From the EditorsA Remarkable Convergence
In 2013 the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics was commissioned by Cruelty Free International to produce an academic report on the ethics of using animals in research.
No strings were attached to the commission or limitations imposed as to what our findings, if any, should be. We immediately approached the fellows of the Centre (now over one hundred) to see if there were some prepared to join a working group. A range of fellows from a variety of disciplines, 18 in all, took up the challenge. The group worked strenuously over a two year period. Numerous drafts were produced, circulated, commented upon, revised, improved, and critiqued again. At first, we thought a report of a few thousand words would suffice, but our work grew, and grew ending up with a report exceeding 60,000 words.
It was a laborious and demanding project, not least of all because the report took account of a wide range of disciplines and included, inter alia, ethicists, philosophers, theologians, historians, sociologists, biological and medical scientists, psychologists, and legal scholars. We would like to express our gratitude to the members of the working group: Aysha Akhtar, Mark H. Bernstein, Darren Calley, Jodey Castricano, Grace Clement, Lydia de Tienda, Natalie Thomas, Lawrence A. Hansen, Lisa Johnson, Les Mitchell, Katherine Morris, Kay Peggs, John Simons, Jordan Sosnowski, David Spratt, Frances Robinson, Mark Rowlands, and Clifford Warwick.
Right from the start, we had no idea what kind of conclusions we would come to—if at all. This may sound surprising, but the Centre's fellowship comprises academics with a wide range of views on animal ethics. There was no "line" that had to be adhered to, nor was a "position" required of any of those who volunteered. Academics are notoriously difficult of course and often outrageously critical of other academic work. It is astonishing, then, that we were able to work happily, collaboratively, and constructively. And, most remarkably, agree a unanimous report, with no dissenting voices. The report [End Page v] titled Normalizing the Unthinkable: The Ethics of the Use of Animals in Research was published by the Centre in 2015.
Its main conclusions are as follows:
1. The deliberate and routine abuse of innocent, sentient animals involving harm, pain, suffering, stressful confinement, manipulation, trade, and death should be unthinkable. Yet animal experimentation is just that: the "normalization of the unthinkable" (Peattie, 1984). It is estimated that 115.3 million animals are used in experiments worldwide per annum. In terms of harm, pain, suffering, and death, this constitutes one of the major moral issues of our time.
2. This normalization flies in the face of what is now known about the extent and range of how animals can be harmed. The issue of the complexity of animal awareness, especially animal sentience (defined as the capacity to experience pain and pleasure), cannot be ignored. Unlike our forebears, we now know, as reasonably as we can know of humans, that animals (notably, mammals, birds, and reptiles) experience not only pain but also shock, fear, foreboding, trauma, anxiety, stress, distress, anticipation, and terror to a greater or lesser extent than humans do. This is the conclusion of many scientific books and scientific papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
3. This normalization is buttressed by an overconfidence in animal experiments as a scientific technique. The current debate has been given new impetus by the new scientific critiques, especially in relation to the unreliability of animal experiments; the unpredictability of laboratory environments; the discordance between human diseases and "animal models" of disease; interspecies differences in physiology and genetic function, and the development of more predictive human-based testing. The upshot is that it is no longer accurate or reasonable (if it ever was) to say that the only moral choice is between experimenting on animals and giving up on scientific progress.
4. This normalization is based on the discredited idea that animals are just tools for human use, means to human ends, fungible items, and commodities that can be treated and dispensed with as humans think fit. During the last forty years, there has been considerable growth in intellectual work on the ethical status of animals. This new work has challenged the ideas that (i) humans should always have absolute priority in our moral thinking (moral anthropocentrism); (ii) animals exist for human beings, to serve their interests and wants (instrumentalism), and (iii) humans should be distinguished and separated from other animals in terms of a binary "them" and "us" (dualism), in which animals are inevitably denigrated.
5. This normalization is challenged by new moral thinking which centers around three positions: (i) individual animals have worth in themselves. Sentient beings (beings capable of pleasure and pain) are not just things, objects, machines, or tools; they have their own interior life that deserves respect. This view extends to sentients as individuals not just as collectivities or as part of a community. (ii) Given the conceding of sentience, there can be no rational grounds for not taking animals' sentience into account or for excluding individual animals from the same basic moral consideration that we extend to individual human beings. And (iii) [End Page vi] it follows that causing harm to individual sentient beings (except when it is for their own good for example, in a veterinary operation), if not absolutely wrong, minimally requires strong moral justification. Indeed, some would argue that such acts of harming innocent (i.e., morally blameless) sentients is absolutely wrong.
