Animal Rights

Serious questions have been raised about the ethical justification of the use of animals in research designed to benefit human beings. Moral condemnation for the use of animals to benefit humans, however, is not the principal point of such questions. The issue of the use of animals in research is an integral part of the framework of animal rights/animal liberation within the larger structure of environmental ethics. This research defends the ethical framework of animal rights/ animal liberation. The primary focus in this defense is on the use of animals in research designed to benefit human beings.

The Ethical Basis of Animal Rights/Animal Liberation

Animal rights/animal liberation has a belief system that is based in ecocentrism. Ecocentrism draws philosophical inspiration from Eastern philosophies based on conformance with the critical order of nature, indigenous reverence for life-giving earth, transcendental and preservationist movements, the land ethic, and the deep ecology movement that rejects human domination over nature.

Ecocentric ethics holds that the earth is the nurturer of life, a great interlocking order, and a web of life in which humans are but one strand. The earth, according to this philosophy, is alive, active, and sensitive to human action, and sacred. The governing metaphor is organic, with wholeness representing the basic principle of ecocentrism. Thus, all things are connected to all other things, and internal relations and

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s for cage sizes and other criteria that would relieve the level of cruelty to animals used in medical and other scientific experimentation. Utilitarian-based arguments are also employed by users of animals for projects less worthy than biomedical research. As an example, animals are used to test the effects of cosmetics. The blinding of rabbits to test the toxicity of eye makeup is justified along with the use of animals in the search for a cure for AIDS (acquired immunity deficiency syndrome). Those individuals who promote the use of non human animals in medical and other scientific research seldom differentiate their justifications based on research purposes because they accord little credence to the concept of animal rights. Organizations most often involved in the testing of animals wherein pain is involved and wherein anesthetics are not used are commercial firms. Tests involving unrelieved pain are conducted by corporations, and corporations use approximately one-half of the animals used each year in medical and other scientific experimentation. The other uses of animals that rouse the ire of animal rights and animal welfare activists involve the fur trade and factory farms. In each instance, animals are killed for

Category: Philosophy - A