Why Animal Experimentation Matters: The Use of Animals in Medical Research (review)

This volume of eight essays in defense of animal research closes (but could usefully have opened) with its best contribution: R.G. Frey's "Justifying Animal Experimentation: The Starting Point." Frey explains, with impressive clarity, that the debate over animal experimentation is a product of an ethical crisis occasioned by secularism. Within the Judeo-Christian tradition it has been axiomatic that human life, in all circumstances, has prior claim over nonhuman life. But in the secular age, it is impossible to find philosophically satisfactory criteria that justify the experimental use of animals but do not also justify the use of at least certain categories of humans in some circumstances. The result is an unresolved, and possibly irresolvable, moral quandary over the sacrifice of animal interests to human interests in laboratories.

Ellen Frankel Paul and Jeffrey Paul, respectively professors of political science and of philosophy at Bowling Green State University, have brought together scientists, historians, and philosophers whose common purpose is to undermine the philosophical assumptions underlying the abolitionist side of the vivisection debate. Though the tone and temper of the essays varies considerably, all the contributors share a conviction that the animal rights movement has made more headway than the quality of its philosophical argumentation warrants.

A revolution in animal rights philosophy was triggered by the publication of Peter Singer's Animal Liberation (1975). Singer writes in the utilitarian tradition of consequentialist ethics, in which the morality of an action is judged in terms of its net production of pleasure or pain. Like Jeremy Bentham, Singer argues that animals, as sentient beings, must be brought within the moral calculus. The argument turns on the concept of "personhood," the definition of which Singer borrows from John Locke's Essay on Human Understanding (1689): "A thinking intelligent being that has reason and reflection and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places." Clearly, Singer points out, a perfectly healthy nonhuman primate meets these criteria, whereas an anencephalic human infant does not. Yet only the former is considered a suitable subject for laboratory use. This, the argument continues, is a product of "speciesism," a self-interested and irrational privileging of one's own species that Singer likens to racism and sexism. Consequently, in Singer's widely influential analysis, experimentation upon animals is morally illegitimate and its phasing out would generate the necessity that would in turn lead to the invention of alternatives.

The admission of animals into the moral calculus is now a fait accompli. The ethical irrelevance of animal suffering, theorized most fully by Descartes in his Discourse on Method (1637), is now dismissed—even by most supporters of vivisection—as an extreme and untenable position. The legislative framework regulating animal experimentation in most advanced industrial states is now based on the "3 Rs": the replacement of animal experiments with alternatives where available; the reduction of the number of animals used; and the refinement of experimental processes to limit animal suffering, for example, through the use of analgesics, anesthetics, and euthanasia. This regime is based on what JerroldTannenbaum, in his contribution to the volume under review, calls the "traditional" approach, thoughTannenbaum points out that there is currently a "paradigm shift" towards an "emerging approach" that requires costly accommodation of animals in conditions that make for their positive contentment.

Anti-vivisectionists respond that both the traditional and the emerging approaches represent nothing more than "speciesist" applications of the utilitarian philosophical method, in which humans are always accorded "lexical priority" when their interests are considered relative to those of animals. The charge of "speciesism" or, more neutrally, anthropocentricism, is accepted and defended in a variety of ways by the contributors to this volume. Some emphasize the tangible medical gains secured through vivisection, and the consequent reduction in human suffering...