Bernard E. Rollin

On Telos and genetic engineering

Aristotle’s concept of telos l lies at the heart of what is very likely the greatest conceptual synthesis ever accomplished, unifying common sense, science, and philosophy. By using this notion as the basis for his analysis of the nature of things, Aristotle was able to reconcile the patent fact of a changing world with the possibility of its systematic knowability. Unlike Plato, whose austere mathematical model of knowledge led inexorably to a denigration of the experienced world, Aristotle saw that world as does a biologist, and found unproblematic the possibility of structural permanence underlying the constant flow of change. Though individual robins come and go, ‘robin-ness’ endures, making possible the knowledge that humans, in virtue of their own telos as knowers, abstract from their encounters with the world. Common sense tells us that only individual existent things are real; reflective deliberation, on the other hand, tells us that only what is repeatable and universal in these things is knowable.

Euthanasia, moral stress, and chronic illness in veterinary medicine.

Euthanasia is a double-edged sword in veterinary medicine. It is a powerful and ultimately the most powerful tool for ending the pain and suffering. Demand for its use for client convenience is morally reprehensible and creates major moral stress for ethically conscious practitioners. But equally reprehensible and stressful to veterinarians is the failure to use it when an animal faces only misery, pain, distress, and suffering. Finding the correct path through this minefield may well be the most important ethical task facing the conscientious veterinarian.

Animal research: a moral science Talking Point on the use of animals in scientific research

Historically, the scientific community—at least in the USA—did not perceive the use of animals in research as an ethical issue. Anyone who raised questions about the way animals were kept and treated during experiments ran the risk of being stigmatized as an anti‐vivisectionist; a misanthrope preferring animals to people; or an ingrate who did not value the contributions of biomedical science to human health and well‐being. I received a full barrage of such charges when I drafted and promoted what eventually became two US federal laws to protect laboratory animals: the 1985 Health Research Extension Act and an ‘Animal Welfare’ amendment to the 1985 Food Security Act. Indeed, a reviewer of my book Animal Rights and Human Morality (Rollin, 1981)—in which I argue for elevating the moral status of animals and codifying that status into law for laboratory animals—wrote that I “exonerate the Nazis” by comparing the killing of animals for science with the Holocaust, and that the book gives “a false cloak of morality” to attacks on research laboratories (Visscher, 1982). To be fair, anti‐vivisectionists were not much more sophisticated at the time—conceptually or morally. The day after I received the published review, abolitionists criticized the book, castigating me for accepting the reality of science, and scolding me for proposing regulations that would result in short‐term improvements for animals, thereby retarding the complete abolition of animal research. My own experience of being vilified as ‘anti‐science’ by the scientific community has been reflected in societal debates on animal research. Although abolitionists argue that using animals in biomedical research produces no benefits for humans, the scientific community has adopted an equally extreme position. The Foundation for Biomedical Research—a non‐profit organization in Washington, DC, USA—produced a film in 1984 entitled Will I Be All Right, Doctor? . The query in the …

Animals in science: some areas revisited

Abstract Science is a human activity, and as such, it is not value-free. Not only do subjective views permeate all types of science, they also prevail in many moral debates concerning how animals are used for primarily anthropocentric ends, even when formal philosophical argument is put forth. Four issues are addressed that demand closer attention by those who are seriously engaged in the collection, interpretation, and explanation of behavioural data. (1) It is important to recognize that an animals point of view is actually an animals point of view from a humans point of view. (2) Attempts to quantify pain and suffering in animals are fraught with difficulties, and despite the best intentions, do not eliminate human responsibilities. (3) Appeals to science to resolve difficult questions concerning animal suffering must be combined with other factors including common sense and moral and ethical commitments. (4) When in doubt, err on the side of the animals. Those who study animal behaviour and behavioural ecology need to be particularly aware of problems of animal welfare for these types of research involve field observations, studies of captive animals, and experiments. In addition, findings from cognitive ethological investigations are used to inform and motivate discussion of human moral and ethical obligations to animals.

Ethical Issues in Geriatric Feline Medicine

Most veterinarians hold a ‘pediatric’ rather than ‘garage mechanic’ view of their function. In recent years, sophisticated medical modalities have allowed veterinarians to keep animals alive, and increased value of companion animals in society has increased demand for such treatment. But whereas humans can choose to trade current suffering for extended life, animals seem to lack the cognitive apparatus required to do so. Thus, veterinarians must guard against keeping a suffering animal alive for too long. Clients may be emotionally tied to the animal and blind to its suffering. Part of the veterinarians role, therefore, is to lead the client to ‘recollect’ quality of life issues. A second major role for the veterinarian in treating geriatric or chronically ill animals is control of pain and distress. Unfortunately, pain and distress have historically been neglected in both human and veterinary medicine for ideological reasons. It is ethically necessary to transcend this ideology which leads to both bad medicine and bad ethics.

