Same species, different needs: could 'genes for' improve the way we treat animals?

The New Scientist recently reviewed a variety of studies showing that many traits often supposed unique to humans are in fact shared by animals. There is evidence that apes, dolphins, songbirds, elephants, and monkeys share with humans some of the most important aspects of behaviour associated with speech; killer whales have distinct cultural groups; great apes and some monkeys have a degree of understanding of the minds of others, enabling them to deceive; chimpanzees, gorillas, and crows use tools; and there is suggestive evidence that elephants, magpies, baboons, whales, and chimpanzees demonstrate emotional behaviour, and that monkeys and rats are capable of drawing primitive moral distinctions.

Claims that animals have capacities usually thought unique to humans are controversial, and those who make them are often accused of anthropomorphising animal behaviour. Plausibly, there is often more to such accusations than concern for explanatory parsimony. As humans, we profit from using animals—for food, research, sport, and so on—in ways that we would not use other humans, and suggestions that animals are more like humans than we usually suppose place an unwelcome demand on society to rethink its ethical stance towards animals. This suggests that a clear division between humans and other species is important to us in justifying the discrepancies between what we view as ethical treatment of other humans and what we view as ethical treatment of non-human animals. Pragmatically speaking, if we humans wish to retain a privileged moral status, and if our privileged moral status is at least partly due to our being different to other animals in certain important (usually biologically-based) respects, then it is in our interests to resist attempts to draw similarities between humans and other animals.

However, the claim that all humans enjoy a higher moral status than all non-human animals is threatened not only by important biological similarities betweeen humans and other animals, but also by important biological dissimilarities among humans. Philosophers like Peter Singer observe that certain humans, including infants and the mentally disabled, have mental capacities that more closely resemble those of certain non-human animals than those of adult, healthy humans. And David Hull has argued that ‘it is simply not true that all organisms that belong to Homo sapiens as a biological species are essentially the same’ [1]: specifically, any property possessed only by humans is not possessed by all humans, and any property that is possessed by all humans is not unique to humans. This means that there is no group of properties possessed by all and only humans, in virtue of which we can claim to enjoy a privileged moral status. The upshot of this, in essence, is that one’s moral status is not properly determined by one’s species.

These observations about human differences and their ethical implications are familiar to academic philosophers, but are rarely mentioned in public debate. To the extent that there is public debate about humanity, it usually focuses on emphasising similarities between humans and playing down our differences. Issues such as racism, sexism, and homophobia make this attitude understandable. However, the explosion in discoveries of human ‘genes for’—including a gene for obesity, a gene for left-handedness, a gene for obsessive behaviour, and even a Jewish gene for intelligence—shifts the focus from human similarities to human differences. Genetic engineering to improve physical and mental capacities could in the future increase genetic diversity among humans, if widely adopted. Either way, an increasing awareness that humans differ in as many ways as they are similar seems inevitable.

Is this a good thing?  I believe that, potentially, it is a very positive thing.  Delineating moral status along species lines may be convenient, but it is crude.  It encourages the view that all humans have equal needs, and that it is acceptable to treat non-human animals in ways that we would never treat even those humans of comparable sentience and cognitive abilities. Focusing on genetic similarities and differences between individuals could greatly improve society’s abilities to meet the needs of those individuals, whether or not they are human.  Ethically, this would be a huge step forward for humans, and especially for other animals.

 

Reference

[1] Hull, D. L. (1986) ‘On Human Nature’, PSA 2: 3-13.

Comments

[Dennis Tuchler]

fairly soon, some animals will be found to have a concept of self, which should make some of us queasy when we eat their meat.