Do These Factors Play A Role In Why Animals Are Used To Test Medicines?

Fauna experimentation

A difficult upshot

In 1997 Dr Jay Vacanti and his squad grew an ear on the back of a mouse

Fauna experiments are widely used to develop new medicines and to test the safety of other products.

Many of these experiments cause pain to the animals involved or reduce their quality of life in other ways.

If it is morally wrong to cause animals to suffer and so experimenting on animals produces serious moral problems.

Animal experimenters are very aware of this ethical problem and acknowledge that experiments should be fabricated as humane as possible.

They also agree that it's wrong to use animals if culling testing methods would produce equally valid results.

Two positions on creature experiments

• In favour of animal experiments:
• Experimenting on animals is adequate if (and only if):
  • suffering is minimised in all experiments
  • human being benefits are gained which could non be obtained by using other methods
• Confronting brute experiments:
• Experimenting on animals is ever unacceptable considering:
  • it causes suffering to animals
  • the benefits to human beings are not proven
  • any benefits to human being beings that animal testing does provide could be produced in other means

Harm versus benefit

The case for animal experiments is that they will produce such great benefits for humanity that it is morally acceptable to harm a few animals.

The equivalent case against is that the level of suffering and the number of animals involved are both and then high that the benefits to humanity don't provide moral justification.

The iii Rs

The iii Rs are a set up of principles that scientists are encouraged to follow in guild to reduce the bear on of enquiry on animals.

The 3 Rs are: Reduction, Refinement, Replacement.

• Reduction:
• Reducing the number of animals used in experiments by:
  • Improving experimental techniques
  • Improving techniques of data analysis
  • Sharing information with other researchers
• Refinement:
• Refining the experiment or the fashion the animals are cared for so as to reduce their suffering by:
  • Using less invasive techniques
  • Meliorate medical care
  • Meliorate living conditions
• Replacement:
• Replacing experiments on animals with culling techniques such as:
  • Experimenting on prison cell cultures instead of whole animals
  • Using reckoner models
  • Studying human volunteers
  • Using epidemiological studies

Drug safety

Animal experiments and drug safety

Scientists say that banning beast experiments would hateful either

• an end to testing new drugs or
• using human beings for all safe tests

Creature experiments are not used to show that drugs are safe and effective in human beings - they cannot do that. Instead, they are used to help decide whether a particular drug should be tested on people.

Animal experiments eliminate some potential drugs equally either ineffective or too dangerous to use on human beings. If a drug passes the beast examination it'south then tested on a small human being group before large scale clinical trials.

The pharmacologist William D H Carey demonstrated the importance of brute testing in a alphabetic character to the British Medical Periodical:

We take 4 possible new drugs to cure HIV. Drug A killed all the rats, mice and dogs. Drug B killed all the dogs and rats. Drug C killed all the mice and rats. Drug D was taken by all the animals up to huge doses with no sick consequence. Question: Which of those drugs should we give to some good for you young human volunteers as the first dose to humans (all other things beingness equal)?

To the undecided (and non-prejudiced) the answer is, of course, obvious. Information technology would also be obvious to a normal 12 twelvemonth old kid...

An alternative, adequate answer would be, none of those drugs because even drug D could cause damage to humans. That is true, which is why Drug D would be given as a single, very small dose to homo volunteers under tightly controlled and regulated conditions.

William DH Carey, BMJ 2002; 324: 236a

Are animal experiments useful?

Are animal experiments useful?

Animal experiments only benefit human beings if their results are valid and can be applied to homo beings.

Not all scientists are convinced that these tests are valid and useful.

...animals take not been as critical to the advocacy of medicine as is typically claimed past proponents of creature experimentation.

Moreover, a bully bargain of animate being experimentation has been misleading and resulted in either withholding of drugs, sometimes for years, that were subsequently plant to be highly beneficial to humans, or to the release and use of drugs that, though harmless to animals, have actually contributed to human suffering and death.

Jane Goodall 'Reason for Hope', 1999

The moral status of the experimenters

Animal rights extremists often portray those who experiment on animals every bit being so cruel as to have forfeited any ain moral standing.

But the argument is about whether the experiments are morally correct or wrong. The general moral graphic symbol of the experimenter is irrelevant.

What is relevant is the upstanding approach of the experimenter to each experiment. John P Gluck has suggested that this is often lacking:

The lack of ethical self-examination is common and by and large involves the denial or avoidance of beast suffering, resulting in the dehumanization of researchers and the ethical degradation of their research subjects.

John P. Gluck; Ideals and Behavior, Vol. 1, 1991

Gluck offers this advice for people who may demand to experiment on animals:

The use of animals in enquiry should evolve out of a strong sense of ethical self-exam. Upstanding self-examination involves a careful self-assay of one's ain personal and scientific motives. Moreover, it requires a recognition of creature suffering and a satisfactory working through of that suffering in terms of 1'south ethical values.

John P. Gluck; Ethics and Beliefs, Vol. 1, 1991

Beast experiments and animal rights

The event of animal experiments is straightforward if we accept that animals take rights: if an experiment violates the rights of an animal, then it is morally wrong, because information technology is wrong to violate rights.

The possible benefits to humanity of performing the experiment are completely irrelevant to the morality of the case, considering rights should never be violated (except in obvious cases like self-defence).

And every bit ane philosopher has written, if this means that there are some things that humanity will never be able to larn, so be information technology.

This bleak result of deciding the morality of experimenting on animals on the ground of rights is probably why people always justify animal experiments on consequentialist grounds; by showing that the benefits to humanity justify the suffering of the animals involved.

Justifying animate being experiments

Those in favour of animate being experiments say that the good washed to human beings outweighs the harm done to animals.

