I am a little sketchy about putting ethical behavior on a spectrum. I think there are grey areas, but the grey areas are only because there is doubt or controversy about whether the behavior crosses the line or not.

If we reason that these extreme animal rights folks cross the line, then focussing on the behavior, these folks are no better than a Timothy McVeigh. I think if you cross the line to harm a few scientists, then you might as well make you sick arguements in favor of a massacre. The only difference is the level of retribution you owe in the end. But that’s a post-crime issue for experts in justice. What we are talking about is a pre-crime rationalization of a particular behavior and whether or not it crosses the line.

That society treats different crimes differently is simply a matter of bureaucratic convenience and political priorities. Just because society wants to focus on the big massacres to contain damages doesn’t mean that one crime is lesser or worse from an ethical standpoint. The “good” or “bad” decisions we make individually have no berring on how a society tries to manage them in the larger picture.

The first is that it’s less an absolute distinction and more a continuum that follows when you abandon the proposition that you have any obligation to persuade other people that you’re right and they’re wrong, or any need to submit your views to some kind of procedural operations that include people who do not share your views. Once you’re absolutely convinced that your views of a situation are non-debately correct, and that your views are imbued with an absolute morality, then the only limits to the action you undertake is either instrumental (e.g., what will further your ends), practical (e.g., what is it that I can actually accomplish) or some peculiar “cultural” limitation. (Say, deciding that you will only strike violently at individuals because you see what you’re doing as a personal duel between you and some other individual.)

If putting a molotov cocktail at the doorstep of a primatologist is seen as effective, then why not blow up the whole primatology lab? That would work just as well, and surely everyone who works within such a lab, even the administrative staff, shares in proximate guilt if you accept the proposition that the lab is a torture chamber. Why not blow up the administrative center of the university that funds the lab? Surely they know what’s being done in the lab. Once you cross a certain line, the only thing keeping a group or individual from moving to “I’ll kill everyone in the vicinity” is an inability to do so, a fear of retaliation if one does so, or a belief that smaller acts of violence are more effective. The last actually strikes me as oddly inconsistent: if violently threatening a single researcher works so well, why not scare the hell out of everyone even vaguely associated with such a research program? Why observe any moral limits, if you believe in the absolute moral correctness of your cause, and disbelieve completely in the proposition that anyone else might have any legitimate objections to your cause?

And of course some animal rights extremists *have* moved on to small-scale McVeighisms, with arson attacks on facilities and residential properties. Any time you start burning things down or blowing them up, you’re showing a certain indifference to who might get killed or wounded as a result of your action. SHAC’s campaign against Huntingdon Life Science is pretty explicit: anybody even slightly connected to Huntingdon is a legitimate target for direct action, including arson.

And I strongly disagree with any law that would forbid protesting or “economicly disrupting” research on primates. I think the protesters are wrong–but when most people think I’m wrong, I want to be able to protest peacefully. It’s perfectly right to forbid acts (arson, vandalism, etc)–but it is an extremely dangerous idea, in my eyes, to forbid expressive acts for unpopular opinions, but not for popular opinions.

McVeigh is in the third category.

Some (but very few) animal rights activists, and some (but very few) anti-abortion activists, are in the second category.

Most of the hard core of activists on both issues, though, are in the first category.

The second category makes sense to me–internally; that is, I can see Paul Hill as wrong, but not crazy. If you believe that using force to stop murder is OK, and you believe that vivisection (or abortion) is murder with torture, killing someone to stop them from it seems reasonable.

Radical animal rights activists (and I would add that category contains a range of approaches and ethical stances within it, but I’ll focus here on the more extreme versions that would engage in or endorse these campaigns of intimidation and violence) are essentially fundamentalists, and as such are less interested in philosophical coherence (though their ideas are more internally coherent, if simplitically so, than you paint them to be) than in purity. I would think, however, that even if we believe their actions and the actions of other fundamentialist groups, such as radical anti-abortion activists, to be unacceptable, we can also imagine a social evil that state and majority-society allowed to exist, say slavery, where reasoned debate and appeal to properly constituted bodies might not seem like enough.

By the way, re virologista’s comment, like most vegetarians and folks commited to animal rights, I try and do the best I can in this world, minimize my part in animal-killing industries and make choices about how I consume animal products, but recognize that these are never pure choices and that I may not always make the best or most informed ones. Radical animal rightsers may in fact have no answer for you on medicine, short of letting nature take it’s course or pursuing home health care, but I have run into several examples, particularly in the zine world, of folks, including those who are very ill, wrestling with whether to take animal derived drugs or treatments (the provenance of testing usually being another opaque level beyond this) and making decisions both to refuse as well as to grudgingly accept.

A mean-spirited part of me wishes that members of these groups would carry their beliefs so far as to refuse to personally take advantage of drugs or surgical procedures tested on animals. Granted there aren’t many alternatives…but they could start a market for that.

And thanks for the excellent post–much more cogently written than many scientists’ arguments, alas.