Shock and indignation were the reactions when an unknown philosopher named Peter Singer denounced animal research in his 1975 best seller, Animal Liberation. Readers of what has come to be known as the bible of the animal rights movement seemed more startled at themselves than at Singer for claiming animals have interests that must be considered equally with our own. Why hadn’t anyone thought of all this before — that:
- animals and humans are so different that it is pointless to apply the results of
animal experiments to humans; - both animal pain and its relief through anesthesia interfere with and invalidate
experimental results; - alternatives to animal research are available;
- animal researchers are motivated only by money, their own advancement or an idle and sometimes sadistic curiosity;
- animal research, even if needed and beneficial, is wrong for the pain it causes living creatures;
- prevention of disease through hygiene and nutrition, not health research, deserves funding;
- homeopathy are better than technological medicine;
- physical health and longevity are not the supreme value in life (1)
<li<healing in the traditional forms of observation, counseling, natural drugs and
As a matter of fact, many people did think about all this — a century ago. In fact, the above list of seemingly revolutionary claims has been culled from newspapers of the 1800s, not the 1900s. Exactly 100 years before the appearance of Singer’s book,
England was engulfed in a national controversy over vivisection (literally, “cutting living things), and Parliament was debating the regulation of animal research. Fifty years later the movement called antivivisectionism was all but forgotten.
Antivivisectionism failed simply because the public could not be convinced that the use of animals in advancing the knowledge and treatment of disease was either immoral or futile. Surely, people did not want to see animals, especially their pet dogs and cats, mistreated. For that reason they welcomed regulations on research. Nevertheless, once alerted by the medical profession that progress in treating disease depended on animal research, they became wary of the abolitionist agenda. They trusted physicians such as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who argued that “The interests at stake [in the antivivisection controversy] are so vital than an enormous responsibility rests with the men whose notion of progress is to revert to the condition of things which existed in the dark ages before the dawn of medical science”(2).
The claims of doctors were made good by the accumulating successes of scientists. Researchers, demonstrating beyond doubt that microscopic organisms are responsible for disease, were laying the groundwork for medical treatments and public health measures that would remove, one by one, the threat of anthrax, cholera, rabies, diphtheria and typhoid. Historian Richard French writes that “On the simplest reading the decline of antivivisection was in direct proportion to the success of the experimental approach. . .” (3). Even contemporary animal rights advocate Reverend Andrew Linzey comments ruefully that the movement lost its way when, in a “Credo” adopted in 1908, it committed itself to the untenable proposition that animal research cannot be scientifically necessary. “This line . . . that vivisection is useless. . . has cost the antivivisection movement dearly”(4).
How, then, did Singer, acknowledged as the father of the current animal rights movement, revive the once-failed and discredited antivisection movement? No doubt, his prolific writing has had extraordinary influence in the past quarter of a century. After reading Animal Liberation, Alex Pacheco helped found People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PeTA), the world’s largest animal activist organization. Undergraduate philosophy students have cut their teeth on Animal Liberation or one of several abridged versions in college anthologies, and the general public has become familiar with Singer’s arguments through a steady stream of well-written, easy-to-read articles.
Even so, Singer’s skills as a messenger can’t alone explain how concern about the status and treatment of animals has moved into the mainstream of public policy discussions. Master communicator though he be, the culture had to be ready for his message. It had been prepared by several factors, among them the civil rights, peace and women’s movements and the apparent failure of science and technology to deliver fully on all their promises. Chernobyl, holes in the ozone layer, pesticides in the food chain, and the possibility of a brave new world created by cloning and genetic engineering have put the suspicion and fear of scientists into our collective hearts.
Not failures, however, but significant successes are the most important factor in preparing the culture for Singer’s message — the triumphs of 19th and 20th century medical science. Here we encounter paradox. Medical advances were the death knell of Victorian anti-vivisectionism, but those same advances have contributed to the rise of the current animal rights movement. The key to this paradox is collective amnesia. The success of biomedical research during the last 100 years has rendered many people oblivious of the connection between medical advances and animal research. People who have grown up since the 1960s seldom trace the origins of their vaccinations and medications beyond doctors’ offices and pharmacies to research laboratories. Show a group of junior high school students a picture of iron lungs lined up in rows in the children’s wing of a hospital, and only one or two of them will know what they are or be aware that polio vaccines protect them from a disease that terrified their grandparents and held their parents hostage through long summers in the early 1950s.
