| Product: |
Vivisection |
| Date: |
27/07/01 (75 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Good Drugs, Man, Products that give My Hear that Natural Shine, Less Strays?
Disadvantages: Wrong, Wrong, Wrong
As is my custom with matters of an ethical nature, I'd like to have a look at what logic might have to tell us about this mess of morals. If you’d be so kind as to strap down your preconceptions, store all your criticisms in the overhead lockers until the end of the journey, and slip into an open-minded dressing gown, we can begin. If anyone thinks I am a plagiarist for continually throwing out the ideas of famous philosophers, I would have to agree. Unfortunately, I am not a great philosopher, and the cross to bear for the mediocre meditator is that he/she has to resign himself/herself to explaining what the great philosophers had to say about certain matters. It may be plagiarism, but in the best possible way. That’s how I explain it, anyway.
My favourite, and most cogent, take on the whole vivisection debate comes from the mind of the renowned animal-rights activist Peter Singer. His work on animal ethics is probably the most famous and, of course, controversial philosophical project of the day. But let’s cut the foreplay, strip ourselves down, grit our teeth, think of the 1966 England squad, and get stuck into the argument.
Unlike most of the practical arguments spewed back and forth on this subject, Singer attacks animal experiments from a very different angle. In fact, his thoughts are less of an argument and more of a plea for people to consider the consequences of their moral stance. He begins by asking what, if anything, makes racism immoral. If I abuse someone purely on the basis of the colour of their skin, how would you, the rational observer, explain to me that what I was doing is wrong? Well, the most obvious solution is to say that the colour of their skin is a feature over which they have no control, and that, in all other tangible senses, they are exactly the same as me. To prejudge someone based on something beyond their control is irrational – a moral that is very widely-accepted in this day and age. I
n exactly the same way, if I abused someone purely because they were less intelligent than me, we would be living in a world where computer geeks ruled with an iron mouse, pillaging our PCs, raping our ROM and generally tyrannising the technophobe. What this is all boiling down to is the question of where we can draw the line as to who/what has rights in our society and who/what does not. For example, I would not like to see a pebble getting the same rights as myself, since, as a clearly inanimate object, its connection with rights is meaningless. Of course, I understand that there are racists out there, as well as people who belittle those with less intelligence – for them, the argument becomes much longer and more involved, but still achievable. That can be your homework, if you like.
So hopefully we have arrived at the same point by now – a person’s colour, physical attributes or intelligence should have no bearing on their basic rights (i.e. the right to life, the right to not be tortured, etc.). I’m sure you can all see where we are going with this – why are animals excluded from this structure of basic rights? More importantly, how can we distinguish between an animal’s rights and a pebble’s rights? If we include animals, do we not necessarily include non-living matter? A common answer is to say that objects that are clearly human have rights, whereas non-human objects do not. This, however, is the same as saying white people have rights and black people do not. If you do not agree with racism or chauvinism, you cannot logically condone “speciesism”. To claim humans as superior to animals is just as random as to claim that men are superior to women. Some men are superior in some ways, some men aren’t – some humans are, some are not. Singer’s answer is that we should use the ability to feel pain as the rule of thumb as to whether an object has rights or not. If an object has the a
bility to feel pain, then it is surely its basic right to not be forced to feel that pain. How do we know that animals feel pain? The same way that we know that other humans feel pain. As with everything in the world, you can never be 100% certain. Maybe, when the person next to you gets stung by a bee, his noises, gestures and words actually mean pleasure – and when they win the lottery, they actually experience, what you would call, pain. Sounds ridiculous, no? The reason we believe that other humans feel pain like our own is that they react in a similar way to how we react when feeling pain. They also have an extremely similar biological make-up – their nerves and nerve-endings seem to work the same as our own, so the logical conclusion is that they are feeling what we are feeling – namely, pain. By this definition, we can clearly see that many animals, including most of those experimented on, are candidates for having the ability to feel pain (this part of the argument may seem unnecessary, but the idea that animals cannot feel pain is still put forward to this day). If we then accept the idea that pain is the best division between objects with rights and those without, we arrive at the conclusion that the use of animals in experiments is immoral. It violates that animal’s basic rights to not be tortured. As small footnote, one common rebuttal of this view is that animals, themselves, harm and torture each other, hence justifying our abuse of them. As I pointed out in my Christianity/Homosexuality op, though, the day we start taking our morals from the animal world will be a dark day indeed. Atrocious acts such as rape, murder and public masturbation (go see the monkeys at the zoo) would become moral acts. A sorry state, indeed. Once again, we have never used animal morality to judge or create our own, and there’s no reason to start now.
The more challenging opposition to this view is total non-acceptance of the dividing li
ne as tenable. Why should we accept the ability to feel pain as the ultimate giver of rights? To the pro-vivisectionist, this is as arbitrary a division as colour, creed or intelligence. Singer, however, never claims that the pain-barrier is in any way uncontestable. What he does say, though, is that if we *do not* use this differential, we arrive at some interesting morality. For example, if we do not accept that the ability to feel pain is a legitimate device for deciding what we can and what we cannot experiment on, we arrive at a situation where it would not be immoral to experiment on and test cosmetics on retarded children. For any grouping that you would like to take, except the ability to feel pain or to be human, a normal chimpanzee would be considered as having more rights than the retarded baby. The chimp could well be more intelligent, stronger, have a longer life expectancy and have a higher quality of life. Since we have already discussed the use of “being human” as a grouping above, the only viable alternative is to accept pain as the valid limit.
Singer’s proposal in no way tried to force you to accept his opinions. Rather, it says that if you do not accept his proposition, you must accept that retarded babies, retarded children, children with fatal diseases, etc. are valid subjects for experimental use. If you wish to adopt this view, then you have a perfectly sound argument for your beliefs – but it certainly does not seem to fit in with the rest of society’s morals.
I think that, once again, the disputes inherent with this issue are the result of too much emphasis on the specifics of vivisection. If we can take a step back (as Truman III always advocates) and decide what is actually right or wrong about a certain situation, we should stick with that decision and work from there. Until we can take an objective view of things, society will never be able to agree.
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