Does Singer Think That Animal Experimentation Is Always Wrong

Fauna experimentation

A hard issue

In 1997 Dr Jay Vacanti and his team grew an ear on the back of a mouse

Animal experiments are widely used to develop new medicines and to examination the rubber of other products.

Many of these experiments cause pain to the animals involved or reduce their quality of life in other ways.

If information technology is morally wrong to crusade animals to suffer then experimenting on animals produces serious moral problems.

Fauna experimenters are very aware of this ethical problem and admit that experiments should be made every bit humane as possible.

They besides agree that it's wrong to utilise animals if culling testing methods would produce every bit valid results.

Two positions on animal experiments

• In favour of animal experiments:
• Experimenting on animals is adequate if (and but if):
  • suffering is minimised in all experiments
  • human benefits are gained which could non exist obtained past using other methods
• Confronting animal experiments:
• Experimenting on animals is always unacceptable because:
  • it causes suffering to animals
  • the benefits to homo beings are non proven
  • any benefits to human beings that animal testing does provide could be produced in other means

Harm versus do good

The case for animal experiments is that they will produce such nifty benefits for humanity that information technology is morally acceptable to impairment a few animals.

The equivalent case against is that the level of suffering and the number of animals involved are both so high that the benefits to humanity don't provide moral justification.

The three Rs

The three Rs are a set of principles that scientists are encouraged to follow in social club to reduce the impact of inquiry on animals.

The three Rs are: Reduction, Refinement, Replacement.

• Reduction:
• Reducing the number of animals used in experiments by:
  • Improving experimental techniques
  • Improving techniques of information analysis
  • Sharing data with other researchers
• Refinement:
• Refining the experiment or the way the animals are cared for and so every bit to reduce their suffering by:
  • Using less invasive techniques
  • Better medical intendance
  • Meliorate living conditions
• Replacement:
• Replacing experiments on animals with alternative techniques such every bit:
  • Experimenting on cell cultures instead of whole animals
  • Using computer models
  • Studying human volunteers
  • Using epidemiological studies

Drug prophylactic

Animal experiments and drug safety

Scientists say that banning creature experiments would mean either

• an terminate to testing new drugs or
• using human beings for all rubber tests

Animal experiments are not used to bear witness that drugs are safe and effective in human beings - they cannot practise that. Instead, they are used to assist make up one's mind whether a particular drug should be tested on people.

Animal experiments eliminate some potential drugs as either ineffective or also dangerous to apply on man beings. If a drug passes the animal test it'southward then tested on a small human group earlier large scale clinical trials.

The pharmacologist William D H Carey demonstrated the importance of animal testing in a letter to the British Medical Periodical:

We take 4 possible new drugs to cure HIV. Drug A killed all the rats, mice and dogs. Drug B killed all the dogs and rats. Drug C killed all the mice and rats. Drug D was taken past all the animals up to huge doses with no ill outcome. Question: Which of those drugs should nosotros give to some good for you young human volunteers as the first dose to humans (all other things being equal)?

To the undecided (and not-prejudiced) the respond is, of grade, obvious. It would also be obvious to a normal 12 year erstwhile kid...

An alternative, acceptable answer would be, none of those drugs considering fifty-fifty drug D could cause impairment to humans. That is true, which is why Drug D would be given equally a single, very small dose to human volunteers nether tightly controlled and regulated conditions.

William DH Carey, BMJ 2002; 324: 236a

Are animal experiments useful?

Are beast experiments useful?

Animal experiments only benefit human beings if their results are valid and tin can exist applied to human beings.

Not all scientists are convinced that these tests are valid and useful.

...animals take not been as critical to the advancement of medicine as is typically claimed past proponents of brute experimentation.

Moreover, a keen deal of brute experimentation has been misleading and resulted in either withholding of drugs, sometimes for years, that were later found to be highly beneficial to humans, or to the release and use of drugs that, though harmless to animals, have actually contributed to human being suffering and death.

Jane Goodall 'Reason for Hope', 1999

The moral condition of the experimenters

Fauna rights extremists ofttimes portray those who experiment on animals as being so roughshod as to have forfeited whatever own moral standing.

But the argument is about whether the experiments are morally right or incorrect. The general moral character of the experimenter is irrelevant.

What is relevant is the ethical approach of the experimenter to each experiment. John P Gluck has suggested that this is frequently lacking:

The lack of ethical self-exam is common and more often than not involves the denial or avoidance of animate being suffering, resulting in the dehumanization of researchers and the upstanding degradation of their research subjects.

John P. Gluck; Ideals and Behavior, Vol. i, 1991

Gluck offers this advice for people who may need to experiment on animals:

The utilize of animals in inquiry should evolve out of a strong sense of upstanding self-examination. Ethical self-exam involves a careful self-assay of 1'southward own personal and scientific motives. Moreover, information technology requires a recognition of brute suffering and a satisfactory working through of that suffering in terms of 1's ethical values.

John P. Gluck; Ethics and Behavior, Vol. ane, 1991

Brute experiments and animal rights

The event of animal experiments is straightforward if we accept that animals have rights: if an experiment violates the rights of an animal, then it is morally wrong, considering it is wrong to violate rights.

The possible benefits to humanity of performing the experiment are completely irrelevant to the morality of the example, because rights should never be violated (except in obvious cases like self-defense force).

And as one philosopher has written, if this ways that there are some things that humanity will never be able to acquire, so be information technology.

This dour issue of deciding the morality of experimenting on animals on the basis of rights is probably why people always justify animal experiments on consequentialist grounds; past showing that the benefits to humanity justify the suffering of the animals involved.

