Abstract
The concern of biomedical researchers for the well-being of laboratory animals reflects a consensus that animals are conscious subjects. Partisans of the animal rights movement believe that researchers must go beyond the acknowledgment of consciousness and consequent attention to animal well-being. They should recognize just how similar human and animal consciousness are, and then address animal interests and animal rights. Consideration of these issues would challenge all uses, even painless uses, of animals. In any effort to identify the interests and rights of animals, even animal rights philosophers admit that the nature of consciousness and cognition—human and animal—matters. A theory of human consciousness and cognition developed by B.F.J. Lonergan is helpful in understanding and comparing human and animal consciousness. According to Lonergan, elemental wonder makes human consciousness and cognition a dynamic, self-assembling process moving from presentations given in experience through successive levels of understanding, judgment, and responsibility to the affirmation of values. Questioning sweeps humans across a divide between elementary knowing, which is shared with animals, and a type of knowing that is exclusively human. None of the animal behaviors catalogued by animal rights partisans reveals wonder and the drive to understand, affirm and decide. That drive is a single, restless activity generating successive levels of consciousness. If, as animal rights philosophers agree, animals are incapable of responsible behavior, it must also be that their cognitional feats are qualitatively different from those of humans. Absent questioning and the drive to understand, animals never emerge on the level of intelligent and rational, much less responsible, consciousness. Their cognitional achievements appear to fall within the province of elementary knowing, a realm in which they are accomplished associative learners— clever, to be sure, but not capable of the beginnings of full human knowing. Human consciousness and cognition differ enough from animal consciousness and cognition that humans claim rights while animals do not. So it is that even if we use animals in research, having vouched for their humane care, we use humans as experimental subjects only when they give informed consent. We safeguard the welfare of animals; we guarantee the rights of persons.
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References and Notes
Cf. American Association for the Advancement of Science: http://archives.aaas.org/docs/resolutions.php?doc_id=381; Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology: http://opa.faseb.org/pages/PolicyIssues/animalresearch_restatement.htm; Society for Neuroscience: http://www.sfn.org/index.cfm?pagename=guidelinesPolicies_UseOfAnimalsandHumans; American Psychological Association: http://www.apa.org/science/anguide.html. Professional societies helped animal protectionists craft and then update the 1966 Animal Welfare Act that sets standards of animal care for research institutions. Cf. The National Research Council-Institute of Laboratory Animal Resources. Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals. Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1996. Moreover, they endorse regulations that implement the Act—regulations that stipulate conditions for the housing, feeding, cleanliness, exercise, and medical needs of laboratory animals; prescribe anesthesia for potentially painful procedures and analgesic drugs during postoperative care; and require participation on Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees (IACUCs) to ensure that research animals are treated responsibly and compassionately.
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Singer allows the use of animals when it is clear that small harm to few animals is outweighed by great benefits for many humans. Such cases, however, are very few. Biomedical research—especially basic research—does not proceed in a straight line from a handful of animals to certain specific persons. Ten years after declaring that the routine use of hundreds of thousands of laboratory animals in research “without the remotest prospect of significant benefits for human beings or any other animals” is ethically unacceptable, Singer heralded experiments in which experimentally damaged nervous systems of rats were repaired with stem cells derived from embryos. (Cf. Singer P. Sense and sentience: We might not need pig hearts if the ban on human embryo experiments were lifted. Guardian August 21, 1999:24.) Singer touted these experiments because they could lead to the practice of growing tissues for the repair or replacement of damaged organs, thus eliminating the need of temporary animal transplants for patients on human organ waiting lists. This research, however, depended on decades of basic research, much of it conducted with little understanding of its role in stem cell therapy and all of it involving the routine use of thousands of laboratory rats. None of it would have been approved if Singer’s moral calculus had been used prospectively.
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Parker, J. (2008). The Ethical Basis for Animal Use in Research. In: Conn, P.M. (eds) Sourcebook of Models for Biomedical Research. Humana Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-59745-285-4_4
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