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Moral Community and AnimalResearch in MedicineR.G. Frey

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To cite this article: R.G. Frey (1997): Moral Community and Animal Research inMedicine, Ethics & Behavior, 7:2, 123-136

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ETHICS & BEHAVIOR, 7(2), 123-136 Copyright O 1997, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Moral Community and Animal Research in Medicine

R. G. Frey Department of Philosophy

Bowling Green State University

The invocation of moral rights in moraYsocia1 debate today is a recipe for deadlock in our consideration of substantive issues. How we treat animals and humans in part should derive from the value of their lives, which is a function of the quality of their lives, which in turn is a function of the richness of their lives. Consistency in argument requires that humans with a low quality of life should be chosen as experimental subjects over animals with a higher quality of life.

Key words: moral standing, animal rights, value of life, experimentation

My position on animal research in medicine is unlike the positions adopted by some of the other philosophers-Tom Beauchamp, Carl Cohen, and Tom Regan-in these pages.

I support the use of animals in medical research.' I reject, therefore, abolitionist accounts of the matter, such as Regan's, that recently have emerged from the "animal rights" lobby. Unlike Cohen, however, I do not reject these accounts on the ground that animals lack moral standing and so are not members of the moral community. Rather, as Beauchamp correctly divines, I reject them because I think moral standing is a matter of degree, and although animals possess it, normal adult humans possess it more. Mine, then, is a more complicated position on animal experimentation than those of the overly simplistic "stop all animal research now"

'1 develop and defend my position on animal experimentation in a number of places (see Frey, 1987, 1988, 1993, 1996).

Requests for reprints should be sent to R. G. Frey, Department of Philosophy, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH 43403.

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and the overly convenient "permit all animal research now" schools. Not unnatu- rally, therefore, it attracts opposition from both camps.2

For purposes of exposition, I set out the essentials of my position on animal research around six points. Before doing so, however, I make two observations on matters to do with ethical theory: moral rights and utilitarianism.

MORAL RIGHTS

Nothing in my position on the morality of animal research turns on or involves talk of moral rights. There are a number of reasons for this, including some rather abstract ones having to do with the grounds or foundations of such putative rights. But I do not require any such abstract considerations to point to the fact, which all of us perfectly well realize, that the invocation of moral rights in moral/social debate today is a recipe for deadlock in our consideration of substantive issues.

Even among people who are enamored of moral rights today, massive disagree- ment exists about what rights we have. Do we have a right to die? Some rights theorists say yes, others say no. Do we have moral rights to welfare, wherein we have positive rights to goods that, if we ourselves cannot supply them, other people must supply them to us? Some rights theorists say yes, others say no. Do we have amoral right to a job and paid vacations? The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights says yes, many Americans, I suspect, say no. Does the fetus have a moral right to life? Have adults a moral right to whatever sexual orientation and practice they desire? Not even rights theorists agree about these matters, so it is difficult to see how anything substantive with regard to these important morallsocial issues can be achieved, even among themselves, through an appeal to putative moral rights.

Of course, in the United States today, every group with acause is eager to convert that cause into a moral right so as to enhance the cause's standing in our public debate, wherein the currency of public exchange has become claims to rights. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that we increasingly hear of homosexual rights, the rights of the disabled, the rights of children, and the rights of the homeless or disadvantaged, on the one hand, and, moving only slightly further afield, the rights of future generations not yet conceived, the rights of trees or the environment or ecosystems generally, and, of course, the rights of animals, on the other. Given that our public debate on moral/social issues unfortunately has taken this form, no one with a cause can afford not to claim a moral right for their group, else the group lose standing and respect in the shouting that so often passes as debate about rights.

'1 do not mean to imply that, with regard to animals, only my views on experimentation attract opposition. Those who have followed the animal rights debates from the appearance of my books in the area (Frey, 1980,1983) know otherwise.

