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Can Knowledge Itself Justify Harmful Research?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2020

JEFF SEBO  and
DAVID DEGRAZIA
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Extract

In our paper, we argue for three necessary conditions for morally permissible animal research: (1) an assertion (or expectation) of sufficient net benefit, (2) a worthwhile-life condition, and (3) a no-unnecessary-harm/qualified-basic-needs condition.1 We argue that these conditions are necessary, without taking a position on whether they are jointly sufficient. In their excellent commentary on our paper, Matthias Eggel, Carolyn Neuhaus, and Herwig Grimm (hereafter, the authors) argue for a friendly amendment to one of our three conditions.2 In particular, they argue for replacing the first condition—expectation of sufficient net benefit (ESNB)—with an expectation of knowledge production (EKP).3 In this reply, we will explain why we are open to this proposed amendment, but not yet convinced.

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Departments and Columns
Information
Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics , Volume 29 , Issue 2 , April 2020 , pp. 302 - 307
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2020

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Footnotes

Acknowledgment and disclaimer: Work on this paper was supported, in part, by intramural funds from the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center. The views expressed here are the authors’ own and do not reflect the position or policy of NIH or any other part of the federal government.

References

Notes

1. DeGrazia, D, Sebo, J. Necessary conditions for morally responsible animal research. Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 2015;24(4):420–30CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

2. Eggel, M, Neuhaus, C, Grimm, H. Re-evaluating benefits in the moral justification of animal research: A comment on ‘Necessary conditions for morally responsible animal research.’ Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 2020;29(1):131–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. Because what is at issue in this exchange of views is the prospective justification of particular animal trials, rather than a general justification for animal trials, we will understand the first condition as an expectation of sufficient net benefit (ESNB) rather than as an assertion of sufficient net benefit (ASNB).

4. We draw this idea from a study that found frogs to have two independent—that is, nonintegrated—visual systems ( Ingle, D. Two visual systems in the frog. Science 1973;181:1053–5CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed) and a discussion in Godfrey-Smith, P. Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux; 2016:89–90 Google Scholar.

5. See note 2, Eggel et al. 2020, at 134.

6. See note 2, Eggel et al. 2020, at 137. The authors also stress that, in order to justify harmful research, the knowledge produced should be generalizable. In what follows, we will assume that the knowledge produced in all the examples we discuss is generalizable.

7. See note 2, Eggel et al. 2020, at 136.