Some years ago, the philosopher Mary Midgley wrote

How and Why Animals Matter Strachon Donnelley Some years ago, the philosopher Mary Midgley wrote Animals and Why They Matter (Midgley 1983). The book speaks for itself eloquently; and despite much philosophic, theological, and ethical exploration of humans' relations to and use of animals in laboratory research and elsewhere, the central question remains: Why do animals matter? The question remains fundamentally important because we humans and the character and goodness of our lives are centrally implicated. Our attitude toward animals and wider animate life says much about who we are and about our basic human and moral stance toward the world. Moral concerns for animals in laboratory research settings are not new. Fundamental moral issues of pain, suffering, distress, death, and respect have long been recognized by animal care and use committees and researchers who have acknowledged the importance of guidelines for laboratory animal care (Donnelley and Nolan 1990; NRC 1992). Yet our basic attitudes and moral stances toward animals remain a crucial and ongoing issue, for these motivate our behavior and concern toward animals how we follow guidelines and what standards are used. I believe it is appropriate to reopen the issue of how and why animals matter and ask again: Is it possible to agree on an overall framework of thought or world view to orient ourselves and help guide our moral decision making on animal use with respect to institutional policies and individual research protocols? Animals matter to us within particular contexts of human interests, purposes, and concerns; frameworks of thought and action; and situations requiring moral judgment and response. These contexts are as numerous as the various opportunities for thought and action that involve both ourselves and animals. In this article, I explore our encounters with animals in various settings (laboratories, homes, and the wild) and then ask whether these various encounters suggest overall philosophic reflections on why animals matter to us in fundamentally important ways ways that might not be immediately obvious to us in laboratory settings. Finally, I explore what a robust philosophy of organism or organic life offers on this issue of animals "mattering" to humans. Strachan Donnelley, Ph.D., is Director of the Humans and Nature Program, The Hastings Center, Garrison, New York. Animal Encounters In the Laboratory Who or what is the animal (such as a mouse or frog) in laboratory research? First and foremost, it is an object of physiological or behavioral inquiry. It primarily "matters" because it is the practicing scientist's object of scientific curiosity. In the heat of scientific activity, the animal is essentially a physiological or behavioral system unconnected with the environing world. It is an isolated representative or model of physiological, behavioral, or animal (biological) existence. The practicing scientist is subjectively animated by scientific questions and uses reigning scientific paradigms and related conceptual approaches such as Galilean-Cartesian materialism, Watsonian genetics, or Skinnerian behaviorism to answer the questions and to formulate new inquiries. 1 These dominant scientific interests and conceptions are crucial in determining the animal's characteristics or identity for the scientist. The animals and scientists are embedded within an overarching scientific world view that includes its own particular ethos and mores. If the science is materialist and mechanistic, the scientist observes and acts on what is taken to be a mere material mechanism. In any case, science by definition is universal or abstractly general, and so the encounter is with the animal as a faceless instance of animate being. Typically a laboratory animal scientist, when acting in the role of a scientist, does not encounter an individual animal in its ordinary worldly context, including its relationships with other individual animals. As the object of scientific inquiry in the laboratory, the animal is an isolated "it," 'The scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, orchestrated by Galileo (1564-1642), Descartes (1596-1650), and Newton (1642-1727), among others, has been particularly dominant in modern Western science and culture. Scientifically, nature has been understood to be essentially physical or material (matter or energy in motion or agitation); causally deterministic (physical antecedents solely determining physical consequents, with no room for mental spontaneity or any exercise of freedom, human or other); and amenable to prediction via mathematical expression of physical laws, statistical or not. These characteristics of natural science survive into the 20th century, for example, in the molecular biology and genetics inspired by the discovery of DNA by Watson and Crick (1953) and in the psychological behaviorism (stimulus and response, operant conditioning) of B. F. Skinner (1904-1990). Significantly for us, the scientific study of animals characteristically ignores, if not denies outright, the individual liveliness, experience, and "subjectivity" of the animal, which are a central concern of ethics and moral consideration. 22 WAR Journal