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In fact, this rush to moral rights has proved singularly unhelpful in the discussion of substantive issues because deadlock is reached almost immediately--one's opponents also recognize the currency of our public debate-when the opposing side either refuses to agree one has the right one claims or, worse yet, converts its own cause into a right. Thus, the right of a pregnant woman to control over her body runs up against the right to life of the fetus; the right of doctors to decide what is best for their patients, given the traditional understanding of the doctor's mission, runs up against patients' exercise of their right of autonomy in aid of intentionally terminating life; and the right of the homosexual to his or her sexual preference and lifestyle runs up against the right of individuals in their communities to determine what sexuaVsocial practices will be permitted within those communities. The inevitable result is certainly a moral standoff, but it is usually a legal standoff as well.

Everybody who is party to these disputes knows full well that deadlock in moral rights claims immediately is reached when each side claims its right, and this in part explains why so many people with causes are eager to get into court. For if a judge decides in favor of one's cause, then, however deadlocked the parties may be morally, those who espouse one's cause might be favored with a legal right or at least a legal permission to practice whatever is at issue in one's cause. If so, then one might gain the upper hand over one's opponents because one can then legally demand, on pain of punishment, that one's opponents take account of this legal right or legal permission. And this, one hopes, gives one's cause much firmer support than does the mere appeal to moral rights. Alas, not even court decisions stem the controversy over rights. Thus, I do not have the faintest idea whether women have a moral right to an abortion during the first trimester of a pregnancy; but I know that one side of the abortion controversy has a U.S. Supreme Court decision in favor of its plea for a legal right and that the other side is working feverishly to get that same court to overturn the decision. A 1986 U.S. Supreme Court decision held that the U.S. Constitution does not fully protect homosexual activity, and homosexual groups are striving constantly-and may well have succeeded with a Supreme Court decision in a Colorado case in 1996-to get that decision overturned. All kinds of groups are trying to get court decisions in favor of rights-based, affirmative action policies overturned, as happened in the U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1996 on admissions to the University of Texas Law School. Does anybody really believe that, should the opponents of all these decisions prevail, those who currently have the upper hand will see the rightness of their cause in any way diminished and so will go away? What they will do, almost certainly, is to behave in exactly the way their opponents currently are behaving.

Until we are presented with a logic that enables us to argue about moral rights in a way that amounts to more than one side affirming and the other denying the right in question, I think we would do well to dispense with talk of moral rights in our attempts to come to grips with moraVsocia1 problems and to present and assess the considerations that we think relevant to reaching a view about what it would be

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126 PREY

right to do in the contexts of those problems. Rights claims simply divert us from this task, from the real issues, as we spend our time trying to figure out what a moral right is, who or what has one, and whose theory or story about the foundations of moral rights should be favored among the dozens offered. In this situation, if Beauchamp, Cohen, and Regan really believe that claims to rights are the way to discuss issues morally, I simply do not see how they can succeed.

UTILITARIANISM

Just as nothing in my position on animal experimentation turns on claims about moral rights, so nothing in it, contra Regan in these pages, turns on the fact that in normative ethical theory I am a ~tilitarian.~ My position turns fundamentally on the notion of quality of life, and no one has ever thought that only utilitarians may make use of this notion. Moreover, what I submit makes up the quality of life-its content and richness-is open to people of any normative stance to adopt. Although Regan appears not to understand this (I am not concerned here with the rather simple objections he raises to utilitarianism or with the numerous devices with which those objections can be met), in fact, I suspect that he understands it full well but that he is in the age-old business, when one's own position is going to strike most people as rather incredible, of trying to paint the opposition in even worse colors.

