Beginning today and for the next few weeks I will be engaging a formal debate here with philosopher Paul Bali on the morality of the scientific use of animals. Dr. Bali teaches philosophy at Ryerson University, in Toronto, and has taught at the University of Toronto, Trent University, and Ontario Tech. He has a PhD in Philosophy (2003) from the University of Toronto, where he specialized in Religious Epistemology. Animal Ethics has been a focus of his written work and activism since 2014. He posts most of his work at PhilPapers.org. For myself, you may consult my About page for detail, but in short, my PhD is in Intellectual History (including history of philosophy) and I have published several peer-reviewed works in philosophy, including on moral theory (in The End of Christianity).
The procedure followed is that Bali would begin with an opening statement. Which is provided below. I would then reply in a following blog post; and he in turn; and so on until the debate closes. We aimed to do three entries each (for six in all). After completing which I thought it might be fruitful to go one more, but Dr. Bali preferred to close after three, and continue with informal discussion in comments. Each entry was limited to roughly the same word count of only 1200 words (not counting references). There was no assigned pace—so we could each research our next entry before submitting it, and ensure as careful a wording as possible.
Comments on each of the entries in this debate series are open to anyone who submits polite and relevant remarks. Patreon patrons retain the privilege of their comments publishing immediately. Everyone else’s will wait in a moderation queue that I will have to check and clear every few days. Debate topics like this do have a tendency to attract intemperate tinfoil hat, so I strongly urge commenters to keep their remarks short and to-the-point, respectful and professional, and constructive; citing sources for fact-claims is highly preferred.
Complete Index to This Debate:
- Against the Scientific Use of Animals—Part I by Dr. Paul Bali
- In Defense of the Scientific Use of Animals—Part I by Dr. Richard Carrier
- Against the Scientific Use of Animals—Part II by Dr. Paul Bali
- In Defense of the Scientific Use of Animals—Part II by Dr. Richard Carrier
- Against the Scientific Use of Animals—Part III by Dr. Paul Bali
- In Defense of the Scientific Use of Animals—Part III by Dr. Richard Carrier
Previous debates of most similar kind include my debate with atheist Jennifer Roth, Is There A Secular Case Against Abortion? The Carrier-Roth Debate (2000), and my debate with atheist Mike McKay, Is Happiness the Goal of Morality? And my most pertinent blog article is Meat Not Bad.
Against the Scientific Use of Animals
by Paul Bali, Ph.D.
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First, my thanks to Dr. Carrier for agreeing to this debate, and for hosting it.
Definitions
- Definition 1: animal
My focus is on non-human sentients: experiencers of e.g. pain & pleasure, satisfaction & frustration, attraction & aversion. Much animal experiment [AE] uses animals widely agreed to be sentient. It’s assumed in the premises of institutional welfare protocol, and in the epistemic ends of the experiments: in, for example, rat studies on depression, or addiction research on macaques. I don’t know whether C. elegans, fruit flies, or zebrafish embryos are sentient in this sense. I modestly assert the hypothetical: if they are, then my arguments against AE will tend to include them.
- Definition 2: experiment
My focus is on invasive research on animals confined & controlled from birth to death: the majority of AE ongoing in our college, corporate, & government labs. (One exception: free animals caught for lab use, a small percentage of the annual tens of millions.)
Our Use Is Morally Contradictory
We use them because they’re like us; yet our use “fails to accord them any moral status even approaching our own.” [1]
Many of the lab’s dominant “animal models” are highly sensitive social mammals: cognitively curious, thus stressed by dearth of stimuli in microisolator racks; traumatized by social disruption, as in maternal deprivation experiments, or in the regular separation of bondeds in the gauntlet run from breeding hub to kill-chamber. They may bond with lab personnel, too—their handlers who betray them all the while, yet who may find killing them “psychologically difficult”—thus does the NRC Guide advise sensitivity of supervisors delegating killing duties. [2]
Suffering Is Endemic to the System
Only “necessary” pain should be inflicted, goes the common rule [3]; yet necessary here means for achieving the study’s epistemic endpoints. Thus “no procedure whatever, no matter how painful, lethal, or cruel, is ruled out.” [4]
- Much toxicology prohibits analgesia as it may confound results.
