The need for an ethic regarding our treatment of animals grows with our ever increasing use of them for food, clothing, labour, medicine, research and education. This usage is becoming more mechanised and removed from our daily lives so that we may remain unaware of how inhumane it has become despite it’s importance to the human economy. This removal from daily experience has meant that cruel practices often go uncriticised in public debate. However, philosophers have been discussing the nature of our obligations to non-human animals since ancient times.
Recent moral theories that have elaborated on how we ought to treat animals have largely moved along two axes The first rely on utilitarian claims that we should minimise suffering and maximise happiness of animals because they have the capacity to feel; the second on deontological claims that because animals have ‘ends’, they too have inalienable rights that we should not transgress. Both these streams of thought are part of the ‘first extension’ of moral theories that deal with the equality of human beings, by extending that reasoning to other species.
Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism is the ethic that judges the rightness or wrongness of an action by it’s consequences for utility. Utility, according to Jeremy Bentham is based on “the greatest happiness principle”, in that actions are right in proportion to their promotion of happiness. Bentham saw the significance of this theory for our behaviour towards animals in that causing the suffering of animals was wrong because it was our moral obligation to promote happiness. Sentience, the ability to feel pleasure or suffer, is the defining criteria that warrants moral obligation. It is supposed that sentience entails having interests, and thus as our duty to maximise happiness, we must takes its interests into consideration.
This method of deciding moral issues was meant to alleviate all the problems associated with a rigid set of universalisable rules such as Kant espoused, that may sometimes lead to bad consequences. For instance, a ‘thou shalt not kill’ rule may prevent one from alleviating the suffering of a being when there is no prospect of recovery. Utilitarianism is thus thought incompatible with a rule-oriented Kantian ethic because it does not espouse absolute moral principles, actions being determined by circumstances. However, Kant proposed that we should treat the ends of others as we would treat our own, which is perfectly compatible with the utilitarian claim that “everyone counts for one and none for more than one” (Hare paraphrasing Bentham: 235)
Peter Singer, in All Animals are Equal (1974) argued that the basic principle of equality that we already apply in our dealings with other human beings can validly be extended to include other sentient beings. Singer, like Bentham, compares the liberation of animals from the “tyranny” of human usage to other liberation movements including the emancipation of slaves, and equal rights for women, both of which were initially considered unthinkable. we
Singer puts a lucid case against the traditional excuses we have used to exclude animals from the realm of consideration. He marks the fact that differences in our ability to reason, to use language, to form intentions based on learning are morally irrelevant, because such criteria may not be possessed by all humans, and indeed may be possessed by some animals even to a greater degree that some humans. Singer postulates a gradation of awareness amongst sentient beings that puts some humans on par with some animals. For instance, the intellectual capacity of a dog is evidently more advanced than the new-born human infant. If it is the case that “possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human being to use another for his own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit non-humans” (Singer 1974: 32) Thus both Singer and Bentham see no clear cut line between humans and animals.
The greatest strength of Singer’s utilitarianism is it’s justification of equality. Singer makes it clear that we cannot continue to embrace any notion of equality with consistency if we are not willing extend equality to animals.
we can only be logically consistent if we accept animals into the realm of consideration, or else reject the notion of equality for humans also.
Deontological or rights theory
In utilitarianism, no being has a ‘right’ to preferential treatment over any other, it is their interests that is paramount. Deontology is that moral framework that takes values to be independent of outcomes. As such, it is the values themselves that determine right behaviour, not consequences.
Kant’s theory of ethics espoused the intrinsic worth of human beings as ‘ends-in-themselves’ based on our ability to reason. Kant supposes that the ability to reason allows us to conceptualise our ‘ends’, and this somehow separates us from beings who are unable to conceptualise their ends, though he grants they may have them. While it is the relevance of reason to moral worth that Singer takes to task, it is Kant’s notion of inherent worth based on ends that animal rights theorist Tom Regan adopts in his Case for Animal Rights.
Even if humans were justified in claiming our superiority to animals in every respect, would that give us the right to use other species as we will? Tom Regan thinks not. If anything, our superiority as the possessors of language, consciousness or souls should rather increase our duty towards them.
Suppose it is true that all the other species utilize species “below” them…from this fact it does not follow that we humans ought to utilize the species below us, or that we do nothing wrong if we do so. Neither values not moral principles follow logically from facts…(Regan 1994:25)Regan’s position is for the abolition of all animal usage by human beings. His view is that, since all living beings have ends, they are ‘ends-in-themselves’ and as such have inalienable rights to life and liberty. He espouses the notion of the ‘inherent value’ of all sentient life. Regan shows that we already accept such a notion for human beings, and that there is no valid reason for not extending that to animals. Indeed, Regan’s extension of moral consideration to animals argues against the very same claims to difference that Singer’s does.
Regan sees the wrong in human use of animals not in the fact that we cause them to suffer, but that we think we have the right to do so, to “view animals as our resources”, as means to our ends (Regan 1985:13).
It is not just a refinement or reduction that is called for, not just larger, cleaner cages, not just more generous use of anesthetic or the elimination of multiple surgery, not just tidying up the system. It is complete replacement. The best we can do when using animals is not to use them. (Regan 1994: 24)Regan establishes the rights case by systematically excluding the claims of theorists who deny that animal deserve moral consideration, just has Singer has done.
Bernard Rollin agrees that if we are willing to attribute inherent value to human beings, regardless of their personal characteristics, then we must logically extend that to animals. Inherent value arises, for Rollin, out of the biological natures of living beings: He attributes to them a ‘telos’, “the infringement upon which matters greatly to them, and the fulfilment of which is central to their lives.” (1994:30)
One of the benefits of a deontological approach to animal ethics is that it stems from a fixed principle. Thus Regan can afford to be abolisionist in his stance towards animal usage, because from the notion of intrinsic worth it follows that no transgression of a beings right to respect will be brooked.
