Planet of the Apes and Philosophy (9 page)

So although the statement “In the distant future, Earth will be ruled by an advanced simian society” could not in fact be verified or falsified in 1972, it was still meaningful, since we could see how it could be verified, for example by building rocket ships and sending astronauts deep into outer space and back at near light speed. Such a statement is totally unlike the statement “There are intelligent beings in Heaven,” because, however our technology is perfected, we don't even know what it would be like to visit Heaven, since it is not a physical place. Thus, according to the logical positivist, it's a meaningless statement.

What does all this have to do with ethics? Quite a bit, it turns out. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who greatly influenced the logical positivists, remarked in a public lecture around 1930, that if you take an inventory of all the
facts
in the universe, you will not find it a
fact
that killing is wrong. In other words, ethics is not part of the furniture of the scientific universe. You can't, in principle, test the proposition that “Killing is wrong.” It can neither be verified nor falsified. So, according to Wittgenstein, ethical judgments are empirically and scientifically meaningless. It's a short leap of logic to the conclusion that ethics lies outside the scope of science, along with all judgments regarding values. The slogan that I learned in my science courses in the 1960s, and which is still being taught in too many places, is that “Science is value-free.”

The denial of the relevance of ethics to science was taught both explicitly and implicitly. One could find it stated in science textbooks. For example, in the late 1980s when I was researching a book on animal pain, I looked at basic biology texts, two of which a colleague and I had used, ironically enough, in an honors biology course we team-taught for twenty-five years attempting to combine biology and its philosophical and ethical aspects. The widely used Keeton and Gould textbook, in what one of my colleagues calls the “throat-clearing introduction,” loudly declares that “Science cannot make value judgments . . . cannot make moral judgments.” In the same vein, Mader, in her popular biology text, asserted that “Science does not make ethical or moral decisions.” The standard line affirms that science at most provides society with
facts
relevant to making moral decisions, but never makes such decisions itself.

So according to the logical positivists, moral discussion is empirically meaningless. But that is not the whole story. Positivists felt compelled to explain why intelligent people continued to make moral judgments and continued to argue about them. Their explanation goes like this. When people say things like “killing is wrong,” which seem to be statements about reality, they are in fact describing nothing. Rather, they are “emoting,” expressing their own revulsion at killing. “Killing is wrong” really
expresses
“Killing, yuk!” And when we seem to debate killing, we are not really arguing about ethics (which we can't do any more than you and I can debate whether we like or don't like the Tim Burton remake), but rather disputing each other's facts. For example, a so-called debate over the morality of capital punishment is my expressing revulsion at capital punishment while you express approval. What we can debate are factual questions such as whether or not capital punishment serves as a deterrent against murder.

It's therefore not surprising that when scientists were drawn into social discussions of ethical issues they were every bit as emotional as their untutored opponents. According to positivist ideology these issues
are nothing but emotional
; therefore, the notion of rational ethics is an oxymoron, and he who generates the most effective emotional response “wins.”

So in the 1970s and 1980s debate over the morality of animal research, most scientists either totally ignored the issue, or
countered criticisms with emotional appeals to the health of children. For example, in one film entitled “Will I Be All Right, Doctor?” (the question asked by a frightened child), made by defenders of unrestricted research, the response was “Yes, if
they
leave us alone to do what we want with animals.” So unabashedly mawkish was the film, that when it was aired at a national meeting of laboratory animal veterinarians, whom you'd expect to be about the most sympathetic audience you could find, one veterinarian exclaimed that he was “ashamed to be associated with a film that is pitched lower than the worst anti-vivisectionist clap-trap!”

Other ads placed by the research community affirmed that ninety percent of the animals used in research were mice and rats, animals “people kill in their kitchens anyway.” Sometimes questions raised about animal use, as once occurred in a science editorial, elicited the reply that “Animal use is not an ethical question—it is a scientific necessity,” as if it cannot be, and is not, both.

Denying the relevance of values in general and ethics in particular to science has blinded scientists to issues of major concern to society. But that's not all. There is another major component of scientific ideology that harmonizes perfectly with the value-free dictum. That was the claim that science can't legitimately talk about consciousness or subjective experiences—since they are unobservable—which led to a question about their existence—even pain! (John Watson, the founder of Behaviorism came close to saying that we don't have thoughts, we only think we do!)

As you can imagine, agnosticism about animal pain quickly devolved into atheism. During the 1970s and 1980s, two veterinarians, an attorney, and I conceptualized, drafted, and ultimately persuaded Congress to pass two pieces of 1985 federal legislation assuring some minimal concern on the part of researchers for the welfare of laboratory animals. In the course of my discussions with Congress, I was asked why a law regulating animal research was needed. I replied that the scientific community did not use analgesics (painkillers) for animals used in the most painful experiments. Congress replied that
the research community claimed it did use painkillers very liberally, and it was my job to prove they did not.

After much thought, I approached a friend who was a librarian at the Library of Congress, and asked him to do a literature search on analgesics for laboratory animals. That search revealed no articles. I then asked him to expand the search to analgesics for animals. The search found two papers, one of which affirmed that there should be papers! Fortunately, this strategy plainly indicated the need for legislation.

