(draft: not for distribution or quotation.)
I make explicit the implicit ethical premises that guide the book: harming animals requires
justification. As a society, we have decided that animals have some middle moral status, not as
high as we grant to our fellow humans, but higher, deserving of greater deference, than a table or
a head of broccoli. I prioritize sentience, animals’ capacity for pleasures and suffering, and
would expand our sphere of concern to all plausibly sentient animals, not just monkeys and dogs,
but mice, fish, and maybe hermit crabs as well. I argue that pain and distress are not the only
harms in the animal lab, and that we should consider all confinement and all deprivations harms
to be minimized. Why should a dog in a lab have a shorter or duller life than a dog running on
the beach? Collectively, our society has decided that humans can harm animals for our purposes,
including for medical experimentation, but we must somehow put limits on what we do to
animals. We must minimize suffering, pain, and distress, but more, we must balance those harms
against the potential benefits of an experiment, and reject experiments that fail this harm-benefit
analysis. In our current practices, scientists cannot decide alone that their work deserves funding
and permission to use animals, but our system of scientist-heavy ethics committees does not go
far enough in speaking for animals’ interests or opening decision-making to science boosters and
skeptics alike.
No comment yet, add your voice below!