Jerome, Nathan, and Anencephaly
Today, something became readily apparent to me in my Environmental Law class: There are very few people willing to take seriously the suffering of non-human animals. When we take seriously the suffering of another being, we create a legal remedy that can be sought in a court to prevent the suffering or to redress the harm it has already caused to the aggrieved being.
In a famous case regarding the constitutional reach of the standing doctrines (Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U.S. 555 (1992)), the court rejected the standing claims of some environmentalists who said that they were aggrieved by a project which threatened the habitats of crocodiles in the Middle East (which the United States was funding). The court dismissed the claims suggesting that, unless the plaintiffs had a plane ticket in their pocket to go see the crocodiles, their interest in the crocodiles was surely a very small one.
I listened to this analysis in stunned silence as classmates spoke up in response to a question by the professor to characterize the nature of the harm that was suffered. Finally, after what seemed like a large number of class responses, I had to point out that the harm here was not to the women who wished to go see crocodiles in their natural habitats.
The real harm is…
TO THE FREAKIN’ CROCODILES!
Non-human animals enjoy (or rather suffer from) a classification under the law as ‘objects.’ In law, all things are treated as either objects or persons. Persons are the possessors and exercisers of rights. Objects are those things over which persons exercise rights. Because non-human animals are not the bearers of rights, under the law we can do them no real harm (with the sole seeming exception of (non-human) animal cruelty laws). This idea should be deeply shocking to us, but to most people (including people who read this, I’d wager) it isn’t.
In class, I used an analogy that I find particularly apt. It isn’t the analogy that I would have liked to make, but making my preferred analogy would likely have drawn much more derision. My class-analogy was this. Suppose I beat your dog to death. Nothing precipitated my brutal attack. The dog didn’t bark at me or try to bite me. Instead, I just woke up one morning and decided that I wanted to beat something to death and your dog is the first thing I saw. (If you think this is far-fetched, last year in Canada, some teenagers hung a cat from a barn rafter by its tail, skinned it alive, disemboweled it, took turns beating it with a baseball bat, and then slit the still barely-living cat’s throat, and all while laughing and jeering on the video they made of the event). You decide to sue me over the death of your dog.
What is the harm over which we should be outraged? Was what I did wrong because of your loss of a dog? Is the harm the fact that you must now go purchase a new dog and will suffer the loss of the companionship of your old one? Surely not. It seems clear, to me at least, that the harm over which we should be properly outraged is the harm to the dog itself. Your harm at the loss of the dog is, at best, collateral to the actual serious harm inflicted.
The analogy I should have liked to present (and the one which I feel is the most apt and most powerful) is the analogy of slavery. If I own another being as property, and can exercise my rights of property (alienation, use, disposal and waste, etc.) over that other human being, what is the harm if you come and kill my slave? Is the harm truly to me – the slaveholder – or is it to the slave himself who suffered the attack?
For a long time, humankind has divided the animal world into humans and all things that are not human. The reason for this can only be described in speciesist terms. Non-human animals (from across the spectrum) have many of the same capacities as human animals. You can find examples of non-human animals that can feel pain in identical ways and with the same intensities, can fear, hope, love, hate, use languages and tools, have politics, pass culture from generation to generation, solve complex problems through the use of insight instead of trial and error, have arts, play, engage in abstract mental representations of the real world, can self-recognize, can self-medicate, can remember the past and understand the concept of the future, can tell the truth or lie as the situation dictates to them, can perform simple mathematics, and have a sense of justice and morality.
At the same time, there are human beings to which we accord substantial rights (rights to life, liberty, and autonomy) who cannot recognize themselves, who cannot use languages or tools, and in fact have few (if any) of the above characteristics. A good example of this would be the severely mentally retarded or infants. Infant humans have mental capacities far below those of a large percentage of adult non-human animals. What principled line – not based solely on membership to a particular species - can we draw that puts the human newborn on one side of the line (the side to which we accord rights) and puts ALL non-human animals on the other side of the line?