Critique
When we are making judgements about what is right or wrong treatment of others, human or animal, within a utilitarian framework, it is the consequences of our actions for the interests of those individuals that we should take into account. This is what Singer calls the “principle of consideration of interests” This principle does not entirely discount human usage of animals, where it is judged that the benefit to humans outweighs the harm to any individual animal, and thus can be used to justify animal use in medical research. The supremacy of the greater good over the suffering of the individual is a common criticism of utilitarianism.
Peter Carruthers writes that this flaw is ‘counter-intuitive to…questions of distributive justice” (1992:27)
Since all that utilitarianisn regards as mattering, in the end, is total…utility, the intense sufferings of a few can in principle be justified in terms of the marginal benefits of many (1992:27)Another criticism of utilitarianism put forward by Carruthers and others, is that making moral judgements based on the outcomes seems to place an enormous burden on the individual to always be making conscious choices regarding everything. The difficulty of predicting outcomes becomes immediately obvious. Quite often animal based research that has shown promise in the theoretical stage, has not given the great result it was hoped, so lives may have been expended unnecessarily.
Bernard Williams says he ‘suspects’ that utilitarianism makes the notion of human integrity meaningless. Personal preferences are supposed to be overlooked in favour of utility. Williams understand good actions as requiring a personal commitment to certain values that acting out of utility seems to deny the need for. He suggests that utilitarians might overlook the importance of personal commitments to personal happiness, when they put utility towards general happiness in advance of personal projects, and that personal happiness is possibly as important to acting well towards others as is the happiness of others.
The Deontologial approach to ethics using the notion of intrinsic worth has been criticised by Singer for its vagueness. Singer considers appeals to intrinsic worth to be detrimental to the consideration of the rights of animals because he sees it needs an appeal to some common characteristic. Singer seems to imply a ‘slippery slope’ of commitment to a separation of moral worth based on characteristics that threatens to undermine consequentialist morality. However, Regan denies the relevance of personal characteristics in deciding moral worth, the intrinsic value of individuals coming from beyond personal talents. He identifies that value in the fact that we are all the “experiencing subjects of a life”(Regan 1994: 23)
Despite the fact that rights theory and utilitarian theory have different means of encompassing animals in the realm of moral consideration, they do manage to agree that is their end. Essentially, the similarities between animals and humans, in particular sentience, are the grounds by which this equality of consideration is based. However, for Regan it is the fact that we are all “the experiencing subjects of a life” that make us equal; while for Singer we are equal by virtue of our having interests (especially that of avoiding pain). What they do wholly agree on is that the first extension of moral consideration to animals is the logical progression of other liberation movements, and that by espousing such a view one is committed to act on it. As Regan says, “philosophy is no substitute for action” (Regan 1994:24)
Bibliography
Carruthers, P 1992 The Animal Issue, Cambridge University Press, NY: USA
Hare, RM 1999 “Why I am only a demi-vegetarian” in Jamieson, D (ed) Singer and his Critics, Basil Blackwell: UK
Kant, I 1994 “We have only indirect duties to animals”, in Environmental Ethics, Pojman, L (ed), Jones, Bartlett and Sons: USA
Regan, T 1985 “The case for animal rights” in In Defence of Animals, Singer, P (ed) Basil Blackwell: UK
Rollin, B 1994 “Sentience is the criterion for moral worth” in Environmental Ethics, Pojmnan, L (ed), Jones, Bartlett and Sons
Singer, P 1998 “All animals are equal” in Environmental Philosophy: from animal rights to radical ecology, Zimmerman, M (ed) Prentice Hall
Singer, P 1976 Animal Liberation, Englewood Cliffs: NJ
Williams, B “Two examples” in Utilitarianism: For and Against
Women must see that there can be no liberation for them and no solution to the ecological crisis within a society whose fundamental model of relationships is one of domination - Rosemary Radford Reuther
It is no coincidence that social justice movements like animal rights and human rights should find many parallels to reaffirm their claims of validity. There is also a case for a unique relationship between feminist and ecological values: not only do the goals of the environmental movement have much in common with the feminist struggle to free womyn from the domination of a patriarchal system that also subjugates nature, but that the domination of nature is akin to the domination of persons. Linking these two struggles can be mutually reinforcing.
Ecofeminism is difficult to define because it is so diverse. However, ecofeminist thought does have a common thread: that there are important correlations between the domination of women and the domination of nature and the implications are “crucial to feminism, environmentalism and environmental philosophy”1.
Karen Warren identifies eight important womyn-nature connections. The first is a historical link, whereby patterns of domination have stemmed from the end of the matriarchal period in Europe marked by invasion from the east. Ancient Greek culture is also held as historically responsible in establishing the dualist and rationalist traditions that continue today. These historical links have been continually reinforced throughout history, but most notably by the establishment of a mechanised view of nature as promoted by Descartes in the 16th century.
The second womyn-nature connection identified by ecofeminists is conceptual. Val Plumwood points to the value dualisms and hierarchies within our language and thought which pair values such as ‘man/womyn’, ‘reason/emotion’, ‘mind/body’, ‘culture/nature’ where the first are identified as the norm or superior, the second as aberrations or otherness.2 Accordingly women in giving birth and mothering are equated with nature and the body, men extract themselves from nature by engaging in “rational” projects. Feminists maintain that though birth might be a natural occurrence, the circumstances in which it occurs is social, as too is child-rearing. Ynestra King: “the process of nurturing an unsocialised, undifferentiated human infant into an adult person is the bridge between nature and culture”4. Some theorists have seen the gendered differences in our lives to have given women a unique way of seeing the world, a “different consciousness” that increases their respect for nature.
