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• Aristotle himself used animals in his own scientific researches, so quite clearly he would regard such procedures as compatible with a virtuous character.
• Aristotle insisted that the highest thing in us is reason, that is, our intelligence – our intellect (Nicomachean Ethics 1177a 20–21) – we use our intelligence to do science, to discover what the world is really like, and there can be no achievement of reason greater than that. Using animals in scientific procedures extends our intellect and increases knowledge, and so is virtuous on that level.
• However, one of the biggest objections to using animals for scientific experiments is that animal pain is not always properly controlled, primarily because some researchers do not care about the suffering of the animals. Some argue that the very fact of using animals in this way can lead researchers to be cruel. At the very least, then, a person of good character would insist upon the control of pain by anaesthetics, since this would be a minimum requirement of the compassion that should be felt for animal suffering as well as for the humans who benefit from the research.
• Other virtue ethicists would object that the use of animals in scientific experiments is not compassionate at all. It is obviously done without the consent of the animals; there is no regulation to avoid experiments being duplicated in different parts of the world; and there are now a number of alternative technologies that are at least as effective as the use of research animals.
• Hursthouse


  ‘Just as the exercise of virtues such as charity, generosity, justice, and the quasi virtue of friendship, necessarily involve not focusing on oneself and one’s virtue but on the rights, interests, and good of other human beings, so the exercise of compassion and the avoidance of a number of vices, involves focusing on the good of the other animals as something worth pursuing, preserving, protecting, and so on