SHOULD THE GREAT APES BE USED IN BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH? NO
Jean Kazez
Southern Methodist University
In July 2010, the fate of about 200 chimpanzees living on the Holloman Air
Force base in Alamogordo, New Mexico, became a topic of national debate (Frosch,
2010). The primate facility had been created in 2000 as a sanctuary for the chimp
population of the Coulston Foundation, which had closed its labs after being charged
with animal welfare violations over a period of two decades. Now, ten years later,
the National Institutes of Health (NIH) wanted to transfer these animals to the
National Primate Research Facility in San Antonio, Texas, where they would once
again be used in biomedical research.
These apes would join over 160 already in San Antonio, adding to about
1,000 chimpanzees (pan troglodytes) used for research in the US (NCRR, 2007). The
facility’s website explains that chimpanzees were “critical to the development of
vaccines for Hepatitis A and B” and are now used primarily in “developing and
testing vaccines and drugs for Hepatitis C” (SNPRF, no date). According to a careful
investigation conducted by Kathleen Conlee of the Humane Society (Conlee, 2007),
chimpanzees in US labs are also used “as models for human reproduction, malaria,
gene therapy, respiratory viruses, Crohn’s disease, drug and vaccine testing, and
other infectious diseases.” (p. 114) Despite the initial hopes of researchers in the
80s and 90s, chimpanzees are no longer considered viable models of AIDS, since HIV
infection rarely progresses to AIDS in this species.
Hepatitis C research is not easy on chimpanzees, despite the video of
frolicking apes displayed at the San Antonio facility’s website (SNPRF, no date). In
the course of this research, the apes are injected with virus, watched for signs and
symptoms, frequently biopsied (largely percutaneously), and kept in isolation
whenever they’re being studied (Bettauer, 2007). Apes are not natural carriers of
Hepatitis C, which spreads between humans primarily by blood transfusion and
when drug abusers share needles. But they can be infected, and they appear to be
the only non-human species that can be infected—hence the San Antonio facility’s
interest in the Alamogordo chimpanzees.
The proposed transfer led to reintroduction of the Great Ape Protection Act
(GAPA), which was initially introduced in Congress in 2009 with 160 cosponsors
(HSUS, 2010). A descendant of the Great Ape Project, established by Peter Singer
and Paola Cavalieri in 1994 (Singer & Cavalieri, 1994), GAPA would phase out all
invasive research on pan troglodytes and (less important, since they’re seldom used)
the rest of the great apes--bonobos, orangutans, and gorillas. All primates
(comprising about 20 species) already receive extra consideration under the federal
Animal Welfare Act, which requires “a physical environment adequate to promote
the psychological well-being of primates.” (AWA, no date, §2143). Under the CHIMP
act, passed in 2000, chimpanzees came to be favored in another way: if they survive
research, and they’re not useful for further research, they must be retired to a
federally approved sanctuary, not killed (as other animals would be). GAPA takes
the ultimate step: it prohibits all invasive research on the great apes. Passage
wouldn’t put the US in the vanguard; in fact, just the opposite. Starting with the UK
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in 1997, countries around the world have stopped using the great apes in
biomedical research. Only the US and Gabon still support the use of chimpanzees
for medical experiments (Conlee, 2007).
With the 200 chimpanzees bound for Texas, all attention was on the plight of
these animals. Meanwhile, pro-research organizations did their best to redirect
attention to humans who could benefit from continued research. Opposition to
GAPA is strenuous in the biomedical research community (Wolinetz, 2010). If we
care about the human victims of diseases like Hepatitis C (who include, potentially,
ourselves and our own loved ones), then how could we not use the chimpanzees to
find cures?
That’s certainly a good question. I’ll try to answer it in section one, and then
focus on more general issues: Do animals have rights? Do we have obligations to
them? Is animal experimentation ever defensible? In the last section, I’ll explain
why I support the Great Ape Protection Act. (For other views on why apes should be
protected, see Cavalieri & Singer, 1994).
