Biology Reference
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are not eligible for even minimal moral protection; technically put, possessing moral
status seems to be both a necessary and a sufficient condition for some level of pro-
tection. It therefore seems natural to suppose that there is some correlation between
higher status and more entitlements. These claims can be accepted as true (ignoring
the confusions that “moral status” introduces), but they do not support (2), namely, it
does not follow that
degrees
of rights or other protections derive from degrees of
moral status. The flaw is the move from protections being derived from status to
levels
of protection being derived from (or dependent on) levels of moral status. A
club that has regular and honorary members can extend special rights to honorary
members, and honorary membership can just mean special rights. But it is an open
question whether it should mean this. Honorary membership can simply have symbol-
ic significance: it can even mean that the club expects more from honorary members,
that they have more obligations and less entitlements than regular members. Greater
status does not just mean (nor does it entail) more rights or more protection. To con-
clude: if one grants animals even minimal moral protection, then no “threshold” that
humans pass validates experimenting on animals since nothing in having high moral
status as such hooks on to placing or removing specific restrictions. The human su-
periority argument as an apology for research must be wrong.
A possible objection here is to say something like this: “It may be the case that
the degrees of protection are not necessarily derived from degrees of status. But is it
not reasonable to expect that considerations underlying determining degrees of protec-
tion should include the degree of moral status of the entities involved? Weaker glue
than logical necessity can legitimately solder distinct evaluations. Accordingly, expos-
ing a logical disconnection between degrees of moral status and degrees of protection
does not suffice.” Yet the gap I am foregrounding is not merely logical. Nothing
makes the move from status to degrees of protection factually reasonable or morally
probable. High moral status can be linked with greater protection, but it can just as
easily entail greater moral demands, such as refusing to sacrifice entities of lower
status for one's own gain. What makes one connection more reasonable than the oth-
er?
“But surely,” a different objector will say, “the higher status and superior value you
are willing to grant us humans minimally means that in us-or-them cases—like press-
ing cases in animal-based research—entities of lower status should be sacrificed first.”
The problem here is the repetition of the flaw we found in the cruder version of the
superiority claim: the greater value of A over B does not justify A in
doing
anything
to B. True, if it is a matter of saving either A or B, then it is justified to save A,
which is why, upon entering a burning house and having the option of saving a sick
old man or his healthy eight young dogs (Peter Carruthers's example), it is justified
