The Daily Pennsylvanian :: Martin Seligman | Data that opens countless doors (Counterpoint)

I gave up animal research more than thirty years ago, and I have not done research with dogs for forty years. I have thought a great deal, however, about when scientific animal research is justified and when it is not. Here is my own history about the ethical dilemma I faced doing learned helplessness experiments in animals.

I arrived at Penn as a graduate student in psychology in 1964, when Richard Solomon's laboratory was doing experiments with electric shocks and dogs. Dogs that received 64 brief inescapable shocks became passive, and this seemed to me a likely model of human helplessness and depression.

As excited as I was by the possibilities of this discovery, I was dejected about something else.

Could I work in a laboratory that gave shocks to perfectly innocent animals? I have always been an animal lover, particularly a dog lover, so the prospect of causing pain - if only minor and temporary pain - was very distasteful. I shared my doubts with one of my philosophy teachers (who went on to become one of the world's leading philosophers), Robert Nozick.

"I've seen something in the lab that might be the beginning of understanding helplessness," I started out. "No one has ever investigated helplessness before, yet I'm not sure I can pursue it, because I don't think it's right to give shocks to dogs. Even if it's not wrong, it's repulsive."

"Marty," Bob asked, "do you have any other way of cracking the problem of helplessness?" It was clear to both of us that case histories of patients were a scientific dead end. It was equally clear that only well controlled experiments could isolate cause and discover cure. Further, there was no way I could ethically give shock to human beings. This seemed to leave only experiments with animals.

"Is it ever justified," I asked, "to inflict pain on any creature?" Bob reminded me that most human beings, as well as household pets, are alive today because animal experiments were carried out. Without them, he asserted, polio would still be rampant and smallpox widespread.

"Let me ask you one thing about what you propose to do," Bob said finally. "Is there a substantial chance that you will eliminate much more pain in the long run than the pain you cause in the short run?"

My answer was "yes."

Some now claim that the learned helplessness experiments were unnecessary. "Couldn't we have figured out all this obvious stuff without inflicting suffering on laboratory animals?

This claim is completely wrong.

Nothing was obvious then. It is enormously ironic to hear all this called "obvious" now, when almost no investigators, except the Penn lab, thought this was helplessness (learned "helplessness" is still found in skeptical quotation marks in some textbooks).

Almost no one thought that it was even remotely related to depression - this only seems obvious in hindsight after many people did the careful science to discover what was going on. Here are the questions that took scores of scientists around the world years to find out.

Does trauma produce passivity or is it the inescapability of the trauma?

Is this inescapability the crux of human depression?

Could this knowledge be used to cure and prevent human depression?

First we found that the identical shocks under the control of the animal did not produce passivity. So the culprit in depression was not trauma, as most people believed, but uncontrollability.

But was this really depression?

That required a decade of research in many laboratories to find out if the symptoms of depression (passivity, cognitive retardation, sadness, loss of appetite) were identical to the symptoms of learned helplessness and then to find out if the brain chemistry of depression in humans was the same as the brain chemistry of learned helplessness. It turned out that it was.

Most importantly, knowing that uncontrollability rather than trauma is the crux of depression has led to the relief of depression (and the prevention of suicide) in hundreds of thousands of human beings.

Treating depression by teaching patients how to better control major events is at the heart of successful behavior therapy. Treating depression by teaching patients to challenge unwarranted beliefs about helplessness is at the heart of successful cognitive therapy. Using the medications that break up learned helplessness in animals is at the heart of the successful biological therapies for depression.

Forty years ago, several dozen dogs got 64 brief shocks that were moderately painful. From the knowledge that was gained, depression was relieved for hundreds of thousands of people. Inflicting pain on animals or humans in medical experiments can only be justified if it is likely that the knowledge gained will eliminate vastly more suffering.

This is what I believed then, and what I still believe today.

Martin Seligman is a professor of psychology and Director of the Positive Pscyhology Center. He is also the father of an SP news editor. His e-mail is seligman@psych.upenn.edu.

Comments (4)

Jolt 0 Jesus 1

Sorry, Holy Jesus, but Jolt is right: Seligman is using argument by assertion. He did not arrive at his position through reasoned argument but rather through an assertion that it is wrong to experiment on humans. It does not follow from this that it is right to experiment on animals. It is also the case that there is no foundation (no referent, no first reason) for ethics, other than feelings. As Jesus, however, you may prefer to believe that you provide the foundation for ethics. Since your existence cannot be proven through reason but rather through, as Kierkegaard argued, a leap of faith, you cannot serve as the logical foundation of ethics. Last but not least, you have also acquired the uneducated habit of arguing by assertion and worse still, of the even more flawed (but increasingly common) tactic of arguing ad hominem (attacking the person rather than reasoning through the person's ideas). To get a sense of how flawed the process of reasoning is, you might read some of the pro-slavery tracts: you'll find the resemblance between Seligman's position and the pro-slavery position interchangeable. That said, I appreciate how threatening it is for us to face the reality that something we are doing to benefit ourselves and others like us is in fact immoral and indeed reprehensible.