Even more telling, what about anencephalic babies? Periodically newborns emerge into this world with a disorder known as anencephaly, which literally means ‘without a head.’ In reality, these children are fully lacking in a cerebellum, and usually lack significant portions of the upper skull as well. The children possess a cerebrum and brain stem, which regulate the autonomic functions of the body (like breathing, heartbeat, digestion, and such). The child is fully alive in the standard meaning of the term, but is not, and never will be conscious. Ever. The child is permanently and utterly unable to sense, perceive, or react consciously to the world around it. Yet, an individual could be prosecuted for first degree murder if he purposefully killed one of these infants.
At the same time, we have examples like Jerome the Chimpanzee, whose life is recounted in the introduction to a book I highly recommend on the issue of legal rights for animals (Rattling the Cage by law professor Steven M. Wise). Chimpanzees, like Jerome, possess nearly all (if not all) of the faculties I listed above. They are our closest living genetic relatives.
Jerome was owned by an animal research and testing company in Georgia. From his infancy on, scientists repeatedly infected Jerome with numerous strains of the AIDS virus, and denied him treatment for any of the accompanying illnesses and infections. Jerome lived in a small concrete box in a basement room where he never was allowed to see the outside world, slept in a cell that regularly reached less than 50 degrees Fahrenheit at night, and had to exist in immense suffering as his body slowly decayed and was eaten away by illness after illness. In the end he died - after having been subjected to 3 different strains of HIV, and after enduring almost 14 years of immense suffering. He died only days shy of his birthday from a hybrid strain of HIV made from two of the three previous strains.
Is that horrifying? It should be, but if not, what about this next sentence?
Nathan, another chimpanzee at the research facility was infected with an intentional transfusion of 40 milliliters of Jerome’s blood shortly before Jerome’s death. Nathan now has begun wasting away in the same manner that Jerome did shortly before him.
If the only reason we can come up with to place ALL non-human animals on one side of the proverbial line (including Jerome and Nathan), and ALL humans on the other side of the line (including the anencephalic infant) is the humans’ membership to our species, then I ask what reason we can have to include black people or women? Why not confine rights to a gender or to a race? After all, the laws were largely written by white men, for white men. Why not draw the line where our ancestors did?
To paraphrase the ethicist Peter Singer, an individual’s membership to our species is an ‘ism’ no different from sexism or racism. It is speciesism. What matters ought not to be the question ‘Are they human?,’ but the question ‘Can they suffer?”
And the suffering of non-human animals is a large problem. To confine this discussion to Jerome and Nathan would be to miss the great bulk of non-human animal suffering. According to Professor Wise, every time your heart beats, 300 mammals and birds are killed to sate our lusts for their flesh and skins. And this does not include the deaths of fish, reptiles, amphibians, insects, arthropods, or annelids.
Until we can take seriously the suffering of non-human animals, we are only scarcely better than our ancestors who owned their wives and their fellow men.
In a famous case regarding the constitutional reach of the standing doctrines (Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U.S. 555 (1992)), the court rejected the standing claims of some environmentalists who said that they were aggrieved by a project which threatened the habitats of crocodiles in the Middle East (which the United States was funding). The court dismissed the claims suggesting that, unless the plaintiffs had a plane ticket in their pocket to go see the crocodiles, their interest in the crocodiles was surely a very small one.
I listened to this analysis in stunned silence as classmates spoke up in response to a question by the professor to characterize the nature of the harm that was suffered. Finally, after what seemed like a large number of class responses, I had to point out that the harm here was not to the women who wished to go see crocodiles in their natural habitats.
The real harm is…
TO THE FREAKIN’ CROCODILES!
