The rights of humans and other animals

Animals have occupied a precarious, often changing position in the major moral traditions of Western thought. Viewed as reincarnations of human souls in Eastern thought, they have been denied not only souls but awareness in others. And while some theories argue that we have duties directly to sentient animals, others maintain that all our duties involving these animals are indirect duties to humanity. The implications of these approaches for animal experimentation will be explained, as will the fundamental difference between the philosophy of animal rights, on the one hand, and these traditional approaches, on the other. That philosophy is categorically abolitionist in its implications concerning the harmful use of animals in science, whereas the traditional approaches are reformist at best.