I read an article today from Animal Experimentation: The Moral Issues and it bothered me.
In the section of the book on Supporting Animal Experimentation, one article's entire basis for believing vivisection to be justified hinges on semantics.
In Carl Cohen's "For the Use of Animals in Biomedical Research", the writer spends a great deal of time arguing that the animal rights view is wrong because animals, being nonhuman, do not have rights simply because rights are something that only humans have. He also says that while humans have an obligation to treat nonhuman animals decently, the nonhuman animals themselves do not even have a "right to life" on their own part. If this is the typical supportive stance for animal experimentation, it makes me wonder why it still exists in the first place. Semantics are not a strong enough argument for me, and I hope, not for many others, either.
1 comment:
Cohen's arguments, especially given his fame and training as a logician, are surprisingly bad. For one, he seems entirely unaware of the so-called "argument from marginal cases": if human infants have moral rights based on the possession of some set of inborn capacities, and assuming some nonhumans share with those infants the same (or sufficiently similar) set of capacities, then the nonhumans will have those basic moral rights as well.
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