University of Chicago Legal Forum Volume 2006 | Issue 1 Article 5 Lay Persons and Community Values in Reviewing Animal Experimentation Jeff Leslie
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf Recommended Citation Leslie, Jeff () "Lay Persons and Community Values in Reviewing Animal Experimentation," University of Chicago Legal Forum: Vol. 2006: Iss. 1, Article 5. Available at: http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol2006/iss1/5 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Chicago Unbound. It has been accepted for inclusion in University of Chicago Legal Forum by an authorized administrator of Chicago Unbound. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Lay Persons and Community Values in Reviewing Animal Experimentation Jeff Lesliet Is it morally acceptable to use animals in scientific experi- ments that will not benefit those animals, but instead solely benefit people? Most people would say yes; but at the same time most would view the use of animals as a regrettable necessity, to be pursued only when the benefits to people outweigh the harm to the animals, and only after everything possible is done to minimize that harm. Identifying benefits and harms may require specialized scientific and technological understanding, to be sure, but evaluating the tradeoff between them requires not technical expertise, but rather the capacity to make difficult moral judg- ments. We do not usually think of moral judgments as the unique terrain of any particular set of professionals or experts. Anyone capable of ethical reasoning has an equal claim to exper- tise, and a pluralistic society can be expected to exhibit a wide range of moral beliefs.