The third womyn-nature connection used by ecofeminists includes finding empirical evidence for their claims. Health risks to women, first world development policies, animal exploitation in factory farms and the practice of meat-eating, pornography and rape, are some of the diverse range of cultural phenomena identified as evidence of patriarchal domination. Some more radical theorists see womyns identification with nature as complying with that which oppresses, yet some womyn have chosen the spiritual dimension of identification with nature with its recognition of the value of indigenous beliefs that have often been decimated in the dominator culture.
Symbolic connections found in religion, art and language are the fourth sphere of womyn-nature connections. These social structures perpetrate many symbolic devaluation of the feminine, including the identification of the body as impossibly non-spiritual, or the only source of value for women (especially in art). Language reinforces the link between women and nature by using the same exploitative phrases to describe both: “nature is raped, her secrets are penetrated”.
Epistemology is charged with being male-biased and the source of the fifth womyn-nature connection analysed by ecofeminists. Philosophy has been implicated in maintaining the separation between humans and nature, and in perpetuating the view that nature is purely instrumental. Ecofeminist analysis will require us to re-examine many philosophical notions that we take for granted. Reason, rationality, knowledge, objectivity, ethics and what constitutes the moral self will need a radical rethink. Marti Kheel sees an affinity with deep ecology here, where “the emphasis of both philosophies is not on an abstract or ‘rational’ calculation of value but rather on the development of a new consciousness for all of life, they call for an inward transformation in order to attain outward change”3
The political connections between womyn and nature are far ranging: from health, to the treatment of animals, to the peace and anti-nuclear movements. Womyn are clearly an important voice in these movements and, in my experience, are often there in greater numbers than men.
The seventh womyn-nature connection dealt with by ecofeminst analysis is an ethical one. Theorists point out that environmental ethics as formulated in the mainstream are “problematically anthropocentric or hopelessly andocentric”. Ecofeminists suggest alternatives ethical theories, including an ‘ethic of care’ stemming from the notion of care we learn to give and receive as part of the parent-child relationship, reciprocity, kinship, animal rights, and social ecology perspectives.
The final womyn-nature connection is a theoretical one. Ecofeminist theory is seen as a valid alternative to the consequentialist / deontological dichotomy: an ethic not based either on weighing outcomes to achieve the “greatest happiness”, or setting inflexible rules. They make no claims to be the only alternative, but have some common threads with deep ecology, social ecology and Leopoldian land ethics.
The significance of ecofeminism lies within and without environmental ethics. Like much feminist critique before it, ecofeminism points to a new way of formulating mainstream thought. Importantly: “Can mainstream philosophy generate an environmental ethic that is not male-biased?” Many ecofeminist theorists suggest that it cannot because it is deeply entrenched in the dominator model of patriarchal culture. If it cannot, then it remains the task of alternatives like ecofeminism to dissect the fundamental premises of mainstream philosophical analysis and theory, and to show how it might be different.
Unless you have been living in a closet for the last 20 years, it can hardly have escaped your notice that many people perceive the world to be in environmental crisis. In Australia alone we have vast tracts of farmland rendered useless and dead through salinisation; we have agricultural runoff, trawling and climate change destroying the Great Barrier Reef; we have less than 5% of old growth forests remaining. We have a kangaroo cull quota of over five million while introduced hoofed animals that outnumber the human population 10 to one are pulverising our marginal ecosystems beyond repair. In Queensland we have the highest rate of land clearing in the western world, the fifth highest in the world if we were a country. Globally, climate change has resulted in the hottest 14 years on record since 1980; yet we continue to use fossil fuels (indeed our use of them increases yearly) despite the knowledge that the carbon rich pollution that results is a major contributor to this climate change.
Globally, biodiversity is decreasing at an alarming rate:
70% of the world’s fish species are either fully or over-exploited. One third of all fish species are threatened with extinction.
14% of the world’s 242,000 plant species are threatened with extinction.
11% of the world’s 9,600 species of birds are threatened with extinction
11% of the world’s 4,400 mammal species are threatened with extinction
This decline in species can inevitably be traced to over exploitation or negligent use of habitat by human beings.
In the face of these sobering facts, it is difficult to see what difference philosophy can make. However, ethical theories can help make clear our concerns by attempting to show that what we feel is right or good is also logically valid. That our feelings of moral outrage are justified.
A study carried out by the Wilderness Society in 1996 found that most Australians do value wilderness, only 12% thought economic growth was of greater importance. The study found that:
there was strong and widespread agreement…(that) ‘wilderness areas should be conserved for their own sake, not because people want to use them’ and ‘ we have a duty to future generations to conserve wilderness areas (1999:2)There are obviously deep contradictions in our society when most people value nature, yet are acting within a system that is detrimental to it.
Roderick Nash elucidates the two views that promote human obligations to preserve nature:
first, some people believe that it is right to protect and wrong to abuse nature…from the standpoint of human interest…But the more radical meaning…is that nature has intrinsic value and consequently possesses at least the right to exist. (1989:9)The first view is what has been called anthropocentrism, or human-centred ethics; the latter covers biocentrism and deep ecology. Nash sees this more radical way of viewing nature as part of the evolution of ethics. He observes that “environmental ethics is revolutionary; it is arguably the most dramatic expansion of morality in the course of human thought” (1989:7) He also observes that the idea, to most people, is still ‘incredible’. However, so too was the idea of freeing slaves, women’s equal rights and the rights of indigenous peoples. Every milestone in the evolution of ethics, in the words of John Stuart Mill, has been met with ‘ridicule, discussion, (and finally) adoption’ (in Nash 1989:8) Paul Taylor also sees the acceptance of ‘life-centred’ rather than ‘human centred’ ethics as having the potential for a “profound reordering of our moral universe” (1998:72)
Before I go on to discuss the more radical premises of environmental ethics, I would like to say a little about the enterprise of ethics in general. The main purpose of ethics, as I see it, is to make clear to us the reasons for what we do. When it comes to other human beings, this is a relatively easy task. We assume that other people are very like ourselves - we accept that they feel pain and pleasure and have the same basic needs as we do. We are able to put ourselves in the place of another because we know what it feels like to be a human being. It is on this premise that we rest our obligation to treat others well, hence we have the ‘golden rule’ that we should ‘do unto others as we would have them do to us’. Thus we value human life. We can call this value an intrinsic one because it is not merit-based, it rests on no personal quality or talent, just the virtue of being human. So even human beings that are medically brain dead are still accorded some moral consideration even if that consideration involves turning off their life support to preserve their dignity as persons.