The truth is that Regan is an abolitionist. He advocates shutting down all animal experimentation now (only occasionally in public debates with him have I heard him speak of a gradual shutdown), no matter how far advanced or promising or important the research is (e.g., in gene therapy) with respect to serious human illnesses. Do we continue with animal experiments until we find replacements for them? Regan is ambivalent on the matter, but I do not see why. If, as he maintains, it is immoral to experiment on animals at all, then what permits us to continue in our current immorality until replacements are found? No, the truth is that he wants animal experimentation stopped. Given the number of people who would be affected adversely by any such shutdown, given the numbers who have been saved already by the fruits of animal research, I fail to see why I am the person, if Regan is to be believed in these pages, who is playing fast and loose with human life. Until we can find replacements for animals (and it is important that Regan never, anywhere, submits that this is even likely over the entire range of medical experi- ments in which animals currently are used), humans pay the cost of Regan's abolitionism. Why are his opponents the ones who show lack of regard for other people?

In any event, nothing in my view about animal research involves anything that nonutilitarians may not accept.

3 ~ a n y different types and versions of types of utilitarianism are on offer today. It would consume too many pages to go into this matter here.

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MORAL COMMUNITY

For ease of exposition, I set out my position on animal experimentation in six planks. Each, of course, requires much more elaboration than I can give it here.

First, moral standing, or moral status, has nothing to do with the possession of moral rights (as indicated, I dispense with moral rights talk). Furthermore it does not require agency on the part of the subject. As people fall completely into the grip of Alzheimer's disease they may cease to be moral agents, neither making choices and weighing reasons for action nor directing their own lives, but few of us think as a result that they cease to be members of the moral community. The severely mentally enfeebled may never have become agents in the first place, but few of us hold that they, therefore, are not morally considerable and or that they are not part of the moral community.

In my view, moral standing, or considerability, turns on whether a creature is an experiential subject, with an unfolding series of experiences that, depending on their quality, can make the creature's life go well or badly. Such a creature has a welfare that can be affected positively or negatively depending on what we do to it. With a welfare that can be enhanced or diminished, a creature has a quality of life. So far as I am aware, no one denies that patients with Alzheimer's disease and the severely mentally enfeebled are such creatures and so are beings with a quality of life that can be affected positively or negatively by what we do to them. Equally, however, very few informed people today deny that rodents, dogs, and chimps are such creature^.^ They are experiential subjects with a welfare and quality of life that our actions can push up or down, and this is true whether or not they are held to have moral rights and whether or not they are held to be moral agents.

I do not think, therefore, that the moral community is shaped by who or what has moral rights or by who or what is a moral agent. It is shaped by who or what is an experiential subject and so is a creature with a welfare and a quality of life that can be affected by what we do to it. Such creatures have biographical lives that consist in the unfolding of experiences. Although there may well be cases where I am uncertain whether a creature is an experiential one (e.g., mere adaptation to environment does not suffice because plants can do this), I do not think rodents, dogs, chimps, and the usual experimental subjects are doubtful ones.

I reject Regan's abolitionism; the benefits animal research has conferred on us have proved substantial, and gene therapy alone holds out extraordinary prospects for us finally to come to grips with some of the most terrible human illnesses. But I also reject Cohen's view that animals are not members of the moral community. I think they have moral standing and so are part of that community, on exactly the same basis that we are, and I think that any account of our justification for using

4 ~ n d d , it is pmisely because these animals are experiential subjects whose lives are affected positiveIy or negativeIy by what we do to them that research protocols in our Iabs and medical schools demand that we justify what we do to them.

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128 FREY

animals in experiments must take this fact into account. That is precisely what my middle position on animal research does.

Second, what is it about animals that is supposed not to count morally? The two most obvious candidates are their pains and sufferings and their lives. On my view, pain is pain, as much an evil for a dog as for a child, and the pains of both dog and child count morally. To give an example I use frequently, I can see no moral difference between pouring scalding water on a dog and pouring it on a child: If it is wrong to do this in the case of the child, and most people would agree it is wrong just because of the pain the child feels (and not because of the relationship the child may bear to one), I can see no reason why it is not wrong to do this to the dog. Where pain is concerned, species makes no difference; what matters is that both are experiential creatures and that pain typically represents an evil in the lives of all such creatures, if not intrinsically, then certainly instrumentally, with respect to the quality of life. Of course, it may be true that adult humans suffer in more and different ways than do animals, but that does not affect the point that animal pains are morally significant features of the world that we need to take into account in deciding how we are to act.

