Ethics and Public Policy

A Philosophical Inquiry

Jonathan Wolff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351128643
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Ethics and Public Policy: A Philosophical Inquiry, second edition subjects important and controversial areas of public policy to philosophical scrutiny. Jonathan Wolff, a renowned philosopher and veteran of many public committees, introduces and assesses core problems and controversies in public policy from a philosophical standpoint. Each chapter focuses on an important area of public policy where there is considerable moral and political disagreement. Topics discussed include:

• Can we defend inflicting suffering on animals in scientific experiments for human benefit?

• What limits to gambling can be achieved through legislation?

• What assumptions underlie drug policy? Can we justify punishing those who engage in actions that harm only themselves?

• What is so bad about crime? What is the point of punishment?

Other chapters discuss health care, disability, safety, and the free market. Throughout the book, fundamental questions for both philosopher and policy maker recur: what are the best methods for connecting philosophy and public policy? Should thinking about public policy be guided by an 'an ideal world' or the world we live in now? If there are 'knock down' arguments in philosophy why are there none in public policy?

Revised throughout to reflect changes in policy and research, this second edition includes four new chapters, on risky new technologies, the future of work, poverty, and immigration.

Each chapter concludes with 'Lessons for Philosophy' making this book not only an ideal introduction for those coming to philosophy, ethics, or public policy for the first time, but also a vital resource for anyone grappling with the moral complexity underlying policy debates.

1

SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENTS ON ANIMALS

§Introduction

How should human beings treat non-human animals? This question is often debated under the heading of ‘animal rights’ or, rather differently, ‘animal liberation’ (you might want to liberate animals even if, strictly thinking, you don’t think animals can or do have rights). This may well be, from the perspective of the future, the defining question of our age. Will future human beings look back at contemporary practices of eating meat and using animals for scientific experiments with the horror we have for earlier practices of slavery? Indeed, in some ways what we do to animals is far worse than what was at least routinely done to slaves.

It is unlikely that we can come to an accurate view about what future generations will think of us. But we can try to come to a view about the correct approach to the ethical question of the treatment of animals. My main task here, however, is not to argue for any particular answer to that question, although I will towards the end of this chapter set out some tentative conclusions. Rather, I will attempt to argue that one standard way of approaching the moral question of our treatment of non-human animals is unhelpful, and an alternative framework is much more promising both philosophically and for policy debates. My discussion will focus on the use of animals in scientific research, and I will say very little about other practices such as eating animals, keeping them as pets, or hunting animals for sport.

§The use of animals in scientific experiments

Before getting started on philosophical discussion, it is worth looking at some of the details about the use of animals in scientific research. My discussion will focus on animal experimentation in the UK, where, it is sometimes said, the regulations are the most restrictive in the world. Nevertheless, similar considerations also apply elsewhere. In the UK the main legislation is the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986. Each year the Home Office provides a set of statistics concerning the licences granted for the year. It is not always necessary to obtain a licence, but as the Home Office explains,

Under this Act any scientific procedure carried out on any living vertebrate animal, or one species of octopus (Octopus vulgaris), which is likely to cause that animal pain, suffering, distress or lasting harm is a regulated procedure requiring licence authority.

(Home Office 2009, 3)

No licence has been granted in the UK for experiments on the great apes (chimpanzees, gorillas, and orang-utans) since the current Act of Parliament has been in force.

A licence will only be granted if, in the opinion of the authority, the benefits of the research outweigh the harms, and experimenting on animals is the only feasible way of obtaining the information sought. This is not intended to rule out ‘basic’ scientific research with no obvious, immediate application, but it must at least be plausible that the experiment will contribute to the scientific enterprise, with possible eventual benefits to human or to animal welfare. Experiments, or other licensed procedures, are divided into four classifications: mild, moderate, severe, and unclassified. Unclassified are those where the animal suffers no pain, as, for example, in experiments where it remains unconscious throughout the procedure and never regains consciousness (we will look at such cases in more detail later). Mild, moderate, and severe refer to the degree of pain or suffering involved, although how a particular procedure is classified is generally a matter of judgement and experience, as coming up with an operational definition of the boundaries is probably an impossible task. Relatively few licences are granted for severe procedures, but the majority of licences are for moderate ones.

