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28 Animal subjects research Part I: Do animals have rights?
The Case of Laika
In 1957, a stray dog from Moscow named Laika, described by her keepers as “quiet and charming,” became the first animal to orbit the planet, and the first death in orbit. Training for her mission included subjection to confinement in progressively smaller cages for up to 20 consecutive days, during which she was whining and restless and would stop urinating or defecating for prolonged periods of time. She was placed in centrifuges simulating rocket acceleration and the noises of the spacecraft, causing extreme changes in her blood pressure and pulse. On the day before her mission, Dr. Vladimir Yazdovsky took her home to play with his children. He later said, “I wanted to do something nice for her: she had so little time left to live.”1
In the capsule, she was confined by a harness that allowed her only to sit, stand and lie down in one place. A launch pad malfunction kept her waiting for 3 days in freezing temperatures inside a capsule the size of a washing machine before she was launched into orbit. Although it was reported at the time that Laika lived for 7 days in space and was then was mercifully euthanized with a pre-programmed portion of poisoned food, in 2002 it was revealed that she had, in fact, died only a few hours into orbit as a result of broiling heat due to a thermo-regulator failure.2 In 1998, Oleg Gazenko, one of the scientists involved, expressed his regret:“
Work with animals is a source of suffering to all of us … The more time passes, the more I’m sorry about it. We shouldn’t have done it. We did not learn enough from this mission to justify the death of the dog.”3
The case of Laika, and other cases involving the use of animals to serve human ends, raise moral questions such as the following. Is there something distinctive about humanity? Do humans have a special moral status that nonhumans lack? Is there a quality that human beings alone possess that qualifies them for higher moral standing? If not, should we broaden our conception of who is a member of our moral community? If it is sometimes acceptable to use animals in research, when it would not be acceptable to use human beings, and what accounts for this difference?
In this chapter we consider what it means to say that a being deserves moral consideration. We ask what it means to say that a being has a right to life. We then consider the claim that, even if a being lacks a right to life, it deserves to have its interests taken into account. Finally, we consider the application of these ideas to research with animals.
Human beings, animals, and persons
Throughout this discussion the term, “person,” refers to any living being of any species whose characteristics entitle it to a right to life. Thus the term “person,” as defined here, is a moral or ethical term, not a biological one, and quite distinct from the term “human being.”
The term, “human being,” refers to anything that is biologically alive and belongs to the species, Homo sapiens. In this definition, the term “human being” obviously includes normal human children and adults, but also includes prenatal human life, human beings with physical or mental abnormalities, and humans in a persistent vegetative state who will never regain consciousness.
To assume that only instances of human life could count as persons in a moral sense, and so possess a right to life, would be a moral error analogous to claiming that only members of favored racial groups possess certain rights or are persons. The latter mistake is called racism; the former might thus be called speciesism. To avoid this mistake, we cannot assume membership in a species represents a necessary or sufficient condition for personhood, but must instead identify a quality independent of species that establishes personhood.
In many cases most agree about who is and is not a person. For example, normal adult human beings are considered to be the sort of beings of whom personhood can be predicated. Many will also agree that certain living things are not persons. For instance, there is not widespread belief that trees are persons. That is not to say that we ought not to take good care of trees. Saying that trees are not persons is merely saying that trees do not have a right to life, nor are trees entitled for their own sake to have their lives preserved.
In-between the cases of trees and normal human beings, is a spectrum of less obvious cases. Do permanently unconscious human beings, human fetuses, human beings who will live in the distant future, or intelligent life that we might encounter on other planets qualify as persons? What about members of other terrestrial species? Are nonhumans animals, such as dogs, chimpanzees, or dolphins, persons?
To focus on the specific question of whether personhood applies to nonhuman animals (henceforth referred to simply as “animals”) here on earth, let us consider three distinct views one might hold. First, what we shall call a conservative position claims that no animals are persons with a right to life. A second, moderate position asserts that at least some animals deserve moral consideration for their own sake, but no animals have a right to life. A third view, which we shall call a liberal view, holds that at least some animals are persons with a right to life.
Are animals “persons”?
