7

OTHER LIVES

Ethical Decisions

With the minds that evolution and human history have given us, we can reflect, criticize, and look ahead. We can make choices on the basis of debate. We can discuss how we want to live on Earth, as well as trying to understand what goes on.

That ability is one consequence of the path our species took through sociality and culture, as described in chapter 5. Also as a result of that path, our species began to have effects on the natural world that no other species has had. In this chapter and the next, I look at some of those effects. Now that we can see what we’re doing, what should we do next? Should we change course, and if so, how?

In this chapter, the main topic will be our relations with other animals that have come under our close control, especially in farming and food production, and also in scientific experiments. The next chapter will range more widely, looking at climate change, extinction, and the loss of wild nature.

Human action has dramatically changed the overall shape that life has on Earth. We’ve had a huge effect on the distribution of animals, in particular. I’m going to begin by thinking about this in terms of the biomass, the amount of living matter that exists in organisms of various kinds. In a later chapter I’ll talk about the relationship between biomass and the number of individual animals, as some questions depend more on one and some depend more on the other.

About half of animal life is made up of arthropods, the group that includes insects. I’m going to set them and other invertebrates aside here, and also set aside fish, which, despite our depredations, still seem very numerous (the oceans are huge). The rest of animal life is dominated by livestock. As you can imagine, making estimates is difficult and the numbers should be seen as rough, but it appears that fourteen times more biomass is in farmed mammals than in wild mammals, and farmed birds make up over twice as much as wild birds. Livestock as a whole makes up more than ten times the biomass of wild mammals and birds. Humans themselves are a large component in the system; about nine times more biomass is in us than in all wild mammals. The startling level of domination that we’ve achieved raises many questions, and it surely seems that something might have gone awry. But if we’ve done something wrong here, what kind of wrongness is it? And how might we put things right?

Rather than just diving in, I’m going to approach all this by way of a general discussion of ethical questions. Philosophy has a standard menu of options for understanding what we might really be up to when we offer ethical claims. One position has it that we can describe “moral facts,” real features of the world, values that are inherent in events and actions themselves. Another suggests that moral claims are not descriptions at all, but commands. They might instead be expressions of an emotional response. Perhaps the moral claims we make are attempted descriptions of moral facts, but attempts that always fail because such facts don’t exist. (I am going to use “ethical” and “moral” nearly interchangeably here, as many philosophers now do, though in this context I prefer the term “ethical.”)

Behind many of these debates lies a deeper division, between a picture in which we are discovering what is right or good and a picture in which our role, inevitably, is one of construction or invention. Are moral values found or made? Do we learn what’s right, or decide on it? Both pictures have appeal. We create value systems in order to live together—in that sense, we are constructing them. But at least part of the time, this creative act feels constrained, not arbitrary. Ethical thought and debate can feel like an attempt to understand hidden relationships; we can discover that we were wrong, admit this, and improve our choices. If we don’t think that we are in touch with something beyond ourselves when we do this, it seems to throw the project of moral reasoning away. But it’s hard to make sense of what this “something beyond ourselves” might be. It’s easier if God is in the picture, and other views of the universe can also be friendly to objective moral knowledge, but a modern scientific outlook makes the problem acute.

Those traditional options I listed for understanding moral language are stark and simple. Perhaps we need a more mixed, more complicated view of what is going on? I’ll outline a view of that kind, and will approach it by looking, in a schematic way, at how we came to be where we are.

Chapter 5 looked at human social life, and at how it might have acquired its unusual features. Human societies include a lot of cooperation, and within these arrangements, temptations arise to exploit others, dominate, or free-ride. Norms or principles of behavior, whether implicit or explicit, arise to keep the group functioning. That seems to be the beginning of ethical thinking. A picture like this is seen in historical sketches that have been developed by many writers, including Philip Kitcher, Kim Sterelny, and others: norms arise to protect cooperative social projects from exploitation and collapse.

Work from psychology and anthropology suggests that these cooperation-smoothing roles are not the whole story. There can be a tendency to read back into history some kinds of norms, the ones that secular liberal societies have separated out from more of a tangle. The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and others have developed a framework that recognizes roughly five distinct psychological responses that are part of an “intuitive ethics” seen in different forms across cultures. The features that these intuitive responses track are harm, fairness, loyalty, respect, and purity, where that last one tends also to be related to notions of sanctity. Each culture will turn some of these “up” and others “down,” and factions within a culture may want to make their own adjustments. Traditional religious societies often regard harm as below purity/sanctity in importance; secular liberalism does not trust purity intuitions and would like them out of the picture. A “live and let live” attitude toward homosexuality, for example, has often required a tamping-down of concern over purity, and so has a willingness to let women choose their own paths in relationships and social life. The big questions I mentioned above arise here again: If you don’t suppress the illiberal moral intuitions, if your society emphasizes loyalty and purity over fairness and harm prevention, are you making a mistake, or just making your own choices?