Moreover, animal researchers today often acknowledge this point. All kinds of hospital and institutional guidelines exist for conducting animal research, and research protocols routinely go into how the pain and suffering of a research animal is to be controlled, limited, mitigated where feasible, and justified in the course of the experiment. Often, the animal is euthanized before it recovers from anesthetic. The day when these sorts of concerns about animal suffering could be ignored, if it ever fully existed, has long since passed.

If, however, the pains and sufferings of animals count morally, it is hard to see why their lives do not. For one of the things that so concerns us about pain and suffering is how these things can seriously blight a life and diminish its quality, and this possibility exists in the cases of all those who can experience these things. Neither in ourselves nor in the "higher" animals do we take excruciating agony to be an indication, all other things being equal, of a high or desirable quality of life. Animals are not like test tubes, which are broken and discarded without a second thought; they are, as are we, living creatures with experiential lives and, thus, things with a welfare and a quality of life. For these very reasons, I think that their lives have some value. Furthermore, I think the deliberate, intentional destruction of things of (some) value must be justified.

Research scientists and others think, of course, that they can meet this demand of justification for the destruction of valuable animal lives. They, as do I, cite (actual and potential) human benefit as their defense.

Third, animal life has some value, but it does not have the same value as normal adult human life. I accept a quality-of-life view of the value of a life, in which it is not life, but quality of life, that determines a life's value. Such views are a commonplace today, figuring as they do in virtually all the literature coming out of medical and social ethics having to do with the human condition. Experiential

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creatures generally, however, have a welfare and a quality of life, which can be ~ i n m a ' o r ai'minishea' 6y the quality o f their experiences, including those that ensue as a result of our treatment of them. Their lives can go well or badly. It is not just humans of whom these things are true. So I think a quality-of-life view determines the value not only of human but also of animal life. I see no reason whatever to turn to a different account in the animal case.

I think that the value of a life is a function of its quality, its quality of its richness, and its richness of its capacities or scope for enrichment. Richness of content, in other words, determines a life's quality and value, and a creature's capacities or scope for enrichment determines richness of content. Elsewhere, I have had more to say about richness and scope for enrichment (Frey, 1987,1988,1993,1996). But much more work in the animal case remains to be done because a commitment to a quality-of-life view of the value of a life requires that we have access to the subjective experiences or inner lives of animals, that we be able, in terms appropriate to the species of animal in question, to determine to a reasonable degree how well or badly their lives are going. That we do this all the time, at least at some level, is clear; that is why we play fetch with our dogs, take them for walks and runs, and give them bones. But if quality-of-life judgments are sometimes difficult in the human case, even though a good deal of the time they seem unproblematic at least in broad measure, it stands to reason that they can be difficult in the animal case.

I accept that the dog has subjective experiences, that those experiences determine its quality of life, and that the quality of its life determines that life's value. We use behavior and behavioral studies to give us access to the inner lives of animals, of course; and what we use in a rough-and ready way to begin with we can come to use with more assurance as empirical studies of animals make more information available to us. Perhaps I cannot know exactly what it would be like to be a dog, but I can come to know more and more in this regard as we learn more about them and their responses to their environments.

I do not think, obviously, that the lives of all experiential creatures have the same value. If the value of a life depends on its quality, and the quality of two animal lives can vary substantially, then those two lives will have a different value. This can be true even of animals of the same species, for example, two dogs.

