Lives in the Balance: Utilitarianism and Animal Research

Wageningen Academic Publishers eBooks, 2016

This chapter addresses the question of killing animals in research, primarily from a moral perspective, but also taking into account some of the practical and scientific considerations with moral consequences in this context. We start by exploring in which situations animals are killed in research and whether these are always inevitable, analysing re-use and re-homing of animals as potential alternatives. We then discuss for whomand under what circumstances-killing matters, considering situations where there may be a conflict between the wish to avoid killing and that to avoid suffering, and further take humananimal interactions into account. We argue that, although there are relevant practical, scientific and ethical arguments favouring the euthanasia of animals in most research contexts, there is a potential for rehabilitating more animals than is currently the practice.

Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, 2006

Human beings with diminished decision-making capacities are usually thought to require greater protections from the potential harms of research than fully autonomous persons. Animal subjects of research receive lesser protections than any human beings regardless of decision-making capacity. Paradoxically, however, it is precisely animals' lack of some characteristic human capacities that is commonly invoked to justify using them for human purposes. In other words, for humans lesser capacities correspond to greater protections but for animals the opposite is true. Without explicit justification, it is not clear why or whether this should be the case. Ethics regulations guiding human subject research include principles such as respect for persons-and related duties-that are required as a matter of justice while regulations guiding animal subject research attend only to highly circumscribed considerations of welfare. Further, the regulations guiding research on animals discount any consideration of animal welfare relative to comparable human welfare. This paper explores two of the most promising justifications for these differences between the two sets of regulations. The first potential justification points to lesser moral status for animals on the basis of their lesser capacities. The second potential justification relies on a claim about the permissibility of moral partiality as found in common morality. While neither potential justification is sufficient to justify the regulatory difference as it stands, there is possible common ground between supporters of some regulatory difference and those rejecting the current difference.

Scientific American, 1997

F or the past 20 years, we have witnessed an intense but largely unproductive debate over the propriety and value of using animals in medical and scientific research, testing and education. Emotionally evocative images and simple assertions of opinion and fact are the usual fare. But we do not have to accept such low standards of exchange. Sound bites and pithy rhetoric may have their place in the fight for the public's ear, but there is always room for dispassionate analysis and solid scholarship. When it comes to animal research, there is plenty of reason for legitimate dispute. First, one has to determine what values are being brought to the table. If one believes animals should not be used simply as means to ends, that assumption greatly restricts what animal research one is willing to accept. Most people, though, believe some form of cost-benefit analysis should be performed to determine whether the use of animals is acceptable. The costs consist mainly of animal pain, distress and death, whereas the benefits include the acquisition of new knowledge and the development of new medical therapies for humans. There is considerable disagreement among scientists in judging how much pain and suffering occur in the housing and use of research animals. More attention is at last being given to assessing these questions and to finding ways of minimizing such discomfort. Developing techniques that explicitly address and eliminate animal suffering in laboratories will reduce both public and scientific uneasiness about the ways animals are used in science. At present, indications are that public attention to the animal research issue has declined somewhat; however, the level of concern among scientists, research institutions, animal-rights groups and those who regulate animal use remains high. There is also much room to challenge the benefits of animal research and much room to defend such research. In the next few pages, you will find a debate between opponents and supporters of animal research. It is followed by an article that sets out the historical, philosophical and social context of the animalresearch controversy. We leave it to you to judge the case.

Animal Sentience

In response to the seventeen commentaries to date on my target article on reducing animal suffering, I propose that the term "welfarism" (when used pejoratively by animal advocates) should be qualified as "anthropocentric welfarism" so as to leave "welfarism" simpliciter to be used in its generic sense of efforts to improve conditions for those who need it. Welfarism in this benign sense-even in its specific utilitarian form (maximizing the sum total of net welfare) with long-term future effects and effects on others (including animals) appropriately taken into account-should be unobjectionable (even if not considered sufficient by all advocates). Rights, both animal and human, should be similarly grounded in the promotion of welfare. My strategic proposal to concentrate on reducing the suffering of farm animals now has been criticized as putting human interests above those of animals and as ignoring the suffering of animals in the wild. These criticisms misunderstand my position and fail to distinguish between the short and long run or between strategy and ideal morality. My position is consistent with perfect impartiality between animals and humans at the level of ideal morality. I also respond to the extreme asymmetrical focus on reducing suffering, ignoring the moral importance of pleasure (the argument against trading off "my orgasms against others' agony"). Even mild measures for reducing animal suffering such as enlarging cage size for factory chickens and prohibiting the cutting of live eels have to be based on some interpersonal and interspecies comparisons of welfare. We must not use the philosophical uncertainty about the comparability or the very existence of animal sentience to diminish our efforts to protect animal welfare.

Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 2009

Do not judge this book by its cover. Richard Haynes's remarkably well-researched, philosophically reflective, and thought-provoking book is by no means a discussion of animal welfare alone, welfare conventionally meaning the pursuit of reforms in the way animals are now treated, rather than animal rights advocacy, which focuses on the abolition of using nonhuman animals for human ends (although the concept of animal rights is a complicated matter, as this book demonstrates). Haynes suggests that a more integrity-laden definition of animal welfare, freed from the prejudicially vested interests of scientific and commercial organizations, entities and individuals that control the defining of what constitutes animal welfare, as well as its moral legitimacy as currently ''practiced'' in laboratories and agriculture, would fall far closer to a rights (or abolitionist) position than what now passes for animal welfare. Haynes argues that the ''animal welfare science community'' has ''illegitimately appropriated the concept of animal welfare'' and created the assumption in the public mind that it is ''ethically acceptable'' to use animals in agriculture and scientific research, even though the animals thus utilized all too frequently suffer tortured lives and deaths. Haynes tackles emotionally charged issues, but while admitting that he is in the abolitionist camp, his approach is dispassionate, philosophically comprehensive, and impressively meticulous. The author has gone to great lengths to inform readers of the origins and history of animal welfare activities in both England and the United States, and in so doing makes a persuasive case that laboratory animal 1 scientists have historically and unjustifiably ''responded to critics of their use of animals by claiming to have a more

I offer some reasons for the theory that, compared with human beings, non-human animals have some but lesser intrinsic value. On the basis of this theory, I ®rst argue that we do not know how to compare an animal's claim to be free from a more serious type of harm (e.g., death), and a human's claim to be free from some lesser type of harm (e.g., non-fatal morbidity). For we need to take account of these parties' intrinsic value, and their competing types of claim. Yet, there exists no known way for making such comparison, when a human's intrinsic value is higher than that of an animal, whereas the type of claim an animal has is morally weightier than the type of claim a human has. Second, I explain why utilitarianism is unhelpful in making such comparison. Third, in the case where some animals can be sacri®ced for saving a larger number of humans, it is crucial to ask whether animals have the right to life, and I argue that this question is more perplexing than we might think. My conclusion is that the various dif®culties mentioned above have a deeper source than we have so far acknowledged, and that this re¯ects that the moral reality is less tidy and more complex than many theories portray.

2015

This paper is a brief summary of a report by the working group of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, which offers a new assessment of whether animal experiments can be justified morally. The Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics was founded in 2006 to pioneer ethical perspectives on animals through academic teaching, research, and publication. The centre is independent, and is not under the aegis, control, or sanction of the University of Oxford. The centre comprises an international fellowship of more than ninety academics drawn from the sciences and the humanities, and more than one hundred academic advisers.

Between the Species: An Online Journal for the Study of Philosophy and Animals, 1991

humane benefits that flow from it cannot outweigh the suffering of a rat" (214). Some activists have questioned the sincerity of this humanitarian appeal. In his classic study on vivisection, Victims ofScience, Richard Ryder observes: Those with genuinely humane motives are most likely to prolong life or alleviate suffering by bringing existing medical knowledge to bear in those parts of the world where men and women are suffering and dying because they cannot afford any treatment Yet many scientists prefer Animal rights activists are often accused of showing to spend their lives in laboratories causing untold more concern for animals than for human beings. How, suffering to animals in questionable medical it is asked, can activists condemn the use of animals in research with a slrong commercial motive; these research that might eventually provide a cure for cancer, researchers are not convincing when they plead AIDS, muscular dystrophy, or diabetes? C. R. Gallistel that hwnanity is their overriding concern (22). speaks for many critics of the animal liberation movement when he writes: Ryder's point is that health care professionals have a choice between applying their knowledge and skills in It is an affront to my own ethical sensibility to laboratory research or devoting themselves instead to hear arguments that the suffering of animals is providing basic medical care to the poor. The first of greater moral weight than the advancement choice involves inflicting untold suffering and death of human understanding and the consequent upon any number of animals in research which may alleviation of human suffering (214). never yield beneficial medical results. The second choice involves helping people directly without any Gallistel's appeal to the humanity of the scientific harm coming to animals. It is this second choice, Ryder enterprise is not uncommon among apologists for urges, that is the truly humane one. 1 vivisection. The argument is that animal research is an indispensable tool in the treatment of disease and, consequently, to condemn such research, as activists do, is to condemn indefmitely many people to misery and death. One should accept restrictions on animal research, PHILOSOPHY Gallistel insists, "only ifone believes that the moral value of.. .scientific knowledge and of the many human and Between the Species 90 Spring 1991

EMBO reports, 2007

I offer some reasons for the theory that, compared with human beings, non-human animals have some but lesser intrinsic value. On the basis of this theory, I ®rst argue that we do not know how to compare an animal's claim to be free from a more serious type of harm (e.g., death), and a human's claim to be free from some lesser type of harm (e.g., non-fatal morbidity). For we need to take account of these parties' intrinsic value, and their competing types of claim. Yet, there exists no known way for making such comparison, when a human's intrinsic value is higher than that of an animal, whereas the type of claim an animal has is morally weightier than the type of claim a human has. Second, I explain why utilitarianism is unhelpful in making such comparison. Third, in the case where some animals can be sacri®ced for saving a larger number of humans, it is crucial to ask whether animals have the right to life, and I argue that this question is more perplexing than we might think. My conclusion is that the various dif®culties mentioned above have a deeper source than we have so far acknowledged, and that this re¯ects that the moral reality is less tidy and more complex than many theories portray.