1. Apes, Art, Trees
Seldom discussed when animal research is in question, but obviously true:
we forfeit medical advances all the time, with no special fanfare or debate. For
example, the US funds art museums, instead of channeling every last tax dollar into
medical research. We could raise more money for AIDS and Hepatitis C research by
selling off the treasures of the National Gallery, but nobody thinks we should do
that. Nor is this just a matter of some unique importance possessed by art. The
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regal trees lining French country roads cast shadows that can befuddle drivers and
turn highway run-offs into deadly crashes. Cutting them down would save some
number of lives every year. Likewise, highway engineers know that by reducing
speed limits, thousands of highway fatalities could be prevented. Yet nobody really
thinks the trees must be cut down and the speed limits reduced. All these examples
show that on the whole we reject the idea that saving the maximum number of
human lives is our constant number one imperative. Other things are important
too—art, the natural world, the lifestyle we prefer—and we will continue giving
them their due.
We value art, trees, and fast driving enough to let more people die so we can
have them. Do we also care about chimpanzees to that degree? In fact, more and
more people do. Of course, someone who knows nothing at all about the great apes
won’t have this reaction. But that’s true of art too. The artistically ignorant will
want all money to go to medical research, none to art, but it makes sense to think
funding priorities should be based on informed preferences, not ignorant
preferences. The person who knows nothing about apes just doesn’t know what he
needs to know.
Why do so many informed people attach special value to chimpanzees? For
one, they are our closest non-human relative, historically speaking: chimpanzees
and humans diverged from a common ancestor about 7 million years ago. They’re
also our closest non-human relative genetically, sharing 96 to 98 percent of our
genes, depending on research methodology (NIH News, 2005). In fact, when we
inform ourselves about the great apes, we learn that we are arguably great apes too.
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Vanity makes us resist the classification, but many scientists think that genetically,
and in terms of evolutionary history, it makes good sense for homo sapiens, pan
troglodytes (the common chimpanzee) and pan paniscus (pygmy chimpanzees or
bonobos) to be grouped together (Diamond, 1992).
Chimpanzees have a great deal in common with human beings
psychologically. Like us, they have some level of self-awareness. We know that
because they pass the mirror self-recognition test, unlike the vast majority of
species. They examine their faces in a mirror, instead of searching behind the
mirror for the “other” animal. That alone is no huge accomplishment, but it suggests
that chimps have a sense of themselves, so can be aware of their own plight in a
deeper way than most other animals can. This is not to trivialize what other
animals suffer—we can all tell what our own cats and dogs feel about being trapped
in a small space, stepped on, or hungry. The point is that there are extra dimensions
to chimpanzee experience, making it more like our own.
Chimpanzees can also be taught rudimentary sign languages. An ape being
injected or biopsied could, with sufficient training, literally say he doesn’t like that,
in contrast with other animals protesting inarticulately. Frans de Waal has shown
that chimpanzees have some of the rudiments of morality (de Waal, 2006). Chimps
can empathize with their troop-mates, and (on the other hand) will get angry when
others get more than their fair share—they grasp the concept of fairness. There are
experiments that suggest chimps have a stronger awareness of the future than other
species; they’re more capable of planning and strategic thinking. As Jane Goodall
famously discovered, they use tools and pass on local customs, so that chimpanzees
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in geographically separated troops have different “cultures.” Their social
interactions and way of life are different from our own, but similar enough that de
Waal speaks of “chimpanzee politics.”
We care about chimpanzees for all of the above reasons, but also because
they are an endangered species (IUCN, no date). Native to equatorial Africa, it’s
been estimated that their numbers will have been halved by the end of the 60-year
period from 1970 to 2030, the result of habitat destruction, poaching (largely for the
lucrative bush meat trade), and disease. Now, chimpanzees can be preserved in
zoos, and even in laboratories. So merely preserving the genome doesn’t require us
to stop experimenting on chimpanzees; in fact, the more we breed them for
research, the more the genome can be expected to survive. But what we value is not
just the genome, or the existence of individual chimpanzees. We value there being
communities of chimpanzees freely living their own lives, instead of being our
captives, and living the very restricted lives we impose on them. The more they
dwindle in Africa, the more it will become disturbing to think that the remaining
animals are incarcerated in our labs and infected with our diseases.
Call the argument I’ve just made the “Value-to-Us Argument”. It’s the most
cautious and conservative argument that can be made for the Great Ape Protection
Act. It turns on attitudes we already have—our support for the arts, preserving
trees, and higher speed limits; and attitudes people have toward the great apes
when they inform themselves about them. It gives animals no new-fangled place in
the order of things. It doesn’t so much as assert that we have obligations to
chimpanzees, let alone that they have rights. The argument doesn’t lead in the
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direction of exempting all animals from research, because not all animals have as
much value to us as the great apes do. The reasoning indulges human special
concern for their own near and dear, allowing that apes may matter to us especially
because they are our closest non-human kin. Even with all this caution and
conservatism, we can still make a good case against further experimentation on
chimpanzees.