The “conservative” view
Perhaps the best known proponent of the conservative position is Immanuel Kant. Kant believed that human beings alone qualify as persons by virtue of their rational capacities. He wrote:
… every rational being, exists as an end in himself and not merely as a means to be arbitrarily used by this or that will…Beings whose existence depends not on our will but on nature have, nevertheless, if they are not rational beings, only a relative value as means and are therefore called things.4
For Kant, humanity had an intrinsic and unconditional value. By contrast, animals had only a relative or instrumental value. Elaborating this position in “Duties to Animals and Spirits,” Kant stated:
… if a man shoots his dog because the animal is no longer capable of service, he does not fail in his duty to the dog,…but his act is inhuman and damages in himself that humanity which it is his duty to show towards mankind.”4
Kant understood our duties to human beings as direct duties, but regarded our duties to animals as indirect duties. Direct duties are duties we owe someone for their own sake. Indirect duties are duties we owe to someone for the sake of someone else. For instance, if a child is cruel to animals by pinching a cat’s tail, Kant’s worry was that the child may go on to develop a corresponding sentiment of cruelty to humans, and may treat humans cruelly too. The reason that it is wrong for a child to pinch the tail of an animal, according to Kant, is that doing so will ultimately harm human beings, who matter morally for their own sake. Thus, the child has a duty to the cat for the sake of her fellow human beings.
The philosophical basis for the above distinction is Kant’s idea that human beings, by virtue of their rational agency, are persons and possess intrinsic moral worth. Kant’s position is not speciesist, because the ultimate basis for the dignity of human beings is not species membership, per se, but rational nature. As Wood notes, “Kant thought it quite likely that there are rational beings on other planets; they would be ends in themselves every bit as much as human beings …”5
It follows from Kant’s philosophy that we should not cause suffering to animals, for example, by performing painful experiments “for the sake of mere speculation, when the end could also be achieved without these.”6 However, Kant thought that we do have a right to kill animals, provided we do not cause pain and suffering or kill merely for sport. Kant encouraged the humane treatment of animals who work for us, as well as gratitude. In his lectures, he told a story about the philosopher, Leibniz, who reportedly returns a worm to its leaf when done examining it.7 For Kant, this exemplified the attitude humans should cultivate toward animals.
Despite the fact that Kant’s philosophy encourages the humane treatment of animals, critics charge that it gives insufficient regard to animals. Allen Wood maintains that, by virtue of the fact that animals are not persons in Kant’s approach, we are permitted to treat animals solely as instruments or objects of human goals. To illustrate this, he asks us to imagine the following possibility:
If it happened to be a quirk of human psychology that torturing animals would make us that much kinder toward humans (perhaps by venting our aggressive impulses on helpless victims), then Kant’s argument would apparently make it a duty to inflict gratuitous cruelty on puppies and kittens so as to make us that much kinder to people.8
If Wood’s reasoning is correct, then even though Kant himself rejects cruelty to animals, his philosophy still allows this possibility.
In response, defenders of Kant’s approach can argue that it is inconsistent with Kantian ethics to treat animals as mere things for our use or enjoyment. Kantian philosophy, as they interpret it, emphasizes our positive duties with regard to animals, even if we have no duties toward them. O’Neill, for example, argues that the fact that Kant’s allowance for indirect duties to animals is not trivial, because “Kant endorses more or less the range of ethical concern for non-human animals that more traditional utilitarians allowed: welfare, but not rights.”9
Contemporary Kantian scholars further develop Kant’s conservative position in a variety of ways. Christine Korsgaard proposes that what distinguishes humans is their capacity for a special sort of rationality. Humans alone use reason to reflect about morality, to be what Korsgaard calls “sources of normativity.”10 Humans alone face the problem of normativity: the problem of considering the morality of their reasons for acting and deciding what they ought to do. According to Korsgaard,
We human animals turn our attention on to our perceptions and desires themselves, on to our own mental activities, and we are conscious of them. That is why we can think about them … And this sets us a problem that no other animal has. It is the problem of the normative… The reflective mind cannot settle for perception and desire, not just as such. It needs a reason.7Related posts:
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