Animal Rights
Should animals be harmed to benefit mankind? This pressing question has been around for at least the past two centuries. During the early nineteenth century, animal experiments emerged as an important method of science and, in fact, marked the birth of experimental physiology and neuroscience as we currently know it. There were, however, guidelines that existed even back then which restricted the conditions of experimentation. These early rules protected the animals, in the sense that all procedures performed were done so with as little pain as possible and solely to investigate new truths. Adopting the animals' perspectives, they would probably not agree that these types of regulations were much protection, considering the unwanted pain that they felt first followed by what would ultimately be their death. But, this is exactly the ethical issue at hand. For the most part, animal rights are debated in regards to two issues: 1) whether animals have the ability to rationalize or go through a logical thought process and 2) whether or not animals are able to experience pain. However, "it will not do simply to cite differences between humans and animals in order to provide a rational basis for exclud
Most of these theories revolve around the notion that animals do not have the ability to reason, which is considered the most important feature of humans and is what sets them apart from non-humans. So, only human beings fall within the scope of moral concern. This concept should be restricted to considering only the pleasure and pain of those directly involved, which is difficult in this case since almost all people and animals are implicated into this dilemma. He also formulates an idea of duty in which he claims that, "Duty is the necessity to act out of reverence for the [moral] law" (Kant 68), and, "human action is morally good if it is done from duty alone" (class outline). ing animals from the scope of our moral deliberations" (Rollin 7). These statements reflect on Kant's idea of seeing moral actions on a basis of ends and means. However, it is obviously reason that dominates over everything else since we humans are the only ones that possess it and are obviously the most advanced. But, we must then determine, on a quantitative level, how much more unintelligent that cow really is when compared to humans. In his words, animals are "subjects of a life" just like humans and each subject of life contains "inherent value". First of all, I think that there is way too much human reliance on animals to stop their use for human benefit. Evidence of this claim sets humans apart from animals through one of the most important arguments regarding the issue of animal rights: the ability to reason. He desires to avoid cruelty because he believes that this sort of behavior can lead to cruelty towards men or, on a lower scale, that cruelty to an animal causes human harm since it is damage to his/her property. There are many viewpoints concerning this issue that need to be dealt with in order to fully grasp the mindset of those so deeply involved in the struggle to determine what, if any, rights that animals possess. My interpretations of Mill's viewpoints lead me to the conclusion that utilitarians would not take a particular stance on animal rights until they had examined the entire scope of the scene.
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