The way the argument about usefulness of animal experimentation for medical purposes is put by its defenders is often fallacious for a very simple reason: it is on qualitative, and not quantitative, grounds.
(In addition, it goes against the nature of advanced science, historically, to reason in qualitative and not quantitative terms. The most developed sciences, like physics, and fields of science reach their maturity by going from being qualitative to being quantitative, especially in recent times.)
When people say ‘drug x was developed through animal experiments’ or ‘treatment y was found researching on animal models’, the point is not even whether what they say is true or not.
The relevant question is: how many (how many millions, more likely) animals were used, how many experiments that had no useful result were necessary before arriving at that particular single result?
It is a statistical problem that we should address.
Because, had we used a different method of research, the statistical utility (I mean, for example, the percentage of successes) could have been higher.
We must always use this yardstick, this criterion for comparison.
(This is the way that control groups are used in tests: I’m here transferring a scientific technique to a meta-scientific context.)
It may very well turn out that, when compared with other methods already in existence or that we know could be developed, the percentage of successes in medical animal experimentation, among the number of all experiments performed, is extremely low.
It could also turn out that the corresponding percentage of misleading results (eg penicillin, or the role of smoking in lung cancer) or downright deleterious effects is higher than it needs to be.
It’s certainly well worth investigating along these lines, from now on.
Senin, 03 April 2006
Jumat, 24 Maret 2006
Empathy
Whether people feel that a certain being (or group of beings) belong to the moral sphere, or even, at the simplest level, whether they feel concern for the welfare and interests of that creature, depends on one simple thing: that is, whether they identify with that being or not.
The beings we feel concern for (and subsequently we let them enter into our moral sphere) are the ones whose suffering we feel as our own, for some or other mechanism of identification.
The other beings, the ones left out, are those who we can’t identify with and therefore, for biological reasons, we perceive them as antagonistic to us, competing for the same resources (it’s a law of nature, a rule of life), rivals, opponents, enemies.
I think that we cannot escape from this scenario.
What happens is that, when people don’t care about some-one or some group (and therefore the latter fall into the second category described above), but they know that they should care, in the sense that it’s socially expected from them (for reasons of political correctness, for example, or, put in another way, current political orthodoxy, fashionable ideology, or anyway because it’s the accepted social norm geographically and historically), what happens then is that people fake concern, or at least some respect for the social norm: it’s very easy to do.
Interestingly, there’s a connection with psycho-therapy, here.
Something similar happens in psychotherapy.
Whether a psychotherapy treatment succeds or not depends (almost entirely, with perhaps a few exceptions due to exceptionally good techniques) on whether the psychotherapist feels empathy for the client or not, ie whether the therapist can identify with the client and, so to speak, feel his/her pain. If the therapist doesn’t, s/he doesn’t really care about helping that person and most likely s/he won’t, for the reasons I’ve given above: ie it’s a law of nature that mors tua vita mea, the therapist may even feel rather good that somebody else and not him/herself is suffering (especially if the therapist has a lot of problems of his/her own, which I think is an extremely common case).
The beings we feel concern for (and subsequently we let them enter into our moral sphere) are the ones whose suffering we feel as our own, for some or other mechanism of identification.
The other beings, the ones left out, are those who we can’t identify with and therefore, for biological reasons, we perceive them as antagonistic to us, competing for the same resources (it’s a law of nature, a rule of life), rivals, opponents, enemies.
I think that we cannot escape from this scenario.
What happens is that, when people don’t care about some-one or some group (and therefore the latter fall into the second category described above), but they know that they should care, in the sense that it’s socially expected from them (for reasons of political correctness, for example, or, put in another way, current political orthodoxy, fashionable ideology, or anyway because it’s the accepted social norm geographically and historically), what happens then is that people fake concern, or at least some respect for the social norm: it’s very easy to do.
Interestingly, there’s a connection with psycho-therapy, here.
Something similar happens in psychotherapy.
Whether a psychotherapy treatment succeds or not depends (almost entirely, with perhaps a few exceptions due to exceptionally good techniques) on whether the psychotherapist feels empathy for the client or not, ie whether the therapist can identify with the client and, so to speak, feel his/her pain. If the therapist doesn’t, s/he doesn’t really care about helping that person and most likely s/he won’t, for the reasons I’ve given above: ie it’s a law of nature that mors tua vita mea, the therapist may even feel rather good that somebody else and not him/herself is suffering (especially if the therapist has a lot of problems of his/her own, which I think is an extremely common case).
Animal experiments: ethical vs medical arguments
We often read, in forum discussions (eg the Oxford Gossip), that some-one without medical expertise cannot make statements on animal experimentation.
So, by the same token, we cannot condemn experiments on humans performed in Nazi camps, or any other tests carried out on humans, for that matter. I remember Paola Cavalieri once saying to me: “Do we need medical knowledge to say that we are not allowed to experiment, say, on the Chinese?” or something to that effect.
The obvious problem here is that the two questions, the ethical and the medical, have been confused.
The effect of stressing the medical/scientfic aspect of animal research (its lack of reliability, being bad science etc) created by Hans Ruesch, a great anti-vivisection writer but albeit one who only covered one aspect of the issue, is that now there is an assumption that who opposes animal experiments takes an epistemological stance on its own or in addition to a moral one.
So, by the same token, we cannot condemn experiments on humans performed in Nazi camps, or any other tests carried out on humans, for that matter. I remember Paola Cavalieri once saying to me: “Do we need medical knowledge to say that we are not allowed to experiment, say, on the Chinese?” or something to that effect.
The obvious problem here is that the two questions, the ethical and the medical, have been confused.
The effect of stressing the medical/scientfic aspect of animal research (its lack of reliability, being bad science etc) created by Hans Ruesch, a great anti-vivisection writer but albeit one who only covered one aspect of the issue, is that now there is an assumption that who opposes animal experiments takes an epistemological stance on its own or in addition to a moral one.
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