Q J Med 2000; 93: 831-835
© 2000 Association of Physicians
Commentary |
Duty and the beast: animal experimentation and neglected interests
From the Department of Philosophy, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa
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Introduction |
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Ethical issues are now regularly debated in medical and scientific journals. Much has been written, for instance, about euthanasia and assisted-suicide, about resource allocation and health-care systems, about drug trials and experimentation involving human subjects. By contrast, relatively little attention has been devoted by medical and scientific journals to probing and debating one issue that is an integral part of contemporary medical science—experimentation on non-human animals.1 This is cause for concern, given how much suffering and loss of life such experimentation involves—despite the many regulations and restrictions that have been imposed.
To attribute this neglect—as well as the continuation of experimentation on animals—to general indifference to animal suffering, appears uncharitable. An alternative explanation is that though medical and other biological scientists are not insensitive to the costs of their research to animals, there is a consensus among them that such costs are overridden by the benefits for humans which such
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