Proceedings of the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine, Vol 211, 109-138, Copyright © 1996 by Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine

ORIGINAL ARTICLES

A dissection of the chapter "Tools for Research" in Peter Singer's Animal Liberation

SM Russell and CS Nicoll
Department of Integrative Biology and Cancer Research Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, 94720, USA.

The book Animal Liberation, by philosopher Peter Singer, is frequently referred to as the bible of the animal liberation/rights movement(ALARM). Thus, Singer is regarded as a major moral standard- bearer of the ALARM. Some have suggested that his book provides "intellectual rigor" to the moral arguments for animals' equality with humans, which had previously been based largely on emotionalism and sentimentality. We have analyzed the contents of the chapter "Tools for Research" which criticizes the use of animals in biomedical research as well as for drug and product-safety testing. In order to discredit these practices, Singer "documents" his arguments with 138 "notes", some of which are to the same reference and others of which contain multiple references. Of the 132 difference references, we attempted to verify the accuracy of 49 of them. Of these, 16 (33%) were inaccurate or we could not find. In addition, Singer mischaracterizes the cited studies in various ways. He quotes selectively and out of context from numerous research projects. He never mentions the objectives of these projects, except occasionally when, in our opinion, he distorts or trivializes them. Singer also cites supposedly damning "evidence" published by other antivivisectionists, even though this "evidence" has been refuted in the literature. Singer supposedly embraces utilitarianism, a philosophy which holds that the harm done by a practice should be balanced against the gain realized from it. However, he makes virtually no attempt to consider objectively the benefits that have been realized from animal-based medical research and he greatly exaggerates the costs. To him, animal research is "all pain and no gain." We believe that Singer's moral arguments for animal equality are not convincing. The lack of objectivity and the reliance upon distortion and selective quotation that characterize Singer's "scholarship" are surprising when one considers that he presents himself as an ethicist and moralist.