But the really crucial point here is that most of us do not think animal life is as valuable as is human life, and I think we are right to think this. The richness of normal adult human life vastly exceeds that of animals, and our capacities for enrichment, in all their variety and extent, vastly exceed anything that we know or associate with them. Although it is true that the dog has a more acute sense of smell than we do, what we should need to think, in order to think the quality and value of its life approaches the quality and value of ours, is that the dog's sense of smell confers on its life a quality that approximates the quality that all our capacities for enrichment, along multidimensions that appear unavailable to the dog, confer on our lives. Some activities we share with the dog, but there are dimensions of enrichment in our lives-music, literature, science, reflection-that do not appear

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present in the lives of dogs. At the end of life, when we say of a man that he led a rich and full life, we mean something incomparably beyond what we mean were we to say this of a rodent, dog, or chimp.

It can, of course, be objected by "animal rightists" that animal lives are every bit as rich as the lives of normal adult humans, that, for example, the differences in capacities and, therefore, in the depth, extent, and variety of experiences between a normal adult human and a rodent, dog, or chimp do not convey varying degrees of richness on the respective lives. It is difficult to see the basis for this claim of equal richness. In the case of chimps, I am quite prepared to be convinced by more and more evidence that their similarities to us run deep and in ways reflected in their experiential lives. If this turns out to be true, and in creatures whose DNA is 99% the same as our own it may well, claims of equal richness will be appropriate, and my view would then say of chimps what it says of normal adult humans. But what about the cases of very common experimental animals, such as rodents or rabbits? In these cases, where as best we can tell there are wide discrepancies in capacities (and so in experiences) with normal adult humans, we need something to anchor the claim of equal richness. That anchor is not provided by the claim that the current life is the only life that a rodent or rabbit or normal adult human has, so that its life is as valuable to the rodent or rabbit as the human's current life is to the human. This only shows that a creature has to be alive in order to have a quality of life; it shows nothing about the quality of life a creature has.

I am, therefore, prepared to be persuaded that animal lives can be as rich as normal adult human lives. In the case of chimps, baboons, apes, and so forth, if this turns out to be true, the claims I make on behalf of normal adult humans I would make on their behalf.' In the case of some common experimental animals, however, I certainly need to be persuaded of the claim of equal richness.

There is nothing speciesist or discriminatory about my view. The reason normal adult human lives are more valuable than animal lives is not because of species but because of richness and scope for enrichment. I am not guilty, therefore, of discriminating in favor of humans because they are human. Indeed, my view plainly allows that the quality, and therefore value, of some human lives can fall well below that of some animal lives.

My position, therefore, is that animals are members of the moral community because they are experiential creatures with a welfare or well-being that can be affected by what we do to them. They have moral standing. But they do not have the same moral standing as do normal adult humans because the value of the lives of the latter far exceed the value of the lives of the former. The truth is that not all creatures who have moral standing have the same moral standing. It is this truth that now must be put to the human case.

'ln thiseventuality, I should be. prepared to support the Great Ape Project in its essence, which I take to be. the conferral of moral standing on the great apes.

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Fourth, because not all human lives have the same quality, not all human lives have the same vaiue. ina'eed, there are some human liies o fa q u d j l so iow that' we would not wish them on anyone, and those who live these lives desperately seek release from them (and often today, in a public manner). Accordingly, it strikes me as foolish to pretend, as some moralists do, that these lives are as valuable as normal adult human lives. Those fully and finally in the grip of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis do not so pretend; why should we?

If, however, not all human life has the same value, then the possibility arises that the quality of life of a perfectly healthy baboon can exceed that of a human. So, if one is going to appeal to human benefit to justify animal research, and ifthe benefit in this case can be realized either through experimenting on the baboon or the human, then why use the baboon in preference to the human? A quality-of-life view of the value of a life gives a consistent answer over taking a life and saving a life: One saves the creature with the higher quality of life, and one sacrifices the creature with the lower quality of life. In this case, the human has the lower quality of life; so, if either the baboon or the human has to be used in order to realize the benefit, the human must, all other things being equal, be used. Clearly, my view on the value of life and so on this choice is not speciesist.

