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Opposing Views on Animal Experimentation: Do Animals Have Rights? Tom L. Beauchamp

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To cite this Article Beauchamp, Tom L.(1997) 'Opposing Views on Animal Experimentation: Do Animals Have Rights?', Ethics & Behavior, 7: 2, 113 — 121 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1207/s15327019eb0702_3 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/s15327019eb0702_3

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Opposing Views on Animal Experimentation: Do Animals Have Rights?

Tom L. Beauchamp Philosophy Department Georgetown University

Animals have moral standing; that is, they have properties (including the ability to feel pain) that qualify them for the protections of morality. It follows from this that humans have moral obligations toward animals, and because rights are logically correlative to obligations, animals have rights.

Key words: animal experimentation, animal rights, moral standing

The belief is almost universal that scientific protocols should be assessed differently if research subjects are human rather than animal. But why and in what ways should the two classes of subjects be assessed differently, if they should? If human subjects had the properties that justify our using animal subjects, would we be justified in treating human subjects exactly as we treat animal subjects? Answers to these questions turn on whether animals have moral standing, and

Downloaded By: [Vienna University Library] At: 19:29 25 February 2011 if so, whether rights follow from their standing. In this issue Raymond Frey and Carl Cohen deny that animals have rights, although they do not claim that animals are altogether without standing. By contrast, I argue that the moral standing of animals grounds their rights. After a schematic presentation of the reasons for holding this position, I offer a few criticisms of the positions expressed by Cohen and Frey .

Requests for reprints should be sent to Tom L. Beauchamp, The Joseph and Rose Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University, Washington, DC 20057. 1 14 BEAUCHAMP

THE MORAL STANDING OF ANIMALS

To attribute moral standing to a creature is to say that it has properties that qualify it for the protections of morality. The term standing implies a grading concept that separates beings whose interests we morally must consider from beings whose interests count for less. The mainstream approach to moral standing has been to inquire whether an entity is the kind of entity to whom moral categories apply. The more an animal can be shown to have properties that make it like an intact adult human being, person, or autonomous agent, the more the animal is elevated on the grading scale of standing and the more it is protected by rights. The literature on this subject dominantly suggests that animals have few such properties and, therefore, have a minimal moral standing, if any. Cohen's position is representative of this outlook, which is currently the received view in the sciences and probably in the ethics literature as well. The view is typically that animals are neither persons nor autonomous agents, so they fail to qualify for rights or any significant moral protections beyond protection against interventions that produce severe and enduring pain. However, some writers turn this argument in the other direction. They believe that at least some animals do have the properties to qualify as persons and therefore qualify for moral protections, just as all persons do. For example, Cavalieri and Singer (1986), editors of The Great Ape Project, argued that the great apes are persons, just as humans are apes. It is no accident that the central theme of their project is a declaration of the personhood of apes.

THE MODEL OF COGNITIVE PROPERTIES

The implicit contrast between human life and animal life in this literature is at the center of the problem of animal rights and human obligations to animals. Those

Downloaded By: [Vienna University Library] At: 19:29 25 February 2011 who believe animals have reduced moral standing believe that special human properties distinguish us in the relevant ways from animals. The idea is that humans have cognitive capacities to be self-determining in ways animals cannot. These properties are invoked to justify the ways in which we traditionally allow human interests to rank higher and count for more. Accordingly, the search has been for the precise set of properties that give humans the protections of morality, and whose absence denies the same protections to animals. About 2 decades ago, a group of philosophers adduced schematic arguments along the following lines: One is a person if and only if one possesses certain cognitive properties, and the possession of precisely these properties gives an entity moral standing. As a corollary, anything lacking these properties lacks moral standing, and so lacks rights. The main appeal in this argument is to our moral intuitions that there is something special about persons in the way pelicans, baboons, and dogs, say, are not special. Given the choice of preventing the death OPPOSING VIEWS ON ANIMAL EXPERIMENTATION 1 15

of a human or a pelican, we would choose the human; and this does not seem morally arbitrary because pelicans are distinguished from persons by cognitive differences between them of the utmost moral importance. Cognitive criteria such as the following have been put forward as the relevant conditions for status as a person:

1. Capacity for self-consciousness. 2. Capacity for purposive action. 3. Capacity to communicate in a language. 4. Capacity to make moral judgments. 5. Rationality.

