This continues the Carrier-Bali debate. See introduction, comments policy, and Bali’s opening statement in Should Science Be Experimenting on Animals? A Debate with Paul Bali. I am grateful to have a professional philosopher debating this subject and I thank Dr. Paul Bali for engaging it. I’ve found it’s more personable and collegial if I call my opponent by their first name in a debate, and I welcome Paul’s doing the same in turn here.
In Defense of the Scientific Use of Animals
— Part I —
by Richard Carrier, Ph.D.
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Foundations
Two fundamentals must first be established: (1) why is anything moral or immoral; and (2) whether animals even have “any moral status approaching our own,” or whether they instead occupy a very different moral status. We might go deeper into these in coming entries. For now space permits only a summary.
(1) I believe the only coherent, evidence-based foundation for morality is some form of desire utilitarianism, morality being a construct of all true hypothetical imperatives. Right and wrong are therefore a function of the harms the agent’s choices have upon themselves and their own desired ends, in terms of reciprocal and iterative social consequences and in terms of the individual’s life satisfaction, through what sort of person they become in their actions, and the impact that has on their access to a contented life worth living. [1] Moral conclusions therefore follow from what actual harms a choice causes, compared to when a different choice is made, in respect to the sort of person we want to be and the sort of world we want to live in and be responsible for.
(2) Paul hedges on whether worms and insects are sentient enough to qualify for moral status for a reason: such animals are substantially different from, say, mammals, in precisely those respects relevant to assigning moral status (degree and qualities of cognition, and the ability to appreciate its significance, and thus how we weigh relative harms). This is equally true of the moral distance between humans and other animals, for a different but related reason: humans develop moral cognition, and cognitively constructed goals and understanding (humans can understand existence, and existing, in a way animals can’t), and a narrative self-identity (humans become ontological persons, in a way most other animals never can), and are able to enter (and know they are violating) social contracts, upon which our concepts of innocence, guilt, and responsibility actually acquire their basis. Most animals lack these features, and thus must occupy a substantially different moral status. For these are literally the most salient features of what grants humans their moral status in the first place.
There are some nonhuman animals that fall in between these two categories (e.g. apes, cetaceans, elephants, corvids), on which my conclusions may differ than for the rest. But for economy I will hereafter mean by “animal” only the rest.
General Objections
I have four general objections:
(1) Paul conflates the question of whether animal subjects should be better treated with whether they should be experimented on at all. Just as it is the case that the solution to bad government is better government and not the elimination of all government [2], the solution to animal maltreatment in the sciences is often better treatment and not the elimination of animal research altogether. Likewise with regard to dangerous and damaging occupations for humans: athletes and dancers essentially destroy their bodies for their art; firefighters and loggers face alarming risks of death and disability; laborers who pick our fruit and vegetables must endure grueling conditions. Solutions are not the abolition of those occupations but optimizing their safety and outcomes—such as health care, pensions, professional and consumer ethics, workplace and occupational safety, pay commensurate with associated harms, and the like. Analogous mitigation is available for animals.
(2) Many of Paul’s arguments consist solely of appeals to aesthetic discomfort, which by itself is not a legitimate moral metric. Humans must morally do all manner of things that are discomfiting: body cavity searches on criminal suspects; euthanizing suffering pets; making toddlers cry by denying them things they don’t realize are harmful or afflicting them with things necessary for their welfare, from injections and purges to medicines and surgeries; autopsying the deceased; necessary amputations and elective abortions; killing in self-defense; fighting wars. The world is full of trolley problems.[3] “Doing nothing” allows no escape, as doing nothing or something precisely is the choice to be made, and both choices may entail negative outcomes. Therefore “has a negative outcome” is not a valid moral metric by itself; and that’s true even when the negative outcomes are objectively real. Whereas appealing to one’s unvetted intuitions is never valid in moral reasoning precisely because it is fallaciously circular: it presumes that happenstance psychological or cultural convictions are morally trustworthy, when we know for a fact they often are not. Homophobes and sexists and honor killers are fully convinced of their moral “feelings” about these things; yet are entirely wrong. If their intuitions can be so blindly wrong, so can ours. Intuition therefore tells us nothing as to whether we are correct. Even Paul might agree “I am horrified by the idea of mercy-killing my dog” does not tell us whether we morally ought to do it or not.
(3) Paul presumes without foundation that animals are the moral equals of humans. This is to anthropomorphize animals, to assume the same things have the same meaning or salience to animals as to humans, to assume animals are just like humans in their preferences, needs, comprehensions, desserts, and expectations. This is a false premise, leading to false conclusions. [4] Can one get to the same conclusions once you abandon that false premise? That remains to be seen. Paul thinks it is contradictory to experiment on animals “because they’re like us” and yet not treat them morally identically to us. But we employ them because they are “like us” only in ways not relevant to assessing moral status (e.g. shared physiology; not moral or existential cognition). He has thus not identified a contradiction, but begged the question: by only “assuming” physiological similarity equals moral identicality, leaving us with no actual reason why this equation should be made. “Social animal” does not mean “moral reasoners” or “social contractors” or even “cognitive persons.”