Peter Singer has shown us that it is not difficult to extend the realm of moral consideration to other sentient, or feeling, beings because we can empathise with them. We can imagine what it feels like to be a rabbit whose eyes are being washed with a caustic substance, what it feels like to be a monkey deprived of its young and incarcerated in a small cage for the duration of its life. Singer accords value to the lives of animals because:
This last point is what rights thrusts have called a point-of-view that amounts to a purpose or and end to their lives.
However, Singer voices some doubt about the usefulness of speaking of life having ‘intrinsic value’. In his essay All Animals Are Equal 1974, he suggests that intrinsic value “takes the problem back one step, because any satisfactory defence of the claim…would need to refer to some relevant capacities or characteristics that all and only humans possess.” Given that there is no such characteristic, to use intrinsic value to substantiate a claim necessitates including all of life, including non-sentient life, which Singer is loath to do. However, nineteen years later, in the 1993 edition of Practical Ethics, Singer does accord animals intrinsic value, but sees any further extension of the concept as ‘problematic’. Hence Singer’s view of environmental ethics is restricted to the instrumental: preserving the environment protects the interests of sentient beings.
Singer draws the line of moral consideration at animals, while plants, trees, rocks, rivers and mountains remain only as useful to sentient life. There is room in this theory to accommodate caring for the environment, despite the fact that we cannot know what it is like to be a tree or a river. Singer encourages assessment of our idea of luxury, and a measure of pleasure based not on consumption, but on developing human relationships.
Others seek to justify our obligation to preserve the environment beyond the needs of sentient life. When deep ecology speaks of nature having ‘intrinsic value’ they seek to find value in nature that is not attached to the needs of life forms. Paul Taylor claims that judgements based on merit are a human cultural phenomenon, a form given to nature based on our value system. Inherent worth or intrinsic value judgements, on the other hand, have no grounding in culture. If a thing has inherent worth, it simply does, you believe it or you don’t, but no evidence can be brought forward to defend the claim. The ‘good’ or ‘end’ of an organism life exists independently of our valuing it.
it is the good (well-being, welfare) of individual organisms considered as entities having inherent worth, that determines our moral relations with the Earth’s wild communities of life. (Taylor 1998:73)Taylor’s life-centred ethics seeks to expand the realm of moral consideration to include all life, using the notion of the inherent worth of life as it’s justification. Being alive, he says, involves having a ‘good of one’s own’. That good is the “full development of (one’s) biological powers”, through the realisation of the life cycle. There is no need for a life form to have awareness of this end for it to exist.
I take it that trees, for example, have no knowledge or desires of feelings. Yet it is undoubtedly the case that trees can be harmed or benefited by our actions… we can help or hinder them in the realization of their goodTaylor’s theory overlaps with deep ecology when he speaks of the interconnectedness of life being vital to the realization of individual good. Holmes Rolston III accords individual life value because of this interconnectedness. For Rolston, individuals have ends-in-themselves which cause them to value their own lives intrinsically, but individuals also serve the system that supports them. The ecosystem and the biosphere as a whole is credited with a higher respect because not only is it instrumental to the lives of individuals, it is the source of new species, or kinds. Individuals and species increase their kind, but the biosphere increases kinds. The biosphere is a creative force. Inanimate life and non-life are all valued intrinsically in this theory. It is ’short sighted’, he says,
to say that the only value in the system is the production of life…the astronomical and geological processes are precursors to life, but that does not reduce them to mere instrumental value. Nature is not inert and passive until acted upon…by life and mind. Neither sentience nor consciousness are necessary for inventive processes to occur (1988:198)It is the creative potential, or ‘inventive processes’ of the biosphere that Rolston identifies as the “root of all value” (1988:198)
It is difficult to comprehend how something so apparently inert and insensitive to what happens to it, like dirt for instance, could have intrinsic value. Dirt doesn’t have interests in the Singerian sense: it can’t suffer. Dirt doesn’t have a goal, an end that wants realising that would give it value in Taylor’s theory. It appears to be the mere by-product of natural processes a resource for life.
Dirt can be accorded value in Taylor’s system if one accepts that “commitment to certain normative principles” (to a moral code) need not involve validation by empirical truth or facts. Taylor gives up claims to comprehensive reason for confirming beliefs. This is not without precedent because, as CS Pierce points out, human beings often use a combination of experience and reason to fix their beliefs. Additionally, comprehensive reason has been used to justify some heinous crimes and makes egoism seem entirely plausible. But egoism does not offer protection for animals or nature, or even for other human beings except as they are resources for the pleasure of the egoist.
Respect for Nature, then, is an attitude informed by beliefs, based on experience and intuition. This is the tack that some ecofeminist philosophers take when they identify feelings, compassion and caring as the source of morality. Indeed, when one thinks about the right or wrongness of despoiling wilderness, it is a feeling that something good will be lost by doing so that first arises. John Rodman describes this sensation when he says:
I confess that I need only stand in the midst of a clear-cut forest, a strip-mined hillside, a defoliated jungle, or a dammed canyon to feel uneasy with the assumption that could yield the conclusion that no human action can make a difference to the welfare of anything but sentient animals…An appreciation and respect for nature arises, for Rodman, as a sensibility developed through experiencing the facts of nature and reflecting on the feelings that arise form those experiences.