- When testing a novel analgesic, pain may be inflicted first; and a control group whose pain is unalleviated “is scientifically justified but should be explained” to the researcher’s IACUC. [5]
- Electro-shock is common, still, in Psychology’s manipulative “learning regimes”. The Forced Swim Test is standard for quantifying its recipient’s vitality—its will to live—by how long they struggle in a pool. In one study, rats were considered exhausted “when they failed to rise to the water surface to breathe within a 7-s period.” [6]
- For mice subjected to trauma & sepsis research, such as Gentile et al’s multisystem trauma model that “combines pressure-controlled hemorrhagic shock, long bone fracture, soft-tissue injury, and laparotomy with cecectomy” [7], their small size may preclude use of interventions such as mechanical ventilation or effective surgical operation. [8]
- Animals in extreme distress may be relieved, if only by death; but first must be noticed by personnel. “[S]ome species may mask signs of pain until they are quite severe”, the NRC Guide advises, “making it difficult to monitor and evaluate the animal’s state when it is present.” [9] A cancer study may call for “a humane endpoint” when the subject’s tumors exceed a stipulated size, yet internal tumors “can be particularly challenging because there is not an obvious tumor to measure”. [10]
- Even administering analgesia/anesthesia/euthanasia requires stressful capture, handling, and [often] needling—unmitigated by a belief that human patients enjoy, that it’s for their own good. One review of 80 studies found that even routine handling and blood collection significantly stressed lab animals. [11]
Yet pain is a narrow (albeit bright-red) band on the spectrum of harms.
Consider the confinement. Set aside the worst, like a mouse immobilized in a stereotaxic device, or a rabbit collared for a Draize test. Consider that floorspace in a standard mouse cage is 280,000-times smaller than the mouse’s natural range. [12] The NRC Guide allows 1.5 square feet of floorspace for rabbits up to 2 kgs—so, they’ll never run; and 16 inches high—so, they’ll never jump. [13]
Consider our sexual control of animals: of individuals, including castration, said to cause “little or no physical impairment” [14]; and of the lineages we genetically hobble into often-dubious models of human disease. Mice are naturally resistant to the SARS coronaviruses, but the Jackson Lab assures clients it’s prepping a fitting transgenic mouse colony: all K18-hACE2 transgenic mice die within seven days when intranasally inoculated with a human SARS-CoV strain. [15]
Animals Are Innocent
These harms are undeserved and unconsented to. They are inflicted on beings wholly in our care, for our benefit (at best).
In research on e.g. obesity & drug abuse, we harm them to undo harm we’ve brought on ourselves. How much disease have we self-inflicted via toxins unleashed in our ongoing biosphere-wide experiment with industrial chemistry? Toxins, note, that harm also our free animal neighbours, and which we pre-test on their lab-confined relatives.
The total benefit of AE may exceed the harm. In a subsequent post I’ll address the Utilitarian case for AE, but I’ll say now: without deontic limits, Utilitarianism reduces to absurdity. There are bad things one shouldn’t do, despite the benefit, and harming the innocent is high on that list.
These animals are innocent in a rich connotative sense: “experimentally naïve” juvenile virgins, typically, and “model” for their meekness, like the beagle favored in dog AE, or the ubiquitous Sprague Dawley rats, those “small, clean, gentle and easily caged animals” who “can safely and easily be handled.” [16]
Yet they’re innocent, also, in the stricter, minimal sense—they don’t deserve it.
The old Temple bled-out the Innocent for the same reason we sacrifice in our pristine labspace—for human flourishing. The old Cult was ineffective, perhaps, its gods non-existent or indifferent. A cargo cult, then, to today’s Lab: they aped our central rite sans comprehension of the mechanism.