-
6. This normalization is belied by rational factors that should commend animals as subjects of special moral solicitude:
i. Animals cannot give or withhold their consent.
ii. They cannot represent or vocalize their own interests.
iii. They cannot understand or rationalize their suffering.
iv. They are morally innocent or blameless.
v. They are vulnerable and relatively defenceless.
These considerations make justifying harm to animals (like harm to human infants) especially difficult. (The above is adapted from Linzey, 2009.)
7. This normalization is based on flawed moral arguments. We have examined three authoritative reports emanating from the UK:
8. This normalization is reinforced by the massive institutionalization of animal experiments through (i) legislation; (ii) institutional and establishment thinking; (iii) public and private funding; (iv) the partiality of the media, and (iv) the language of experimentation, which obscures, justifies, exonerates, and minimizes what actually takes place in laboratories. The result of these factors is, inter alia, moral stagnation and resistance to change. We cannot avoid the conclusion that animal experimentation represents the institutionalization of a pre-ethical view of animals. [End Page vii]
9. This normalization is augmented by a range of regulations and controls, which in reality do very little to protect animals and indeed often do the reverse. We have shown how inspection is flawed; how licensing creates a false sense of legitimacy; how supervised self-regulation in the EU is inadequate, how the "three Rs" (reduction, refinement and replacement) are not enforced, and how care and ethics committees do not provide a rigorous evaluation of proposals from an ethical perspective and are fundamentally flawed in not addressing the basic ethical issue. The "three Rs", which are endorsed by the EU and to which lip service is paid by governments (and which might have provided some impetus to change), are in practice massively underfunded, so that alternatives are the Cinderella of scientific research. Even where controls exist, we find them wanting. This is confirmed by disturbing evidence provided by undercover investigations.
10. This normalization is justified by the oft-repeated assertion that human interest requires such experiments, but it has to be questioned whether humans are ever benefited by the abuse of animals. Humans can be harmed, for example, by desensitization, loss of empathy, habituation, and denial. We now know that there is a strong link between animal abuse and violence to human beings. Also, the new scientific evidence must make us challenge the claim of utility, since we now know that many experiments have provided misleading or erroneous results. In addition, the very logic that would justify experiments on animals also justifies the practice in relation to humans, and of course, inter alia, prisoners of war, people of color, Jewish people, and children have been made subject to experimentation.
11. This normalizing of the unthinkable needs to be de-normalized and de-institutionalized. Ethical research techniques need to be fully institutionalized, and there should be a massive switch of funding to non-animal replacement techniques as a matter of urgency.
The report is now published by the University of Illinois Press and titled The Ethical Case against Animal Experiments (Linzey and Linzey, 2018) with eleven supporting essays by (in order of appearance) Simon Pulleyn, Robyn Hederman, John Rossi and Samual A. Garner, Kay Peggs, Katy D. Taylor, Robert Patrik Stone Lazo, Nedim C. Buyukmihci, Jarrod Bailey, Carlos Frederico Ramos de Jesus, Elizabeth Tyson, and Kurt Remele. Without immodesty, we can say that it is a ground breaking publication, and certainly the most detailed and comprehensive report on the ethics of animal research ever published. It is of course the Centre's first major report, and we hope it will be the first of many.
The report attracted public endorsement from more than 150 academics and intellectuals worldwide. Although there are too many to list here, perhaps at least some should be mentioned: Keith Ward, emeritus professor of divinity, University of Oxford; Winchester University vice chancellor Joy Carter; Daniel A. Dombrowski, professor of philosophy, Seattle University; University of South California Upstate associate vice chancellor Clifton N. Flynn; Conor Gearty, professor of human rights, London School of Economics; Stanley Hauerwas, emeritus professor of divinity and law, Duke Divinity School; Richard Llewellin, former bishop at Lambeth, London; David Madden, former British ambassador to Greece and senior member, St. Antony's College, Oxford; International [End Page viii] University of the Caribbean vice president Adrian McFarlane; John Pritchard, former bishop of Oxford; John P. Gluck, emeritus professor of psychology, University of New Mexico; Éric Baratay, professor of contemporary history, Jean Moulin Lyon III University, and Jan Wetlesen, emeritus professor of philosophy, University of Oslo.
Perhaps the last words should go to J. M. Coetzee, the Nobel Laureate for Literature, who generously endorsed the book:
At a time when the necessity for animal experimentation has been called more and more into doubt, the Linzeys show how deep-seated research paradigms, institutional inertia, and money from the biomedical industry can persuade an esteemed university like Oxford to press on with practices that to any dispassionate observer must seem barbaric. Their analysis is backed up by an impressive set of essays by philosophers, lawyers, and scientists.
(Linzey and Linzey, 2018, backcover.)
