In their paper entitled “A Belmont Report for Animals?” Hope Ferdowsian and colleagues propose that a parallel document analogous to the Belmont Report, which safeguards human research subjects, be created to protect nonhuman animals (hereafter, ‘animals’) in research.Footnote 1 They point out that the key ethical principles outlined in the Belmont Report are applicable to other animals, and should form the basis for a similar foundational level of protection for them.
The Belmont Report establishes the principles to which research with humans should adhere: respect for autonomy, obligations to beneficence and justice, and protection for vulnerable individuals and populations.Footnote 2 When put into action, these principles are transformed into informed consent, risk-benefit analyses, and careful selection of subjects.
Unlike uniform protections for humans, existing guidelines for nonhumans are inconsistent and gerrymandered for our convenience, as they exclude the majority of animals used for invasive research. The Animal Welfare Act excludes birds, rats of the genus Rattus, mice of the genus Mus, fish, farmed animals, and all invertebrates.Footnote 3 Other documents, such as the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals, do cover all vertebrates but no other groups.Footnote 4 Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees (IACUCs) are employed, but they are silent on basic ethical questions such as whether certain animals should be used as subjects in certain ways. They simply ensure that the necessary boxes are ticked on fundamental protocols, but are able to eschew important ethical issues by permitting pain and suffering in favor of scientific justifications. This giant loophole allows for a number of heinous procedures. And, of course, IACUCs enforce certain methods of animal killing without addressing the question of whether ending a life is a harm itself.
Many in the animal research community have donned a rather thin coat of superficial ethics known as the three Rs, a framework proposed by William Russell and Russell Burch.Footnote 5 The three Rs promote reduction of the number of animals used, replacement of apparently more cognitively-complex animals with less cognitively-complex animals (amounting to an adoption of the scala naturae for ethics), and refinement, that is, adoption of ways to gather the most data in the least invasive ways possible. While these guidelines are good recommendations, they are often not implemented in a serious way. Moreover, they make assumptions about animals and suffering based on unscientific and outdated views of nature from the time of Socrates—the scala naturae.Footnote 6 Needless to say, these assumptions may not be correct. Further, the three Rs framework is a classic example of welfarism and does not prohibit the use of animals as a means to an end. Like all welfare-based proposals, it prioritizes human wants and desires over animal needs.
The classic welfare approach to animal protection will always subjugate the needs of other animals to human desires, providing incremental changes within existing systems of abuse and exploitation. Welfarism is tantamount to “ethical gerrymandering.”Footnote 7 When there is a conflict between human and nonhuman interests, human interests almost invariably dictate the meandering border of animal protections in favor of our species. It is for these reasons that animal welfare guidelines, while helpful, have generally failed to provide the kind of protection for animals necessary to ensure their well-being.Footnote 8
The weaknesses of welfarism are brought into stark contrast when one considers that, despite numerous organizations and efforts around the globe claiming to work for ‘animal rights,’ no nonhuman being anywhere has any legal rights.Footnote 9 Only one organization in North America, the Nonhuman Rights Project, is actively working for legal personhood status for animals, which would allow them to have basic rights, such as the right to bodily liberty and the right to bodily integrity—two basic liberty rights.Footnote 10 These two fundamental rights alone, if recognized legally, would prohibit essentially all forms of treatment currently deemed permissible under welfarism. Legal rights are the only kind of protections that ensure animals are shielded from the self-indulgence and caprices of humans. They are the most durable way to protect animals from harm, leaving them less subject to differing opinions and philosophical arguments.
In order to possess legal rights, one must be a legal person, an entity with the capacity for legal rights. Courts recognize that bodily liberty and bodily integrity are fundamental human interests protected by fundamental human rights. But what is a sufficient condition for being considered a legal person? The law recognizes practical autonomy as sufficient. An individual is said to possess practical autonomy (and thus sufficient characteristics for legal rights) if she: can have desires; can intentionally try to fulfill those desires; and possesses a sense of self which allows for an understanding that desires are being or not being met. In other words, beings with practical autonomy know when their life is going well, and when their plans, desires, and needs are being thwarted.Footnote 11 Currently the Nonhuman Rights Project recognizes that there is sufficient scientific evidence for practical autonomy in all great apes, cetaceans, and elephants. Their efforts do not imply that other animals are not autonomous, but that the strongest and most agreed-upon empirical evidence for autonomy in animals currently exists for these mammals.