The sheer numbers of animals involved, however, may come as a surprise. In 2008 licences were granted for 3.7 million procedures, up from about 3.2 million the previous year, but a long way down from the peak of above 5 million in the 1970s. The very great majority of animals used are mice, rats, and fish, although together dogs, cats, and non-human primates numbered over 11,000. Pigs, turkeys, and other farm animals were also used in experiments relating to veterinary medicine. Worldwide, it has been estimated that over 115 million animals are used each year (Linzey and Linzey 2018, 6). Many types of experiments are carried out. Pigs have been used in military experiments, to test practices of resuscitation after bomb blasts, and many types of product, chemical, and food and drink experiments are conducted on a variety of animals, while of course animals are used particularly for drug discovery and testing, as well as in other medical research on such things as the effects of brain stimulation and the treatment of eating disorders (Linzey and Linzey 2018, 15–19). In the case of drug discovery, although some early testing can be done in the test tube, using tissue samples or cell cultures, nevertheless animals will generally be used extensively to attempt to establish the effects of particular chemical compounds. These will either have been manufactured in the lab or derived from a natural source, often the rain forest, or even the sea bed. Perhaps it is no surprise, given evolution, that nature seems to be a wonderful source of compounds with health-protective properties. Once a desirable effect is detected, and firmly established, the next stage is to test the compound to see if it is safe, or whether it has adverse side effects, prior to testing it on human beings under specialized and carefully controlled conditions (which do, nevertheless, sometimes go wrong, as in the notorious Northwick Park Hospital case, where a drug safety test caused immediate highly adverse reactions, with permanent effects (Attarwala 2010)).

The scientific use of animals has a long history, especially in dissection. Indeed, in the seventeenth century the philosopher Descartes revealed himself in his writings to be an enthusiastic devotee of animal dissection, in order to further his understanding of human anatomy (Descartes 1985 [1637]). It may well have been that Descartes even performed vivisection: experiments on living animals. Vivisection became more common in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and began to spark considerable protest and disquiet (Linzey and Linzey 2018, 1–10). Experimentation on the mass scale we now see began only in the twentieth century with the use of animals anaesthetized with ether and chloroform. The use of animals in research has always been accompanied by protest, although it has been stronger and more vocal, and, indeed, even violently active at certain times (NCB 2005). And the extent to which animal experimentation takes place is rarely made explicit. For example, when you put money in the collecting tin for heart or cancer research there is a high chance that the money you give will pay for experiments on animals. Indeed those who support antivivisection charities may well, unwittingly, in their support of other charities, be funding exactly the work they want to ban. In collecting evidence for the Nuffield Council we found that among the strongest supporters of animal experiments were societies and charities desperately seeking a cure for severe medical conditions.

§Moral philosophy and policy debates: animal experimentation

In the Introduction to this book I mentioned some of the difficulties in trying to influence public policy on the topic of animal experimentation by means of philosophical argument. Given that philosophers have such radical disagreements among themselves, and their views often have implications that are very far from current practices, philosophical discussions, on their own, are likely to be treated as fairly marginal to practical debates in policy. But I do not for a second want to diminish the effect that philosophers can have on changing the intellectual climate. Peter Singer’s arguments for ‘animal liberation’, for example, have had a huge influence on how these questions are considered and discussed, and as a result of the efforts of Singer and others very significant changes have been made. Many of the types of experiments once taken for granted in the 1960s and 70s, which inflicted great harm and suffering merely to satisfy the curiosity of the researchers, are now outlawed. But one can hardly argue that animals are now liberated, or that the world is on its way there, even if some of the worst abuses have been eliminated. This sets the question of how philosophers can have greater influence, or even any influence at all, in practical areas of policy.

There is also a second background issue that needs to be brought out before going further. In public debates about the ethics of animal research, two distinct but intermingled questions need to be separated. The first is the scientific question of whether experimenting on animals is a useful way of finding out about human beings: do the animal models ‘work’? Some critics say they fail: if chocolate had been safety-tested on beagles it would never have reached the market, so it is said. Apparently a beagle could die if it ate a whole box of dark chocolates. Others take a more nuanced view. One researcher said to me, ‘I know an awful lot about pain in rats. I don’t know how much I know about pain in human beings’. Hence there is a scientific debate to be had about the efficacy of the science of animal experiments.

