Some philosophers think that using animals in harmful ways in scientific research is
seriously wrong. They arrive at that conclusion in different ways, working in different
ethical frameworks, and some of the details of their positions are different. Here I
want to discuss a short argument for this conclusion which would probably be
accepted as sound, with perhaps some qualifications, by almost all philosophers who
hold the view that using animals in scientific research is wrong. While I think this
argument is powerful and is an important one to come to terms with, I also
acknowledge that it raises some difficult questions to which I do not think I have any
satisfactory answers at the moment. I shall discuss some of these issues after
presenting the argument.
The argument could be summed up like this. We would not be prepared to conduct
harmful scientific procedures on unconsenting humans with similar cognitive
characteristics to the nonhuman animals typically used in research. So we should not
think it acceptable to do the same thing to nonhumans either.
Here is an outline of the argument.
(1) Given two cases involving treating a being in a certain way under certain
circumstances, if it’s correct to give different moral judgements of the two cases,
then there must be a morally relevant difference between the two cases – a
morally relevant difference either between the circumstances in the two cases or
between the nature of the two beings. (Aristotle’s principle of formal justice,
“treat like cases as like”, Nicomachean Ethics, V. 3, 1131a10-b15).
(2) It would be morally wrong to use unconsenting humans, with similar cognitive
characteristics to those nonhuman animals typically used in research, in harmful
ways for the purpose of scientific research, even if steps were taken to reduce the
suffering they experienced, and even if there were significant prospects of
benefits thereby being achieved.
(3) There are no morally relevant differences between such use of nonconsenting
radically cognitively impaired humans and the harmful use of nonhuman animals
in scientific research which actually occurs.
(4) Therefore, the harmful use of nonhuman animals in scientific research is morally
wrong.
Let me discuss and elaborate on the three premises of the argument in turn.
The first premise of the argument, the formal principle of justice, as I said dates back at
least to Aristotle. Thomas Nagel, in a short essay discussing the question of why we
should be moral, discusses an example where you visit a library where people leave their
umbrellas on a stand near the entrance. You would find it convenient to have an
umbrella, but you do not have one of your own, so you take someone else’s umbrella
without their consent. Nagel considers the question of what sort of argument might
persuade you that you have a reason not to do this. As Nagel observes, the most common
argument used is “How would you like it if someone did that to you?” However, it is not
clear at first sight how this argument is supposed to work. One might imagine someone
replying “If someone did it to me, I’d mind. But fortunately someone else isn’t doing it to
me. I’m doing it to someone else, and I don’t mind that at all!” Nagel suggests that the
answer to this line of reply is that if someone took your umbrella without your consent,
there would be more to your reaction than just your finding it inconvenient and
frustrating. You wouldn’t just mind it, you’d resent it. You’d think, not just that it was
inconvenient for you, but that it could be condemned from an impartial perspective which
you could reasonably expect other members of a civilized society to share. You’d think,
in short, that the action could not be justified from the moral point of view. But taking the
moral point of view brings other commitments as well. Many philosophers have held that
the formal principle of justice is a defining feature of the moral point of view. If you
condemn someone else’s action from the moral point of view, then you are also
committed to condemning similar actions by yourself – unless you can identify a morally
relevant difference. The fact that your stealing an umbrella benefits you, whereas
someone else stealing your umbrella does not, is not a morally relevant difference.
Pointing out this difference would not justify judging the two actions differently from an
impartial perspective. If we think that people are required, from the moral point of view,
to observe certain restrictions on their behaviour towards us, we must also think that we
are required to observe similar restrictions on our behaviour towards them, according to
the formal principle of justice, assuming that the two cases are relevantly similar.
The formal principle of justice has other applications. Another way to state it is that it
rules out arbitrary discrimination. In the nineteenth century it was thought permissible to
enslave people who had dark-coloured skin, but not those who had light-coloured skin.
The formal principle of justice entails that this differential pattern of judgement cannot be
defended unless we can identify a morally relevant difference between the two cases.