Because of biomedical research, most people today survive infancy, never experience chicken pox or malaria, and expect a life span of some 70 years. We take vaccines and antibiotics for granted or speak of them as “miracles,” overlooking their origins in decades of research, much of it animal-related. It was different “even as late as the 1930s, [when] a schoolboy could have lost a companion from tuberculosis, mastoid infection, diphtheria, or scarlet fever, and might play with a friend crippled by polio [and when] deformity, pain, and disability were familiar experiences” (5). At the turn of the 20th century, suffering was simply accepted as part of life; at the turn of the 21st century, health rather than suffering is taken for granted.
Not less important in explaining the readiness of our culture for Singer’s ideas is the same process of urbanization that favored the rise of Victorian antivivisectionism. Eighty percent of the American population now lives in cities and suburbs. This means that most people grow up with little experience of farm animals, let alone with animals in the wild. Their only experiences with animals are with pets. In a survey of participants in the 1990 March for Animals, 87 percent indicated that intensely emotional relationships with pets were a significant mobilizing force in their lives.
What urbanization has taken away — first-hand experience of real animals, either farm or wild animals or animals — Hollywood has replaced. Children experience animals not only as pets but as animated cartoon characters or stuffed dolls. These fuzzy, innocent, talking and playful creations evoke powerful sentiments of affection for the real creatures they represent. Probably the most influential factor in changing the contemporary perception of animals and of our responsibilities to them have been the image makers at Disney studios. They have given us Mickey Mouse, Bambi and Babe, and with them, a decidedly anthropomorphic view of animals.
Late 20th century culture was ready for Singer. Before examining his message, let’s set the philosophical stage for the entrance of the philosopher of animal liberation.
Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant
Three philosophers from ancient, medieval and modern times — Aristotle, Aquinas and Kant — have constructed the philosophical foundation for the common sense commitment to animal welfare. They held that:
- there is a distinction between humans and animals;
- we may use animals in our service; and,
- we have the obligation of acting in line with our rational human nature (i.e., acting humanely) in our treatment of animals.
What distinguishes humans, according to Aristotle and Aquinas, is not the possession of a soul — which is the form or a pattern that makes a living being the type of creature that it is — but the possession of a rational soul. The rational soul of human beings consists of a capacity for questioning, reflecting on ourselves, understanding, judging and deliberating — activities that go into making reasoned choices. As we deliberate and make decisions, we discover in ourselves the constant companion of conscience. We realize that we are held (and can hold others) accountable to norms of rational behavior.
Animals, on the other hand, act on instincts selected through evolution that guide them in fulfilling needs. They are not moral agents who hold and are held responsible as they shape their lives and the world around them through reasoned decisions. Because they stand outside the community of responsible decision-making, animals cannot make claims on humans.
Even so, according to Aristotle and Aquinas, we must show animals compassionate care. Anything less violates our own rational and responsible nature. Such compassion is consistent with the use of animals. God, according to Aquinas, governs the human family directly by appealing to our rational and responsible nature and governs other creatures indirectly or through our exercise of reason and responsibility. Following Aristotle step by step, Aquinas declared that “plants make use of the earth for their nourishment, animals make use of plants, and man makes use of both plants and animals.” Animals have instrumental value.
In Kant’s perspective, only individuals who live under the rule of reason revealed by conscience have rights. Humans, for example, are bound by conscience to always tell the truth, a rule that is truly rational because we want to live in a world where everyone tells the truth; animals, obviously, are not beholden by conscience to such a rational and universal rule. Consequently, humans, but not animals, qualify for rights. Still, Kant prescribed that we act kindly toward animals precisely because in conscience we discover another truly rational law that we want everyone to follow: the law of compassion. Humane acts, then, are duties we owe directly to ourselves and indirectly to animals.
These three — Aristotle, Aquinas and Kant — have provided the philosophical basis for treating animals compassionately. They have given the very word “humane” — in accord with our rational and responsible nature — to animal protection societies. But, to Peter Singer, discussion of the humane treatment of animals seems hopelessly anthropocentric (6). What is right or wrong, he is convinced, must be determined by how an action affects others, not by how it fulfills responsibilities to God or conscience. About every action, we should ask, “Does this further the interests of those, including animals, that it will affect?”
