• animal experimentation
• moral status
• research ethics
• speciesism

The Weatherall Report claims that research on non-human primates (NHPs) is permitted and morally required. The argument rests on the following thought experiment:

The hospital fire: A hospital is on fire. Some of the residents are humans and others are non-human animals. You can only save one group. What do you do?

Some people have the intuition that we should rescue the humans. According to the report, if we accept that human lives have priority over non-human lives in this case, consistency requires us to support the use of non-human animals in research. This is because both cases are about saving human lives at the expense of the lives of non-human animals.

Two critical replies appeared in the literature, by E J Moore1 and Muireann Quigley.2 In a recent paper3 Gardar Arnason claims that such objections fail. I will argue, however, that his assessment is unconvincing.