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; and after that is my first response, Bali’s first reply; and my second. To which Dr. Bali now responds.


Against the Scientific Use of Animals

— Part III —

by Paul Bali, Ph.D.

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Animal Sci is hard to pry from Agribiz—where “better feed & harnesses” tend to mean building better meat machines.

Eco-toxicology screens out the worst of our contaminants—mitigating harms of our industrial expansionism.

Vet Med, Zoology, Molecular Biology—stewards of the biosphere need these, and more. Yet how much AE is truly for animals, so far?

Hell Hospital

Since we tied Mouse to the track, AE is more like Fat Man or Transplant—where Richard says let the Five die:

If it were a universal law that single patients attending hospitals can be killed to save five, no one would ever go to hospitals. The social consequence of this would be vastly worse than letting the five patients die. [1]

For Richard, deontic reasons are consequentialist, since “It is logically impossible to decide what laws to wish universal without any context as to what such a universalized behavior will do (to you, and the world).” [2]

As I see it, the harm done to innocents is a consequence of the act, yet its badness lays partly in the past—that it’s undeserved.

But let’s map Richard’s consequentialism onto the Med-Sci regime. Here, a dominant species confines, manipulates, and kills the weaker to extract useful data—largely for its own benefit. Here, the hellish hospital persists—the people keep coming—since their favored kind are immune from the harvesting.

The hospital’s badness universalizes to a cosmos where uber-sentients may vivisect sufficiently unter-sentients; where humans may, in our galaxial wanderings, fall within the purview of an alien Med-Sci.

That hospital—that cosmos—is one we’d stay away from.

A Rawlsian Veil

Trackworker enjoys employment, Fatman has a Trolley pass, and Donor has hospital access. As condition of access, each might consent to a system policy of Five-favoring in Five/One dilemmas. The policy benefits their kind, tends to benefit any one of them, and they can always withdraw—stay away from Track & Hospital.

Yet lab animals are marked for sacrifice and barred from system benefits. From the Original Position, prior to assignment of species, you might consent to a Lab that uses all species for wide benefit; yet not to one that serves a dominant minority, with sacrifices only from the majority.

You might endorse a rule that the first to ecologic dominance—the first to a universal ethic!—should treat other species as nascents or implicits in a biosphere society.  For the good of all, or from self-interest: odds are you don’t become a Dominant; and Dominants who self-aggrandize tend to self-destruct—see our own ecocidal reign.

The Dominant, at minimum, should not interfere.

Objection: all beings are potential beneficiaries

Donor could pre-affirm his preference for Five-favoring. The OP sentient, likewise, might agree that n animals shall be medically sacrificed for n5 Dominants. Thus labmouse is like the Trolley’s unlucky One: unlucky “this day” [i.e. in this incarnation], yet part of a system [the Anthropocene biosphere] that can benefit their basic kind [i.e. the sentient]. For each OP sentient, their odds of incarnating as a Med-Sci beneficiary are low; yet higher, still, than odds of being a lab animal.

A fortiori, the OP sentient might agree that n sentients shall be medically sacrificed for n50 sentients—from all species, for all.

AE & the wider scene

Lately, your odds of being an animal somehow abused by humans are high. You’re more likely to arrive as a male chick heading down a conveyer belt into a macerator (seven billion per year), than as a human enjoying his sisters’ eggs.

I judge current AE guilty by association with our wider systems of animal abuse. I see the AE Trolley in its political context: in the reign of Homo dominus, where life is made his chattel or obliterated.

Bret Weinstein: “you have no obligation to treat a dishonorable system as if it were an honorable one.” [3] Even were Mouse prone to leap onto the mainway for trans-species welfare, she ought to first consider that this Trolley shows low concern for trans-species welfare.

I’m not sure about the idealized “n for n50: from all, for all” AE. I’d weight it more coming from a people sworn to global good.

In his Naturalist magnum opus, Richard writes: “It is not by accident that humans have mastered the Earth and are the only species to go beyond it. We are highly adapted for social cohesion and mutual aid, and that makes us nearly unconquerable.” [4]

High adaption for intra-kind cohesion, yes—and inter-kind abuse. To animals, we may seem a choreographed hunt, a monster composed of we billions.

Robert Sapolsky sums a Dutch study where subjects administered oxytocin, then asked to consider the Trolley, were less likely to push one of their own onto the track—yet more likely to push a foreigner. “Oxytocin doesn’t make us more pro-social; it makes us more pro-social to people who feel like an us. If it’s a them, it makes us crappier and more xenophobic to them.” [5]

Animal Umwelten

A rabbit dam returning to her kits at dusk cares about her future!

She comprehends her life by valuing it—correctly—though may not calculate utiles.

Apes, cetaceans, elephants, corvids—who else? We might, with Darwin, see life’s spectrum, and query hard thresholds.

Our self-representation “is unlikely to have appeared de novo in a few large-brained animals”, but rather emerged “in small incremental steps”. [6]

Richard writes that “each human shares our awareness of being”. [7] Yet every sentient is sentient of being. Mouse may not abstract into Philosophy her self/world gestalt—yet few of us are Aristotle, still!

Our debate’s title is simple, yet the reality isn’t. I agree with Frederic Christie that there’s no bright line between invasive & non-invasive research, no hard wall between lab manipulation & ecologic management. And if sentience admits of degrees, our correlative duties could, too. Yet there’s no bright line here at our apparent apex, either. If fruit flies may be trapped, deformed, and killed for us, so may we for super-sentients.

Or is there a universal threshold we’re above, an inviolable Citadel we’re certain of?

Bear in mind, Child. . .there are higher planes, infinitely higher planes, of life than this. . . [8]

As sentient supersedes non-, so may modes unthinkable supersede us!

Cross-species empathy

Mice shown labmates in pain “intensify their own response to pain”. [9] Even if we define empathy as an abstractive “mental state attribution”, rats suggest it when refraining from a food-lever wired to shock a labmate. [10] They learn to liberate a labmate trapped in a container, preferring this altruism to accessing food—food which they’ll share, post-rescue. [11]

Likewise would we critics of AE free rats from the larger container, from the lab itself. By shared distress we advocate for them—and for ourselves, a bit.

Yet first I judge myself, and more than “by association”. I’ve sealed to their death a lab’s worth of fruit flies, taking out the trash thru the years. And the trash itself, the residence I generate it from, the road it traverses—all these convict me for death both direct (roadkill) and indirect (asphalt toxicology.)

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See Dr. Carrier’s response.

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Endnotes

[1] Richard Carrier (2015). “Open Letter to Academic Philosophy: All Your Moral Theories Are the Same” (Nov 11).

[2] Carrier (2015).

[3] Bret Weinstein (2021). DarkHorse Podcast 97 (Sep 18).

[4] Richard Carrier (2005). Sense and Goodness without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism (Authorhouse): 327.

[5] Robert Sapolsky (2017). “The Biology of Humans at our Best and Worst” (lecture, Stanford University, Oct 24).

[6] Frans de Waal (2008). “Putting the Altruism Back into Altruism: The Evolution of Empathy.” Annual Review of Psychology 59: 286.

[7] Carrier (2005): 331.

[8] So sang a telegraph wire to Thoreau. Sep 12 1851, from his Journal.

[9] de Waal (2008): 283.

[10] Frans de Waal and Stephanie Preston (2017). “Mammalian empathy: behavioural manifestations and neural basis.” Nature 18: 499.

[11] de Waal and Preston (2017): 502.

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