Animal experimentation - the double bind

The double bind problem

Sufficiently like us?

Some philosophers say that people who want to experiment on animals are caught in a double bind.

• The animals must be sufficiently like human beings for the experiment to be useful
• If the animals are sufficiently like human beings to be useful then it is unethical to treat them in a way that would be unethical if imposed on a human being
• If the animals are insufficiently like human beings for the experiment to be useful then it is unethical to experiment on them because to do so is a pointless waste of the earth's resources

This isn't totally convincing, because the biological similarities required for the experiment to work may not require the animal to have the morally relevant features required to show that the experiment is unethical.

But although this argument isn't always effective, it can be applied to some types of experiment - particularly psychological ones.