Utilitarianism
Strictly speaking, Singer is not an animal rightist. He tolerates the phrase “animal rights” only because it serves well in 30-second sound bites. Singer reminds us that he is an utilitarian, as followers of Jeremy Bentham, an English contemporary of Kant, have come to be called. Bentham was convinced that ethical reflection arises from our empathy with others in their pleasure or pain. For Singer, that is the correct starting place, especially when considering actions toward animals. An ethic based on calculations of pleasure and pain will include responsibilities not just to rational human beings, but to all creatures that experience pleasure and pain. Singer quotes a Bentham proclamation that has become what essayist Vicki Hearne aptly calls “The Great Sentence” of the animal rights movement: “The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”(7).
Bentham proposed that we align ourselves with a hypothetical observer who is all-seeing, impartial, benevolent and capable of discerning every consequence of a given action. From such a position we will be able to choose the actions that achieve the greatest utility — defined as the maximum pleasure and minimum pain — for the greatest number of individuals. “Each [individual],” he insisted, “is to count for one and none for more than one.”
Singer extends Bentham’s key notion of equal consideration to animals. Notice that Singer doesn’t claim that humans and animals are equal or demand that we treat them equally. Indeed, most members of the biological (chromosomal) species homo sapiens are persons, whom he defines as those possessing rationality and self-consciousness, but many animals are not. Conversely, many chromosomal humans, such as the mentally disadvantaged and senile, are not persons, while some animals such as chimpanzees clearly are (8). Persons or not, however, all suffer. Thus, even though we don’t always treat each sentient creature equally — it makes no sense to extend the vote to dogs — we should consider the potential pleasures and pains of each equally. Just as giving more moral weight to members of one race or gender merely because they belong to that race or gender, is to act as a racist or sexist, so also giving moral consideration to certain individuals solely on the basis of their membership in the human species is to act as a speciesist. Singer concludes that:
“If the experimenter is not prepared to use an orphaned human infant, then his readiness to use non-humans is simple discrimination, since adult apes, cats, mice, and other mammals are more aware of what is happening to them, more self-directing and, so far as we can tell, at least as sensitive to pain, as any human infant” (9).
So much for causing animals pain and suffering. What is to be said of subjecting animals to painless (i.e., anesthetized) experimental surgery and painless death? At this point, Singer enlarges Bentham’s principle of pleasure and pain. He counsels us to go beyond calculations of pleasure and pain to consider the interests and harms of the greatest number of those who will be affected by any action. Those interests and harms are best determined by taking account of individuals’ preferences. As a “preference utilitarian,” Singer holds that the capacity for pleasure and pain is important only as an entitlement to moral consideration. Without that capacity, creatures would have no interests at all. But, interests and harms are Singer’s real concern.
When Bentham asked himself if we are permitted to use or even kill animals as long as we do it painlessly, he said yes. In fact, in the same famous footnote already cited, just a few lines before his “Great Sentence,” he makes us wonder if he might not approve painless research and experimental death:
“. . . there is very good reason why we should be suffered to eat such of them (animals) as we like to eat; we are the better for it, and they are never the worse. They have none of those long-protracted anticipations of future misery which we have. The death they suffer in our hands commonly is, and always may be, a speedier, and by that means a less painful one, than that which would await them in the inevitable course of nature” (10). =20
Singer, however, says no. Even though killing may be painless, it is not ordinarily in any creature’s interest. True, the harm and the wrong involved in killing a human is greater because his consciousness is more complex, his pleasures fuller and his future richer. But, since many animals have a mental life comparable to that of human infants, we may kill them only if we are prepared to take the lives of human babies of the same mental level (11). Otherwise, we are guilty of speciesism.
Utilitarianism and basic research
Not surprisingly, some scientists charge Singer with presenting a caricature of biomedical science in his application of utilitarian calculations to animal-based research. Charles Nicoll and Sharon Russell contend that in chapter two of Animal Liberation, Singer fails to reason as the utilitarian he claims to be. Readers expect him to provide an example of rigorous moral calculation concerning medical research. All they get is that “Many experiments inflict severe pain without the remotest prospect of significant benefits for human beings or any other animals.” (12). Russell and Nicoll note that Singer
“. . . makes virtually no attempt to consider objectively the benefits that have been realized from animal-based medical research, and he greatly exaggerates the costs. To him, animal research is ‘all pain and no gain'” (13).
This failure may disappoint but shouldn’t surprise. For any research to be permissible it would have to be so important that the researchers conducting it would be prepared to take the lives of certain human infants just as much as they would be ready to take the lives of laboratory animals. Thus, Singer might endorse some project in AIDS research on the condition that chimpanzees and mentally disadvantaged, orphaned human infants were considered equally as experimental subjects. Some animal advocates would delight in such an endorsement as a contemporary version of Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal, but most people would receive it as an outrage to their moral sensibilities.