Non-human animals enjoy (or rather suffer from) a classification under the law as ‘objects.’ In law, all things are treated as either objects or persons. Persons are the possessors and exercisers of rights. Objects are those things over which persons exercise rights. Because non-human animals are not the bearers of rights, under the law we can do them no real harm (with the sole seeming exception of (non-human) animal cruelty laws). This idea should be deeply shocking to us, but to most people (including people who read this, I’d wager) it isn’t.
In class, I used an analogy that I find particularly apt. It isn’t the analogy that I would have liked to make, but making my preferred analogy would likely have drawn much more derision. My class-analogy was this. Suppose I beat your dog to death. Nothing precipitated my brutal attack. The dog didn’t bark at me or try to bite me. Instead, I just woke up one morning and decided that I wanted to beat something to death and your dog is the first thing I saw. (If you think this is far-fetched, last year in Canada, some teenagers hung a cat from a barn rafter by its tail, skinned it alive, disemboweled it, took turns beating it with a baseball bat, and then slit the still barely-living cat’s throat, and all while laughing and jeering on the video they made of the event). You decide to sue me over the death of your dog.
What is the harm over which we should be outraged? Was what I did wrong because of your loss of a dog? Is the harm the fact that you must now go purchase a new dog and will suffer the loss of the companionship of your old one? Surely not. It seems clear, to me at least, that the harm over which we should be properly outraged is the harm to the dog itself. Your harm at the loss of the dog is, at best, collateral to the actual serious harm inflicted.
The analogy I should have liked to present (and the one which I feel is the most apt and most powerful) is the analogy of slavery. If I own another being as property, and can exercise my rights of property (alienation, use, disposal and waste, etc.) over that other human being, what is the harm if you come and kill my slave? Is the harm truly to me – the slaveholder – or is it to the slave himself who suffered the attack?
For a long time, humankind has divided the animal world into humans and all things that are not human. The reason for this can only be described in speciesist terms. Non-human animals (from across the spectrum) have many of the same capacities as human animals. You can find examples of non-human animals that can feel pain in identical ways and with the same intensities, can fear, hope, love, hate, use languages and tools, have politics, pass culture from generation to generation, solve complex problems through the use of insight instead of trial and error, have arts, play, engage in abstract mental representations of the real world, can self-recognize, can self-medicate, can remember the past and understand the concept of the future, can tell the truth or lie as the situation dictates to them, can perform simple mathematics, and have a sense of justice and morality.
At the same time, there are human beings to which we accord substantial rights (rights to life, liberty, and autonomy) who cannot recognize themselves, who cannot use languages or tools, and in fact have few (if any) of the above characteristics. A good example of this would be the severely mentally retarded or infants. Infant humans have mental capacities far below those of a large percentage of adult non-human animals. What principled line – not based solely on membership to a particular species - can we draw that puts the human newborn on one side of the line (the side to which we accord rights) and puts ALL non-human animals on the other side of the line?
Even more telling, what about anencephalic babies? Periodically newborns emerge into this world with a disorder known as anencephaly, which literally means ‘without a head.’ In reality, these children are fully lacking in a cerebellum, and usually lack significant portions of the upper skull as well. The children possess a cerebrum and brain stem, which regulate the autonomic functions of the body (like breathing, heartbeat, digestion, and such). The child is fully alive in the standard meaning of the term, but is not, and never will be conscious. Ever. The child is permanently and utterly unable to sense, perceive, or react consciously to the world around it. Yet, an individual could be prosecuted for first degree murder if he purposefully killed one of these infants.
At the same time, we have examples like Jerome the Chimpanzee, whose life is recounted in the introduction to a book I highly recommend on the issue of legal rights for animals (Rattling the Cage by law professor Steven M. Wise). Chimpanzees, like Jerome, possess nearly all (if not all) of the faculties I listed above. They are our closest living genetic relatives.