2. Concern for Animals
But is that all we can say? The argument so far ignores an important fact
about apes. Unlike paintings, they can suffer; they have preferences. We can look
into the eyes of chimpanzees and feel compelled to do things on their behalf. We
seem to have obligations directly toward them, whereas we have no obligations
directly toward paintings. Everything we do with respect to paintings is really for
ourselves or other people.
The fact that apes can feel and want, and that we must do things for their
sake, could strengthen the case I’ve made so far on behalf of the Great Ape
Protection Act—that’s the possibility I’ll be exploring, step by step. And certainly, it
is a case of strengthening, not replacing. There’s no incompatibility between
protecting apes because of their value to us and because we have duties to them
directly.
At certain points in history there has been strong resistance to the idea that
animals have feelings and preferences, and that we have obligations toward them.
In the 17the century, renowned philosopher Rene Descartes argued that animals
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have no feelings whatever—no conscious mental life at all. He thought
consciousness required a soul; and you couldn’t attribute souls to apes or dogs
without starting down a slippery slope and finally attributing souls to insects—
which to his mind would be patently absurd.
Periodically, even today, a philosopher steps up to the plate and tries to
argue that animals see nothing, hear nothing, feel nothing—consciously, that is.
Obviously, signals propagate through animal nervous systems just like they do
through ours. The debate is only about the feeling aspect, or sometimes it’s about
whether animals really have beliefs and desires, as opposed to just having
complicated neural mechanisms that register inputs from the world, and generate
outputs—i.e. behavior.
What about the idea that we have obligations to animals? Again, there have
been philosophers who think otherwise. Immanuel Kant, the great philosopher of
the enlightenment, holds that we have no duty to feed a starving cat or relieve the
pain of a suffering dog for the animal’s sake, since dogs and cats are not (on his
view) the sort of being to which it’s possible to have duties, however much they do
suffer. (He did worry that cruelty to animals might lead us to be cruel to other
humans, so for that reason he did think we should feed our cats and help our dogs. )
As much as they’re philosophically interesting, I’ll set aside unusual positions
that convince almost nobody today (for further discussion, see Kazez, 2010,
chapters 2-3). We’ll assume here the common sense picture—animals do suffer, and
they have other morally relevant mental states as well, such as preferences; and
these things directly give rise to obligations in us, such as the obligation to feed our
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pets, use anesthesia for veterinary surgery, avoid hitting animals on the road, and
the like. Putting all of that in a nutshell, you might say that animals have rights. But
rights talk is open to many different interpretations. And the interpretation makes a
huge difference to the sort of arguments you can make about the great apes. We
need to separate the different shades of rights talk.
Ethicists who think animals have rights in a very strong sense have in mind
what are often referred to as “human rights.” Consider how we condemn research
on non-consenting humans—like the Guatemalan prisoners infected with syphilis
by American researchers in the 1940s (this only recently came to light – see McNeil
2010). If someone asked how the researchers could have been expected to pass up
medical progress on syphilis, we’d simply say they had to, since human prisoners
have rights—so-called “human rights”—and the experiments violated them. If rights
like this were extended to some animal species—and don’t let the nomenclature
make you think they couldn’t be—experimentation on that species would have to be
drastically curtailed or terminated.
Ethicists who hold that animals have rights in a looser sense think there are
conditions in an animal (like pain) that give rise to obligations in us, obligations that
are owed directly to the animal. These could be relatively limited obligations, like
the obligation to ensure that animals used in research receive adequate food,
housing, and pain relief. Or they could be quite extensive and status quo-altering—
as I’ll argue in section four. I’ll call this more challenging view “The Strong Direct
Obligation View,” contrasting it with a “Humane Traditionalism” that allows us to
continue using animals in all or most of the usual ways.
