Ethics and Animal Research

Categories: Ethics, Bioethics, Social and Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
Author: Paul Bali
Word Count: 995

Millions of animals are used in scientific research annually.^[1] They’re burned, blinded, drowned, starved, and electrocuted; they’re forced to ingest poisons, given strokes and heart attacks, and made prone to cancer, diabetes, and other diseases.^[2] And they’re almost always killed at the experiment’s end.

While many medical advances such as vaccines, analgesics, and dialysis have involved animal research, the practice is controversial for a simple reason: we experiment on animals because they are like us, yet this likeness may imply that we’re wrong to use them.

This essay discusses the ethics of animal research, by considering three common defenses of it and some responses.

1. Claim: ‘Animal Research is Necessary for Progress’

Defenders of animal research claim it’s “necessary” for medical progress. Critics reply that in many cases it might facilitate or speed progress, but it’s not strictly necessary: progress is made in other ways.^[3] Critics also argue it has sometimes hindered medical progress: results from animal experimentation can be misleading when applied to humans, due to biological differences.^[4]

But even if animal research has been necessary for some advances, it might not always be. Sophisticated alternatives, such as in vitro or organ-on-a-chip technologies, may render much animal research unnecessary.^[5]

Defenders counter that though alternatives may replace some animal use, live organisms are too complex to accurately model for all scientific purposes: lab-grown skin cells may serve well for testing chemical irritants, but basic research may require a live animal with all its subsystems interacting.^[6]

But even if progress requires animal research, that doesn’t make it absolutely necessary: it is necessary only to seek that progress. If achieving a goal requires doing something morally wrong, then it’s wrong to seek it. So, if animal research is morally wrong, then claiming that it’s necessary for progress doesn’t show that it’s not wrong: indeed, that might just assume it.

2. Claim: ‘The Benefits of Animal Research Outweigh the Harms’

To assess this defense, we might apply an influential moral theory called Utilitarianism which requires us to act in ways that most increase happiness and reduce unhappiness overall.^[7]

Utilitarianism is egalitarian: all beings who have an experiential welfare matter. Like humans, animals matter morally because they are sentient: they have an inner life: they experience pleasures and pains, desires and fears, emotions, and, perhaps, thoughts.^[8] To exclude or underweight animal experiences from our moral calculation would be speciesism, an inter-species parallel of racism and sexism.^[9]

Utilitarianism makes the easiest case against animal research wherever the benefits of the experiment are small, while the harm to animals is great:^[10] e.g., testing the toxic effects of yet another detergent brand.

Demonstrating which animal research meets the Utilitarian standard often isn’t easy: harms to animals in research are clear and definite—such as induced injuries and illnesses, confinement and social isolation in cages, and their deaths—while the benefits of animal research can be vague and uncertain—especially in basic research without a particular therapeutic goal.^[11]

A Utilitarian case may be made for an instance of animal research where the animal harms are clearly outweighed by the medical benefit: e.g., many dogs were harmed in the development of insulin, but insulin has since saved the lives of millions of diabetes patients.

Yet this same Utilitarian logic might justify experimentation on humans, especially since the experimental results would be more relevant to human medicine. Perhaps this result of Utilitarian reasoning shows that Utilitarianism is an incorrect moral theory. Philosopher Peter Singer thinks, rather, that it creates a high bar for the justification of animal research: the experiment must be so vital that it would also justify experimenting on a human.^[12]

3. Claim: ‘Animals Lack Rights’

Perhaps experimenting on humans would violate our rights, which animals arguably lack.^[13] Philosophers have tended to ground rights in the rationality of the rights bearer, and denied animals rights on the claim that they’re not rational.^[14]

To recognize animal rights, we might demonstrate a rationality common to humans and non-humans. Ironically, animal research itself may provide some evidence for animal rationality.^[15] Yet we already ascribe rights to infants and mentally-impaired humans. So even if animals lack sophisticated rationality, to exclude them from moral consideration may be inconsistent insofar as we do not condone experimentation on babies or the cognitively disabled.

Another way to ground animal rights is in sentience. Perhaps animals, like infants, have rights simply because each is a “subject of a life”, to use philosopher Tom Regan’s (1938-2017) influential formulation: things can go well or badly for them; what happens to them matters to them, and this gives them a value that places hard limits on what we’re allowed to do to them.^[16]

This rights-based approach is critical of the Utilitarian approach, arguing that Utilitarianism can’t explain how a mouse grafted with tumors has been wronged if the harm leads to an effective chemotherapy.^[17] Utilitarianism might justify “the 3Rs” of lab animal usage—Reduce, Replace and Refine^[18]—yet can’t justify the abolition of animal research. In contrast, argues Regan:

If animals have rights, and if rights are the trump in the moral game, their rights override any benefits, real or imagined, we have gained, or stand to gain, from using them in biomedical research.^[19]

A negative right, a right to not be treated in some way, often has priority over a positive right, a right of access to some good, such as healthcare or education. So even if the search for cures is part of our general positive right to healthcare, that right may be overridden by animals’ negative right to not be violated by that search.