viewed primarily as a representative of a genus or class and not as an individual living being with a life of its own. An abstract view of the animal as a "type" is necessary for universal, objective, and empirically verifiable biological knowledge. In the Home The situation described above changes significantly when the scientist or technician leaves the laboratory and goes home, where many of us encounter animals as pets. When I arrive home from a day of administration and bioethical reflection, there is Nasti, our aging black Labrador retriever. Galilean science, Skinnerian behaviorism, or moral philosophy are the farthest things from my mind. I want to know whether Nasti has been outside lately and whether he has raided the garbage bag. He is no faceless "it" or scientific model for me, but an all too familiar individual. He is lovable, difficult, and annoying, just like the other members of our household, which includes five daughters. Actually, I rarely think of Nasti explicitly in the thought frameworks of "animal" or "biology." He is simply Nasti, with whom I must live and deal, day in and day out. Nasti's importance for me is not equal to my wife's or daughters', and we often ignore him while pursuing our more immediate human interests. Nevertheless, Nasti receives similar attention and care, and he is definitely an integral member of the lively community that is our home. Moreover, there are times when Nasti and I prefer to be away from the others, whether crosscountry skiing along a river or wrestling in the grass. In short, Nasti exists for me as an individual within the framework and feeling of familial living. Encounters with domestic pets are very different from a scientist's involvements with laboratory animals. In the 2 contexts, the animals exist and matter for human beings in decidedly different ways, and the human actors are animated by dissimilar interests, feelings, and thoughts. Both the humans and the animals exist within different webs of human meanings and values. Central to the world of homes and families are the values of care, concern, and responsibility for one another; and pets fit integrally into this world. Thus, our feelings of concrete responsibility for the care of domestic pets are characteristically different than they are for laboratory animals. Animals experienced as uniquely individual and as "members" of human families have a stronger and more complex ethical importance to us; likewise, we have come to matter essentially to them. Without our family or human others to provide similar care and affection, Nasti in all probability would be unable to fend for himself. He has always, and more or less happily, lived within the walls of our home, irrespective of walks in the woods. In contrast, involvements with most laboratory animals, under the dominant umbrella of scientific meanings and values, are characteristically less personal and intimate. These animals, with the possible exceptions of certain higher mammalian individuals, matter differently and are less dependent on interactions with human others for their own individual wellbeing. They require the care and attention necessary for them to flourish as laboratory animals, not as members of human family households. In the Wild In addition to human and animal experiences of a domestic nature, encounters with animals in the wild, outside the "human city," constitute other philosophically and ethically significant experiences. These encounters are particularly important because the animals again matter differently and play, or can play, a decidedly different role in determining the terms of the human experience and the particular context or web of meanings and values. Human interests and activities become more and more attuned to animals and animate being within the natural world. This is how we culturally "civilized ones" recreate ourselves bodily, artistically, scientifically, and ethically. New vistas of human selfunderstanding derive from and are altered by the vital interplay of the human city (human cultural life) and the natural, animate world. Encounters with wild animals may occur close to home. While cooking weekend breakfasts, I look out a country kitchen window at birds around a feeder chickadees, blue jays, cardinals, woodpeckers, doves, sparrows, red-winged blackbirds, and numerous (but for me, nameless) others. I am drawn by the diverse bird species and by the antagonisms, cooperative efforts, and natively instituted pecking orders. I may in passing be provoked to think of Darwin, artists, or some ethological tract, since this is the kind of primary worldly experience that may have motivated those human explorers. Although I have enticed the birds onto the back lawn with a feeder, they come and leave on their own terms. They are familiar to me, yet are independent creatures that do not need me. My birdseed is gratis, a brief respite in their naturally rigorous lives. They are beyond my direct human responsibilities and dominantly human-centered frameworks of thought. As I peer out the window, the birds are in the world abroad, undisturbed. I am a mere spectator. I let them be. Correspondingly, I am more or less free to make of them what I will, elaborating my own web of thoughts, meanings, and values. My natural inclination to be a spectator may be transfigured, and I may be lured out-of-doors in search of other animals in wilder habitats. I may remain an amateur observer of the animal realm or imagine becoming a professional ethologist, progressing from native curiosity to scientific inquiry. In any case, this arguably is not our most richly complex and primordial human encounter with wild animals. Additional conceptions, meanings, and values are to be uncovered. Here a thinking human being stands "over against" the naturally active animals, viewing them across a divide constituted by disinterested "beholding." Something crucial to human self-understanding is missing in this example of the way animals matter to us. The human has not engaged, Volume 40, Number 1999 23

