Duplicating Suffering - Economics and Ethics When Experimenting With Animals

Recording a podcast episode on Animal Ethics for the excellent Philosophy Gets Schooled podcast last week, the discussion turned to animal experimentation. Listening back to the episode on Thursday, I realised I hadn't made an argument I often make when speaking to students about animals so thought I might make it here.

Animal experimentation, like eating meat, is one of those things that, for a long while, were simply done by humans rather unthinkingly. An assumption was made that we could cause harm to non-human animals in a way that we could not do to humans. The suggestion was that there was something different about them and us, often based in religious ideas about the existence of a human soul. Once people like Peter Singer coined the term "speciesism", however, such assumptions were held up to scrutiny. The idea that it was OK to do X to a non-human animal but not to a human being simply because they are not human was, rightly, found as morally wanting as any other prejudiced division that denied certain groups vital considerations given to others. So we could no longer justify a medical experiment on a non-human animal simply by pointing to the fact that they weren't human. Which put the business of animal experimentation in trouble as, really, that was usually it's entire justificatory framework:

1) Humans need a new medicine.

2) We need to test that medicine before giving it to people because if it doesn't work it might cause them great harm.

3) If we test the experimental new medicines and they do not work they might cause the test subject great harm.

4) So the test subject either needs to:

a) consent to the risk of great harm or

b) be something we do not care about harming.

It is, after all, true that there are certain categories of things that we care little about harming. When a woodcutter tests their new axe on a log no one sheds a tear for the splintered wood, nor do they trouble themselves about the ground on which the wood is stood, impacted by the blow. If the axe misses, we do not apologise to the blade for hitting the ground, and if it finds its target we do not ask if it is OK after the impact. The idea seems to go that animals are something similar but it was always problematic because of the clear evidence of animals being not only animate instead of inanimate, but self-aware and holding clear aversions to pain and suffering. Singer basically exposed the choice to ignore animal interests as a prejudice where we purposefully discount the suffering of those not like us just so we can exploit them for our own benefits.

All of which is fairly standard animal ethics stuff, and discussion then frequently turns to thought experiments such as would it be OK to kill one hundred mice if it might save one billion humans from cancer? What if it was one hundred and one mice, or only one million humans, etc. So long as human volunteers might also be equally considered, and the physiology of the animal is not prohibitively different from the humans the drug is intended for, and harm is kept to a minimum, some might eventually conclude such experiments might be justified. Others might say that because non-human animals can never give consent they might never be justified. Others still might suggest non-human animals ought only be used for veterinary experiments designed to help other animals, not used only for the good of humans while those unconvinced by Singer might dismiss the concerns raised from his objections and continue to use non-human test subjects anyway. However, even the latter would now have to justify the levels of harm they make non-human animals endure. Whatever your position on the moral status of animals ultimately, Singer has no doubt made even the hardened speciesist recognise that non-human suffering must at least be considered.

So what is the argument I left out of the podcast?

It is a thought I have had over the years about capitalism and competition. About intellectual property rights and how that might affect animal (and human) ethics.

Let us imagine we can agree that, so long as we limit any unnecessary suffering, at least some potentially harmful medical experimentation can be done on either human or non-human animals. The likelihood remains that the most potentially dangerous tests will continue to be done to non-human creatures over human ones simply because this has historically been the case, but now it would at least be done under a sheen of moralism - perhaps a code that promises only to cause the minimum amount of harm necessary to establish findings that will help with the medical development. Perhaps even an agreement on what medical development is absolutely necessary and worth risking harm for (so we cannot accuse the vivisectors of performing unnecessary experiments to make progress we may not think warrants the moral costs).

My issue comes with how we might define limiting "unnecessary" suffering given capitalist economics and a research marketplace where different companies compete for the next big discovery that they can copyright and profit from. Because if, for example, there are twenty different companies all vying for that same information, each one funding separate research which they do not want shared because they want to be the first to have it so that they - and only they - can patent the product and dominate the marketplace, then how much suffering is being unnecessarily duplicated simply because the private industry funding the research do not want their competitors to pip them to the post?

Exactly the same question applies to human medical research.

It does not, of course, apply to research that actually is shared. But, unfortunately, due to the nature of funding and of competition within capitalist economies, we do know that not all research is freely disseminated when the potential profits that could be generated from it are significant. Some data sets are destroyed, or locked away, especially those which might not show what the funders want them to show.

Which can ultimately lead to one believing a possible case could be made for accepting certain, limited, forms of animal experimentation but not within the current economic system because it is structurally set up to maximise, rather than minimise, the possible duplication of unnecessary suffering due to prioritising intellectual property rights over the rights of non-human (and human) animals.

Feel free to send me any examples that you think either support or weaken this idea, as it is literally a free-floating thought I've had for a while but not done any deep research into. Perhaps there are fantastic conventions in scientific communities to mitigate precisely against this - where the data from any experiment with animals must be shared to avoid duplicating suffering. But the only ones I have heard of (within the EU, for example) seem to come after the fact - once a result is established and shared by researchers (into new chemicals, for example) then others are prohibited from replicating results we already know. The initial research, however, before data is shared, due to intellectual property rights seems far more murky and liable to lead to duplicate suffering.

Anyway - just an idle thought on a boiling hot Friday afternoon at the end of a long week where most of my intellectual efforts have been focused on revising a paper on punishment for an academic journal. If you want more animal ethics chat - listen to the podcast: https://philosophy-gets-schooled.podbean.com

Author: DaN McKee

My book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE , from the publisher, and from all good booksellers. Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com