3. Conclusion

We’ve considered three common defenses of animal research. The topic is of course part of a larger discussion on the moral status of animals, and our treatment of them. The history of civilization is in part the history of increasing human control over non-human life. How we use that power is surely one of the central problems of ethics.

Notes

[1] 190 million vertebrates annually, by one recent global estimate. (See Taylor & Alvarez, 2019.) Our focus here is on vertebrates since they are most likely to have minds, and that a being has a mind is usually taken to be ethically significant: see Tiina Carita Rosenqvist, Animal Minds.

Of course, we’re talking about non-human animals, here. We’ll say animals for short, with the cautionary note that this linguistic practice may reinforce anthropocentric attitudes that facilitate our exploitation of animals—justified or not.

Common invertebrate “model organisms” of the modern lab, such as fruit flies and planaria worms, are in the scope of this essay’s main arguments only to the extent that they are sentient. For a compilation of research on invertebrate sentience, see The Invertebrate Sentience Table (2020), by the Rethink Priorities group.

Also, our focus is on invasive research on captive animals in the lab. Research on wild populations of animals using, e.g., fairly non-invasive tagging and tracking, may lie beyond the scope of the arguments here.

[2] This list of procedures done to animals is informed by Regan’s (2005) essay “Empty Cages: Animal Rights and Vivisection.”

[3] Some argue that what would be most effective for promoting human health and well-being at the broadest scale would not be animal research, but a better distribution of current medical knowledge and health-promoting resources: see Brandon Boesch, Ethics and Absolute Poverty: Peter Singer and Effective Altruism for the basis of such an argument.

[4] For example, 30-40 HIV vaccines were effective in tests on non-human primates, yet none were found effective in human trials. On the other hand, penicillin failed post-approval toxicity tests on guinea pigs, but was safe in humans. Had the tests been required prior to administration on humans, would penicillin have been adopted? For an overview of these and other prominent failed translations between animal research and human medicine, see Keen (2019, pp. 248-258).

[5] The European Union aims to replace all animal research with alternate methods, according to Directive 2010/63/EU. By the FDA Modernization Act 2.0 animal research is no longer required for approval of new pharmaceuticals in the U.S. For an overview, see U.S. Food and Drug Administration (2024).

[6] See, e.g., Stanford Medicine (2024) for an assertion of the continuing necessity of animal research. Note that in psychological research there’s often no replacement for a functioning mind: in testing a novel analgesic, e.g., we seem to require pain-sentient test subjects. Another problem for animal-free psychological research: a computer model of the brain sophisticated enough to model the mind may by that fact itself be sentient. This is a controversial view in the philosophy of mind, but if correct, the “virtual” alternative to animal research would be just as ethically fraught as the thing it’s meant to replace. See Thomas Metcalf, Artificial Intelligence: The Possibility of Artificial Minds.

[7] See Shane Gronholz, Consequentialism and Utilitarianism. For a full discussion of utilitarianism’s applications to animal research, see Bass (2012). 

[8] See Tiina Carita Rosenqvist, Animal Minds for discussion of what types of minds many animals might have and the basis for thinking that they do.

[9] See Dan Lowe, Speciesism: Discrimination on the Basis of Species.

[10] See Alastair Norcross (2007), p. 654.

[11] The floorspace in a standard mouse cage is 280,000-times smaller than the mouse’s natural range. See Lahvis (2017), p. 2. For rabbits, the National Research Council allows 1.5 square feet of floor space that is 16 inches high: not enough to run and jump. See National Research Council (2011), p. 59.

Concerning whether death harms animals, killing animals (at least, conscious and sentient animals) prevents them from experiencing their future experiences. Since this is the typical reason why death is thought to be harmful for humans—it prevents us from experiencing our future experiences—it seems that many animals can be harmed by death. For discussion of the basic case to think that death is often bad for human beings—to consider whether that case applies to any animals—see Frederik Kaufman, Is Death Bad? Epicurus and Lucretius on the Fear of Death. It’s also often thought that an animal’s poor quality of life can make it that they are better off dead too and so compassion dictates that we should end their lives: for discussion that can be applied to animals, see Nathan Nobis, Euthanasia, or Mercy Killing, especially note 2.

[12] Singer (2023), 2^nd Chapter. By a human he specifies a severely cognitively-damaged orphan, to (purportedly) equalize that human’s capacities for experience with the capacities of a typical mouse in a laboratory.

[13] Here the focus is on moral or natural rights—not legal rights— roughly, rights that anyone would have, regardless of what the law says or whichever legal rights they have or lack.