Jerome was owned by an animal research and testing company in Georgia. From his infancy on, scientists repeatedly infected Jerome with numerous strains of the AIDS virus, and denied him treatment for any of the accompanying illnesses and infections. Jerome lived in a small concrete box in a basement room where he never was allowed to see the outside world, slept in a cell that regularly reached less than 50 degrees Fahrenheit at night, and had to exist in immense suffering as his body slowly decayed and was eaten away by illness after illness. In the end he died - after having been subjected to 3 different strains of HIV, and after enduring almost 14 years of immense suffering. He died only days shy of his birthday from a hybrid strain of HIV made from two of the three previous strains.
Is that horrifying? It should be, but if not, what about this next sentence?
Nathan, another chimpanzee at the research facility was infected with an intentional transfusion of 40 milliliters of Jerome’s blood shortly before Jerome’s death. Nathan now has begun wasting away in the same manner that Jerome did shortly before him.
If the only reason we can come up with to place ALL non-human animals on one side of the proverbial line (including Jerome and Nathan), and ALL humans on the other side of the line (including the anencephalic infant) is the humans’ membership to our species, then I ask what reason we can have to include black people or women? Why not confine rights to a gender or to a race? After all, the laws were largely written by white men, for white men. Why not draw the line where our ancestors did?
To paraphrase the ethicist Peter Singer, an individual’s membership to our species is an ‘ism’ no different from sexism or racism. It is speciesism. What matters ought not to be the question ‘Are they human?,’ but the question ‘Can they suffer?”
And the suffering of non-human animals is a large problem. To confine this discussion to Jerome and Nathan would be to miss the great bulk of non-human animal suffering. According to Professor Wise, every time your heart beats, 300 mammals and birds are killed to sate our lusts for their flesh and skins. And this does not include the deaths of fish, reptiles, amphibians, insects, arthropods, or annelids.
Until we can take seriously the suffering of non-human animals, we are only scarcely better than our ancestors who owned their wives and their fellow men.
posted by The Academian | 2:48 PM
4 Comments:
"Until we can take seriously the suffering of non-human animals, we are only scarcely better than our ancestors who owned their wives and their fellow men."
I think I follow your logic, pretty much the same thing as Singer, right? Bestiality isn't reprehensible because it violates natural law or a moral code, its wrong because it's essentially rape. We shouldn't spay or neuter our pets because it eliminates their ability to procreate unilaterally, etc.
If we follow this logic to its natural end, a vegan lifestyle is the only approach not akin to cannibalism, right? Probably a good idea not to use the slavery thing in class, comparing african americans to non-human animals is not going to go over very well. I know you weren't talking about AA's specifically, but you can't say slavery and not have that be the issue highlighted. Sorry for the long comment, but I need to head home and let fido (aka uncle barney) out before he craps in the house.
I don't mind long comments (I prefer them actually since it shows that someone had something to actually say).
I'm a utilitarian in the same manner as Singer, yes. My philosophy is drawn from my own observations, his works, the work of Peter Unger, Steven M. Wise, and a few others. Bestiality isn't reprehensible on a moral level (albeit, I think it's disgusting) because it violates some natural law. We used to very strongly believe in the natural laws forbidding miscegenation as well. Sex with a non-human animal can only be wrong for the reasons that any act is wrong - namely, that it causes suffering which cannot be otherwise justified when weighing interests.
You make an incorrect assumption, though to posit the vegan lifestyle as the only possible logical conclusion of this philosophy. Weighing interests between moral agents (like between a human animal and a non-human animal) does not necessarily demand that each person's interests are weighed equally. Here, I depart from the classic utilitarian calculus. A being only has interests to the extent that the being can suffer. Humans have a large capacity to suffer. Some non-human animals will have a greatly diminished capacity to suffer (like a cricket, for instance). While it would likely be wrong for me to kill a human being due to the suffering I would cause, since a cricket may not have the capacity to experience certain types of pain (psychological, emotional, etc.), it is less wrong to kill it. And when other benefits can be weighed against the interests of the aggrieved party, a utility calculus can give us the correct answer in a moral sense.
