This article addresses the ethical issues and scientific validity of animal testing, emphasizing that the benefits to humans are not significant, calling for the need for and development of alternative testing methods, and presenting a deontological ethic in which all life is to be respected.
Animal testing is any experiment or scientific procedure performed on animals for scientific purposes, including education, testing, research, and the production of biological products. During this process, animals are subjected to various forms of pain and stress, and often die at the end of the experiment. While these experiments have a long history, and some argue that they have contributed to the advancement of medicine and science, the ethical issues that arise and the validity of the experiments have been controversial.
In Chapter 20 of Yuval Harari’s Sapiens, he argues that Homo sapiens is violating the laws of natural selection and trespassing into the realm of God through intelligent design. For example, in 2000, Brazilian bioartist Eduardo Katz paid a laboratory to create a green fluorescent rabbit, and the laboratory inserted a gene from a jellyfish that fluoresces green into the embryo of an ordinary white rabbit. The case was highly controversial at the time and raised important questions about how far the boundaries of science can be pushed. More recently, bovine cartilage was implanted into the backs of mice to create prosthetic ears. While these experiments are intended to advance science, they also raise serious moral questions about animal rights and welfare. In addition, a member of the British Union for the Abolition of Animal Testing (BUAV) exposed dozens of rabbits crammed into plastic machines in a pharmaceutical company’s laboratory in the UK. These incidents have been important in educating the public about the reality of animal testing and have raised awareness of animal welfare.
It is known that many of the animals used in these experiments were coerced by humans and that we gain little benefit from them. Therefore, it’s hard to justify animal testing from a practical and ethical point of view. Many people question whether animal testing is really necessary and whether there are any alternatives.
Before we get into the nitty-gritty, let’s take a look at what we mean by the word “ethical.” Ethics are the rules that humans follow in order to organize and live in society. The normative ethics that we usually talk about are deontological and teleological ethics. Deontological ethics is a universal ethics that focuses on the behaviors and fundamental principles that humans should follow regardless of time and place, while utilitarian ethics is concerned with the pragmatics of doing what is right because it benefits humans in the end. In the debate over animal testing, these two ethical perspectives often clash and serve as the basis for evaluating the legitimacy of an experiment. Therefore, “ethical” is a combination of both deontological and teleological ethics. If the rightness or wrongness of animal testing is contradictory between the two ethics, it depends on which ethics you focus on more, but if the two ethics point in the same direction, it shouldn’t be controversial.
First, those in favor of animal testing argue that humans benefit greatly from it. Not only are mice and rabbits easy to breed and can be used quickly for many experiments, but in general, in order for the results of an experiment to be accepted, the same results must be reproduced when the same experiment is repeated, regardless of the experimenter or the date of the measurement, and the genetic similarity of these mice and rabbits makes animal experiments more reproducible and reliable. For these reasons, animal testing has been an important tool in scientific research. In fact, many scientists have used animals throughout history, including Pasteur in the 19th century, who used sheep in his anthrax and vaccine studies, and Pavlov in the 20th century, who inserted a tube into a dog’s esophagus to force saliva out of its mouth in a conditioned reflex experiment. These historical examples support the argument that animal testing has contributed greatly to the advancement of science, which is to say that the main argument of animal testing advocates is that animal testing allows us to advance medicine and biology, and is therefore largely right from a deontological ethics perspective. But on the deontological side, we are taught from an early age that “all life is precious and should not be taken lightly.” In other words, we are expected to treat animal life with the respect it deserves, so animal testing is hard to justify in deontological ethics.
However, animal testing is not as useful to humans as we think it is. The reason people think animal testing is useful is because there is a similarity between humans and laboratory animals, but it’s only a functional similarity, meaning that even though humans and laboratory animals have similar functions, the causal mechanisms that enable those functions are different in each animal. In fact, of the 30,000 diseases that humans have, only 1.16% are shared by animals, so the results of animal testing are of little use in understanding humans and treating human diseases. This is an important fact that highlights the limitations of animal testing, so it’s hard to justify animal testing from a purposive standpoint when it doesn’t provide much benefit to humans. Of course, animal testing doesn’t only help solve human disease problems. In some cases, animal testing is used to improve the quality of life for humans, such as beauty and fashion. However, in recent years, alternatives to animal testing have begun to emerge, such as patient observation and cadaver studies, experiments with human cells and tissues, and research using computer simulations. These alternatives have the potential to reduce the use of laboratory animals and can contribute to alleviating ethical concerns. In particular, a variety of alternative experimental methods are being developed that use human cells, artificial skin, or computer modeling to mimic animal responses. Rather than indiscriminately testing on animals, the use of alternatives to animal testing could help improve both quality of life and the development of alternative testing methods.
Next, humans do not have the right to use animals in their experiments. Nowhere does it say that humans are entitled to use animals for research or experimentation. So why do humans use animals in experiments? It’s probably because they believe that animals are under their control, meaning that they have low intellectual capacity and cannot do anything to humans no matter how we treat them, so we can use them at will. This idea stems from anthropocentric thinking and disregards the rights of animals. But it’s just another form of discrimination. It’s no different than discriminating against someone just because they’re less intelligent. We ignore people with disabilities because they are less intelligent than us and can’t do anything, and we discriminate against them and even use them in vivisection. The main reason for this is that people with disabilities also have feelings, so differences in intelligence shouldn’t be a reason to use them as test subjects, and all living beings should be treated with respect. Of course, they may not say they’re in pain, but we can tell from their reactions when they’re poked by something that they feel pain. In the same way, we know that animals used in experiments have feelings and feel pain, so by the same logic, they cannot be used in experiments.
From an objectivist point of view, it’s hard to argue with the ethics of animal testing given that there are some diseases that can be solved through animal testing. Alternative testing methods do exist, but they are still underdeveloped. While it’s hard to completely deny the need for animal testing in these situations, it’s hard to justify testing that doesn’t take into account animal welfare and ethical issues. However, we know from the reactions of many animals that they feel pain just as much as humans do, and by analogy, animal testing is difficult to justify in deontological ethics, as all life should be respected and should not be taken lightly because of its lower intelligence or for any other reason. Therefore, the debate on the ethical justification of animal testing should continue, and it is urgent to develop alternative methods that are both ethical and effective. Rather than continuing to conduct experiments simply because we think they will somehow benefit humans, I believe it is best to pause and find and develop methods that are more effective and ethically justifiable than animal testing. Reevaluating animal testing and finding alternatives is an important task for the benefit of both humans and animals.
