this week's ethics class was on animals in research and whether they have rights, and if so, to what? we read about the PETA raids of the "silver spring monkeys" (in which they stole 17 research monkeys from edward taub's lab in silver spring maryland) and the raid on the penn head injury lab, in which 60-80 hours of videotape of baboon subjects in head-injury experiments were stolen. disturbing stories, disturbing video. but enough rambling. the class once again brought up in my head the question of how important, relatively, various lives are. i'll leave aside for today the question of choosing between various human lives (who would you save? a 3 week-old infant or a 23 year-old woman? who would you save? a 23 year-old or an 83 year-old? a 3 week-old or an 83 year-old? why? what are you considering?) now, i want you to choose between a human (whoever you thought was most worth saving from the above 3-way choice) and an animal. first, in the "lifeboat scenario": a human and a dog are on a lifeboat. only one can be saved. which one do you throw overboard? (though of course most people say the dog should be thrown overboard, ingrid newkirk, president and co-founder of PETA, has apparently been heard to say she'd throw the person over. fyi.) in this scenario, we are of course assuming that the person and the dog are both worthwhile beings (no murderers, no rabid animals), but neither are particularly special to the rest of the population (e.g. it is not mr. rogers and lassie on the boat). it is just a regular person and a regular dog. both in the prime of their lives.

okay, so now we move on from the lifeboat scenario to the anencephalic baby scenario. what if you're faced with a choice of saving a (normal, healthy) baboon or an anencephalic baby (a baby born without most of its brain)? okay, what if, instead of just "saving it", you're advocating a substitution in a research project. would you be willing to substitute an anencephalic baby for a baboon in a research experiment where the subject was to be caused pain and then humanely euthanized? okay, if not then, what about if the experimental design was such that you could find out your answer by using only one anencephalic baby, but to get the same answer, you'd have to use 100 baboons? or 1000 baboons? is there any point at which you would say that the animals' rights outweigh those of the human?

aiiight, now that you're all warmed up, try this one: what if there was a species that was near extinction. let's say that with the current number of animals, the species can be saved, but if just one more is lost then the species is sure to become extinct. (all this explanation is necessary because this hypothetical started out with "would you do X extreme action to save the last animal of the species" to which i answered "no" because saving the last animal is pointless. if there's just one left, then unless it can asexually reproduce, the species is doomed anyway. so the scenario had to be changed so that you're saving the animal that puts them over the line from severly, critically endangered to out-and-out doomed.) okay. so. before you is the crucial animal, without which the species will fail. also before you is a normal, decent human in the prime of life. you can only save one. which do you save? do you let an entire species die just to save one human? does it matter what species it is (say, the last of a particular species of tiger vs. the last of a particular species of butterfly)? what if the human is your relative? at the most extreme, what if the human is your own child?

as a thought experiment, i would save the human in the lifeboat scenario, and would use the anencephalic baby rather than a baboon, and would save the butterfly over the human. of course, in real life, would i really? and would i save the butterfly or my mother? would i save the butterfly or my daughter? realistically, i would save my daughter and let the butterflies be damned. same with mom. (but i'm not 100% proud of that--my principles say that the butterfly species is more important than my one beloved human relative). but i hope that i would have the courage to save the butterfly rather than the random person i didn't know. i'd have to face my own guilt, of course, and surely the righteous anger of maybe everyone else on the planet (except for ingrid newkirk) including a judge, jury, and executioner. but for the chance to save *an entire species*.