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Chapter four explores the development by academic animal breeders of performance tests enabling the transformation of pigs into organisms embodying fascism. Standards developed at the University of Halle by Gustav Frölich and at Gottingen by Jonas Schmidt assured that pigs were fat and rooted in the soil (bodenständig) contributing to the institutionalization of the Nazi regime: Germans were now feeding their animals produce of the national soil, making the country more resilient in case of war, and following the standards imposed by a new bureaucratic structure. Contrary to many historical references of animals and humans in Nazi times, pigs were not just metaphors calling for comparisons between the way they were bred and the Nazi breeding of humans. It was the particular way they were bred, making them bodenständig,which formed the new ties weaving the German Volk. The animals scientists designed were intended to perform the transition of German society into a national community, embodying Nazi alternative modernity.

Medical research communities have longstanding traditions for handling the risks that human experiments entail. A cornerstone of these traditions is the logic of lesser harms, whereby hazardous interventions are moral if they generate net benefit and the risks are lower than those of the natural disease. Other expectations have accompanied lesser-harm reasoning. Clinical researchers, for example, require that animal tests precede human experiments. Also, many have begun human testing by first experimenting on themselves. This chapter examines historical episodes in which those initiating and studying medical innovations articulated or displayed their moral logic with clarity, focusing on the politics of smallpox vaccination. It sheds light on the character of experimenters' informal morality and the purposes their moral logic has served. It argues that traditions for conducting human experiments are, in large measure, an outgrowth of the cognitive norms of science. The chapter looks at moratoria and animal testing as legacies of laboratory medicine, along with self-experimentation and the “morality of method.”.

From the early 1950s through early 1960s, Dow and Shell marketed DBCP before toxicological testing was complete. Marketing techniques used the language of science to teach farmers about DBCP’s then-unfamiliar target pests—near-microscopic, wormlike nematodes—and said DBCP-based products would boost profits by controlling them. Confidence in new pesticides was not unbounded, as many worried about the harm to human health. Toxicology and government regulation seemed to resolve the tension between pesticides’ benefits and risks. In the case of DBCP, however, animal testing had alarming results, notably, reproductive problems in males. Companies and regulators together downplayed these results in favor of an interpretation of DBCP as “safe for human use.” Production and use of DCBP continued with few protections for those exposed.

This chapter argues that while some versions of contractarian moral theory preclude granting moral status to nonhumans, the most plausible, and the most influential, versions of this approach are not only compatible with the moral claims of animals, they actually entail these claims. It assumes that animals meet neither the equality of power condition nor the rationality condition. It defends the most plausible form of contractarianism available—essentially a Rawlsian version stripped of certain unnecessary and infelicitous elements. It uses this model to the difficult issue of animal testing. This chapter suggests that autonomy is far from the Kantian concept of the ability to morally reflect on one’s actions.

This chapter explores the relationship between animals and humans by focusing on the work of psychoanalyst Gustav Bally. In his study of animals and humans, first published in 1945, Bally entered a field overcrowded with precursors, mainly Jakob von Uexküll and his students. Bally summarizes findings that prove that in animal testing the best results are obtained through a noncatastrophic but unexpected stimulus, such as a measured electrical shock. Animal testing and the study of animal behavior and learning are sometimes on the same field. Stimuli that are punitive make the animal more careful, expand the view of the surrounding environment, and lead to new solutions. Uexküll, the figure Giorgio Agamben followed into corners in which Martin Heidegger backed up animals, is at the top of a long list of researchers Bally consults on the animal side of his study.

This chapter takes Darwin to have posed a new question for moral and social theory: How is the organic world described in the Origin of Species to be governed? Darwin also pointed toward a way of addressing that question. The Descent of Man, with its emphasis on the continuity between our species and the rest of the animal kingdom, indicates a new approach to ethics. After exploring Darwin’s defense of the continuity thesis, this chapter focuses on the connection between ethical practice and nonhuman animal behavior, outlining a contractualist ethics. It then considers how to apply that form of ethics to the governance of the animal world. Finally, the special responsibilities that we humans have toward the animals with whom we regularly interact are considered in the context of animal testing.

This chapter addresses the practical implications of the results established in previous chapters. Previous chapters have argued that a wide array of creatures have feelings and perceptual experiences: fish feel pain, as do crabs; honeybees feel anxiety; bowerbirds experience visual illusions; appropriately constructed robots of the future may feel annoyed or happy. If such creatures can share with humans a range of perceptual, bodily, and emotional experiences, how ought we to behave toward them? Ought we to become vegetarians? The answer to this question is ultimately left up to the reader, but the chapter provides ways of thinking about how to answer it.