Somewhere in this mix, on the psychological side, are other phenomena that we encountered back in chapter 5. In social life, a lot of weight is carried by a sense of sheer propriety—this is how things are done. This might be related to loyalty and respect, occasionally also to purity, but it seems to have its own role. (Remember, from that chapter, those young children primed to look for norms, and to enforce them.)

Norms that guide behavior may start out implicit but then take the form of principles and rules. Eventually, they include written legal and religious codes.

The norms that guide social life eventually also come into greater contact with reasoning and reflection. I don’t think of this as happening only in societies with written codes, but also in settings with storytellers, interpreters, and others who hold and express traditional law. Once norms are explicit, and once decisions can be questioned and defended, consistency starts to become a constraint. Even if the response to a challenge is just This is how we have always done things, to say that is still to offer an explicit defense, and it can be challenged in turn: Have we really? What about that time when … Especially because existing principles must always be adapted to new settings, the idea of parity takes on an important role: cases that are similar should be handled in similar ways (treated on a par). If you did this in earlier cases of some infraction, then you should respond in a similar way now, unless you can say why not. Priests, chiefs, and the like might obfuscate, deflect, or ignore such appeals. But once we can reason, this spotlight gets directed on everything.

Especially when parity questions are on the table, norms also become more answerable to factual matters. If you have been told to make a sharp moral distinction between your group and others, and it becomes clear that the “others” are not much different from you, it is still possible to keep in place the sharp distinction in how you treat people, but now it’s under pressure. (This can be seen as a clash between loyalty and fairness, two of those intuitive modes of thinking I mentioned earlier.) “That is how we do things” can have power, but it doesn’t stick indefinitely. All this brings an essentially practical, forward-looking activity into the realm of argument and evidence. Those five components of intuitive morality (purity, loyalty, etc.) might be where we start out, but there’s nothing stopping us from reshaping our ethical thinking in radical ways, if we choose to.

That is a schematic sketch of normative thinking and its history, especially in social life. Suppose it is roughly right. Where do we end up? I noted a moment ago the simplicity and starkness of the traditional philosophical options for understanding ethical language: it is describing facts or making commands or expressing emotions … I suggest now that the habits of ethical thought and discussion we have ended up with are almost designed to defy those standard options. What we find ourselves with is the result of bringing the prescriptive, evaluative, choosing side of life into the realm of explicit statement, defense, and reason, especially in areas that deal with social relations and behavior. Ethical claims are a kind of valuation, and valuation in some form is just about inescapable. It is putting options in order, working out what to do. The valuations we make are reflected in various behaviors, including choosing, criticizing, and so on. In some situations where we make valuations, we are not much worried about disagreement—if you prefer jazz to classical music, no one needs to argue with you. In other situations, disagreement is a problem. If we’re working out how people ought to behave, or how social life should be organized, then different possible answers do tend to clash, and the conflict has to be resolved. Resolution might be achieved through force, legal authority, or reasoned arguments.

That is my view of what we are up to. Ethical choice is forward-looking in its function. We’re working out what to do, how to live, what choices we will encourage and discourage. The point of the practice is forward-looking, but its “inputs” are diverse, including factual matters, our sense of similarity between cases, and more. Though the point of the practice is forward-looking in this way, the format in which we make ethical claims also allows us to direct them backward, to criticize things done in the past. Ethical claims are not equivalent to commands or expressions of an emotional response. They don’t fall into one of these other categories of things we say. Valuations, including ethical valuations, are “their own thing.”

This view is closer to the made side than the found side of the divide that I mentioned earlier. But there is plenty we can find, or discover, when we try to defend one decision or judgment in the light of others, when we encounter new factual information, or when we apply an old value to a new situation.

I say this view is closer to the made side than to the found side, but perhaps it is a blend, living in a balance between them? I’m tempted to say that, but it might mislead a little. The possibility of “finding things out” in this area comes from the fact that, due to language and reflection, just about everything we know about can be brought to bear on our valuations. But a lot of flexibility remains. Suppose a person makes no commitment to giving reasons, respecting parity arguments, and so on. If a person just ignores all that, and determines what they value in a more chaotic way, I don’t think they need to have made a factual or logical mistake. They might, but might not. A person can choose how well integrated with the rest of their thinking they want their ethical orientation to be. And even if someone does take parity arguments seriously, these claims are dependent on which similarities between cases are seen as important and which are not; they depend on our rather flexible sense of what is similar to what. There’s an inherent freedom in the situation that should not be sidestepped or obscured.

