Q&A: Is It Moral to Use Medication When There Is No Danger to Life
Is It Moral to Use Medication When There Is No Danger to Life
Question
In order to approve (and validate) the medication, apparently experiments were conducted on a huge number of animals; some of them may even have died, suffered, and certainly had their freedom taken away during the experiments (cages, etc.).
Is there a moral problem with using medications when there is no life-threatening situation (for example, a pill for a headache, or an anti-inflammatory pill when מדובר in a wound that is not life-threatening)?
Answer
It is hard to answer this in a general way. Preventing human suffering is also a justification for causing some degree of suffering. Animal experiments should be conducted with minimal suffering regardless of the use involved, and I do not know the actual situation for certain.
Discussion on Answer
I do not have a sweeping answer to all these questions. Each person and his own considerations. Clearly there is moral value in avoiding it as much as possible. How much is possible and how hard it is—each person decides for himself.
According to Wiki, suffering is usually caused:
*"Animals on which experiments are conducted usually experience physical suffering, mental suffering, or both together."*
Eating animal-based food too, according to some studies—and especially given the many people who experienced physical problems when they became vegetarians (I understood that a huge percentage go back to eating animal-based foods, despite the moral difficulty, because of problems they experienced as vegetarians)—ultimately also prevents human suffering.
So, for example, should a moral person prevent his children from eating meat and eggs (in a certain quantity) if this involves only some possibility of risk to their development?
Should a person stop eating meat, eggs, or milk if he experiences weakness after he stopped eating them?
This sounds a bit like apologetics, but I do not see such a big difference between controlled eating of animal-based foods and taking mild medications (when the situation is not life-threatening)—in both cases animals probably suffered.