Ethical perspectives on modifying animals: beyond welfare arguments

One of the earliest applications of biotechnology to livestock was the so-called Beltsville pigs. Researchers at the U.S. Agricultural Research Service in Beltsville, Maryland, inserted the gene for human growth hormone into pigs in order to achieve a better food conversion rate (Thompson, 1997). This led to many health and welfare problems in the pigs, such as arthritis and lung problems and it ultimately led the researchers to terminate the experiment. This was seized upon by critics of biotechnology to show that genetically modifying animals was unacceptable (Thompson, 1997). However, I don’t think the critics had a very strong case. You could say that these pigs did not present us with a moral dilemma. After all, when it is clear that something is morally wrong, it is not a moral dilemma, it is simply wrong. It was recognized by the researchers that the animals’ welfare was harmed and therefore they terminated the experiment. But in reality, most modified animals do not have welfare problems. Some modifications in fact “solve” welfare problems. Think, for example, of polled cattle (Figure 1). Because they are modified to not grow horns, they are less likely to harm other cattle and farmers. But is this then the end of the story? I don’t think so. Many people still have moral problems with modified animals, whether or not they experience welfare problems. Perhaps it would have been better for the critics to focus on those other problems. Of course, one could argue that welfare is commonly understood in quite a narrow sense. Commonly used criteria such as The Farm Animal Welfare Council’s five freedoms (Brambel Report, 1965) do not constitute welfare, but only the “necessary conditions for welfare” (Harfeld et al., 2016). Welfare is more than what you can objectively measure. There is also a broader sense of the term welfare, which perhaps should be termed well-being. In this broader sense, welfare is not just measured at specific points in time, but over the course of the animal’s whole life. The central question then becomes “what constitutes a good life for animals”? Of course, the absence of pain and injury, hunger and thirst, fear and stress are very important, but well-being is also about things such as enjoyment, about achieving what one wants to achieve, about having good relationships with conspecifics. I don’t think all of these are necessarily covered by the five freedoms, not even by the freedom to express normal or species-specific behavior. But still, genetic modification does not necessarily interfere with well-being in this broader sense either and the moral objections remain. Welfare or well-being are in the end about the subjective experiences of animals, but many of the moral discussions about genetically modified animals are not about how the “animals” experience it, but how we “humans” experience it. What does genetic modification do to our own view of the good life or our worldview? In other words, there are objections to genetic modification that move beyond welfare and these are the focus of this contribution. I will briefly discuss four clusters of these arguments or objections beyond welfare: the arguments that modifying animals violates their integrity, that it instrumentalizes animals, that it amounts to playing God, and that it is unnatural. These objections are actually not limited to genetic modification of animals, but often apply to modifications through artificial selection as well. For example, in my research about people’s perceptions about pedigree dog breeding, Implications