Here's a personal anecdote strangely reminiscent of the sort of “logic” employed by Dr. Zaius when he denies to Taylor's face that Taylor is capable of thought. In 1982, I was invited to give the prestigious C.W. Hume lecture on animal welfare at the University of London. I was also asked by the organizers to comment on a paper dealing with pain in dogs. The speaker was a prominent British pain physiologist who dwelt at length on how different the electrochemical activity in the cerebral cortex of dogs during the administration of painful stimuli was from that of people. He concluded that dogs did not feel pain in any sense humans could relate to. My response was uncharacteristically brief. I pointed out that he was a prominent pain researcher who did pain research on dogs and extrapolated the results to people. He agreed. I then pointed out that either his speech or his life's work was false, since, of course, if dogs don't feel pain, they can't model human pain!

In further illustration of this twisted logic, consider what's known as the “psychologist's dilemma.” If animals do not, as scientific ideology suggests, experience fear, loneliness, boredom, anxiety, or similar emotions, what's the point of studying these states in “animal models?” And if they do experience them in a way that is analogous to the way we do, how can it possibly be moral to create those states in them? This is an excellent example, as it shows plainly the way in which denying the existence of the animal mind works hand-in-hand with denying the relevance of ethics to science.

Recall Taylor's plaintive lament to Zaius—“Don't you believe your own eyes?” The ability of ideology to blind us even to patent sense experience has a long history. For example,
when Galileo was accused of heresy, in part because he denied the Moon was perfect, and he implored the bishops to see for themselves by looking through his telescope, they refused to look. The reason is that they already “knew” the Moon was perfect. And if someone had made them look, we can imagine the answer—“Galileo has built an instrument that distorts the perfect moon and makes it look flawed.”

Neither logic nor sense experience can overcome ideological bias, as
Planet of the Apes
clearly illustrates. Early on in my work on ethics and animal research, I could not fathom how veterinarians could be blind to obvious animal pain. On one occasion, I was walking through the surgery wards of our veterinary hospital with the hospital director. I could hear the animals whining and crying. “Why don't you give them any analgesics?” I challenged him. “Oh,” he said. “That is not pain, it is after-effects of anesthesia!” Such is the power of ideology.

On another occasion, I telephoned a veterinarian who had written one of the very rare (at the time) papers dealing with pain control and animals. I asked him if he ever encounters colleagues who deny that animals feel pain. “Sure,” he said. “How do you deal with that?” I asked. “Well,” he responded, “I ask them to take a hundred pound Rottweiler and put him on their examination table. Then I tell them to take a vice grip, fit it around the dog's nuts, then squeeze. He'll tell you he feels pain by ripping your God damn face off!” His answer was based in common sense and experience, yet would of course never convince the ideologue. This is the exact point made in the movie.

One of the most extraordinary consequences of scientific ideology was the denial of pain not only in animals, but in newborn humans. For a long time, indeed, until the 1990s, open-heart surgery was performed on newborn human babies without anesthesia. Curariform drugs were instead utilized to hold the babies still. Such drugs have no analgesic or anesthetic properties; they are drugs that
paralyze
by depolarizing
the neuromuscular junction. If anything, they increase pain by virtue of paralyzing the diaphragm muscles, causing black terror.

In defense of this practice, as well as the practice of withholding pain control from animals, the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) affirmed that to feel pain requires the possession of language. This idea comes down to us from René Descartes (1596–1650), who claimed that nonhuman animals, not having language, are not conscious. They are machines that have no souls and therefore no feelings. This teaching exonerates Descartes's followers when they perform literal
vivisection
—cutting up live animals for scientific purposes, and it also provides blanket permission to ignore pain control in nonlinguistic beings, including human babies. Likewise in Ape City, whose Dr. Zira we take to be the very model of the progressive, humane scientist, experimental neurosurgery is performed on humans, precisely because they—with the notable exception of Taylor—are mute!

Unfortunately, no one at IASP ever explained the connection between possession of language and the ability to feel pain. Did these people genuinely believe that at some unspecified point in development, when babies acquire linguistic ability, along with this, like the prize in a box of Cracker Jacks, they also magically begin to feel pain? Did they genuinely believe that animals, despite patent pain behavior of innumerable kinds, are not capable of experiencing pain? If so, what happens to Charles Darwin's view that there is continuity between humans and other animals because of our common ancestry? If our common ancestry has given us physiological and anatomical traits continuous with those of other animals, why aren't our psychological traits—such as the ability to feel pain—equally continuous, as Darwin himself believed?

At Taylor's trial, he makes one claim after another that, according to the members of the ape tribunal, could not possibly be true. So outraged are they at the heresies he utters that they cover their eyes, ears, and mouths: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.

Visibly irritated, they refused to listen to a word Taylor says. When I recently viewed this scene once more, I was reminded of the time when liberal members of IASP invited me to speak at their annual meeting. There I gave a detailed talk attacking their view of pain in relation to language. In my thirty-plus years of giving invited lectures all over the world to groups ranging from cowboys to animal researchers, I never experienced as much hostility and hatred as I did from the IASP audience. People were white with rage, and stalked out of my talk without anyone asking a question of me or responding to my arguments.

Afterwards, a physician who had been involved in writing the pain policy approached me to explain. He pointed out that one of the most common illnesses that incapacitate workers is lower back pain. However, lower back pain is often present in the absence of a visible injury. Wanting to address this problem on compassionate grounds, IASP decided that reporting lower back pain was enough to justify its presence. I was astounded! I pointed out that apparently what they were trying to say was that a verbal report of lower back pain was a
sufficient condition
for assuming its presence. But what they ended up affirming was that verbal reports, and therefore linguistic capacity, were
necessary conditions
for attribution of pain, a fundamental error in freshman logic!