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The Rights View and the Strong Direct Obligation View involve rethinking
our relationship with animals, and giving them more protection than historically
they have been given. To take these ideas seriously, we have to be aware of our own
biases, and try to drop them or at least see beyond them. And clearly we do have
biases. Even if we are attached to our pets, we are prone to think that animals are
“just animals.” Philosophers since the ancient Greeks have tried to capture what it is
to be human in terms of a contrast between human excellences and animal
deficiencies. All cultures allow animals to be used for human benefit in myriad
ways. On a visceral level, humans find some species more than inferior, and actually
repellant. In short, we are “speciesists”—to use a term that entered English in the
1970s: we have a deep-seated bias in favor of the human species and against other
species (Singer, 2009).
Eliminating speciesist bias is such an important step in rethinking animal
ethics that we need to pause here and more closely examine what speciesism is and
isn’t. (1) Clearly we should count blanket disparagement of animals as speciesist:
distaste for fur, tails, feathers, and the like is an obvious bias. If your gut feeling is
“they’re just animals,” that’s surely sheer prejudice. (2) We should also count it as
speciesist when one makes a moral distinction—“we can do X to apes, but not to
humans”—and can back it up with nothing but sheer species: “They’re apes, and
we’re humans, end of story.” We ought to recognize that “human” is simply a
biological category (it means “member of homo sapiens”). How could a mere
biological category, in and of itself, be a status-conferring, ethics-changing honorific?
(3) On the other hand, we shouldn’t assume it’s automatically speciesist to believe
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we can do X to apes, but not to humans, no matter how we arrive at that view.
Overcoming speciesism doesn’t mean we have to see animals and humans as
interchangeable, no matter what the moral issue or context.
With all of that in mind, we’ll now look more closely at the Rights View and
the Strong Direct Obligation View.
3. The Rights View
“Human rights” give an individual a sort of inviolability that imposes
enormous limits and obligations on others. If you have a right to life, then everyone
else has to do things like not driving into you as you walk across the road, not
turning you into an organ bank, even if that would save 10 other people, or 100, and
not using you as protein in a time of famine (think of the Cormac McCarthy
book/movie The Road). In some situations, recognizing and respecting an
individual’s rights will mean sacrifices for other individuals and decreases in the
aggregate of happiness or satisfaction. Extending “human rights”—even the most
basic ones—to animals would clearly be no small matter.
Perhaps the most frequently made argument for the rights of animals is the
“argument from marginal cases” (AMC). This argument takes different forms, but
the common denominator is this insight: humans can have robust moral rights even
if they are not well-endowed with the capacities we most highly prize—reason, selfawareness, moral acuity, creativity, etc. Babies, elderly people with severe
dementia, and people with cognitive impairments all surely have rights.
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To make the rest of the argument vivid, think of a particular child with severe
Down’s syndrome—and call her “Molly.” Molly, we all agree, has strong rights just
like anyone else. Now picture Chuck, a chimpanzee with more or less the same
abilities as Molly—a realistic assumption, given what we know about Down’s
syndrome and chimpanzees. If Molly has strong rights, then how can Chuck fail to
have them too?
The reflexive response most people have to this argument is “But Molly is
human!” Since Molly and Chuck are not in every way the same, we don’t actually
have to think the Chuck has rights, just because Molly does. But that response is
ruled out by the decision at the outset to eschew speciesism. We can’t say that sheer
humanness raises Molly to a higher status, without being guilty of the prejudice we
were trying to steer clear of.
If the AMC is sound, then we should no more use the great apes in research
than we should use impaired children. By producing variations on the argument
that match other animals to other atypical humans, with greater and greater
impairments, we can generate arguments that rule out experimentation on many
other species as well, including all the ones typically used in research labs.
Despite its initial appeal, I think the AMC is shaky. The problem is that it
turns on a problematic implicit (or sometimes explicit) premise: rights proceed
solely from an individual’s abilities, so that if x and y have the same abilities (like
Molly and Chuck) they must have the same rights. We can see this is questionable if
we focus on rights that are less mysterious than our very most basic ones. Legally,
I’m entitled to vote in US general elections, and in my home state of Texas. This is a
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moral matter too, as we can see when we consider that African-Americans had a
moral right to vote in US elections before that right was constitutionally recognized
by the 15th amendment and supported by later legislation. Initially, voting rights
would seem to proceed from abilities. Adults, but not children, have the right to
vote because they’re mentally equipped to choose rationally between candidates,
and children aren’t. For example, a boy of ten has no right to vote, but his 40 year
old mother does.
But now take Grandma, age 90, a woman with fading cognitive abilities.
