Utilitarianism - Animal Experimentation for medical research

Application of Utilitarianism

Animal Experimentation - what is it

• Has enabled humans to discover huge amounts about how living bodies work

• Plays a critical role in developing the drugs in the first place. It is considered unethical to experiment on humans in this way.

• Concerns that deliberately inflicting suffering upon a creature that will gain no benefit from it is cruel.

Animal Experimentation - Bentham

• An act is moral if it promotes happiness and immoral if it promotes suffering.

• Animals are not moral agents and so are not subject of much of his writing

• Yet, it is reasonable to assume that they too can feel happiness and can suffer.

Animal Experimentation - Bentham

• Many argue that animals are subordinate to humans because they are not as intelligent or because they cannot use language.

• He argues that the capacity to feel pleasure or pain is the only factor that should influence how you treat another being.

Bentham - Quote on animal experimentation

“The question is not, can they reason nor can they talk? But, can they suffer?”

Animal Experimentation - Bentham

Argues that the interests of animals and humans are worth the same because they are based upon a shared capacity for pleasure or pain.

• If an animal suffers when it is experimented on, their suffering must be weighed in the balance.

But, he elsewhere made the declaration that killing animals is acceptable provided there is a clear purpose to it and the animal is not made to suffer unnecessarily.

Animal Experimentation - Mill

He is not primarily concerned with writing about animal experimentation. But, his development of Utilitarianism can be applied to this issue.

• He said that when decisions must be made on behalf of those who cannot do so for themselves, they should be taken only for the benefit of those concerned.

• Thus, animals cannot be treated as possessions or harmed simply for the benefit of others.

Animal Experimentation - Mill: the law

• Advocated that the law should protect the interests of animals to ensure that they do not experience unnecessary suffering.

• This does not mean that we should never experiment upon animals.

• But, it does mean that unnecessary cruelty and suffering should be avoided.

Animal Experimentation - Mill: the law

Primary aim was the ‘greatest happiness for the greatest number’ which includes minimising suffering.

• So, laws that govern the treatment of animals should always look to remove or minimise suffering.

Animal Experimentation - Peter Singer

Argues that supporting the use of animals in medical research are guilty of speciesism

Suffering is equivalent to suffering, no matter who or what is experiencing it.

Argues that if we say animals should be experimented on for the benefit of humans because we are somehow more important:

• Then, we are using the same kind of argument as those that support white supremacy.

Quote - Peter Singer on animal experimentation

“Speciesism is a prejudice or attitude of bias in favour of the interests of members of one’s own species.”

Animal Experimentation - Singer response to Mill

Mill’s idea that not all happiness is the same could be used to support an argument that animal suffering is of less value than humans.

• If animals are less capable of higher pleasures because they have a lesser intellect, it is acceptable to inflict suffering upon those less capable of higher pleasures than upon those who are more capable of experiencing them.

Animal Experimentation - Singer response to Mill

Singer objects to the idea that lesser intellect is a justification for animal experimentation.

He argues that animals may even suffer more than humans, as it is impossible to explain to them what we are doing and reassure them that they will come to no harm.

Animal Experimentation - Bentham: using hedonic calculus

• His approach requires simply that we weigh the suffering and happiness of humans and animals using the hedonic calculus.

• The pain experienced by animals must be balanced against the pain experienced by the person who is suffering from an illness that the experiment is designed to cure.

• All the factors from Bentham’s calculus must be weighed in the balance for all the parties involved, and this includes both humans and animals.

• Not all animal experiments require extreme suffering for the animals.

Animal Experimentation - Mill response to Bentham

• Since Bentham rejected the idea that any being had rights that could not be challenged, if experimentation on a small number of animals would enable a larger number of animal or humans to gain more happiness and less suffering overall, then this is acceptable - ‘greatest happiness for the greatest number’.

HOWEVER:

• Mill wanted the law to be based upon the principle of utility and believed that the principle should apply equally to humans and animals.