The Ethical Treatment of Animals Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

The Ethical Treatment of Animals - Assignment Example arian to protect the rights of the animals while maintain maximum satisfaction of the interested parties, the guiding ethical principles should be universalistic, welfarelist, and aggregative. Being Universalist means that utilitarian ethics should protect the rights of all the animals regardless of whether they are domesticated or not. Utilitarian ethics should express welfare of the animals by looking at what is good for them. Lastly, being aggregative means the decisions made on how animals should be treated should add up to the weight, intensity and the number of interest of the animals affected by the possible actions of people. Rights-based ethics on the other hand, can refer to the basic rights of animals that should not be violated. As much as humans do harm to the animals, right-based ethics are there to ensure that they also benefit as well. I think right-based ethics put limits to the extent animals can be harmed, for example, in experiments, animals is morally wrong to su bject the subject under unnecessary pain jus t because the researcher is interested with some desired resulted that must be understood after the animals has endured pain. Basing on right-based ethics, rules apply differently according to the purpose of keeping the animals. For example, animals kept as pets have more protective ethical rights compared to the animals kept for experimentations. There have been major conflicts between utilitarian and right-based ethics. Arnold Schwarchezenegger who was the governor of California signed an ethic right document to stop ducks from being fed on foei grass. The grass enlarged their livers; causing them to have pain on their necks for the purpose of gourmet human delicacy (Cohen and Regan 380). As a result, controversies have emerged over utilitarian and right-based ethics of animals. The controversies have been based on three issues: Whether animals have direct moral standings and if so, what should be morally right for animals that are kept