This is one of the areas where the great inconvenience of thinking about the ethical status of non-human sentient beings appears. On the one hand, one may feel strongly that non- human sentient beings shouldn't be harmed, for reasons I've already mentioned; on the other, it seems that important human interests require that such harm be done; that the life of a rat being of less value than the life of a human being, as many rats as possibly necessary should therefore be sacrificed in any activity which many prolong or improve human life. We are in a much different realm than the one where animals are harmed only to provide pleasure (the taste of meat, the decor of fur, the joys of the chase).
If we think that animals are not conscious or sentient, if they have no interests, there is no need to worry about their ethical or political standing. However, most people do think that animals have some ethical standing. That being the case, how can animals be ethically harmed in research? Usually, it is justified by following a sort of arithmetic of interests (one human life equals very many rats' lives, or infinitely many, because a rat's sentience or consciousness is assumed to be smaller or less worthy than a human's). But if such a calculation can be made, there doesn't appear to be any reason, other than convention or religious rule, not to apply the same sort of reasoning to the lives of certain human beings; and as research and experimentation on human beings would be much more effective than on rats (unless we're trying to cure rat diseases, which is usually not the case) there are solid utilitarian reasons for doing it. Many significantly disadvantaged Third-World children live under miserable conditions and will probably die before reaching adulthood; why not buy some, bring them to an advanced country, feed them well, and experiment on them? Should not a few thousand probably already lost lives be consumed, so that many millions can be gained? If lives are subject to arithmetic, it is not unreasonable to suppose that many human lives are worth more than one human life.
There are arithmetics under which this sort of thing could be easily justified and in fact such things have been done often enough, and not just by the unpleasant regime of the previous century which was recently alluded to in a related discussion. (Another possible source of human material would be, of course, humans who were severely impaired, especially if their relatives were poor or belonged to another unpopular class; their lives, too, could be deemed of less import than those of regular humans. Prisoners and Welfare recipients would be yet other popular sources of experimental material.)
Of course, we can skip over the perhaps impossible evaluation of the inner world of our potential experimental subjects, and decide that we will perform our selection on the basis of genes regardless of the phenotype produced by them and its mental attributes. But again, we are faced with the possibility of performing the same operation on sets of humans -- humans differ genetically, and markers can probably be found which will separate the more powerful, important categories from the less. The latter could then be defined by those who had the power to do so as fit for use in service to the former.
In other words, the idea that one set of sentient beings may be severely harmed for the putative benefit of another leads readily to some unpalatable possibilities: the boundaries of the sets can easily be moved, along whatever measure they have been placed, be it behavioral, phenotypical, or genetic. The same sort of rhetoric which can be used to justify the use of animals in research can be used to justify the involuntary use of various classes of human beings in research. And in history, this is exactly what we see.
A further problem is that we do not necessarily get one human life for one or a thousand or any particular number of rat lives. It is in fact impossible to compute how many human lives have been saved by sacrificing how many animal lives, because the accounting must encompass all the possible courses of action which were foregone by the choices that were actually made. That is, we don't know what would have happened if fewer animals had been used, or none at all, in favor of more experimentation with human subjects, with cell cultures, or by computer simulation. Each possible choice would produce a different balance of human and non-human lives gained and lost, and we don't have a very good idea what most of the numbers are because the objects we're doing our accounting on -- communities of living animal bodies -- are complex and unpredictable.
One should not forget as well that the sacrifice of animals (or low-status humans) may be done inefficiently -- that is, if their status is low enough for them to be sacrificed at all, it may well be so low that the sacrifices will be wasteful, either through carelessness or through intent -- some people do like to harm and kill, and others profit from it according to quantity rather than quality of work.
In short, the concrete actuality of doing some kind of harm, usually painful and fatal harm, to a particular conscious, sentient, intelligent organism is balanced, not by a particular human life saved, or even the fraction of a human life saved, but by a rather dubious conundrum. One can see why some people might object to it.
Nevertheless, I don't think there's an easy answer to this question. While the entertainment and convenience uses of animals appear to be clearly unethical if one thinks of non-human animals as having any significant ethical standing, the business of animal experimentation is a tougher question. Working out a political solution to it is made more difficult by the inability of most of the people in favor of using and consuming animals to take the ethical objections to these practices seriously enough to answer them in their own terms. Discourse being effaced, vandalism and terrorism ensue.
In any case, it's not going to be an easy set-piece for movie stars; the problem does not lend itself to soundbites or zippy film editing.
Gordon
-- -- -- --
Yoshie Furuhashi:
> ***** A Star Is Torn
> By Douglas Sadownick
>
> The fur flies as Tinseltown's favorite causes lock horns over animal research.
>
> Tensions between animal-rights activists and AIDS advocates escalated last
> October when a radical group calling itself The Justice Department mailed
> 87 razor-blade-rigged letters to primate researchers around the country.
> The letters, one of the most organized animal-rights campaigns to date,
> warned that scientists who didn't release primate captives would be
> "subjected to violence which is uncomparable [sic] to booby-trapped
> letters." This assault came on the heels of spring break-ins organized by
> the Animal Liberation Front at labs at the University of Minnesota and the
> University of California at San Francisco. None of these actions was
> directed at HIV research in particular, but together they unnerved AIDS
> activists lobbying for research into new meds to fight the epidemic. Every
> lifesaving antiretroviral drug, from AZT to last fall's Agenerase, was
> tested on animals. Critical discoveries in immunology have also been made
> through animal research. Every compound now in the pipeline, including
> vaccines, will be tested on animals before it reaches a single human body.
>
> That's why ACT UP/Los Angeles protested a fundraiser last September for
> Hollywood's favorite antifur brigade, People for the Ethical Treatment of
> Animals (PETA) -- to the dismay of many peltless, red-ribbon-sporting
> attendees.
>
> PETA is against all biomedical experimentation involving animals -- even
> research into life-threatening illnesses, regardless of what protections
> are in place. In 1989, PETA president Ingrid Newkirk famously remarked that
> even if animal studies led to a cure for AIDS, "We'd be against it." When
> contacted by POZ, she was unrepentant, saying, "If we could get a cure from
> animals for my father's heart condition, it wouldn't give me any comfort.
> Why don't we respect animals as victims, too?" PETA spokesperson Dan
> Matthews, who is gay, addressed gay community concerns in USA Today in 1996
> by saying, "Don't get diseases in the first place, schmo." He recently
> explained to POZ that he was referring to an overall approach to stopping
> the AIDS epidemic, "which should include prevention."
>
> PETA may have learned how to spin some of its PR gaffes, but many AIDS
> advocates see the group as extremist and a threat to already-diminishing
> donations for AIDS research. In 1995, after a long fight by AIDS advocates,
> Jeff Getty of ACT UP/Golden Gate received a baboon bone-marrow transplant,
> a risky experimental procedure to try to save his failing immune system,
> and then suffered a campaign of hate mail, hate phone calls and death
> threats that followed him from the hospital through his recuperation. "I
> had an animal-rights activist try to kick me in the face at a press
> conference," he recalls. "PETA denied that they sent those letters, but
> they went after me big-time in the press." And while most animal-rights
> organizations condemned The Justice Department's recent threats of
> violence, PETA's Newkirk wrote in a November 1999 letter to The Atlanta
> Journal-Constitution, "Perhaps the mere idea of receiving a nasty missive
> will allow animal researchers to empathize with their victims for the first
> time in their lousy careers."...
>
> <http://www.thebody.com/poz/inside/02_00/peta.html> *****
>
>