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EO&B Lecture Dieter Birnbacher (University of Düsseldorf)
Absolute or relative ethical limits of making animals suffer in animal experimentation?

According to a view held by many philosophers, scientists and legislators the amount of suffering imposed on animals in animal experimentation is justified by balancing it against the amount by which the suffering of humans (and other animals) can be reduced by the expected results. In this way, even the imposition of enduring and intense pain might be justified, e. g. in cases in which there is a high probability that the research paves the way to an effective therapy of an otherwise crippling disease. Several animal protection laws even go so far to allow the imposition of suffering of great intensity and duration in cases in which the experiment is held by experts to be of exceptional importance for the solution of scientific problems.

Against this, the lecture argues for a categorical limit of the imposition of suffering. Such a limit was first introduced by the Swiss academy of Medical Sciences and the Swiss Society of Scientific Research in their Ethical principles and directives for scientific research with animals in 1983. Making use of a distinction between two levels of moral rules originally introduced by Richard Hare, I argue that a categorical limit can be justified by referring to factors that, in practice, are liable to distort the calculation of consequences, such as anthropocentric prejudice and uncertainties in the estimation of results.