This is a consequentialist argument, because information technology looks at the consequences of the actions under consideration.

It can't exist used to defend all forms of experimentation since in that location are some forms of suffering that are probably impossible to justify fifty-fifty if the benefits are exceptionally valuable to humanity.

Ethical arithmetic

Animal experiments and upstanding arithmetics

The consequentialist justification of animal experimentation tin can be demonstrated by comparison the moral consequences of doing or non doing an experiment.

This process can't be used in a mathematical way to help people make up one's mind ethical questions in practice, but it does demonstrate the bug very clearly.

The basic arithmetic

If performing an experiment would crusade more harm than not performing it, then information technology is ethically wrong to perform that experiment.

The harm that will result from not doing the experiment is the outcome of multiplying three things together:

• the moral value of a human being
• the number of man beings who would have benefited
• the value of the benefit that each human being won't get

The impairment that the experiment will cause is the result of multiplying together:

• the moral value of an experimental brute
• the number of animals suffering in the experiment
• the negative value of the harm done to each animal

Just it isn't that elementary because:

• it'due south nearly impossible to assign a moral value to a being
• it's about impossible to assign a value to the harm done to each private
• the harm that will be washed by the experiment is known beforehand, just the benefit is unknown
• the damage done by the experiment is caused past an action, while the impairment resulting from not doing information technology is caused past an omission

Sure versus potential harm

In the theoretical sum above, the damage the experiment will do to animals is weighed against the harm washed to humans past non doing the experiment.

Only these are two conceptually dissimilar things.

• The harm that will be washed to the animals is certain to happen if the experiment is carried out
• The harm done to human beings past non doing the experiment is unknown considering no-ane knows how likely the experiment is to succeed or what benefits it might produce if information technology did succeed

Then the equation is completely useless every bit a way of deciding whether information technology is ethically acceptable to perform an experiment, because until the experiment is carried out, no-one can know the value of the benefit that information technology produces.

And there's another factor missing from the equation, which is discussed in the adjacent section.

Acts and omissions

The equation doesn't deal with the moral difference between acts and omissions.

Virtually ethicists call back that we have a greater moral responsibility for the things we do than for the things we neglect to do; i.e. that it is morally worse to exercise harm by doing something than to do damage by non doing something.

For example: we think that the person who deliberately drowns a child has washed something much more wrong than the person who refuses to wade into a shallow pool to rescue a drowning child.

In the animal experiment context, if the experiment takes place, the experimenter volition carry out deportment that harm the animals involved.

If the experiment does not take place the experimenter will non do anything. This may cause harm to homo beings because they won't do good from a cure for their disease because the cure won't exist developed.

And so the acts and omissions statement could lead united states of america to say that

• it is morally worse for the experimenter to damage the animals by experimenting on them
• than it is to (potentially) harm some human beings past not doing an experiment that might detect a cure for their affliction.

And so if nosotros desire to go on with the arithmetics that we started in the section above, we need to put an additional, and different, factor on each side of the equation to deal with the different moral values of acts and omissions.

Other approaches

Other approaches to animal experiments

One writer suggests that we can cut out a lot of philosophising about animal experiments past using this test:

...whenever experimenters claim that their experiments are important enough to justify the use of animals, we should inquire them whether they would be prepared to use a brain-damaged human being at a similar mental level to the animals they are planning to utilise.

Peter Vocaliser, Animal Liberation, Avon, 1991

Sadly, there are a number of examples where researchers take been prepared to experiment on human beings in ways that should not accept been permitted on animals.

And another philosopher suggests that it would anyway exist more effective to inquiry on normal human being beings:

Whatsoever benefits animal experimentation is thought to concord in store for united states, those very aforementioned benefits could be obtained through experimenting on humans instead of animals. Indeed, given that problems be because scientists must extrapolate from creature models to humans, one might think there are adept scientific reasons for preferring human subjects.

Justifying Animal Experimentation: The Starting Signal, in Why Fauna Experimentation Matters: The Employ of Animals in Medical Inquiry, 2001

If those man subjects were normal and able to give free and informed consent to the experiment then this might non be morally objectionable.

Proposed European union directive

Proposed EU directive

In Nov 2008 the European Union put forward proposals to revise the directive for the protection of animals used in scientific experiments in line with the three R principle of replacing, reducing and refining the utilise of animals in experiments. The proposals accept 3 aims:

• to considerably improve the welfare of animals used in scientific procedures
• to ensure fair competition for industry
• to heave research activities in the European Matrimony

The proposed directive covers all live non-human vertebrate animals intended for experiments plus sure other species probable to experience pain, and as well animals specifically bred and so that their organs or tissue tin be used in scientific procedures.

The main changes proposed are:

• to make it compulsory to carry out upstanding reviews and require that experiments where animals are used be subject to authorisation
• to widen the scope of the directive to include specific invertebrate species and foetuses in their last trimester of development and also larvae and other animals used in basic research, education and training to prepare minimum housing and care requirements
• to require that only animals of second or older generations exist used, subject to transitional periods, to avert taking animals from the wild and exhausting wild populations
• to state that alternatives to testing on animals must be used when available and that the number of animals used in projects be reduced to a minimum
• to require fellow member states to ameliorate the convenance, accommodation and care measures and methods used in procedures so as to eliminate or reduce to a minimum whatever possible pain, suffering, distress or lasting harm caused to animals

The proposal as well introduces a ban on the use of neat apes - chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans - in scientific procedures, other than in exceptional circumstances, but there is no proposal to phase out the employ of other non-human primates in the firsthand foreseeable future.

Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/animals/using/experiments_1.shtml

Posted by: kellygeression1998.blogspot.com

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