Abstract
This chapter explores critically ethical concerns arising from forms of suffering to which domesticated nonhuman animals are subjected in scientific instruction and research and within the industrial-factory-farm-food complex, as well as other contexts. Consideration is given to the views of Arthur Schopenhauer on suffering, René Descartes’s designation of ontological differences between human and non-human animals, and Donna Haraway’s reconfiguration of the relationship between human and nonhuman animals in scientific laboratory settings. Proceeding from a discussion of David Benatar’s “antinatalist” views the focus of analysis is on the forms of suffering imposed on domesticated nonhuman animals by humans. In response to ethical concerns raised about the suffering inflicted on nonhuman animals in the course of scientific research, scientists have sought a “solution” in the form of genetically engineered nonhuman animals whose responses to painful stimuli are presented as modulated to reduce pain. This reductive conceptualization of suffering reduces the complexity of suffering to physical sensation alone and does not engage with the ethical issues involved. Drawing on the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Albert Schweitzer the chapter concludes that an ethical solution to the complex issues explored lies in refraining from exposing nonhuman animals to pain and suffering.
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Notes
- 1.
D. Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 2.
- 2.
M. H. Buehr, “Genetically Modified Laboratory Animals—What Welfare Problems Do They Face?” Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science 6, no. 4 (2003): 319; A. Shriver, “Knocking Out Pain in Livestock: Can Technology Succeed Where Morality Has Stalled?” Neuroethics 2, no. 3 (2009): 115–24.
- 3.
ADAPTT, “Animal Kill Counter,” last revised February 10, 2015, http://www.adaptt.org/killcounter.html. This figure does not include nonhuman animal subjects who are killed in laboratories and in animal shelters, who die in captivity, who die in blood sports, or who are killed because they are no longer deemed suitable for racing.
- 4.
A. Schopenhauer, On the Suffering of the World (London: Penguin, 2004), 3.
- 5.
Ibid., 15.
- 6.
Ibid., 8–9.
- 7.
Benatar, Better Never to Have Been, 2.
- 8.
Ibid.
- 9.
Ibid., 17.
- 10.
Times (London), “Animal Rights and Wrongs,” March 15, 2014, 24.
- 11.
A. Kleinman and J. Kleinman, “The Appeal of Experience, the Dismay of Images: Cultural Appropriation of Suffering in Our Times,” Daedalus 125, no. 1 (1996): 125.
- 12.
R. Descartes, “Animals Are Machines,” in Environmental Ethics: Divergence and Convergence, ed. S. J. Armstrong and R. G. Botzler (New York: McGraw Hill, 1993), 281–85; Schopenhauer, On the Suffering of the World.
- 13.
K. Anderson, “Animals, Science, and Spectacle in the City,” in Animal Geographies: Place, Politics, and Identity in the Nature-Culture Borderlands, ed. J. Wolch and J. Emel (London: Verso, 1998), 27–50. The species differentiation drawn by Descartes was developed by Kant, who designated a further quality differentiating human from nonhuman animals—namely, “personhood,” a capacity attributed to humans alone: “The fact that the human being can have the ‘I’ in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person and … through rank and dignity an entirely different being from things such as irrational animals, with which one can do as one likes” I. Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, ed. R. B. Louden, introd. Manfred Kuehn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 15.
- 14.
M. Rowlands, Animals like Us (London: Verso, 2002), 3.
- 15.
Bernard Williams argues that although Descartes conceded that we cannot get into the hearts of nonhuman animals, he did think that nonhuman animals were purely mechanical. B. Williams, Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1978), 282.
- 16.
Descartes, “Animals Are Machines.”
- 17.
J. Dupre, Humans and Other Animals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
- 18.
Benatar, Better Never to Have Been, 3.
- 19.
Ibid., 3n1.
- 20.
M. Midgley, The Myths We Live By (London: Routledge, 2004), 138.
- 21.
M. Hauser, Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think (London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 2000), xviii.
- 22.
Council of the European Communities, “Council Directive 86/609/EEC of 24 November 1986 on the Approximation of Laws, Regulations and Administrative Provisions of the Member States regarding the Protection of Animals Used for Experimental and Other Scientific Purposes” (Brussels: Council of European Communities Publications Office, 1986), Article 2a.
- 23.