Thus has the Cult advanced: we have, now, sound reason for demanding naïve victims! The scientific sacrifice is sometimes efficacious, thus more moral than the ancient cult, no?
Or: today’s is efficacious, thus worse. Competent at last, a fulfillment of the old.
Or: today’s shares an ancient efficacy. The Sacrifice seeks power by exploiting steep gradients. The cult’s gradient is harder to quantify than a D-cell battery, but it may be: the victims’ innocence versus the evils imposed—the blood on albino white. It may be: the horrors imposed and the banality of the imposers, our retreat into an agentless language where
Electrodes are inserted, formalin is injected, arteries are tied off, holes are drilled in skulls, and mice are enucleated, all in the passive voice, with no human performing the actions. Animals are not blinded by anyone, but an ocular end point is reached. . . .The struggling, cries, bleeding, repetitive behaviour, moans, agitation, anxiety, pain, fear, depression, and vomiting from animals may be deemed of no relevance to the researcher and thus be linguistically expunged from reality. [17]
The gradient may be: the decency of lab personnel, and the degradations they enact; the noble aims of our researchers, and the de facto brutality.
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See Dr. Carrier’s reply.
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Endnotes
[1] Joel Marks (2010). “Innocent and Innocuous: The Case Against Animal Research.” Between the Species 10: 100.
[2] National Research Council (2011). Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals, Eighth Edition (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press): 124.
[3] U.S. Code of Federal Regulations, Title 9 (Animals and Animal Products), §2.31; cf. USDA Final Rules and CustomsMobile on Title 9, Chapter 1, Part 2, Subpart C (Research Facilities).
[4] Marks (2010): 107.
[5] Swapna Mohan and Patricia L. Foley (2019). “Everything You Need to Know About Satisfying IACUC Protocol Requirements.” ILAR Journal 60.1: 54.
[6] H.A. Lee et al. (2014). “Onion peel water extracts enhance immune status in forced swimming rat model.” Laboratory Animal Research 30.4: 163.
[7] Julie A. Stortz et al. (2017). “Murine Models of Sepsis and Trauma: Can We Bridge the Gap?” ILAR Journal 58.1: 93.
[8] Stortz et al. (2017): 99.
[9] NRC Guide (2011): 121.
[10] Stephanie D. Lewis, Judy M. Hickman-Davis, and Valerie K. Bergdall (2016). “Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee Considerations Regarding the Use of Virus-Induced Carcinogenesis and Oncolytic Viral Models.” ILAR Journal 57.1: 89.
[11] Jonathan Balcombe, Neal Barnard, and Chad Sandusky (2004). “Laboratory Routines Cause Animal Stress.” Contemporary Topics 43.6: 42-51.
[12] Garet P. Lahvis (2017). “Unbridle biomedical research from the laboratory cage.” eLife 6:e27438: 2.
[13] NRC Guide (2011): 59.
[14] NRC Guide (2011): 117.
[15] Summarizing 2007 work by McCray et al. at the University of Iowa: Qiming Wang, “hACE2 transgenic mouse model for coronavirus (COVID-19) research,” The Jackson Laboratory News & Insights (24 February 2020).
[16] Pennsylvania Society for Biomedical Research, “Why do we use albino rats?”
[17] The Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics (2015). Normalising the Unthinkable: The Ethics of Using Animals in Research. Andrew Linzey & Clair Linzey, Eds (p. 45).
Mr. Bali I have a question for you. When most people think of animal testing they think of instances where the testing is for the betterment of mankind (humans).
I’m curious if you take the same position on testing of animals when it is being done for the betterment of the species being tested. An example might be pet products designed to cure or improve the health of a particular species. But it could also be lab experiments designed to determine the environmental impact or harm being done to a particular species so that lawmakers can be equipped with the information needed (in the form of scientific studies) to improve the long term greater good of that species.
