predictions made about human reactions based on her (human) reactions will be significantly more accurate. Consequently, Frey's argument, that suffering is not sufficient to outway the benefits accrued from animal experimentation, seems to fail.
So far, in examining Peter Singer's trilemma, I have focussed on explicating A and B. However, C: that discriminating between animals and marginal humans is speciesism, has been considered only briefly with reference to R.G. Frey, who concurs with Singer that no criteria for distinguishing the two exist. The search for some criterion, some distinguishing factor, has involved significant efforts from philosophers of ethics. One by one, suggestions are made and then refuted. Perhaps it is our capacity for language, morality or autonomy; and yet, like rationality, these are hardly able to be generalised across the whole species (and indeed, some primates have demonstrated at least some capacity with language.) Sir William Paton offers the human ability to accumulate knowledge: but plenty of marginal humans are unable to do this, and even if they were, what relevance does this have to an animal's capacity for suffering? Carl Cohen and Mary Anne Warren both argue that animals have fewer rights than humans, not because of some criterion (which would be as easily dismissed as those I have already addressed) but because of the nature of human morality. Cohen takes the extreme position, arguing that animals have no rights and defending speciesism on the grounds that animals cannot reciprocate morality, while Warren attempts to reconcile Cohen's views by including some rights for animals but limiting them. These kinds of arguments essentially constitute a defence of position C, speciesism, and are consequently popular; if they hold, they are a good way out of the dilemma.
Cohen's radical article “The Case for the Use of Animals in Biomedical Research” positions him firmly on the side of the speciesists, going so far as to say that not only is it permissable to use animals for research, but necessary. According to Cohen, the moral status of being a rights-holder does not derive from capacity to suffer pain, but from membership in a “community of moral agents.” (504) Rights are claims against members of the community, from members of the community. Animals, who do not have the capacity to behave morally, do not, fact cannot, make these claims; it is consequently nonsensical to speak of animals as having rights since they cannot reciprocate. Animals should not suffer needlessly, true, but this imperative derives not from the rights of animals, but from the obligations of humans (as moral agents) towards animals. (505-6) A dog does not have a right to be walked, but its owner has an obligation to walk it; these obligations may derive from a difference in status. Cohen does not bother to defend his distinction of right and obligation, however. If humans have, in general, the obligation to treat animals well, what makes this obligation different from a basic standard of treatment animals have rights to?
Even if we accept this, however, Cohen's argument continues to appear arbitrary. In the case of marginal humans – who, like animals, cannot be moral agents – he insists that they gain their rights by membership in the human race, which, in general, is a community of moral agents. “The capacity for moral judgement... is not a test to be administered to humans one by one.” (506) Rather, as members of humanity, they are granted a special exemption, allowing them to be members of the moral community even though they do not have moral autonomy. Although this argument is stated a little differently, it is essentially the similarity argument in disguise. Because most humans are rights-holders, all humans should be treated as rights-holders, since moral capacity is part of the definition of human. What Cohen seems to have missed, though, is that if moral autonomy is the definition of human, then it can just as easily be concluded, consistently, that marginal humans are, in fact, not humans at all. Instead ot succeeding in showing that marginal humans ought to be treated differently than animals, Cohen appears to have reduced the status of these marginal humans even more.
In continuing to defend speciesism, Cohen says that Singer's argument depends on the assumption that “all sentient animals have equal moral standing.” (507) This is ridiculous, he says, since surely the suffering of a thinking, rational, normal human being must be considered more important than the suffering of a rat. Speciesism is not on a par with racism, because it is perfectly rational: humans, being morally autonomous, have rights while animals do not. However, Cohen has mis-stated Singer. Singer, in fact, concedes that the suffering of a normal human being ought to take precedence over the suffering of a rat; rats do not have the equal rights as humans, only to equal consideration of interests. We may still conclude that human suffering is more important than animal suffering; but without recoursing to Cohen's false distinction, we cannot rationally conclude that a marginal human, who is not and cannot be morally autonomous, is more important than a normal animal, which has the same moral capacity.