Ibid., Article 2d.
- 24.
The assessment was undertaken partly in response to public concerns about the ethics of experiments that use nonhuman animal subjects. K. Peggs, “Nonhuman Animal Experiments in the European Community: Human Values and Rational Choice,” Society and Animals 18, no. 1 (2010): 1–20.
- 25.
Commission of the European Communities, “Commission Staff Working Paper Accompanying the Proposal for a Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on the Protection of Animals Used for Scientific Experiments: Impact Assessment,” SEC 2008 2410/2 (Commission of the European Communities, Brussels, 2008), 13.
- 26.
A. Linzey, Why Animal Suffering Matters: Philosophy, Theology, and Practical Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 9.
- 27.
Benatar, Better Never to Have Been.
- 28.
E. O. Price, Animal Domestication and Behaviour (Wallingford, UK: CAB International, 2002), 11.
- 29.
T. P. O’Connor, “Working at Relationships: Another Look at Animal Domestication,” Antiquity 71 (1997): 149–56.
- 30.
D. Haraway, When Species Meet (London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 206.
- 31.
V. Despret, “The Body We Care For: Figures Of Anthropo-Zoo-Genesis,” Body and Society 10, no. 2–3 (2004): 111–34; V. Despret, “Sheep Do Have Opinions,” in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, ed. B. Latour and P. Weibel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 360–70.
- 32.
B. Noske, Beyond Boundaries: Humans and Animals (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1997).
- 33.
Despret, “The Body We Care For,” 122.
- 34.
Ibid., 130.
- 35.
N. Russell, “The Wild Side of Animal Domestication,” Society and Animals 10, no. 3 (2002): 289.
- 36.
P. Ducos, “Domestication Defined and Methodological Approaches to Its Recognition in Faunal Assemblages,” in Approaches to Faunal Analysis in the Middle East, ed. R. H. Meadow and M. A. Zeder, Peabody Museum Bulletins, no. 2 (Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum Press, 1978), 53–56.
- 37.
Ducos, “Domestication Defined,” 54.
- 38.
D. Nibert, Animal Oppression and Human Violence: Domesecration, Capitalism, and Global Conflict (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 12.
- 39.
Haraway, When Species Meet, 72.
- 40.
Ibid., 69, 70, 74.
- 41.
Ibid., 71.
- 42.
Ibid., 72, 73.
- 43.
Z. Weisburg, “The Broken Promises of Monsters: Haraway, Animals and the Humanist Legacy,” Journal of Critical Animal Studies 7, no. 2 (2009): 35.
- 44.
Haraway, When Species Meet, 69.
- 45.
Ibid., 73.
- 46.
Ibid.
- 47.
Ibid., 74.
- 48.
Ibid., 75.
- 49.
Ibid., 76. See also 78–79 and 335n20.
- 50.
Ibid., 77, emphasis added.
- 51.
Ibid., 73.
- 52.
K. Taylor et al., “Estimates for Worldwide Animal Laboratory Use in 2005,” ATLA 36 (2008): 327–42.
- 53.
Home Office UK, Annual Statistics of Scientific Procedures on Living Animals: Great Britain 2016 (London: Stationery Office, 2017), https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/627284/annual-statistics-scientific-procedures-living-animals-2016.pdf.
- 54.
PETA, “Animal Experiments: Overview,” accessed August 23, 2017, http://www.peta.org/issues/animals-used-for-experimentation/animals-used-experimentation-factsheets/animal-experiments-overview/.
- 55.
Haraway, When Species Meet, 82, emphasis added.
- 56.
Ibid., 336n27, emphasis added.
- 57.
R. D. Ryder, “The Ethics of Painism: The Argument against Painful Experiments,” Between the Species 13, no. 2 (August 2002), http://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/bts/vol13/iss2/; see also D. DeGrazia and A. Rowan, “Pain, Suffering, and Anxiety in Animals and Humans,” Theoretical Medicine 12, no. 3 (1991): 193–211.
- 58.
Haraway, When Species Meet, 335n19.
- 59.
Ibid., 80, emphasis added.
- 60.
Ibid., 84, emphasis added.
- 61.
D. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience (New York: Routledge, 1997), 82.
- 62.
Haraway, When Species Meet, 76, emphasis in original.