We’ll assume Grandma has abilities about the same as Boy’s. Does sameness of
ability give the two the same voting rights? Not at all. Not only legally, but morally
too, Grandma has rights that Boy lacks. This is fully explainable without any
recourse to arbitrary categories and pernicious prejudices. Grandma has the right
to vote because it would be morally wrong to apply intelligence tests to determine
who gets to vote. For one, the testing would probably be abused. Furthermore, as
we look ahead to our old age, we’d be disturbed by the prospect of being treated like
children again. The reasons we have to grant Grandma a moral right to vote simply
don’t carry over to Boy.
Molly and Chuck have matched abilities, like Grandma and Boy do. The rights
advocate alleges that they must therefore possess the same moral rights. But now
we can see that the match between their abilities is not decisive. There could
conceivably be a good reason to see a difference in their rights, even if we
scrupulously avoid speciesism. It could be that other factors besides Molly’s
abilities —though not necessarily exactly the ones I’ve discussed with respect to
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voting rights—account for her having basic moral rights like the right to life. And it
could be that these factors don’t pertain to Chuck (like in the case of Boy).
Now, the rights advocate will insist: it might be reasonable to see voting
rights as rooted in a very broad, rich set of facts about the human lifecycle, social
interactions, fairness, fallibility, and so on. But the right to life is much more
fundamental, and seems rooted in an individual’s own inner constitution. And so we
must see the right to life (and other very basic rights) as depending on abilities
alone. But it’s quite possible that appearances, here, are deceptive. It’s important to
emphasize that we can be very serious about rights, and even fervent, even if they
do have a basis in a broad set of facts, and they are not entirely a matter of inner
constitution.
A very different sort of argument for the rights of apes takes a direct
approach, first explaining what gives rise to basic rights in typical, adult human
beings, and leaving children and people with impairments out of the picture.
Ethicists with this orientation tend to think along lines influenced by Kant, focusing
not on elementary sentience, but on attributes like autonomy, self-awareness,
rationality, and morality. But do animals really have “enough” of any of those
attributes? Kant clearly thought not (see Kazez, 2010, chapter 2), but the neoKantian animal advocate points out that we don’t think humans have stronger or
weaker rights, the more or less they possess these attributes; rather, having rights is
a question of meeting a threshold. The argument, then, is that the great apes meet
the threshold too, even though they have much less of each “power” than a normal
human being does. For example, lawyer and writer Steven Wise (2002) has argued
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that the great apes and a number of other highly cerebral species have enough
“practical autonomy” to be rights-holders. Thomas White (2007) makes an
argument in the same neighborhood on behalf of dolphins.
Do animals really meet the threshold for (“human”) rights? At this point in
time, it’s hazy where that threshold lies, and we’re also not so sure about the
relevant abilities. For example, self-awareness is notoriously difficult to study and
has many facets—it’s not entirely a matter of recognizing your body as your own.
Morality also has multiple facets. Do the great apes exemplify the right ones?
Interestingly enough, Frans DeWaal, a primatologist with great esteem for apes,
rejects the rights approach (DeWaal, 2006) “What if we drop all this talk of rights,”
he says, “and instead advocate a sense of obligation?” (p. 77) At least at this
juncture, my assessment is that the Kantian argument on behalf of the great apes
remains in a holding area between the certainly sound and the certainly unsound, so
I won’t be relying on it in my brief for the Great Ape Protection Act. (For further
discussion of the rights view, pro and con, see Sunstein & Nussbaum, 2004).
4. The Strong Direct Obligation View
It seems obvious that people have obligations to animals. You must, for
example, remove the splinter from your dog’s paw, just because your dog is
suffering, and not for any other reason. Almost everyone today will be on board
with that assumption, but few see that it must lead to major changes in the way we
use and treat animals.
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Perhaps this is the predominant “ethic” in our society: we may do just about
anything to animals that meets our own wholesome needs and desires, but we must
not inflict more harm on animals than is integral to meeting them. This ethic says,
for example, that we are permitted to put animals in zoos, because wanting to view
them is perfectly wholesome, and we can’t do so unless they are in cages. But
keeping them in tiny cages isn’t integral to satisfying our desires—they must be in
big enough cages. Raising animals for food and profit is permitted—what’s wrong
with enjoying the taste of meat and wanting to make money? To do both (the
prevailing ethic says) we may castrate bulls and dehorn them and brand them, all
without pain relief. That’s necessary for cattle ranching to be profitable and beef to
be tasty. But physically abusing sick animals isn’t integral to the activity, so it’s
forbidden. Using animals in research is permitted, because the goal is to save
human lives and alleviate health problems; but doing experiments without
anesthesia isn’t allowed, because we can achieve our ends at lower cost to the
animals. The general idea is that as long as we are aiming at legitimate goals
(nutrition, entertainment, life, health, enjoying food, etc.), there is no problem with
what we’re doing to animals. At most, there are problems with how. We should be
using animals for our bona fide purposes without imposing more harm on them
than necessary. This is the position I referred to in section two as “Humane
Traditionalism.”
