Team:SDU-Denmark/Tour22
Our P. A. S. T. project aims for a cheap and specific way of targeting of peptide aptamers using E. Coli bacteria instead of animal subjects. This means that E. Coli bacteria can replace the animals that normally would be used for this purpose. It is not only a layman’s feeling that opposes experimenting on animal, but also from within the sciences there is a search for alternatives to animals. This implies that even the scientist has a gut feeling about the matter.
Animal Ethics
Experimenting on animals goes as far back as to the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE and the attitude towards animal rights has shifted a 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. This seems at first sight as the most natural intuition, but digging just a bit deeper shows that its consequences is to 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. A hundred years later one of the first proponents of animal rights came along, Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). Jeremy Bentham was utilitarian 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. From the utilitarian point of view, an action is ethical correct if the outcome produces the highest possible amount of happiness overall. How to measure happiness is still a huge challenge for utilitarians.