Animal Eating and Experimentation

Eating animals is also criticized on health and ecological grounds, but this article only deals with wrongs
to the animals involved.
An animal raised for food is being used by others rather than being respected for itself. In philosopher's
terms it is being treated as a means to human ends and not as an end in itself. No matter how humanely
an animal is treated in the process, raising and killing it for food remains morally wrong. But: This is using
'rights' in a rather technical philosophical sense. When people talk about animal rights colloquially, they
are usually talking about animal interests.
The human interest is classed as trivial because human beings don't need to eat meat in order to live.
The animal interest in staying alive is classed as basic, because if the animal is killed then all its other
interests are frustrated as well.
Virtue ethics regard the motivation and character of a person as crucial to whether an act is good or bad.
A morally good act is one that a virtuous person would carry out, and a morally bad act is one that they
wouldn't. Virtuous people live lives that demonstrate virtue. They are generous, kind and compassionate.
People who participate in a system that treats animals cruelly, and that kills animals to provide trivial
pleasures to human beings, are behaving selfishly, and not as a virtuous person would. Since their
behavior is not virtuous, their behavior is morally wrong, whether or not it has any effect on whether
people continue to raise and kill animals for food.
Animal experiments are widely used to develop new medicines and to test the safety of other products.
Many of these experiments cause pain to the animals involved or reduce their quality of life in other ways.
Experimenting on animals is acceptable if (and only if):
- suffering is minimized in all experiments and human benefits are gained which could not be
obtained by using other methods
The three Rs are a set of principles that scientists are encouraged to follow in order to reduce the impact of
research on animals. The three Rs are: Reduction, Refinement, and Replacement.
Animal experiments are not used to show that drugs are safe and effective in human beings - they
cannot do that. Instead, they are used to help decide whether a particular drug should be tested on people.
They eliminate some potential drugs as either ineffective or too dangerous to use on human beings. If a
drug passes the animal test it's then tested on a small human group before large scale clinical trials.
Certain versus Potential Harm the harm that will be done to the animals is certain to happen if the
experiment is carried out. The harm done to human beings by not doing the experiment is unknown
because no-one knows how likely the experiment is to succeed or what benefits it might produce if it did
succeed
Acts and Omissions Most ethicists think that we have a greater moral responsibility for the things we do
than for the things we fail to do; i.e. that it is morally worse to do harm by doing something than to do
harm by not doing something. In the animal experiment context, if the experiment takes place, the
experimenter will carry out actions that harm the animals involved.
If the experiment does not take place the experimenter will not do anything. This may cause harm to
human beings because they won't benefit from a cure for their disease because the cure won't be
developed.