Animals

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Animals R. G. Frey
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POSITIONS ON ANIMAL EXPERIMENTATION

• Abolitionism df. All animal experimentation
  should cease immediately no matter how
  significant it may be to humans or other animals.
  Tom Regan supports this.
• Progressive abolitionism df. Animal experiments
  should be eliminated as other non-animal research
  possibilities arise.
• Anything goes df. Animals can be used in
  research any way that humans decide.
• Middle position df. Animals have moral
  standing their lives have value their pain must
  be seriously considered research should be
  progressively eliminated as other possibilities
  arise one must assess the relation of
  experimental benefits to experimental harms.
• Frey thinks that the middle position morally
  justifies animal experimentation.

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HUMAN BENEFIT

• What drives animal research is the benefit to
  human beings of that research.
• This benefit is typically used in an attempt to
  justify animal research.
• However, as Frey indicates, this attempt at
  justification must be supplemented by other
  considerations because the benefits that animal
  research confers on us could be obtained from
  doing the research on humans. (And wouldnt
  using humans give us experimental results that
  would be of greater benefit to humans since we
  have the same bodies and nervous systems?)
• Presumably everyone would think that that is
  wrong, but if it is wrong for us why is it not
  wrong for animals?

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THE EXTREME POSITION

• The extreme position for justifying animal
  research says that humans are morally superior to
  animals, and because of that moral superiority we
  can experiment on animals but not on humans.
• Or, animals lack the moral standing that we have,
  and so that there is nothing morally
  objectionable to using them experimentally to
  benefit us.
• Kant thought that animals have no moral standing
  in themselves, as humans do, since animals are
  not rational agents as we are, and are not
  self-conscious as we are.
• For Kant, animals are here to benefit us, and so
  using them experimentally to our benefit is
  morally acceptable.
• Frey disagrees with the extreme position.

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THE TRADITIONAL JUSTIFICATION

• Frey the traditional justification of animal
  experimentation incorporates the extreme
  position.
• The traditional justification rests on three
  claims
• 1. Animals lack moral standing in themselves,
  they are not members of the moral community, as
  humans are. (Kant.)
• 2. Animal lives have little or no value.
• 3. Because humans have moral standing are
  members of the moral community we cannot use
  them in experiments as we can animals.
• According to Frey, the traditional justification
  is wrong and must be abandoned.

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HUMANS AND ANIMALS

• Frey as we learn more about animals, it becomes
  more difficult to maintain a sharp break between
  animals especially primates and ourselves.
  (Primate is an order of mammals including humans,
  apes, monkeys, and related forms such as lemurs
  and tarsiers.)
• Frey also points out that disease and
  degeneration can result in humans who cannot do
  many of the things that other primates can do,
  and so that too makes drawing a sharp line
  between us and them difficult.
• There is also the factor of human arrogance
  simply thinking that we are superior and making
  moral rules that suit ourselves and exclude
  animals.

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RELIGION AND ETHICS

• Frey says that much of our condescension towards
  animals results from a religious ethic that
  places us at the culmen of creation and excludes
  them.
• However, Frey says that we cannot take for
  granted any longer the religious underpinning of
  the claims of human superiority that suggest that
  we alone have moral standing and that animal
  lives have little or no value.
• Frey In a pluralistic society, unanimity in
  religious opinion is no longer the case . . .
  different religions, especially Eastern ones,
  take different views about animals . . . and the
  number of non-religious people also appears to
  have risen.

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ANIMAL RIGHTS

• For Frey, animals have moral standing and so are
  members of the moral community and . . . their
  lives have value.
• This then is a rejection of the first two points
  of the traditional justification of animal
  experimentation, viz. that animals have no moral
  standing and that their lives do not have value.

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PAIN AND SUFFERING

• If we take pain and suffering to be bad for
  humans, as we do, and animals can suffer and feel
  pain, as they can, then why should pain and
  suffering be bad for humans and not for animals?
• Frey there is something odd about maintaining
  that pain and suffering are morally significant
  when felt by a human but not when felt by an
  animal.
• For Frey, animal pain and suffering are relevant
  and should be considered what confers moral
  standing upon animal lives and gives them value
  is precisely what does these things in our lives
  namely, their experiential content.