or been engaged by, the animals in a single sphere of dynamic interaction. The human individual has not radically discovered its own animality and natural mode of organic being, its primary status in the natural scheme of things. Such firsthand revelations are left to other human encounters with wild animals, for example, those in hunting and fishing, described below. Human Involvement in the Wild Each June I go fishing during a mayfly hatch on a remote pond in northern Wisconsin. Other actors in this annual event (a natural high holiday) include my daughter Inanna, red-winged blackbirds and swallows, brown trout, and the mayflies. Typically the pond is still, or a slight breeze ripples the water. It is dusk with a red-orange sun setting behind a blackening forest of evergreen trees. The air is cool, and the sounds consist only of birds and mosquitoes. A swallow leaves its perch on a dead stump in the middle of the pond and dives through the air, to be joined immediately by other birds. Inanna and I quickly row over to the birds. A host of dun-colored mayflies emerges on the water's surface. The surface is broken by a swirl, and a mayfly disappears. The dusk deepens, with only the faint light of the horizon. There are slurps of feeding trout all around us. Inanna and I cast our flies to the sounds. Occasionally there is a decent cast, and we dimly see the dry fly riding high on the water. Reacting to a swirl and a sudden, strong pull on the rod, we fight the fish in the dark, trying to keep it away from submerged logs. Sometimes we lose the fish; other times we land it a cool, smooth, fat-bellied brown trout. We throw it back or put it in the boat's live-box and, along with the blackbirds, go home, leaving the other trout to continue their feast well into the night. Several things about this human involvement in a mayfly hatch are noteworthy. First, it is the natural and animal world that importantly sets the terms of the human experience and determines reflections on its meanings and values. The concerns and preoccupations of the human city are left far behind. Second, a human being enters the realm of action as only one among several actors, and the actors are fundamentally on equal terms. All are interlocked in a single dynamic realm, involved in characteristic living activities, whether seeking prey, avoiding predators, or preparing for mating. All of this activity takes place within a community of interaction. Being a participant actor "within," rather than a spectatorobserver "without," decisively transforms the human experience. The animals are seen in a different and arguably more complex and realistic light. The swallow in this context is no mere physiological and behavioral system or scientific object, nor is it an object of disinterested curiosity. It is a living individual, an animal subject actively involved in its own world. The swallow patiently and attentively awaits the anticipated mayflies, an unwitting lookout for the parasitic human fishermen. The brown trout are wily animate others lurking in the depths, strangely beautiful, intricately patterned and colored. The mayflies bring the trout to the surface, casting their natural caution to the winds. The mayflies themselves are shapely and delicate emissaries from the (for us) mysterious insect kingdom, the focus of this complex and compelling natural drama, even while they are having their 1 day in the sun after a year as nymphs in the muddy bottom of the pond. In short, these animals are not objects of science or everyday curiosity, nor are they familiar pets. They are living, individual, and interconnected wild presences, emerging from, while remaining in, nature. By the wild otherness of the animals and our firsthand interactions with them, we vividly confront our own existence as living organisms. We are shocked back from the provinces of the human city to our place within the wider natural scheme of things. We are forced to probe radically the nature of our own organic being and to question thoughtfully the natural world and its ultimate meaning, values, and goodness why we, animals, and nature matter and matter together. Two aspects of the scene described above stand out forcibly: the dynamic interconnection or interaction of animals and their own individual liveliness or being. In the pursuit of philosophic interpretation and ethical responsibility, I want to emphasize both dynamic interconnectedness and individuality, for they bear significantly on questions of the moral status of humans, animals, and nature. Philosophic Reflections The foregoing descriptions of animal encounters in different contexts how and why animals matter involve humanly reflective interpretations as well as descriptions of ourselves, animals, and