Although the received view is that one or more of these criteria is a necessary condition of personhood, it is questionable whether any list approximating these criteria can resolve issues of standing. The most direct threat to this analysis is that some animals satisfy one or more of the central items on the list. That is, if animals have a mental life that makes them self-conscious, purposive, communicative, rational, and so forth-as Darwin thought and as various scientists and philosophers have been maintaining in recent years--on a cognitivist theory we would be compelled to change our treatment of animals. I believe that cognitive criteria favor rather than disfavor standing and rights for animals, but I here attempt little more than a critique of the cognitivist model-es- pecially the idea that there is something very special about us that cannot be duplicated in the animal world. I deny that there are the kind of morally significant cognitive differences between healthy adult humans and animals in the way proposed in cognitivist theories, even if there are psychologically significant cognitive differences. I also deny that the crucial concepts of self-consciousness and autonomy-as presented in cognitivist theories-exclude animals. Once these concepts are properly explicated, it can be plausibly maintained that animals have such capacities. Downloaded By: [Vienna University Library] At: 19:29 25 February 2011 The central question about cognitive capacities and moral standing, in my judgment, is whether animals act autonomously.The two most important conditions of autonomous action are understanding and intention. If animals both understand and intend, are not these significant properties? Are they not morally significant properties on the cognitivist model, not merely cognitively significant properties? Might they not, therefore, be the kind of properties we should look to in conferring moral standing? But do animals understand and intend?' Perhaps more important, are their forms of understanding and intention accompanied by thought? Many close observers of animal behavior now agree that animals do, to some degree, have significant

'several related problems not explored here were examined by Rollin (1989) and Radner and Radner (1989). 1 16 BEAUCHAMP

abilities to intend, understand, and communicate. Many forms of behavior are also intentional, and many forms of goal-directed behavior, such as defending a nest, often appear to be innovative and unprecedented. The novelty under discussion by many ethologists and psychologists is hard to understand without attributing understanding, intention, thought, imaginativeness, and forms of communication to animals. Typical examples are their reliance on past information to act in the present and their exhibitions of complex patterns of thinking in constructingshelters and prey-catching devices, and so forth. One also could cite novel forms of defense, using natural items as tools, adapting to sudden changes of environment, sounds used to communicate or convey feelings, creative forms of play, and so forth. Different scientists may give different explanations for this behavior (e.g., in terms of contingencies of reinforcement), but whatever explanation is given for an animal's behavior also can be given for parallel forms of human behavior. Under- standing, intending, thinking, and the emotions that drive human and animal motivation and behavior are massively important traits in the evolutionary struggle, and any animal able to use them to choose between alternative forms of behavior is likely to be advantaged in the evolutionary process. It would be odd if only humans had achieved any measure of this great advantage. As long as one holds out for high-level cognitive criteria that attribute singular capacities of thought closely connected to human language or that attribute some property such as dignity on the basis of which humans alone qualify for moral standing, animals will not gain a significant standing. But if one appeals to cognitive capacities such as intention, understanding, desire, preferences, emotions, and beliefs, animals will merit protection and thereby gain moral standing.

THE MODEL OF NONCOGNITIVE PROPERTIES

There is an additional problem with the cognitivist program for denying standing to animals. Even if the five cognitive criteria previously discussed are indeed

Downloaded By: [Vienna University Library] At: 19:29 25 February 2011 properties on the basis of which we can frame certain questions of standing or personhood, it may be that some creature deserves moral standing without satisfy- ing a single one of these cognitive criteria. Perhaps some noncognitive property is sufficient to confer a significant measure of moral standing.2At least two kinds of properties ought to be considered when reflecting on this possibility: properties of sensation and properties of emotion. Consider sensation first. As Jeremy Bentham (1789) long ago pointed out, the capacity to feel pain, which is not on the aforementioned list, may be sufficient to warrant an important level of moral standing. Lack of personhood did not for him imply a lack of moral standing, because the capacity for experiencing pain was