It is possible, however, to believe that a well-defined animal experiment can teach us a great deal, yet still be morally wrong. After all, we can imagine numerous experiments on humans that would yield very useful information – the Nazi scientists on trial at Nuremberg did some – yet most of us have an unshakeable view that it would be wrong to perform this type of experiment on unwilling subjects, however much that would increase our knowledge. Indeed some people think it is wrong to use the information gained in the Nazi experiments, even if significant benefit would come of it (Moe 1984). But the main point is that even if animal experiments work, this doesn’t settle the moral question of whether they should be permitted. Conversely, however, if it is shown that the experiments do not work, then for all but the most extreme view, that would be enough to show that the experiments are not only scientifically flawed, but also morally wrong. For example, much of the moral case against animal experimentation in a recent report is based on a series of arguments that many experiments yield little useful information, and may, in fact, be misleading and put discovery back (Linzey and Linzey 2018). If those arguments are correct, that would seem to be enough to show that experimenting on animals is wrong. But even if these arguments are refuted, and it becomes clear that experimenting on animals yields powerful knowledge we cannot get in any other way, that is not yet enough to show that the practice is morally justified.

§The standard approach: defining the moral community

One popular way of trying to advance the debate on the morally proper treatment of animals is to try to define what it is about human beings that makes us ‘members of the moral community’ and to explore whether this – whatever it is – is also true of at least some animals. Now, there is one obvious proposal that would settle the matter immediately: the critical morally relevant property is ‘being a human being’ and this would explain why it is that all and only human beings are members of the moral community. Such a view resonates with the often-heard expression that it is ‘obvious that human beings are more important than animals’. However the form of this claim is suspiciously like the claims once heard that it is ‘obvious that men are more important than women’ or that ‘whites are more important than blacks’. Rather than statements of the moral obvious they are now, of course, taken to be statements of sexism and racism, and the term ‘speciesism’ has been coined to make a similar point in the current context (Ryder 1975; Singer 1995). In effect, the challenge is to find why being a human being is so important. Is there a morally significant property that human beings have, and at least some animals do not, which would then justify drawing the bounds of the moral community in such a way that it leaves out those animals we eat, hunt, or experiment upon, or in other words treat in ways we would never treat human beings? On this view, the property ‘human being’ is not sufficient: membership in a species has no moral weight in itself.

We need, then, to look for some underlying property to explain why human beings are morally special. To jump ahead, some possible candidates offered by moral philosophers are sentience, autonomy, possession of a conception of the good, capability to flourish, sociability, and possession of a life. These are all properties typically held by human beings, and to varying degrees, by animals. Our question, then, is whether any of them provide a criterion for membership of the moral community. An immediate difficulty was pointed out by John Rawls. On the face of it many of these properties come in degrees, but it seems that, as far as the moral community is concerned, you are either a member of it, or not. Hence, Rawls argued, we need what he called a ‘range property’: one such that either you have it or you do not. Rawls’ own slightly confusing example was whether or not a point on a plane was ‘inside the circle’. Of course, one point could be closer to the centre of a circle than another, but this is not the same as being ‘more inside’ the circle. Either the point is inside the circle or it is outside (ignoring those points that hit the line). Similarly, it seems, in the current context of trying to draw the boundaries of the moral community we need a property that is either had, or is not had (Rawls 1999 [1971], 508).

The first suggestion on the list was ‘sentience’, to be understood as the capacity to suffer or feel pleasure and pain. Possibly this could be a range property. Of course some creatures may have a capacity to feel differing ranges or intensities of pain and pleasure, but it is not unreasonable to suppose that an entity either has a capacity or fails to do so. As Jeremy Bentham put it, the question is not whether they can talk or reason but whether they can suffer (Bentham 1996 [1781], 283). Yet it is well known that there are problems with this approach in that, as far as many are concerned, it gives a rather uncomfortable answer to the question of the boundaries of the moral community. On this view more or less any creature with a nervous system is a member of the moral community. Indeed, there is an interesting echo of this thought in the UK regulations mentioned above. As we saw, a licence is needed to experiment on all vertebrates and the common octopus (see Godfrey-Smith 2016 for a philosopher’s account of the mind of the octopus). Presumably the justification for this is that we know that such creatures have a very clear capability to suffer. However, one obvious, and rather troubling, consequence of the position that a capacity to suffer puts a creature into the moral community is that it would seem to leave a small number of human beings out: those with a seriously malfunctioning nervous system or those in a permanent coma (although perhaps these individuals can be regarded as suffering in other ways).