nature. The example of the mayfly hatch includes not too distant echoes of Darwinian evolutionary biology and ecology as well as nature poets and philosophers. For humans, this cultural overlay seems to be characteristic and inevitable. It is harmless if explicitly recognized for what it is. Actually it is the interaction or intermingling of our firsthand experiences and culturally influenced reflections that allows us to understand and explicitly value ourselves, animals, and nature. The philosophical reflections on animals in the wild that follow are intended to explore the question, Why, most fully, do animals matter to us? Our reflections may enable us to take a moral stance that we, both as members of the human family and as researchers, can embrace. The reflections are derived, at least in part, from the thought of Charles Darwin, Aldo Leopold, Alfred North Whitehead, and Han Jonas. Charles Darwin I have chosen to begin this philosophic exploration with the thought of Charles Darwin (as interpreted by Ernst Mayr) because, in the present era, a theory of evolutionary biology 24 ILAR Journal

and ecology must fit into any philosophy of nature that we can honestly embrace (Mayr 1991). In a nutshell, Darwin's doctrine of evolution involves the evolution of all life and organic species from a common origin via genetic and behavioral variation and natural selection. For our purposes, certain crucial aspects of Darwin's theory merit emphasis. (1) There is the, by now famous, demise of the cosmic teleology or purpose, that is grand design/designer of nature. Now our understanding is that nature evolves its own forms of order and dynamic evolutionary and ecological processes. It is ruled or governed by no one. (2) The introduction of evolutionary thought has signaled an end to Newtonian causal determinism, which rests on the hegemony of efficient causation (antecedents solely determine consequents). Our fundamental framework of thought concerning nature now is that organic events (whether genetic, organismal, or ecological) are caused by myriad factors involving multispatial and temporal scales. These major features of Darwin's thought give rise to "systems thinking," that is, the importance of complex historical contexts and the recognition that outcomes are the product of multiple systems of interactive factors. Of greater importance, for our purposes, is the fact that Darwinian biology has resulted in the end of typological or essentialist thinking as a fundamental tool for interpreting nature. We no longer have the traditional species concept of "dog," "horse," and "human being." Rather we have moved to "populational thinking" or modes of thought, which considers individual differences among organisms to have central significance. Individual organisms live and interact within interbreeding populations (as well as within the wider world). Each individual organism is genetically and phenotypically unique, different from all the others. These fundamental themes of individuality, particularity, and diversity are the backbone of the evolutionary story and likewise characterize populations, communities of organisms, ecosystems, and bioregions. Moreover, these themes are conjoined with equally fundamental ideas of the importance of historical contexts, dynamism, and contingency the direct or indirect interconnections of all forms of life in the unique "story" that is the historical evolution of life on this planet. I suspect that for many of us, the fundamental lineaments of the evolutionary, ecological account appear interpretively much closer to our experiences of mayfly hatches and other animals in the wild than to our encounters with animals in scientific laboratories. Remember that in laboratories, the individuality and particularity of animals are minimized, if not totally eclipsed, by our focus on that which is universal and common to the objects of our studies. The emphasis in laboratory animal science is characteristically on constant laws of nature and organic being that allow Newtonian thought patterns to reign over those featured by Darwin. In latoratories, something important, something that matters to us as human beings, is invariably omitted from consideration namely, the world view and message of Darwinian evolutionary, ecological nature. From a philosophic and moral perspective, we must ask the question, Is laboratory science too partial, too abstract? Conversely, we must also ask, Does a Darwinian account of organic life and systems in scientific, evolutionary, and ecological theory omit something that matters to human beings? If we regard the objects of our study as mere behavioral cogs, energy exchangers, or genetic reproducers in a natural or cosmic system, we run the risk of missing the individual animals and all that they philosophically, spiritually, and ethically connote. Where, in this frame of thought, is Nasti, our family Labrador? We now proceed onto philosophically speculative ground, which inherently and by necessity is slippery. We simply do not know final philosophic truths with certainty. However, we must continue our explorations if we want to understand, no matter how imperfectly, why we and animals matter. Let us consider the following brief discussions of 3 philosophers Aldo Leopold, Alfred North Whitehead, and Hans Jonas who boldly ventured beyond science