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trials are done in the developing country because it is simpler or cheaper to do them there. Successful products of the research become available soon afterwards to the industrialized country but become available in the developing country only fifteen to twenty years later, if at all;

3.Clinical trials are conducted in a developing country and could not, for ethical reasons, be conducted in the sponsoring, industrialized country;

4.Randomized clinical trials are conducted in both the industrialized country sponsor and in a developing country, with the control group in both countries receiving the best current treatment for the disease. A successful product resulting from the research becomes available only in the industrialized country because neither the government nor the majority of the population in the developing country can afford the product.

Macklin explains that, in the last case, the research subjects are treated equally in the industrialized country and in developing countries and both groups receive equal benefits during the study. However, the benefits are not provided to the wider population after the study is concluded, for economic reasons. She rightly points out that whether this situation fits the definition of exploitation depends on how the benefits of research are calculated. I agree that this is a difficult case to evaluate. There are reasons to accept this kind of research because it may benefit not only the subjects but also part of the research infrastructure of such a country. Even if some bioethicists would see the latter as exploitative (Glantz et al. 1998), I have doubts about this. Part of the problem will be to clarify what is understood by the difficult concept of ‘adequate compensating benefits’. Undoubtedly these are very complex and controversial issues, and a case-by-case examination is necessary.

Once again the controversy arose over the Declaration of Helsinki. Following the ethical principle of benefiting from research, paragraph 30 says: ‘At the conclusion of the study, every patient entered into the study should be assured of access to the best proven prophylactic, diagnostic and therapeutic methods identified by the study’ (WMA 2000). This paragraph again raised strong criticism, which led to an attempt to make another clarification in October 2003. This paragraph puts pressure and implies expenditure, or, at least, responsibility, on the part of the pharmaceutical industry, as well as on the researchers.

The WMA explained that the terminology ‘conclusion of the research’, ‘best methods’, and ‘identified by the study’ was inadequate. They also said that research is not a fitting substitute for an inadequate healthcare system, and that it could inhibit academic research with small budgets. They did recognize that attacking this paragraph implied contradicting paragraph 19, which indicates that ‘medical research is only justified if there is a reasonable likelihood that the populations in which the research is carried out stand to benefit from the results’ (WMA 2000). In order to counter these criticisms, it is necessary to read this paragraph correctly. It implies the ethical principle of benefiting, but its scope is exaggerated, implying an

obligation not on all kinds of research, but on some treatments such as treatment of chronic diseases.

Owing to the strong opposition of some developing countries, the amendment was postponed. Particularly strong throughout these debates was the position of Brazil, which never accepted a double standard and which, for example, provides universal antiretroviral treatment for AIDS. In the case of paragraph 30, Brazil maintained its leading role and the Argentine delegation supported it, even though this did not end the debate. At the time of writing, the WMA Workgroup (2004)

Report on the Revision of Paragraph 30 of the Declaration of Helsinki was issued. It recommends making no changes and recovering the spirit of the ethical principles that the paragraph establishes, but acceptance of its recommendation is still open to discussion.

CONCLUDING REMAR KS

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Undoubtedly research in developing countries is generating new problems and discussions. We can see how the current analysis brought forward by developing countries goes far beyond informed consent, as well as beyond the first framework of early ethical guidelines. Informed consent is a necessary condition for research, but it is not sufficient. Developing countries’ problems show that ethics does not end with the acceptance of a contract; the conditions under which it is accepted are also relevant. Individuals with no other choice may find it difficult to refuse to participate in research. They are not acting as contractors, and they may reflect the characteristics of the victim. The situation of the Swedish research subject who enjoys a public, efficient, and accessible healthcare system is a far cry from the subject in Mozambique or Bolivia who has no access to vital medication. It is not enough just to have a clear initial contract.

If research subjects share some features of a contractor as well as of a victim, adequate informed consent and an effective protection system should be in place. As we have seen, such responsibility seems to be shared by various actors, but this is one interest among many. Research ethics committees seem to have such responsibility; their main goal is the research subject’s protection. However, they are not very powerful. They may have many problems in their functioning (such as inadequate membership, education, or expertise for diverse novel protocols). But, most importantly, they rely on ethical documents like the Declaration of Helsinki as a guide for difficult cases. Hence, the attacks on and questionings of the ethical codes are not naive. Not only do they undermine the foundations of research ethics and generate confusion, but they also destroy one of the tools for the evaluation of ethics committees. And even if ethical codes cannot be legally enforced, they do provide moral standards. They can shame researchers and justify criticisms

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from peers and colleagues. It is essential to maintain this moral and normative power, and it should not be diffused by issuing opposing guidelines or obscure ‘clarifications’.