In many cases, this will be identical to Veganism. Can we really weigh our interests in eating tasty veal agaisnt the calf's interest in not suffering (and a veal calf usually suffers quite a bit before being sent off to be slaughtered), and come to the conclusion that our interests outweigh the amount of suffering that we cause to the calf? I don't think we can.
Almost any action in which we engage will cause some suffering to other beings (both human and non-human). For instance, if a house is burning down, and a woman outside screams at me that there her 5-year old daughter is trapped inside, as well as 2 pet white mice, and I only have time to save either the girl or the cage with the 2 white mice, the calculus would demand that we save the girl.
A classic utilitarian here (who subscribed to including non-human animals as moral agents) would have to save the 2 white mice, but I would contend that due to the vastly greater capacity to suffer of the little girl (much greater than the 2 mice put together), that her life be the one I rush into the flames to save.
Vegetarianism isn't necessarily even the outcome of this philosophy, which might surprise you. Eating the flesh of the dead isn't in itself wrong. What is wrong is the causing of suffering to the moral agent. If we could find painless ways to kill a cow, for instance, instead of using a metal spike to punch through their skulls while we cut their throats open with a large knife, we might be able to justify killing a cow. I'm assuming of course, that we can do away with the fear/terror that the cows feel as they are led to the slaughter (documented), and the experience of loss which the still living cows have at the disappearance of a member of their herd (also documented as a physiological response).
As for the slavery issue, I DID mean to directly compare non-human animals to the historical situation of racial minorities, including African-Americans. In a very real way, both occupied rungs on the "Great Chain of Being" below the station of white men, according to the philosophy and theology of the time. So argued the medieval philosophers, just as animals were made for the use and enjoyment of man (meaning white man), so too were the native inhabitants of Africa made (by God) for the express purpose of serving the needs of the white man.
My claim is that the history of the dominant groups (notoriously white men) has been a very slow, but accelerating, trend toward including more and more beings in the list of moral agents. It is high time that we took the next step in that progression.
If we can justify killing a cow when the means do not involve suffering, then why can't we kill a person through painless measures? Why can't Cain kill able so long as he does it in a manner that doesn't cause Able to suffer? Is it because we know that cows suffer less than a human? Do we know that? Does our need for protein outweigh a cow's right to live under your utilitarian matrix?
Does a fetus suffer? I think there's a bit of controversy over the latest study that said they could, but under this theoy, would the suffering of the baby make abortion wrong, or would you weigh the suffering of the baby versus the suffering of the expectant mother? whose suffering would win? inconvenience versus life, or rape/incest/life of the mother versus life? Sorry to through abortion in the mix.
Why choose the girl over the mice? Do mice have such an inferior ability to suffer that warrants their death? What if I could save a box of 5000, 500, or 50 mice, versus a single child, could the aggregate suffering of the mice ever be greater than that of the girl?
Perhaps a better question is Jerome or the little girl (let's say a baby) (both chimps and humans have relatively equal abilities to suffer, right?) The baby does not realize it is going to die, and will probably die through asphyxiation. Do we side with the baby because the suffering of the parents? If so, then do we side with the entity with the most friends & family when ability to suffer is equal?
Do we side with the chimp because it probably appreciates the situation, knows that it will die and will suffer more?
Do we side with potential? Baby grows up to be doctor. Chimp is studied by scientists and something remarkable is found out about chimps. Baby grows up to be a serial killer. Chimp throws poop for the remainder of its life.
are primates equal? do we just choose the one that's closest to the door?
my position: choose Jerome in every situation, but only if he is an Orangutan, then we could do that "right turn clyde" thing, makes me laugh every time.
Good arguments, Anonymous. You’ve hit upon several key reasons why people find some of my views unpalatable. I, for one, find few of these issues personally troubling, but as I’ve discovered time and time again, my moral intuitions frequently are not quite in line with those of many other people.
