Examples Of Utilitarianism

1. From a utilitarian point of view, we could generally say that it is permissible to test on living creatures, because by finding a cure for pancreatic cancer we would help a large amount of people, while only hurting a few in the research process. According to Singer’s concept of speciesism, there is no significant difference between the human and the chimpanzee that we should take into account in making this decision. It doesn’t matter what species you belong to, and just because the human belongs to our race we shouldn’t value his life higher or give him any priority. Having that said and therefore viewing the human and the chimpanzee as equals in their moral worth, a utilitarian would choose to research on the human, because it would produce less pain. The chimpanzee is completely healthy and has his whole life to live, with no reason for any significant pain or an early death other than by natural causes. The human on the other side, since being brain-dead, will be in a vegetative state forever until his death, and can’t experience any pain, because he is completely unconscious. For the human, nothing would change, he wouldn’t know what would happen to him and he would miss out on nothing. We can therefore conclude that in a utilitarian view,
the human would be the better object to work with.

2.
I believe animals do have the moral right not to be tortured by us for our own interest. I don’t see the difference why we shouldn’t experiment on humans because it is unethical, but to it on animals should be fine. Following utilitarian argumentation, it would be okay to make animals suffer if there is a greater good that is achieved, for example human nutrition or medical achievements. However, animals don’t realize what is happening to them when they have to suffer and they will never experience the good that comes out of it. It would even be more logical to instead do research on humans, since they understand what they are sacrificing themselves for, instead of being confused as to why they re treated that
way.
If humans have rights, then other animals who are aware that they exist, who plan their life in some way and who are equally complex as our species should have rights too. You could say that there are animals for which those characteristics don’t apply, but then we would have the issue of where to draw the line. I think, those distinctions between which animals would have rights and which wouldn’t, would always be arbitrary and therefore not desirable.

3. I definitely do not agree with the anthropocentric view. It seems so egocentric to assume that everything that is not human only has a value if it brings us some sort of benefit or pleasure. On what grounds can anyone say that we are the species every other creature should direct their purpose towards ? Simply the fact that by their very nature, animals direct their life towards what pleasures them shows that we as humans don’t have any natural right to interfere with that.
I don’t think we need to kill animals for food, especially in the highly industrialized world there are plenty of options, so saying that it is crucial for human nutrition to eat meat is wrong. Plenty of people are vegetarians or vegans, including myself, and they live just fine. And as far as research goes, I’d like to believe that nowadays we could find other methods to test medicine or cosmetics. It would require more work and higher costs, but that should not be a reason to keep experimenting on animals.