This basis of moral responsibility extends in kind, if not in degree, to all life. It necessitates a directing conscience which shall guide all our intellectual and practical relations with every category of life.
This moral element enters unavoidably into our treatment of animal life from its lowest to its highest form. Our treatment of a monkey or a prince contains an element of moral attitude which does not exist in our relation to inorganic Nature.
It is a difference of kind as well as of degree, which it is blindness to ignore.
The divergence which now exists between some biological investigators and their critics rests upon the failure to recognise that moral error may engender intellectual error.
The special subject which has produced this controversy is the present method of using the lower animals in biological research, which has so enormously extended of late years. The essence of the controversy is the ethical question—viz., Have we a right to torture?
It must be distinctly understood that there is here no question of our right under certain circumstances to put to death. Neither is there a doubt of the utility of rational experiment and of research. But the right to put to death in the most humane manner known to us, and the right to torture to death, are two widely different questions.
We have no right, for any purpose whatever, to torture a living creature to death, either by the mutilation of the organs, the slow deprivation of the necessary conditions of life, or the still slower process of destroying by the inoculation of disease.
CHAPTER IV
Right and Wrong Method
It must be carefully noted that the wrong involved in inflicting torture upon a living creature is the violation of a rational principle. The employment of torture or of painful experiment in biological research is not a question of the right to gain knowledge; it is a question of how we seek to gain knowledge. It applies directly to method.
Thus, the fact observed by Paget, that in a patient who vomited all fat, the pancreas alone was found on post-mortem examination to be diseased, is worth more than a series of experiments on lower animals of different constitution from our own.