To say that is not to downgrade the activity itself. The practices and their transitions that I’ve been describing in this section are a central part of the human enterprise. We are taking the basic, ancient activity of valuation and trying to integrate it with rational reflection, especially in our choices of how to live and how to organize social life. We are trying not only to get a factual picture of the world, one that reaches into the galaxies and the distant past, but also trying to shape our goals and living patterns in a rational way.

Food and Farming

Now let’s consider, in this light, our relationships with other animals. I’ll first look at the largest problem in sheer scale. That is farming, especially modern industrialized farming.

Early forms of domestication of animals for human use probably included a mixture of coercion and mutual benefit, where animals such as goats and sheep benefited from our protection. Through selective breeding, they often became less able to survive on their own. The most momentous changes occurred in the twentieth century. The level of control exerted over the lives of farmed animals greatly increased. Their living conditions moved further from those of their ancestors and, in many cases, became more and more brutal. The shape of animal life on Earth was changed by human farming, and then again by industrialized agriculture.

Huge numbers of mammals and birds now live in continual, lifelong confinement in factory farms, or CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations). About 73 million pigs are alive at any time in the United States alone, for example, with a large majority confined indoors for their entire lives. Cattle are something of a special case, as their lives in modern farming are often a mix of an initial period on pasture and confinement in outdoor “feedlots” later.

As an ethical problem, the situation of intensively farmed pigs and chickens is perhaps the most alarming; the only good thing that can be said about their lives is that they are short. The lives of mother pigs, the breeding “sows,” are perhaps the worst, with most of their life spent in various metal crates that are barely bigger than the animal’s body. The raising of mother pigs in these tiny prisons now generates enough outcry that some practices are changing in this area, but at the time of writing, most sows in the United States still experience this. Setting aside the full-time mothers, pigs in modern operations are removed from the mother after a couple of weeks (traumatic for both), may be subjected to various no-anesthesia operations (castration, tail cutting), and then spend the rest of their life before slaughter in crowded indoor pens. That life might total around six months.

Chickens raised for meat live a much shorter time, six weeks or so, also in extreme crowding. The demands of rapid growth have led to these chickens having distorted, ungainly bodies. Life as a battery hen raised for eggs might be worse. Much more could be said, but I think the picture is clear.

Should we stop doing these things? And if we set out on a path of large-scale change, where does this end? The questions do not only concern cruelty. Industrialized farming is environmentally harmful in many ways, and encourages the emergence of dangerous diseases. Those are serious concerns, but in this chapter I am going to focus on the welfare side.

On questions about intensive farming of these kinds, the major ethical theories in the modern Western philosophical tradition tend to converge, at least at first. The utilitarian approach to ethics is based on a direct accounting of the total amount of good and harm done by an action, where “good” and “harm” are usually understood in an experience-based way. From a utilitarian point of view, once we recognize the enormous suffering present in factory farming, and the fact that the only good it does is to give us cheaper food, it’s clear that factory farming is a great evil. Peter Singer’s landmark Animal Liberation (1975) was written within that approach. The Kantian ethical framework, named after the eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant, is a rival to utilitarianism, and perhaps the approach that professional philosophers have been most attracted to in recent decades. A Kantian thinks that our goal should not be getting better things to happen by any available means (as in utilitarianism), but acting in ways that respect the preferences and projects of others. We should not treat other agents as mere means to our own ends, but as “ends in themselves.”

Kant had little interest in the lives of animals, but his view has been revised in this respect, especially by the American philosopher Christine Korsgaard. In this framework, what is bad about factory farming is not so much the sheer suffering, but our imposing control and so completely thwarting the preferences of other animals. The change to the Kantian framework that brings nonhuman animals into the picture is recognizing them as beings with their own legitimate interests.

Don’t plants, also, have interests and something like preferences? This problem might be handled by treating the preferences of sentient agents as special (that is what Korsgaard does). This move might be questioned, both in principle and in how it handles some cases, but let’s accept it for now.

The way I want to motivate an end to factory farming is a little different from both of those more familiar paths (though those theories will return to the discussion). I’ll do it with the idea of a life worth living—a life that’s better than no life at all. Imagine that after you die, you can choose between coming back for another life as an animal—the particular kind of animal is not your choice, but is determined for you—or not coming back at all.