The question of animal personhood is a vital area of interest and debate in contemporary philosophy as well. But while philosophical concepts are fine for clarifying how we might want to structure our thinking and efforts around this issue, they have even less authority and enforceability than some animal welfare guidelines. And, in philosophical circles, there is no agreement on which capacities are sufficient for personhood, or even if the notion of personhood is appropriate for animals.Footnote 12
Nonetheless, the road to legal personhood for animals is long and difficult, and such efforts currently do not include any but the most cognitively-sophisticated animals. Legal personhood therefore offers no protections for the vast majority of animals used in research. This problem may be only a temporary state of affairs and depends, to some degree, upon whether judges become more comfortable with the idea of personhood for animals in general.
So where does a Belmont Report for animals fit into the current architecture of protections for animals in research? And how does the Belmont Report compare with legal rights?
The first principle of the Belmont Report is respect for personhood or autonomy. This principle relies upon recognizing that nonhuman beings are self-determining. This recognition amounts to respecting animals’ choices in life, and not putting them in a position where it is difficult for them to express their choices. In this way, the Belmont Report has much more in common with a rights-based view than an animal welfare view. Rights-based views, particularly those appealing to legal status, are wedded to personhood in the common law as pursued by the Nonhuman Rights Project. One is either a legal person or an object. The Animal Welfare Act and other welfare-based guidelines do not come anywhere close to recognizing autonomy, self-determination, or personhood in other animals, and are therefore much weaker than the proposed Belmont Report for animals. Welfare fits into existing viewpoints rather than changing them.
However, a Belmont Report for animals would still require consensual definitions of personhood and autonomy, which have been difficult to determine even for animals such as great apes, dolphins, and elephants, for whom the scientific evidence is overwhelming. The situation becomes more difficult for animals who are not considered as psychologically complex and sophisticated as great apes, dolphins, or elephants, including other mammals, birds, nonmammalian vertebrates, and invertebrates. That is not to say that these animals are not autonomous beings, but that it will be difficult to reach a consensus on beings such as fish, amphibians, reptiles, insects, and others. The scala naturae view still has a tight grip on both scientific and public perspectives of other animals.
The second principle of the Belmont Report is beneficence. Ferdowsian, et al. state that a Belmont Report for animals would make it necessary to assess whether the benefits of research on animals can be obtained through alternative methods. But from a formal rights-based viewpoint, if harm is done, and inherent rights are violated, the question of whether alternatives are available is irrelevant.
Finally, the principle of justice comes into play in determining whether other animals should be used as research subjects for the purposes of benefitting humans. Here, the question of vulnerability comes to the forefront. But unlike even the most vulnerable of human subjects (e.g., infants) who enjoy protection through representation by conspecifics who can give informed consent on their behalf, other animals do not have such surrogates, and are therefore the most vulnerable research subjects. Unlike humans representing the interests of other humans, even if human representatives were appointed to protect the interests of nonhuman subjects, it is doubtful they could do so with the same level of validity and accuracy as they do for other humans, because of species differences. As the authors point out, in many ways, the special vulnerability of other animals means that they should be protected by the most stringent guidelines.
Even though many complex issues would need to be examined, a Belmont Report for animals is clearly critically important for protection of these vulnerable subjects, particularly in the absence of legal rights. The Belmont Report (for humans) has been incorporated into several regulatory and legal prescriptions for human subject protection and, more importantly, is a set of consensus-driven guidelines. While there are no clear legal penalties for violations, it does carry the weight of an accepted set of ethical principles. Violations are often met with some form of punishment (e.g., social disapproval and termination of the research), and there are restitutive recourses for harmed subjects. So while the Belmont Report does not have the legal ‘teeth’ to enforce protections for human research subjects, it does have the heft of being part of a globally accepted set of rules for how to treat human subjects; those who attempt to violate its rules meet widespread vilification.
More importantly, because the Belmont Report is a cohesive set of principles, violations are easily recognized, and there is little room for deviation from its code without condemnation. The consensual aspect of the Belmont Report places it in a powerful ethical position for the protection of human subjects. No existing welfare regulations for animals have this level of consistency and authority and, importantly, profundity. While legal rights for other animals represent the most powerful protection for them, a Belmont Report for animals has the capacity to be transformative in a way that even the strongest animal welfare laws could not be. A Belmont Report for animals would necessitate a reexamination of our relationship with, and treatment of, other animals, creating a qualitative ethical leap from existing animal welfare regulations.
