Animal-Rights Extremists Target UCLA Researcher Again

I really dislike that phrase “claimed responsibility.” If they want to claim responsibility for something, let them show up in person. A terrorist’s phone call to say they did it, whether or not they did, has nothing to do with responsibility. The whole point is that they are avoiding responsibility for their acts.
Have your cake or eat it. Can’t do both.

Q: (I)s it possible to treat animals humanely whist (sic) conducting experiments upon them? Or should we forsake medical advancement for the sake of the rights of mice?

A: The latter.

There are two big sets of questions surrounding this issue. The first one is, do animals have rights and if so which ones? If one believes humans have rights then I believe it is difficult to argue that animals do not have any rights. Unless one resorts to disembodied souls as the reason for asymmetry. And even if humans do have non-physical souls (or some other characteristic), one can question why having a soul matters. The medical benefits cited to support animal research often muddies the waters in the animal rights discussion. Granting for a moment that some animals have some rights, the benefits to medicine are only relevant to the extent we would be willing to perform them on unconsented/unwilling humans. For I take it the question of whether an entity (human or animal) has rights is not dependent on questions about benefits of that entity medical technology. So, that’s one set of questions.

The other set of questions regards civil disobedience and violence in the face of injustice. Was John Brown behaving unethically? You may say that John Brown was justified and these animal activists are not, but then you must admit it is not the tactics that are wrong, but the activists are mistaken about animals having rights (which is a complicated question about which reasonable people disagree). For if it is true that these animals’ right to life are being violated then the use of force against the violators may be justified, or at least very understandable. The upshot is that we want to separate moral judgments about tactics from the ethical facts, but the tactics may be justified depending on the ethical facts.

Lastly, democracy, and generally living in any community, requires us to give up violence to solve our problems; we solve them through compromise, debate, the legal system, etc. But in the case of severe wrongs, such as slavery and violations of basic rights, the social contract is perceived to be in breach and resorting to force is sometimes justified. As a side note, I haven’t made up my mind about any of these issues.

Let’s experiment on the terrorists, instead.