Defenders of animal research often employ utilitarianism, confident that the benefits coming from such research outweigh the harms done to laboratory animals. They are readily understood by the media and by the public. But embracing utilitarianism has its risks. Even if we overlook the fact that Singer demands much more than scientists are willing to allow — being prepared to use human infants in experiments =AF the calculations that he prescribes still work to prevent the use of animals in research.
The reason for this is due to a basic flaw in Bentham’s method. Long before Singer, critics asked how we can make precise comparisons of quantities of pleasures and pains that exist in an unknown future. It would seem that any measuring potential pleasures and pains, interests and harms that might derive from one action or another serves as a feeble guide to moral decision-making.
This is especially true in basic research, which deals with discovery. If we could run history backwards and stop at some point in a particular discovery process — the 1870s, for example, when the antibiotic properties of certain penicillium molds were first observed — we would notice hundreds of experiments going on. With hindsight we might recognize several of those projects — many seeking to establish the germ theory of disease that would be a pre-condition for exploiting observations about penicllium molds — that made it possible for Alexander Fleming in 1929 to grasp the significance of the accidental contamination of his cultures. Researchers in 1870 could approximate the amount of pain or loss that a number of animals would suffer in their own experiments, but they couldn’t see into the future to determine if and how their own experiments would contribute to Howard Florey’s experiments in the 1940s that led to the drug we know as penicillin. Biomedical breakthroughs are never the result of a single idea or one series of experiments, and scientists are explorers, not clairvoyants.
This thought experiment has been confirmed recently by Singer himself. Ten years after declaring that the routine use of hundreds of thousands laboratory animals in research “without the remotest prospect of significant benefits for human beings or any other animals” is ethically unacceptable, he heralded experiments in which damaged nervous systems in rats were repaired with stem cells derived from embryos (14). This example of animal research thrilled Singer because it could lead to growing tissues for the repair or replacement of damaged organs, thus eliminating the need for temporary animal transplants for patients on human organ waiting lists.
What Singer didn’t report is the earlier work of animal researchers who first located the source of neural stem cells. These scientists stood on the shoulders of hundreds of others pursuing still more basic investigations of the mechanisms of cell development and interaction. All proceeded with no more than hints and hopes of how their studies might benefit humans. Still, it was through the routine use of thousands of laboratory animals that the breakthrough so pleasing to Singer was achieved. It is doubtful that any of that research, which was of uncertain value when it was conducted, would have passed Singer’s scrutiny.
Because we cannot peer into the future and discern the connection between a given experiment and a new treatment or count the beneficiaries of a discovery, Singer’s mathematical model for ethics serves to foreclose medical advances before they get started. It may be that he considers this weakness of his system its best recommendation. Utilitarian calculations accomplish his purpose of ruling out most any research with animals. Of course, he protests that he has never “said that no animal experimentation is ever of use to humans (though I do think that much of it is of minimal or zero value)” (15). But, “he doth protest too much.” Few are the research projects he likes. For all practical purposes, Singer is an animal research abolitionist.
Utilitarianism: causing pain and taking the lives of animals
Apart from the unworkability of his cost/benefit method of guiding action, Singer’s “updating” of Bentham’s utilitarianism is troubling on a deeper level. Can it be true that the pain and the interests of animals are of the same moral significance as the equally severe pain and the interests of humans?
Singer, of course, does not claim that human and animal pain or human and animal interests are equal, but only that they must be given equal consideration. We may treat humans and animals differently, but always because of their greater or lesser suffering or their greater or lesser interests and never because they are humans in the one case, animals in the other. That being so, Singer’s moral concern about animal research focuses on two issues: (1) subjecting animals to pain, and (2) painlessly killing animals whose interests are on par with the interests of newborn, severely retarded and hopelessly senile humans.
Let’s consider the second issue first. Singer maintains that many animals — adult chimpanzees, dogs, pigs, cats and mice — have the same level of self-awareness and self-direction possessed by some humans — infants, the mentally impaired and the senile. If we take the lives of the former to advance medical knowledge and cures, we should be prepared to take the lives of the latter as well. Singer does note, however, that there is good reason to stay a killing hand from infant, retarded and senile humans — taking their lives would add to the balance of suffering in the world by grieving their parents, friends, care givers and children and by rendering all of us anxious about our own future. This reason is persuasive enough to narrow Singer’s human categories to severely impaired newborns who have been orphaned or whose parents seek their euthanasia.
