This continues the Carrier-Bali debate. See introduction, comments policy, index, and Bali’s opening statement in Should Science Be Experimenting on Animals? A Debate with Paul Bali; after that is my first response, Bali’s first reply; my second; and Bali’s third. To which I now respond. At Dr. Bali’s request, this shall conclude the formal component of our debate. Informal discussion might continue in comments below.


In Defense of the Scientific Use of Animals

— Part III —

by Richard Carrier, Ph.D.

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Paul has had three chances at bat. And I haven’t seen anything beyond anthropomorphization and emotivism, neither of which is a factual or logical basis for moral conclusions. Nor has he answered any questions in my last entry’s first paragraph, yet I’ve asked them twice now.[1]

As already explained: (1) appeals to mere feelings cannot be a sufficient basis for establishing anything as morally true; (2) and animals are not at all cognitively like humans.[2] Paul deploys other fallacies, e.g. he emotively complains about feed and harness tech serving “meat machines,” ignoring everything I said about pets and zoos and labor and service animals. But Paul seems most concerned to abolish only “certain kinds and purposes” of animal experimentation, because it equals a “dominant” race exploiting an “inferior” one. But that analogy is false. Because animals aren’t people. You may as well say we should never wear clothes or eat food because that’s just a dominant race (humans) exploiting an inferior one (plants). “But animals are more sentient than plants” is true, but does not answer the pertinent question: are they relevantly more sentient than plants?

All of Paul’s attempts to make animals “just like” humans in Trolley Problems are thus factually false. Because animals aren’t comparable to humans in any pertinent sense. They can’t enter social contracts, they don’t have any comparable comprehension of life, existence, themselves, or even causal reality, and they have no cognitive futures. Thus it is not the case that humans deeming animals too insentient to morally appreciate their lives or circumstances is “just like” advanced aliens thinking the same of humans. Unless those aliens were enslaved to factually false beliefs, they’d agree humans are their moral equal because they possess the same quality of morally relevant cognition; whereas, they’d agree, animals don’t.

This is not a difference in degree, like comparing a cold to a hotter gas. It is a categorical difference in kind, like comparing a gas to a liquid. Human cognition is a fundamental phase-change in the nature and capabilities of consciousness: our minds build narrative personal identities and self-reflective understanding of what it means to be alive or dead, and what is happening to us, and what the options are. There may be middle cases (apes, elephants, cetaceans, corvids; even human infants), but I already set those aside [3]; we do not subject them to the same experimental rigors as the animals Paul gives examples of. A rat simply is not similar in kind to an ape. Nor are the kinds of experiments we conduct with them comparable (Paul seems okay with “cruelty-free, non-invasive” animal experimentation, so that’s irrelevant here).

Consider Paul’s appeal to Rawls. Let’s insert factual reality there and see what happens: if the random wheel of fate were to assign Paul to a rat, in that universe, Paul does not exist. The wheel has destroyed him. All his cognition, all his personhood, near everything that makes Paul a morally significant entity in the world, even his ability to appreciate where the wheel of fate has put him and why that matters, has been dissolved, as none of it can be contained in the limited neural apparatus of a rat. In that scenario, “Paul” is dead. Therefore nothing we do to “his” body can matter to “him,” because there is no him. Paul does not exist to evaluate his lot in life. Thus, a Rawlsian perspective doesn’t apply. Yes, a rat can appreciate more than a cadaver, but still nothing at all sufficient to constitute any relevant bit of a person, like Paul. It has no concept of a future. No understanding of life or death. No sense of self. No narrative memory. No causal understanding of reality (as opposed to mastering causal patterns through operant conditioning, which is noncognitive). And it isn’t building any of those things, either. Whether it lives one year or ten is cognitively irrelevant to it. All that it can comprehend is how it feels in any given moment, and sensory memories and emotive inclinations called up by noncognitive triggers, over which it has no appreciation or control. It is no more sentient than what would be left if we stripped away over 99% of Paul’s cerebral neurons.[4] Basically, nothing of Paul would remain; nor any capacity to rebuild it.

Yet Paul acts like he’d still be Paul, trapped inside a rat body, and thus aware of everything happening but unable to do anything about it, akin to the end of Being John Malkovich. That’s simply not factually what it’s like to be a rat. It’s impossible to fully imagine, of course, because humans can only “imagine” within a framework of a cognitive self-model (you are always you, self-aware, when putting yourself in someone else’s mind, with all your cognitive comprehension [5]), and rats never experience anything that way. They are never self-aware or possessed of any cognitive comprehension. This is why their suffering is less of a harm than a human’s. The cost is vastly less; the significance vastly less; the effect vastly less. It’s not non-existent (as with plants). So compassion warrants consideration, as I’ve described.[6] It would make you a malevolent or callous person (and thus undermine your wellbeing) to cause them harm for no worthwhile purpose.[7] But as we morally accept causing harm to humans (children even) when necessity compels (particularly trivial harms, like needle sticks and safety restraints), we far more so allow to animals, because the harms we thus inflict are so much less substantial in their comprehension and effect.[8] This is why we experiment with animals in the first place. It is far, far less harmful than if we jumped straight to human experimentation instead.

Contrary to what Paul has claimed, animals are not “sentient of being.”[9] They just have experiences, not an understanding of what that means; nor are they developing such.