2~ more precise way to put the point is to say that even if some cognitive criteria do turn out to form a sufficient condition of moral standing (and so to confer moral protection), these criteria may only be sufficient conditions of moral standing, not necessary conditions. OPPOSING VIEWS ON ANIMAL EXPERIMENTATION 1 17

solely sufficient, prompting Bentham's famous statement: "The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?" (Chapter 17, Section 1). In a similar vein, Donald Griffin (1992) argued that there is insufficient reason for placing emphasis on the distinction between perceptual capacity such as pain and reflective consciousness in the form of cognitive capacity in making out moral distinctions (p. 248). Second, consider emotion. The emotional lives of animals have long been suppressed in moral writings about animals. But the basis for the attribution of a broad range of emotions to animals is as adequate as the basis for the attribution of pain. In Griffin's (197611981) early work The Question of Animal Awareness and in the recent best-seller When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals (Masson & McCarthy, 1995) we find a return to the influential Darwinian theme that animals experience love, joy, anger, fear, shame, compassion, and loneli- ness-the full range of the emotions so often ignored in literature on animals. Darwin (1871), anticipating these views, wrote, "It is a significant fact, that the more the habits of any particular animal are studied by a naturalist, the more he ascribes to reason and the less to unlearnt instinct^."^ He argued that animals practice deceit, love of companions, grief in the loss of life, jealousy when attention is given to competitors, gratification when others approve their behavior, and the like. They feel wonder, exhibit curiosity, attentiveness, planning, and so forth. We could add that many animals seem to have desires about their futures that motivate their actions in the present. There is much to be said for the relevance to the debate about moral standing of both pain and emotion: Moral claims on behalf of animals do not in any obvious way have anything to do with cognitive properties of intelligence, capacity for moral judgment, self-consciousness, rationality, personality, or any similar prop- erty. Pain, suffering, and disruption to the emotional lives of animals have always been the central appeals of the critics of our uses of animals. An account of both moral standing and rights emerges from this line of thought about cognition, sensation, and emotion. The conclusion is that animals exhibit a Downloaded By: [Vienna University Library] At: 19:29 25 February 2011 diverse range of properties that qualify them for moral protections. It is presumably on this basis that we long have judged that we have at least some obligations to animals. This leads to questions about whether animals also have rights correlative to these obligations, which takes me to Cohen's views.

On Cohen's Views

In his reflections on animals and research, Cohen consistently has aimed to show "why animals have no rights." In his well-known article "The Case for the Use of

'~nOrigin of the Species, Danvin did not attempt to pinpoint a single ancestral origin of humans and apes, although he tried to trace a general line of descent from a primitive ape low in the mammalian series. Animals in Research" (1986), he reasoned as follows: A right is a claim that one party validly may exercise against another. Claiming occurs only within a commu- nity of moral agents who can make claims against one another. Therefore, rights "are necessarily human; their possessors are persons" with the ability for moral judgment and the ability to exercise moral claims; and animals cannot have rights because they lack these abilities. Cohen also concluded that "In conducting research on animal subjects, therefore, we do not violate their rights, because they have none to violatew4(pp. 865-870). Two major problems are present in this line of argument: (a) Cohen neglected a vital feature of rights language, the correlativity of rights and obligations; and (b) he advanced a question-begging account of the legitimate ways in which rights can be exercised on behalf of first parties by second parties. I consider each problem in turn. First, Cohen acknowledged that we have obligations to animals and maintained that the grounds of those obligations come from several sources. What he neglected is a widely accepted doctrine in rights theory, in both law and ethics, that rights are logically correlative to obligations. On this account, if a research investigator has an obligation to animal subjects to feed them and abstain from extremely painful procedures during the conduct of research, then animal subjects have a right to be fed and not to have the pain inflicted. Because Cohen recognized obligations, he logically must recognize that animals have whatever moral rights correspond to whatever moral obligations the system of social morality imposes. He therefore must yield his claim that animals have no rights. Second, if one possesses a right, others validly are constrained from interfering with the exercise of that right whether or not one is competent in the circumstances to exercise one's right. A right's holder need not be able to assert rights in order to have them. One of the functions of members of committees established to protect the interests of research animals is to see that prevailing policies of protection are implemented properly and that pain and suffering are minimized. If members of such committees have obligations to ensure that agony to animals is minimized, Downloaded By: [Vienna University Library] At: 19:29 25 February 2011 those obligations alone provide sufficient reason to say that they are protecting the rights of animals. The view, therefore, that Cohen should defend is that animals have all and only those rights that are correlative to our obligations in regard to them. Cohen (1986) also acknowledged that inhumane treatment is a moral wrong and that unnecessary use of animals is inhumane treatment, from which it follows that we should not experiment on them if the same results can be accomplished by using alternative methods. Cohen correctly asserted that requirements of humane treat- ment take precedence over mere preferences that the researcher may have for the