Rodman is in good company when he refers to the feelings of awe inspired by nature. Paul Davies, astrophysicist and physics populariser sees microphysics, astronomy and chemistry as “fine tuned to such a stunning degree (that) a hidden principle seems to be at work, organising the cosmos in a coherent way.” Mike Corwin, another astrophysicist wonders:
our very existence appears to be the merest happenstance. Any significant change in the initial conditions would have ruled out the possibility…(in Rolston 1988:193)Getting back to valuing the dirt, Edward O Wilson, biologist, describes the awe which he associates with the valuing of nature:
think of scooping us a handful of soil and leaf litter…this unprepossessing lump contains more order and richness of structure, and particularly of history, than the entire surface of all the other (lifeless) planets. It is a miniature wilderness…Every species living there is a product of millions of years of history, having evolved under the harshest of conditions of competition and survival. Each organism is the repository of an immense amount of genetic information… Each of the species has a distinct life cycle fitted to a portion of the micro-environment… The individuality of each is programmed by an exact sequence of nucleotides…these species have evolved as independent elements for thousands of generations…This is the creative process that Rolston describes. The path from accepting that this is wondrous to formulating a moral code that defines how we ought to behave towards the dirt (or non-living nature in general) appears to amount to wanting to care, and feeling that caring is the right thing to do. I don’t know if this amounts to according non-living nature intrinsic value, but it certainly defines the setting for a code of conduct towards nature. The idea of intrinsic value in non-living nature remains problematic.
However, if one is prepared to accept that nature and the universe itself may be intrinsically valuable, it could indeed result in the “profound reordering of our moral universe” that Taylor hopes for. Practically, one would expect to see radical changes in our use of the planet. Perhaps the influence of this ‘deep’ appreciation of the creativity and wonder of nature has already been felt in the values that underlie the Endangered Species Act, The Wilderness Act and The World Heritage Convention.
The intrinsic value of nature is a given to the more radical environmental protectionists like the Earth First! group whose spokesperson Dave Foreman professes:
every living thing in the system has intrinsic worth and a nature-given right to be here…we must constantly extend the community to include all the other beings - four-legged, winged, six-legged, rooted, flowing etc…they are their own justification for being, they have inherent value, value completely apart from whatever worth they have for…humans (in Nash 1989:92)Earth First!, with their slogan “No Compromise in Defense of Mother Earth” and their campaigns of monkeywrenching (tree spiking, destroying roads, decommissioning earth-moving equipment, defacing billboards etc) believe themselves to be performing “the most moral of all actions: protecting life, defending the earth” (Foreman in Nash 193) They defend their actions as morally justified, but more importantly as morally required, as duty. There is no doubt to Earth Firsters! That the realm of moral consideration extends beyond sentient beings.
Turn off the tv and think for a moment.
Despite the fact that most of the species that have ever existed are now extinct, never before in the history of the earth have extinctions occurred at such a breathtaking rate: we are causing it. Every year more than 20,000 species, evolutionary history, disappears forever down the plug-hole with our toxic waste (except that the toxic waste comes back to haunt us, but no Dodo ever has…) 20,000 species but countless individuals.
The species that, by small mercy we find useful, survive in a living hell, either subjugated to our will at every turn, and/or in such an unnaturally manipulated form that they are no longer able to fend for themselves or indeed live a decent, pain-free life. The domestic animals and pets that we have bred to suit our purposes may owe their existence to our interfering use of them, but what kind of existence is it? Deformed by breeding, commercial poultry for instance are subject to bone disease (amongst myriad other breeding-related deformities) which result in many of them suffering extreme pain as they grow at a ridiculously accelerated rates to become our next chicken-burger. We become the living graves of others, subjugating their most basic interests, that of life, to our most trivial tastes.
We keep nature captive everywhere. We cage and beat animals for food, sport and fun. We put fences around forests and call them national parks while over the fence we raze that same forest to the ground so that we can torture more cattle to feed our spurious taste for the flesh of other beings. We ‘cull’ our native animals so that we can replace them with introduced ones. The hypocrisy of the fact that National Parks and Wildlife are responsible (either directly or in the issuing of permits) for killing the most wildlife is truly mind-boggling.
The biodiversity of nature after earth’s previous extincitions was largely preserved by species enduring in small numbers in ‘refugia’, usually enclaves of tropical rain forest that survived the heating or cooling of the planet. Yet rainforests are disappearing more rapidly than any other bio-region, ensuring that after humans have finished with, the Earth will remain a biological desert for eons to come. Does this sound the death knell for nature?
So this is civilisation, this is what the free-market with its insatiable growth fixation, has driven us to become. We are aliens in Gaia, we are no longer part of the ecosystem, we think ourselves lords over it. We have become alienated from it, cocooned in our electronically enhanced concrete prisons, where we endure life so that we may occasionally be entertained and distracted from how truly soul-destroying it is. The result is that we are often unaware or uncaring about how we have, as a species, fucked up the natural world. We don’t see ourselves as part of it anymore, we are mere parasites living off it.
The earth was once gloriously diverse with nature. Yet every place that we have infested we have left our destructive footprint. Easter Island is probably a case in miniature of what most environmentalists see is happening to the world writ large.
Easter Island was first encountered by human beings during the fifth century when a boat, probably blown off course in a storm deposited its human cargo. The island is remote and hosted a limited but endemic range of species: 30 types of plants, no mammals and few insects, lizards or fish. The climate was not suited to the traditional diet of the new arrivals, tropical fruits and vegetables, so they subsisted on mainly sweet potato and chickens. As a consequence, they were permitted the luxury of leisure time because neither of these food stuffs required much work to provide.
The clan structure was the basic social unit, around which ceremonial activities worked. It is thought that these ceremonial activities became the driving reason for all other activity on the island, inducing a sort of intense nationalism that warranted wars in the end. It was the competition between these clans that is credited with the collapse of the islands environment and subsequently its human inhabitants.
