Why Animal Experimentation Matters: The Use of Animals in Medical Research

Etukansi
Ellen Frankel Paul, Jeffrey Paul
Transaction Publishers - 224 sivua

Animal experimentation has made a crucial contribution to many of the most important advances in modern medicine. The development of vaccines for deadly viruses like rabies and yellow fever depended upon animal research, and much of our basic knowledge about human health and physiology was discovered through the use of animals as well. Inspite of these gains, animal rights activists have been zealous in communicating to the public and policymakers their view that the use of animals in medical research is morally wrong and should be severely curtailed or eliminated. The activists' arguments draw upon a range of disciplines and focus on both practical and ethical aspects of animal experimentation.

Advocates of animal experimentation have been slow to respond to these arguments. Given that the worldwide toll of communicable diseases is still immense--and that deadly new pathogens may emerge at any time in the future to menace human health--failing to defend animal experimentation from the arguments of its opponents has disastrous implications. A quick response to an unanticipated threat on the order of the AIDS epidemic is unimaginable absent a vigorous research establishment, which in turn is dependent on animal proxies. Why Animal Experimentation Matters is a first attempt by research scientists and moral philosophers to mount a convincing defense against animal rights enthusiasts. Because opponents of animal experimentation come from a variety of intellectual backgrounds, this defense is necessarily interdisciplinary as well. In this collection of eight essays, the authors scrutinize how animal experimentation actually functions in the laboratory, the vital role that it plays in palliating and eradicating human and animal diseases, and the moral justification for sacrificing animals for the betterment of human life.

The subjects covered in the essays include the moral status of animals and persons, the importance of animals for advancing scientific knowledge, the history of animal experimentation (and of its detractors), differing theoretical approaches of American and European animal-experimentation regulations, the heavily restrictive legislation promoted by animal rights activists, and the threats posed to research and researchers by violent animal rights zealots. Contributors include Baruch Brody, H. Tristram Englehardt, Jr., R. G. Frey, Kenneth F. Kiple and Kriemhild Cone Ornelas, Adrian R. Morrison, Charles S. Nicoll and Sharon M. Russell, Jerrold Tannenbaum, and Stuart M. Zola. This important anthology will be of interest to scientists, philosophers, individuals suffering from heritable or communicable diseases, relatives of afflicted individuals, and policymakers.

Ellen Frankel Paul is deputy director of the Social Philosophy and Policy Center, professor of political science and philosophy at Bowling Green State University, and editor-in-chief of the journal Social Philosophy & Policy.

Fred D. Miller, Jr., and Jeffrey Paul
are, respectively, the executive director and associate director of the Social Philosophy and Policy Center; both are professors of philosophy at Bowling Green State University.

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Sisältö

Introduction
1
A History
23
Making Choices in the Laboratory
49
Basic Research Applied Research Animal Ethics and an Animal Model of Human Amnesia
79
What It Is Why It Is Happening and What It Portends for Medical Research
93
An International Perspective
131
A Darwinian View of the Issues Associated with the Use of Animals in Biomedical Research
149
Their Right to Be Used
175
The Starting Point
197
Contributors
215
Index
219
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Sivu 192 - Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth. And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea ; into your hand are they delivered. Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you ; even as the green herb have 1 given you all things.
Sivu 8 - The racist violates the principle of equality by giving greater weight to the interests of members of his own race, when there is a clash between their interests and the interests of those of another race. Similarly the speciesist allows the interests of his own species to override the greater interests of members of other species.
Sivu 177 - Man is the measure of all things, of things that are that they are, and of things that are not that they are not.
Sivu 161 - This objection fails: it mistakenly treats an essential feature of humanity as though it were a screen for sorting humans. The capacity for moral judgment that distinguishes humans from animals is not a test to be administered to human beings one by one. Persons who are unable, because of some disability, to perform the full moral functions natural to human beings are certainly not for that reason ejected from the moral community. The issue is one of kind. Humans are of such a kind that they may...
Sivu 7 - ... with other pigs in a place where there is adequate food and room to run freely. But the basic element — the taking into account of the interests of the being, whatever those interests may be — must, according to the principle of equality, be extended to all beings, black or white, masculine or feminine, human or nonhuman.
Sivu 56 - The Scientist The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate. Consider, for example, two of them: mere insatiable curiosity and the desire to do good. The latter is put high above the former, and yet it is the former that moves some of the greatest men the human race has yet produced: the scientific investigators.
Sivu 99 - The principal investigator has considered alternatives to procedures that may cause more than momentary or slight pain or distress to the animals, and has provided a written narrative description of the methods and sources, e. д., the Animal Welfare Information Center, used to determine that alternatives were not available...
Sivu 149 - But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rationaL as well as a more conversable animaL than an infant of a day, or a week, or even a month, old. But suppose they were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not. Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?

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