Some will be very happy to accept sentience as the basis of entry into the moral community, but we should be aware of the very radical consequences of doing so: that there is no moral privilege to human status. This, of course, will be welcomed by many who object to our current treatment of animals. However, the further implications of such a view are not so clear. Often it is assumed that it entails that animals have rights, on the basis that if human beings have rights and there is no moral distinction between human beings and other sentient animals, then such animals must have rights too. Yet Bentham, who, as we saw, was a defender of the view that sentience is what matters, equally famously denied that human beings had rights in any substantial sense (Bentham 1987 [1796]). For Bentham the consequence of drawing the bounds of the moral community in terms of sentience is that other animals have, not rights, but equal weight in the utilitarian calculus with human beings. For this reason, perhaps, Peter Singer, a contemporary utilitarian, named his book Animal Liberation rather than Animal Rights.

We will return later to the question of rights versus utilitarian aggregation. In the meantime, we should look at a second approach to drawing the bounds of the moral community, which draws more on the Kantian tradition in moral thought. It comes in a number of variants, but all take as the qualifying property for the moral community something like autonomy, will, or freedom, which either is, or is based on, some sort of higher-level cognitive functioning, possibly involving the ability to reflect on the thinker’s own thoughts. Accordingly it draws the bounds of the moral community much more tightly than the sentience approach, leaving out almost all, if not all, non-human animals. Perhaps a case can be made for great apes and dolphins, but not much more.

While many may be pleased to draw the line in a way that allows us to continue to eat and experiment on animals there are two well-known immediate consequences that should give us pause. First, those creatures that do not have higher-level cognitive functioning are therefore excluded from the moral community. It appears to follow from this that they are, therefore, owed no more concern than inanimate objects. Animals, then, could be treated just as we treat plants or mineral ores, and so on, which is to say without regard for their own welfare or interests in any respect. This is a notorious consequence of the Kantian view. Kant’s own response was that we should treat animals well out of a concern for ourselves, so as not to demean our own moral status (Kant 1997 [1794], 212). But this seems to get things exactly the wrong way round. If it were not in some way wrong to treat animals badly it is hard to see why it would be demeaning of our own humanity to treat them so.

The other obvious problem is that, just as with the sentience approach, some human beings would also be left out of account. In this case, though, the problem is much more serious. Babies, adults with severe learning difficulties and those suffering dementia would also be excluded. Babies could, perhaps, be rescued on the basis of potential moral status, but the other categories are much more problematic.

Now other properties have been proposed as possible bases for membership of the moral community, such as sociability or possession of a life, but rather than go through them one by one, we can note it seems unlikely that any of them is capable of generating the ‘common-sense’ position that we owe moral concern to (many) non-human animals, but we need not treat (all of these) animals the way we treat human beings. Even if we are justified in killing animals for food, few would think that we don’t have to care about how they are kept or treated. However, on the approach we are considering, if we think in terms of a ‘range’ property, then, to put it crudely, you are either in or out, and so the common-sense position that we owe something to animals but not the same as we owe to human beings is unsupportable. On the ‘moral-community’ approach we should either treat animals as we do human beings, or we have no moral duties to them at all. The fact that the philosophical debate is so polarized in this way is the crux of the matter of why philosophers’ views match up so poorly with current policy and regulations, which appear more complex in structure than is typically offered by philosophers. This, of course, is not an argument that public policy is right and philosophical theories wrong. But before we can make progress we should at least try to understand the moral assumptions behind the common-sense view.

§An alternative approach: morally relevant properties

The obvious alternative is to deny that we need a range property, but that membership of the moral community is a matter of more or less. Perhaps we need to find some sort of ‘sliding-scale’ property to explain why we should treat some creatures, such as human beings, in a different way to others, such as mice, which in turn should be treated in a different way to ants. There is, I think, something to this idea, but I think the way it is stated is misleading.

First, the notion of ‘moral community’ is unhelpful and should be abandoned. It suggests a cut-off point: as we said, either you are in or you are out. But once a sliding-scale or continuum is adopted there seems no reason for thinking there is a boundary line that we need to police in some way. Second, the assumption that we should explain the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface to the second edition
• Preface to the first edition
• Introduction
• 1. Scientific experiments on animals
• 2. Gambling
• 3. Drugs
• 4. Safety
• 5. Risky new technologies
• 6. Crime and punishment
• 7. Health
• 8. Disability
• 9. The free market
• 10. The future of work
• 11. Poverty
• 12. Immigration
• 13. Conclusion: Connecting philosophy and public policy
• Note on the chapters
• Further reading
• Bibliography
• Index