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THE CENTRAL PROBLEM I

• Human beings are said to possess some things,
  such as intelligence, sentience, and
  self-direction, that animals lack, or possess
  them to a degree that animals lack.
• If certain animals are not intelligent, sentient,
  or self-directed at all, or to the degree that
  the average adult human is, then experimenting on
  them may be thought to be acceptable.
• The central problem here is that not all humans
  are intelligent, sentient, or self-directed to a
  degree required to protect them morally if those
  things are taken to be the basis for moral
  protection. And if that is the case, then why
  can they not be used experimentally?
• Frey If animals do not gain protection from
  research because they lack the relevant degree of
  the relevant characteristic, then what about
  those humans who lack that degree of those
  characteristics?

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THE CENTRAL PROBLEM II

• Why is it wrong to use any human in research -
  especially those who are less intelligent,
  sentient, and self-determining than what is
  required to distinguish humans from other animals
  but not animals?
• Frey The appeal to human benefit cannot stand
  alone as a justification of animal
  experimentation, since it would also justify
  human experimentation.

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THE CENTRAL PROBLEM III

• Frey for any characteristic selected such as
  intelligence as that around which to formulate a
  claim of protection, humans will be found who
  lack the characteristic altogether, or lack it to
  a degree sufficient to protect them from being
  used in medical experiments, or lack it to a
  degree that in fact means that some animals have
  it to a greater degree. and so, for that
  reason, should not be used in experiments.
• Frey Indeed, depending on the characteristic
  selected, to distinguish humans from animals
  all kinds of animals, and of different species,
  will exceed the human case.

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THE CENTRAL PROBLEM IV

• Having had two human parents is not enough to
  secure moral protection.
• This is because that says nothing about ones
  present quality of life, intelligence, capacity
  for pain and distress, the ability to direct
  ones life, and so on, and these sorts of
  characteristics appear much more like the kinds
  of things that would justify not treating a human
  life as we presently treat animal lives.
• These things are important because they say
  something about the life being lived, not what
  produced that life.
• Thus quality of life is more morally important
  than what resulted in that life.

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THE CENTRAL PROBLEM V

• If (at least some) humans cannot be separated
  from (at least some) animals used in experiments,
  then either animal research will have to stop, or
  we will have to experiment on some humans in
  addition to some animals namely those that lack
  some characteristic or characteristics used to
  separate man from animals.

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MORAL STANDING I

• According to Frey, moral standing or moral
  considerability turns upon whether a creature is
  an experiential subject, with an unfolding series
  of experiences that, depending on their quality,
  can make that creatures life go well or badly.
• The key thing here then is that such an
  experiential being has a welfare that can be
  positively or negatively affected, depending upon
  what is done to it.

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MORAL STANDING II

• Frey thinks that animals that are routinely used
  in research such as rodents, rabbits, pigs, and
  non-human primates are experiential subjects
  who have moral standing and are members of the
  moral community in exactly the same way that we
  are.
• Frey pain is a moral-bearing characteristic for
  us, and I cannot see what difference it makes as
  to which species feels pain. Pain is pain.
• And if pain is important no matter which being is
  experiencing the pain, then Frey thinks that it
  is odd to suppose that the lives of beings that
  can experience pain including animals - do not
  matter.

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QUALITY OF LIFE

• Frey quality of life determines the value not
  only of human but also of animal lives.
• Frey the quality of life is a function of the
  scope and capacities of a creature for different
  kinds of experiences.
• If animals have a quality of life in virtue of
  being experiential beings, and quality of life
  can be negatively affected by pain, then animals
  will have to be taken into moral consideration,
  and it will not be morally acceptable to do just
  anything to them in using them in research
  experiments.

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SPECIESISM

• Speciesism df. Discrimination on the basis of
  species alone.
• Relative to humans and animals used in research,
  it would be a case of speciesism to maintain that
  it is acceptable to use animals in research, but
  not humans, because humans are a superior
  species.
• Kants view of the superiority of humans to
  animals would be speciesist.