Suppose you would come back as a pig in a factory farm, or CAFO (the term “farm” really is a bit out of place in this setting). I sketched what that life would be like a page or two back. It’s a life of about six months, removed early from your mother, with the amount of time spent in behavior that’s typical and preferred by pigs in the outdoors being zero, not one day. All of the days are days of crowded confinement and some combination of stress, monotony, and pain.

The situation of cows raised for meat in intensive farming tends to be somewhat better. Dairy farming includes both better and worse options, where the worse ones, as for pigs, involve confinement for the animal’s entire life and a round of forced pregnancies followed by immediate removal of your calves. Would you rather come back to a life like one of these after you die, or not come back at all?

This reincarnation test is obviously an imperfect thought experiment. Given that in some sense it has to be you returning, what sort of mental life do we assume? Your mind in a chicken’s body, or a chicken’s mind that somehow has hints of you? I suppose the second is the more realistic way to do it. There has to be enough continuity between you, in the present, and a hypothetical future mind for you to feel the choice as one where your own interests are at stake. An imperfect thought experiment, yes, but perhaps a useful one. In my own case, I find that however the details are filled out, I’d choose not to come back at all rather than to come back as a factory-farmed animal of those kinds. There is no way for me to get the other answer.

You might prefer another way of asking the question about whether the lives of factory-farmed animals are worth living. The reincarnation test has a good deal of potency for me, though. It is a way of making vivid the fact that some of the lives that we humans now initiate and control seem unbearable. And this is where our human powers have brought us, along the road described back in chapter 5, the road from life as just another medium-sized mammal to what we are now. Along the way, we have become able to create unbearable lives for other animals, and we do this to them in huge numbers.[1]

We can see how this happened, as our scope for control became greater, human populations increased, and agribusinesses shaved their costs and increased their scale. We can see how it happened, and we can stop and think: Should we continue to do this? Ending factory farming should be our highest priority in animal-human relations. This shift will have consequences for human diets. I don’t think that people should be expected to abandon high-protein diets, so we do need to find better ways of enabling diets of this kind. I expect lab-grown meat to become a major component of food production, along with new plant-based options. In lab-grown, or “cultured,” meat, a few cells from an animal are used to generate billions more, without any need for killing. Though these shifts cannot take place immediately, there can be immediate pressure to move away from the worst practices. Factory farming benefits from government subsidies—that is, from the money of taxpayers—in many countries. Ending these would reduce the price distortions that make modern farming hard to shift.

Suppose we agree on this. And imagine that we’ve reached a point where the worst excesses have gone or are receding. We then reach another set of questions about farming. Does this line of thought take us to a conclusion in which all farming of nonhuman animals, or perhaps all that involves killing, should end? Does humane farming make a difference or not?

In my discussion of factory farming I used the idea of a “life worth living.” My opposition to those practices is not primarily based on the badness of killing; in modern farming, we control not just the animal’s death but its entire life. The animal comes into existence, lives, and dies under our control. We are responsible for the whole life, and the whole life is what we should assess. This is part of the point of the reincarnation test; you are not coming back just to be killed, but to live an entire life. When asking ethical questions about farming, it is common to focus just on death. Death is big, but it’s not the only thing.

In the humane farming of animals, many of the lives are worth living. Returning to the reincarnation test, I would feel fine about coming back as a cow on a humane farm. Certainly I’d prefer that, in the thought-experiment, to no reincarnation at all. Here I assume that life would be spent in the fields just about all the way through, with veterinary care, no threats, and a pretty quick death at the end. This is nothing like what we imagined earlier.

Given this, opposition to humane farming has to come from different reasons from those above. I think of our situation as one with two “rounds” of reflection or discussion. The first round, which is about factory farming, is comparatively easy. Once that stage is behind us—not that factory farming has ended, but once we agree it should end—we face a new round of questions. What kind of relationship do we want to have to the lives of nonhuman animals? Is a controlled, custodial relationship of the kind seen in humane farming acceptable, or should we just walk away?

In this second round, disagreement is probably inevitable, even when people are trying to be as reasonable as they can. Different moral theories, and different ways of thinking about the relationship between happiness and control, lead to different conclusions. A utilitarian perspective can approve of humane farming, even when it involves killing. Given that utilitarianism tries to consider all the effects of an action, this also depends on questions about environmental effects of farming, the economic side, and so on. But it is not hostile to humane farming itself. The other ethical theory I mentioned, the modernized Kantian approach, will probably never accept it. Humane farming, for a Kantian, still treats an animal “as a means,” as something whose role is merely to serve our interests. This is most clear at the stage of killing, as animals usually have an interest in staying alive.

