benio
who I am
I obtained my degree in Philosophy at the university of Rome 2 Tor Vergata.
My work was on the theory of animal automatism, as was conceived by René Descartes, and on its refutation in French philosophy of the 17th and 18th centuries by Descartes' opponents; I especially focused on materialist thinkers such as La Mettrie and Diderot. In 2005, I produced a summary of this work for the Estivales de la Question Animale, a militant annual meeting in France; this summary has been published in the journal Les Cahiers Antispécistes and can be found here (in French).
I am co-founder of the Web journal Liberazioni, which explores the connections between the human and not-human emancipatory movements (from revolutionary marxism to animal liberation, from radical feminism to antipsychiatry, from homosexual critique to ecology).
I am currently studying the animal question from a marxist and feminist point of view; I explained some of my conclusions in the 2007 edition of the Estivales with a contribution entitled “L'antispécisme est-il métaphysique?”.
In recent years, I have been studying the history and theory of experimental medicine in order to propose an alternative approach to the issue of animal experimentation in scientific research. I wrote several articles in French, Italian and English, and contributed to conferences in France and Germany to explain my approach.
The so-called scientific approach to vivisection claims that animal experiments are completely unreliable and that they are de facto a scientific fraud which has delayed the progress of “good science” throughout the centuries.
Here are the dangerous consequences of this approach:
- Historical evidence on progress of Western medicine has been misrepresented in order to prove that animal tests are useless.
- Animal rights activists' ethical opinions have been belittled (as subjective, relative, useless for the struggle for animals' rights) and replaced by a pseudo-scientific belief; activists have taken up this belief not through rational assent (since they usually don't possess the necessary technical background) but through an act of faith towards those who propound it. This means they have been persuaded exactly the same way common people are constantly being persuaded of the necessity of animal experiments for medicine's advancement: through authority.
- The bio-political problem of ethics in experimental research has been hidden by the simplified scheme “good science” (= without animal tests) vs. “bad science” (= using animals): the issue has been formulated as purely a matter of the production of statements of truth, hence excluding from the discussion the complicated relation between science and society and, most of all, ignoring that experimental medicine, as such, cannot but make use of living subjects.
I propose, as an alternative point of view, to approach animal and human experimentation in medical research as a bio-political problem:
1. given that experimental medicine is a device aimed at producing knowledge about living beings through the manipulation of living bodies in laboratory experiments;
2. given that the choice of experimental subjects is not neutral from an ethical point of view, since it follows social categories of exclusion (non-human animals, prisoners, death convicts, mentally diseased, poor people) to the dominating classes' advantage (= health);
3. the first aim of the struggle against animal (and human) experimentation must be to show this contradiction, in order to raise social consciousness about those who are sacrificed in laboratory experiments and to promote public discussion about the ethical costs of medical research.