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Comment by disbelief | Hacker News Reader

This is pretty sickening. I have spent a lot of time around various monkey species, including the Rhesus Macaque, and the amount of emotional awareness and sensitivity they have is comparable to that in humans. To subject such intelligent and sensitive animals to such fear and cruelty, at such a young age, and then to euthanize them afterwards, in a reprise of past experiments, is beyond senseless.

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Well, a committee of scientists that know better than you think results will be worthwhile and disagree.

I'll take their word over uneducated ethical argument. I apologize for being presumptuous about your occupation and field of research.

> Well, a committee of scientists that know better than you think results will be worthwhile and disagree.

The article stressed that green lighting the research was a hugely controversial decision. I'm also pretty certain there are a huge number of scientists who do research on animals are wouldn't be comfortable with this research.

Also, I think the parent was rejecting the deontological framework in which the decision was made, rather than calling into question the resulting calculation by the ethics board. So an appeal to the expertise of the panel doesn't make much sense.

So what if it was controversial? Some decisions are controversial. This one received more discussion, input, and thought than most other plans. Just because it did it doesn't make that decisions wrong or unethical.

Another committee of scientists -- another IRB board -- probably would have not allowed the study.

Therefore, the parent's appeal to the IRB process as the harbinger of ethics is misguided.

If any IRB would deem a study ethical, then there's probably consensus among the scientific community on the cost-benefit tradeoff of the study. If one IRB deemed the study ethical, and if there're probably a lot of other potential IRBs that would not, then appealing to some sort of scientific consensus on the matter is a misnomer.

What makes you think that "scientists" have any better ethics than anyone else? Given past examples, I really don't trust them to look beyond their own self interest. Besides, this particular experiment would be much more useful if performed with "scientists" children.

I assume your joking about doing an equivalent experiment with human beings, right?

He’s not saying it should be done on human beings, he’s arguing it’s also wrong to do it on monkeys for the same reason it’s wrong to do on humans. You, and many other people, are making an argument that I find at least somewhat uncomfortable that it’s OK to treat animals, even those very similar to humans, much worse than humans because they’re of a different species. Can you articulate why you believe that, and how comfortable are you with your reasoning?

Under that line of reasoning there could be no science done involving any type of living creature, both big and small (like bacteria), unless it was purely non-contact observational.

Monkeys are much more similar to humans, and presumably much more able to experience suffering, than bacteria are. People like to draw an arbitrary line between humans and other animals, and there are good reasons for that in a lot of cases (e.g., should we give chimpanzees the right to vote in government elections, or start giving them drivers’ licenses?), but that might not be the most relevant line to draw in terms of ability to experience suffering. Many people clearly experience some cognitive dissonance when deciding how to treat animals: for example, many people treat pet dogs as family members but eat other animals like pigs, even though dogs and pigs probably aren’t really very different in any ethically relevant way.

Ethical concerns should trump all. How and why are the two most important questions when conducting research.

And besides, animal suffering matters to many people, often more than the answer itself matters.

Must I have a degree in the field of research related to this study in order to have a valid opinion on the torment, suffering, and eventual euthanization of 20 innocent monkeys?

Likely. You have to be able to see the trade offs and cascading effects. It is similar to the ethical question where if you reroute the train track it kills someone and if you don't it kills two.

Of course, it is more hairy than that. There is an estimate of the number of people on the original track as well as a probability that the reroute does not save them.

The ends don't justify the means for me. The study hopes to gain a better understanding of the early causes of anxiety and depression. We're not saving the human race here, we're not necessarily even saving lives.

Even if a new treatment for depression were developed due to this research (which it probably won't), and you were clinically depressed, would you want to receive it knowing it was came about after the torture and eventual deaths of 20 baby monkeys? I wouldn't feel comfortable with that.

If it developed a better treatment or prevention for depression, lives would be saved.

Personally, I wouldn't have a problem with taking said treatment, but I know that others may have different feelings about that. The ends don't justify the means is a very valid ethical opinion, how relatively extreme it is in this case depends on the size of the possible award vs. the trade-off, which takes professional knowledge to properly estimate.

Scientists don't get to write the rules about what is and isn't morally acceptable in society.

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