All that remains on the island today are the infamous Easter Island ‘heads’ which became the symbols of power and hence prompted the destruction of all other values (including ecological ones) to that power. The statues were carved from a quarry, the production of which must have taken up a great deal of time and provided ‘useful’ work to the population. The island was heavily treed and these trees were used as rollers to transport the statues from the quarry. As the population rose (to an estimated max of 7,000 in 1550), clans would have proliferated, and prompted the escalation of statue production. Yet when the Europeans first landed on Easter Island in the 18th century, they discovered a number of unfinished statues in the quarry, and the island was treeless except for a few inaccessible specimens in the crater of an extinct volcano. It appears that culture went mad, ultimately destroying itself as it stripped nature bear to feed its irrational desire for growth and competition.
Captain Paul Watson, in The Politics of Extinction, compared the ecological destruction of the earth to the hull of a ship, each species a rivet:
If I were to go into my engine room and find my engineers busily popping rivets from the hull, I would be upset and naturally ask them what they were doing. If they told me that they discovered that they could make a dollar each from the rivets, I could do one of three things. I could ignore them. I could ask them to cut me in for a share of the profits, or I could kick their asses out of the engine room and off my ship. If I was a responsible captain, I would do the latter. If I did not, I would soon find the ocean pouring through the holes left by the stolen rivets and very shortly after, my ship, my crew and myself would disappear beneath the waves.The last option is the only sane one. Capitalists still maintain that a cut of the profits is more important while paying lip service to ‘green’ ideals, governments often wish it would all go away. Yet while things change slowly in public policy, destruction continues unabated in most respects. Sixty-eight percent of people opposed Jabiluka uranium mine, yet it went ahead. Despite an exhaustive public consultation process that demonstrated widespread opposition to it, genetically engineered crops are now being grown in Australia. The majority of people want nature preserved, yet the Vegetation Management Act at remains unproclaimed and unenforced while Queensland forests fall at the highest rate in the Western world. We say we respect life, but it remains only partial so long as it excludes the rights of animals and nature to be protected against our selfish whims. Is looking on in horror all we can do? Do we remain Earth parasites? Or do we kick the butts of the world’s oppressors by uniting our personal commitments with our public actions, and become truly integrated within ourselves and with the natural world on which we all depend. Of course we kick those damned butts, because if we don’t we all go down with the sinking ship.
There will come a time when the world will look back on vivisection in the name of science as they do now to burning at the stake in the name of religion.
Dr Henry Bigelow, Professor of Surgery, Medical School, Harvard UniversityWhen dealing with the moral issue as to whether it is wrong or not to use animals for experimentation, we often find that the issue is clouded by the supposed costs and benefits of such experiments. We must decide firstly, if animals are worthy of consideration, and if they are, whether their suffering is justified in terms of human interests, and finally if human interests are really being met by such experiments.
For the purposes of this article, I will use the words ‘experimentation’ and ‘vivisection’ as interchangeable, since vivisection means the “cutting of life”, and experimentation with dead animals does not raise the same issues of suffering.
Are animals worthy of moral consideration?
Peter Singer, in All Animals are Equal 1974, argues for the extension of moral consideration to animals. Singer states that the basic principle of equality of consideration that we already apply to human beings, regardless of their abilities, can validly be extended to other sentient beings. Singer sees the liberation of animals as being consequent of other liberation movements, such as the women’s movement and the civil rights movement. The change required rests on a profound rethink of contemporary values.
Prejudiced attitudes, Singer notes, are often based on defining what is ‘different’ about the subject being excluded from moral consideration. The intellectual superiority of humans, in our capacity to use language, to reason, and to form intentions for the future based on knowledge have been use to differentiate us from other animals. Yet even some human beings, infants and the elderly, do not meet this criterion. Indeed, the intellectual capacities inherent in a cow may well exceed that of a new-born human, yet we would never think of using infants for food or medical experiments.
If possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use another for his own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit non-human? Singer1979:36Even if we were justified in claiming our superiority to animals in every respect, would that give us the right to use other species as we will? Tom Regan thinks not. If anything, our superiority as the possessors of language, consciousness or souls should rather increase our duty towards them.
Suppose it is true that all the other species utilise species “below” them…from this fact it does not follow that we humans ought to utilise the species below us, or that we do nothing wrong if we do so. Neither values not moral principles follow logically from facts…Regan 1989:p25Singer suggests that when we are making judgements about what is right or wrong in our treatment of others, human or animal, it is the consequences of our actions for the interests of that individual that we should take into account. Animals have a lot in common with human beings, physiologically, so we can make assumptions about their good or suffering extrapolated from what we know about ourselves, as well as on behavioural evidence. Singer makes it clear that this does not mean that every group granted moral consideration should be treated equally - it is questionable that a amoeba has consciousness, when compared to a human its awareness would be minimal, and there is no doubt that humans suffer simply by being aware of the possibilities the future might hold. Yet non-awareness does not give us carte blanche to use animals as we like. As basic as their responses might be, they are capable of feeling pain, and clearly pain is not in the interests of a good life. “The question”, says Jeremy Bentham, “is not Can they Reason? nor Can they talk,? but, Can they suffer?” The ability to suffer is “prerequisite for having interests…if a being suffers there can be no moral justification for refusing to take the suffering into consideration”(Singer 1979:31) This is what he calls the “principle of consideration of interests”.
That we continue to disregard the interests of animals, Singer claims, is simply prejudice: “speciesism”. That we continue to eat, kill and maim animals is evidence that we are willing, through pure self-interest, to put our most trivial tastes above the most fundamental interests of another being, that of continuing to live.
Singer makes it clear that we cannot continue to embrace any notion of equality with consistency if we are not willing extend equality to animals. In my opinion, this is the strongest part of his argument. In order to accept it, one has to accept a gradation of awareness amongst living things that will put some humans on par with some animals, we can only be logically consistent if we accept animals into the realm of consideration (or else reject the notion of equality for humans also).
