"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." - Martin Luther King Jr.
Before the Nazis performed experiments on humans, it was considered horrible to perform experiments on humans.
What Nazis had that allowed them to perform experiments on humans was a carte blanche to do whatever they want by contemporary law, and the ideology that those human beings were in fact "inferior" human beings.
I don't know if you eat fish, chicken and so on, but probably you don't think of yourself as a Nazi if you would. Because you don't consider a chicken at the same level as a human. And this gives you carte blanche to have chicken for dinner and feel absolutely no remorse.
Is it right or wrong? I don't pass judgment. I know all beings have a sense of self and we shouldn't cause pain and take a life for no reason, yet, killing each other and eating each other is part of the cycle of life.
I know that if we consider life sacrosanct and we eat chicken fingers at Chipotle, we need ideology to justify our actions, and so we'll consider animals inferior. If we consider them inferior, they'll be target for experiments, because medical science will continue to evolve.
Depending on how our culture evolves, the moral compass may move in an entirely different direction, where we stop regarding life of any kind as so precious, even human. We'll acknowledge how replaceable we are, and our mortality. This would enable full legalization of humane practices like assisted death for the heavily disabled and terminally ill, and might open the doors again for experimenting on humans to move medicine forward.
You never know.
I'm not sure what "the cycle of life" is, but just because something may be present elsewhere in the animal kingdom does not mean we should replicate it or justify our actions through it.
The pattern that I see is that society is giving moral value to groups that have less power; groups that we have historically harmed without thought.
We must define "group" though, because obviously the most powerless things on this planet are plants and inanimate, nonliving objects. And it would be very short-sighted to define "group" as "everything that society currently gives moral value, i.e. all humans and an arbitrary subset of animals". I define "group" as persons that can feel emotion (not necessarily human emotion), have some sense of their environments, and have some sense of desire. In short, our "group" includes all sentient beings.
If we follow this line of thought, it feels obvious that all sentient beings will be recognized as valuable. And that the question is not "if", but "when".
I want to address your counter example:
> This would enable full legalization of humane practices like assisted death for the heavily disabled and terminally ill, and might open the doors again for experimenting on humans to move medicine forward.
As a society, we believe that a moral being does not have the right to take their own life. It doesn't say anything about who is or isn't a moral being, which is what I am addressing.
The counter example you were looking for was a society where all humans had no moral value. If humans have no moral value, then it does not matter if a human kills themselves, because it also doesn't matter if humans kill and harm each other.
Disclaimer: I have lived my entire life in the United States. When I say "society", I usually mean "the west".
Why should animal suffer for human? Well human have higher moral value because of higher ability of pain, emotions and cognition.
Don't get me wrong given the choice I would stop any animal cruelty if there would be alternative. As far as I know there isn't one. We can't just simply switch to some computer simulation for testing drugs instead of testing them on live animals unfortunately.
So stopping animal testing entirely doesn't seem to me to be right, but we should take a closer look at it. Be extremely careful that any harm done to animals is justified, that research being done on them really brings benefits and that we are doing best we can to relieve as much pain as it is possible.
I believe that much bigger issue eating meat, where reason why we cause huge amount of pain to animals comes mostly to , because it taste good.
Assume that in the near future, we give nonhuman animals the same moral value as humans. And then say we wanted to conduct an experiment on an animal to cure a human ailment. Before we harm a nonhuman animal, we need to ask whether we have the right to harm that animal. Because nonhuman animals and humans have the same moral value, this is equivalent to asking whether we would have the right to harm a human in the same position.
So right off the bat, our standard for conducting tests on animals is, "would we have the right to conduct this test on a human?"
Let's also assume that we believe humans must give consent before we have the right to conduct scientific experiments on them. If we apply this to animals, then we need to determine how to get consent from an animal, which seems hairy. And then there's the question of fairness -- if we've already determined that we have the right to perform this test on a human, and we're trying to cure a human ailment, then isn't it selfish to perform the experiment on a nonhuman animal?
But, you may say, what if the gains outweight the cost? If we truly believe that we will gain enough to justify violating the rights of a nonhuman animal, that's consistent with justly violating the rights of a human. And then the question of selfishness comes up again.
> I believe that much bigger issue eating meat, where reason why we cause huge amount of pain to animals comes mostly to , because it taste good.
I believe they are both big issues. My only advice is to be careful not to fall into the trap of classifying one as a less evil (even though it seems that harming animals for our enjoyment is much worse than harming them out of necessity). If we fight to recognize the moral value of nonhuman animals on all fronts, then the world you wish for (only performing experiments out of extreme necessity) will come too. (This is not a personal jab at you -- it's something I noticed in my own thinking, too.)
But you can win any argument by first granting that it must be true, which is what you do in your second paragraph.
If we disagree on that point, then we will obviously reach different conclusions and there is no point in arguing with each other. That is why I stated it as an assumption.
It's illogical to grant them equivalent rights (right to vote, basic education, etc.) but there's nothing illogical in granting non-human animals rights that are relevant to them.
There's a distinction between sentient and non-sentient beings. If it is accepted that an animal experiences pain and distress, and have the innate desire to seek comfort and avoid pain, then the logical thing to do is to grant them the right to be kept from intentional harm, just like we do with human animals, regardless of their cognitive abilities (we don't exclude mentally impaired humans from our moral community).
Those are arbitrary categories. Let's say I decide you have lower ability to feel pain, emote and have inferior cognition.
How exactly do you prove me wrong. By grimacing a lot when I cause you pain? Well animals absolutely clearly demonstrate they hate pain, too. Yet, here we are discussing your opinion to the contrary.
Truth is... they don't speak, so we can speak for them whatever is convenient for us.
What about all those that don't work in a job benefitting humanity, and do so for more selfish reasons than moral?
Do we do that today? If a researcher refuses to harm an animal to further science, do we think less of them?