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SAWE Summer School: Guide to teaching provided by Jan Deckers

This guide provides all information that students should read to prepare successfully for the lectures delivered by Jan Deckers on the broad theme: ‘What should scholars and practitioners in animal ethics and law do to prevent public health crises in the post-Covid-19 era?’. Feel free to contact Jan at any time by emailing: jan.deckers@ncl.ac.uk

Introduction: What should you do to contribute to the lectures delivered by Jan Deckers?

The materials that should help you to prepare for the lectures delivered by Jan Deckers contain the following:

– Text: Please read the texts you are being asked to read. Note down anything that is unclear and anything that raises a moral question for you. You may get the chance to discuss these questions in Jan’s lectures.

– Videos: Please watch the videos you are being asked to watch. Note down anything that is unclear and anything that raises a moral question for you. You may get the chance to discuss these questions in Jan’s lectures.

– Questions: these are to stimulate reflection and discussion. Please write down your answers to these questions before you come to Jan’s lectures. In the lectures, time will be set aside to discuss some of these.

If you have not had the time to look at these materials before you come to Jan’s lectures, please do not worry.

The most important resources you should read to participate in Jan’s lectures in the Summer School are the following:

– Deckers J. Fundamentals of Critical Thinking in Health Care Ethics and Law. Gent: Owl Press, 2023, chapters 1, 5, and 8 (2023a). Note that there is no Open Access provision for this resource. However, you can order this book from many book shops on the internet.

– Deckers J. What Should We Do to Prevent Zoonoses with Pandemic Potential?. Journal of Applied Animal Ethics Research 2023, 5(2), 147-169.(2023b)

– Deckers J. Could some people be wronged by contracting swine flu? A case discussion on the links between the farm animal sector and human disease. Journal of Medical Ethics 2011, 37(6), 354-356.

– Deckers J. Animal (De)liberation: Should the Consumption of Animal Products Be Banned?. London: Ubiquity Press, 2016, appendix. This is an open access book. If you would like a printed copy, you can buy one at a price of € 10 if you email Jan to ask for a copy before 5 September 2024.

1. Ontologies and ethics

Philosophy is about the love of wisdom. Moral philosophy is about the love of wisdom in relation to morality. Moral philosophy is sometimes referred to as ethics. Philosophy deals with many other areas, but ontology and ethics are probably the two key areas. Ontology is the study of being, reality, or states of affairs. Ethics could be understood as the study of what ought to be, which presupposes the ability to contemplate potential states of affairs. As many human beings try to figure out how they ought to be or how they ought to act, it might be argued that moral beings who provide an answer to the question of what reality is (rather than what it ought to be) will always provide answers to what reality is that are influenced by their beliefs of what it ought to be. While we might try to understand reality as it is (for example, a place where good and bad things happen), rather than as we think it ought to be (for example, Shangri-la or the land of Cockaigne), we cannot leave our ethical perspectives behind when we address the question of what reality is.

To provide an example: the statement ‘this entity/being is a cow’ may not seek to express any opinion about what a cow ought to be, but the idea of what a cow is will necessarily be influenced by moral perspectives, for example by the idea that, when we state of something that it is a cow, we ought to rely on our sense organs (e.g. on our sight) to provide us with an idea of what a cow is (as it may be part of the definition of a cow that it is a kind of entity that can be observed with our eyes and appears in a particular way before our eyes).

While you may never have heard of the word ‘ontology’, it is highly likely, indeed – perhaps more accurately – inevitable that you adopt a particular ontology even if you may not be explicitly aware of it.

To prepare for the Summer School, please watch this PCap on ‘Ontologies and ethics’: https://recap.cloud.panopto.eu/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=2050b371-dc60-431a-9d92-acb0007629b1

2. A selection of ethical theories

Meta-ethics is sometimes distinguished from ethics. The former is a reflection on what ethics is: what do we mean when we say that something is right or wrong? It is good to reflect on what meta-ethical theory you adopt:

– do you think that your ethical theory is right and that the ethical approaches of others are wrong if they disagree with you

– do you think that ethics is a mere matter of personal taste?

– do you think that there are some things which ought to be accepted by all people, but that you are unsure of which things these are?

