A few hundred? There's plenty of folks who already think animal testing is barbarism.
Unfortunately, like the "doctors" of the bad old days, for medical purposes we don't really have a choice, do we?
We do, however, have a choice when it comes to cosmetics and non-critical research, and I stand by my conviction to use cosmetics not tested on animals exclusively.
What if humans were so different from other creatures that testing human medicines on other species made no sense and the established practice was testing on human “volunteers”, i.e. poor people. Would it still make sense to argue that we didn’t have a choice?
Since humans are sufficiently different from other creatures that animal testing alone isn't sufficient for neither efficiency nor safety tests, we do run clinical trials on human volunteers, as we don't really have a choice. Launching new drugs without such tests costs more lives, and not launching new drugs also costs, so we do human testing with the understanding that sometimes it costs lives and causes other grievous harm.
However, since testing human medicines on other species does have some sense, we would consider it unethical to run potentially risky tests on humans if that can be avoided by doing preliminary tests on animals instead. If it turns out that some drug which seems safe in vitro actually turns out harmful in the whole organism, then we do want to determine that before trying it out on humans even if that process takes the lives of a lot of lab mice.
If your experimentation kills a patient because you intentionally didn't do the due diligence in order to save some animals, that's not an excuse, that's IMHO as good as murder.
My question was about a sci-fi hypothetical scenario, not the current state of things.
However the hypocrisy of the current state of things is staggering to me. Using words like 'ethical' and 'unethical' makes it worse. Nothing makes a human being's life more important than the life of a lab mouse. To avoid a result "as good as murder" in humans, we are actually murdering other animals.
From an objective view point, it is completely and obviously true. There is no intrinsic quality of humanity that makes our lives more valuable than that of any other organism, or indeed, anything else in the universe.
Which isn't to say that we necessarily should be interacting with the rest of the universe as though everything is human, because... well honestly I'm not sure I can express the concept in a way that it is even remotely likely to be understood, but I think it would suffice to say that we should not fool ourselves into thinking that we are somehow special and preferred by the universe. We may prefer ourselves simply because we are us, but at the same time our concept of self is incredibly expandable. Even within those arguing against parent there are people willing to include non-human species among that definition because they display similar cognitive qualities, and there are humans who would exclude other humans for various reasons. The line is arbitrary and subjective to the point that I make the following assertion: it is entirely illusory, an imposition of our mind's desire to categorize.
> From an objective view point, it is completely and obviously true. There is no intrinsic quality of humanity that makes our lives more valuable than that of any other organism, or indeed, anything else in the universe.
The only "obvious" answer I could see from the perspective of the entire universe is that the value of a single life is zero.
But that perspective isn't useful for most moral decisions.
If you evaluate that mouse = human = nonzero, I don't think that's "completely and obviously true" at all.
Let's remove the issue of human exceptionalism, even. It is not "completely and obviously true" that mouse = tapeworm = nonzero, either.
A lot of your argument is just that humans are not categorically different, which is not the same discussion as whether different species have different multipliers.
You're not arguing that the line should be drawn somewhere else. You're arguing that there is no line.
So let's take it all the way. What makes the life of a lab mouse more valuable than the life of a single cell of yeast?
I think answers about awareness and capability just rationalize the fact that intuitively some life forms are more sympathetic to us than others. We will draw the line at some level of sympathy, but only as far as practicality allows us.
A human life is more valuable than the life of a lab mouse because a human is more sympathetic than a mouse and it is impractical to value lab mice highly. That's the only answer.
Nevertheless, it's probably true. It's wishful thinking to hope that morality can be put on any firmer ground than "what humans intuitively feel, as a consequence of millions of years of ultimately self-centred evolution". The moment your more-perfect moral framework disagrees with intuition, it will be discarded.
It all comes down to the level of self awarenes and emotional development demonstrated by species. Some primates come close enough to young human children in that regard to cast at least some doubt, but mice? Yes, we probably shouldn't kill them for fun, but saying that their lives are worth as much as human lives is ridiculous and insulting to all humans.
> It all comes down to the level of self awarenes and emotional development demonstrated by species.
Why does it come down to self awareness and emotional development? Because of suffering? Nothing about this is obvious, but I believe (given lack of evidence to the contrary and given that mice and human brains are similar enough) that mice suffer as much as humans. This is my belief -- not an argument intended to convince others.
> saying that their lives are worth as much as human lives is ridiculous and insulting to all humans.
Anything unconventional is ridiculous. But how is it insulting to humans? Are we supposed to be at the top somehow? This is a religious argument you seem to be making.
This is a touchy topic, and I don't think productive discussion will obtain here, so I will not make any further comments in this thread.
As a bystander to this discussion, though, I should add that I held the same convictions as GP, feeling that it was somehow obvious that you were wrong. When I applied some serious scrutiny to this thought, though, it became a lot less obvious. I say "I" applied scrutiny, but it was basically this book, which I would therefore recommend to anyone reading along: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29380.Animal_Liberation
It might not convince you completely of this point, but it will force you to seriously consider your arguments, and is therefore in my opinion a great intellectual exercise.
Some people become vegetarian for this exact reason, but then why stop there? is there a reason to declare life of the plants that you eat less valuable? Stop eating them, these apples or carrots they all have families, dreams, plans for their future.
The level of self awareness is pretty much the only thing we can grade life. I might even like mice, but their lives are endless cycle of eat - fuck - sleep - shit. Human lives are much more productive, creative, interesting and therefore more valuable. And all of that starts with self-awareness.
That is literally our choice. Human volunteers as first test subjects or animals. There aren't any other choices besides putting drug research in stasis.
So every toxicology study will need to be postponed until we find 100 people willing to die for no reason? Oh and all of those people need to be part of the representative population the drug is being developed for.
Unfortunately, like the "doctors" of the bad old days, for medical purposes we don't really have a choice, do we?
We do, however, have a choice when it comes to cosmetics and non-critical research, and I stand by my conviction to use cosmetics not tested on animals exclusively.