KILLING FOR KNOWLEDGE - Ethics and the Beast - page 49

I am postponing to a later section the discussion of the claim that because humans
are worthier they deserve more, a move that sometimes does the tacit work here, and
am instead focusing on what follows from superiority as such. A subtler version of
the superiority claim is that humans are not simply cognitively worthier but, unlike
animals, have crossed a threshold that makes them eligible for moral consideration.
Morrison can perhaps be asserting precisely that in the citation above, but there are
clearer statements of this view:
Secular moral philosophy is constructed from the perspective of moral agents who
are rational stakeholders in moral controversies, and it is these stakeholders who have
the dignity of being the cardinal arbiters of morality. This grants a plausible but not
conclusive priority to human concerns, interests, and projects over and against consid-
erations of the pains, pleasures, and lives of animals. It is humans who incarnate the
fullness of the moral life, suggesting that the health, quality, and extension of human
life should have priority over concerns regarding animal life. From this it follows that
it is good to use animals to advantage human well-being. 9
According to this defense of animal-based research, a disanalogy exists between the
alien-human case and the human-animal one, and a sophism is involved in conceptu-
alizing the apology for research in terms of an unjustified move from superiority to
conduct. Experimenting on animals is permissible because it involves acting in rela-
tion to beings that have no moral status (or have a merely derivative moral status).
This is the essence of Carl Cohen's argument:
Humans are of such a kind that they may be the subject of experiments only with
their voluntary consent. The choices they make freely must be respected. Animals are
of such a kind that it is impossible for them, in principle, to give or withhold volun-
tary consent or to make a moral choice. What humans retain when disabled, animals
have never had.

10

Yet since categorically ostracizing animals from moral concern is implausible—as
such a view cannot account for the widely shared concern to eliminate cruelty to an-
imals or the wish to reduce their suffering—the superiority claim will in effect be
quantitative: the threshold that humans pass does not mean that animals are excluded
from any degree of consideration, but that animals are not entitled to a level of con-
sideration that makes it immoral to experiment on them.
Suppose that believing in degrees of moral considerability is defensible. 11 The vi-
ability of the superiority argument would now largely depend on what “degrees” and
“value” should mean. Take the second chapter's unpacking of “status” into moral pro-
tection. According to such explication, ascribing a “higher” moral status to humans
would mean that humans are covered by a broader and more inclusive range of moral
entitlements and protections relative to nonhuman animals. If one would now go on