4~ohenoffered no defense of this claim, and I have been unable to locate any empirical studies that support it. OPPOSING VIEWS ON ANIMAL EXPERIMENTATION 1 19

use of animals in research. However, Cohen's response to the question whether researchers should at least strive to reduce the number of animals in research, was "No, we should increase it" and that "enlargement in the use of animals is our obligation." He asserted, without empirical support of any sort, that the use of animals already is limited dangerously and that animal research opportunities that would increase human safety are "commonly missed" (p. 869). Cohen (1986) acknowledged that some research causes pain to animals and that experimenters have an obligation to subject animals only to necessary pain: "Animals certainly can suffer and surely ought not to be made to suffer needlessly" (p. 867). Thus, animal suffering has moral weight, suggesting that the issue of permissible pain should be resolved by examination of the reasonably expected benefits of a particular experiment or program of research. But what neither Cohen nor Frey considers is the need for pain limits or thresholds, which indicates they think any level of pain, mental suffering, and the like are justifiable if the benefits of the research are anticipated reasonably. Their position conflicts with my view that we have a moral obligation to fix upper limits of basic decency in the conduct of research, for humans and animals alike. (In the United Kingdom upper limits of pain are established by law, but in theunited States no actual limits are mentioned.) I believe, as does Cohen, that we may be justified in conducting some forms of animal research, but not with the scope or of the type he sanctions. What makes the infliction of pain wrong, when it is wrong, is precisely that it is harmful (i.e., the animal suffers a setback to interests), and no justification of the harm in terms of nobler purposes can wipe that fact away. The acceptability of pain inflicted on animals in the conduct of research always will depend on the merit of the research and the amount and type of pain inflicted, but it also should be constrained by upper thresholds of inflicted harm.

On Frey's Views

Downloaded By: [Vienna University Library] At: 19:29 25 February 2011 Frey agrees that we should attribute moral standing to animals, but he raises profound questions about the level of standing the animal obtains. He argues that the value of a life is contingent on its quality, its quality on its richness, and its richness on its capacities and scope for enrichment. Although animal life typically is not as rich and, therefore, not as valuable as human life, some animals have lives that are more valuable than those of other animals, and some animals have lives that are more valuable than some human lives. He maintains that for humans and animals alike, life is valuable only under certain conditions. It loses value when its richness or valued components are stripped away. As a life becomes progressively less valuable, it has a progressively reduced moral standing that makes it increasingly more vulnerable to use in the riskier sides of biomedical and behavioral research. In principle, a human life can have the same value or less value than many forms of animal life; and an animal may overtake a 120 BEAUCHAMP

