A Philosophical View of Animal Rights Should animals be harmed for the benefit of humanity? This urgent question has existed for at least two centuries. In the early 19th century, animal experiments emerged as an important scientific method and, in fact, marked the birth of experimental physiology and neuroscience as we know it today. However, already then there were guidelines that limited the conditions of the experimentation. These early rules protected animals in the sense that all procedures performed were performed with as little pain as possible and solely to investigate new truths. Adopt animals? From this perspective, they would probably disagree that these kinds of regulations offered much protection, considering the unwanted pain they felt first, followed by what would ultimately be their death. But this is precisely the ethical question in question. For the most part, animal rights are debated around two issues: 1) whether animals have the ability to rationalize or follow a logical thought process, and 2) whether or not animals are capable of feeling pain. However, “will it not be enough to simply cite the differences between humans and animals to provide a rational basis for excluding animals from the scope of our moral deliberations?” (Rollin 7). This, argues Bernard Rollin, would be foolish. He says that doing this is comparable to a person with a full head of hair excluding all bald men from his moral deliberations simply because they are bald. The real ethical question at hand is, “do these differences serve to justify a moral difference?” (Rollin 7). Furthermore, what differences between humans and nonhumans are significant enough to be taken into account in determining the fate of nonhumans? Many differences have been proposed over the years. Some theorize that rights depend on the ability to possess interests, which in turn depend on, for example, the ability to make verbal formulations. If this were the case, then it would rule out the possibility of rights for most animals, with perhaps the exception of some primates. But, as Rodd states, ?beings incapable of possessing genuine rights might possess moral status in virtue of other qualities, such as the capacity to suffer? (Rodd 4). So, it's easy to see how many views have accumulated over time. The task of determining animal rights also came into the context of examining these inherent differences at the qualitative and quantitative levels.