In reality, I think a much more status quo-challenging ethic emerges, the
minute we start taking it seriously that an animal’s suffering and frustration, etc., do
generate obligations in us. It is actually incoherent to divide our thinking into an
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accommodating “what” stage and a critical “how” stage.” That combination of
indifference and concern is simply inconsistent.
To answer questions about “what”, we have to decide whether causing such
and such harm to an animal or group of animals is warranted, given the benefit to
another individual or group (usually human). How should we make our
assessment?
In his groundbreaking book Animal Liberation, Peter Singer argues that we
should give equal consideration to equal interests (2009, chapter 1). That is to say,
the pain a researcher causes to an ape matters no less than the same pain in a
human being. In effect, we should make our decisions blindfolded, only in light of
facts about costs and benefits, not in light of who will bear them. Accepting the
equal consideration principle doesn’t entirely resolve our dilemmas; we still need a
principle for deciding which costs are “worth it” for which benefits. Singer offers
guidance here as well; his view is that we should judge based on utilitarian ethics,
tallying up total costs and benefits, and going forward with research when the
balance of benefits is as great as we can possibly make it. In short, we should
maximize total good.
Utilitarianism is an extremely controversial moral theory (see Shafer-Landau
chapters 9-10 for further discussion and objections). Even the principle of equality
can be contested, and without reverting to speciesism (see Kazez 2010, chapter 5).
Fortunately, there are some plausible guidelines we can rely upon, without
committing ourselves to quite so much ethical baggage. To anyone who rejects
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speciesism, and accepts that we have obligations to animals, these ought to seem
like appropriate questions to ask, before embarking on a particular experiment:
(1) Will the harm done to individual animals be so terrible—will it involve
such devastating pain, impairment, loss of life, and degradation—that going forward
is intolerable, just about whatever the outcome? (I say “just about,” because we can
all imagine thought experiments that juxtapose great suffering with fantastically
large and certain benefits; one chimpanzee suffers horribly, but we know the result
will be a cure for cancer. Rarely, in real life, do we actually confront such scenarios.)
(2) If the harm to animals will not be “beyond the pale,” then we still want to
make a judgment of balance. Harming 10 to benefit a million is one thing; harming a
million to benefit 10 is another. But even if the ratio is attractive, there are still
questions to be asked. We need to be wary of benefits that look impressive only in
the aggregate. A fanciful thought experiment proves the point. Suppose you can
extract a heavenly perfume—call it “Whiff”—only by torturing one dog for an hour.
A little bit of Whiff goes an extraordinarily long way. In fact, one hour of torture
yields enough for a trillion seconds of human pleasure. Thus, torturing the dog
increases total pleasure in the world, despite the dog’s suffering. Surely that
impressive aggregate, a trillion seconds of pleasure, does not provide warrant for
harming the dog. An aggregate that matters, morally, has to be an aggregate of
benefits (or harms) that matter taken one by one.
(3) We should ascertain whether there is a high probability of future health
benefits, or rather the experiment is most likely just to advance academic careers, or
make everyone look busy, or secure a bigger piece of the funding pie for a particular
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facility or institution. As cynical as it sounds, we must recognize motivations behind
animal research besides the health-related ones that are worthy of respect (Singer,
2009, chapter 2).
(4) It’s not wrong to see experimentation on some species as particularly
disrespectful and cruel. In part, that’s because the different psychology of different
species makes for variation in impact. It’s also not immaterial that death for some
animals has a much higher cost than for others. A young chimp can lose 50-60
years of life by dying in an experiment, and a mouse (for example) up to 3 years.
Given the Strong Direct Obligation View, and abiding by the four
considerations I just sketched, many experiments on the great apes cannot be
justified. Researchers would be wronging apes by performing them. On the other
hand, it would not be impossible to devise an experiment on chimpanzees that is
morally permissible. The animals are not wronged, if the research is performed. So
what does that mean, as far as the legality of future research goes?