Animal Rights as a Mainstream Phenomenon

Simple Summary The twentieth century has witnessed a bewildering array of ethical revolutions, from civil rights to environmentalism to feminism. Often ignored is the rise of massive societal concern across the world regarding animal treatment. Regulation of animal research exists in virtually all western countries, and reform of “factory farming” is regnant in Europe and rapidly emerging in the United States. Opponents of concern for animals often dismiss the phenomenon as rooted in emotion and extremist lack of appreciation of how unrestricted animal use has improved human life. Such a view totally ignores the rational ethical basis for elevating legal protection for animals, as explained in this essay. Abstract Businesses and professions must stay in accord with social ethics, or risk losing their autonomy. A major social ethical issue that has emerged in the past four decades is the treatment of animals in various areas of human use. Societys moral concern has outgrown the traditional ethic of animal cruelty that began in biblical times and is encoded in the laws of all civilized societies. There are five major reasons for this new social concern, most importantly, the replacement of husbandry-based agriculture with industrial agriculture. This loss of husbandry to industry has threatened the traditional fair contract between humans and animals, and resulted in significant amounts of animal suffering arising on four different fronts. Because such suffering is not occasioned by cruelty, a new ethic for animals was required to express social concerns. Since ethics proceed from preexisting ethics rather than ex nihilo, society has looked to its ethic for humans, appropriately modified, to find moral categories applicable to animals. This concept of legally encoded rights for animals has emerged as a plausible vehicle for reform.

Send in the Clones ... Don't Bother, They're Here

The creation of a cloned sheep from mammary tissue has raisedmajor social concern, and much talk about major ethical issuesoccasioned by this technology. It is necessary to separategenuine from spurious ethical issues here, a task made failureto initiate ethical discussion and explanation of new technologyas well as by fear reactions in society. As in geneticengineering of animals, issues about cloning fall into threecategories – suggestions that the technology is inherently wrong,risk emerging from the technology and harm to the creatureengendered. The issues regarding the cloning of humans can beanalyzed using the same categories.

Crazy like a fox. Validity and ethics of animal models of human psychiatric disease.

Animal models of human disease play a central role in modern biomedical science. Developing animal models for human mental illness presents unique practical and philosophical challenges. In this article we argue that (1) existing animal models of psychiatric disease are not valid, (2) attempts to model syndromes are undermined by current nosology, (3) models of symptoms are rife with circular logic and anthropomorphism, (4) any model must make unjustified assumptions about subjective experience, and (5) any model deemed valid would be inherently unethical, for if an animal adequately models human subjective experience, then there is no morally relevant difference between that animal and a human.

Rodeo and Recollection—Applied Ethics and Western Philosophy

Like many other sports, rodeo can be understood on a variety of different levels. Although professional rodeos (those sanctioned by the Professional Rodeo Cowboy Association) recognize only a limited set of events as part of the sportbull riding, steer wrestling, saddle bronc riding, bareback bronc riding, calf roping, team roping, and barrel racing-numerous other events are often included. These events are too diverse to list exhaustively but may include goat roping and barrel racing (womens events); wild horse races; wild cow races; chuck wagon races; cowboy bull fighting (in which the animal is not hurt); calf riding for small children; steer riding (less dangerous than bull riding); steer tripping (illegal in most states); rawhide racing; pick-up or rescue races; milk races (where nursing foals are separated from mares, and race back to mama); cow, buffalo, or horse turd throws; greased pig contests; cutting horse exhibitions; competitions involving dressing a wild cow in a negligee. Charro, or Mexican rodeos, which have recently garnered much publicity, featured horse tripping, an event now banned legislatively in most states.

Animal consciousness and scientific change

In 1872, Charles Darwin published his major work, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals. Ten years later, Darwin’s friend, George Romanes, Secretary of the Linnaean Society, making use, as he tells us, as one of his sources of “all of the notes and clippings on animal intelligence which [Darwin had] been collecting for the last forty years” (Romanes, 1898, p. xi), published an exhaustive five hundred page survey of animal mentation throughout the entire phylogenetic scale. Neither man experienced the slightest difficulty in imputing consciousness, emotion, reason, concepts, in short subjective mental experiences and awareness to animals. To Romanes, the sort of philosophical skepticism which would militate against imputing mental lives to animals can hardly be stopped at animals if we are serious about that, we cannot reasonably refrain from doubting that other humans have such experiences also. The only subjective experiences we have access to are our own; if we are willing to impute subjective experiences to other people it must be on the basis of analogy. But the analogies which license such inferences obtain regarding animals as well, so Romanes feels quite comfortable about dismissing this sort of skepticism as unproductive nihilism violating common sense and rendering all science impossible, and after a few additional pages of philosophical and methodological preliminaries turns directly to the study of the different sorts of mental life found in the animal kingdom. This belief in animal consciousness and its scientific knowability dominates psychology until Watson (1913) and figures prominently in the theoretical stances of a wide variety of psychological thinkers. Contrary to widespread belief, consciousness in animals is taken for granted in Lloyd Morgan (1894), whose famous canon was directed not against the imputation of consciousness to animals, but rather against overhasty ascription of reason to them (see Morgan, 1894, Chapter 111). Similarly, animal mentation is never denied by any of the thinkers usually described as immediate precursors of positivistic behaviorism, including Jacques Loeb, H. S. Jennings, and E. L. Thorndyke. This is not surprising. The evidence of common sense (and common language) militate strongly in favor of imputing consciousness to animals. When this prima f&-k belief is buttressed, as it was in the 19th century, by the theoretical requirements of Darwinian evolutionary continuity, it becomes a powerful and coherent edifice, which would appear difficult indeed to dislodge. It is rare, after all, that a revolutionary scientific theory accords with common sense very often they are inimical. But in the case of animal consciousness, it is clear that Darwinism