As far as ethics is concerned, it makes sense to distinguish between formal and material ethical theories. The former are about the abstract things that matter in ethics, for example health or happiness, while the latter are about the concrete things that matter, for example plants or fungi. The latter are called axiologies, or theories of value. Once we have decided what sorts of things matter, it is also important to decide whether things matter intrinsically (for themselves) or extrinsically (instrumentally; for others), and how much something matters relative to something else. For example, a tree may be instrumentally valuable as it may be useful for us to make furniture from, or it may be useful as we may appreciate its beauty, or it may be useful for birds who make their nests in it. However, some might say that a tree also has intrinsic value, regardless of whatever value it may have for other entities. What does it mean for something to have intrinsic value, and what sorts of things could be said to have intrinsic value? Much has been written on these questions in the field of animal ethics.

Watch the PCap on ‘An introduction to bioethics’:

https://recap.cloud.panopto.eu/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=131313f1-9f23-4162-a108-ac4900a5e08f

For the recommended reading, you may ignore:

Ashcroft et al.

GMC references (all)

Now read Deckers 2023a, chapter one (pp. 10-23).

3. Personal benefits and costs associated with the consumption of animal products

People have been using nonhuman animals for a long time, for various purposes. A common purpose for which people use nonhuman animals is to provide human nutrition.

Now read Deckers 2016, appendix.

4. Public benefits and costs associated with the use of animals for food

Now read Deckers 2011, which revolves around this case:

Question:

What questions does this case raise for you?

Now read Deckers 2023b. The article describes that the majority of new infectious diseases that affect human beings are zoonoses. Zoonotic pressure is also increasing, for various reasons. Reflect on the reasons zoonotic pressure is increasing.

Now read Deckers 2023a, pp. 77-84 and Deckers 2024, and address the following questions.

Questions:

1. What might be the reasons behind the fact that most books on global health do not consider the human consumption of animal products?

2. What moral theory (carnism, vegetarianism, veganism, or some other theory) do you adopt in relation to the human consumption of animal products?

3. What would the law in your country on the use of non-human animals for research imply for the human consumption of animal products, if the law in relation to the latter was consistent with the law in relation to the former?

4. What is your evaluation of the morality of cellular agriculture?

5. What is your view on the usefulness of distinguishing the moral from the legal issues related to human dietary choice?

6. What should scholars and practitioners in animal ethics and law do to prevent future public health crises?

7. European Parliament and the Council of the European Union (2010: art 4 par. 1) states the following in relation to the use of live animals in research: ‘Member States shall ensure that, wherever possible, a scientifically satisfactory method or testing strategy, not entailing the use of live animals, shall be used instead of a procedure’. What would this imply if we had a similar law related to the use of animals for food?

8. In the UK, the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022 (section 2 par. 5) states that any recommendations by the Animal Sentience Committee ‘must respect legislative or administrative provisions and customs relating in particular to religious rites, cultural traditions and regional heritage’. Would you agree with this?

5. Public benefits and costs related to the use of nonhuman animals for research

People have been using nonhuman animals for research for a long time, and this has escalated in the last century. This raises legal and ethical issues.

While many people may know that the use of nonhuman animals for research is regulated, fewer people may know that the regulation that is there only applies to some animals. This is so in many, if not all jurisdictions. In the European Union, for example, compliance with the law (Directive 2010/63/EU) is required where the non-human animals are vertebrates during some stages of their development (including ‘independently feeding larval forms’ and ‘foetal forms of mammals as from the last third of their normal development’) or cephalopods (European Parliament and the Council of the European Union 2010: art 1, par. 3).

The use of nonhuman animals for research, whether regulated by law or not, is controversial. Where the research in question might benefit the animals concerned, relatively few people might question it. Where the research might benefit other animals of the same species, but not the animals themselves, more might take issue as the animals involved would be used as instruments for others. This is also the case where these benefits only accrue to members of Homo sapiens. Those who adopt speciesism might justify this by claiming that the provision of small benefits for human beings outweighs the imposition of relatively great harms on nonhuman animals because of the special status that speciesists ascribe to the human species. However, adopting speciesism does not necessarily imply that one ought to approve also of the use of nonhuman animals. The claim that human beings should be preferred in our moral evaluations can also be compatible with the claim that nonhuman beings ought not to be used for research.

Whilst nonhuman animals are, arguably, unable to consent to research participation, the fact that they are not able to consent does not necessarily yield an argument against using them. If they do not know what they are being used for, some might argue that this implies that they cannot be harmed by being used non-voluntarily.

