Ethics & Behavior Opposing Views on Animal Experimentation
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This article was downloaded by: [Vienna University Library] On: 25 February 2011 Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 931547535] Publisher Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37- 41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Ethics & Behavior Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t782890670 Opposing Views on Animal Experimentation: Do Animals Have Rights? Tom L. Beauchamp Online publication date: 08 January 2010 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 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. ETHICS & BEHAVIOR, 7(2), 113-121 Copyright O 1997, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. 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