Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
decision to have domestic animals, it is better to have left the telos alone
and to have created animals for whom domestication involves a state of
constant violation of their telos.
3
Or to take a simpler example, suppose we genetically engineer animals
to be resistant to certain diseases, as has in fact been done with chick-
ens and Marek's disease; we certainly curtail a source of suffering that
matters to the animal, and we have changed its telos, yet we have done
it no harm and indeed have improved its well-being. By the same token,
consider the current situation of the farm animals mentioned earlier,
wherein we keep animals under conditions that patently violate their
telos so that they suffer in a variety of modalities, yet are kept alive and
productive by technological fixes. As a specific example, consider the
chickens kept in battery cages for efficient, high-yield, egg production. It
is now recognized that such a production system frustrates numerous sig-
nificant aspects of chicken behavior under natural conditions (that is,
violates the telos), including nesting behavior, and that frustration of this
basic need or drive results in a mode of suffering for the animals. Let us
suppose that we have identified the gene or genes that code for the drive
to nest. In addition, suppose we can ablate that gene or substitute a gene
(probably per impossibile) that creates a new kind of chicken, one that
achieves satisfaction by laying an egg in a cage. Would that be wrong in
terms of the ethic I have described?
If we identify an animal's telos as being genetically based and envi-
ronmentally expressed, we have now changed the chicken's telos so that
the animal that is forced by us to live in a battery cage is satisfying more
of its nature than is the animal that still has the gene coding for nesting.
Have we done something morally wrong?
I would argue that we have not. Recall that a key feature, perhaps
the
key feature, of the new ethic for animals I have described is concern for
preventing animal suffering and augmenting animal happiness, which I
have maintained involves the satisfaction of telos. I have also implicitly
argued that the primary, pressing concern is the former, the mitigation
of suffering at human hands, given the proliferation of suffering that has
occurred in the twentieth century and continues in the twenty-first. I have
also contended that suffering can be occasioned in many ways, from the
infliction of physical pain to the prevention of satisfying basic drives. So,
when we engineer the new kind of chicken that prefers laying in a cage