(4) Paul contradicts himself when he says (quoting Marks) “no procedure whatever, no matter how painful, lethal, or cruel, is ruled out” immediately after admitting countless procedures are ruled out by a requirement of necessity. The fact that “countless procedures are ruled out” cannot become “no procedures are ruled out.” This is like saying “it is morally necessary to shoot at the enemy in battle; ergo, everything in war is permitted.” That’s a non sequitur; and thus can make no valid critique. Paul concludes with a related fallacy of false analogy: slaying animals to appease non-existent gods is simply not morally identical to using animals to an actually real and effective purpose. The one has nothing to do with the other. That’s rather like saying jailing witches is bad, therefore so is jailing murderers; or subjecting human volunteers to dangerous alternative therapies we already know are ineffective is bad, therefore all human drug trials are bad.
Conclusion
I haven’t yet seen an argument; just emotivism, anthropomorphism, and fallacies. I expect Paul will fill in the blanks. Then we can get to the real matters—why do we deem it moral to avoid harm in the first place; when do we accept harm; what harms are worse; how do the limits of animal cognition relate to measuring all this; and what is the moral value of animal research.
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Endnotes
[1] See: Richard Carrier, “Moral Facts Naturally Exist (and Science Could Find Them).” The End of Christianity, ed. by John Loftus (Prometheus 2011): 53–74, 372–75; Richard Carrier, “The Real Basis of a Moral World” (12 November 2018); Richard Carrier, “Your Own Moral Reasoning: Some Things to Consider” (19 March 2018); Richard Carrier, “Open Letter to Academic Philosophy: All Your Moral Theories Are the Same” (11 November 2015); Richard Carrier, “Goal Theory Update” (28 October 2011).
[2] Richard Carrier, “Sic Semper Regulationes” (5 January 2012).
[3] Richard Carrier, “Everything Is a Trolley Problem” (27 September 2021).
[4] Richard Carrier, “Meat Not Bad” (9 December 2011).
I expressed #1 in a comment to Paul as well, and essentially predicted you would make this move: It is possible to stipulate that reform is needed to limit animal experimentation where the moral costs exceed a density that is tolerable without saying that all experimentation is therefore unethical.
I don’t know if I think that #2 is entirely correct, though perhaps Dr. Bali will expand and show that you are making a fair criticism. I do think that the list of kinds of harm is more emotionally manipulative than is necessary in this context since it is actually ancillary to the core question.
Regarding your #3, I would submit that we as a society do benefit from treating sentient beings with at least some of the same framework we do humans. With that in mind, I do think Dr. Bali may have a point. But I do think you are right to say that treating animals as morally identical rather than broadly morally equal is incoherent. Animals don’t want what we do. If we were to treat them like people, even very unusual people, we would not be acting in their best interest or ours.
To argue a fortiori for Paul on point #4, I would say that perhaps what is missing is something like a just war theory to continue the war analogy you make, or Constitutional rights limiting state power in the murderer analogy. That is, perhaps the argument being made is that animal experimentation has so few ethical guidelines that are properly enforced and practiced that it is like there are no limits whatsoever. I don’t know if this is actually a case that can be made, but perhaps it hyperbolically points to a real lack of the field having a truly evidence-rooted bioethic that minimizes harming sentient beings except insofar as it is absolutely necessary. (So, you know, not cosmetics).
What I found remarkable was that Dr. Bali didn’t even seem to state his actual position. Does he actually think that there would never be a case to engage in animal experimentation of any kind?
#1 and #2: I would say that these points remove a bulk of examples, but not all of them. So it’s more a call to cull excess and focus on actually pertinent, well-formulated examples; and then, presumably, adjust the conclusion advocated to correspond to this now more-qualified position that results. But it is up to Bali’s response to see how he responds to these issues.
#3 and #4: This is what I hope to get to eventually. I didn’t have word count to move to what I think we should be talking about, which is what relation animal cognition has to our assessment of what constitutes harms and relative degrees of harm, and thus taking into account why we even do animal experimentation in the first place, and thus what the differential costs are of doing it or not doing it. I understand he wants to make a deontological argument of some kind, e.g. we don’t think we can just experiment on humans without their consent—utility be damned—and animals can’t consent, ergo why shouldn’t our human ethic apply to animals? There is much to be said there. But we have to clear the baffles of these fundamentals first. There is a reason we weight the value of consent in humans so much; and we need to get to what that is, before we can analyze whether that analogy even makes sense.
