Harm-Benefit Analysis for Animal Experiments Is Not Utilitarian

The claim is commonplace that harm-benefit analysis (HBA), a weighing procedure widely used in ethics reviews of animal experiments, is utilitarian. We argue this is false and misleading for three reasons: (1) HBA does not compare, let alone maximize, utility across different options, but merely assesses whether the consequences of one option are net-positive, thereby ignoring opportunity costs; (2) HBA does not aggregate utility coherently, as it allows for varying degrees of speculation in the assessment of harms and benefits; (3) HBA is not concerned with moral evaluation or moral goodness. From our discussion, we derive positive suggestions for how to improve animal experimentation policy and public communications about it. Most straightforwardly, scholars and institutions should stop claiming that HBA is “utilitarian.”