251–260 of 319 posts
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Speak for yourself bud. We only have one life, and it is not for you to decide what other person should eat based on your moralist principles.
from an ethical perspective, why wouldn’t you want to live in such a way that minimizes suffering?
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But why should we absolutely "lower net suffering"? Giving birth causes intense agony to the mother, but where are the hordes of humans advocating for the end of suffering, demanding that we put an end to natural births?
Because they believe that the net suffering is reduced by the joy being brought into the world via the birth. And there are people who believe we should stop giving birth and let our species die. They are antinatalists. I think they are too extreme, imho, but you asked where they are: just google them.
> Because they believe that the net suffering is reduced by the joy being brought into the world via the birth.
Sorry, who believes that?
One of the features of arguments for “ethical” treatment of animals is that they are often so unethical. For example, it is often argued that animal research is unnecessary because computer models are sufficient. Of this misleading article that conflates animal research with animal testing. It turns out that living this are complicated, and how they react to chemicals is largely impossible to predict. And humans stil…
One of the features of arguments is that accusing people who disagree with you of being hypocrites is popular. It doesn't lead to a good discussion, though.
In this discussion, you're cherry-picking an extreme position in order to misrepresent and then accuse a lot of people who haven't expressed that far out of an opinion.
The usual consequence of that is that you end up in a meta-discussion (like this one), instead of a discussion, and then everyone is unhappy.
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Too bad most food animals are tortured, sometimes for their entire life, before being killed. The unluckiest ones are the females kept alive for breeding.
That is true of battery chickens and of meat and dairy cattle in factory farms, but not for "most animals", like you say, and certainly not the world over. On the contrary, around most of the world, farm animals are among the happiest, healthiest, best-fed and best-cared for animals on the planet. Of course you will not know that if you selectively look at the factory farms with feedlots that are the norm in the US,…
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there are a number of replacement methods, though i don't know if they cover all the cases. these include using tissue cultures, diseased humans and software modelling. also, when drugs have been deemed sufficiently safe, they can be further studied using human volunteer trials.
We already do all of this in drug discovery research before putting things into animals. We try computer modeling (very inaccurate but a good pre filter) then cell culture, and only after that do we use animals. Not only is it ethically the right thing, it’s the economical thing. Animal studies are crazy expensive (each mouse costs a couple dollars per day just to keep alive and you need a lot of them) compared to ce…
I am personally not ok with subjecting animals to torture, in order to extend human lifespans.
It’s not something I would want done to me if a more advanced alien species were to come along, but I suppose it is an easier decision to make when you are on the side that benefits.
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Adult humans who have given informed consent would probably be preferable to potatoes. In most cases, at least.
I think you're going to have trouble finding adult humans that are willing to infect themselves with, e.g., vibrio cholera to test new vaccines (or, for that matter, to have their guts biopsied for immunological assays).
if human beings determine a need, then we should pay the price for their development. not force that onto “lesser” species.
Lets also consider how much more money and brainpower would be redirected to the development of significantly more advanced technologies if experimentation on animals was to be even partially banned. Things like more advanced simulations, tissue/organ engineering and better non-invasive testing of humans. "Necessity is the mother of invention" and currently animal testing is often the "easy" and "obvious" way to do s…
Nobody really LIKES doing experiments. Even in vitro work is slow, tedious, and expensive. Anything involving living organisms is orders of magnitude more aggrevating. If we could simulate things instead, we absolutely would: cheaper, faster, less suffering, etc. But we can't. The canonical example is a nematode called C. elegans . It's small: 959 cells, 302 of which are neurons. It has been studied thoroughly . We h…
Lets also consider how much more money and brainpower would be redirected to the development of significantly more advanced technologies if experimentation on animals was to be even partially banned. Things like more advanced simulations, tissue/organ engineering and better non-invasive testing of humans. "Necessity is the mother of invention" and currently animal testing is often the "easy" and "obvious" way to do s…
How would you prove the simulation and organ engineering works? Test it on humans?
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If animal experiments were banned in neuroscience I think it's likely that would force the development of new technologies for studying the brain that would actually accelerate progress in neuroscience - "necessity is the mother of invention".
> If animal experiments were banned in neuroscience... would actually accelerate progress. And if planes would be banned humans will develop wings, or maybe not. The other option, advances in neuroscience stagnating for decades until we would be able to develop this miraculous Kosher substitutes, is also possible. Young researchers quitting the field in mass upset by the new barriers would be also a probable outcome.…
It's also possible more researchers would enter the field since many young people are probably disgusted by the prospect of having to do dubiously ethical experiments on animals.
I also want ALS And Alzheimer's solved as fast as possible, but perhaps the solution will be arrived at thanks to more advanced tissue engineering and computational methods, and we're 100,000,000 person-hours away from it. But resources are finite, so investment in animal experiments takes resources away from and delays us finding the actual solution. This is of course speculative, but thinking that animal testing will deliver the solution is also speculative, with career & institutional inertia also playing a role.
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If animal experiments were banned in neuroscience I think it's likely that would force the development of new technologies for studying the brain that would actually accelerate progress in neuroscience - "necessity is the mother of invention".
That seems unlikely. Look into techniques like ICSS which have no non-invasive substitutions. Banning animal experiments in neuroscience would just eliminate large swaths of research pursuits, leaving only observational techniques like FMRI, which would slow down the science greatly.