Philosophical
view - Do Animals Have Rights?
Should animals be harmed to benefit mankind? This pressing question has been
around for at least the past two centuries. During the early nineteenth
century, animal experiments emerged as an important method of science and, in
fact, marked the birth of experimental physiology and neuroscience as we
currently know it. There were, however, guidelines that existed even back then
which restricted the conditions of experimentation. These early rules protected
the animals, in the sense that all procedures performed were done so with as
little pain as possible and solely to investigate new truths. Adopting the
animals’ perspectives, they would probably not agree that these types of
regulations were much protection, considering the unwanted pain that they felt
first followed by what would ultimately be their death. But, this is exactly
the ethical issue at hand. For the most part, animal rights are debated in
regards to two issues: 1) whether animals have the ability to rationalize or go
through a logical thought process and 2) whether or not animals are able to
experience pain. However, “it will not do simply to cite differences between
humans and animals in order to provide a rational basis for excluding animals
from the scope of our moral deliberations” (Rollin 7).
