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If we were living in a world where we don't eat or we constitute our food from raw materials directly then we could be questioning the morality if this, but we live in a world where we eat corndogs and fried chicken.
We can't yet live without killing something to eat (and plants are more alive than most give credit).
I'd say in our current context this kind of research, done as humanely as possible, should be allowed.
Deathrow prisoners are a non starter for a lot of practical reasons (not to mention a lot of clear cut moral and social ones).
For me, deathrow itself is a non starter. I get your point about ... well, I remember New Scientist used to have a back page cartoon called "Albert the experimental rat". I'm still a subscriber but Albert was consigned to the history books a few years back.
I note your point about plants being "more alive" but I think that plants are perhaps more complicated, rather than more alive. The interplay between fungi and trees is quite well documented now and getting more interesting.
We might like to do some more basic studies first, before involving torture on non humans. For example:
When the covid-19 pandemic really kicked off, critical care wards fairly quickly discovered that lying intubated patients on their side instead of back sometimes helped. How on earth did that become a thing? Ask anyone with, say: a history of breathlessness due to long term smoking - "do you have a preferred side to sleep on, or your back?"
How about sciatica? I have largely cured mine. I am now 53. I used to have episodes lasting from a few days to a few months of crippling pain. I suffered from it starting around age 30ish.
I used to keep my wallet in my back pocket. I put 2+2 together aged around 48 and around five years later, I don't have sciatica any more. Just to ram the point home: I kept a leather wallet in my right back pocket. It was a hard surface under my bum and must have caused occasional damage to one of my sciatic nerves.
Top tip: sit on your arse and nothing else!
I'm an IT bod and I have to occasionally pick up SANs weighing something like 50Kg - for the last few years, that's not a problem: My back is fine now.
I think you have a point with the rats - they're clearly very intelligent creatures, which is unfortunately also makes them so valuable for this kind of research. So it comes down to a trade off between improving human lives at the cost of another less intelligent but nonetheless very much aware creature.
While norms will likely shift over time, I don't think it's really possible to establish consensus view on this sort of thing - everyone will have the own level of comfort, just like eating meat.
Making absolute statements about the sanctity of life I think I'm a little more comfortable making a concrete statement on. If you embrace an absolutely view sanctity of life, just existing basically becomes impossible - how do you deal with the insects you accidentally kill when you walk on grass? What about the bacteria that your body kills during an infection? It's just not workable.
As for experimenting on people on death row, my gut is that to the extent that Capital Punishment Exists (something I'm against for what it's worth), it cannot have any external utility derived from the process. Rather it needs to exist purely as part of the justice system.
If there's an exogenous utility being derived from Capital Punishment, I think there's an unacceptably high risk that the motivations for capital punishment will become twisted. To put forward a hypothetical, but not infeasible scenario:
- We allow scientific experimentation on death row inmates
- Then, a lobby group points out that we could save even more innocent lives by using the inmate's organs for donation rather than experimentation. It's the same fundamental thing, just a different use.
- Then, there's a small but meaningful pressure on the justice system to find more people guilty in order to keep the flow of life saving organs strong. (We already know what the justice system is susceptible to this sort of pressure, see forced labour)
๐: Hey ๐, have you had your pet humans spayed and neutered yet?
๐: Nah, I think that's cruel. Look how happy they are!
๐: They may look cute now, but you don't want them breeding out of control. Look at ๐ โ built an entire Dyson swarm to make more room for them, and by the end the humans were so out of control that the neighbours had to call in the exterminators to blow up the star with a Trih Xeem. Nobody will even lend ๐ a simple VN probe these days in case they do it again.
... Anyway, I "fixed" my sciatica.