Abstract

The year 2024 can be seen as the year of xenotransplantation. This essay will reflect on this practice from Silvana Castignone’s perspective on animals. After a brief review of the history of xenotransplantation, with particular attention to recent successes, and a summary of the Italian legal framework, highlighting the numerous uncertainties, I will focus on the issues of animal ethics. In particular, I will argue that xenotransplantation poses problems that are only quantitatively (slightly) different from normal animal experimentation, and then I will examine the main positions of animal rights advocates in relation to this practice, distinguishing between positions that go back to the rationalist monism approach and those that instead go back to Humean sentimentalism. I will try to argue that Castignone’s position, while it has elements of both currents, is best categorized within the latter. I will then attempt to offer some (admittedly inconclusive) reflections on the moral permissibility of xenotransplantation.