The tension between common sense and scientific perception of animals: recent developments in research on animal integrity

Abstract

A distinction can be made between aesthetic or intuitive perception in holistic biology and in daily life, and reductionistic scientific perception based on the search for causal mechanisms. Going from our observations of animals in daily life to observations of animals in scientific experiments implies a transformation. Scientific experiments exclude all values that are important in daily life. For research on the concept of animal welfare it can be shown that excluding values is impossible as this issue lies too close to our daily experience. This means that the empirical and the moral domain of the concept cannot in fact be separated. And by means of the moral domain, background theories about man’s relation to nature, about the role of natural science, and about what is morally relevant play a role in definitions of animal welfare. This is illustrated for two bioethical theories: zoocentrism and biocentrism. In the zoocentric theory, only sentient animals are morally relevant. Some consider the argument that genetic engineering violates the integrity of an organism not a moral issue, but an aesthetic one. In a biocentric ethical theory, all living beings have moral relevance; moral and aesthetic issues are then closely related. In such a theory the characteristic nature of an animal is respected and knowledge of this nature is intimately related to a more aesthetic and holistic perception of animals. This paper shows that the ethical attitude towards nature is directly linked to the way human beings perceive nature. In experimental reductionistic science, nature is seen as a material object, subject to mechanistic analysis: when animals are subjected to scientific experiments it is impossible to completely avoid ethical issues, but they are restricted to utilitarian ones. The genetic engineering of animals enhanced awareness of ethical issues directly relating to the technology itself and to the attitude towards nature underlying it, irrespective of the consequences. These issues only come up when the animal is perceived in a holistic way, which comes close to our perception of animals in our daily life.