Alas, your conclusion is useless. The clauses “moral status” and “moral community” and “concerns suffering” are undefined and entail nothing with respect to behavior, the only thing morality “concerns.”

What you want is to generate an imperative proposition that supersedes all other imperative propositions (there has to be some “you ought to do [x]” directive at the end of this).

If you want to see how that looks in syllogism form, see my peer-reviewed chapter on moral theory in The End of Christianity, at the end of which is a complete valid syllogism, of the kind of you trying to build.

That won’t help get to your conclusion, though. Because merely “experiencing suffering” or “having moral status” does not dictate just any moral proposition. You still have to derive what is then dictated by that state of affairs.

For example, in this debate I explain how the status of animals as capable of suffering does entail moral dictates; just not the ones you might desire. That is why it is not useful to derive the conclusion that “animals have moral status.” That statement tells us nothing about what that moral status is, or what it entails vis-a-vis behavior.

So you still have to engage with my arguments in this debate—at least, if you want to get to any proposition about how we should behave toward animals. Because, even if you gave coherent and workable definitions to your syllogism’s undefined terms, its conclusion still doesn’t get you to any such result (it dictates nothing about behavior).

I concur with your first point. Fanatics on every spectrum (liberals in general, conservatives in general, animal rights advocates in particular) tend to undermine their own goals by painting a picture so divorced from reality no one has any reason to parse out what they are saying that is still valid. Thus it all gets dismissed as far-fetched noise. If they wanted to make headway, they should stick to calm and accurate and nuanced descriptions of reality, and sensible, achievable, empirically validated stepwise plans to fixing it.

I also think virtue ethics is a better approach than deontological (I of course think they are all the same thing, really; but differ in framing, and your framing is the correct direction here, IMO).

I’m glad that we’re on the same page with the point that just because it is almost certainly incoherent to treat animals like they are morally identical to humans it does not then follow that robust animal rights aren’t ethically supported. What I find frustrating about the debates around animal rights is that you have folks like the PETA fanatics making points that are just stated as bald assertions that I suspect may have some truth to them, but the people who are not either animal rights fanatics or blithely dismissive of caring about humane treatment don’t seem (in my experience at least) to be figuring out if these claims are true. Like, for example, is there a correlation between patriarchal social systems and the widespread abuse of animals? This is a common vegan-vegetarian position, but I’ve seen the support for it being extremely poor, and yet I do think it is plausible that there may be some correlation. I suspect quite strongly that a society that cultivates a cruelly exploitative, amorally utilitarian perspective of the world is going to exploit both animals and people, and that fights for animal rights end up exposing the same kind of reasoning that leads to the exploitation of people. I suspect there are a host of harms to allowing the exploitation of animals without strict limits and a clear need for a pressing cause. Dr. Bali seems to be going a deontological direction, but I hope he makes an argument from virtue ethics, because what I suspect is going on (though this needs to be determined by actual evidence) is that when we mistreat animals it prevents the development of the kinds of virtues that let us care about the cessation of pain. As a Buddhist, I have definitely found that being attentive to the way I treat animals (even if I will ultimately swat a fly) helps me be more compassionate to people too.

As for the rules needing to be enforced: I agree. In fact, even if the rules end up being far more draconian than I imagine you would support, it would still be critical for those rules to be articulated, and supported evidentially, and properly enforced. This is one of those cases where I think that one of the ways the extremists are harming their own cause is by making it harder for relevant actors to actually spend the time to investigate, publish and then enforce rules. In any case, there not being any rules at present is obviously no argument for outright total prohibition. I am by no means a reformist by default, but here I think that it is quite likely that a reformist agenda is at the minimum the best way to start. Frankly, I also doubt that prohibitions on animal experimentation would ever wholly work and would ever be enforced with any vigor, whereas I do think it is politically realistic to imagine enforcement of strict but not totally-prohibitive standards.

#1 and #2: I would say that these points remove a bulk of examples, but not all of them. So it’s more a call to cull excess and focus on actually pertinent, well-formulated examples; and then, presumably, adjust the conclusion advocated to correspond to this now more-qualified position that results. But it is up to Bali’s response to see how he responds to these issues.

#3 and #4: This is what I hope to get to eventually. I didn’t have word count to move to what I think we should be talking about, which is what relation animal cognition has to our assessment of what constitutes harms and relative degrees of harm, and thus taking into account why we even do animal experimentation in the first place, and thus what the differential costs are of doing it or not doing it. I understand he wants to make a deontological argument of some kind, e.g. we don’t think we can just experiment on humans without their consent—utility be damned—and animals can’t consent, ergo why shouldn’t our human ethic apply to animals? There is much to be said there. But we have to clear the baffles of these fundamentals first. There is a reason we weight the value of consent in humans so much; and we need to get to what that is, before we can analyze whether that analogy even makes sense.

But as to the suggestion that “few ethical guidelines are properly enforced and practiced,” I see that asserted a lot, but rarely in evidence; but the matter is moot to the debate because the same can be said of every human profession—and the correct response to that is not banning all professions, but cracking down on our ethical pursuit of them. So even if it were the case that “few ethical guidelines are properly enforced and practiced,” then we should be debating how to get them properly enforced and practiced, not abandoning the entire enterprise. As is the case in every other occupation that exists. The solution to bad government is better government; not no government. But that’s not the debate we are having at present.

I don’t know if I think that #2 is entirely correct, though perhaps Dr. Bali will expand and show that you are making a fair criticism. I do think that the list of kinds of harm is more emotionally manipulative than is necessary in this context since it is actually ancillary to the core question.

Regarding your #3, I would submit that we as a society do benefit from treating sentient beings with at least some of the same framework we do humans. With that in mind, I do think Dr. Bali may have a point. But I do think you are right to say that treating animals as morally identical rather than broadly morally equal is incoherent. Animals don’t want what we do. If we were to treat them like people, even very unusual people, we would not be acting in their best interest or ours.

To argue a fortiori for Paul on point #4, I would say that perhaps what is missing is something like a just war theory to continue the war analogy you make, or Constitutional rights limiting state power in the murderer analogy. That is, perhaps the argument being made is that animal experimentation has so few ethical guidelines that are properly enforced and practiced that it is like there are no limits whatsoever. I don’t know if this is actually a case that can be made, but perhaps it hyperbolically points to a real lack of the field having a truly evidence-rooted bioethic that minimizes harming sentient beings except insofar as it is absolutely necessary. (So, you know, not cosmetics).

What I found remarkable was that Dr. Bali didn’t even seem to state his actual position. Does he actually think that there would never be a case to engage in animal experimentation of any kind?