I didn’t sign on to either of those views in that earlier discussion; instead, I used the idea of a “life worth living,” as explored with the reincarnation test. I also insisted on thinking about the whole lives of animals, not just their deaths. The attitude embodied in that part of my discussion is a kind of “welfarism”: we should ask about the overall welfare of the nonhumans, and humans, affected by farming, and try to avoid significant harms to their welfare. To say this is not to offer a general ethical theory—what do we do when welfares clash? Conflicts and trade-offs are at the heart of most problems in this area, and utilitarianism and the Kantian approach have a lot to say about them. For utilitarianism, you bring together all the good and bad consequences of an action, and consider the outcome as a whole. Kantianism looks for ways to enable everyone to pursue their goals without interfering with others doing the same thing. A general ethical theory has to grapple with questions like this. But although conflicts are very important, they’re not always present. A welfarist can approve of humane farming when the animals involved have a good life.

In arguments against humane farming, people often make use of the idea of exploitation. This is related to the Kantian concept of “treating someone as a means,” but people who object to farming because of exploitation can do so without working within a Kantian ethical theory. The argument can be more direct: we know exploitation is bad, and humane farming is a form of exploitation. So is keeping bees for honey, and other practices that don’t seem to involve much suffering. People often say to me that all farming of animals is exploitation and is hence wrong—they view this as overriding other arguments.

I see why the idea of exploitation can motivate us to question a practice, but I don’t think this argument is compelling. The idea of exploitation is one that we import from human social life, from our attempts to establish fair arrangements between people, especially in situations of unequal power. We can bring this concept over into the nonhuman domain, but it doesn’t automatically have the same ethical significance when we do. (This is an example of the flexibility of parity judgments, which I discussed earlier.) Or, if we insist that exploitation must always be bad, then its presence might have to be detected differently. Humane farming can include mutual benefit, an exchange of protection for food. The fact that nonhuman animals are controlled in these arrangements, the fact that they are not equal partners in setting the arrangement up, can make things look like exploitation even when the animals have good lives. A welfarist might not mind about that.

A different concept that can be exported from human social relations has more impact on me. That is the concept of betrayal. Modern industrialized farming is a high-tech descendant of a relationship that humans formed with some other animals about 10,000 years ago. The relationship can have genuine reciprocity in it, when we give animals protection and a peaceful life. But modern factory-farmed animals are the victims of an immense betrayal of this relationship. I can see how this importation of a concept from human social relations might be questioned, but I don’t want to be a part of this kind of betrayal.

A more revolutionary response to these problems is to take on an ideal of disengagement. We might decide to get as far out of the lives of nonhuman animals as we can. Quite a few philosophers find themselves in a place like this. The ideal might not be achievable, and perhaps we can’t expect to even get close to it, but it still might be seen as our goal. We would abandon the farming of animals, also hunting and fishing, and probably even having companion animals—this last move takes the disengagement idea quite far from utilitarianism and the welfarist approach. We would allow wild nature to continue, and treat what happens there as not our business. Aside from abstract arguments about respecting animals’ autonomy, this might be seen as a gigantic apology for the steadily escalating harms we have perpetrated, especially over the last few hundred years.

That is one choice we might make. An alternative ideal is to stay more engaged with nonhuman animals and continue farming, but do so in a better way. We do not step away from the control that we have, but we put that control to better use. The ideal would be a relationship that is mutualistic, one that benefits both sides. We ensure that all the animals under our control have lives that are clearly worth living. This might be seen as the restoration of an earlier relationship between humans and nonhumans, if we think that early animal husbandry and domestication were mutualistic. But even if the past was not like that, mutualism is still a goal that we can reasonably pursue.

This would be a future in which killing would remain part of what we do. For some people thinking about this topic, killing remains a unique harm, no matter what else is going on, and we should just turn away from it. I feel this pressure. But just about every response to the problem gets itself into an odd place somewhere. Animal advocates often contrast life on a modern farm or CAFO with a different life for animals, “the life they dream of,” as one campaign had it, a carefree life in the fields. This is used in promotions to support veganism or something similar—a plant-based future. But if the future of human food is entirely plant-based, this won’t give cows and chickens a new, carefree life, but something closer to no life at all. All of this does depend on decisions we might make about “rewilding,” a topic I’ll look at in the next chapter. We might encourage the descendants of some domesticated animals to head back into a life closer to that of their wild relatives. But at least for some domesticated species, if animals of their kind are are to continue on in any numbers, then some kind of farming will be in the picture. Perhaps all views in this second round of discussion end up encountering some perplexing or disturbing moments.