Justifying animate being experiments

Those in favour of animal experiments say that the good washed to homo beings outweighs the harm done to animals.

This is a consequentialist statement, because it looks at the consequences of the actions under consideration.

It tin can't be used to defend all forms of experimentation since there are some forms of suffering that are probably impossible to justify even if the benefits are exceptionally valuable to humanity.

Ethical arithmetic

Animal experiments and upstanding arithmetic

The consequentialist justification of animal experimentation tin be demonstrated past comparing the moral consequences of doing or not doing an experiment.

This process can't be used in a mathematical way to help people decide upstanding questions in practice, but it does demonstrate the bug very clearly.

The bones arithmetic

If performing an experiment would cause more harm than non performing it, and then it is ethically wrong to perform that experiment.

The harm that volition event from not doing the experiment is the issue of multiplying iii things together:

• the moral value of a human being
• the number of human beings who would have benefited
• the value of the do good that each human won't go

The harm that the experiment volition cause is the issue of multiplying together:

• the moral value of an experimental animal
• the number of animals suffering in the experiment
• the negative value of the impairment done to each animal

But information technology isn't that elementary because:

• it's virtually impossible to assign a moral value to a being
• information technology'south nigh impossible to assign a value to the harm washed to each individual
• the harm that will exist washed by the experiment is known beforehand, but the benefit is unknown
• the damage done by the experiment is caused by an action, while the harm resulting from not doing information technology is caused by an omission

Certain versus potential harm

In the theoretical sum above, the damage the experiment will do to animals is weighed against the damage done to humans by not doing the experiment.

But these are two conceptually dissimilar things.

• The harm that volition be done to the animals is sure to happen if the experiment is carried out
• The damage done to human being beings past not doing the experiment is unknown considering no-i knows how likely the experiment is to succeed or what benefits it might produce if it did succeed

And then the equation is completely useless as a way of deciding whether it is ethically acceptable to perform an experiment, because until the experiment is carried out, no-1 can know the value of the do good that it produces.

And in that location's another factor missing from the equation, which is discussed in the next section.

Acts and omissions

The equation doesn't deal with the moral divergence between acts and omissions.

Almost ethicists think that we have a greater moral responsibility for the things we do than for the things we fail to exercise; i.east. that information technology is morally worse to do harm by doing something than to practise impairment by not doing something.

For case: nosotros think that the person who deliberately drowns a child has done something much more incorrect than the person who refuses to wade into a shallow pool to rescue a drowning child.

In the creature experiment context, if the experiment takes identify, the experimenter will carry out actions that harm the animals involved.

If the experiment does not take identify the experimenter will not do anything. This may crusade harm to human beings because they won't do good from a cure for their disease because the cure won't be adult.

So the acts and omissions argument could pb us to say that

• information technology is morally worse for the experimenter to impairment the animals by experimenting on them
• than it is to (potentially) harm some man beings by non doing an experiment that might find a cure for their disease.

And so if we want to continue with the arithmetic that we started in the section above, we need to put an additional, and unlike, factor on each side of the equation to deal with the different moral values of acts and omissions.

Other approaches

Other approaches to animal experiments

I author suggests that we can cut out a lot of philosophising virtually creature experiments by using this exam:

...whenever experimenters merits that their experiments are of import plenty to justify the use of animals, nosotros should ask them whether they would be prepared to utilize a encephalon-damaged human existence at a similar mental level to the animals they are planning to apply.

Peter Vocalist, Fauna Liberation, Avon, 1991

Sadly, there are a number of examples where researchers accept been prepared to experiment on human beings in ways that should non have been permitted on animals.

And another philosopher suggests that it would anyway be more effective to research on normal human beings:

Whatever benefits animal experimentation is thought to concord in store for us, those very same benefits could be obtained through experimenting on humans instead of animals. Indeed, given that problems exist because scientists must extrapolate from beast models to humans, one might recall in that location are good scientific reasons for preferring human subjects.

Justifying Creature Experimentation: The Starting Indicate, in Why Animate being Experimentation Matters: The Utilise of Animals in Medical Research, 2001

If those human subjects were normal and able to requite free and informed consent to the experiment and then this might not be morally objectionable.

Proposed European union directive

Proposed EU directive

In November 2008 the European Union put forward proposals to revise the directive for the protection of animals used in scientific experiments in line with the three R principle of replacing, reducing and refining the use of animals in experiments. The proposals have 3 aims:

• to considerably meliorate the welfare of animals used in scientific procedures
• to ensure off-white competition for industry
• to heave research activities in the Eu

The proposed directive covers all live non-human vertebrate animals intended for experiments plus certain other species likely to feel hurting, and also animals specifically bred so that their organs or tissue can be used in scientific procedures.

The main changes proposed are:

• to make it compulsory to carry out ethical reviews and require that experiments where animals are used be discipline to authorisation
• to widen the telescopic of the directive to include specific invertebrate species and foetuses in their last trimester of development and likewise larvae and other animals used in basic research, education and training to fix minimum housing and care requirements
• to require that but animals of second or older generations exist used, subject to transitional periods, to avoid taking animals from the wild and exhausting wild populations
• to country that alternatives to testing on animals must be used when available and that the number of animals used in projects be reduced to a minimum
• to crave member states to amend the breeding, accommodation and intendance measures and methods used in procedures and then as to eliminate or reduce to a minimum any possible hurting, suffering, distress or lasting harm caused to animals

The proposal also introduces a ban on the use of great apes - chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans - in scientific procedures, other than in exceptional circumstances, merely at that place is no proposal to phase out the apply of other non-human primates in the immediate foreseeable future.

Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/animals/using/experiments_1.shtml

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