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"The question is not, "Can they reason?" nor, "Can they talk?" but "Can they suffer?”" ― Jeremy Bentham, The Principles of Morals and Legislation

Animal Ethics

Figure 1: A laboratorie rat.

Experimenting on animals goes back to the 4^th and 3^rd centuries BCE and the attitude towards animal rights has shifted quite many times. The issue then, is the same as today. Can experimenting on animals reach a universal ethical justification or do we have to rely on particularism? What kind of rights should animal have? Choosing the universalistic approach means that we will have to provide some arguments that cannot be refuted, and make sure that these arguments could be applied to all situations at all times and at any place. The particularistic approach gives every single situation its "own" ethical code. That means that what is right in situation A, can be wrong in situation B. At first sight this seems as the most natural intuition, but digging just a bit deeper shows that its consequences is too radical and the boundaries between right and wrong becomes blurred. Through history many philosophers have joined the debate about animal rights.

The first philosophical rationalist, Renè Descartes (1596-1650), was certain that animals were mere machines without souls and therefor had no rights at all. They cannot feel pain and when they scream it is to be compared with the sound it makes when one breaks a stick or throws a stone into the water. Reference: Rene Descartes, Meditationer over den første filosofi. Publisher: Det Lille Forlag 1. edition, published 19.04.2002. Hundred years later one of the first proponents of animal rights came along, Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). Reference: Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (General Historical Collections). Publisher: British Library, Historical Print Editions. Published 25.03.2011
ISBN-13: 9781241475611 Jeremy Bentham was utilitarian UtilitarianismFrom the utilitarian point of view, an action is ethical correct if the outcome produces the highest possible amount of happiness overall. and meant that the most important criterion for having rights should be the ability to feel pain, and therefor the wellbeing of animals should also be considered. How to measure happiness though is still a huge challenge for utilitarians.

Now that the two opposite philosophical positions concerning animal rights have been sketched up lets focus the attention on the present ethical approach. Today, the general argument for justifying experimenting on animals is that, opposite humans, non-human beings do not have the experience of the past and they do not expect their future. But that is problematic. Because if that is the criterions, then why should we not experiment on brain-dead humans or infants? An argument could also be that because we are able to control these animals, they are less worth than humans and therefor they can serve as tools for us. This straightforward argument is also extremely conflicting with our view on our selves as caring, reasonable beings. There is no bulletproof argument for why it is okay to decide that some animals are born in a laboratory, enduring experiments their whole lifespan and at the end get killed. The debate on experimenting on animals is not in any way an easy ethical discussion. Fortunately there has, from scientific integrity, sprung an initiative to find a middle ground. It is called the 3Rs; refinement, reduction and replacement. The Three Rs are a set of ethical guidelines for use of animals in testing. These were first described by W.M.S. Russell and R.L. Burch in 1959.

Refinement refers to methods that minimizes pain, or distress, and enhance animal welfare for the animals used.
Reduction refers to methods that enable scientists to obtain comparable levels of information from fewer animals, or to obtain more information from the same number of animals.
Replacement refers to the preferred use of non-animal methods over animal methods whenever it is possible to achieve the same scientific aims. Reference: (Link)

Even though the 3Rs is widely accepted and the use of dogs, pigs, primates, cats etc. are decreasing, the overall use of animals in experiments are increasing. This is caused by an escalating use of mice and GM-animals. Experiments are being done to 100 million vertebrates annually according to British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection, Reference: Cruelty Free International, (Link) and it does not count invertebrates like shrimps and flies, nor does it count animals bred for research and then killed as surplus.

One can only hope that the success of this project, PAST, really can support the process towards lesser animals in laboratories.

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Animal Ethics