Ch. 4— Ethical Considerations • 83 
difference to the needs of animals find no scrip- 
tural support, and virtually all religious thinkers 
condemn them. If God is a good shepherd, treat- 
ing humans kindly without being bound to, hu- 
mans can be as much to the animals in their care. 
The Christian position thus amounts to a synthe- 
sis of two elements in tension. On the one hand, 
animals are inferior in worth to humans, as the 
body of a person is inferior to the soul. On the 
other hand, they are not so inferior that their own 
welfare cannot stand in the way of unbridled use 
of them. 
Modern religious and philosophical patterns of 
thought are branches of the same ancestral trunk. 
It should not be surprising, then, that the philo- 
sophical tradition exhibits the same tension on the 
subject of animals. Humans have standing as per- 
sons— that is, as individuals who can assume duties 
and enjoy rights. To join them, animals must at 
least be capable of possessing rights. But they can- 
not assume duties and do not have the power of 
discretion that gives rights a distinctive role in 
morals. Consistency suggests rights should be 
ascribed to animals once rights are given to infants 
and mentally handicapped humans who also lack 
discretion. Yet it would be inconsistent to assert 
that humans are not superior to animals while sug- 
gesting that humans should refuse to exploit other 
species, even though other species exploit each 
other. 
Even if animals are not moral persons, however, 
it does not follow that they are mere things, morally 
indistinguishable from machines. They are suffi- 
ciently like humans in one morally relevant re- 
spect— their capacity for suffering in basic forms— 
to generate a moral claim on humans. It would 
be inconsistent to hold that, other things being 
equal, human suffering ought to be relieved, but 
animal suffering ought not. 
Because it extends the scope of moral concern 
to animals without committing itself to a vulner- 
able theory of animal rights, utilitarianism has be- 
come the theory of choice among those who would 
press for more constraints on humans’ treatment 
of animals. If the principle of utility requires that 
suffering be minimized, and if some kinds of suffer- 
ing are found in animals as well as humans, then 
to count human suffering while ignoring animal 
suffering would violate the canon of equality. It 
would make a simple difference of location— in one 
species rather than another— the basis for a dis- 
tinction in value. Like racism, such “speciesism” 
enshrines an arbitrary preference for interests 
simply because of their location in some set of in- 
dividuals. 
The rule that suffering ought to be relieved, in 
humans or animals, is the principle of humane 
treatment. It covers a large and heterogeneous 
range of situations; the most germane, for the de- 
bate over animal use, are those in which someone 
inflicts suffering on someone else. The humane 
treatment principle establishes a presumption 
against doing this, but that presumption can be 
overcome— always in the case of animals, and 
sometimes even in the case of a human— by show- 
ing that the harm done is necessary . Necessity here 
is not bare utility, but necessity overall. The harm 
must not only be a means to a good end, it must 
be the only means. A broader definition of neces- 
sity might also require that the harm be a means 
to an end whose value is considered in light of the 
degree of harm necessary to achieve that end. In 
addition, necessity always implies a comparison 
with available alternatives. 
Animal use in research, testing, and education 
creates a conflict of interests between the liberty 
that humans have to use animals for human ends 
(knowledge, health, safety) and the need that ani- 
mals have to be free of suffering. There is no rea- 
son why either one of these broad interests should 
always prevail over the other. The fulcrum on 
which they are balanced is the necessity standard 
itself. That is, when the suffering inflicted on ani- 
mals is not necessary to satisfy a desirable human 
objective, the animal interest will prevail. And 
when the suffering is unavoidable, the human in- 
terest will be controlling. Animals are morally en- 
titled to be treated humanely; whether they are 
entitled to more than that is unclear. 
