Paradoxes in the Legitimization of Animal Experimentation Review of Marta Tafalla’s Paradojas de la Experimentación en Animales

Paradojas de la Experimentación en Animales stands as a significant contribution to current debates in animal ethics. Marta Tafalla (philosopher and professor of ethics and aesthetics at the Autonomous University of Barcelona) has long devoted her work to examining the moral relationship between humans, nonhuman animals and the natural world. In this volume she returns to that terrain with a sharper analytical lens, interrogating the conceptual architecture that underpins animal experimentation and arguing that its legitimacy relies on a set of internal paradoxes. Tafalla employs the notion of paradox in its strict philosophical sense: a situation in which plausible premises and seemingly valid lines of reasoning generate conclusions that are mutually incompatible or at odds with the very framework that produced them (11). This approach enables her to analyze animal experimentation not merely as a scientific or institutional practice, but as an argumentative structure sustained by deep and persistent logical tensions.