Robert Streiffer

Discussions about the ethics of animal research usually focus on the significance of the knowledge produced by the research and on the harms the research procedures cause the animal subjects. These research procedures typically occupy only a small portion of the animals’ lives compared to the time they spend confined in their cages. This chapter clarifies both the conceptual and ethical issues raised by the confinement of laboratory animals. How should “confinement” be defined? Are the ethical costs and benefits of confinement relevant to the ethical evaluation of the later research in which the animals are used? In what ways are animals’ interests instrumentally related to their being confined? Do they have an intrinsic interest in liberty that is frustrated by confinement per se? And, finally, what are the ethical implications of the ways in which confinement is or is not related to animals’ interests?

Moral status is the moral value that something has in its own right, independently of the interests or concerns of others. Research using human embryonic stem cells implicates issues about moral status because the current method of extracting hESCs involves the destruction of a human embryo, the moral status of which is contested. Moral status issues can also arise, however, when hESCs are transplanted into embryonic or fetal animals, thereby creating human/ nonhuman stem cell chimeras. In particular, one concern about chimera research is that it could confer upon an animal the moral status of a normal human adult, but then impermissibly fail to accord the animal the protections it merits in virtue of its enhanced status. Understanding the public policy implications of this ethical conclusion is complicated by the fact that certain views about the moral status of the embryo cannot legitimately be used to justify public policy decisions. Arguments like those employed in the abortion debate for the conclusion that abortion should be legally permissible even if abortion is not morally permissible also support, to a more limited degree, a liberal policy on hESC research involving the creation of chimeras.

According to Autumn Fiester, the Presumption of Restraint—the thesis that an application of biotechnology to an animal is unethical unless backed by morally compelling reasons—is justified by five ethical claims. In this commentary, I explore the relevance of what Derek Parfit has dubbed the Non-Identity Problem for the implications of one of these claims, the Animal Welfare Claim. I conclude that while the Animal Welfare Claim condemns the alteration of founder animals in ways that are bad for them when there is no important human or animal health benefit in the offing, it fails to condemn the alteration of animals in the context of important research projects, even if the alteration causes some animal suffering, and, given the Non-Identity Problem, it fails to condemn the subsequent creation of animals bred from the founders, so long as the subsequent animals have a life worth living.