My first year as a teacher, I was shoved into my classroom by the Vice Principal and told, “You have three 'I Don’t Knows' that are going to have to last you to June, make ‘em count.” It was a slogan he’d developed after years of watching initially enthusiastic young teachers slowly devolve into instructors of the Read the Chapter the Night Before variety. The instant he said it, I knew precisely when I would need to use that small cache of professorial fallibility. It’s the same thing I've been saying “I don’t know” to myself about since sixth grade: animal testing.
There is no other problem out there that leaves me so intellectually flat-footed as how my humanism might shed light on my thoughts about medical animal research. When I became a vegetarian a decade ago, the decision took all of five minutes of sustained reflection. Meat is almost comically bad for my health, the meat industry is detrimental to the environment on a level that super villains would be envious of, and the cost is a living being raised as poorly and slaughtered as cheaply as possible. In exchange for all of that, all I get is that meat registers as delicious to the taste receptors on my tongue for a few seconds. Intellectually, it’s an easy choice.
Animal testing, however, is a matter not so easily disposed of. At least, certain manifestations of it. I think we are all agreed as a civilisation that, if it takes the poisoning of small mammals to produce the next line of mascara products, then we’ll make do just fine with what we’ve got. It might only extend lashes by 115 per cent instead of 122 per cent, but somehow we’ll muddle on as a species. By and large, we are very willing to pay an extra couple of dollars for cosmetics if they come with the peace of mind that nothing suffered agonies to make us look marginally better for our night on the town or shadow-bestrewn Skype date.
So, yes, cosmetic testing is a problem easily dealt with, but medical testing is an entirely different creature, breeding unreflective binarisms of the most trenchant sort. It is either never okay, or always okay, and in either case one searches in vain for a justification that ekes beyond metaphysical sloganeering. And that is all understandable, as a close inspection of the ethics of animal testing soon lands us in waters that call our very own existence as independent actors into question. Even those of us steeled in the fires of rigorous humanism find it a bleak and vertigo-inducing perspective from which to see ourselves, so it’s hard to blame those who actually believe in gods and souls for stopping short of a thorough-going analysis of their own motivations and talking points.
But right here, right now, it is just you and I, so I am going to take you with me through the argument as far as I can and show you precisely where I think it breaks down and then, in fine and well established teacherly tradition, I’ll hand the proof off to you to complete.
Here are some of the ground assumptions I'm making which I think are necessary to honestly approach our relation to other life forms on our planet: I do not believe in gods, souls, free will, or the afterlife. I consider myself in every way a machine with some interesting quirks and chemical properties that I'm entirely satisfied to spend a lifetime observing from the cheap seats that are my conscious brain (that sounds depressing, but if you don’t make a habit of frequenting the cheap seats, then you don’t know where the REAL party is). I’ll do my best to stay alive and enjoy the relatively brief span during which this biochemical experiment currently wrapped in a Tears For Fears shirt will run its course. The decisions that emanate from me are the result of deterministic processes that, excepting some fundamental indeterminacy on the Planck level of space-time, I couldn't change if I wanted to.
There are two extremes one can take from this position. On one hand, you could see all life as just chemical reactions and conclude that all morality and ethics are meaningless afterthoughts, and so humans are entitled to do whatever they want to whatever they want. On the other, you could realise that there is nothing qualitatively separating humanity from the other forms of life out there, and refuse to do so much as take medicine that could harm the bacteria seeking to eat you from the inside out. Both of these conclusions, however, leave out a crucial component – the mutual programmability of primatekind.
Determined my behaviour might be, but it is determined in line with my primate inheritance, one which prejudices actions that favour social cohesion over those that do not. When others act out from their primate social instincts to pass judgement on the ethical rigour of my decisions, it programs me on a neurochemical level to make future decisions according to the best models and critiques I've been offered, and when I offer my opinions in turn, I help to program others. This mutual feedback system has pushed humanity into ever wider circles of inclusivity. We can’t help it – we have been given a set of chemical reactions that reward a constant broadening of perspective, and are each other’s watchmen in the advancing of this process.
