The three distinct senses of inherent value in the animal rights debate -

Abstract

Medicine and biomedical sciences have attained progress, and praise, unprecedented in history. The growth of biomedical ethics goes hand in hand with the growth of the biomedical sciences. One of the aspects of bioethics which has been receiving growing attention over the past few decades is the issue of using nonhuman animals in medical research. The ethical problems relating to such use of nonhuman animals are posed by the animal rights movement on biomedical scientists through arguing that animals have moral claims on humans and that these claims are widely ignored in favor of scientific goals. Because the ethical debate on the use of animals in medical research boils down to whether or not animals have moral standing, we simply cannot reach a clear answer without first going into a debate on their rights. In this thesis, I will highlight the most crucial points in The Animal Rights Debate, a book involving the two sides of the debate; with an argument for and another against animal rights, as accounted for respectively by Tom Regan and one of his most known opponents, Carl Cohen. I will consider in more detail one of the objections which Cohen presents to Regan’s inherent value; a distinction between two senses of inherent value, one with and another without moral content. I will argue that Regan commits a mistake when he fails to account for an inherent value with no moral content, and that Cohen commits another mistake when he only accounts for two senses of inherent value, as he excludes a group of humans who lack moral agency, and thus fall under neither of his categories. I will then suggest a third sense of inherent value to accommodate for that special group of humans. I will also argue that animals fall under the new proposed category of inherent value, defending this claim through considering the argument from marginal cases, presented by Peter Singer in “Speciesism and Moral Status”. I will then present major counterarguments to Singer’s account to show that, because ther