into speculative philosophy to interpret why we, animals, and nature matter. Aldo Leopold The patron saint of modern conservation ethics (protection of the natural environment), Aldo Leopold, is famous for his land ethic and for defining the human good and bad in terms of our impact on the "integrity, stability, and beauty" of the biotic community or the land (all biotic and abiotic elements of nature, including ourselves, that are implicated in life processes). In A Sand County Almanac (Leopold 1968), Leopold explicitly embraces a Darwinian evolutionary and ecological scientific and philosophic world view and exhorts us to become "plain members and citizens" of the land, rather than the conquerors of an alien or antihuman nature. The final piece of his philosophic revolution is the recognition of the genuine subjectivity and individual liveliness of animals. Some examples are the she-wolf of Thinking Like a Mountain, predators such as bears and cougars, and less imposing sandhill cranes, grebes, woodcock, chickadees, hunting dogs, and brook trout. Leopold's philosophic revolution or conversion is perhaps most vividly expressed by his encounter with the shewolf in Thinking Like a Mountain (Leopold 1968). Leopold had been professionally involved in the Southwest in game management, specifically the eradication of predators (wolves, bears, and mountain lions) for the purpose of increasing deer populations for hunters, if not paving the way for cattle ranging. While on a mountain trip, Leopold and his companions came upon a she-wolf crossing a river to join her cubs. Following the dictates of "wise-use" game management and the "trigger-itch" of young hunters, the group shot at the wolves, killing the she-wolf. As Leopold watched the "fierce green fire" dying in the she-wolf's eyes, he was humbled. The mountain and the wolf knew something that Leopold did not, and what they knew shamed him. Predators have an ultimate significance and central role to play in evolutionary, ecological, and geological time and the ongoing Volume 40, Number 1999 25

well-being of ecosystemic nature and the humanly good life. Leopold had previously been thinking, feeling, and acting in a wrong frame of reference. He had not taken a long-range biotic, evolutionary, and ecological perspective and did not appreciate the roles that wolves and other large predators play in the overall health of specific ecosystems (keeping prey species at healthy levels, preventing the overcropping of plant resources, helping the ecosystemic whole maintain a "dynamic balance or equilibrium"). Henceforth, Leopold knew better. Two things are simultaneously happening to Leopold in this account. He is radically converted to a biotic, evolutionary, and ecological world view; and he comes to recognize the genuine individuality and subjective life of animals the fierce green fire of the she-wolf s eyes. Thus, Leopold enjoyed both a personal and "philosophic" relationship with animals that he encountered, and a similar appreciation for the wild interactive flora that is their habitat, precisely because he was convinced that all originated from and interacted in evolutionary, ecological nature that all life had a common origin and lively connections, a single historical home, which includes all. Leopold recognized a specific human difference or significance within nature; only humans could (imperfectly) comprehend the evolutionary story and be morally moved and motivated by its triumphs and tragedies. However, this difference can arise only because we share varying evolved capacities of life with all other animal and animate life. All are "commonly connected" by the very fact of life, which expresses itself and its capacities variously in its individual instances. Animals matter importantly, but their mattering to us involves both their individual liveliness and our common historical context. Meeting animals on equal terms in a common historical world is a characteristic theme of A Sand County Almanac. Alfred North Whitehead Earlier in the 20th century, Alfred North Whitehead made a similar philosophic and particularly telling move. In his classic essays "Nature Lifeless" and "Nature Alive" (Whitehead 1968), Whitehead traces the historical rise and demise of modern Galilean-Cartesian-Newtonian science a scientific world view of nature based dominantly on "superficial" common sense and sense perception (especially vision), assuming "nature at an instant" (no necessary and significant historical dimensions and interactions) and a "billiard-ballsin-motion" causal determinism and materialism. By the end of the 19th century, new scientific emphasis on electromagnetism, energetic dynamism, and field theory (the complex interconnections and interactions of all physical constituents of the world) led to what Whitehead claimed to be a "mystical chant over an unintelligible universe," a philosophical, if not scientific, dead end. Whitehead was particularly interested in what the reigning modern science and philosophy ("positivism," the claim that only empirically verifiable observations constitute knowledge) left unintelligible: the interconnections of life, thought, and nature among themselves and with fact and value, which also are experienced as interconnected. These are primary, "pre-philosophical" deliverances of our everyday human experience. In a