  • Rabbits do not “care about their future.” They have no capacity to even comprehend what a future is. They do not “comprehend” anything whatever. Their behaviors are instinctual. They do not know why they do them. They can’t comprehend what a “why” would even mean.[10]
  • They feel. Rabbits (and rats; but not flies or worms) are motivated by social emotions, and intuitions (evolved and learned). But those all evolved as precursors to intentional planning and conscious action—they are what developed in animals that hadn’t yet capacity for such action; it was over on top of “emotional computing” that those human capacities evolved additional. This is why emotion and reason often conflict: the one was an add-on to the other, and recently; hence before there was rational comprehension, there was only emotion sans understanding.[11]
  • And animals have desires. But they do not comprehend “valuing” things, as that requires a far more complex cognitive capacity.[12]

Therefore suffering is far less significant to animals than people; while death has no significance to animals at all. They also are incapable of entering contracts, have no moral conscience, and have no comprehension of even the point of consent. We thus have no duty of care to them beyond not making their lives worse to no greater purpose.[13]

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This concludes the formal debate. See comments below for continuing discussion.

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Endnotes

[1] From Dr. Carrier’s Second Reply:

Paul hasn’t responded to my First Reply. No account of why anything he describes is actually wrong. Why should we care about any of it? We cannot know where to draw the line, if we don’t even know why we are drawing lines at all. Paul also hasn’t accounted for the cognitive and thus moral distinctions between kinds of animals experimented on (fruit flies, vs. rats; dogs; monkeys; apes). Is he okay with certain animals? Why? Why not? And what kind of animal experimentation is okay and why? Paul sanctions “non-invasive” experimentation, but what all counts as invasive, and why does that matter? Paul also needs to explain where a line goes between practices we could continue once improved (e.g. limit cage time to what is actually necessary for a study); and those to abandon.

[2] In Dr. Carrier’s First Reply, General Objections, §2 and §3.

[3] Op. cit., “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.”

[4] See “Human-Rat Comparisons” at Neurondevelopment.org and “List of animals by number of neurons,” Wikipedia.

[5] See my discussion of our inability to discard our advanced cognitive apparatus when imagining things in Richard Carrier, “The Argument from Specified Complexity against Supernaturalism” (17 April 2018). On the foundations of human cognition see Richard Carrier, “The Mind Is a Process Not an Object” (29 June 2018) and Sense and Goodness without God, III.6, “The Nature of Mind,” pp. 135-60, and index, “personhood.”

[6] From Dr. Carrier’s Second Reply:

The overall quality of their experiential life matters (because they are not automata), and therefore animals subject to experimentation deserve compassion, thence a reasonable attendance to their emotional and physical welfare…attending the rule of necessity (if a practice causes suffering yet isn’t necessary, then it should not be a component of the experimental procedure).

[7] References on how I derive true conclusions in morality are in Endnote 1 of Dr. Carrier’s First Reply.

[8] On this comparison see Dr. Carrier’s Second Reply.

[9] Michael Tomasello and Hannes Rakoczy, “What Makes Human Cognition Unique? From Individual to Shared to Collective Intentionality,” Mind & Language 18.2 (April 2003): 121-147; David Premack, “Human and Animal Cognition: Continuity and Discontinuity,” PNAS 104.35 (28 August 2007); Marc Hauser, “Origin of the Mind,” Scientific American 301.3 (September 2009): 44-53 (for summaries thereof see “What Makes Humans Unique?” and “Hauser Defines the ‘Humanique’”); and Jonathan Birch et al., “Dimensions of Animal Consciousness,” Trends in Cognitive Science 24.10 (1 October 2020).

[10] In addition to the references above: Mathias Osvath and Gema Martin-Ordas, “The Future of Future-Oriented Cognition in Non-Humans: Theory and the Empirical Case of the Great Apes,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B (Biological Sciences) (5 November 2014); Baumeister, Maranges, and Sjåstad, “Consciousness of the Future as a Matrix of Maybe: Pragmatic Prospection and the Simulation of Alternative Possibilities,” Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice 5.3 (2018); Thom, Clayton, and Simons, “Imagining the Future—A Bird’s Eye View,” The Psychologist 26.6 (June 2013): 418-21; Thomas Suddendorf, “Anticipation of Future Events,” Encyclopedia of Animal Cognition and Behavior (Springer, 2017); Jonathan Redshaw and Adam Bulley, “Future-Thinking in Animals: Capacities and Limits,” The Psychology of Thinking about the Future (Guilford 2018); and Dean Buonomano, Your Brain Is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time (W. W. Norton, 2017), esp. index, “animals.”

[11] Joseph E. LeDoux and Richard Brown, “A Higher-Order Theory of Emotional Consciousness,PNAS 114.10 (7 March 2017); Jiayi Luo and Rongjun Yu, “Follow the Heart or the Head? The Interactive Influence Model of Emotion and Cognition,” Frontiers in Psychology 6 (May 2015); Andy Norman, “Why We Reason: Intention-Alignment and the Genesis of Human Rationality,” Biology & Philosophy 31 (June 2016): 685–704; and Laith Al-Shawaf et al., “Human Emotions: An Evolutionary Psychological Perspective,” Emotion Review 8.2 (April 2016).

[12] See Carrier, Sense and Goodness without God, IV.2.1.1, pp. 315-16 (and index, “values”), with Hechter, Nadel and Michod, eds., The Origin of Values (de Gruyter, 1993), esp. Ch. 11, George Mandler, “Approaches to a Psychology of Value,” and Ch. 12, Richard Michod, “Biology and the Origin of Values.”

[13] From Dr. Carrier’s Second Reply: “Humans are not obligated to make animals “feel better” than they’d experience in the wild (any more than we ought to erase every ounce of human suffering); it is only our obligation to at least not make it worse without a necessary purpose,” with the rest of same paragraph; and Dr. Carrier’s First Reply, General Objections, §2 and §4.

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