Animal liberation?

Reason‘s Ron Bailey has an interesting article about the moral implications of scientifically “uplifting” animals – i.e. making them more intelligent – through genetic manipulation:

Some technoprogressive thinkers such as editor-in-chief of Betterhumans.com George Dvorsky argue that we have a moral obligation to uplift other species to sapiency. “It would be negligent of us to leave animals behind to fend for themselves in the state of nature,” declared Dvorsky. He foresees mostly great good coming out of any such project. On the other hand, the prospect of uplift inspires dread in bioconservatives like Francis Fukuyama who worries that biotechnologists will create slave chimpanzees with the intelligence of a ten-year old boy.

Setting aside the fact that no one has any idea of how to actually uplift, that is, to dramatically boost the intelligence of animals, would it be moral to do it? How would a dumb animal give its consent to being uplifted? Since no human being gives his or her consent to being born with whatever level of intelligence or health he or she has, why should prior consent be required for uplifting animals? Dvorsky actually thinks that it is more moral to uplift already born animals so that we can ask them before-and-after questions. Perhaps they would recall their pre-sapient state and tell us if it were preferable to the anxieties of self-awareness. But what if uplifted chimps and dolphins told us that self-aware intelligent language using is not all that it’s cracked up to be and that they’d rather go back to their state of natural innocence?

Bailey correctly concludes that it would be wrong to create what he calls “happy animal slaves,” that is, animals with enhanced intelligence who nevertheless are genetically “programmed” to be content with taking orders from us, like animal equivalents of the Epsilons in Huxley’s Brave New World. “Successfully uplifted animals would have to be treated with the same moral respect that we owe to human persons,” he notes.

Still, there are good reasons to think that the whole idea of “uplifting” animals, even if technically feasible, is wrongheaded. First, there are serious moral obstacles to using animals as experimental subjects in the first place, especially if there is no particularly pressing (e.g. life-saving) benefit at stake.

Second, and to me this is more fundamental, the underlying premise that animals are nothing more than “defective humans” who, if they knew better, would want to be as much like us as possible, betrays a deep misunderstanding of the value of non-human nature. In fact, it’s not too far removed from the old idea that women were “defective males” who failed to develop properly. But why should we assume that the natures that animals have are valuable only insofar as they approximate human nature? It seems more reasonable to say that the cluster of traits possessed by each species represents a set of trade-offs without one being clearly superior in every way to all the others. As it is, at the rate we’re going, human beings may turn out to be the one species capable of overshooting its carrying capacity and taking a bunch of other species with it, which would suggest that we’re less than the ideal creature.

Here again is a fundamental divide between a purely utilitarian view of nature and one that recognizes the intrinsic value of non-human creatures. If nature is sheerly raw material for human purposes, why not try to improve other species as much as possible? (Though, even on those grounds it seems to me that unforseen consequences would be a good reason for trepidation; ask Charlton Heston about wars between human beings and super-intelligent apes.) On the other hand, though, if the natural world and the creatures who inhabit it have an intrinsic value of their own, then each species exists for its own sake (or, on a theological view, for the creator’s sake) and not as raw material for human meddling.

Rather than trying to “improve” animals by making them more like us, maybe we should consider learning to let them be.