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Guest Post: Christine Korsgaard, Harvard University

On November 5, 2014, RT reported that Filipino workers in Saudi Arabia claimed that they were being “treated like animals.” On November 14, The Independent reported that the members of Pussy Riot complained that while in prison in Russia they were “treated like animals.” On November 17, the BBC reported that Nepalese migrant workers building the infrastructure for the World Cup meeting in Qatar complained of being “treated like cattle.” On November 25, The Indian Express reported that Indian tennis star Sania Merza complained that women in India are “treated like animals.”

What does it mean to be “treated like an animal”? The Filipino workers gave as an example that their “feet were chained.” Members of Pussy Riot complained that in Russian prisons, the wardens “very casually beat people up. They don’t have a sense that they [inmates] are human.” Earlier they claimed that prison administrations “just treat prisoners as they want with impunity.” By being “treated like cattle” the Nepalese migrant workers meant “working up to 12 hours a day, seven days a week, including during Qatar’s hot summer months.” On December 24, Time reported that the Nepalese migrant workers are dying at the rate of one every two days. Sania Merza said that women in India face discrimination and violence. She also said, “I hope one day everyone will say that we are equal and women are not treated as objects.”

Merza’s last remark raises a question. As these examples suggest, people whose rights are violated, people whose interests are ignored or overridden, people who are abused, harmed, neglected, and unjustly imprisoned, standardly protest that they are being treated “like animals.” Why do we so often formulate our protest that way, rather than saying, as Merza also said, and as people sometimes do, that we are being treated “like objects”? After all, it is objects that may, in the words of Pussy Riot, be treated “just as [we] want with impunity,” if indeed anything can. Perhaps it’s because people feel that that fails to completely capture the force of their protest. After all, an object cannot suffer from being beaten up or chained or caged, or die from overwork in harsh working conditions. In the relevant sense, you cannot treat an object badly, even if you do treat it “just as you want with impunity.” But when we treat animals just as we want we can treat them badly. But in that case, the implication of the phrase seems to be that animals are the beings that it is all right to treat badly, and the complainant is insisting that he or she is not one of those.

Read More »Treated like Animals, Guest Post by Christine Korsgaard

Guest Post: Emilian Mihailov, Research Centre in Applied Ethics, Univeristy of Bucharest

The most persuasive argument for experimenting on animals is probably the claim that it is only through such research, that we save human lives. This does not imply that we don’t have any moral duties towards animals. Because they are not mere objects we ought to treat them kindly, promote their wellbeing, and even take action to prevent others from applying cruel treatment. However, when human lives are at stake, we have the strong belief that it is morally permissible to experiment on animals even if the experiments in question necessarily involve chronic pain and death. We might get residual moral feelings, such as guilt, from the infliction of pain, but nevertheless, it is believed that saving human lives takes priority. We are sorry, but we matter more.

It is hard to argue the contrary, since the idea of saving human lives seems so appealing. How can we not try to cure cancer, epilepsy, or Alzheimer’s disease? Those who challenge the desirability of this aim will be considered eccentric, if not irrational.

But, sometimes, our strong reactions may stem from the framing of a problem. The way a problem is “framed” often has a powerful influence on how people react. The “framing effect” is observed when the description of consequentially identical decision problems in terms of gains (positive frame) rather than losses (negative frame) elicits systematically different choices (Tversky & Kahneman 1981). Christine Korsgaard recently suggested in the Animal Ethics Workshop, held in Oxford, that the there are “framing effects” with the problem of saving lives through animal experimentation. If the benefits of experimentation are not framed in terms of saving lives, but in terms of extending lives, then our supportive reactions might not be so strong, because the benefit of gaining a few more years to live does not seem extremely attractive. Christine Korsgaard then proposed to imagine two possible worlds: in world A we live 70 years and we have social practices that do not allow animal experimentation; in world B we live 90 years and have social practices which permit experiments on animals. She believes that world A is morally preferable because the benefits we get from extending our lives do not seem that high as to justify failing to treat animals as ends in themselves. More simply, it is not worth having a mere extension of our lives with the moral cost of mistreating animals. If we frame the problem in these terms, then perhaps many would be more sympathetic towards the moral standing of animals in research.

Read More »Is it worth saving human lives at the cost of mistreating animals?