ABSTRACT

Even those biomedical researchers who embrace the deontological defense of animal experimentation often resort to a utilitarian justification of the practice: they claim the practice is justified because of its enormous benefits to human beings. While it is true that animals die and suffer, that is morally insignificant when compared with experimentation's spectacular payoffs. As Cohen explains it:

When balancing the pleasures and pains resulting from the use of animals in research, we must not fail to place on the scales the terrible pains that would have resulted, would be suffered now, and would long continue had animals not been used. Every disease eliminated, every vaccine developed . . . indeed, virtually every modern medical therapy is due, in part or in whole, to experimentation using animals (1986: 868).