Regan, on the other hand, suggests that because animals can be said to have a purpose, or end to their lives then they should be accorded at least the right to exist. He sees Singers utilitarian approach as possible justification for practices like vivisection because if it could be proved to be of more benefit to a greater number than it causes harm, it would be morally okay. Either way, both theorists believe that animals should be included in the realm of moral consideration.
Is animal suffering justified in terms of human interests?
If one accepts Singer’s and Regan’s argument that animals are morally considerable, then the question remains: is animal suffering justifiable in terms of human interests? In order to accept that it is, one must accept that there exists a kind of moral hierarchy. Many people do believe, for various reasons, that humans are the apex of evolution and that it is our right to use other creatures below us. This is part of the value system underlying the scientific use of animals to solve human problems. However we might want to deny that animals are like ourselves, and so set ourselves above them we are caught in a paradox: If results based on animal experimentation are to be considered valid for humans, we have to claim that animals are like humans. Yet if animals are like humans, how can their suffering be ignored?
It is certainly in the interests of humans to discover the causes and cures for the various diseases that increase human suffering and death world-wide. If it could be shown that human suffering has been decreased by the use of animals in experiments, then by this world-view, animal experimentation would be justified. If it could be shown that the same vital interests of humans could be met without the use of animal experiments, would the denying of the vital interests of animals to achieve that same ends then be immoral?
Regan says that there is no direct connection between facts and value. If that is the case, then the rightness or otherwise of the use animals should remain unchanged despite changes in technology. When Thomas Koch used guinea pigs to prove his hypothesis about the source of tuberculosis, it may have been possible by other means such as epidemiological studies and improvements in microscopy. Yet the practicality of his method may not have been informed so much by what was the best method, or the right method, but by the prevailing scientific culture that accepted vivisection as valid for historical reasons.
Descartes made the claim, in the seventeenth century, that animals do not feel pain, and are mere automaton because they cannot speak and “the reason why animals do not speak as we do is not that they lack organs but that they have no thoughts”(in Masson 1994:33). Vivisectors contemporary to Descartes were known to make fun of those who pitied creatures as if they felt pain. Cartesianism remains alive an well in the scientific lab today, where the steps towards being a true scientist involve denying feelings of compassion for other species staring with dissection to teach anatomy in schools.
The actions of experimenters are not simply the function of best scientific method, but can also be informed by desires such as being accepted by their peers, self-glorification and economic gain. Dr E.J.H. Moore, Vice-President of Doctors of Britain Against Animal Experiments, says “The pressure on young doctors to publish and the availability of laboratory animals have made professional advancement the main reason for doing animal experiments.” Such pressures led one doctor to describe the lab rat as, “an organism which when injected produces a paper.”
In making a judgement about the moral validity of experimental use of animal it is useful to differentiate the purposes of experimentation. Bernard Rollin identifies five types of experiments involving animals:
Where pure science involves the use of animals to discover things about genetics, cell functioning etc, this information is not necessarily even applicable where it relates only to the animal on which the research is being conducted. Many doctors and researchers now question research done on animals being valid even for these purposes because of the artificial nature of experimentation. Caged and restrained animals are subject to stress which is known to effect their behaviour and may well effect biochemical changes that render research invalid.
Even more doubt arises when this information is extrapolated to human beings. Even amongst the closely related (and frequently used ‘animal models’) rats and mice, there is only a 70% correlation in the effect of toxins. The similarity between humans and other primates has been used to justified their use in experiments, yet this very same similarity recently (1999) led the New Zealand parliament to make illegal their use in research laboratories.
Professor Pietro Croce, MD, speaker at the 1995 review of the Animal Research Act:
An experimental model of the human being does not exist. Every species, all the varieties of animals and even individuals of the same species are different from each other. No experimentation carried out on one species can be extrapolated to any other, including man. To suppose that such extrapolation could be legitimate is the main reason for the failure and sometimes for the catastrophes which are inflicted upon us by modern medicine, especially in the area of drugs.There are many “alternative” methods; about 450 have been counted. However, their number is theoretically unlimited as every research endeavour presupposes devising a method specific to that research, able to guarantee a credible result, in harmony with scientific logic, repeatable ad libitum and capable of satisfying the “criterion of falsification” - all qualities missing from the vivisectionist method.
A great deal of consumer product testing does not even pretend to meet vital human needs, but serves rather as an insurance policy against laws suits. The two most commonly used tests, The Draize eye-irritancy test and the LD50 (Lethal Dose 50 percent) cause prolonged pain. The former involves the application of irritant substances to the eyes of rabbits who are often blinded, the harmfulness of the product is then assessed rather subjectively by examination. The LD50 involves the force feeding of substances to rats, mice or guinea pigs until half the population dies. This may take from days to months, the intervening period marked by convulsions, vomiting, diahorrea and many other forms of physical effect, not to mention the mental anguish accompanying this suffering. Clearly the development of a new consumer products is a trivial desire when compared to the vital interests of an animal not to suffer. Britain, in 1998, became the first country in the world to ban cosmetic testing.
The military frequently use animals as victims to measure the efficacy of their ‘products’, weapons. Donald J. Barnes worked for the US airforce doing nuclear research for sixteen years. He would irradiate the brains of rhesus monkeys and then compel them to perform tasks as they gradually died over a number of days or weeks. “I saw a lot of pain, I saw a lot of suffering…It’s a horrible thing to watch an animal die form radiation poisoning, to just waste away with bloody diahorrea and vomiting. It’s gruesome.” It wasn’t until he was asked to perform an experiment for funding reasons that he began to question his role. “I didn’t want to be seen as a poor scientist. I didn’t want to be castigated by my peers.” He was fired as as a consequence began to question the justification for his research: “I asked myself how I had helped humans by vivisecting monkeys, and I realised I couldn’t answer that question.”
