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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See Dr. Bali’s reply.

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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).

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