To consider such newborns — let us call them marginal humans =AF any differently than animals constitutes speciesism according to Singer. Speciesism, however, is a bias, a preference without rational basis. Isn’t there some rational basis for distinguishing between animals and marginal humans? James Lindemann Nelson is one who thinks there is. He reminds us that:
“The distinction is this: the birth of a ‘marginal’ human, or the reduction of a normal human to a marginal state, is a tragedy; the birth of say, a healthy collie pup, whose potentials are roughly on a par with the human’s is not” (16).
The grief and the pity we experience in the presence of marginal humans reveal just how different they are from non-humans who lack the same potentials but whom we happily accept as normal. By virtue of some physiological accident marginal humans are missing what they might have had, while animals, by physiological nature, “lack” what they never can have. This difference, which seems to constitute a rational basis for considering marginal humans as humans and not as animals, calls into question the charge of speciesism that Singer levels against animal researchers.
We still may ask what difference between human and non-human animals underlies the special consideration and treatment we give to our own species. An answer to this question may appear more clearly if we go on to analyze the first issue of Singer’s concern — inflicting pain. This issue is less perplexing than that of taking life. It is not a matter of comparing the lot of research animals to humans who appear in no way different than many animals, but to humans who exercise self-awareness and self-direction. Although less perplexing, it will require a somewhat longer reflection.
Before beginning that reflection, we should take stock of the dimensions of the issue. Because of anesthesia and analgesic treatments, some 90 percent of animals involved in biomedical research never experience pain; they should cause Singer no concern (17). Still, the 10 percent subjected to painful procedures — many of them animals assigned to studies that seek to understand the mechanisms of pain itself — do pose a problem. Numbers or percentages of themselves never make a moral argument. The point in mentioning these statistics is only to note that Singer, just as he uses marginal humans as a wedge case to argue for considering human and animal interests equally, uses a fraction of biomedical research cases — those in which animals experience actual pain — to challenge the whole research enterprise.
Moreover, animals are used in pain-causing research protocols only after those protocols have survived levels of scrutiny and approval beyond those required for the use of animals in all other procedures. It is not that researchers don’t attach any weight to the pain of animal subjects, but only that they do not extend — as Singer believes they should =AFthe same protection to them that they do to human subjects.
The controversy, then, is about whether or not the pain of some research animals puts them on the same moral footing as humans. One of Singer’s critics, the philosopher Peter Carruthers, notes, “The hardest thing to accept [about Singer’s system] is that the suffering of an animal should have equal moral standing with the (equally severe) suffering of a human being” (18). Hard to accept, but also difficult to refute. After all, pain is pain. Although most people feel that something is amiss if we consider the equal suffering of humans and animals equally, they may be hard-pressed to explain why.
We best approach this issue by examining Singer’s egalitarianism. A recent critic points out that his notion that each individual counts for one and only for one, important as it is to political democracy, has monstrous effects in ethics (19). To consider strangers and members of one’s own family equally when trying to decide how to spend emotional or financial resources strikes most people as heartless and repugnant. Kinship counts. Not even Singer can live under the tyranny of his cold logic. He has been forced by filial feelings to commit more money to his elderly mother, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, than to others whose needs, as assessed from the egalitarian viewpoint, are greater than hers. Singer now confesses that he has begun “to appreciate that the moral life is complex” (20).
Complex, indeed. And, considering the pain of rats and pigs equally with those of our children affronts our moral sensibilities even more than denying comfort to one’s mother for the sake of an unknown person’s suffering. Singer calls our sensibilities speciesist, but speciesism, as we have mentioned, is a prejudice or practice without rational basis. Surely there is some rational basis for considering the suffering of our kin in humanity differently from that of animals and for not subjecting humans to pain-causing research.
That reason is one we have already mentioned in speaking of Aristotle, Aquinas and Kant — we who are humans shape our lives and fashion our world through questioning, deliberating and making free choices. Others who would impose their will upon us do so to our injury, an insult to the capacity for moral decision-making that is fundamental and defining of who we are. For humans, there are harms greater than pain.
This difference seems obvious, and we wonder why Singer doesn’t pay attention to it. It may be because our language has not caught up with advances in cognitive science. Eskimos have dozens of words for varieties of snow, but we have the single word “thinking” and the single word “desiring” to designate two important activities that appear to be quite different in human and animal species. Singer frequently asserts that animals share with us certain capacities — the self-awareness in which we think of ourselves as the same thing in different times and places; the ability to remember the past and anticipate the future; and the capacity for interacting with others. This ambiguous assertion hides an enormous difference between the species. Singer employs key words — self-awareness, past, future, interaction — that mean one thing when used of humans and something else altogether when used of animals.
