Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
morality,” as the above arguments claim, such experimentation has to meet weighty
requirements that, when spelled out, demand a fundamental reform of current research
practice. There is small hope that such will occur.
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PRACTICAL CONSEQUENCES
But do we really want to see laboratories shut down and all animal-based experi-
mental research stopped? Do we wish to join hands with varieties of antiscientists
that do not share a fundamental respect for the spirit of inquiry underlying research,
that have never felt wonder or pride or delight at understanding the complexities that
science unravels? Can we genuinely undertake the responsibility for actively stopping
or slowing down the search for better medication that will cure us and our relatives
(as well as our companion and farm animals) in years to come? Do we wish to risk
trying out on ourselves new products and chemicals, doing away with in vivo screen-
ing? And what about the inconvenience of attacking the people with whom we have
lunch in academic cafeterias, those to which some of us (me) are attached by family
ties, and who bring respectability and funding to the institutions in which we work?
Farmers were always easy targets for intellectuals concerned with the maltreatment of
animals. Picking on the academic colleagues next door is much more awkward.
Telling scientists that their work is immoral is presumptuous and antisocial, and
telling them that their work can be done using alternatives requires the expertise that
only scientist themselves have. Tom Regan urges scientists to look for alternative re-
search models to those deployed today, adding that this is a first-rate scientific chal-
lenge. Regan's suggestion is consistent with the line taken by most antivivisectionists,
who refuse to see the elimination of animal-based experimentation as an attack on
science or product testing as such. But one can readily expect scientists who are
genuinely driven by the desire to explore a particular phenomenon to be reluctant
about spending years to locate means to explore the phenomenon instead. Devising
controls on experiments and searching for alternatives, enforcing on reluctant scientists
the use of models that they would rather not use—all this is not exciting or prestigi-
ous work.
Acknowledging such weighty pragmatic, social, and intellectual concerns cannot
modify the conclusions of the previous discussion, and different practical implications
can be derived from them. My own view regarding these implications (which need
not be shared by others who accept my previous analysis) begins with a pessimistic
prediction: animal research is not going to stop in the next decades (at least not due
to moral claims). The reason for this pessimism is not merely that reform takes
time—fully correcting human exploitation takes decades, possibly more—but that, in
comparison with the large-scale killing of animals for much lighter reasons, animal-
based research presents the strongest claim for using animals in exploitative ways.
