PHI 2396 Lecture Notes - Lecture 17: Harm Principle, Sentience, Speciesism
16 Dec 2017
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The case for the use of animals in biomedical research. Author seems to confuse legal rights with moral rights. Kant: we are moral beings because we have free will and reasoning, so we have moral rights: animals don"t have these abilities. Carl cohen: you cannot violate an animal"s rights because they don"t have any. A right can is a claim that one party may exercise against another. Rights can arise only among beings who can intelligibly defend them and the claim or who can make moral claims against each other. Therefore, rights can only be held by humans. Kant: humans are the only one"s with a moral will the autonomy to use its entails. Animals are not capable of free moral judgment or of exercising or responding to moral claims and therefore have no rights. Therefore, the claim that animal testing violates animal rights is false. We do have commitments to use animals humanely.
