I was happy this week to announce a third series of Friday Forums, and indeed a third year of life for the Good Science Project. Our first Friday Forum, on October 25th, is on the future of animal experimentation. Like all our Forums, this one will be a discussion of something close and intimate to the life scientific. And like all our Forums we will be able to step back from our busy lives for a short hour, discussing a matter of great importance to our lives as scientists, and gaining new perspectives.
The subtitle for the ‘animals’ Forum was provided by my colleague in Central Biomedical Services, Dr Anna Napolitano, who has been so helpful in setting up the meeting, finding speakers and setting the agenda. The subtitle is ‘Looking back, looking forward’ and is an excellent pointer to how the discussion might go. For in our work to ensure animal experiments are efficient in their outcomes, controlled by agreed conventions, and tied to progress in biomedicine, no doubt we should have a sense both of the history of vivisection and its projected future.
Ethics in science is always a mixture of technical fact and moral principle. With the animal model, the sense of moving forward in ethical discussion is very reliant on technical and methodological advances. Such advances are characterised by the ‘3Rs’, namely ‘replacement, reduction and refinement’, and have as their champion a campaigning organisation that promotes the very ideas we will be exploring at our Friday Forum. It is a very good thing that Imperial College now has its own, excellent website devoted to the 3Rs.
Stepping back a little, I can see that our ‘animals’ Friday Forum is a good example of how I want the Good Science Project – now in its third year – to work. I want our meetings to be properly sensitive to the daily priorities and pressures of daily science, and the things we call ‘ordinary science’. In the last two years the Project has therefore promoted a great amount of such ‘ordinary’ talk. We’ve argued about: the way technicians are important to science; the way scientists sometimes feel they have to be politically active; the way the design of laboratories matters; the problems of moving country to do your science; how your priorities change, or do not change, as you get more experienced in research. At the same time I have wanted to mix in with these quotidian matters much broader and elusive concepts: what do we mean by progress in science? What are the risks in science moving away from ‘blue-skies’ research to the high-impact variety? Can the arts and the sciences find points of contact?
In a recent blog I started to discuss a theme close to the heart of the Good Science Project. I told how our Vice-Provost, Prof Mary Ryan, had described my project as ‘ethics’. This had prompted me to go away and get clear in my mind how good science, and ethical principles, might mesh. As I described in that blog, the Good Science Project’s interest in daily science didn’t seem to match well the demands of utilitarianism, or rule-based ethics, which are the two strands of ethical argument we are most familiar with, and which typically are seen as the moral grounding of science. Instead, I asserted, it is virtue, or Greek ethics, that seems the better fit.
Can I explain this further, by looking at the subject matter of our first Friday Forum, on animals? Can I be confident that, if the Good Science Project is an exploration of ethics at Imperial College, as Mary Ryan suggested, the main philosophical tradition we should use comes not from Kant (rule-based ethics), or the Victorians (utilitarianism), but instead from classical Athens, and the work of Plato and Aristotle?
At first sight it seems likely that the ethics of the animal model will depend entirely on rule-based ethics, and on utility. For the way we describe the ongoing relevance of the animal model is clear. The results obtained from animal experiments are highly beneficial to human health and understanding. This lines up with the utilitarian idea that an act is good if it increases the sum of human happiness. And Kantian ethics are central to our understanding of the animal model too. For legislation and regulation – ‘Home office rules’ – are the basic grounding of good practice.
No doubt at our Friday Forum discussion of animal models these strands of thought will be mentioned. But it is my strong hunch that, when we have finished our conversation , and leave the Sir Alexander Fleming Building for some well-deserved weekend rest, it will be the classical Greeks, and the moral philosophy of Aristotle, that in some quiet way will be echoing in our minds.
For Aristotle, and for the tradition of virtue ethics, the point of focus must be on daily life and on the steady practice of our skills. This is no mere ‘turning of the handle’. On the contrary, for the idea of virtue to take hold, the importance is in the way we constantly enhance our skills, share our knowledge with others, see how best we can do our job, and challenge ourselves to work well. Aristotle describes this vision of virtue at length in his Ethics but for a more contemporary, and highly celebrated account, you should turn to Alasdair MacIntyre’s magisterial After Virtue, published in 1981. It’s a densely argued book, so you’ll need to take your time. It is said that MacIntyre tore up his first manuscript, and started again, after reading the highly influential text of philosophy of science, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Written by Thomas Kuhn in 1962, the book is famous for its elevation of the importance of ‘normal science’ and its suggestion that the heart of science is not its progress, but rather its daily practice. And Kuhn went so far as to suggest that if philosophers want to ‘understand’ science, it is laboratory life that matters, rather than simply its developing knowledge. In a sense then, MacIntryre’s subsequent promotion of virtue ethics owes a lot to new ideas then circulating about the life of science.
Let’s be precise. Where does virtue ethics get traction, when it comes to the animal experiment? Why might utility, and rules-based management of animals, be usefully supplemented by ideas dating back two and a half thousand years, to classical Athens?
When we gather in Room 121 SAFB, on January 25th, it is the attentiveness, and the craft knowledge, of our panellists that no doubt will be striking. They will be triangulating ideas about physiology, biochemistry, and comparative evolution and anatomy. We will hear about animal husbandry and we will hear about veterinary science. We also will hear from our Imperial experts about the regulation of experiments, and the way the value of such experiments can be discussed in public. It is great that joining us is John Meredith, head of outreach and education at Understanding Animal Research. And no doubt our audience will listen, share experience, and ask important questions. This, quite precisely, is what is meant by ‘virtue ethics’: a community, learning together over time, sharing skills, and putting priority into what is in front of us now, rather than some imagined future. Take care of the present, Aristotle would have said, and the future will take care of itself.