Mary Anne Warren attempts to reconcile Cohen's arguments with a moral philosophy that does allow some rights to animals, but limits them. She agrees that animals do have a right to consideration of their interests, and points out that in different areas animal and human interests require different levels of consideration; for example, a human has the right to vote but an animal does not, and humans need a greater degree of physical liberty than animals generally do; an animal in a zoo enclosure that significantly resembles its natural habitat does not suffer unduly, while a human in a similar enclosude certainly would. (513-515) Therefore, while both humans and animals have rights, human rights are generally more extensive than animal rights. Perhaps one area in which human and animal rights might be equal is in relation to pain and suffering: “There is little reason to suppose that pain and suffering are any less unpleasant for the higher animals (at least) than they are for us.” (515) So we cannot differentiate an animal's right to freedom from suffering on the same grounds that we use to weaken its right to freedom of movement. Here Warren brings up Cohen's moral autonomy: although autonomy is not a “precondition for possessing moral rights” (516), it may nevertheless be grounds for weakening the rights of animals on a basis of reciprocity.
Warren explicitly founds the human system of morality in the nature of reciprocity. We accept that there are right and wrong ways to behave because of “mutual advantage” (516). We do not take from others because we know that if stealing was morally permissable, others would be free to take from us, and so on. Since animals are fundamentally unable to reciprocate in this kind of relationship, their participation and rights under this theory of morality ought to be restricted. She defends it from claims of speciesism by pointing out that, unlike women or blacks, animals truly are inherently incapable of moral autonomy.
Singer responds to arguments about reciprocity by identifying groups of humans who are unable to reciprocate; slavers, for example, have little reason to refrain from enslaving the poor, since the poor have little or no ability to reciprocate. Even the potential to reciprocate will not work, as the severely intellectually disabled have no such potential. (Singer, 1979, 78-80)
Warren defends her inclusion of “nonparadigm humans” (517) by claiming that, although they do not have moral autonomy, their claim to rights is strengthened by other factors, particularly their importance to morally autonomous humans, such as families. The affections of the family of an intellectually disabled woman require that she is given special consideration above animals.
Warren acknowledges that this is a controversial statement of rights – many non-sentient objects have great importance to morally autonomous individuals (for example, jewelry or paintings) but these objects are not said to have rights. It is not only their importance for others, but also the fact that they have interests which much be considered, which separates marginal humans from animals, she responds. Animals do have the latter, but not the former. (519) However, some intellectually disabled individuals may be orphaned, and consequently not particularly cared for; similarly, many animals are held in great esteem by their owners. Animals have the same potential for being cared for as marginal humans. Perhaps Warren means that marginal humans are held in higher esteem by autonomous humans, who would be disturbed by the notion of treating marginal humans as equal to animals: but this is circular, claiming that marginal humans should have more rights because humans believe that marginal humans have more rights. It may even be mistaken, as animal rights groups become more vocal advocates for the rights of animals. Warren still has not succeeded in refuting Singer, only restricted the group of marginal humans who cannot be distinguished from animals.
Singer's trilemma, which argues that excluding marginal humans from experimentation necessarily requires that animals also be excluded from experimentation, is a powerful argument that still holds against the objections I have outlined. Even Frey's response, which works within the trilemma but reluctantly chooses to include marginal humans for experimentation, rather than exclude the animals, is not successful in refuting Singer's arguments from pain and suffering. However, some may still not accept it. I believe that there is another very good reason to exclude animals from experimentation: that the benefits accrued from animal experimentation can, and should, be obtained in other ways.
The wildly different estimations of the value of animal testing, which vary from paper to paper, are indicative of the fact that it is very difficult to state with certainty exactly what benefits have been gained from animal experimentation that could not have been gained elsewhere. Cohen insists that “[t]he sum of the benefits of [animal] use is utterly beyond quantification” (509); he is quite right, but the uncertainty does not necessarily imply that the benefits are very great, or that they are excusive to tests upon animals. Frey writes that vivisectionists make a “false presumption that the only alternative to not testing [therapeutic drugs]... is to test it upon animals: it could, of course, be tested upon human beings” (Frey, 1990, 473). Proponents of animal testing who insist that the suffering it causes is justified by the benefits it produces rarely consider that the same argument would justify experimentation on humans. If they believe that experimentation on humans is not justified, why then, we return to Singer's trilemma; on the other hand, if they do believe that it justifies testing on humans, it would be better to test therapeutic drugs intended for humans upon humans, as more accurate predictions could be made.