The only way I can see to avoid this implication of the possibility of human experiments is to come up with something that cedes a human life of any quality, however low, greater value than an animal life of any quality, however high. I can find no such thing. And it is well to remember that if one appeals to the side effects of any decision to proceed with such experiments in order to oppose it, these effects may possibly be overcome through education and careful argument that makes clear the moral basis of why one is proceeding.

Notice that my position here is not that we must experiment on humans, only that we must do s o - o r at least envisage such experiments-if certain conditions obtain, as I think they do. My position is that ifwe continue to employ an argument from benefit to justify animal experimentation in medicine, and if we continue to employ a discussion of the comparative value of human and animal life to justify using the animal in preference to the human, then, because not all human life has the same value as normal adult human life, we are faced with the prospect of human experiments, of, that is, using some humans as we currently use some animals. The antecedents here are accepted widely in the medical research community; with that the case, I see no way to avoid the conclusion. Many of us favor animal research in medicine, and it extracts from us, I suggest, a severe cost.

Fifth, a series of dodges by which to avoid this cost of the defense of animal experimentation all come to grief. I do not have space to go into all these, let alone at any depth; I simply list a couple of dodges and append a few remarks to each.

One might simply insist that any human life, however deficient, has a higher quality than does any animal life, however exemplary. Today, such insistence rings hollow, even at the level of appeal to intuitions. When we visit a hospital, a surgeon says to us, "Now you understand, this man has a very low quality of life. We are

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debating whether withholding treatment and writing a no~esuscitation order are appropriate here. We are debating whether to ask the family for permission to discontinue treatment." Neither the surgeon nor we fail to realize that what we are talking about here is the glaring discrepancy between this life and normal adult human life.

On a quality-of-life view of the value of a life, a life has a value only if it has a quality, and it has a quality, at bottom, only if it has experiences. Accordingly, the lives of anencephalic infants and those in a permanent vegetative state have no value.6 What could possibly justify using perfectly healthy baboons in preference to these humans?

Of course, it may be. said by some that these infants and patients have ceased to be. human; but surely that is a point in favor of using them in preference to healthy animals? Anencephalic infants have had no quality of life and do not and will not have one. Why should they not, as a committee of the American Medical Associa- tion recommended in 1995, only to be. overturned by a vote of the entire organization in 1996, be. used as sources of organs for transplant? But the very emphasis today on xenograft, or cross-species transplantation, shows reluctance to use them in preference to healthy animals.

Why cannot we show a preference for our own kind? We can. The problem is how one defines own kind. If I define my own kind as White, heterosexual, and male, presumably many will protest against the bias they take to be implied in what I say. Why should the category own kind be any less biased defined around species? Besides, if asked which of two creatures is more my own kind, a healthy baboon or a human in a permanently vegetative state, I would choose the baboon, who remains an experiential creature. Only in our "outer shell," in our similarly looking bodies, do those in a permanently vegetative state form part of our own kind; and similarity in outer shell is hard to see as a morally relevant, let alone a morally decisive, characteristic.

Humans are agents in their own right, guiding their lives through autonomous choices and decisions about how they want to live; animals do not and cannot do these things. Neither, alas, do or can all humans, as I noted earlier. The severely mentally enfeebled have never done these things; anencephalic infants can never do them; and although patients fully in the grip of Alzheimer's disease once did them, they no longer do. There is no decisive break to appeal to here in order to advantage the human.

Why cannot we appeal to our tradition and claim that it is a part of that tradition that we accord more respect to humans than to animals and that we accord this respect to humans even in cases in which the only resemblance left is the resem- blance of our outer shells? We can. But why should the fact that something is a part of my tradition vouch for its moral quality and correctness? In the tradition lived

'%his does not deny, of course, that what we do to these humans may affect negatively the welfare of other humans, which, obviously on my view, must be taken into account.

