From RICHARD RYDER
David Morton’s and Judith Hampson’s excellent pieces on animal experimentation
(‘A fair press for animals’ and ‘The secret world of animal experiments’,
11 April) highlight the novel and interesting requirement of the 1986 act
that the Home Secretary make a cost-benefit analysis before permitting a
project to proceed. He is required to weigh ‘the likely adverse effects’
on the animals against ‘the benefit likely to accrue’. This is asking a
lot of a Home Secretary (in practice, his officials) and raises some fundamental
philosophical questions as well as the practical ones raised by Hampson.
First, is he to measure benefits and costs entirely in terms of suffering?
Secondly, does he give equal weight to all species, human and nonhuman?
Thirdly, to what extent does he aggregate costs and benefits across individuals?
Let us assume, for the sake of brevity, that the answers to the first
two questions are in the affirmative: he measures costs and benefits in
terms of suffering and avoids speciesism by giving no more weight to the
pains or pleasures of humans and dogs, for instance, than he does to those
of rats and reptiles.
This leaves the question of trading off the pains and pleasures of some
against those of others. This utilitarian approach would allow, for example,
in circumstances outside the laboratory, a group of sadists to justify torturing
a child on the grounds that their aggregated pleasures outweigh the pain
and distress of their victim. Against this is a traditional rights position
which would argue that each individual patient has a right not to be (painfully)
experimented upon regardless of benefit to others. Clearly the Act tends
to take the former view but in doing so must raise further questions – best
answered, perhaps, by informed public opinion rather than Whitehall mandarins.
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Richard Ryder Haytor, Devon
