Should we subject animals to dangerous experiments?

• Do potential medical benefits to humans justify inflicting pain on animals?
• Is an ape more valuable than a rat?
• What responsibility do we have to protect the lives of animals?

What rules apply to animals that don’t apply to humans?

For that matter, what rules apply to humans?

This week’s Roundtable discussion quickly moved to some of the deepest questions of morality. Before we can justify a particular treatment of animals, we have to determine what ethical value we associate with the animal’s suffering and death. Is suffering itself a moral ill, or are we only reprehensible when we actively inflict suffering? We don’t often walk into the forest to prevent the tiger from killing its prey—but some of us do protest killing animals in controlled situations, even if the benefit to humanity in those cases may far outweigh the benefit that the tiger gains from killing.

Perhaps we disapprove of inflicting pain on animals from an essentially anthropocentric perspective, as it may desensitize us to the value of life (with consequences for how we treat one another). But is that conception sufficient, or is it necessary for us to attribute negative moral value with suffering itself? If so, are apes (for example) endowed with moral responsibility?

It was generally agreed that our functional morality is derived by Bayes-type induction: We make instinctive moral decisions in a large number of specific cases, then extrapolate to broader principles. But in the case of animal testing (and other questions of bioethics), that approach may make us uncomfrotable. It forces us to accept, essentially, that “that which is, is good”—often referred to as the naturalistic fallacy. On the other hand, there may be no other solution. We may have to accept that changing circumstances change ethical perspectives, and that change is equivalent to progress.

From a utilitarian standpoint, we can accept that sacrifice is necessary—in certain cases, non-consentual sacrifice. Can we apply this standard to animals as well as humans, and is it applicable cases of life and death? Joe, though terrified by his proposition’s implications, suggested that if the danger of animal testing is desensitization, perhaps we ought simply to devalue that which we need to sacrifice. If we disregard an animal’s capacity for pain and the value of its experience, subjecting it to painful processes won’t detract from interhuman ethical practice. But what are the limits of such devaluation?

In the course of the discussion, our group generally established an inverse relationship between rigor and principle in ethical systems. The more comprehensive and rational a system seems to be, the more arbitrary its foundation appears. In cases like this, precision and simplicity may be mutually exclusive traits. Dichotomous thought experiments can bring clarity to moral judgment, but they often lead us to strikingly unfamiliar and uncomfortable conclusions. The underlying question of our discussion, though it was never explicity voiced may have been: “Are we willing to abandon our passion for the sake of reason?”

Nate Becker and J.S. Mill: “Yes!” PETA and Saint Augustine: “Never!” Nietzsche and the Godfather: “Forget about it!”