Erich Linder

Can nonhuman animals be used for the benefit of humans in a scientifically and morally justified manner and, if yes, how? Based on our own experiences as scholars from various academic backgrounds, we argue that this question can only be answered as an interdisciplinary and international endeavor, considering insights from research ethics and animal ethics as well as scientific and legal aspects. The aim of this article is to contribute to the foundation of the emerging field of animal research ethics. In doing so, we describe the following seven phases of animal research experiments: ethical, legal and social presumptions (phase 0), planning (phase I), review (phase II), conduct of experiments (phase III), publication/dissemination (phase IV), further exploitation of results (phase V), and evaluation (phase VI). In total, 20 key ethical, legal, and practical challenges that an ethical framework for the use of animals in research needs to address are identified and analyzed. Finally, we characterize the following four meta-challenges and opportunities associated with animal research ethics as a field: (1) moral pluralism, (2) the integration of views and positions outside the laboratory, (3) international plurality of conduct, standards, and legal norms, and (4) interdisciplinary education.

In this paper I will address the relevance of the distinction between doing and allowing harm (DDA) in applied ethics focusing on veterinary ethics. Such a distinction can help professionals, in this case veterinarians, in reflecting on the demands inherent to their profession and how these relate to their personal identity. I will show this by first illustrating the DDA. According to this distinction — if we always have reasons to reduce harm — doing harm is harder to justify than merely allowing harm. Many utilitarians claim that such a distinction does not hold and that our positive duties are equivalent to our negative duties. Instead, advocates of the DDA hold that this distinction is necessary to grant an agent their integrity, meaning their capacity to pursue the life projects they are committed to and that constitute the image that they have of themselves. Were they responsible for all the harm they allow, they would have to give up on their life projects and instead pursue the projects that best maximise utility. This would lead them to think of themselves as an impersonal agent devoid of any idiosyncrasies and personal history. The DDA shows us how agents are depicted in different ways by its advocates and its opponents: on the one hand we are confronted with impartial agents, on the other, we are asked to consider the importance of one’s personal identity. I will then show how this distinction is reflected also in practical contexts, such as those faced by veterinarians in catastrophic circumstances. I will argue that some essential elements of the veterinarian profession seem to demand to give equal consideration to the harm directly done and the harm allowed. This in turn threatens other aspects of the individual veterinarian. In fact, veterinarians are not just veterinarians, they are people with particular desires and life-projects. Assuming that there is no distinction between doing and allowing harm would threaten parts of their identity by burdening them with excessive negative responsibility.

Wittgensteinian approaches to animal ethics highlight the significance of practical concepts like ‘pet’, ‘patient’, or ‘companion’ in shaping our understanding of how we should treat non-human animals. For Wittgensteinian animal ethicists, moral principles alone cannot ground moral judgments about our treatment of animals. Instead, moral reflection must begin with acknowledging the practical relations that tie us to animals. Morality emerges within practical contexts. Context-dependent conceptualisations form our moral outlook. In this paper, we argue that Wittgensteinians should, for methodological reasons, pay more attention to empirical data from the social sciences such as sociology, psychology or anthropology. Such data can ground Wittgensteinians’ moral inquiry and thereby render their topical views more dialectically robust.

Feeding the world’s growing population in ways that are effective, ethical and socially just, and protect the natural systems on which all life depends is one of the greatest challenges facing huma...