The Ethical Basis for Animal Use in Research

Abstract

The concern of biomedical researchers for the well-being of laboratory animals reflects a consensus that animals are conscious subjects. Partisans of the animal rights movement believe that researchers must go beyond the acknowledgment of consciousness and consequent attention to animal well-being. They should recognize just how similar human and animal consciousness are, and then address animal interests and animal rights. Consideration of these issues would challenge all uses, even painless uses, of animals. In any effort to identify the interests and rights of animals, even animal rights philosophers admit that the nature of consciousness and cognition—human and animal—matters. A theory of human consciousness and cognition developed by B.F.J. Lonergan is helpful in understanding and comparing human and animal consciousness. According to Lonergan, elemental wonder makes human consciousness and cognition a dynamic, self-assembling process moving from presentations given in experience through successive levels of understanding, judgment, and responsibility to the affirmation of values. Questioning sweeps humans across a divide between elementary knowing, which is shared with animals, and a type of knowing that is exclusively human. None of the animal behaviors catalogued by animal rights partisans reveals wonder and the drive to understand, affirm and decide. That drive is a single, restless activity generating successive levels of consciousness. If, as animal rights philosophers agree, animals are incapable of responsible behavior, it must also be that their cognitional feats are qualitatively different from those of humans. Absent questioning and the drive to understand, animals never emerge on the level of intelligent and rational, much less responsible, consciousness. Their cognitional achievements appear to fall within the province of elementary knowing, a realm in which they are accomplished associative learners— clever, to be sure, but not capable of the beginnings of full human knowing. Human consciousness and cognition differ enough from animal consciousness and cognition that humans claim rights while animals do not. So it is that even if we use animals in research, having vouched for their humane care, we use humans as experimental subjects only when they give informed consent. We safeguard the welfare of animals; we guarantee the rights of persons.Key WordsEthicsConsciousnessAnimalsBiomedicalResearch