But as to the suggestion that “few ethical guidelines are properly enforced and practiced,” I see that asserted a lot, but rarely in evidence; but the matter is moot to the debate because the same can be said of every human profession—and the correct response to that is not banning all professions, but cracking down on our ethical pursuit of them. So even if it were the case that “few ethical guidelines are properly enforced and practiced,” then we should be debating how to get them properly enforced and practiced, not abandoning the entire enterprise. As is the case in every other occupation that exists. The solution to bad government is better government; not no government. But that’s not the debate we are having at present.
I’m glad that we’re on the same page with the point that just because it is almost certainly incoherent to treat animals like they are morally identical to humans it does not then follow that robust animal rights aren’t ethically supported. What I find frustrating about the debates around animal rights is that you have folks like the PETA fanatics making points that are just stated as bald assertions that I suspect may have some truth to them, but the people who are not either animal rights fanatics or blithely dismissive of caring about humane treatment don’t seem (in my experience at least) to be figuring out if these claims are true. Like, for example, is there a correlation between patriarchal social systems and the widespread abuse of animals? This is a common vegan-vegetarian position, but I’ve seen the support for it being extremely poor, and yet I do think it is plausible that there may be some correlation. I suspect quite strongly that a society that cultivates a cruelly exploitative, amorally utilitarian perspective of the world is going to exploit both animals and people, and that fights for animal rights end up exposing the same kind of reasoning that leads to the exploitation of people. I suspect there are a host of harms to allowing the exploitation of animals without strict limits and a clear need for a pressing cause. Dr. Bali seems to be going a deontological direction, but I hope he makes an argument from virtue ethics, because what I suspect is going on (though this needs to be determined by actual evidence) is that when we mistreat animals it prevents the development of the kinds of virtues that let us care about the cessation of pain. As a Buddhist, I have definitely found that being attentive to the way I treat animals (even if I will ultimately swat a fly) helps me be more compassionate to people too.
As for the rules needing to be enforced: I agree. In fact, even if the rules end up being far more draconian than I imagine you would support, it would still be critical for those rules to be articulated, and supported evidentially, and properly enforced. This is one of those cases where I think that one of the ways the extremists are harming their own cause is by making it harder for relevant actors to actually spend the time to investigate, publish and then enforce rules. In any case, there not being any rules at present is obviously no argument for outright total prohibition. I am by no means a reformist by default, but here I think that it is quite likely that a reformist agenda is at the minimum the best way to start. Frankly, I also doubt that prohibitions on animal experimentation would ever wholly work and would ever be enforced with any vigor, whereas I do think it is politically realistic to imagine enforcement of strict but not totally-prohibitive standards.
I concur with your first point. Fanatics on every spectrum (liberals in general, conservatives in general, animal rights advocates in particular) tend to undermine their own goals by painting a picture so divorced from reality no one has any reason to parse out what they are saying that is still valid. Thus it all gets dismissed as far-fetched noise. If they wanted to make headway, they should stick to calm and accurate and nuanced descriptions of reality, and sensible, achievable, empirically validated stepwise plans to fixing it.
I also think virtue ethics is a better approach than deontological (I of course think they are all the same thing, really; but differ in framing, and your framing is the correct direction here, IMO).
1′. Morality concerns suffering (i.e., experiencing pain).
2′. The moral community consists of just those beings who are capable of what morality concerns.
3′. All sentient beings are capable of suffering (i.e., experiencing pain).
4′. All sentient beings are members of the moral community. (from 1′, 2′, 3′)
5′. All members of the moral community have moral status.
6′. All sentient beings have moral status. (from 4′, 5′)
7′. Many animals are sentient beings.
8′. Many animals have moral status. (from 6′, 7′)
Alas, your conclusion is useless. The clauses “moral status” and “moral community” and “concerns suffering” are undefined and entail nothing with respect to behavior, the only thing morality “concerns.”
What you want is to generate an imperative proposition that supersedes all other imperative propositions (there has to be some “you ought to do [x]” directive at the end of this).
If you want to see how that looks in syllogism form, see my peer-reviewed chapter on moral theory in The End of Christianity, at the end of which is a complete valid syllogism, of the kind of you trying to build.
That won’t help get to your conclusion, though. Because merely “experiencing suffering” or “having moral status” does not dictate just any moral proposition. You still have to derive what is then dictated by that state of affairs.
For example, in this debate I explain how the status of animals as capable of suffering does entail moral dictates; just not the ones you might desire. That is why it is not useful to derive the conclusion that “animals have moral status.” That statement tells us nothing about what that moral status is, or what it entails vis-a-vis behavior.
So you still have to engage with my arguments in this debate—at least, if you want to get to any proposition about how we should behave toward animals. Because, even if you gave coherent and workable definitions to your syllogism’s undefined terms, its conclusion still doesn’t get you to any such result (it dictates nothing about behavior).