Consider my dog. When Fatigu* sees me standing at the door with his leash, he begins wagging his tail excitedly and pawing my leg. Fatigu* is certainly aware of himself, remembers past walks, foresees another walk, eagerly desires that walk and obviously interacts with me. He has an interest or welfare that matters to him, an interest that I can serve or thwart.
But what is going on in Fatigu*’s mind? The only way we can know is by judging his behavior, and his behavior tells us only this much: Fatigu* is a conscious knower. In addition to undergoing vital processes such as the formation and nutrition of skeletal and muscular structures, he is aware of himself in the process of knowing things around him. His image of me at the door holding the leash calls up from memory other images of previous outings. The association of images triggers an expectation — If A, then B.” Feelings associated with previous walks give momentum to the expectation, and Fatigu* begins to wag his tail.
Like humans much of the time –when we daydream or drive to the mall on auto-pilot –Fatigu* lives all the time in a stream of consciousness in which he perceives patterns in space and time. He knows the relationships of up and down, here and over there, before and after. Because he can perceive these patterns, he can know “If A, then B.” As anyone will vouch who has walked a dog, this “if/then” knowing is truly astonishing, surpassing much human knowing in quickness and accuracy. Such knowing allows animals to rapidly and effectively win sustenance, bear offspring and, for a short time, stave off predators (21).
Fatigu*’s behavior as I fasten on his leash gives no indication, however, that his knowing and desiring are identical to mine. Neither he nor any dog has ever declined a walk because he foresees inclement weather or notices that his master is weary. What we have said about Fatigu*’s knowing tells us less about any reasoning inside his head and more about a reasonable habitat that “his head is inside of,” a habitat in which there is a dependable relationship between A and B (22). Fatigu* doesn’t seem to be driven by the performance of asking questions which turns such a habitat into a world that is a cause of wonder.
Because of that wonder, my thinking is driven not by the “If/then” link, but by questioning. Questioning lifts me across the threshold between simple consciousness, in which I am aware of myself, and into introspective consciousness, in which I reflect on myself, my feelings and my knowledge. Asking “What if?” involves me in supposing, imagining, having insights and taking responsibility for the truth of what I affirm or deny. It turns a “before” into the past, my fragile reconstruction of what really happened and why. It turns an “after” into my uncertain future, that equally fragile creation that results from my deliberations about what ought to be. It converts desires into values as I take stock, seek to understand and choose to follow or reverse the momentum of feelings in free decisions about what is truly worthwhile. Finally, it transforms my interactions with others into responsible inter-relationships.
Whether animals ever wonder or engage in questioning, with all of its consequences, is highly doubtful. They certainly give no evidence of “What if?” thinking. Singer’s assertion about what they share with us — the self-awareness in which we think of ourselves as the same thing in different times and places; the ability to remember the past and anticipate the future; and the capacity for interacting with others — is ambiguous and misleading. The truth lies in distinctions. Humans and animals alike are self-aware, but only humans are reflectively conscious. Humans and animals alike live in the “before” and “after” of the space-time continuum, but only humans, are, in Darwin’s apt phrase, “utopian creatures” who construct past and future (23). Humans and animals alike have preferences, but only humans form values. Humans and animals alike interact, but only humans do so responsibly.
The fact that human beings possess reflective self-awareness, self-direction and a sense of responsibility not possessed by animals makes a great difference in how we weigh the pain and injury we might cause members of our own species against the pain we might inflict on animals. Humans, as we mentioned, can be harmed by more than pain and suffering. For that reason, we use humans as experimental subjects only when they give informed consent; we use animals in research as long as scientists vouch for their humane care. We guarantee the rights of humans; we safeguard the welfare of animals.
Common sense and “nature alive”
Philosophical realism — the thinking of Aristotle and Aquinas undergirding the use and, at the same time, compassionate care of animals –has been called common sense gone to school. Originally denigrating, this judgment may be construed as a compliment. After all, an important function of philosophy is to reveal the foundations of intuitions and thought patterns that make up the wisdom of ordinary people. Our task is to make common sense philosophically articulate.