Skin colour by itself would probably not be a plausible candidate for a morally relevant
difference. If you wrote an application for a research grant and found that yours was
turned down but another application was accepted on the grounds that you had blue eyes
while the other applicant did not, you’d probably regard this as unfair. If we assume that
eye colour is not morally relevant, then eye colour is not a sufficient basis for
discrimination, according to the formal principle of justice.
Most philosophers take some version of the formal principle of justice to be a basic
feature of sound moral reasoning. And, as my examples suggest, most people in general
seem to believe in something like it.
Let’s take a look at the second premise. In the documentary “Monkeys, Rats, and Me:
Animal Testing”, a researcher called Tipu Aziz discusses some research he has been
engaged in regarding Parkinson’s disease. In the course of his research, he induces
parkinsonism-like syndromes in nonhuman primates by means of opiate drugs. He
maintained that, by doing this procedure on approximately 100 primates, he had
discovered that a certain area of the brain, not formerly associated with Parkinson’s
disease was overactive in the primates with parkinsonism-like syndromes. He found that
by operating on this area of the brain, he could significantly reduce the symptoms of
Parkinson’s disease. He maintained that approximately 40,000 sufferers from Parkinson’s
disease had experienced significant lifestyle benefits as a result of this discovery.
Let’s imagine that I am the director of an institution that looks after cognitively impaired
human beings. These human beings have similar cognitive capacities to nonhuman
primates. They have a complicated social structure and can perform some complicated
cognitive tasks, but they do not use language and are not cognitively more advanced than
a typical three-year-old human child. I have an opportunity to try to learn more about
Parkinson’s disease by inducing parkinsonism-like syndromes in these people by means
of opiate drugs, say about 100 of them. And of course there is always the chance that a
discovery will be made that may bring significant lifestyle benefits to many thousands of
Parkinson’s sufferers. Ought the research to be done?
I assume that if such research became publicly known about, public opposition to the
experiments would be fairly strong. Most people would feel it was an outrageous
violation of human rights. It would be a fairly bold person who would publicly claim that
such research was defensible. Still, as someone might point out, widespread public
opinion is not necessarily correct. It is conceivable that someone might maintain that,
despite widespread intuition to the contrary, such research would be morally justified. I
shall not look into this any further now, though we shall return to the matter later. I am
assuming that there will be a widespread intuition that such research would not be
justifiable. I am appealing to this intuition in support of my second premise. Those who
do not share the intuition may not be convinced, although I shall have something to say to
such people later.
It may be objected that I have unfairly stacked the deck by constructing my case by
analogy to research involving primates. It might be agreed that research involving
primates raises special ethical issues. But mice are far more commonly used than
primates, it may be said. And perhaps it might be claimed that we cannot form a
sufficiently clear idea of a human who is cognitively on a par with a mouse to say much
about a hypothetical case involving such a human. Mice are just too different from us to
perform the appropriate thought-experiment. I would suggest, on the contrary, that it is
not too difficult to imagine a human who is cognitively on a par with a mouse. Mice
experience pleasure and pain, things can go well or badly for them, they are aware of
their environment and can perform some problem-solving tasks, in natural environments
they are social animals. Some humans remain permanently at the cognitive level of a
three-month-old infant, I would dare to say that they are probably cognitively no better
off than a mouse. So I would suggest that, while perhaps we might initially think
otherwise, we can in fact imagine a case involving scientific research on a human who is
similar in all the relevant respects to a mouse. And, in the case of procedures which are
likely to harm the human, I would suggest that our intuitive reaction to such a case would
still be seriously negative. As long as you share this intuition, I suggest, you should
accept my second premise.