People sometimes reach a stage in the discussion like this and say, “Oh well, the issues are just not clear—we’re back to square one. Maybe we should just continue with what we’ve been doing.” But we’re not back to square one at all; we’re at a place that’s quite far down the track. If we can apply in practice the conclusions reached in the first round of discussion, we’ll have solved the most pressing problem in this area, the problem of the suffering caused by factory farming.

Questions about humane farming can sometimes come across as obsessing about a practice that can only end up as a middle-class indulgence, not something that’s likely to feed large numbers of people. I am not sure if we know that to be true—that humane and regenerative farming practices can’t scale up—but even if this is so, the question remains an important one. In developing countries, some traditional forms of farming are much more humane than factory farming. Should those traditional practices be continued? The middle class is also growing globally. Should humanely farmed meat be part of their lives or not?

My own view is that humane farming is okay. It can be justified by a whole-life argument and the possibility of genuine mutual benefit. My thinking in this area is also affected by my attitude toward death. Some people who write on these topics appear to have a horror of death itself that I do not share. I like life very much, but I am comfortable with being a part of an omnivorous web, part of a cycle in which turnover and consumption are inherent to the system. Each of us, a pocket of bioenergetic order, passes into and out of being. Having an animal life means that one will die somehow.

This section of the book has looked at farming rather than hunting and fishing, and has concentrated on the farming of mammals and birds. In the case of hunting and fishing, the whole-life reasoning that I’ve been using does not apply, or not in the same way. In those cases, we are cutting short a life that was spent mostly out of our control. The ethical question is about our action at the final stage. Fish farming, which now accounts for about half of the fish we eat, has welfare problems in many cases, though it’s probably not as bad as the worst farming of mammals and birds. The main thing for me in this area, the central priority, is to oppose the use of our powers to give rise to immense numbers of lives that are not worth living. The idea that an animal might die to feed me and other humans is not the big problem. Everyone dies. The idea that an animal should live in misery and stress for its entire life, because of our choices, is a completely different matter.

Animals in Experiments

The other problem this chapter will wrestle with is the use of nonhuman animals in experiments in biology and medicine. This problem is made especially acute by the fact that some of these experiments, over many years now, have been a means by which we have learned much of what we know about the minds of other animals. These findings have often shown that there’s more going on in there than we might have expected. We have learned a lot from “noninvasive” work that does not involve surgeries, implants, and the like, but the invasive work has often been crucial. The experiments that I’ll look at in this section include others, like drug testing, that don’t have a role of this kind, but some of the work I’ll question does include a continuation of research that got us to where we are now, with our richer understanding of animal minds.

In earlier chapters of this book (and my previous book, Metazoa), I have made use of work on “maps” discovered inside the brains of rats. The idea of inner maps had been conjectured in the 1940s by the psychologist Edward Tolman, who was looking just at the animals’ behavior. A few decades later, the neuroscientists John O’Keefe and Lynn Nadel found that Tolman’s inner maps were more physically real than might have been expected. As the rat moves through its environment, “place cells” that form a map-like structure light up. A continuation of this work found more surprises, including the dream-like—or not just dream-like—traversing of paths in sleep, the rehearsal and recollection of journeys, and mental exploration. This work has truly given us a look inside. But once this work went beyond Tolman’s first steps, it involved tracking what individual neurons in the rats’ brains are doing, with surgically implanted electrodes connected to wires leading out of their heads. I am not sure how bad this experience would be for the rats—perhaps much better now than it was in earlier decades. Animal neuroscience has also been full of “lesion” studies, however, where some part of the brain is destroyed to see what the animal can still do after it wakes up. I have frequently described “split-brain” research in these books. Human split-brain surgery was done for medical reasons, helping patients with severe epilepsy. But a lot of surgical experiments were done on animals as well, especially primates. These included tests of procedures, studies to see what happens if a split-brain cut is deeper than it would be in humans, and so on. Some of that work would, I assume, have informed the medically beneficial surgery done on people, but much of it appears to have been done more out of scientific curiosity.

Now that we know more about the animals, what sort of policies should we choose for the future? I do think change is needed. I won’t go through horror stories here in this chapter’s main text, but I will put some links in the endnotes, making sure they are fairly recent, for those who want to look closely. Dogs are still used in a lot of harmful testing, especially tests of the toxicity of chemicals. Most of these dogs are beagles; tens of thousands of beagles are used in research each year in the United States alone. Beagles are known for their amiable, trusting disposition, and that very fact has doomed them to awful experiments. As with factory farming, I see this practice as squarely, and almost unbearably, in the realm of human betrayal of animals who have made a life with us.