It won’t do, however, for us to simply repeat Aristotle or Aquinas or even Kant in a louder voice, as if animal rights partisans are just slightly deaf. The world view of Aristotle and Aquinas was static; they considered the stable essences of beings that they believed had either existed from all time or had been created in one original divine act. Our world view is dynamic; we reflect on populations that emerge and then become extinct in the patient process of evolution. The only way to move dialogue forward is to revisit the humane tradition based on Aristotle and Aquinas in light of contemporary understandings of ourselves as situated within evolutionary nature. Such is the suggestion of Strachan Donnelly, a philosopher at the Hastings Center for Bioethices (24).
Donnelly understands the nature of biomedical inquiry — its method of controlled experimentation, its reliance on the explorations of basic research, its tentative character, even its serendipity. He appreciates medical science not only because it leads to the relief of suffering, but also because it enshrines the human value of advancing knowledge. At the same time, he is solicitous for the well-being of animals. He wants to stake out ground on which scientists and animal rights critics — humanitarians all — should be engaged.
According to Donnelly, “Ethical oughts are crucially determined by what concretely is. ought ” What is, is a world characterized by “the fundamental and ultimately good fact of metabolic existence, life using life” (25). It is a world in which individual creatures live in dependence on others and serve ongoing life, in turn, by becoming their sustenance. The primary and final value in such a world is life itself or what Donnelly calls “nature alive”– the ongoing emergence of individuals into existence and their striving to secure existence.
Secondary to this value of nature alive are a pair of interconnected values — the worth of individuals and the worth of communities. Ultimately, there is no considering individuals and communities apart from one another. Biological individuals depend on the ongoing communities in which they arise, while communities depend on individuals’ flourishing and then perishing. Each requires the other — in life and death — to survive. It is the rule of life that animal organisms, including humans, “harm” other individuals, but this “harm” serves the primary value of nature alive.
We should explain the qualifying quotation marks around the word “harm.” The only unqualified harm that individuals can inflict is the harm of pain. Animals inflict that harm on prey, and some humans sometimes cause unrelieved pain to animals. The harm of death, on the other hand, can be predicated of individual animals only hypothetically — it is a harm that an animal would prefer to avoid if that animal were aware of its impending death. It is not a harm but a boon to the species and to other species.
Extinction of a nonhuman species may be a harm from viewpoint of another species, but that species can be harmed in its own extinction again only hypothetically. Moreover, a species, may actually benefit from being exploited in domestication or used in research. Dogs, for example, are more of an evolutionary success than the wolves from which they have been domesticated, and laboratory mice thrive both in numbers and genetic diversity well beyond their threatened cousins in the field. Far from being a harm, the interdependence or symbiosis of two species in mutual usefulness is a good for both (26).
Donnelly goes beyond Aristotle and Aquinas, who assessed the value of animals as being merely instrumental — that is, coming from their usefulness to humans.
Living beings have value in themselves both because they make up the marvel of nature alive and because communities exist to support their emergence. In addition, they have value because they contribute to the continuance of those same communities.
But, Donnelly stops short of Singer, who finds an identical intrinsic value in all sentient creatures. Depending on the degree of their individuality, purposiveness and relatedness to the world, living beings have more or less value in relationship to each other. It is such complexity — not suffering, as utilitarians maintain — that ultimately lends them their moral status. Of all species, humans are the most individual, most purposive and — since they dwell in realms of meaning and not just in habitats — most related to the rest of the world. For that reason, humans are in the most responsible position regarding all of nature alive. We are “saddled with the task of ethically and judiciously sacrificing or harming life for the sake of the ongoing worldly reality and goodness of life” (27).
Since the ultimate ethical principle, according to Donnelly, is responsible respect for life’s goodness, we must balance judiciously the needs of organic individuals and ongoing communities. This principle doesn’t always entail sacrificing the interests of animal life to human life, but it does provide justification for human experimentation on animals (28). And from it come specific directives to researchers: try to understand and reduce animal suffering and harm; insure that scientific protocols are genuinely important and well-conceived; when possible, use lower forms of life in preference to complex organic individuals; and, provide good care of laboratory animals, respecting even their social being.
Animal rightists fault Donnelly’s view for once again drawing a line between humans and animals. We have seen how Aristotle and Aquinas distinguished humans from animals in terms of rationality and free will, and how Peter Singer, on the other hand, wants us to discriminate between animals that do or do not have nervous systems causing them to register pain — by barking, writhing, etc. — as we do. According to Donnelly, most people draw the line between humans and animals with good reason. Human beings are more individual, purposive and related to the world than animals.
