AR-News: (UK) Superiority Complex

[AR-News]

The Guardian 2 March 04 
www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1159805,00.html
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1159805,00.html> 

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Superiority complex

Despite the view of pro-vivisectionists, there is no rational basis for
always putting humans' interests first

John Gray
Tuesday March 2, 2004
The Guardian

In medical research filmed secretly by anti-vivisection campaigners in
Cambridge in 2002, marmoset monkeys had the top of their skulls sawn off and
part of their brain sucked out or injected with toxins.
The purpose of these hideous experiments was presumably to provide knowledge
that might help in treating brain-damaged humans, but it is questionable
whether making animals suffer in this terrible fashion is the most effective
way to cure human disorders. As Wendy Higgins, of the British Union for the
Abolition of Vivisection, said about the Cambridge experiments, monkeys do
not have the same brain diseases as humans. Yet they do have much the same
capacity for pain, and it is this shared vulnerability that makes using them
in medical research so clearly wrong.

Animal experimentation is the practice of imposing severe suffering on other
species for human benefit. It works scientifically only to the extent that
animals resemble humans, but it is precisely the many similarities between
animals and humans that condemn it morally. Inflicting brain damage on
captive monkeys in order to advance medicine is no more defensible than
using helpless humans for the same purpose. In a truly civilised society all
such experiments would be prohibited.

The moral argument against animal experimentation is simple and conclusive -
and yet in my experience it rarely convinces. Supporters of vivisection do
not deny that it harms animals - how could they? They simply insist that
human interests must always come first. Lying behind this adamant assertion
of human superiority is a set of dogmatic beliefs which are rarely fully
articulated, but which are in fact the tenets of a new religion.

Without realising it, those who support animal experimentation are
reproducing the worldview of old- fashioned Christianity - minus its complex
and subtle theology. For Christians, humans are separated from the rest of
creation. They alone have free will and an immortal soul because only they
are made in the image of God; other animals exist solely to serve them.

This anthropocentric viewpoint has shaped much of western philosophy,
finding expression in Descartes' dictum that animals are unfeeling machines,
and Immanuel Kant's peculiar notion that human personality is the source of
all that is truly valuable in the world.

Most defenders of animal experimentation believe they have dispensed with
religious belief, but when they tell us that consciousness and the power of
choice are definitively human attributes not found in other animals, they
are actually translating the Christian conception of the soul into the
language of science. However, from an empirical point of view, the chief
difference between humans and their closer animal kin is simply that in
evolutionary terms humans have been more successful.

Humans have acquired enormous power over the natural world and as a result
they have become hugely numerous, but there is no reason to think this state
of affairs will continue indefinitely. Climate change -which is in part a
byproduct of human activity - is already making the Earth less hospitable to
us. In humans, as in other animals, evolutionary success is self-limiting.
There is nothing in science to support the belief that we are exempt from
the natural laws that apply to all other species.

Equally, there is no rational basis for the belief that human interests must
always come first. Such a view may make sense for Christians -though by no
means all accept it - but it is a nonsense for anyone who takes a
naturalistic view of the human animal. If - as Darwin taught - humans are
products of natural selection, there can be no reason for thinking they have
some sort of unique mystical worth. No doubt we differ from even our closest
evolutionary kin in some important respects, and where this is the case
different moral considerations apply. As critics of animal rights never tire
of reminding us, animals cannot respect the reciprocal obligations of
justice. The core of morality is not justice, however, but sympathy. In
being sentient and capable of suffering, humans and other animals are
equals.

The idea that other animals exist solely to serve humans is a relic of
Christianity we are better off without. It is not found in other religions
such as Buddhism and has no place in secular thought. Yet it is the central
article of faith in the contemporary cult of science. Defenders of science
imagine they have shaken off the worst errors of religion, but in fact they
are renewing them in a new guise.

Rejecting science as a religion does not mean rejecting science itself, and
it certainly cannot justify the use of violence or intimidation. It does
mean demystifying science and stripping it of its aura of sacred authority.
A belief in human supremacy is the only possible basis of animal
experimentation. It is time we put this superstition behind us. We owe other
animals our compassion because, in the respects that matter most, they are
no different from ourselves.

John Gray is the author of Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other
Animals




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