revolt against contemporary forms of materialism and idealism, 2 Whitehead recoiled and philosophically examined intimate bodily feelings where he found "nature alive," genuine episodes of natural liveliness, characterized by "absolute self-enjoyment" (an immediate, emotional appropriation or taking account of the antecedent world), "creative activity" (the individual process of appropriation), and "aim" (the aim of becoming a uniquely individual instance of life). These bodily experiences disclose (or strongly suggest) the identity of the immediate self with the past self and with the world abroad. Our basic experience reveals the self in the world and the world in the self (mutual immanence). In mutual immanence, life, mentality, and nature are philosophically interpreted in their interconnections with antecedent fact (achievement) and immediate valuing (emotional appreciation and lively reaction). Armed with his new interpretative conceptual scheme of nature alive, Whitehead sought to make intelligible what materialist science left unexplained, if not incomprehensible. Whitehead philosophically interpreted or explained memory (the past functioning in the present); the perception both of one's body and the external world; causation (both efficient and final (effective purpose)); why we arise where and when we do (the primacy of historical context; worldly becoming; and natural, human, and cultural evolution). Moreover, Whitehead rediscovered a significant, valuable, and meaningful nature instances of life (including human and animal individuals) interconnected and aiming individually and collectively at particular worldly achievements and intensities of experience. This "democracy" of historical and "community" life imbued Whitehead with a naturalistic and cosmological spirit (aesthetic and philosophic enjoyment) and appreciation of animal and animate life akin to Leopold's, although he was characteristically more interested in human, particularly intellectual and cultural, history. In any case, the telling critique and grand synthesis of "Nature Lifeless" and "Nature Alive" are eminently worth reading (or rereading) if we want to comprehend how and why we and animals matter. Hans Jonas From quite a different mood and philosophic perspective, Hans Jonas also revolted against the hegemony of modern 2 As used here, philosophical materialism and idealism can roughly be understood as fundamental counterclaims: (1) that all of reality is at bottom physical or material (in terms of which experience or mental phenomena must be interpreted or explained); or (2) experiential, spiritual, or mental (in terms of which physical nature must be interpreted or explained). Philosophically, this is not a happy choice for those who want adequately to interpret organisms and organic life, including humans. Arguably, both materialism and idealism exclude organisms and organic life from philosophic sight and understanding. 26 ILAR Journal

materialist science. He found his way to a philosophy of organic life that philosophically, morally, and spiritually rehabilitated humans and nature and that served as a basis for envisioning important ethical responsibilities to the human and natural future (Jonas 1984). As an active Jewish participant in the humanly fateful events of the World War II, Jonas was particularly concerned with the specters of philosophic and moral nihilism, the core feature of which is the denial of all moral truth, value, and goodness. An intellectually naive and unreflective scientific materialism (mechanistic determinism) denies the freedom and efficacy of mind and annihilates all subjective agency and achievements (realized values), human and other. Jonas held that mechanistic determinism involves or implies a philosophical and ethical nihilism that silently haunts our world, undermining the legitimacy of moral, political, and civic effort and authority. However, such an uncompromising materialism leads, according to Jonas, to manifest absurdity and incoherence. Nature, Darwinian or other, is rendered absurd by implanting in us the useless illusion of purpose, circumscribed freedom, and moral responsibility for no reason. Moreover, the philosophic materialists undercut their own rational argument by denying all efficacy to mind and thought (their "epiphenominalist" thesis of mind having no causal and thus real significance). Why, Jonas asks, should we follow materialists who self-cancel their own authority? In a philosophic countermove similar to Whitehead's, Jonas denies that materialist science needs to turn philosophical and metaphysical and interpret reality according to its own partial and abstract conceptual scheme. This humanly characteristic blunder is what Whitehead (1969) termed "the fallacy of misplaced concreteness" taking the abstract or partial aspects of things for concrete reality, the fullness of things. Jonas claimed that materialist science should confine itself to pursuing objective, empirically verifiable, "causal" knowledge, which is not all we know or understand about ourselves and the world, especially the efficacy or reality of freedom and responsibility. Such intellectual circumspection or modesty gives Jonas the speculative philosophic opportunity to return to everyday experience, move (like Whitehead) beyond inherited modes of materialism and idealism, and