Hastings Cent Rep. 2016 Jul;46(4):28-30. doi: 10.1002/hast.602.
Should monkeys be used in painful and often deadly infectious disease research that may save many human lives? This is the challenging question that Anne Barnhill, Steven Joffe, and Franklin G. Miller take on in their carefully argued and compelling article "The Ethics of Infection Challenges in Primates." The authors offer a nuanced and even-handed position that takes philosophical worries about nonhuman primate moral status seriously and still appreciates the very real value of such research for human welfare. Overall, they argue for an extension and revision of the recommendations regarding chimpanzee research offered by the Institute of Medicine in 2011; the practical upshot of their argument would allow for infection challenge research for promising interventions for Ebola and Marburg virus diseases but not for smallpox or the common cold. The IOM recommendations regarding chimpanzee research put in motion an exceptionalist policy for this great ape population. Barnhill and colleagues' proposal would enlarge the scope of that exceptionalism to embrace NHPs other than great apes. But is such exceptionalism warranted? It is not obvious to me either that the more sophisticated capacities of a species as a whole give it greater ethical protections or that less intellectually or socially sophisticated animals ought to therefore receive less protection when it comes to painful experimental interventions.
猴子是否应该被用于可能拯救许多人类生命的痛苦且常常致命的传染病研究中？这是安妮·巴恩希尔（Anne Barnhill）、史蒂文·乔菲（Steven Joffe）和富兰克林·G·米勒（Franklin G. Miller）在他们精心论证、引人入胜的文章《灵长类动物感染挑战的伦理》中所提出的富有挑战性的问题。作者提出了一种细致入微、不偏不倚的立场，认真对待关于非人类灵长类动物道德地位的哲学担忧，同时仍然赞赏此类研究对人类福祉的真正价值。总体而言，他们主张对 2011 年美国医学研究所（Institute of Medicine）提出的关于黑猩猩研究的建议进行扩展和修订；他们观点的实际结果将允许对埃博拉和马尔堡病毒疾病的有前途的干预措施进行感染挑战研究，但不能对天花或普通感冒进行此类研究。美国医学研究所关于黑猩猩研究的建议为这一大型猿类群体制定了一项特殊政策。巴恩希尔和同事的提议将把这种特殊主义的范围扩大到除了大猿以外的其他非人灵长类动物。但这种特殊主义是否有道理呢？对我来说，并不是物种的整体更复杂的能力赋予它更大的伦理保护，也不是智力或社会发展程度较低的动物在面临痛苦的实验干预时就应该得到较少的保护，这一点并不明显。