The vast majority of mammals used in testing are mice and rats, though, and within animals as a whole, a large number are fruit flies, small fish, nematode worms, and some others. Octopuses are used as research animals more than they were in the past. They now tend to get more protection than other invertebrates, but I hope octopuses never become “model organisms” in biology, as some people have suggested.

Let’s focus on animals that are pretty clearly sentient. I take this to include many animals beside mammals, but mammals raise the most urgent questions. As in the discussion of farming, I want to focus not only on the experimental procedures the animals have to go through, but on their whole lives and likely experience. These lives include confinement and deprivation of opportunities for normal behaviors. They tend to also include a regular food supply, warmth, and so on, at least outside the tests. We need to think about the whole life.

A first response we might make, when troubled by the treatment of lab animals, is to insist on a stringent accounting of the benefits and harms associated with an experiment of a particular kind. Is the work likely to do more good than harm? This accounting would be done in a utilitarian way, counting total harms and benefits and allowing that harm to one can be offset by benefits to another. Such an accounting could not pretend to be exact, but it might give us guidance. Several philosophers have used the example of early-twentieth-century work on the role of insulin in diabetes. About thirty dogs were used in the experiments, and the benefits to humans were enormous. The diabetes case is extreme, and we’re also not dealing with questions that can be answered by looking backward, knowing how the work turned out. Decisions have to be made ahead of time. But a case like that still might provide a model; perhaps sometimes we have good reason to think that things will turn out like this.

How would reasoning of this kind relate to “basic” research and work driven by curiosity, where animals are harmed but there is no clear path to a beneficial therapy? A simple response would be to say that the cost-benefit test is failed and the work should end. But once we start to press a little on the distinction between practically oriented and basic research, this whole approach becomes problematic. Scientific investigation is cumulative; a project that has good cost-benefit accounting now will have it in part because of earlier work, much of it probably “basic” or exploratory, that set up the background knowledge used in later rounds of research. The usual situation is one where different studies interlock; you learn a bit here and a bit there, and the pieces start to fit together in a way that allows you to do something useful. If we stop curiosity-driven work and only do work with clear practical benefits, we will lose out on the next round of knowledge about the basic workings of living systems, work that is likely to make all sorts of other future work beneficial.

For a person concerned about cruelty in experiments, this response can engender frustration. It is too open-ended; it will allow too much. In science, there’s a strong tendency for work to breed more work of the same kind. Papers often conclude with “More research is needed,” and funding agencies are approached in those terms. The result can be a lot of routine work that follows a path and adds small pieces with diminishing returns. In many parts of science, this is not a problem, as there’s no reason not to keep probing away, following small leads. But in the sort of work we are talking about here, it does become a problem, because work of this kind can use a lot of animals.

Let’s try a different tack. Does the discussion of farming in this chapter give us any guidance? Suppose we drop the distinction between “basic” science and research directed on specific harms and therapies, at least for a moment, and consider all the work together. In the case of farming, I insisted on using whole-life reasoning, not just looking at deaths, and said that humane farming of some kinds is acceptable. Can such a model be applied to the lab animal case? The proposal would be to make each animal’s life a good one as a whole, a life clearly worth living. If this is acceptable in the farming case, it should be acceptable here, too.

In the case of some, perhaps many, laboratory animals, this may be impossible. The lives within humane farming envisaged earlier in this chapter were lives spent wandering around outdoors and experiencing little constraint most of the time (paddock fences, yes, but not cages and crates). Laboratory life, in contrast, generally involves confinement and the curtailing of normal behaviors, with no unconstrained wandering and no interaction in the sun. In the case of primates, cats, and dogs, I am doubtful that a life of the right kind could be achieved. Being well-fed, and well-numbed during the bad stuff, is nowhere near sufficient.

With mice and rats, things might be different. The philosopher Philip Kitcher wrote an article in which he suggests a regime of the right kind could be possible for those animals, given their normally short lives and the kind of environment that might be built for them. When there’s a choice between making circumstances natural and just making them good for the animal, we might do the latter. We’d give them food and day-to-day security of a kind that most mice would envy, if they could. We could also try to ensure that typical behaviors can be expressed (if they don’t harm other animals in that setting). Given the spatial scale at which these animals live, he thinks this might be feasible. Such an approach is much more difficult in the case of those beagles and primates.

