This is an excerpt from Tom Regan’s The Case for Animal Rights, in which he explains why he opposes all scientific research on animals.
— Ed.
One can imagine someone accepting the arguments advanced against toxicity tests on animals but putting his foot down when it comes to scientific research. To deny science use of animals in research is, it might be said, to bring scientific and allied medical progress to a halt, and that is reason enough to oppose it. The claim that progress would be “brought to a halt” is an exaggeration certainly. It is not an exaggeration to claim that, given its present dominant tendency, the rights view requires massive redirection of scientific research. The dominant tendency involves routinely harming animals. It should come as no surprise that the rights view has principled objections to its continuation.
A recent statement of the case for unrestricted use of animals in neurobiological research contrasts sharply with the rights view and will serve as an introduction to the critical assessment of using animals in basic research. The situation, as characterized by C. R. Gallistel, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, is as follows: “Behavorial neurobiology tries to establish the manner in which the nervous system mediates behavorial phenomena. It does so by studying the behavorial consequences of one or more of the following procedures: (a) destruction of part of the nervous system, (b) stimulation of a part, (c) administration of drugs that alter neural functioning. These three techniques are as old as the discipline. A recent addition is (d) the recording of electrical activity. All four cause the animal at least temporary distress. In the past they have frequently caused intense pain, and they occasionally do so now. Also, they often impair an animal’s proper functioning, sometimes transiently, sometimes permanently.” The animals subjected to these procedures are, in a word, harmed. When it comes to advancing our knowledge in neurobiology, however, “there is no way to establish the relation between the nervous system and behavior without some experimental surgery,” where by “experimental surgery” Gallistel evidently means to include the four procedures just outlined. The issue, then, in Gallistel’s mind, is not whether to allow such surgery or not; it is whether any restrictions should be placed on the use of animals. Gallistel thinks not.
In defense of unrestricted use of animals in research, Gallistel claims that “most experiments conducted by neurobiologists, like scientific experiments generally, may be seen in retrospect to have been a waste of time, in the sense that they did not prove or yield any new insight.” But, claims Gallistel, “there is no way of discriminating in advance the waste-of-time experiments from the illuminating ones with anything approaching certainty.” The logical upshot, so Gallistel believes, is that “restricting research on living animals is certain to restrict the progress in our understanding of the nervous system and behavior. Therefore,” he concludes, “one should advocate such restrictions only if one believes that the moral value of this scientific knowledge and of the many human and humane benefits that flow from it cannot outweigh the suffering of a rat,” something that, writing autobiographically, Gallistel finds “an affront to my ethical sensibility.”
Even those unpersuaded by the rights view ought to challenge Gallistel’s argument at every point. Is it true, as he claims, “that there is no way to establish the relation between the nervous system and behavior without some experimental surgery?” Again, is it true that we can never say in advance that a given proposal has been drawn up by an incompetent researcher who doesn’t know what he is looking for and wouldn’t recognize it if he found it? What could be the grounds for peer review of research proposals if Gallistel’s views were accepted? Why not draw straws instead? Those stirrings in the scientific community, away from unrestricted use of animals toward the refinement of one’s protocol (thereby eliminating so-called unnecessary experiments) and reduction in the number of animals used, will find no support from the no-holds-barred approach Gallistel advocates. Since there is, in his view, no way to separate the scientific wheat from the chaff in advance of experimenting, why worry about refinement? Why worry about reduction?
These matters aside, the rights view rejects Gallistel’s approach at a more fundamental level. On the rights view, we cannot justify harming a single rat merely by aggregating “the many human and humane benefits” that flow from doing it, since, as stated, this is to assume that the rat has value only as a receptacle, which, on the rights view, is not true. Moreover, the benefits argument that Gallistel deploys is deficient. Not even a single rat is to be treated as if that animal’s true value were reducible to his possible utility relative to the interests of others, which is what we would be doing if we intentionally harmed the rat on the grounds that this just might “prove” something, just might “yield” a “new insight,” just might produce “benefits” for others.
It bears emphasizing that the rights view’s critique of the use of animals in research is unlike some that find favor in the literature on this matter. Some object on methodological grounds, arguing that the results of such research offer very little hope of benefits for humanity because of the by now well-established difficulty of extrapolating results from animals tests to the species Homo sapiens; others challenge the necessity of a variety of experiments, cases where animals have been cut, blinded, deformed, mutilated, shocked into “learned helplessness,” and so on, all in the name of research. Neither of these critical approaches, though each has clear validity as far as it goes, gets to the moral heart of the matter. It is not that the methodology is suspect (though it is), nor that a great deal of research is, Gallistel’s opinion to the contrary notwithstanding, known to be a waste of time before it is undertaken. The point to note is that both these challenges invite the continuation of research on animals, the latter because it would rule out only that research known to be a waste of time before it is conducted, and the former because it gives researchers a blank check to continue animal experiments in the hope of overcoming the deficiencies in the present methodology. If we are seriously to challenge the use of animals in research, we must challenge the practice itself, not only individual instances of it or merely the liabilities in its present methodology.
The rights view issues such a challenge. Routine use of animals in research assumes that their value is reducible to their possible utility relative to the interests of others. The rights view rejects this view of animals and their value, as it rejects the justice of institutions that treat them as renewable resources. They, like us, have a value of their own, logically independent of their utility for others and of their being the object of anyone else’s interests. To treat them in ways that respect their value, therefore, requires that we not sanction practices that institutionalize treating them as if their value was reducible to their possible utility relative to our interests. Scientific research, when it involves routinely harming animals in the name of possible “human and humane benefits,” violates this requirement of respectful treatment. Animals are not to be treated as mere receptacles or as renewable resources. Thus does the practice of scientific research on animals violate their rights. Thus ought it to cease, according to the rights view. It is not enough first conscientiously to look for non-animal alternatives and then, having failed to find any, to resort to using animals. Though that approach is laudable as far as it goes, and though taking it would mark significant progress, it does not go far enough. It assumes that it is all right to allow practices that use animals as if their value were reducible to their possible utility relative to the interests of others, provided that we have done our best not to do so. The rights view’s position would have us go further in terms of “doing our best.” The best we can do in terms of not using animals is not to use them. Their inherent value does not disappear just because we have failed to find a way to avoid harming them in pursuit of our chosen goals. Their value is independent of these goals and their possible utility in achieving them. . . .
. . . . So it is that the rights view issues its challenge to those who do science: advance knowledge, work for the general welfare, but not by allowing practices that violate the rights of the individual. These are, one might say, the terms of the new contract between science and society, a contract that, however belatedly, now contains the signature of those who speak for the rights of animals. Those who accept the rights view, and who sign for animals, will not be satisfied with anything less than the total abolition of the harmful use of animals in science — in education, in toxicity testing, in basic research. But the rights view plays no favorites. No scientific practice that violates human rights, whether the humans be moral agents or moral patients, is acceptable. And the same applies to those humans who, for reasons analogous to those advanced in the present chapter in regard to non-humans, should be given the benefit of the doubt about having rights because of the weight of our ignorance — the newly-born and the soon-to-be born. Those who accept the rights view are committed to denying any and all access to these “resources” on the part of those who do science. And we do this not because we oppose cruelty (though we do), nor because we favor kindness (though we do), but because justice requires nothing less.
The Case for Animal Rights was published by the University of California Press. We’re grateful to Tom Regan for permission to reprint this passage.
© Copyright 1983 by Regents of the University of California.