Barnes came to the conclusion that a great many other researchers and Doctors have come to: “that all research using non-human animals…(was of no benefit to humans and) must be stopped immediately”
In the case of toxicology testing of industrial and commercial chemicals, it has been claimed by some that
This represents not only a useless sacrifice of animals, but it’s an alibi that enables the chemical industry to sell products which are classified as harmless or almost harmless, but are in reality very harmful in the long run, even if taken in small doses. Many pesticides classified as belonging to the fourth category, meaning they can be sold and used freely, have turned out to be carcinogenic or mutagenic or capable of harming the fetus. Also in this case, animal tests are not only ambiguous, but they serve to put on the market products of which any carcinogenic effect will be ascertained only when used by human beings - the real guinea-pigs of the multinationals. And yet there are laboratory tests that can be used, which are cheaper and quicker than animal tests; in vitro tests on cell cultures, which have been proving their worth for years already. But the interests of the chemical industries which foist on us new products in all fields may not be questioned.Prof. Gianni Tamino, 1987, biologist at Padua University, Italian Congressman quoted in Ruesch 1989
Are human interests really being met by the use of animal models?
While some claim that animal research is a flawed methodology and of no benefit to human beings, others go further to claim that animal research may actually harm human interests. They make this claim because vivisection draws a lot of funding that might be beneficially used in other research or in preventative measures, such as clinical human studies, in-vitro research, autopsy studies of disease, computer modelling, epidemiology, human tissue analysis and research, research of how to stay healthy so as to prevent disease, and educating the public so that may change their behaviour to reduce risk.
Why am I against vivisection? The most important reason is because it’s bad science, producing a lot of misleading and confusing data which pose hazards to human health. It’s also a waste of taxpayer’s dollars to take healthy animals and artificially and violently induce diseases in them that they normally wouldn’t get, or which occur in different form, when we already have the sick people who can be studied while they’re being treated.Dr. Roy Kupsinel, M.D. 1988, medical magazine editor, USA.
They also claim that the continued use of vivisection delays the progress of science:
Flemming saw penicillin kill bacteria in petri dishes and tested it on rabbits. It did not work. Rabbits excrete penicillin very rapidly in their urine. Flemming discarded the drug thinking it to be useless as a systemic medication. Years later he had a very sick patient and since he had nothing else to try, gave the penicillin. It is fortunate Flemming’s initial tests were not on guinea pigs or hamsters, it kills them. Howard Florey, the Nobel Prize winner credited with co-discovering and manufacturing penicillin, has stated: “How fortunate we didn’t have these animal tests in the 1940’s, for penicillin would probably never been granted a license, and possibly the whole field of antibiotics might never have been realized” (Guardians newsletter, spring 1999)The most important claim against vivisection for medical purposes is that it has often resulted in death or injury to humans because animal models prove nothing about how substances may affect human beings. The most famous is that of thalidomide (a morning sickness medication released in the mid sixties), which despite the requisite animal testing prior to release, proved to cause extensive birth abnormalities in humans that it did not in the test animals.
Summary
The main objections to vivisection are:
I have dwelt on the objections to vivisection because, for the most part, it is accepted as morally justifiable in mainstream scientific community. Medical science asserts that the sacrifice of animals in the name of research is a necessary evil to serve the greater good of human interests. Researchers using vivisection claim that without the benefit of animal testing, many people would have died. Some of these benefits, as listed by the group Americans for Medical Progress, include: antibiotics, vaccines, gene therapy, insulin to control diabetes; anti-coagulants, anesthesia, and neuromuscular blocking agents, chemotherapy for cancer patients, pacemaker implants to treat cardiac patients, discovery of the HIV virus and development of drugs, organ transplantation techniques, medication to control hign blood pressure,”…Surgery of any type would be a painful, rare procedure without the development of modern anesthesia allowing artificially induced unconsciousness or local or general insensitivity to pain…millions of dogs, cats, and other pets and farm animals would have died from anthrax, distemper, canine parvovirus, feline leukemia, rabies and more than 200 other diseases now preventable thanks to animal research.”
Although many of these claims can be countered by the alternatives argument, there is still the problem that the use of alternatives may have cause delays that would have resulted in more human suffering. However, it can be counter-claimed that reliance on animal use has slowed the development of more humane methods of research. It is a catch-22 situation.
Conclusion: Are animal experiments ever justified?
If this judgement were to be made based entirely on facts, then neither side of the argument would have compelling proof. Animal experiments do appear to have been the only means at the time of achieving some of the medical advances that many people lives rest on today. Besides the moral objection to the use of animals, anti-vivisectionists would claim that every one of these medical aids could have been achieved by alternative means.
The continuation of vivisection as a valid source of scientific information relies, in my estimation, on an entirely anthropocentric and instrumental view of life. Yet even within the human framework, some justification may be given to the ceasing of animal use in experiments because of the adverse effects it has on our humanity:
George Bernard Shaw speaks to this argument well:
You do not settle whether an experiment is justified or not by merely showing that it is of some use. The distinction is not between useful and useless experiments, but between barbarous and civilised behaviour. Vivisection is a social evil because if it advances human knowledge, it does so at the expense of human character.Many theorists, and animal advocates like Singer and Regan, seek to expand the realm of moral consideration to include other animals and even all of life. On the former point of view it is clearly wrong to use animals when they can suffer and are end-in-themselves that should be accorded the right to exist. On the latter, perhaps even the organisms that cause the diseases should be accorded rights. It is essentially this conflict of interests that defines the moral dilemma of vivisection. Yet it remains obvious to any feeling person that the exploitation of animals for human benefit is not morally justifiable, and where life and suffering are involved, it is morality, not practicality, that should win the argument. What are we if we are not moral animals?
Bibliography
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