Are The Arguments For The Ideologies Of Welfarism And Utilitarianism

In this article, there will be an argument made for the ideologies of welfarism and utilitarianism. At the core of welfarism it is believed that although humans can still use animals for various uses, we must also minimize the general suffering of the animals in questions. Opposingly utilitarianism is the belief system that we must maximize beneficial outcomes and neutralize dreadful outcomes for all parties. Both apply to a range of fields, that will be discussed further in the article. This includes the issues of killing animals for food, using animals for lab testing, and the counter arguments to both. In all, a case made for a middle ground in animal rights.

First is the idea that animals should continue to be used as a human food source,

The counterarguments to this claim are that the test are not worth the suffering that they cause and that humans should replace animals in these experiments for fairness. Both are inefficient arguments scientifically and ethically. The first argument is not valid because of the amount of lives the research saves compared to the amount of lives used to conduct research. Animals have been used in experiments for centuries and fairly recently have been used to create almost all currently used vaccines. This means even if each experiment uses a hundred animal lives to work, the result of the experiment will save thousands from sickness and death. Then, the second argument’s proposal would weaken all experiments that apply. Many animals, like mice, are almost built to be used in experiment. Mice breed fast, allowing for a large amount of test subjects for any experiment. To compound is their ability to breed to the point where a whole group has all the same DNA, meaning trails are more valid. Finally, even though they have similar brains to humans, they do not comprehend pain as much as a human. In all, mice, and animals like mice, are much more effective at lab use than humans, and have more ethical affordance due to comprehending less pain. To summarize, to use humans in experiment would be inefficient and to not have experiments at all would overall cause more death and