Macaques, which are small monkeys, are still quite widely used in research. Could they be given a life that would justify experimental work on them? In a case like this, it would require deciding that giving them a life that is very far from a normal, wild one is all right, if they end up in extremely benign, comfortable conditions for most of their time. We’d have to accept that it’s okay for most of the ongoing projects that a normal macaque life involves to be lost. (This idea about the role of “projects” in wild animal life is one I’ll come back to in the next chapter.) One of the heartbreaking things about animals is what they are able to adapt to. The fact that an animal can adapt does not make the thing they are adapting to defensible.

A few initiatives have built and supported retirement facilities for laboratory animals; we try to make it up to the animals afterward. This attempt at balancing is the converse of what is seen in humane farming, as the good part of life comes later. This will surely be better than nothing, but in a fair bit of animal research, the testing stage seems so bad (not just the procedures, but the confinement and deprivation) that I doubt that measures of this kind could be enough for a whole-life justification.

Whether this whole-life approach might allow ongoing use of animals in research is also affected by changes in technology. So far here, I’ve been assuming that confinement and constraint are part of the picture. In the future, perhaps it will be possible for brain recordings and the like to be done with tiny, harmless, self-contained implants that don’t require wires connecting the animal to machines, and that allow the animal to live, freely moving, in a sanctuary rather than a lab. That would transform the problem.

Where does all this bring us in the meantime? It makes it reasonable to oppose a large amount of animal experimentation. At least until testing methods and the lives of the animals are greatly improved, a lot of work should stop. Again, I am focusing on mammals here, and am not sure at all about some of the invertebrates. But I would bring to an end just about all the harmful work on primates and dogs. What about work that has an unusually clear justification in utilitarian terms—research in which a small number of animals suffer harm to achieve great benefits to others? In any policy debate, there will be special cases and hard calls, but if work of that kind is to proceed, it should be done in a way that comes as close as possible to being justifiable in whole-life terms.

In both the farming case and the laboratory one, what I oppose most is humans setting things up, using our powers, to create ongoing misery, stress, and fear for other animals. We humans have emerged from the long history of animal evolution with unique capacities. How do we use them? Some uses of our powers are grotesque in the relationship they establish to the other animals who have come through this history with us, perhaps especially those who have lived among us. Factory farming of pigs and chickens, together with the worst practices used with cattle; the use of dogs, cats, and primates in harmful experiments—those are the most important cases.

If there is a scaling-back of the sort that I have in mind, scientific progress will be slower. We should accept this. Information will still come in, from work of many kinds that doesn’t involve this kind of harm. The pace will be different. An objector might say, “Some people will be worse off because of the delay.” Yes, but that argument has little force—things would go even faster if we used prisoners. We usually accept that the speed of progress is not the only thing to consider. Nearly everyone thinks that some degree of license for harmful scientific research would be too much to grant, and it’s a question of the amount.

I advocate this package of views in the spirit of the discussion of ethical choice at the start of this chapter. In this area, there are some paths that are shortsighted, factually uninformed, inconsistent with other values and projects that the defenders would endorse, and so on. Arguments can be made where we show that someone has been making a mistake, or doing something that can’t be defended. But as in the case of farming, a round of relatively clear improvement is followed by another round of decisions, and that later stage might offer several defensible paths. We should not let the existence of those harder questions prevent the earlier round of progress. Don’t let the question “Is it okay to deliberately breed mutant flies?” deflect us from ending research that inflicts months of pain and stress on monkeys and beagles.

I can imagine a more permissive view for the future, one based on arguments about the overall benefits that come from more knowledge. If someone thinks we have evidence that harmful experiments of some kind that I’d put an end to will work out well, given how broadly the new knowledge could be applied, this, in some cases, could be a defensible position. I think these things are very hard to know, but uncertainty about outcomes is not the heart of the matter for me. I’d just not want to keep doing work of that kind—work that is clearly bad for the animals but might pay off in some important way. Scientific curiosity is insatiable, and we should not allow this curiosity to trump everything else. So I would end invasive and otherwise harmful experiments on mammals, certainly cats, dogs, and primates but also rabbits, rodents—and octopuses—unless a whole-life justification can be given. I accept that some of the work that I would stop might lead to important breakthroughs; I just don’t want it to be done. I would like future generations to look back on our time and say: They decided to give up this kind of work, decided to let it rest. Those looking back would probably also say: This medical advance X (whatever it might be) came more slowly as a consequence of their decision. But, again, we could always go faster by being crueler. I suggest that we just put these practices behind us. Why don’t we make this into one of the choices that these years in history are remembered for?