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Essay by Aaron Simmons |
At the anti-vivisection protest held in front of Kettering, Friday, April 4, a large banner was hung which read "STOP ANIMAL TORTURE." During the protest, the question was raised to me by professor of Neuroscience, Albert Borroni, as to what constituted "torture," and whether or not the procedures performed in his Neuroscience 211 lab fall under that definition. I responded that torture entailed intentionally inflicting physical pain or suffering on another living being, and that drilling into rats' heads certainly seemed to fit this definition. To this, he asserted that the rats, put under anesthesia, felt no pain, and that he would have nothing to do with any procedure that entailed inflicting pain on animals.
Despite my doubts that the rats used in NSCI 211, or animals used elsewhere in the Neuroscience Program, escape physical pain, I was left wondering why then, if allegedly the subjects (or more appropriately, objects) of Neuroscience or Biology experiments suffer no pain, are we using rats and mice and opossums to experiment on, rather than human beings, who would certainly yield results more useful to vivisection's virtuous ends of human freedom from disease and suffering. To this, I received no response, but I didn't need to. "Painless" experiments aren't harmless, laboratory animals such as those used in the Neuroscience program certainly suffer the loss of freedom and the loss of lives as expendable instruments of science. No improved environmental conditions, no animal care and use committee, can compensate for these losses.
The fact that laboratory animals certainly do suffer the loss of their freedom, well-being, and lives is exactly why we wouldn't condone using another human being as we use laboratory animals. Yet how can we justifiably show such respect and reverence for human beings, but not for other sentient beings? Tell me, what makes the lives of human beings superior over those of nonhuman beings, such that their lives can be exploited as mere tools and taken away as means to our ends?
If you reply to me, that certainly human intelligence makes a human life more valuable in the sense that our lives have more meaning and complexity, I ask you what about those humans who don't meet that standard of intelligence? How can we morally deplore involuntary experimentation on severely mentally retarded humans, or human babies and young children, yet consistently condone nonhuman animal experimentation? I then ask you what intelligence has to do with the fundamental moral value of a life, a life lived by a subject who desires to live, feels pain, and suffers from the pain and restrictions placed on him or her? I finally assert that any sentient creature, any subject of a life, should be accorded the fundamental right or freedom to live and not be intentionally harmed by us; this being so, simply because this creature can feel and suffer and possesses what we call a life. As strongly as we may feel for the plight of a diseased love one, or for human suffering from ill health in general, it is inherently violent to injure or take away, to ruin or wipe out, one innocent life as the means to helping or saving another. A lion killing a gazelle isn't asserting his or her right to survive, lions cannot construct rights. Rights and moral behavior are human ideas, based on our unique awareness of, identification with, and compassion for others. This is an important difference between the lion and the human being. Human beings, each of us, has a right to survive, but not through the infliction of suffering or death on innocent others. As humans we have this moral responsibility. It, the responsibility, seems to come easily to me (pushed forth by compassion), and to others who protest for the abolition of vivisection, and to those who have a sick loved one or are ill themselves (including some with cancer or HIV, mind you) and yet still oppose animal experimentation. We morally reject the medical solution that entails harming and killing innocent others for our own, human sake.
If in asserting our right to survive, we deny, like Josh Ritter, any fundamental responsibility and respect towards nonhuman animals, then, accordingly, it is consistent that we may deny this respect towards any individual, human included. In fact, Josh Ritter's argument is a moral argument for the use of other human beings as test subjects in order to train medical professionals. Ritter insists that in rejecting vivisection "you are accepting partial responsibility for preventing research that can save the lives of those you love." Yet, we are also preventing this life-saving research by rejecting human experimentation. Imagine how much faster and more efficiently we could devise solutions to human health problems by directly studying and testing on actual human beings! Human experimentation would undeniably advance science and the medical progress that could save my own or a loved one's life, yet we morally condemn using any human in this way. Wait, what happened to my right to survive?
I imagine that Ritter's response to this might be that our right to survive is a species-based right, just as we can observe in nonhuman species. But it is absolutely absurd to argue that nonhuman nature is our destiny, that what we find in the nonhuman determines what we can and cannot rightfully do. What happened to moral beliefs and arguments? Iwant to survive. I could use you like a lab animal for my survival, but I do not out of my moral compassion and respect for you (not out of some contrived human species-kinship). We each want to survive, yet we compassionately and respectfully refrain from asserting our self-interested survival over the rights and desires of other humans to live and be free. Likewise, there is every good moral reason why we should refrain from asserting this personal self-interest to survive over the lives, freedom and well-being of innocent sentient nonhuman beings.
Aaron Simmons is a College junior
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