The Ethics of Animal Experimentation in Seventeenth-Century England

Guerrini, Anita

doi:10.2307/2709568

Cited by 40 publications

(15 citation statements)

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“…When Hume developed his philosophy of animals, these speculative theories reigned in England and France (Guerrini, 1989) -the two countries then at the forefront of developments in science and philosophy and the two countries in which Hume had studied and written his philosophical works.…”

Section: The Historical Contextmentioning

confidence: 98%

Hume on the Nonhuman Animal

Beauchamp

1999

The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy

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Hume wrote about fundamental similarities and dissimilarities between human and nonhuman animals. His work was centered on the cognitive and emotional lives of animals, rather than their moral or legal standing, but his theories have implications for issues of moral standing. The historical background of these controversies reaches to ancient philosophy and to several prominent figures in early modern philosophy. Hume develops several of the themes in this literature. His underlying method is analogical argument and his conclusions are generally favorable regarding the abilities in animals. Hume does not attribute a moral sense or capacity of judgment to animals, but he does suggest that their actions exhibit moral qualities, such as other-regarding instincts. Hume allows in-kind differences in both demonstrative reason and moral judgment, but in the domains of both causal reason and moral agency he believes there are differences of degree rather than of kind. Hume's most significant philosophical contribution was to move as far as anyone before him to a naturalistic explanation of human and nonhuman minds that invited psychological and epistemological examination of minds by using the identical methods and categories for man and beast.

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Section: The Historical Contextmentioning

confidence: 98%

Hume on the Nonhuman Animal

Beauchamp

1999

The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy

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“…The Cartesian notion of animals as automata had little currency outside philosophy schools, and no British vivisector ever adopted this position: they sometimes argued that animals did not feel pain in the context of a particular experiment, but none claimed they were incapable of feeling at all. 25 Indeed, it would have been difficult for a physiologist to make such a claim, because the validity of experiments on animals depended on their anatomy and physiology being similar to our own: nervous systems organized and functioning like ours could scarcely be found in animals incapable of feeling the pain they so evidently reacted to. 26 The real question was not whether animals had souls, but how closely comparable they were to the souls of humans.…”

Section: Animal Afterlivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Have Animals ? The Late-Nineteenth Century Spiritual and Animal Welfare

Bates

2017

Anti-Vivisection and the Profession of Medicine in Britain

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“…43 Before the 1850s, cruelty to or among animals was no more problematic than it had been for perhaps two hundred years. 44 Similarly, concern with the caterpillars' pain would have been no more intense in the eighteenth century than it had been when the insect's behaviour was first discovered in the seventeenth century. 45 Therefore the sudden interest in recounting its story must have had a more proximate cause in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries than a simple unease about violence.…”

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confidence: 97%

The ichneumon fly and the equilibration of British natural economies in the eighteenth century

Wille

2015

Br J Hist Sci

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The parasitic ichneumon fly, discovered by European natural philosophers in the seventeenth century, remained largely unstudied until it captured the attention of Enlightenment-era natural historians. Although this sudden surge of interest has been explained as an effort to understand the natural 'evil' of parasitism, the heyday of ichneumon studies was actually inspired by the political and agricultural context of late eighteenth-century Britain. British naturalists were captivated by this insect for reasons both philosophical and practical. In the providentially self-equilibrating qualities of 'natural' ichneumon economies, they saw solutions to political problems of famine, dearth, national wealth, governance and excess population, in addition to finding reassurance that Enlightened confidence in nature's inherent stability and fruitfulness was not unfounded.

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The Ethics of Animal Experimentation in Seventeenth-Century England

Cited by 40 publications

References 0 publications

Hume on the Nonhuman Animal

Hume on the Nonhuman Animal

Have Animals ? The Late-Nineteenth Century Spiritual and Animal Welfare

The ichneumon fly and the equilibration of British natural economies in the eighteenth century

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