5. Why We Should Pass GAPA
First of all, even if, in some cases of research on chimpanzees, the animals are
not wronged, it doesn’t follow that we should do this research. Paintings are not
wronged if we sell them off to advance medicine, trees are not wronged if we chop
them down to prevent accidents. The Value-to-Us argument tells us not to use the
great apes in biomedical research whether or not they are wronged by the research.
They are our kin, they have special value to us, they are endangered: all in all, its the
preference of most well informed people to forego biomedical advances in order to
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treat chimpanzees like special, treasured relics of our evolutionary past, instead of
as tools.
But setting aside the Value-to-Us Argument, there are still other reasons to
pass GAPA. In the real world, we must decide about practices as they exist within
whole institutions and under long-standing law and given other real-world limits.
We don’t have the option of sanctioning only morally defensible experiments, and
ruling out the rest.
An analogy may make this clear. Hypothetically, it is not impossible to
imagine a scenario in which torturing a human being would be permissible.
Manhattan is about to blow up, and to save 25 million we need the bad guy to tell us
the location of the bomb, and we know that torture will coax a truthful confession.
But lawmakers deciding whether military personnel should be allowed to torture
terrorism suspects can’t limit the use of torture to perfect scenarios like that. The
same goes for a death penalty law. If you think in principle a murderer could
deserve the death penalty, it does not follow that it would be right to institute the
death penalty under real world conditions, given all the fallibility and unfairness
they may involve.
The real world setting in which chimpanzees are used for research has to be
considered, not just the in principle conceivability of a defensible experiment. To
begin with, there is no such thing as green-lighting just the rare justified experiment.
If a primate facility owns chimpanzees, researchers can use them to conduct any
experiments they wish. And there is reason to think the experimentation will be
relentless. Considering the cost of maintaining chimps—$300-500,000 over their
20
50-60 year life spans (NCRR, no date)—together with the paucity of available
animals, labs have an incentive to keep animals alive, but also to use them as often at
they can.
Futhermore, oversight and transparency are limited. The committees that
oversee animal research, as mandated by the Animal Welfare Act, are made up of
insiders, not neutral and autonomous judges. They are not so much authorized to
address what is done with animals as to regulate how it is done (Carbone, 2004, pp.
181-3). And even where “how” is concerned, the standards are low, and the federal
statute gives great latitude to researchers. Given what we know about past research
on primates (see Singer, 2009, chapter 2), and what we can still see in recent
undercover videos made by reputable animal protection organizations, it would be
unreasonable to trust that research conditions are now just what they should be
(HSUS Video, no date).
And then there are worries about possible pointlessness. Much of the
research done with chimpanzees in the last twenty years did not have the hoped-for
medical benefit. Chimpanzees were used for fruitless AIDS research, many spending
years living alone in sterile cages, as researchers waited for them to develop the
disease (Wise, 2001, chapter 1; Diamond, 1992, chapter 1). They proved resistant
and their suffering was in vain. There is an ongoing debate about whether
chimpanzees are likely to shed much light on Hepatitis C (Bettauer, 2010; but see
also Lee et al., 2010).
21
Finally, we are not without other methods of preventing Hepatitis C, since
almost all human cases are contracted when drug addicts share needles and as a
result of blood transfusions.
*
So what happened to the Alamogordo chimpanzees? 15 of them were
transferred to San Antonio in the summer of 2009. Once the NIH plan came to light,
politicians of both parties, animal advocates, and celebrities protested. Even
Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico took a strong stand against the plan. On
January 6, 2011, after six months of controversy, the NIH announced that the
chimpanzees would remain in Alamogordo for another two years. The National
Academy of Sciences was asked to study the use of chimpanzees in medical
research.
Meanwhile, another 1,000 chimpanzees continue to be poked, prodded,
infected, biopsied, and isolated, all behind closed doors. The Great Ape Protection
Act is stuck in bureaucratic limbo, and has not yet been put to a vote. In the fairly
near future I suspect the US will join other nations and give full protection from
experimentation to chimpanzees. Whether only because we value them as our
nearest non-human kin, or also because experimentation tends to wrong them, it’s
becoming intolerable to picture healthy chimpanzees being deliberately harmed for
human benefit. (5890 words)
22
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