Jared Diamond finds ethical dilemmas in the close kinship between humans and chimpanzees: “It’s considered acceptable to exhibit caged apes in zoos, but it’s not acceptable to do the same with humans. I wonder how the public will feel when the identifying label on the chimp cage in the zoo reads Homo troglodytes” (Diamond 1992, p. 29). Diamond finds the use of chimpanzees in medical research even more problematic. The scientific justification for the use of chimpanzees is that chimpanzee physiology is extremely similar to human physiology, so chimpanzees are the best substitute for human subjects. Diamond notes that jails are a very rough analogue to zoos, in the sense that they represent conditions under which we do consider it acceptable to keep people in cages without their consent (if not to display them). But there is no human analogue to research on chimpanzees: Under no conditions do we consider it acceptable to do medical experiments on humans without their consent. Is it ethically justified to keep animals in zoos? To use animals in medical research? Does the phylogenetic relationship between ourselves and the animals in question matter? If so, how and why?
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