An Attempt At Rational Discussion
'You won't find chimps having this debate'
After the demonstrations and court battles, isn't it time to talk calmly about animal testing? We ask two leading philosophers to debate the rights and wrongs
Discussion chaired by Julian Baggini
Tuesday June 13, 2006
The Guardian
Richard Ryder was one of the pioneers of the philosophy of animal liberation. In 1970, he had an Archimedes moment in the bath and coined the term "speciesism", a prejudice against other species on the grounds of their species difference; akin to racism and sexism. The word is now in the Oxford English Dictionary.
Three decades later, defending any essential difference between humans and animals has become deeply unfashionable, but Kenan Malik has been unusually forthright in doing just that. In his book Man, Beast and Zombie he follows the great philosopher Immanuel Kant in arguing that animals are mere things that can be treated as means to an end.
When we brought Malik and Ryder together to debate the ethics of animal experimentation, we began by asking Ryder what he thought the strongest argument against vivisection was.
Richard Ryder: The strongest reason that I'm opposed to at least unnecessary testing on animals is that I don't really see that the species difference makes any moral difference, any more than differences in race, class or gender. Just as racism attaches a lot of moral importance to racial differences, so speciesism attaches a lot of moral importance to species differences. I think it's very hard to find a rational explanation of why this should be.
Kenan Malik: The analogy between speciesism and racism is invalid. Racists discriminate against people who are fundamentally the same. So-called speciesists assert something that is factually true: that there is a fundamental moral distinction between humans and other animals - which is that humans are what we would call subjects: rational, autonomous beings who are capable of being moral and creating moral systems. We recognise right and wrong, we recognise we're able to act upon such judgments, accept responsibility and apportion blame. Animals do not live in such a community and it would be cruel to treat them as if they did. Animals are objects in that sense; they do not posses self-consciousness and agency as we do.
RR: You are asserting, without very good scientific evidence, that all nonhuman animals lack rationality, moral sense, autonomy and self-consciousness. There is some scientific evidence that they have elements of all those qualities. But even if they didn't, how does that make a moral difference? I've known severely mentally handicapped human beings who lack rationality in the moral, self-conscious sense. Am I allowed to experiment on them?
KM: Children normally grow up to become full members of the moral community. The severely mentally disabled, but for an accident of nature, would have been of the same kind as you and I - rational, autonomous beings, and the kind to which a mentally handicapped person belongs is important.
RR: Even if you're right about these differences, I don't think that an accident of nature excuses the moral prejudice of speciesism. After all, it was an accident of nature that we were born human beings, rather than as cats or horses. Do you accept Darwinism, that we are animals among many other sorts of animal?
KM: Of course I'm a Darwinian. But we shouldn't confuse Darwinism as a scientific theory with a moral philosophy. As everyone from Thomas Huxley to Richard Dawkins has pointed out, human morality gives us a capacity to rise above the struggle for existence. It's very dangerous to confuse moral qualities with brute facts of nature, which is what you're doing.
RR: I think that's what you're doing. You're arguing that because there is something different in the behaviour of the human species, that gives us a unique moral position. I'm saying that there's no great difference in kind between us and some of the other animals, there are only differences in degree, which is indeed the position Darwin took. The moral implications of Darwinism haven't sunk in: we're all parts of nature, we're all on a continuum, therefore if we're going to have any morality at all we need to have a morality that reflects that continuum.
KM: Humans are part of that natural continuum. But we're also in a certain sense very different from other animals. There isn't a group of chimps sitting around having this debate about the relationships between chimps and humans. Opponents of animal experiments point to a whole series of capacities which are sometimes thought of as uniquely human which non-human animals posses as well. But it seems to me that we often use the same terms to talk about very different phenomena. Take something like culture. Primatologists define culture as the acquisition of habits and point out that chimps possess 40-odd cultural habits that one group of chimps have that another group doesn't, such as fishing for termites with a stick. But when we talk about human culture we're talking about a different phenomenon. We're talking about our capacity to transform the world through our ability to act collectively and to learn from the past.
Non-human animals have an evolutionary past, they don't have a history. If you look at the six million years since the evolutionary lines of chimps and humans diverged, lifestyles and behaviours of chimps are pretty much the same. The lifestyles and behaviours of humans are entirely different.
RR: The important thing scientifically is that a lot of other animals, in addition to the human species, react in the same sort of way to noxious stimuli, show the same kind of neurochemical correlates of pain, and the biochemistry and neural structures are similar. Historically, the great reformers of the human condition have also been concerned about animal welfare.
William Wilberforce co-founded the RSPCA; Lord Shaftsbury, after he had led the campaign to liberate children and women from what was effectively factory slavery, became the leader of the anti-vivisection movement in Victorian England; Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill both explicitly include animals within their moral philosophy and said, as I do, that human and animal suffering count equally.
