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Thesis ID: CBB001561224

Becoming Human: Stories of Animals and Ethics in Biomedicine (2008)

Temple University
Levitt, Laura

Publication Date: 2008
Edition Details: Advisor: Levitt, Laura
Physical Details: 342 pp.
Language: English

Outside Links

Academia.edu

Philosophy of science Animals Animal rights Medicine and ethics Engineering, biomedical Biology and ethics; bioethics Science and ethics 20th century United States

***** The debate about using nonhuman animals in biomedical research is not a function of disparate - and adjudicable - philosophical commitments regarding the moral status of animals, as analytic ethicists almost uniformly assume; rather it's a product of a variety of socio-cultural phenomena that condition the postures people take toward the issue. That insight informs this dissertation's non-normative set of stories about the historical and cultural conditions that make it possible for biomedical researchers to insist - and many Americans to accept - that using animals in experiments is a scientific necessity and a moral obligation Avowedly contingent themselves, these stories enact a process of ethical theorizing that claims as its own limiting features the epistemological constructivism articulated by 20 th century microbiologist Ludwik Fleck; the ontological framework of agential realism proposed by theoretical physicist Karen Barad; Judith Butler's interpretation of the performative dimension of norms; and a particular version of ethical and epistemological relativism entailed by these other commitments. As it is analyzed and argued by both opponents and supporters, the ethics of animal research only indirectly concerns animals themselves; what is most often at stake are convictions about who and what humans are. Regrettably, animal rights/liberationists have for the most part declined to attend closely to the stories of animal research proponents. I attempt to remedy this neglect by scrutinizing a variety of justifications for animal use in research offered by scientists, moral philosophers, and others. The influence of liberal political philosophy on the thought style of the American social and scientific collectives is pervasive, and the operation of the liberal norm of the human carries significant consequences for lab animals. Liberalism also had profound implications for the American response to the Nazi medical atrocities and the regulation of biomedical research in the second half of the twentieth century. The invocations of the Nazi crimes by defenders of animal research highlight the ambivalent attitudes of Americans toward the biomedical research enterprise and those who carry it out today. Two fundamental moral demands are commonly cited to validate the use of animals in research: the "research imperative" and the "humane imperative." The widespread acceptance of these mandates by the public has been facilitated by several factors: a shift in cultural attitudes toward pain; the liberal commitment to the primacy of the individual; the promises of science to alter the inevitability of death, loss, and suffering from disease and disability; and the ways in which the secularization of pain, illness, and death have both required and enabled Americans to re-make the meanings of those experiences. *****

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Description Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 69/08 (2009). Pub. no. AAT 3326606.

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