human on the comparative scale. If, for example, the primate being trained in a language laboratory has a richer life than does the progressively deteriorating patient with Alzheimer's disease, the primate gains a higher moral standing than the patient with Alzheimer's disease and deserves more protection as a research subject than does the human. Frey's analysis is difficult to accept. His argument entails that human infants, brain-damaged humans, and others with a lowered quality of life have a weakened or, perhaps, no moral standing. The more a living being is unlike the flourishing adult human person, the more the burden is increased to show that the entity has a significant moral standing that shields it from status as a research subject. But our moral intuitions tell us that infants, the retarded, the senile, and the brain damaged often deserve more rather than less moral protection than do normal adults. I want to make a parallel claim for animals. Species membership is not a factor for Frey in these determinations of moral standing. He accepts the view that humans with a sufficiently impoverished or substandard quality of life justifiably may be treated exactly as we treat animals at the same substandard level of existence. They can be not only justifiably used for research of all types, but mined for tissues and organs, killed when they lack all social utility, and so forth. Frey's thesis is not that a rat obtains a higher moral standing than does a patient with Alzheimer's disease. The thesis is strictly that when the quality or richness of a life surpasses that of any other life, they trade sides on the scale of values and lose or gain moral protections (Frey, 1987a, 1987b, 1988, 1990). I believe that much less of a gulf exists in the richness of animal life than can be invoked in cross-species comparative judgments of the sort to which Frey ties his analysis. Unless we have the experiences animals have, we are not in a position to appreciate the subtleties of animal experience or the meaning and importance of those experiences to the subjects who have them. To argue that our lives are morally weightier, based on our knowledge of the value of our lives (not theirs, to which we have no access), may be only a way of begging the question (Sapontzis, 1987, Downloaded By: [Vienna University Library] At: 19:29 25 February 2011 pp. 2 18-220). Frey rightly recognizes that pain is an evil for an animal just as it is for a human, and he realizes how miserable the research enterprise makes the lives of many animals. These claims together with his comparative value analysis make his proposals fairer than most. However, he provides no satisfactory basis on which to conclude that some forms of animal suffering are unjustifiable even if the benefits to humans and to society are exceptional. If the prospect of human benefit is sufficient, any cost can-indeed, must-be allocated to animals, on his analysis. But the principal moral problem that we face today in the effort to justify our exploitation of animals is how to draw reasonable and fair boundaries that determine what will be permitted and what, for principled reasons, will be prohibited. OPPOSING VIEWS ON ANIMAL EXPERIMENTATION 121

A DARWINIAN CONCLUSION

The fact that we have the same ancestors as do the apes provides a powerful reason for holding that we are very much like our evolutionary kin, whatever the differ- ences. This perspective allows us not only to see many resemblances across species, but to understand them. Evolutionary theory promotes the ideas of progressive development and continua, not sharp breaks. If it did not, much research with animals would be pointless. Coming to grips with this fact is a major part of our struggle with the problem of moral standing, human obligations, and animal rights.

REFERENCES

Bentham, J. (1789). The principles of morals and legislation. Chapter 17, Section 1. Cohen, C. (1986). The case for the use of animals in research. New England Jouml of Medicine, 315, 865-870. Frey, R. G. (1987a). Animal parts, human wholes: On the use of animals as a sowce of organs for human transplants. In J. M. Humber & R. F. Almeder (Eds.), Biomedical ethics reviews. Clifton, NJ: Humana. Frey, R. G. (1987b). Autonomy and the value of animal life. Monist, 70, 50-63. Frey, R. G. (1988). Moral standing, the value of lives, and speciesism. Between the Species, 4(3), 191-201. Frey, R. G. (1990). Animals, science and morality. Behioral and Brain Sciences, 13, 22. Griffin, D. R. (1981). The question of animal awareness: Evolutionary continuity of mental experience (2nd ed.). New York: Rockefeller University Press. (Original work published 1976) Griffin, D. R. (1992). Animal mi&. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Masson, J. M., & McChy, S. (1995). When elephants weep: The emotional lives of animals. New York: Delacorte. Radner, D., & Radner, M. (1989). Animal consciousness. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus. Rollin, B. (1989). The unheededcry: Animal consciousness, animalpain, andscience. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Sapontzis, S. F. (1987). Morals, reason, and animals. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Singer, P., & Cavalieri, P. (Eds.). (1986). The great ape project. New York: St. Martin's Press. Downloaded By: [Vienna University Library] At: 19:29 25 February 2011