[14] As in the work of Immanual Kant (1724–1804), whose ethical theory is one of the foundations of traditional rights-based ethics. See Andrew Chapman, Deontology: Kantian Ethics.

[15] For an overview of research on animal rationality, see Krupenye and Call (2019).

[16] Regan actually believes that many species of animals are rational and autonomous, but that it’s better to argue that rights depend on a capacity more widespread and accommodating since, among other reasons, not all human beings who most people believe have rights are rational and autonomous. See Regan (1997).

[17] Singer, though Utilitarian, accepts the idea of animal “rights”, but only “as a shorthand reference to the way in which the needs and desires of animals give rise to moral obligations on our part.” The Utilitarian goal remains maximizing total overall goodness—such as overall happiness—and rights are recognized only insofar as they serve that goal. Rights are not inviolable, so they can’t override aggregated group interests. See Singer (1987), p. 3.

[18] That is, wherever scientifically possible, replace animal research with alternate methods; reduce the number of animals used, by maximizing the data gathered per animal; and refine animal usage to minimize pain and distress. These three Rs were proposed by Russel and Burch, two English biologists, in their 1959 book The Principles of Humane Experimental Technique.

[19] Regan (1997), p. 105.

References

Bass, Robert (2012). “Lives in the balance: Utilitarianism and animal research”. in The Ethics of Animal Research: Exploring the Controversy, Garret, Jeremy, (ed.), MIT Press, Boston: pp. 81-106.

Keen, Jim (2019). “Wasted Money in United States Biomedical and Agricultural Animal Research”. in Animal Experimentation: Working Towards a Paradigm Change. Kathrin Herrmann and Kimberley Jayne, Eds. Brill.

Krupenye, Christopher and Call, Josep (2019). “Theory of mind in animals: Current and future directions”. Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science 10(1).

Lahvis, Garet P (2017). “Unbridle biomedical research from the laboratory cage”. eLife 6:e27438.

National Research Council (2011). Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals, Eighth Edition. The National Academies Press.

Norcross, Alastair  (2007). “Animal Experimentation”, in Bonnie Steinbock (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Bioethics. Oxford University Press.

Regan, Tom (1976). “The Case for Animal Rights”, in Tom Regan and Peter Singer (eds.). Animal Rights and Human Obligations. Prentice Hall.

Regan, Tom (1983). The Case for Animal Rights. University of California Press

Regan, Tom (1997) “The Rights of Humans and Other Animals”. Ethics and Behavior, 7(2), 103-111.

Regan, Tom. (2005). “Empty Cages: Animal Rights and Vivisection” in Andrew I. Cohen and Christopher Heath Wellman, (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Applied Ethics. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers: 77-90.

Rethink Priorities (2020). “Invertebrate Sentience Table”.

Russell, William and Burch, Rex (1959). The Principles of Humane Experimental Technique. Methuen & Co. Ltd.

Singer, Peter (1987). “Animal Liberation or Animal Rights?” The Monist, 70 (1), 3-14

Singer, Peter (2023). Animal Liberation Now: The Definitive Classic Renewed. Harper Collins.

Stanford Medicine. “Why Animal Research?” Accessed July 13 2024.

Taylor, Kate and Alvarez, Laura Rego (2019). “An Estimate of the Number of Animals Used for Scientific Purposes Worldwide in 2015”. Alternatives to Laboratory Animals. 47(5-6), 196-213.

U.S. Food & Drug Administration. “Facts about FDA and Animal Welfare, Testing & Research”. Accessed September 13 2024.

Related Essays

Animal Minds by Tiina Carita Rosenqvist

The Moral Status of Animals by Jason Wyckoff

Speciesism: Discrimination on the Basis of Species by Dan Lowe

“Can They Suffer?”: Bentham on our Obligations to Animals by Daniel Weltman

Theories of Moral Considerability: Who and What Matters Morally? by Jonathan Spelman

Artificial Intelligence: The Possibility of Artificial Minds by Thomas Metcalf

Ethics and Absolute Poverty: Peter Singer and Effective Altruism by Brandon Boesch

Is Death Bad? Epicurus and Lucretius on the Fear of Death by Frederik Kaufman

Euthanasia, or Mercy Killing by Nathan Nobis

Consequentialism and Utilitarianism by Shane Gronholz

Deontology: Kantian Ethics by Andrew Chapman

Principlism in Biomedical Ethics: Respect for Autonomy, Non-Maleficence, Beneficence, and Justice by G. M. Trujillo, Jr.

Applied Ethics by Chelsea Haramia

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About the Author

Paul Bali teaches Philosophy at Toronto Metropolitan University. He has a Ph.D. in Philosophy from The University of Toronto, and a B.A. in Philosophy from The University of Guelph. His interests range from Ethics to Aesthetics, with lots of Philosophy of Religion along the way. philpeople.org/profiles/paul-bali

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