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COMPARING LIVES I

• Although one wants to avoid speciesism, Frey
  thinks that human lives, on average, have a
  higher value than the lives of most animals.
• This, he thinks, is due to the nature of human
  life contrasted with other life. Our lives are
  richer, our experiences deeper.
• And he thinks that, the claim that the animals
  capacities provide it with a perfectly full life
  for a creature of its kind is not to the point,
  since it disregards the importance of comparing
  the quality of that life with human life, and
  human life is thought to be of greater quality.

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COMPARING LIVES II

• Although the average animals life has value, its
  value is not as great as the value of the average
  human life, and it is worse to destroy lives of
  greater rather than lesser value.
• Frey recognizes though that such a view will be
  speciesist unless something other than species
  membership confers greater value on a persons
  life as opposed to an animals life.
• Richness, capacity for enrichment, and quality
  of life are such things.

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COMPARING LIVES III

• Humans have a richness of life that does not
  characterize animal life. This includes such
  things as art, music, literature, family,
  friendship, love, and intellectual endeavors that
  inform life.
• We can shape our lives in terms of our interests,
  choices, and values in ways that are not
  available to animals, including other primates.
• Frey says that we are not condemned to a life
  appropriate to our species.
• This means that we cannot ignore the role of
  agency in our lives.

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COMPARING LIVES IV

• As agents, humans make choices that not only
  affect themselves, but others. Choices that
  affect others are subject to moral evaluation,
  and free agents have duties to others that
  restrict their agency.
• An animal that lacks agency is not a moral being
  in the full sense of being held accountable for
  its actions.
• Agency is part of the value of human life. The
  moral relations in which normal adult humans
  stand to each other are part of whom they take
  themselves to be.

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COMPARING LIVES V

• Frey does not think that there is a life
  appropriate to the human species, no single way
  of living to which every human being is condemned
  to conform.
• Agency enables us to make different lives for
  ourselves and others and so reflects, in this
  sense, how we want to live. and how others can
  live
• Agency enables normal adult humans to enhance
  the quality and value of their lives in ways that
  no account of the activities we share with
  animals captures.

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COMPARING LIVES VI

• While animals are part of the moral community for
  Frey, and thus deserve moral consideration, their
  lives are not as valuable as ours, and so they do
  not deserve the same level of moral consideration
  that we do.
• For Frey, we have a non-speciesist reason for
  thinking that normal adult human life is more
  valuable than animal life. Its richness and
  quality exceed that of animal life.
• Therefore he thinks that we have a
  non-speciesist reason for using animals in
  preference to humans in research if we have to
  use a creature of some sort.

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THE PROBLEM OF MARGINAL CASES I

• The reason, for Frey, not to use humans in
  research is that human lives are more valuable
  than animal lives. There is a problem though,
  and that is that not all human lives have the
  same value.
• Frey not all human lives have the same richness
  or scope for enrichment they do not, therefore,
  have the same value.
• The value of the life of an animal then might be
  greater than the value of the life of some human,
  so that such a human might be thought better to
  experiment on than the animal.

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THE PROBLEM OF MARGINAL CASES II

• Frey thinks that it is impossible to say that all
  human life has the same value No normal healthy
  adult would choose to trade places with someone
  who is extremely ill, injured, paralyzed, or in a
  coma,
• So Frey says that it seems absurd to pretend
  that lives of these sorts, lives that no one, not
  even the people living them, would wish to live,
  are as valuable a normal adult human life.
• But, again, if human lives vary in richness,
  quality, and value and if the value of some
  human life is very low then the value of quite
  ordinary animal lives appears to exceed that of
  the human.
• Why experiment then on animals whose lives exceed
  in value the lives of certain humans? Why not
  use those humans?

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THE PROBLEM OF MARGINAL CASES III

• Although he does not favor using any human being
  in medical research, Frey says that he does not
  know of any argument that would favor the use of
  an animal the value of whose life is greater than
  that of some human being.
• Frey Assuming that we have to use some lives in
  research . . . we should use lives of lower than
  higher quality. Typically this will mean that we
  use animal lives.
• Frey We simply cannot guarantee that this will
  always be so, however, unless we can find
  something that always ensures, whatever the
  richness and quality of human life, that it
  exceeds in value the lives of any and all
  animals.
• Unfortunately, I know of no such thing.