“I think that if you had to choose between being reincarnated as, let’s say a reincarnated hen at a factory farm or a rat in a laboratory that would eventually get sacrificed for an experiment … you would do better to be the rat than the hen,” said Princeton University Professor Peter Singer on Friday afternoon in the Cole Assembly Room of Converse Hall. Either way, though, Singer would say both have it pretty bad—unethically bad.

Last Friday, as a part of the 2008-09 Amherst College Colloquium Series (ACCS), the College hosted Harvard University professor Michael Sandel along with Singer, who together gave a talked titled “The Ethical Use of Biotechnology: Science and Ethics in Animal Research and Perfecting Humans.”

Singer, author of Animal Liberation, Practical Ethics, and Rethinking Life and Death: The Collapse of Our Traditional Ethics, has written extensively on the ethical objections of using animals for human ends. Singer began the talk with an echo of one of his more famous arguments—the argument against what he calls “speciesism.”

Speciesim, Singer argued, occurs when humans do not give equal capacity of consideration to the interests of animals as they would to other humans. “I don’t think that we can draw a line around our own species and say ‘these are the beings who matter, these are the beings who are entitled to some equality or entitled to a whole set of [human rights],’” he said.

“Where we are talking about similar interests, interests in not suffering, having a life that contents you, I think we are not justified in saying ‘because beings are not humans, we are entitled to disregard their interests.’ We should recognize that we are not the only beings on this planet who have lives that can go well or badly,” Singer said.

Singer’s argument led to the conclusion that there are limitations on how humans can use animals. By his logic, humans cannot use animals in a way that does not give proper weight to the animals’ interests. If an experiment is found to aversely affect the interests of animals, scientists must first find alternatives that do not aversely affect those interests.

Thus, Singer argued, any experiment that is justified to be done on nonhuman animals must also be justified in being done on humans at a similar level of development.

That comparison, Singer admitted, is a bit shocking, indeed. However, it works very well as a “thought experiment,” he contended.

Singer’s argument, unsurprisingly, then turned to questions over vegetarianism, which, he argued, is not too far removed from concerns over animal experimentation. “If you are moved by the general principle that I have talked about,” he said, “then you should be aware that, while the issue of research on animal is a significant issue in that something like 25-40 million animals are used for research in this country each year, the issue of the use of animals for food is a far larger issue.”

Singer’s brief talk was followed by remarks by Sandel, who focused his argument on the use of biotechnology for the enhancement of human beings.

Sandel has taught political philosophy at Harvard since 1980 and is the author of such books as The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering and Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics.

“I distinguish between utilizing genetic technologies to promote health, to cure, to repair injury,” Sandel said. “What I am critical of is the use of new genetic technologies not for medical purposes but for purposes of non-medical enhancement.”

Sandel cited choosing the sex of one’s child as an example of a lapse in bioethics, noting that parents guilty of the offense were invariably guilty of other egregious forms of over-parenting.

“There is something important about the good of the parent-child relationship,” Sandel said. “What makes it special and precious is that good parents accept their children as they come; they don’t design them.”

While Singer and Sandel did not seem to disagree from the outset on any major points, Sandel did pose a number of questions to Singer, one of which questioned the ethicality of genetically engineering chickens to not feel stressed while living in battery cages. In Sandel’s hypothetical situation, humans would be able to remove a chicken’s urge to roam freely. If a chicken lost the interest to roam, keeping in a cage would not be violating any of its interests.

Singer’s response was somewhat surprising. Though he observed that a chicken engineered to be content in a cage is a sort of zombie, he also admitted that he couldn’t, from the utilitarian side of things, find anything wrong with it.