Comment by Natura | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Natura | Hacker News Reader

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Why should we? Right now we need to do this kind of experiments to relieve massive pain from humans. Some tests(not all of them) can't be done without live animals.

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.

> Well human have higher moral value because of higher ability of pain, emotions and cognition.

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.

I do not have an answer to the question of whether experimenting on nonhuman animals can be justified out of necessity. I have some thoughts, though:

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.)

It is morally illogical to grant non-human values equivalent human moral value. We certainly don't grant it to ameoba, bacteria, the tiny multi-cellular organisms that live on our skin. The micro-wasp (which the aforementioned ameoba is larger than, but which has neurons).

But you can win any argument by first granting that it must be true, which is what you do in your second paragraph.

> 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 is morally illogical to grant non-human values equivalent human moral value.

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).

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