It may not necessarily imply, however, that they cannot be coerced. Coercion might apply even in situations where animals do not understand that they are being coerced. Few animals may, for example, seek to subject themselves to particular restraining devices that may be needed to carry out particular research projects. Even if the animals might be conditioned to do things that researchers want them to do by the stimulus of receiving some reward in return for a particular response, they might still experience pain or suffering. Many ethicists have highlighted these capacities to feel pain or to suffer as being of crucial importance to assess the ethics of using nonhuman animals for research, as well as the impacts of this research upon the health of human beings.

Watch these videos:

– video of Andre Menache: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cteMvd0cMik&t=6s

– video of Simon Festing (Understanding Animal Research): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RL_KZ2bAQE

Watch this key resource on animals: https://recap.cloud.panopto.eu/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=737eff8f-9d94-43e8-931a-b0ad00b6fefd&start=1139.014083

Now read Deckers, 2023a, pp. 67-76.

6. Ethics and the genetic engineering of nonhuman animals

People have altered the genetic constitution of nonhuman organisms for a long time through breeding technologies. Natural selection refers to the selection of traits that cope better with environmental factors that affect the fitness of different organisms. Artificial selection is the selection of traits that human beings favour by means of careful breeding techniques where particular organisms are either allowed to reproduce or prevented from doing so. The science of genetics has enabled not only the more precise selection of particular traits, but also the engineering of traits that would not be able to exist or to persist without the technologies that cut and paste into organisms’ genomes, moving genetic material from some organisms into others.

The technology of ‘pharming’ is one example: farming is practised here in order to produce pharmaceutical benefits. Another example is the creation of animals for lab use with particular traits that make them good models. An example is the oncomouse or Harvard mouse, a mouse created with a great disposition to developing cancerous tumours. The science of genetics and the production and use of genetic technologies raise interesting ethical questions.

Watch the PCap on ‘Ethics in relation to the genetic engineering of nonhuman organisms’: https://recap.cloud.panopto.eu/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=77dc6258-aa90-488b-a512-ac5000b40cff

Feel free to ignore the slides that refer to UK and English laws.

Now read this:

Deckers 2023a, pp. 116-128 (chapter 8).

7. Some views from the literature on the public benefits and costs related to the use of nonhuman animals in research

Several authors adopt the view that to conduct any research on nonhuman animals that would not be acceptable to be done on human beings simply on the basis of the former not being members of our species is objectionable, as it would be speciesist. Peter Singer, for example, adopts the view that like interests should be treated alike, regardless of whether or not the organisms that carry those interests belong to different species (Singer 1990). The implication is that, in situations where nonhuman animals can be said to have a similar interest in not participating in research compared to human animals, these interests should be given equal moral weight. In Singer’s view, this would question most research that is being practised on nonhuman animals, but not all.

Singer has claimed that he is convinced that many, but not all animals have an interest in the avoidance of pain, drawing the line between sentient and insentient animals ‘somewhere between a shrimp and an oyster’ (Singer 1976, p. 188). Whilst he has expressed doubt about where the line should be drawn, he also adopts the view that some organisms may not be capable of feeling pain, and that they therefore cannot be claimed to have an interest in the avoidance of pain. If some animals are unable to feel pain, they would be legitimate candidates to be used in research. Other animals would also be appropriate candidates, even where it does inflict pain and death upon them, provided that one can be reasonably sure that the infliction of pain and death is the lesser evil compared to forgoing any interests that might be served by the research. In short, Singer adopts the view that research on nonhuman animals should only be allowed where not doing the research would result in greater harm.

A different perspective is adopted by Tom Regan, who argues that the greatest problem with research on nonhuman animals is not that it might inflict pain on them, but that it treats them as if they were resources for us (Regan 1985). Regan is not quite nuanced in his objection to ‘animal research’, however, as his objection only applies to animals who are ‘subjects-of-a-life’. As he applies the capacity of being a ‘subject-of-a-life’ only to animals with quite advanced cognitive capacities, Regan deems that many animals are not ‘subjects-of-a-life’, and that they therefore would stand to lose nothing by being used in research. While Regan expresses doubt about which animals should be classed as ‘subjects-of-a-life’, he appears to be primarily concerned with the human exploitation of mammals and birds, as it would violate their rights to respectful treatment. In short, Regan adopts the view that research on nonhuman animals should only be allowed if it does not violate the rights of ‘subjects-of-a-life’.