The problems that have been associated with increased research in developing countries have not been solved. They are difficult and complex. In the past there was quite a broad consensus on adequate safeguards, and vulnerability, exploitation, and justice were marginal. At present, these cannot be ignored and imply new challenges. A clear initial contract is merely a first step; other substantial issues should be considered, such as obligations to research subjects during and after research, and the benefit to the populations. Efforts should be made to avoid the moral and legal validation of unfortunate burdens on the vulnerable populations of the world.

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c h a p t e r 2 7

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A N I M A L

E X P E R I M E N TAT I O N

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A L A S TA I R N O R C R O S S

INT RO DUC T I ON

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I TAKE the central issue concerning the ethics of animal experimentation to be the moral status of animals.1 Since most animal experimentation involves treating experimental subjects in ways that would clearly not be morally acceptable if the subjects were human, and since no animal experimentation involves the informed consent of the experimental subject(s), any attempt to justify such experimentation must include a defense of the claim that the moral status of animals differs significantly from that of humans. The influence of animal welfare advocates, in particular Peter Singer, Tom Regan, and their followers, but certainly dating back to Bentham and Mill, seems to have resulted in at least the grudging acceptance by the research community that animals have some moral status. That is, that the interests of animals should be taken into account when designing and justifying experiments involving them.

For example, Baruch Brody argues for what he calls ‘a reasonable pro-research position on animal research’, which is committed to at least the following propositions:

1.Animals have interests (at least the interest in not suffering, and perhaps others as well), which may be adversely affected either by research performed on them or by the conditions under which they live before, during, and after the research.

1 In keeping with common conventions I use the term ‘animal’ in this chapter to refer to non-human animals.

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2.The adverse effect on animals’ interests is morally relevant, and must be taken into account when deciding whether or not a particular program of animal research is justified or must be modified or abandoned.

3.The justification for conducting a research program on animals that would adversely affect them is the benefits that human beings would receive from the research in question.

4.In deciding whether or not the research in question is justified, human interests should be given greater significance than animal interests.

(Brody 2003: 262 – 3)

In clarifying 4, Brody argues that human interests should be given proportionally greater significance than animal interests, as opposed to lexically greater significance. He does not, therefore, claim that any benefit whatsoever for humans can justify the infliction of any harm, no matter how great on animals. He doesn’t attempt to say precisely how much greater significance should be given to human interests. It seems reasonable to say, though, that if this approach is to justify much (though perhaps not all) of the research that currently involves animals, the difference in significance must be vast. Consider such examples of animal experimentation as the Draize Eye Irritancy Test, in which quantities of cleaning fluids are tested on rabbits’ eyes, or the infamous learned helplessness experiments of Martin Seligman, in which dogs were subjected to repeated painful shocks from which they couldn’t escape. If these experiments, or many others like them, are to be justified by appeal to the claim that human interests should be given greater significance than animal interests, the difference in significance cannot be small. If human interests are merely somewhat more significant than animal interests, it should be acceptable to perform such experiments on humans, so long as the humans suffer somewhat less than the animals (or perhaps so long as somewhat fewer humans are subjected to the experiments). I know of no defenders of animal experimentation who are also prepared to defend painful experiments on humans just so long as these conditions are met.

Attempts to justify the widespread practice of giving little or no consideration to the vital interests of animals (the most obvious one being the interest in avoiding suffering) have been made from several different ethical perspectives. This chapter will explore three of the most common perspectives — utilitarianism, natural rights theory, and social contract theory — and explain why none of them is likely to justify the claim that the interests of humans are vastly more significant than the like interests of animals. While many people may be somewhat disturbed at learning the details of many medical and psychological experiments involving animals, relatively few seriously challenge the moral permissibility of such practices. The status quo in this regard appears to be that, minor details aside, our treatment of animals raises no serious moral questions. I will discuss the utilitarian approach in the first section, where I will argue that the utilitarian case against the status quo is overwhelming. In the next section I will consider various attempts to defend

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the status quo from within a natural rights framework, and will argue that all such attempts fail. Finally, I will turn to social contract theory, which appears to hold out the most hope for the defender of the status quo with respect to our treatment of animals. In a recent book, Peter Carruthers has vigorously defended the view that social contract theory can justify the claim that all and only humans have basic moral rights. His approach, he claims, provides the only satisfactory way to justify giving greater weight to the interests of severely retarded humans than to those of animals with equal or greater cognitive capacities. That is, it gives an answer to what is commonly called ‘‘the argument from marginal cases’’. I will argue both that social contract theory fails to give such an answer, and that all the well-known versions of the theory actually beg the question against attributing basic moral standing to animals. The ways in which both a natural rights approach and a social contract approach attempt to answer the argument from marginal cases embody a deeply flawed view of morality.

