Animal testing is often the best, if not only way to get data. The data may lead to the betterment of human lives, so you weigh the potential human benefit against the lives of the mice.
Most animal researchers believe it would be unethical to not conduct the testing. The studies should still be run in a way to minimize the number of animals while collecting the best possible data.
Source: experience in animal testing.
> Most animal researchers believe it would be unethical to not conduct the testing.
but this is what's so bothersome. why is human experience put above that of the mouse? in this specific example, it's even worse. stress in modern day society is almost entirely self-induced from a civilization/societal point of view. humans are very good at building overly complex meta structures in our lives, all of which contribute heavily to stress because it's unbelievably hard to navigate these unnatural systems. so now, mice have to suffer because of our own inability to control ourselves?
i think the ethical argument you mentioned is quite a stretch when view in this real light.
Ethical standards are both arbitrary and necessary. They're arbitrary because we choose them, and necessary because they optimize for our goals. Those goals are themselves implicit in our choice of ethical standards. My ethical system assigns the highest weights to human health and happiness. That also takes into account climate change, because I temporally discount large adverse climate events from the future and consider their effect on our progeny. I don't disregard animal life, I just place human life at the top of my ethical pyramid. If you value human and rodent life equally, and therefore human and rodent suffering equally, then I believe your ethical standards are as arbitrary as mine. You just have a different optimization function, and it is at odds, for better or worse, with that of most of humanity.
What we can be most certain of is, generally, the revealed ethical system of most cultures, as manifested by their customs and laws (excluding the myriad effects of autocratic regimes and the cultural stunting that they entail). We can also be sure of our physical location, which determines the cultural mileu and ethical standards which are used to judge our actions. Furthermore, through empirical studies, we can measure the alignment of ethical systems to their goals and adjust course. We cannot, however, find an objective ethical system. It does not exist. We should not be bothered by that any more than we're bothered by the lack of a magic genie lamp or Velveeta volcano. All of that is to say, your equation of: cost of mouse suffering > widespread benefits of resulting drugs, is simply a preference. It can be restated as "I and a few others who share my views prefer that the lab mice not suffer, even if the result helps millions of humans." Even if you actually believe that the mouse testing is only wrong because it is in pursuit of something ostensibly cosmetic, or, as you stated, because we have made life more difficult for ourselves through over-abstraction and animals shouldn't suffer the consequences, your ethical standards are not any less arbitrary.
"On your current moral view, if all traits true of a given human (who has moral value) are switched to match those true of a given nonhuman animal (who doesn't have moral value), is there any point in the trait-equalization process where moral value is lost?"
I said humans are at the top of my ethical pyramid because humans are a proxy for “intelligent beings” on a planet with no other creatures that are even close in intelligence (with intelligence being defined as it is common understood, and calling that definition arbitrary or saying that it’s not commonly understood would further illustrate the point in my OP). In reality, intelligent beings are at the top of my ethical pyramid. If we could CRISPR a new species of cow that completely lacks sentience and is simply a substrate for nutrients, and its meat was identical to that of more sentient cows, I would prefer its meat. Alternatively, if we can create cell-cultured beef or artificial beef that tastes as good or better than typical beef, I would totally eat it, and much prefer it to the brain-dead cow, since the brain-dead cow is still a mirror of a being with non-zero sentience.
You'll have the formalize that argument, because I'm not seeing the fallacy.
> In its central example, a human being, with their degree of thoughts, feelings, intelligence and all, is transferred to an animal, and the animal is still subsequently labeled as an animal. An accurate representation of my view would, at the very least, label the new animal as one with human-level sentience.
Let's walk this through using your example of intelligence as the trait. I'll also quote the definition of intelligence from Wikipedia as the frame of reference.
>Intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem solving. More generally, it can be described as the ability to perceive or infer information, and to retain it as knowledge to be applied towards adaptive behaviors within an environment or context.
Let's use the reducteo. If we replace animal with a severely mentally handicapped human, the human would fail the meet the above criteria for intelligence. We also have studies that show examples of animals demonstrating problem solving, emotional knowledge, etc. Which would likely place the intelligence of the animal above that of a mentally handicapped person. That being said, do you also support medical experimentation on the mentally handicapped?
I am not bothered by the arbitrariness of my framework, so long as it is internally consistent. I do not believe you have revealed an inconsistency. Find me a dolphin that has 200 unique calls, and I’ll show you how its language doesn’t meet the esoteric definition of abstraction which I am using, one which is not any less esoteric than yours, just as my ethics are no less arbitrary than yours.
I am entirely, exhaustively aware of the subjectivity of intelligence. What are words such as “intelligence” other than imperfect summaries with some degree of private meaning to the speaker that is never 100% conveyed into the listener’s brain? I can further break intelligence into a series of abstraction hurdles that humans meet but not animals, but that increases entropy beyond what I believe is necessary here.
You're creating a straw man.
You said previously you wanted "...intelligence being defined as it is common understood, and calling that definition arbitrary or saying that it’s not commonly understood would further illustrate the point in my OP)."
And I gave you the commonly accepted definition of intelligence, just as you requested. Do you refute the definition I give.
And then you go and claim its subjective and you can give it whatever definition you want....
I'm done here.
The commonly understood intelligence that I am referring to is that which can be clearly observed in someone with Down's Syndrome above and beyond what we observe in animals. Part of it is a matter of magnitude. Dogs seem to have empathy. I'm sure they do, but without sufficient cognition, that empathy is severely bounded. They will jump up and down and wag their tail when you return from a 5 minute walk. If, however, you die and there's other food in the house, they might nonetheless eat your face in short order.
There is no argument anyone can make for preference or equivalence that reduce to an arbitrary ethical foundation. I, and I think most people, just care about humans more than mice.
That said, I would question what exactly is the cause of bother. Is it bothersome because:
A) People honestly believe that a human life is equivalent to that of a mouse, or a number of mice?
B) It brings to light an uncomfortable but ethically justified reality of the world we live in.
You make a an accurate observation that human stress is often self induced, but I don't know how stress free pre-modern society was. From my experience, it is human nature to identify threats and feel stress, under just about any condition. Furthermore, I can't imagine that a "natural society" was stress free, with food scarcity, low life expectancy, and high infant mortality.