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ANIMAL RESEARCH IN MEDICINE 1 33

by many Whites in the American South, Blacks were accorded and endured an inferior status, but few today would cite this fact as a reason for accepting a continued inferior status for Blacks. There are vast numbers of things that, as one thinks through the moral rightness and wrongness of what one has imbibed as a part of the tradition or ethic within which one has been brought up, one rejects.

I could go on. All these dodges are ways of trying to assert a greater value for human life so as to be able always to forgo using a human instead of an animal life in medical research devoted to obtaining benefits for humans.

Sixth, it can be claimed that my position on animal research expresses doubts about the Judeo-Christian ethic, which has underpinned medical practice and research in Western Europe and the United States for a very long time. This is true. I, like Singer (1996) in his book Rethinking Life and Death, think that parts of this ethic need to be rethought, including the view discussed in this article, namely, that all human life has the same value. Under the Judeo-Christian ethic, all human life is equal in the eyes of God, however deficient its quality. Increasingly, however, fewer and fewer are religious and accept this religious presupposition; and even among those who do accept it, parts of this traditional ethic arecoming under intense scrutiny, as, for example, the abortion debate illustrates.

Let me give some other examples. In the case of seriously defective newborns, with respect to whether we should strive officiously to keep them alive, the equal-value view is coming under attack. In the case of euthanasia, it long has been under attack. In the case of suicide and physician-assisted suicide, it is under increasing attack. In all these cases, the mere invocation of the Judeo-Christian ethic and its pronouncements no longer settles matters among us morally. Argument and debate continue, including amo!ig those who take themselves to be religious. Thus, the modern rethinking of the value and importance of autonomy in individual lives, including its role in decisions to end those lives, remains firmly in opposition to any mere appeal to the traditional ethic to settle the matter. In the case of physician-assisted suicide, these individuals want release from a life they see as no longer worth living, and they almost never pretend that their lives now are as valuable as normal adult human life. (It is important to notice that this judgment about the value of one's life can defy treatment of the person for, say, depression. A person in the final stages of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis may well judge his or her quality of life adversely, even if treated for depression.) Indeed, it is precisely because they have concluded the opposite that they make their adverse judgment about continuing to live those lives.

We need to rethink the claim that all human lives are equally valuable. And we must be careful of those who want to foist off on us some substitute for, or alternative to, equal value, such as something that Regan (1982) calls "equal inherent worth." This is an abstraction for which I cannot see that Regan has any good argument, yet insistence on which is supposed to show that, even though human lives can be massively different in quality, they nevertheless are of equal worth. All Regan has done is to seek a secular analog for equality in the eyes of God so as to avoid the

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obvious truth that none of us, if we could choose between a normal adult human life and an adult human life stricken fully and finally with a progressive nervous disorder that eventually destroys all traces of human personality, would choose the latter, which, if Regan is correct, is of equal inherent worth with the former.

I think animal research in medicine is justified and that human benefit justifies it, and I think the comparative value of normal adult human life and animal life is what justifies using animals instead of humans. But not all human life has the same value as normal adult human life, and anencephalic infants and those in permanently vegetative states are cases in point. Unless we can cite something that always, completely, and without exception confers greater value on human than on animal life, whatever the quality of both, we can justify animal research only by conceding that some humans are candidates for research as well. If we reject the use of humans altogether, how can the argument we have considered license us to use animals? As I indicated, disadvantageous side effects to any decision to go forward with such experiments may disappear through education and through our carefully malung the moral case for our actions. However, is this likely? Can we go forward? On the other hand, in the background all the time are the enormous benefits that medical research confers on us. Can we decide not to go forward?

As I said, a committee of the American Medical Association did at one point come out in favor of using anencephalic infants as organ donors, a source for transplant organs needed to save the lives of other infants. If anything, this represents the very kind of rethinking of the view that all human lives have equal value that I am suggesting we need to undertake.