UT ILITAR IANISM

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Most forms of utilitarianism consist of both a theory of the good and a theory of the right. The theory of the good tells us what states of affairs are intrinsically valuable or desirable, while the theory of the right tells us what actions are right or wrong, morally obligatory or morally forbidden. The standard utilitarian account of the good is that happiness, or more broadly, well-being, is intrinsically good, and unhappiness is intrinsically bad. The early utilitarians Jeremy Bentham and, to a certain extent, John Stuart Mill equated happiness with pleasure and unhappiness with pain. More recent utilitarians give a broader account of well-being, some including desire-satisfaction as an essential component, but most agree that pain and other forms of suffering are intrinsically bad. All suffering is bad, not just my suffering, or that of my family, or nation, or race, or species. The standard utilitarian account of the right is that the right action is that action, of all possible alternatives, that results in the greatest balance of good over bad. If more than one action results in the same balance of good over bad, and no actions result in a greater balance, all such actions are right, although none is obligatory. Any action that is not right is wrong. This approach to the rightness and wrongness of actions can also be applied to moral evaluations of character, rules, social practices and institutions, and so on. So, for example, a system of government will be judged morally acceptable or unacceptable by a utilitarian depending on whether there are any viable alternative systems that would result in a greater net balance of happiness.

So what does utilitarianism say about the moral status of animals? Consider an animal abuser who tortures dogs and cats out of malevolent curiosity. Our common moral sensibilities are appalled by such behavior. Utilitarianism provides a clear

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explanation of what is wrong with the abuser’s behavior. The dogs and cats are made to suffer for no sufficient reason. In this respect, the utilitarian answer accords with ordinary intuitions. But the utilitarian approach also calls into question much commonly accepted animal experimentation (and animal agriculture). Many experimental subjects, such as rats, mice, rabbits, and monkeys, are made to suffer, sometimes severely, in the process of medical, pharmaceutical, and psychological research. Perhaps we could deny the moral significance of this treatment of animals by denying that they feel pain. It is often claimed that this was Descartes’s position, though the truth, as I will explain shortly, is more complicated. Whatever Descartes and his contemporaries may have thought, however, it is hard to find anyone today who seriously claims that animals don’t feel pain. The evidence that they do, both physiological and behavioristic, is simply overwhelming. It seems, then, that in order to justify the widespread infliction of animal suffering, a utilitarian will have to argue for a pretty hefty outweighing benefit. What are the prospects for such an argument to succeed?

Perhaps a utilitarian defender of the status quo will deny that she needs to argue for a large benefit to outweigh animal suffering. Perhaps she will say that I was mistaken to claim that all suffering is intrinsically bad. It is only human suffering that is intrinsically bad, she might say. Or perhaps she will admit that animal suffering is, indeed, bad, but nothing like as bad as human suffering. What reason could she supply for such differential concern for animal suffering? Perhaps she will claim that animal suffering is of lesser (or no) moral significance, because animals themselves are of lesser (or no) moral significance. They have less intrinsic value than humans, or maybe none at all. While this line of reasoning is fairly common in discussions of the moral status of animals, it is not one to which a utilitarian can appeal. Utilitarians hold that certain types of states have intrinsic value and disvalue, not types of creatures. Talk of an individual creature’s intrinsic value is best understood in terms of the intrinsic value of the life of the individual, which in turn amounts to the intrinsic value of the states (usually the mental states) that comprise the life. Given the theoretical primacy of judgements about the intrinsic value of mental states of individuals, claims about the intrinsic value of the individuals themselves cannot be used to justify claims about the intrinsic value of the individuals’ mental states. It may well be that the typical human life is of greater intrinsic value than the typical canine life, but this will be because the human life is comprised of a greater and richer variety of experiences, emotions, hopes, aspirations, and the like. The sufferings, however, of a dog, considered in and of themselves, are of no lesser (or greater) moral significance than the like sufferings of a human being.

There is one other line of reasoning open to a utilitarian to deny moral significance to animal suffering. Consider the following partial characterization of what Derek Parfit calls Preference-Hedonism: ‘On the use of ‘‘pain’’ which has rational and moral significance, all pains are when experienced unwanted, and a pain is worse or