Diversity Reading List

In recent years, there has been a growing concern for the well-being of animals reared in factory farms and used in scientific experiments. Most people have learned to accept that they have a moral responsibility to their pets, and there appears to be some recognition and reflection of the fact that farm and experimental animals are animals that may be much like our pets. However, legislation and reform to improve the welfare of animals used in experiments have been virtually non-existent. This is not to say that efforts to improve animal welfare have not been made in the case of animal experimentation. Campaign groups fight tirelessly to improve the lives of animals used in experiments. Rather, the reason why the practice of animal experimentation does not welcome legislation and reform seems, in part, connected to an idea of science as a special sort of field, with a different status to other fields of work. Seen as such, it may be seen as separated from certain moral values. The laboratory is often seen as a place where great knowledge is attained at the expense of animals, and therefore may be somehow seen as a place ‘insulated from certain kinds of moral criticism’ (Diamond, 1995, p.361), particularly in respect of animals. Indeed, there appears to a widespread conviction that animals used for scientific purposes should be perceived or at least treated differently from animals in other contexts. Indeed, this conviction is reflected in law, where there exists separate legislation for the treatment of pet animals and experimental animals.1 Legislation and reform for factory farm animals have been more successfully introduced, largely through the efforts of non-governmental organisations. However, in spite of increasing uneasiness about the suffering of animals in factory farms, the majority of people in the West eat factory-farmed meat. Consistently standing in opposition to factory farming would mean having to restrain one’s eating habits and change one’s lifestyle, something that many people are just not willing to do. In the West there seems to be a food culture, or way of life, which involves being able to eat what one wants, whenever one wants, even to the detriment of one’s health. Whereas meat was once seen as the luxury part of the meal, meat is now so commonplace in Western diet that it could be seen as the staple food for many people. In spite of existing new technologies, animal experiments have actually increased and, with the Western food culture as it is, the practice of factory farming looks to be a permanent fixture and the main system of farming in the future. In the light of this and considering the immense suffering animals endure in the practices of factory farming and animal experimentation the future looks bleak for animals destined for the factory farm and the laboratory, and it is arguably our urgent duty to interrogate, ‘What is the moral status of animals reared in factory farms and used in experiments?’ In order to answer this question one firstly needs to ask ‘What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for X to have moral standing?’ (see Goodpaster’s discussion of this question in ‘On Being Morally Considerable’, 1978, p.309). Reflections concerning anthropocentric attitudes towards animals necessitate concerns for environmental ethics, as animals, the environment and humans are interrelated. Indeed, answers to questions concerning the extent of our moral responsibilities towards animals may also provide answers to questions concerning the extent of our moral obligations towards the environment, and vice versa, since both involve ethical reflections that attempt to throw light on the extent of moral standing. In this respect, at a more fundamental level, environmental ethics and animal ethics merge, and, rather than being viewed as two distinct fields of ethics, should form one coherent ethic. Thus, they are both based on issues arising from answers to the question as to what kinds of entities can be said to have moral standing.