Let us now examine the third premise. Is it right to say that there are no morally relevant
differences between research involving radically cognitively impaired humans and
research involving nonhuman animals? It may have occurred to some of you that the
radically cognitively impaired humans might well have had close relatives who were not
radically cognitively impaired, and they might have been upset by the research being
performed. I might make the point that there are many species of nonhuman who are
highly social and appear to care for their close relatives, and the distress they feel at being
separated from their companions and kept captive under laboratory conditions ought to be
factored into considerations about their welfare. Still, it might be said, nonhumans would
not understand the situation as well as the cognitively normal humans would, and the
humans would suffer more at least in this respect. I think it is reasonably clear, however,
that this feature of the thought-experiment, the fact that the cognitively impaired humans
may have had relatives who may have become upset, is not a very strong determinant of
our reaction to it. I could have stipulated that the cognitively impaired humans had no
living relatives. That would have made the case more contrived, but I don’t think it would
have affected our reactions to it much.
Can we draw a morally relevant distinction based on the nature of the beings involved?
The trouble is that I have stipulated that so far as cognitive capacities go, the humans are
similar in all relevant respects to the nonhumans. Some philosophers try to draw a moral
distinction between humans and nonhumans based on their capacity to understand moral
concepts, or their degree of self-awareness, or things like that. But while these
distinctions may be genuine distinctions between typical humans and nonhumans, they
aren’t a basis for distinguishing between the research subjects in the two cases we’re
considering. The only difference seems to be species membership. But discriminating
purely on the basis of species membership alone seems hard to justify. What is the moral
significance of the fact that we are in a particular biological class? Why is it any more
morally significant than membership in a particular racial group?
There is an extensive philosophical literature about this issue. But I think it is at least
reasonably clear that if anyone maintains that there is a morally relevant difference
between the two cases, the burden is on that person to explain what the morally relevant
difference is and why it is morally relevant. Carl Cohen, for example, tries to explain why
species membership is morally relevant. I shall not look into the issue further here, but I
think it is reasonably clear that there is a puzzle here.
So that completes our examination of the three premises. If they are accepted, then the
fourth seems to logically follow. Our only hope of escaping from the argument seems to
be to question one of the premises. In the course of our examination of the argument we
found two possible ways of doing this. The first was to bravely bite the bullet and
maintain that scientific research on unconsenting human subjects was sometimes
acceptable. The second was to identify a morally relevant difference between research on
cognitively impaired humans and research on nonhumans and give a convincing account
of why it is morally relevant. There are many philosophers who find the first option
unacceptable and think that the second task cannot be achieved.
Suppose one of you were to bravely say: “All right, I agree that, in the case of humans
who are similar in all the relevant respects to nonhuman subjects who are widely used,
scientific research on these human subjects is okay. It just so happens that such research
is not accepted by society.” I have yet to meet anyone who maintains this position
sincerely and consistently. To someone who held such a position, it might be pointed out
that, in view of the difficulties of extrapolating from data obtained from a different
species, research on human subjects might sometimes have a better chance of yielding
valuable results. Should we, then, try to persuade people to accept research on cognitively
impaired humans? Many would find that idea quite repellent. As I say, I have yet to meet
anyone who really is prepared to wholeheartedly endorse such a stance.
But the only other way to escape the argument’s conclusion seems to be to identify a
morally relevant difference between research on radically cognitively impaired human
subjects and on nonhuman animals. There have been numerous attempts to identify such
a difference, but none of them have succeeding in gaining widespread acceptance among
the philosophical community. Hence those who would like to find a satisfactory defence
of the permissibility of research involving nonhuman animals are left in a quandary.
So that is why some philosophers think that the harmful use of nonhuman animals in
scientific research is seriously wrong.
Let me now explore some responses to the argument that I have encountered and some
difficulties that are raised by it.
One response that was made last time I gave this talk was that it is quite a radical
argument. After all, the view that being human makes a big difference appears to be very
widely and strongly held in society. The use of nonhuman animals in order to benefit
ourselves in ways that can harm them is very strongly entrenched in our way of life. Most
people seem to find it hard to imagine ever giving up eating meat, for example, and the
argument I have presented would appear to at least raise a serious question about the
permissibility of slaughtering animals for their meat. If an argument leads us to views
that conflict so strongly with what everyone seems to believe, shouldn’t we have some
reservations about it?