- 63.
Ibid., 86.
- 64.
Ibid., 87, emphasis added.
- 65.
Ibid., 82, 89–90.
- 66.
Ibid., 80, 81.
- 67.
DeGrazia and Rowan, “Pain, Suffering, and Anxiety,” 200, emphases in original.
- 68.
Ibid., 203.
- 69.
B. E. Rollin, “The Moral Status of Invasive Animal Research,” in Animal Research Ethics: Evolving Views and Practices, ed. S. Gilbert, G. E. Kaebnick, and T. H. Murray (Hastings Center Special Report, 2011), S5, http://www.thehastingscenter.org/uploadedFiles/Publications/Special_Reports/AnimalResearchEthics.pdf.
- 70.
M. Stamp Dawkins, “The Science of Animal Suffering,” Ethology 114, no. 10 (2008): 937–45.
- 71.
C. Patterson, Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust (New York: Lantern Books, 2002); S. Best, Review of The Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust, by Charles Patterson, Journal for Critical Animal Studies 5, no. 2 (2007): 103–19.
- 72.
E. Callaway, “Knock Out the Pain Gene,” New Scientist 203, no. 2724 (2009): 8–9; Shriver, “Knocking Out Pain in Livestock.”
- 73.
P. Singer, Animal Liberation (New York: New York Review of Books, 1975).
- 74.
Shriver, “Knocking Out Pain,” 115.
- 75.
Ibid., 118–19.
- 76.
Ibid., 119, emphasis added.
- 77.
Ibid., 112, 116.
- 78.
Ibid., 119.
- 79.
Ibid., emphases added.
- 80.
Ibid., 124.
- 81.
R. Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), 45.
- 82.
Benatar, Better Never to Have Been, 2–3, note 1.
- 83.
Times (London), “Animal Rights and Wrongs.”
- 84.
M. McDermott, “Is Genetically Engineering Animals To Not Feel Pain Really the Solution to Factory Farming?,” Treehugger, February 22, 2010, http://www.treehugger.com/green-food/is-genetically-engineering-animals-to-not-feel-pain-emreallyem-the-solution-to-factory-farming.html.
- 85.
Ibid.
- 86.
E. Aaron, “Facing the Animal: Finding a Place for the Animal in Levinas,” Dialogue 53, no. 2–3 (2011): 149–58; P. Atterton, “Levinas and Our Moral Responsibility towards Other Animals,” Inquiry 54, no. 6 (2011): 633–49; J. Crowe, “Levinasian Ethics and Animal Rights,” Research Paper No. 10–13, Windsor Yearbook Access to Justice 26 (2008): 313–28.
- 87.
E. Levinas, “The Paradox of Morality: An Interview with Emmanuel Levinas,” in The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other, ed. R. Bernasconi and D. Wood (London: Routledge, 1988), 172, emphasis added.
- 88.
J. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008); M. Calarco, Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida (New York: Columbia University, Press 2008).
- 89.
B. Smart, Facing Modernity: Ambivalence, Reflexivity and Morality (London: Sage, 1999), 103.
- 90.
E. Levinas and R. Kearney, “Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas,” in Face to Face with Levinas, ed. R. A. Cohen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986): 13–34.
- 91.
K. Peggs, Animals and Sociology (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
- 92.
Linzey, Why Animal Suffering Matters.
- 93.
Calarco, Zoographies, 62.
- 94.
A. Schweitzer, “The Ethic of Reference for Life,” in The Philosophy of Civilization (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1923), http://www.animal-rights-library.com/texts-c/schweitzer01.pdf.
- 95.
R. M. Gardner and A. M. Goldberg, “Pain-Free Animals: An Acceptable Refinement?” in the Proceedings of 6th World Congress on Alternatives and Animal Use in the Life Sciences, August 21–25, 2007, Tokyo, Japan, special issue, AATEX 14 (2007): 149, http://altweb.jhsph.edu/wc6/paper145.pdf.
- 96.
Schweitzer, “The Ethic of Reference for Life.”
- 97.
Calarco, Zoographies, 55.
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Peggs, K., Smart, B. (2018). Suffering Existence: Nonhuman Animals and Ethics. In: Linzey, A., Linzey, C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Practical Animal Ethics. The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-36671-9_25
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