Comment & Debate
Marymoose. “The case against animal testing”. Helium – “Animal testing generally occurs as a result of developing a cost-benefit model. Basically, if the benefit of the research (to humans) looks high, then it is seen as being worth the costs (to animals). For instance it is seen that if animal research is likely to save the lives of many humans that it is worthwhile. However, it can be argued that all sentient beings have the same rights, and that costs to animals are as important as costs to humans. There is no moral basis for elevating the interests of one species over another this is specieism.
In science animals seem to be seen as renewable resources’ rather than as organisms of value. This violates the principal of respect for all species. No matter what our views on animal testing are, it is without a doubt that all animals deserve respect. With any research it is not possible beforehand to predict that the research will actually benefit anyone, so there is a risk that the test will be totally unnecessary.”
Tom Regan. “The Philosophy of Animal Rights”. Retrieved May 6th, 2008 – “THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANIMAL RIGHTS
The other animals humans eat, use in science, hunt, trap, and exploit in a variety of ways, have a life of their own that is of importance to them apart from their utility to us. They are not only in the world, they are aware of it. What happens to them matters to them. Each has a life that fares better or worse for the one whose life it is.
That life includes a variety of biological, individual, and social needs. The satisfaction of these needs is a source of pleasure, their frustration or abuse, a source of pain. In these fundamental ways, the nonhuman animals in labs and on farms, for example, are the same as human beings. And so it is that the ethics of our dealings with them, and with one another, must acknowledge the same fundamental moral principles.
At its deepest level, human ethics is based on the independent value of the individual: The moral worth of any one human being is not to be measured by how useful that person is in advancing the interest of other human beings. To treat human beings in ways that do not honor their independent value is to violate that most basic of human rights: the right of each person to be treated with respect.
The philosophy of animal rights demands only that logic be respected. For any argument that plausibly explains the independent value of human beings implies that other animals have this same value, and have it equally. And any argument that plausibly explains the right of humans to be treated with respect, also implies that these other animals have this same right, and have it equally, too.”
Tom Regan, an American animal right philosopher. “10 Reasons AGAINST Animal Rights and Their Replies”. Retrieved May 6th, 2008 – “2. You are saying that every human and every other animal has the same rights, which is absurd. Chickens cannot have the right to vote, nor can pigs have a right to higher education.
Reply: We are not saying that humans and other animals always have the same rights. Not even all human beings have the same rights. For example, people with serious mental disadvantages do not have a right to higher education. What we are saying is that these and other humans share a basic moral right with other animals — namely, the right to be treated with respect.”
Albert Schweitzer – “It is the fate of every truth to be an object of ridicule when it is first acclaimed.”[1]
Schopenhauer – “The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.”
Jeremy Bentham – “The day may come, when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny.”