A Star Is Torn: Animal Rights and Medical Research

Wojtek Sokolowski sokol at jhu.edu
Fri Mar 10 07:03:49 PST 2000


Gordon: While I fully concur with your argument against utilitarian arguments justifying animal research (after all, utilitarians are the people who brought us Auschwitz) - I also think that this kind of argument focuses on theology while ignoring the material conditions of producing science.

As I see, animal experimentation continues not beacuse of some utilitarian calculus balancing human and animal life, but because our universities produce graduates by thousands, and those graduates need JOBS. It is intellectual-commodity keynesianism, if you will - the sole purpose of it is to keep research workers employed and their "satanic mills" in business.

The use value of that employment does not matter just as it does not matter in the military version of keynesianism. So it could well be that most of animal research is garbage, as you argue, just as much of the military gizmos are - but the only purpose of this madness is to keep capitalism going and NOT to produce any use-value.

wojtek



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