Bioética e direito: uma avaliação normativa da utilização de animais não-humanos e da experimentação animal

Abstract

This work describes and evaluates ethically some uses that human beings make of the other animals, the non-human animals, specially the use in animal experimentation. Such uses express a predominantly speciesistideology [species-based discrimination]. Many thinkers, partially based in scientific evidences concerning the origin and similarities across species, perceived the speciesism of the dominant practices and they proposed to recognize a moral status that many animals also should have, because their capacity for suffering [sentience] or because their complex psychological life [subjectivity], criteria used for attribution of moral consideration and moral rights. Therefore, the non-human animals were included and defended as subjects of moral consideration and moral rights.We show too that this expanded perception of the circle of moral subjects enrolled in the morality has echoed not only in the ethics but also in the juridical field of modern democracies with the supremacy of National Constitutions being affirmed not only in the legislative process but also and specially in the constitutional hermeneutics and application. In this hermeneutics the optimization of the ethically most important principles in the constitutional text is prior. We defend, concerning Brazil and the animals, that a good interpretation means an understanding of animals as individual subjects of rights and the elimination of any kind of cruelty against them. Therefore, every infra-constitutional law, including n. 11.794/08 [Arouca´s Law], must be evaluated and applied in this direction, we mean, according to the Constitution.