CONCLUSION

I think this view of equal value and the Judeo-Christian ethic in which it is embedded explain the widespread appeal to slippery slope arguments so as to prevent any rethinking of the sort I suggest. The claim always can be made that, if we start with anencephalic infants and patients in a permanently vegetative state, we soon will be led inexorably down the slope of harvesting organs and lulling until we begin to harvest from those with an enviable quality of life, a quality far removed from where we began. Slippery slope arguments are consequentialist in character, and although I do not deny that they can be powerful tools that cause us to pause in what we are about to do, we need to be clear on exactly what it is that is supposed to force us down the slope in the first place.

The fact is there are slippery slope arguments that no one accepts: Have orange juice for lunch today, and you will be led to have orange juice for lunch for the rest of your life. Absolutely no one believes this, and not because the example is a trivial one. What one wants to know, for example, is the causal mechanism that propels one down the slope.

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ANIMAL RESEARCH IN MEDICINE 135

In the case of Christianity, where killing is concerned, that mechanism has been supplied by a conception of human nature that is exceedingly pessimistic and negative. We are seen in the light of the Fall and Original Sin, seen, that is, as basically corrupt, evil creatures in need of redemption as we constantly make decisions for our own selfish convenience. In the light of this view of ourselves, slippery slope arguments are convincing: Given our corrupt nature, there is no way to stop the slide into evil as we permit cases of harvesting organs from anencephalic infants to cany us headlong into seizing children playing in the streets for their organs.

Apart from a dark religious perspective, however, why should we believe any such thing as this? Why, if one rethinks one's view about defective newborns, so that four operations in a row to eke out 2 more months of life are rejected in favor of withholding treatment, is one condemned to slide down the slope to the depths of evil and killing? Why, if one rethinks the case against physician-assisted suicide and comes out for limited, controlled decisions in favor of termination at the patient's request under safeguards, will the safeguards inevitably fail and the Nazi camps be ahead of us? Horrible consequences such as these, if they are to deter rethinking of basic parts of the ethic that traditionally has underlain medical practice and research in the United States, must be shown to be before us, not in some sense of being mere possibilities, but in a sense that indicates some likelihood of occumng. After all, I would never leave my house if the mere possibility of death in the streets is held to be sufficient to deter me. Nor will it do merely to point out that what was once unthinkable is today thinkable, even done. At the very least, leaving aside changes in moral opinions, likelihood of consequences coming to pass must reflect one's case for why all safeguards will fail, no matter what.

None of this is to say that slippery slope arguments cannot be powerful tools to force us to proceed carefully on rethinking any issue to do with taking life. Indeed, we should proceed carefully where something as important as taking life is concerned. But we should not be stopped in our tracks by an appeal to possible consequences that may ensue as the result of the operation of some view of human nature that a religion, a political ideology, or both asserts to be the case.

REFERENCES

Frey, R. G. (1980). Interests and rights. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Frey, R. G. (1983). Rights, killing, and suffering. Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell. Frey, R. G. (1987). Animal parts, human wholes: On the use of animals as a source of organs for

transplant. In 1. M. Humber & R. F. Almeder (Eds.), Biomedical ethics reviews (pp. 89-107). Clifion, NJ: H u m .

Frey, R. G. (1988). Moral standing, the value of lives, and speciesism. Between the Species, 4,191-201. Frey, R. G. (1993). The ethics of the search for benefits: Animal experimentation in medicine. In R.

Gillon (Ed.), Principles of health care ethics @p. 335-344). New York: Wiley. Frey, R. G. (1996). Medicine, animal experimentation, and the moral problem of unfortunate humans.

Social Philosophy and Policy, 13, 181-21 1 .

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136 FREY

Regan, T. (1982). The nature and possibility of an environmental ethic. In T. Regan (Ed.), All that dwell therein. Berkley: University of California Press.

Singer, P. (1996). Rethinking lve anddeath. New York: S t . Martin's Griffin.

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