You have
Access
In their paper entitled “A Belmont Report for Animals?” Hope Ferdowsian and colleagues propose that a parallel document analogous to the Belmont Report, which safeguards human research subjects, be created to protect nonhuman animals (hereafter, ‘animals’) in research.Footnote 1 They point out that the key ethical principles outlined in the Belmont Report are applicable to other animals, and should form the basis for a similar foundational level of protection for them.
The Belmont Report establishes the principles to which research with humans should adhere: respect for autonomy, obligations to beneficence and justice, and protection for vulnerable individuals and populations.Footnote 2 When put into action, these principles are transformed into informed consent, risk-benefit analyses, and careful selection of subjects.
Unlike uniform protections for humans, existing guidelines for nonhumans are inconsistent and gerrymandered for our convenience, as they exclude the majority of animals used for invasive research. The Animal Welfare Act excludes birds, rats of the genus Rattus, mice of the genus Mus, fish, farmed animals, and all invertebrates.Footnote 3 Other documents, such as the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals, do cover all vertebrates but no other groups.Footnote 4 Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees (IACUCs) are employed, but they are silent on basic ethical questions such as whether certain animals should be used as subjects in certain ways. They simply ensure that the necessary boxes are ticked on fundamental protocols, but are able to eschew important ethical issues by permitting pain and suffering in favor of scientific justifications. This giant loophole allows for a number of heinous procedures. And, of course, IACUCs enforce certain methods of animal killing without addressing the question of whether ending a life is a harm itself.
Many in the animal research community have donned a rather thin coat of superficial ethics known as the three Rs, a framework proposed by William Russell and Russell Burch.Footnote 5 The three Rs promote reduction of the number of animals used, replacement of apparently more cognitively-complex animals with less cognitively-complex animals (amounting to an adoption of the scala naturae for ethics), and refinement, that is, adoption of ways to gather the most data in the least invasive ways possible. While these guidelines are good recommendations, they are often not implemented in a serious way. Moreover, they make assumptions about animals and suffering based on unscientific and outdated views of nature from the time of Socrates—the scala naturae.Footnote 6 Needless to say, these assumptions may not be correct. Further, the three Rs framework is a classic example of welfarism and does not prohibit the use of animals as a means to an end. Like all welfare-based proposals, it prioritizes human wants and desires over animal needs.
The classic welfare approach to animal protection will always subjugate the needs of other animals to human desires, providing incremental changes within existing systems of abuse and exploitation. Welfarism is tantamount to “ethical gerrymandering.”Footnote 7 When there is a conflict between human and nonhuman interests, human interests almost invariably dictate the meandering border of animal protections in favor of our species. It is for these reasons that animal welfare guidelines, while helpful, have generally failed to provide the kind of protection for animals necessary to ensure their well-being.Footnote 8
The weaknesses of welfarism are brought into stark contrast when one considers that, despite numerous organizations and efforts around the globe claiming to work for ‘animal rights,’ no nonhuman being anywhere has any legal rights.Footnote 9 Only one organization in North America, the Nonhuman Rights Project, is actively working for legal personhood status for animals, which would allow them to have basic rights, such as the right to bodily liberty and the right to bodily integrity—two basic liberty rights.Footnote 10 These two fundamental rights alone, if recognized legally, would prohibit essentially all forms of treatment currently deemed permissible under welfarism. Legal rights are the only kind of protections that ensure animals are shielded from the self-indulgence and caprices of humans. They are the most durable way to protect animals from harm, leaving them less subject to differing opinions and philosophical arguments.
In order to possess legal rights, one must be a legal person, an entity with the capacity for legal rights. Courts recognize that bodily liberty and bodily integrity are fundamental human interests protected by fundamental human rights. But what is a sufficient condition for being considered a legal person? The law recognizes practical autonomy as sufficient. An individual is said to possess practical autonomy (and thus sufficient characteristics for legal rights) if she: can have desires; can intentionally try to fulfill those desires; and possesses a sense of self which allows for an understanding that desires are being or not being met. In other words, beings with practical autonomy know when their life is going well, and when their plans, desires, and needs are being thwarted.Footnote 11 Currently the Nonhuman Rights Project recognizes that there is sufficient scientific evidence for practical autonomy in all great apes, cetaceans, and elephants. Their efforts do not imply that other animals are not autonomous, but that the strongest and most agreed-upon empirical evidence for autonomy in animals currently exists for these mammals.