[QUOTE id="14c0e7ae-c331-407a-b71d-62b5d8504a4d"]The author shows a marked incapacity for logical/ethical reasoning. That's because there is ethical reasoning that will justify the administration of torture to any being. Dr. Seligman's reasoning is this: it would be unethical to give electric shocks to people; therefore he must give them to animals. That's called argument by assertion, not logic, not ethics. A person with such limited powers of reasoning should not be in a college classroom, much less allowed to inflict cruel and unusual punishments on other living beings. Depression hasn't been cured. It's rampant. In fact, it's more widespread now than when Dr. Seligman was doing his experiments on learned helplessness. It always seems that these pro-torture scientists are innocent of their colleagues' work on other species -- you know, those scientists who have been "discovering" (centuries behind cultures that have been able to live interdependently with other beings) that "animals" have language, creativity, culture, emotions, social relations. A dog can learn up to 600 human words; a human cannot learn a snippet of dog language: go figure. Should they be doing experiments on us? All the old "scientific" arguments supporting animal torture for human benefit have been discredited. It's gotten down to the point where now we just have to say we do it because we can and because we get grant money, etc., for such ugliness. Science has not brought us progress. We have terribly sick, frail elderly people who outlive their own health and put us in a new horrible dilemma of what to do with them. We live in an era of diseases and viruses that are out of control; we have to fear eating a tomato or jalapeno pepper. HIV, arian flu, mad cow, anthrax: this is what science has brought us: weapons of mass and individual destruction. Environmental destruction. Drug addiction. Yes, science "cured" polio, but it brought us a whole lot worse. Not only that, but polio is back! And thanks to the inventions of science, we have an immensely obese nation (and world), we are wiping out the environment, and we are killing everything in our paths. The polio cure is a smokescreen. No one should torture others for any reason. There are marks of civilization that are higher than experiments on potential cures for diseases. You felt badly as a graduate student because you were doing wrong. Ethics, as the philosophers will tell you, stems from an emotional intelligence: a bad feeling. You ran to someone else to help distract you from those bad feelings, and now you try to justify them, retroactively, with some specious nonsense about how they contributed to a cure for depression. How depressing. Do the right thing, Professor Seligman. Dissuade others from engaging in acts of torture. Set aside the myth of scientific progress for a couple of minutes and consider the ideal of ethical progress, which will cure some real evils in this world.[/QUOTE] You're reasoning is tortuous and flawed on a number of levels. You don't know what "argument by assertion" means. If someone believes it's wrong to experiment on humans, then he will experiment on something that isn't human. That's quite logical. Though one may disagree as to whether that's ethical, it obviously shows a person has undertaken ethical considerations. Stop talking about whether this man should be allowed in the classroom. He expresses himself well and articulately. You're an incoherent, ignorant heckler. Science is bad? You might as well say studying and knowing things is bad. The result is someone like you, who takes pride in not knowing what he's talking about. Education, learning, and understanding the world are not bad things. The ways in which technology can be used can be bad. That's not to say all science itself, upon which such technology is based, is inherently bad. His study wasn't for the express purpose of ending all depression immediately for all time, so you can't fault him for not doing so. Also, the long list of diseases you mentioned were NOT brought to us by science, so I don't know why you're saying that. Foods and vegetables are not any more dangerous today than they were in other times, so you're wrong there too. Environmental policies in the first world are CLEANER and MORE STRINGENT today than in the 1970's. Not all philosophers would agree about the foundation of ethics, nor that it is based purely on empathy. Your entire post is just a series of non sequiturs and statements which are either blatantly factually untrue or reveal that you have no idea what you're talking about. It's like you're trying to sound like a stereotypical sheltered, ignorant hippie who's running around screaming, "the sky is falling, western civilization and science are bad! We're all gonna die unless we change our evil ways by renouncing the modern world!"

The author shows a marked incapacity for logical/ethical reasoning. That's because there is ethical reasoning that will justify the administration of torture to any being. Dr. Seligman's reasoning is this: it would be unethical to give electric shocks to people; therefore he must give them to animals. That's called argument by assertion, not logic, not ethics. A person with such limited powers of reasoning should not be in a college classroom, much less allowed to inflict cruel and unusual punishments on other living beings. Depression hasn't been cured. It's rampant. In fact, it's more widespread now than when Dr. Seligman was doing his experiments on learned helplessness. It always seems that these pro-torture scientists are innocent of their colleagues' work on other species -- you know, those scientists who have been "discovering" (centuries behind cultures that have been able to live interdependently with other beings) that "animals" have language, creativity, culture, emotions, social relations. A dog can learn up to 600 human words; a human cannot learn a snippet of dog language: go figure. Should they be doing experiments on us? All the old "scientific" arguments supporting animal torture for human benefit have been discredited. It's gotten down to the point where now we just have to say we do it because we can and because we get grant money, etc., for such ugliness. Science has not brought us progress. We have terribly sick, frail elderly people who outlive their own health and put us in a new horrible dilemma of what to do with them. We live in an era of diseases and viruses that are out of control; we have to fear eating a tomato or jalapeno pepper. HIV, arian flu, mad cow, anthrax: this is what science has brought us: weapons of mass and individual destruction. Environmental destruction. Drug addiction. Yes, science "cured" polio, but it brought us a whole lot worse. Not only that, but polio is back! And thanks to the inventions of science, we have an immensely obese nation (and world), we are wiping out the environment, and we are killing everything in our paths. The polio cure is a smokescreen. No one should torture others for any reason. There are marks of civilization that are higher than experiments on potential cures for diseases. You felt badly as a graduate student because you were doing wrong. Ethics, as the philosophers will tell you, stems from an emotional intelligence: a bad feeling. You ran to someone else to help distract you from those bad feelings, and now you try to justify them, retroactively, with some specious nonsense about how they contributed to a cure for depression. How depressing. Do the right thing, Professor Seligman. Dissuade others from engaging in acts of torture. Set aside the myth of scientific progress for a couple of minutes and consider the ideal of ethical progress, which will cure some real evils in this world.

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