KILLING FOR KNOWLEDGE - Ethics and the Beast - page 56

group or blood type). Impending, hitherto unknown destructive viruses, bacteria, proto-
zoans, and parasites can possibly lead to our extinction. But such doomsday scenarios
do not support continuing research, but merely preserving the theory and small-scale
practice that is devoted specifically to these potential calamities. If such threats should
genuinely motivate our animal-related research, the implication is also that the vast
majority of these experiments (product testing, basic science, most of genetics) should
be immediately discontinued in their animal-based forms, since they are unrelated to
these microscopic future disasters (indeed, they could well lead into them, by artifi-
cially creating unknown life-forms). Nuclear disarmament seems a better possibility on
which these survival-motivated scientists should focus.
We care more for the survival and welfare of our fellow humans than the continu-
ation and comfort of nonhumans. This is a description of our psychology, about what
we value more and less, evaluations that themselves may issue from deeper biological
imperatives. I argued that pace the evolutionary excuses above, these evaluations have
no probative force precisely because they seem to be merely built-in constituents,
rather than sifted evaluations. Moreover, I argued that even if they were sifted evalu-
ations, as authors like Midgley, Brody, or Francis and Norman try to show, they
would still not vindicate harming others. 20 Nepotism shows that our feeling of close-
ness to some individuals does not justify harming or exploiting those whom we value
less. Discounting animal interests, even if it is morally permissible to discount them,
would not justify research.

HUMANS DESERVE MORE

Unequal treatment is sometimes excused by appealing to greater desert. Such argu-
ments are typically entangled with claims of the relative superiority of human over
nonhuman animals that we evaluated previously. But unlike mere assertions of greater
importance, here the tacit reasoning appeals to considerations of greater desert:
Any consideration of suffering must lead us to the conclusion that regard for the
interests of different species must be differentiated, following the criterion of “like
suffering,” according to the degree of their mental capacity, i.e., of their capacity for
suffering. . . . it follows that we should give earnest consideration to the interests of
all sentient beings but that we should give more consideration to the interests of
those species with the greatest mental complexity.

21

[C]ertain capacities, which seem to be unique to human beings, entitle their pos-
sessors to a privileged position in the moral community . Both rats and human beings
dislike pain, and so we have a prima facie reason not to inflict pain on either. But if
we can free human beings from crippling diseases, pain and death through experi-