The question of animal personhood is a vital area of interest and debate in contemporary philosophy as well. But while philosophical concepts are fine for clarifying how we might want to structure our thinking and efforts around this issue, they have even less authority and enforceability than some animal welfare guidelines. And, in philosophical circles, there is no agreement on which capacities are sufficient for personhood, or even if the notion of personhood is appropriate for animals.Footnote 12
Nonetheless, the road to legal personhood for animals is long and difficult, and such efforts currently do not include any but the most cognitively-sophisticated animals. Legal personhood therefore offers no protections for the vast majority of animals used in research. This problem may be only a temporary state of affairs and depends, to some degree, upon whether judges become more comfortable with the idea of personhood for animals in general.
So where does a Belmont Report for animals fit into the current architecture of protections for animals in research? And how does the Belmont Report compare with legal rights?
The first principle of the Belmont Report is respect for personhood or autonomy. This principle relies upon recognizing that nonhuman beings are self-determining. This recognition amounts to respecting animals’ choices in life, and not putting them in a position where it is difficult for them to express their choices. In this way, the Belmont Report has much more in common with a rights-based view than an animal welfare view. Rights-based views, particularly those appealing to legal status, are wedded to personhood in the common law as pursued by the Nonhuman Rights Project. One is either a legal person or an object. The Animal Welfare Act and other welfare-based guidelines do not come anywhere close to recognizing autonomy, self-determination, or personhood in other animals, and are therefore much weaker than the proposed Belmont Report for animals. Welfare fits into existing viewpoints rather than changing them.
However, a Belmont Report for animals would still require consensual definitions of personhood and autonomy, which have been difficult to determine even for animals such as great apes, dolphins, and elephants, for whom the scientific evidence is overwhelming. The situation becomes more difficult for animals who are not considered as psychologically complex and sophisticated as great apes, dolphins, or elephants, including other mammals, birds, nonmammalian vertebrates, and invertebrates. That is not to say that these animals are not autonomous beings, but that it will be difficult to reach a consensus on beings such as fish, amphibians, reptiles, insects, and others. The scala naturae view still has a tight grip on both scientific and public perspectives of other animals.
The second principle of the Belmont Report is beneficence. Ferdowsian, et al. state that a Belmont Report for animals would make it necessary to assess whether the benefits of research on animals can be obtained through alternative methods. But from a formal rights-based viewpoint, if harm is done, and inherent rights are violated, the question of whether alternatives are available is irrelevant.
Finally, the principle of justice comes into play in determining whether other animals should be used as research subjects for the purposes of benefitting humans. Here, the question of vulnerability comes to the forefront. But unlike even the most vulnerable of human subjects (e.g., infants) who enjoy protection through representation by conspecifics who can give informed consent on their behalf, other animals do not have such surrogates, and are therefore the most vulnerable research subjects. Unlike humans representing the interests of other humans, even if human representatives were appointed to protect the interests of nonhuman subjects, it is doubtful they could do so with the same level of validity and accuracy as they do for other humans, because of species differences. As the authors point out, in many ways, the special vulnerability of other animals means that they should be protected by the most stringent guidelines.
Even though many complex issues would need to be examined, a Belmont Report for animals is clearly critically important for protection of these vulnerable subjects, particularly in the absence of legal rights. The Belmont Report (for humans) has been incorporated into several regulatory and legal prescriptions for human subject protection and, more importantly, is a set of consensus-driven guidelines. While there are no clear legal penalties for violations, it does carry the weight of an accepted set of ethical principles. Violations are often met with some form of punishment (e.g., social disapproval and termination of the research), and there are restitutive recourses for harmed subjects. So while the Belmont Report does not have the legal ‘teeth’ to enforce protections for human research subjects, it does have the heft of being part of a globally accepted set of rules for how to treat human subjects; those who attempt to violate its rules meet widespread vilification.
More importantly, because the Belmont Report is a cohesive set of principles, violations are easily recognized, and there is little room for deviation from its code without condemnation. The consensual aspect of the Belmont Report places it in a powerful ethical position for the protection of human subjects. No existing welfare regulations for animals have this level of consistency and authority and, importantly, profundity. While legal rights for other animals represent the most powerful protection for them, a Belmont Report for animals has the capacity to be transformative in a way that even the strongest animal welfare laws could not be. A Belmont Report for animals would necessitate a reexamination of our relationship with, and treatment of, other animals, creating a qualitative ethical leap from existing animal welfare regulations.