KM: Historically it is simply not true that the cruel treatment of animals and humans go hand in hand. The concept of human rights, the treatment of human beings as having equal moral worth, has emerged from a view of humans having special moral, political qualities. On the other hand, at the heart of racial science was the idea of a continuity between the human and the animal world, such that certain human groups were seen as closer to chimps than other human beings. Some of the most reactionary political philosophies, from Nazism to current Hindu nationalism, assert the oneness of humanity and nature in this mystical way. So the relationship you draw between the treatment of animals and humans is not justifiable philosophically or historically.
RR: Philosophically and indeed psychologically I'm convinced it is very similar. It's the desire to try to identify oneself as part of a privileged in-group. One of the great sources of human happiness is feeling better off than others and the tendency to identify with groups that are seen as superior.
KM: Had you lived 100 years ago presumably your argument would have been to stop animal experimentation, and all the advances of the last century would not have happened. The logical consequence of opposition to animal experimentation is that you have to morally accept that we will live in a world without vaccination, without transplantations and so on.
RR: Well they might have been done by other means. And I'm not arguing that the advances that have already been made should be removed. As a politician and a realist I accept that it's not going to be possible to stop animal experimentation immediately, but the ideal position would be to stop it, obviously. But one can see there are advantages coming from it. This highlights the most difficult areas in ethics: the problem of trading off the suffering of one for the benefit of others, and I don't think anyone's solved it.
KM: If you're talking about a trade-off, what you're suggesting is that human welfare, at least in certain sets of circumstances, trumps that of animals, and I would agree with that. But I'd take that argument to its logical conclusion - that's why I support animal experimentation full stop. You cannot say that animal experimentation is acceptable within limits because it provides benefits for humans and still believe that human pain and animal pain are of the same moral consequence.
RR: I'm not saying it's acceptable, I'm recognising that it produces advantages. But then so does experimentation on human beings.
KM: And I'm opposed to experimentation on human beings.
RR: So am I. But what is the difference between the pain of a dog or a cat and the pain of a human being? If there were absolutely conclusive and irrefutable scientific evidence that we were the only species that suffered pain, then I would change my view.
KM: In a similar way, if someone could show me that non-human animals are rational, autonomous moral agents in the way that humans are, then I would change mine.
OK, not exhaustive, but interesting nonetheless.
After the demonstrations and court battles, isn't it time to talk calmly about animal testing? We ask two leading philosophers to debate the rights and wrongs
Discussion chaired by Julian Baggini
Tuesday June 13, 2006
The Guardian
Richard Ryder was one of the pioneers of the philosophy of animal liberation. In 1970, he had an Archimedes moment in the bath and coined the term "speciesism", a prejudice against other species on the grounds of their species difference; akin to racism and sexism. The word is now in the Oxford English Dictionary.
Three decades later, defending any essential difference between humans and animals has become deeply unfashionable, but Kenan Malik has been unusually forthright in doing just that. In his book Man, Beast and Zombie he follows the great philosopher Immanuel Kant in arguing that animals are mere things that can be treated as means to an end.
When we brought Malik and Ryder together to debate the ethics of animal experimentation, we began by asking Ryder what he thought the strongest argument against vivisection was.
Richard Ryder: The strongest reason that I'm opposed to at least unnecessary testing on animals is that I don't really see that the species difference makes any moral difference, any more than differences in race, class or gender. Just as racism attaches a lot of moral importance to racial differences, so speciesism attaches a lot of moral importance to species differences. I think it's very hard to find a rational explanation of why this should be.
Kenan Malik: The analogy between speciesism and racism is invalid. Racists discriminate against people who are fundamentally the same. So-called speciesists assert something that is factually true: that there is a fundamental moral distinction between humans and other animals - which is that humans are what we would call subjects: rational, autonomous beings who are capable of being moral and creating moral systems. We recognise right and wrong, we recognise we're able to act upon such judgments, accept responsibility and apportion blame. Animals do not live in such a community and it would be cruel to treat them as if they did. Animals are objects in that sense; they do not posses self-consciousness and agency as we do.
RR: You are asserting, without very good scientific evidence, that all nonhuman animals lack rationality, moral sense, autonomy and self-consciousness. There is some scientific evidence that they have elements of all those qualities. But even if they didn't, how does that make a moral difference? I've known severely mentally handicapped human beings who lack rationality in the moral, self-conscious sense. Am I allowed to experiment on them?
KM: Children normally grow up to become full members of the moral community. The severely mentally disabled, but for an accident of nature, would have been of the same kind as you and I - rational, autonomous beings, and the kind to which a mentally handicapped person belongs is important.