systematically explore the "nature purposive" that is manifest in all organic, evolutionary life, including that of animals and humans. Jonas conceives that animals and humans are psychophysical individuals with common but varied forms of organic identity and living capacities (Donnelley 1995). All genuine instances of organic (especially animal) life enjoy some form of self-feeling, selfhood, "needful freedom," and active commerce with the world. All have an important value and significance for themselves, and perhaps also for others. These fundamental features of organic life are engendered and necessitated by organisms' metabolic mode of existence, their active use of the "energetic" world to be their bodily selves and to maintain their precarious mode of existence. Metabolic and organic needs and capacities link humans and animals in a single world of significant activity and achievement, with the primary goal of being (organically existing) versus not being. This primordial existential and purposive endeavor "to be," shared by humans and animals, is the ultimate concrete value of reality that serves as the ground of value and the "good in itself and needs no other justification than our emphatic recognition. We humans have ultimate ethical responsibilities to uphold nature purposive this intrinsically valuable good in itself (especially purposive human nature) with its extraordinary moral, philosophic, and spiritual dimensions. These fundamental moral responsibilities are challenged by burgeoning modern scientific and technological societies, which take little long-term heed of nature purposive. Final Reflections The foregoing brief sketches of three different but important philosophies may help us to understand why we and animals philosophically and morally matter together. These Darwinian, naturalist, organicist perspectives place laboratory animal research and its supporters in an interesting moral situation. Neither Leopold, Whitehead, nor Jonas opposes the use of animals for morally legitimate human purposes, including (presumably) scientific research. Indeed, a Darwinian evolutionary and ecological nature lends powerful support for legitimate scientific uses of animals. Life must use itself to be and to realize its various values and goodness. Metabolic and organic rules govern our worldly realm. "Good" and "evil" (harm) are intractably entwined. Yet we and animals are also inextricably bound together physically, subjectively or experientially, and morally. These three philosophers of organic nature provide us with clues to understanding why either humans and animals are, taken together, morally significant, or neither humans nor animals have any significance (the nihilistic implication of materialism and determinism). If we want to argue that laboratory animal research, which produces advances in human knowledge and benefits to both humans and animals, is a moral enterprise, then assuming we wish to live morally coherent lives we must treat laboratory animals with genuine concern, care, and respect. In short, by philosophically coming to appreciate that humans, animals, and nature are intricately interwoven in a single morally (as well as aesthetically and religiously) significant reality, we can begin to see the outlines of an overall moral outlook or perspective that comprehends or includes humans, animals, and nature (all morally matter and matter together). The task then becomes to judge and coordinate our relative obligations to humans, animals, nature, and their worldly future within this overall framework of moral thought (Donnelley 1995). In any case, we have no good reason to slip into cynical moral nihilism, to fall into the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, and to forget humans' and animals' common origin, togetherness, and significance in evolutionary, ecological nature. Holistic reflection about our interrelatedness with Volume 40, Number 1 1999 27

each other, with animals, and with nature is, understandably, absent from many of our somewhat provincial laboratory settings. Nevertheless, if we are to live morally coherent lives, we need a robust philosophy that persuasively interprets the dynamic whole in which humans, animals, and nature exist and interact. References Donnelley S. 1995. Bioethical troubles: Animal individuals and human organisms. The Hastings Center Report 25:21-29. Donnelley S, Nolan K, editors. Animals, science, and ethics. The Hastings Center Report (Spec Suppl) 21:1-32. Jonas H. 1984. The Imperative of Responsibility. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Also Donnelley S. 1989. Hans Jonas, the philosophy of nature, and the ethics of responsibility. Soc Res 56:635-657. Leopold A. 1968. Thinking like a mountain. In: A Sand County Almanac. New York: Oxford University Press, p 129-133. MayrE. 1991. One Long Argument. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. MidgleyM. 1983. Animals and Why They Matter. Athens GA: University of Georgia Press. NRC [National Research Council]. 1992. Education and Care in the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals: A Guide for Developing Research Programs. Washington DC: National Academy Press. WhiteheadAN. 1968. Modes of Thought. New York: The Free Press. Whitehead AN. 1969. Science and the Modern World. New York: The Free Press, p 51. 28 WAR Journal