Is it acceptable to use CRISPR on farmed salmon?

On a common approach to the question of how we ought to treat animals, the decisive factor is derived from their abilities and interests. This is the kind of approach that is defended by Peter Singer and Tom Regan, for example. Their view is that there are morally salient capacities shared by humans and other creatures that are decisive for our obligations to them.

Here, we take a different approach that takes its lead from Cora Diamond and other Wittgensteinian treatments of animal ethics. Diamond suggests a different way of thinking about animals. The point is that we are never confronted with beings with empirically discoverable similarities and dissimilaritites to us, based on which we apply some general principle on how we must act. Rather, animals are our fellow creatures. This is an approach that places emphasis on the relationships we have with animals and the role they play in our life.

Insofar as animals are our fellow creatures, this may seem like something the fish is excluded from due to its alien nature. But through interviews and focus groups with hobby fishers, people working in the salmon industry, and consumers, we have found that conceptualizing fish as fellow creatures both is sound and something that should have bearings on what kind of treatment of them should be considered acceptable.

Can salmon farming become more sustainable?

Studying this question is based on the Norwegian Gene Technology Act which, in addition to risk for human health and environmental safety, require that the production and use of genome modified (hereunder also genome edited) organisms is ethically responsible, has societal utility and contributes to sustainable development. In the approval process of a new genome edited organism, sustainability is included in the risk assessment approach related to environment. In addition, the official evaluation framework for contribution to sustainable development currently includes global impacts in terms of biological diversity, planetary boundaries, the impact on human needs and the distribution between generations, societal groups and countries, and impact on economical growth.

We are working to develop this framework for genome edited fish. Such an adaption leads to sustainability also including animal welfare, as sustainable activity must be morally defendable, and poor welfare is not. We are therefore exploring questions of how sustainability is to be interpreted, both in relation to aquaculture generally and genome edited organisms in aquaculture specifically and how animal welfare can and shall be implemented. In addition to the international conception of sustainability we include the Sami perspective on sustainable living and nature resource management, which is articulated in the expression birgejupmi.