ABSTRACT
How should human beings treat non-human animals? This question is often debated under the heading of ‘animal rights’ or, rather differently, ‘animal liberation’ (you might want to liberate animals even if, strictly thinking, you don’t think animals can have rights). This may well be, from the perspective of the future, the defining question of our age. Will future human beings look back at contemporary practices of eating meat and using animals for scientific experiments with the horror we have for earlier practices of slavery? Indeed on some views what we do to animals is far worse than what was at least routinely done to slaves. It is unlikely that we can come to an accurate view about
what future generations will think of us. But we can try to come to a view about the correct approach to the ethical question of the treatment of animals. My main task here, however, is not to argue for any particular answer to that question, although I will towards the end of this paper set out some tentative conclusions. Rather I will attempt to argue that one standard way of approaching the moral question of our treatment of non-human animals is unhelpful, and an alternative framework is much more promising both philosophically and for policy debates. My discussion will focus on the use of animals in scientific research, and I will say very little about other practices such as eating animals or hunting them for sport.