Killing a human being (I eschew using the word person there, because I’ll use person to refer to moral agents, which might include chimpanzees, bonobos, and many other non-human animals) is certainly less wrong if done through non-painful means. The truth of this statement should seem obvious if we share some of the same moral intuitions.
Consider two cases: In case 1, Bob (a doctor) is going to kill Linda (his patient) in a premeditated fashion. Bob bursts into Linda’s home, drags her kicking and screaming out of her house at gunpoint, throws her into the trunk of his car, drives for a half-hour to a deserted field while she panics and is in dreadful terror in the back. When he gets to an abandoned field, he takes her out, and beats her mercilessly with a crowbar while she pleads for her life. Finally, he leaves her for dead, and over the course of a few hours, she bleeds to death in great pain. In case 2, Bob schedules Linda to come in for an operation which requires that she go under general anesthetic. While she is unconscious, Bob gives her an overdose of the anesthetic, causing her heart to stop, which results in her death.
If we were to assign moral culpability to Bob in the 2 cases, surely we would be more morally offended by the first case in which Linda was subjected to vastly more suffering.
Killing without physical pain lessens one side of the equation, certainly. This makes it more likely (though not certain) that the killing is morally acceptable. But suffering isn’t merely the experience of physical pain. There are many dimensions to the manner in which I use the term ‘pain’ or ‘suffering.’ There is physical pain (the physical sensation of pain), and psychological pain (the awareness and distress that results from knowing that one is in pain), economic pain (the loss of pecuniary objects or property), emotional pain (empathy or sympathy at the losses of others, and also emotional suffering due to negative emotional responses to physical pain), and the list could go on. Humans have a wide capacity to suffer on each of these dimensions. Many non-human animals can also suffer along some, or all, of these dimensions to varying degrees.
Whether a fetus can suffer is a question for science to answer, as it is an empirical question. If a fetus can suffer, then its pains should be taken into account. If it cannot, then it is not a moral agent and we need not worry about harming it for the same reasons that we need not worry about harming rocks or trees.
In all cases, suffering must be weighed versus the suffering of not engaging in whatever action we are attempting to define as right or wrong. It seems likely (though I’m not a developmental biologist) that a fetus can feel physical pain, since they likely (though again, I have no knowledge of this) have nociceptors in their skin in late development to sense painful stimuli. The presence of pain receptors and a nervous system makes it likely that they can feel pain when painful stimuli are presented to them. However, this is only one dimension of suffering. It is almost a certainty that fetuses are not self-aware (thus unable to suffer psychologically) since, as Steven Wise puts it, no infant under 15 months has ever passed our tests for self-awareness. Will the mother suffer by not having the abortion. Surely. We must weigh her suffering (of a greater capacity, of course) versus the severely limited suffering of the fetus. It is likely on my view that it is only in the rarest and most novel of cases that abortion would be impermissible.
A mouse has a greater ability to suffer than a human fetus. Grown mice have nociceptors to sense painful stimuli just like fetuses do, but mice are widely credited with some degree of emotional response, and unlike the fetus, can appreciate painful sensations and respond with fear and panic. The suffering of the little girl (depending on her level of development) is vastly greater than the suffering of the two mice, due to the gigantic difference in suffering-capacity between them. However, you are right in suggesting that at some point (who knows how many mice that would be) the suffering of the mice would outweigh the suffering of the little girl.
Chimpanzees (bonobos in particular which are quite developed) do not have identical capacities to humans to suffer. Fully developed humans still have the edge in terms of our capacity to suffer, though not by a lot. However, fully developed chimpanzees, orangutans, and gorillas, are usually quite a bit more developed that many undeveloped human animals. For instance, there is a test for self-recognition (a component of self-awareness) called the ‘dot-test.’ How the experiment works out is you allow the individual animal become acquainted with the mirror and allow them to observe that the object in the mirror mimics their actions. Then you place the animal under anesthesia and paint an odorless dot of color on some part of their body they would be otherwise unable to see (like their forehead). Present them with a mirror again, and see what happens. Beings which can self-recognize will see the dot and put their hands to their own foreheads to feel for the dot. Beings which do not self-recognize will reach out their hands toward the mirror to touch the dot or will do nothing. Human infants will fail this test regularly and it is only the most developed who will self-recognize even at 20 months. Adult apes of most varieties will self-recognize almost invariably. Yet we do not grant adult apes a higher status in our moral framework than even the most developmentally disabled newborn infant.