RR: Even if you're right about these differences, I don't think that an accident of nature excuses the moral prejudice of speciesism. After all, it was an accident of nature that we were born human beings, rather than as cats or horses. Do you accept Darwinism, that we are animals among many other sorts of animal?
KM: Of course I'm a Darwinian. But we shouldn't confuse Darwinism as a scientific theory with a moral philosophy. As everyone from Thomas Huxley to Richard Dawkins has pointed out, human morality gives us a capacity to rise above the struggle for existence. It's very dangerous to confuse moral qualities with brute facts of nature, which is what you're doing.
RR: I think that's what you're doing. You're arguing that because there is something different in the behaviour of the human species, that gives us a unique moral position. I'm saying that there's no great difference in kind between us and some of the other animals, there are only differences in degree, which is indeed the position Darwin took. The moral implications of Darwinism haven't sunk in: we're all parts of nature, we're all on a continuum, therefore if we're going to have any morality at all we need to have a morality that reflects that continuum.
KM: Humans are part of that natural continuum. But we're also in a certain sense very different from other animals. There isn't a group of chimps sitting around having this debate about the relationships between chimps and humans. Opponents of animal experiments point to a whole series of capacities which are sometimes thought of as uniquely human which non-human animals posses as well. But it seems to me that we often use the same terms to talk about very different phenomena. Take something like culture. Primatologists define culture as the acquisition of habits and point out that chimps possess 40-odd cultural habits that one group of chimps have that another group doesn't, such as fishing for termites with a stick. But when we talk about human culture we're talking about a different phenomenon. We're talking about our capacity to transform the world through our ability to act collectively and to learn from the past.
Non-human animals have an evolutionary past, they don't have a history. If you look at the six million years since the evolutionary lines of chimps and humans diverged, lifestyles and behaviours of chimps are pretty much the same. The lifestyles and behaviours of humans are entirely different.
RR: The important thing scientifically is that a lot of other animals, in addition to the human species, react in the same sort of way to noxious stimuli, show the same kind of neurochemical correlates of pain, and the biochemistry and neural structures are similar. Historically, the great reformers of the human condition have also been concerned about animal welfare.
William Wilberforce co-founded the RSPCA; Lord Shaftsbury, after he had led the campaign to liberate children and women from what was effectively factory slavery, became the leader of the anti-vivisection movement in Victorian England; Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill both explicitly include animals within their moral philosophy and said, as I do, that human and animal suffering count equally.
KM: Historically it is simply not true that the cruel treatment of animals and humans go hand in hand. The concept of human rights, the treatment of human beings as having equal moral worth, has emerged from a view of humans having special moral, political qualities. On the other hand, at the heart of racial science was the idea of a continuity between the human and the animal world, such that certain human groups were seen as closer to chimps than other human beings. Some of the most reactionary political philosophies, from Nazism to current Hindu nationalism, assert the oneness of humanity and nature in this mystical way. So the relationship you draw between the treatment of animals and humans is not justifiable philosophically or historically.
RR: Philosophically and indeed psychologically I'm convinced it is very similar. It's the desire to try to identify oneself as part of a privileged in-group. One of the great sources of human happiness is feeling better off than others and the tendency to identify with groups that are seen as superior.
KM: Had you lived 100 years ago presumably your argument would have been to stop animal experimentation, and all the advances of the last century would not have happened. The logical consequence of opposition to animal experimentation is that you have to morally accept that we will live in a world without vaccination, without transplantations and so on.
RR: Well they might have been done by other means. And I'm not arguing that the advances that have already been made should be removed. As a politician and a realist I accept that it's not going to be possible to stop animal experimentation immediately, but the ideal position would be to stop it, obviously. But one can see there are advantages coming from it. This highlights the most difficult areas in ethics: the problem of trading off the suffering of one for the benefit of others, and I don't think anyone's solved it.
KM: If you're talking about a trade-off, what you're suggesting is that human welfare, at least in certain sets of circumstances, trumps that of animals, and I would agree with that. But I'd take that argument to its logical conclusion - that's why I support animal experimentation full stop. You cannot say that animal experimentation is acceptable within limits because it provides benefits for humans and still believe that human pain and animal pain are of the same moral consequence.
RR: I'm not saying it's acceptable, I'm recognising that it produces advantages. But then so does experimentation on human beings.
KM: And I'm opposed to experimentation on human beings.
RR: So am I. But what is the difference between the pain of a dog or a cat and the pain of a human being? If there were absolutely conclusive and irrefutable scientific evidence that we were the only species that suffered pain, then I would change my view.
KM: In a similar way, if someone could show me that non-human animals are rational, autonomous moral agents in the way that humans are, then I would change mine.
OK, not exhaustive, but interesting nonetheless.