Conclusion
There is, as we have pointed out, something special about human consciousness. Although mammals, like humans, are aware of themselves, none appear to question themselves or wonder what to do with their lives and the world around them. For humans, consciousness is so developed that it has become conscience and life appears to us as one challenge after another in creating what ought to be from what is. Since it is human nature to make ourselves and shape our world through relationships and choices, we know that others act wrongly when they attempt to impose their will on us. We who do not exist to be used by others have a special relationship with anyone in whom we recognize the same capacity. We cannot use another human being for our benefit.
Of course, this difference between humans and animals does not of itself constitute justification for anyone, researchers included, to inflict pain on animals. Just as most people, if asked, would say that the suffering of animals does not have the same moral significance as the equal suffering of humans, so most people, if presented with the opportunity, would flinch at causing any animal pain. They would recognize their instinctive ethical position in the Jewish Talmudic principle (tza’ar ba’ale hayim) prohibiting cruelty and commanding those who would be righteous to remember and alleviate “the pain of living creatures.” Or, returning to what we have called the perennial philosophy of the human/animal relationship, they would agree that our very existence and humanity is at stake in how we use and treat animals (29).
Notes
1. French, Richard D. Antivivisection and Medical Science in Victorian Society. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975, 315-318.
2. Key, Jack D. and Alvin E. Rodin. “Historical Vignette: William Ostler and Arthur Conan Doyle Versus the Antivivisectionists: Some Lessons from History for Today.” Mayo Clinic Proceedings 59 (1984):186-196, 195.
3. French, 405.
4. Linzey, Andrew. “Good Causes Do Not Need Exaggeration.” Animals’ Agenda 20: 24-25, 24.
5. Paton, William. Man and Mouse: Animals in Medical Research. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984, 2.
6. Singer, Peter. “Animal Liberation: A New Ethic for Our Treatment of Animals (2nd edition). New York: New York Review of Books, 1990.
7. Hearne, Vicki. “What’s wrong with animal rights.” Harpers 283:1696 (September, 1991), 59-64. The quote is from Bentham, Jeremy. Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation.New York: Hafner Publishing Company, 1946, 310-311.
8. Singer, 1990, 18-19, and Singer, Peter. Practical Ethics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993, 117.
9. Singer, 1990, 81-82.
10. Bentham, 311.
11. Singer, 1990, 21.
12. Singer, 1990, 36.
13. Russell, Sharon M. and Charles S. Nicoll. “A Dissection of the Chapter ‘Tools for Research’ in Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation.” Proceedings of the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine 211 (1996):109-139, 109.
14. Singer, Peter. “Sense and sentience: We might not need pig hearts if the ban on human embryo experiments were lifted.” The Guardian (August 21, 1999), p. 24.
15. Singer, Peter. “Precommentary: The Significance of Animal Suffering” and “Postcommentary: Ethics and Animals.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13 (1990): 1-60, 46.
16. Nelson, James Lindeman. “Animals, handicapped children and the tragedy of marginal cases.” Journal of Medical Ethics 14 (1988):191-193, 192.
17. USDA. Animal Welfare Enforcement, Fiscal Year 1996, Report of the Secretary of Agriculture to the President of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives.
18. Carruthers, Peter. The Animals Issue. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, 9.
19. Berkowitz, Peter. “Other People’s Mothers.” The Oew Republic 4, 634 (January 10, 2000), 27-37.
20. Beskowitz, 2000, 37.
>br>
21/ Lonergcn, Berncrd J.F. Insight/ New York: Longmans, Green and Todd, 1953, .
22. Budiansky, Stephen.!If A Lion Could Talk. New York: The Free Press,”1998, p. 28.
23. Cited in Budiansky, p. 23.
24. Donnelley, Strachan. “Animals in Science: The Justification Issue.” In Strachan Donnelley and Kathleen Nolan, eds. Animals, Science and Ethics. Briarcliff Manor, New York: The Hastings Center, 1990, p. 8 -13, p. 9.
25. Eonnelley, Strachan. “Speculative Philosophy, thg Troubled Middle, and the Ethics of Animal Experimentation.” Hastings Center Report. March/Aprkl, 1989: 15-21, p. 18.
26. Heffner, Henry E. “The Symbiotic Nature”of Animal Research.” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 43 (1):128-139, 1999.>br>
27. Fonnelly, 1989, r. 20.
28. Fonnelly, 1989, p. 20.
29. Bleich, Rabbi Dr. J. Davkd, “Judaism and!Animal Experimentation,” in Regcn, Tom (ed.), Animal Sacrifices. Philadelphia: Vemple University Press, 1986, p. 61-114.