That many primates can suffer is clear from their use of inter-animal language. In Wise’s “Rattling the Cage,” he recounts an observation of two primates (orangutans, I believe, but I’d have to look it up to be sure). The story involves a group of orangutans which had been taught sign language. One, an orangutan named Washoe, had lost two babies due to miscarriages and became quite interested when another female in her enclosure became pregnant and had visible swelling in her abdomen. Washoe doted on this pregnant female, and when the female disappeared from the enclosure for a few days, Washoe waited patiently (this was routine when they were going to give birth; the scientists observing them would take them to a medical facility on site). When the female returned, she signed to Washoe that she, too, had lost her baby. Washoe then looked dejected and stared at the ground for a while before signing to the other female the sign for ‘cry,’ and then pointed to her own eye.
In the case of the burning building and the baby, you have hit upon the universalizing of the utility calculus. Up until this point we’ve dealt with the suffering of two parties. In reality, any calculus will, by necessity, take into account the suffering of all parties who suffer as a result of the proposed action. The suffering of parents whose baby is burned to death in a fire must be added to the suffering of the infant when determining overall suffering. In such a case where we must either save an adult chimpanzee or the infant with parents who will suffer, we are faced with a close call. This is an area where intense argument would likely have to take place to determine the correct result.
Potential is not an issue in this utility calculus. The future is too uncertain for it to be taken into account in any but a few narrow ways in a suffering-based analysis. For instance, one might suffer at the frustration of plans that one has made. When a father, dying after a car accident, laments that he will never see his son grow up, this is a suffering as a result of thwarted plans. But as a general matter, whether a being is capable of suffering in the future is not an issue in determining whether they will suffer as a result of some action in the present. Future suffering itself must be taken into account, though. For instance if given the option of engaging in action A which would cause person X 10 units of pain now, or engaging in action B which would cause person X 1 unit of pain for 11 years running, we should choose action B (presuming that the quantitative unitizing of pain is accurate here (for instance, if there is a qualitative difference between 10 units at once or 10 units spread out, then our numbers are actually wrong and more reflective numbers should be used instead).
Primates are equal in their ability to suffer in the same way that human animals are identical in our abilities to suffer – i.e., not at all. Humans come in varying levels of development and have varying capacities to suffer. Some people experience sympathetic and empathic pains quite strongly, others barely at all. Some people can experience differing levels of pecuniary loss (although the question of whether a homeless person losing $5 is a larger pain than a millionaire losing $1000 is a fun question to think about). Just the same, not all chimpanzees are the same, and chimpanzees are different from Bonobos, which are different from gorillas, which are different from Orangutans. For instance, chimpanzee troops are known to pass culture from one generation to the next. Chimpanzees from one troop may be more able to experience certain types of pain than others.
We must be sure not to restrict this analysis simply to primates, though, nor just to the apes (as we’ve been doing here, mostly). Most non-human animal species can suffer to varying degrees, and their pain must be taken into account. This does not entail that it will be wrong to kill them, or even to do bad things to them in some cases. What it does mean, though, is that their interests could be represented. In an action to infect Jerome with AIDS strains, why oughtn’t the court appoint a guardian for him in a court action where his interests in bodily integrity could be articulated to an impartial observer who must weigh them against the scientists asserted need to conduct the tests? No such procedure is currently in place, and Jerome’s interests go by the wayside silently.
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