Briefly, when a drug is tested on an animal, it will have one of two results: either the drug will work on the animal, or the drug will not work on the animal. However, whichever result obtains, there is a further uncertainty. Extrapolating from the animal case to the human case is fraught with potential error. The oft-quoted example of thalidomide does not lose its strength by virtue of being repeated: extensive, successful tests on animals failed to reveal the drug's consequences for humans. For this reason, clinical trials on humans are also required before a drug is made widely available. Essentially, whenever a drug is tested, four possibilities pertain: either the drug is successful and not harmful on both humans and animals; or it is successful on humans, but harmful or unsuccessful on animals; or it is harmful to humans but successful on animals; or it is harmful to both humans and animals. [footnote: I am indebted to Peter Wenz for this analysis.] Naturally, experimenters on animals hope for the first and last result. However, they cannot tell merely by experimenting on animals whether something is likely to help or hurt humans. This seems counterintuitive, but consider: suppose the drug worked on the animals. It may still fail or succeed with humans. Conversely, should the drug fail with the animals, it may still succeed or fail on humans. Researchers cannot tell which possibility will pertain.
My confidence in this statement stems from Adam Elga's work on self-locating belief, in which he demonstrates that “similar centered worlds deserve equal credence.” (9) In other worlds, an agent who is in a state subjectively indistinguishable from another possible state must divide his credence equally between the possible states. Consequently, having performed a successful test on an animal, a researcher must nevertheless concede that it is just as likely that the test will fail on humans as it is the test will succeed. This is why clinical trials on humans are necessary. Given these uncertainties, experimenting on animals to benefit humans cannot be justified, as they do not truly give any additional information about drugs' efficacy on humans.
It is wrong to test pharmaceutical drugs on animals. The suffering of an animal is as worthy of consideration as the suffering of a human; moreover, alternatives to animal testing are widely available (at the very least, human subjects.) Animals do lack moral autonomy, but this does not entail that their rights are not worth speaking of: only that it is our obligation to speak for them.
Works Cited
Cohen, Carl. “The Case for the Use of Animals in Biomedical Research.” In Thomas A. Mappes and Jane Zembaty, eds. Social Ethics: Morality and Social Policy, 7th Ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007. pp 504-512
Elga, Adam. “Defeating Dr. Evil with self-locating belief.” References taken from the penultimate draft as printed in 2007 UC course reader for PHIL305. Article published in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 69:2, September 2004. pp 383-396
Frey, R. G. Interests and Rights: The Case Against Animals. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. Ch. 3, pp 28-37.
Frey, R. G., and Sir William Paton. “Vivisection, Morals and Medicine: An Exchange.” In Helga Kuhse and Peter Singer, eds. Bioethics: An Anthology. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1999. 58: pp 471-479.
Singer, Peter. Practical Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Ch. 3, pp 55-82.
Singer, Peter. “All Animals Are Equal.” In Thomas A. Mappes and Jane Zembaty, eds. Social Ethics: Morality and Social Policy, 7th Ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007. pp 478-482.
Warren, Mary Anne. “Human and Animal Rights Compared.” In Thomas A. Mappes and Jane Zembaty, eds. Social Ethics: Morality and Social Policy, 7th Ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007. pp 512-518.
If you do read this, and disagree with me, fair enough because I'm not totally sure I agree with me. However! Please, please read the exchange between R. G. Frey and Sir William Paton, "Vivisection, Morals and Medicine" in Bioethics: An Anthology (Ed. Helga Kuhse and Peter Singer, Blackwell 1999). It's a very good article and it summarises what I think is the dilemma that really confronts us, as part of a society that experiments on animals.
Finally, I was going to post about a couple of things lately: the Urewera raids, Yuletide, blah blah. But it all got put to one side, because Dumbledore: gay gay gay! \o/