We can modify each other’s brains in ways unparalleled in most of the animal kingdom, for both good and ill. We police each other’s biological imperative towards inclusivity, and that mutual reinforcement brings with it an expansion of our notion of responsibility that is just now extending towards the whole human race and will inevitably spread to other species as well. Eventually, we simply will not be able to bring ourselves to experiment on animals any more – the self-reinforcing chemistry of that biological imperative will make it impossible to countenance animal testing as part of the ordinary course of civilisation.
That’s nice, but you can see where it’s not an answer. As mammals, we have a biological need to include and program each other towards inclusivity, but a biological imperative is not a universal one. Sure, I'm acting in line with my basic biological drives when I treat animals better, but my biology is totally arbitrary, the result of an evolutionary process that made our species successful by stressing collaboration and interdependence. There is, however, no link between Successful Behaviour Patterns and the universal imperative that we seem to crave. This is my problem with most people who come out with such strong opinions about animal testing – they behave as if there are universal principles to cleave to in this instance when there are merely interpretations and abstractions of various degrees of honesty.
The primate imperative cuts both ways, and that explains why the rhetoric seems so self-assured to members on both sides of the issue. Primates help each other even when it costs them resources, and so naturally the medical community feels itself to be acting in the best traditions of human nature when it bears the burden of sacrificing animal life to prolong and improve human life. Primates helping primates, even when it costs them peace of mind to do so. Research scientists are not evil charlatans who get off on inflicting harm on animals – they are men and women deeply connected to humanity and who sacrifice their time and happiness in pursuit of our benefit. They are caught up in our primate imperative in its human form.
Likewise, those unilaterally against animal testing have taken the line that any conscious act of will favouring one species at the expense of another is a betrayal of our best natures. Certainly, lines are always drawn and those lines are necessarily somewhat random (I don’t know anybody who doesn't get inoculated, for example, out of sympathy for the viruses), but the general principle is there – don’t hurt another species if it only helps your own. Here we have the primate imperative expanded to a kingdom-wide scale.
Ethics is the name we give to the rules extracted from our mutual chemical programming. In that sense, there is no deciding between the ethics of the research scientist and the PETA activist – they are both abstracted from the same source, the social imperatives that lie at the core of primate survival strategy, and are valid interpretations of the arbitrary evolutionary dictates of that source. There simply isn't any higher court to appeal to.
Lacking that, humans have to do what we have always done – cobble together a liveable compromise that allows us to advance and extend our borders of inclusivity without sacrificing the well-being of our own suffering masses. It is a deeply unsatisfying answer for all involved, and leads quickly to absurdities of the Moral Algebra type: “If one human is worth three bunnies, and an experiment that requires fourteen bunnies has a .5% chance of contributing to the cure for a disease that afflicts one quarter percent of the human population, is it ethical…” and so forth. The only comfort to take is that such a compromise is merely a bridge. Technology and our own biological imperatives are running a race to see which will shut down animal testing first. The only question is, will advanced computing and modelling techniques make animal testing impractical before our advancing definition of inclusion declares it unethical, or the other way around?
That will all probably take a good century to unfold, and in the meantime, there will be enough suffering on both sides of the species divide to call forth sympathy and action. There will be experiments that go positively nowhere at the cost of hundreds and thousands of animal lives, just as there will be breakthroughs that save millions of people from disease, and we will know that the latter does not make up for the former, nor does the former invalidate the worth of the latter. We are at that terribly awkward stage of species adolescence when our intelligence and the tools crafted therefrom don’t quite match up to the most faithful and general realisation of our civilisational principles. It is a stage to be grown out of, not regressed away from. The only way out is forward, as much as that road is filled with things we would really rather not face.
A society polarised into the Yes, Always and No, Never camps only assures that this adolescent phase will be as gruesome and lengthy as possible. The unwillingness to seek a minimally destructive compromise through a renouncing of ethical absolutes can only keep us in a self-imposed immaturity both unnecessary and cruel. This is where humanists can make themselves useful – by highlighting humankind’s role as the shaper of its ethical world independent of god and eternity, we offer the metaphysically neutral ground where compromise can grow and even flourish. In the swirl and clamour of polarised invective, we can make humanist philosophical reduction the stable foundation from which to build a path to the adult phase of our species, and that will work wonders not only for us, but for the growing family of life forms we include within our familial embrace.
With that, I pass the chalk to you, and wish you the best of luck.