Ecofeminists perceive a causal connection between nonhuman domination and human domination, particularly the domination of women by men. Many question research on nonhuman animals from the conviction that it exemplifies such domination. An example is Marti Kheel (1989), who thinks that those who engage in biomedical research on animals cut themselves off from the lives of animals and from nature in general. She thinks that this cutting off must be seen against the background of a male-dominated culture that separates men from women, culture from nature, human beings from the rest of nature, and reason from emotion. In each case, the former part of these binary concepts is defined in opposition to the latter part, and attributed superior status. By refraining from biomedical research on nonhuman animals, she thinks that human beings may learn to reconnect with nature.

The question must be asked, however, whether all biomedical research on nonhuman animals necessarily exemplifies a problematic attitude towards life. Scientists are frequently motivated by the desire to improve life, rather than by the ambition to undermine it, which is why many other human beings may wish to go along with them in the pursuit for knowledge or therapies that might turn out to be beneficial. It is a widely accepted principle that people who consent to research participation should be allowed to participate research, at least if risks are minimised and a good case is made that there is a reasonable degree of likelihood of deriving benefits from the research. Many also accept the view that people who lack capacity should be allowed to participate in some research. If we assume that nonhuman animals lack the capacity to consent to participation, in light of a lack of evidence that they understand the nature of research, it may not be consistent to allow research participation for incapacitated human beings, but to disallow it for nonhuman animals.

Russell and Burch introduced the three R’s, which many consider to be a reasonable framework against which to consider research on nonhuman animals (Russell and Burch 1959; See also: Russell 2005). The first R stands for replacement: nonhuman animals should be replaced by less sentient alternatives, wherever possible. The second R stands for reduction: the numbers of nonhuman animals who are used should be reduced, wherever possible. The third R stands for refinement, demanding that research is refined to impose minimum harm and that measures are taken to ensure animal well-being. With regard to the first R, a recital to the EU law on the use of animals in biomedical research states that the final goal should be the complete elimination of animal research (European Parliament and the Council of the European Union, Directive 2010/63/EU …: recital 10).

There are several reasons, however, why a complete elimination of nonhuman animal research is not desirable at the present time. Firstly, if nonhuman animal research were eliminated, we would forego the opportunity to discover new treatments that might benefit the animals who are within our care. Secondly, some animal research imposes minimal harm upon animals, for example the taking of a blood sample. If we allow human beings to donate blood samples for research, it is not clear why we should not also allow some nonhuman animals to provide blood in some situations, for example when it imposes little or no pain on them. Thirdly, whereas capacitated human beings may be harmed by being forced to participate in research, nonhuman animals may not be able to suffer to the same extent from being entered into a research project without their consent. If they lack the capacity to consent altogether, they would not be able to suffer at all from the thought that they did not consent.

This final point may prompt some to suggest that nonhuman animals should only be used for research projects where it would also be acceptable to use incapacitated human beings. As a speciesist, I believe that this pushes an acceptable position too far. As nonhuman animals are our more distant relatives, I believe that they also deserve less moral significance. The implications are that I think that research on nonhuman animals should also be allowed in situations where it would not be acceptable to do the research on human beings, and that research that harms the interests of nonhuman animals poses greater moral problems the more closely the animals are related to the human species (Deckers, 2023a, 67-76).

References

Deckers J. Fundamentals of Critical Thinking in Health Care Ethics and Law. Gent: Owl Press, 2023 (2023a).

Deckers J. What Should We Do to Prevent Zoonoses with Pandemic Potential?. Journal of Applied Animal Ethics Research 2023, 5(2), 147-169.(2023b)

Deckers J. Could some people be wronged by contracting swine flu? A case discussion on the links between the farm animal sector and human disease. Journal of Medical Ethics 2011, 37(6), 354-356.

Deckers J. Animal (De)liberation: Should the Consumption of Animal Products Be Banned?. London: Ubiquity Press, 2016.

European Parliament and the Council of the European Union, Directive 2010/63/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 September 2010 on the protection of animals used for scientific purposes, in Official Journal of the European Union L 276, 2010 (53) 33–79.

Kheel, M., From healing herbs to deadly drugs: Western medicine’s war against the natural world. In J. Plant (ed.), Healing the wounds: The promise of ecofeminism, pp. 96-111, Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1989.

Regan, T., The case for animal rights, in P. Singer (ed.), In Defense of Animals, pp. 13-26, New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985.

Russell, W., and Burch, R., The principles of humane experimental technique, London: Methuen & Co, 1959.

Russell W., The three Rs: Past, present and future, in Animal Welfare 14 (2005) 279-286.

Singer P. Animal Liberation. London: Jonathan Cape, 1976.

Singer P. Animal Liberation, Second edition, London: Jonathan Cape, 1990.