I guess what I’m trying to get it is at the heart of your objection the idea that we’re using other animals to improve our own lives (i.e. self-serving), or if you’re just categorically against the testing regardless of who the beneficiary might be.
Also, dietary, welfare, cognition, and health care R&D for animals (including industrial animals, commercial animals, and pets). This is a question I wanted to get to as well. I had planned to raise it but don’t have word count in my first reply, which had to address broader issues first; but I have material on this prepared that I expect to bring up in coming entries.
Dr. Bali, I do tend to lean probably closer to your side on this issue than Richard conceptually, but I do want to make some pushback.
You argue that we use animals as analogs for us but then don t accord them the same moral standard as us. But I find two key flaws with this argument. One is that by your reasoning we should also treat computer models as if they are persons. We are generally using animals as a living, physically embedded model of the human body. We actually don’t care about their relations to us in a lot of ways: In fact, in many cases, we would be better off if we had a pile of cells that reacted like humans to, say, medicines or cosmetics on a chemical level, but didn’t experience pain or have social systems. In fact, animal experimentation is practically fraught precisely because the analogy isn’t very good.
But, also… if animals are like us morally, is it not also reasonable to argue that they may have collective duties to other moral actors? We cannot know if a rat would want to be able to help us feel better; does it necessarily follow that we must assume it does not consent? We can be very confident that, say, a dog would love to do something to make its packmates feel better; are we not giving it an opportunity to do so? After all, there are humans persons who participate in medical trials without their consent: We call them children. As long as the parents consent and it doesn’t violate standards like being against their best interest, it is considered ethical to experiment on children. Why could we not extend that same logic, but further, to the animals under our control? Obviously this couldn’t be extended in an unlimited fashion, but the problem is it seems as if you are arguing for essentially no experimentation of any kind.
I would point out to you what Murray Bookchin pointed out to the deep ecologists: Too narrowly anthropomorphizing animals is actually insulting to them precisely because they don’t have the same nature that we do. It can debase both man and wolf to act as if they are the same. So, for example, castrating animals just isn’t the same as castrating a person. There are underlying differences in their physiology, their social relations, and their behaviors. Your analysis doesn’t seem to be able to recognize that.
You then list harms that are done to animals. I agree, these should be mitigated. Heck, we can stipulate to you that all such harm should be outright banned legally in order to have this argument. That still doesn’t mean that we end animal experimentation, because it’s transparently obvious that lots of animal experimentation can be done without any such harms. This feels like an emotionally manipulative argument. You spend a lot of your word count on something that is actually ancillary to the core question.
Finally, you tease that you will be basically tossing any utiltiarianism out the window. Perhaps I am overstating your case. I do agree that narrow utilitarianism cannot be allowed: Richard I am sure will agree, as he has pointed out that rule utilitarianism, deontological theory, social contract theory, virtue theory, Foot’s work, etc. all are critical to round out classic utilitarianism because we need to be attentive to a range of consequences. But the problem is that by your reasoning we can never do anything that could ever cause any harm. Unless your position is that, for example, a person who commits a crime has actually acquired a new, lower moral character as a result. (In which case we can just point out that animals can be cruel and awful and they lose the same rights. Dolphin experimentation could be easily justified!)
If we are going to say that there is never any threshold at which you can interact with innocent people in a deontic way, say goodbye to the criminal justice system: It is impossible to guarantee that you will never prosecute an innocent. Say goodbye to any kind of enforcement whatsoever, even of contracts, for the same reason. Even putting aside uncertainty, we could never resolve any trolley problems. We would be paralyzed.
I am curious how you will present a moral ethos that allows any action, whatsoever, in a world where stakeholders have competing interests and no rights can be treated as absolute because all rights held by all moral agents conflict to varying degrees.
Hi all. I’ll address some of this in coming posts. But looking forward to talking more once Richard and I finish up.
I love written debates and the topic is interesting and super important. Looking forward to it!