My reply to this is that we should not assume that widely held social attitudes are
immune to criticism. It was not too long ago that it was widely held in many societies that
people who belonged to a certain racial group were not entitled to the same sort of moral
consideration as those who belonged to the more privileged racial group, or that women
did not have all of the same basic moral rights as men. Most of us have repudiated such
views today. If we accept that there can be moral progress in this way, then we cannot
rule out the possibility that we stand in need of further moral progress. We must entertain
the possibility that there are grounds for criticizing attitudes which are widely held today.
Last time I gave this talk, someone expressed a worry about why I had used radically
cognitively impaired humans for the purposes of the thought-experiment. She was
worried that I might be somehow suggesting that humans with less cognitive ability are
entitled to less moral consideration.
The answer is that I did not want to suggest that. The reason I made use of radically
cognitively impaired humans for the purpose of the thought-experiment was that if I had
used a thought-experiment involving cognitively normal humans, the likely response
would have been that there are obvious differences between such humans and nonhuman
animals, and I wanted to pre-empt this move. It is interesting that when we are
considering questions of how to treat nonhuman animals, we are often happy enough to
entertain the idea that differences in cognitive ability might make a difference in the
degree of moral consideration to which a being is entitled, whereas when we are
considering questions of how to treat cognitively impaired humans, we tend to find this
suggestion offensive. This suggests that we are engaging in a kind of doublethink – that
we do not really have a clear foundation for the differences between the way we treat
humans and the way we treat nonhuman animals in which we seriously believe. Myself, I
don’t set much store by the idea that cognitive ability is all that morally important. But I
wanted to construct an argument that raised a difficulty for the defender of animal
research even on the assumption that cognitive capacities were in some way morally
important.
Another response I encountered last time I gave this talk is that a tendency to give
preferential treatment to members of one’s own species might be something that has
arisen because it was favoured by natural selection, and hence might be “natural”.
The answer I gave here was that it is not in general valid to infer from the fact that
something is “natural” that it is morally defensible. It would appear to be a possibility,
for example, that the frequent historical occurrences of one tribe invading another tribe,
slaughtering all the men and impregnating all the women, is in part due to a set of
dispositions which have been shaped by natural selection. But if we became convinced of
this, we would not conclude that such behaviour is morally permissible. Normative ethics
goes beyond biology. Also, practices such as animal research or factory-farming are
cultural artefacts and don’t look very “natural”.
Finally, the question arises of exactly how far the argument goes, and here the difficult
questions arise which I do not know how to answer. Animal agriculture in its present
form clearly causes a lot of suffering, and many people who accept an argument like the
one I have given about animal research also say that there is an obligation to boycott the
products of animal agriculture. This may already be an uncomfortable conclusion for
many of you. But plant-based agriculture also causes a lot of harm to animals. When soil
is tilled and crops are harvested by machine, many animals die in the process. Also, many
animals are killed by pesticides. In the course of electricity production, power plants
draw cooling water from local water systems and many fish are killed in the process. In
the United States, over one trillion fish are killed by power plants each year. And of
course, many animals are killed by processes such as land-clearing and timber
production, and so the list goes on. So, for someone who finds an argument like the one I
have presented plausible, there are difficult questions about what civilization ought to
look like, and what the obligations of an individual living in the current civilization are.
On the last point, in the interests of full disclosure I should perhaps mention that I
regularly buy a medication that was tested on animals. The health professionals I have
spoken with agree that it would be very risky for me to stop using the medication, and
unfortunately all the available medications were tested on animals. There is no doubt that
the company that developed the medication did the tests in the hope of eventually
obtaining financial reward from people like me. So, certainly, if the argument I gave is to
be accepted, then there is a question about whether such behaviour can be justified.
The short answer to all of this is that I don’t know of any ethical theory which resolves all
these questions in a way that I regard as fully satisfactory. More work needs to be done.
However, I do not regard acceptance of the status quo as satisfactory either. I believe that
the argument I have given raises important questions which need to be engaged with. So I
hope that you will give serious consideration to the questions raised by this argument.
Thank you for listening.