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Am I the only one who thinks it's fucked up to experiment on animals who can't consent to this? We place so much emphasis on people being the most important thing in the world, we forgot that we are part of the ecosystem too.
This is and will always be small potatoes in terms of the suffering we put relatively intelligent animals through every day.
We would need to slaughter probably 100,000 animals yearly for the US organ demand (at ~50,000 transplants per year and a buffer).
We slaughter 125 MILLION pigs in the US for consumption a year.
Not to mention that "medical grade" pigs will probably be given a golden ticket in terms of care until they are slaughtered, compared to the extremely abysmal environment millions live in today.
If animal welfare is important to you, scientific research is a poor use of advocating resources while we still eat hundreds of pounds of meat yearly. If advocates reduce meat consumption by even a percent or two it would generally greatly outweigh banning animal based research entirely.
Sure, but the article isn't about the inhumane treatment of our industrial meat production facilities. I'm well aware of them. And I want those gone too.
Animal testing isn’t ideal but for important medical advances, animal testing is the only way to demonstrate safety before human trials. At some point, you have to value the life of a human more than mice.
And some of the testing is fun. Like when they give them a buzzer to get more drugs. Lab rats definitely consent to more cocaine.
Confirmed, cocaine is lab rat approved.
I mean, you're probably not the only one who thinks anything.
That said, do you eat meat? If so, the meat and dairy industries systematically do egregious things to millions of animals every day.
Dude if I can preorder a whole pig with a replacement set of lungs too ….
Dinner and an upgrade?
Bacon and breathing
We are, but being a part of the ecosystem doesn't really mean much. Ecosystems aren't obligations, authorities, sources of morality or subject to it. They're just systems of relationships between organisms in a particular place. Whatever humans do, as long as it involves other organisms, that is our role in the local ecosystem. If we start doing something else, we aren't forgetting our role in the ecosystem, no role was ever assigned to us, our "role" is merely descriptive of what impact we have.
There are plenty of carnivores in the ecosystem. But I can’t think of another one that keeps prey suffering in a box from birth to death in order to feed itself.
It’s funny that we consider ourselves higher organisms because only we can even think about ethics or have ethics. But is it ethical to treat those incapable of ethics unethically?? If we are the only one in the picture with ethics, don’t we have a double responsibility to apply them for all?
If other predators were even capable of animal agriculture, I'd bet that there's a good chance that they would do it, but that's of course not really possible to know for sure. If we were going to apply ethics to things like animals that don't naturally have them, though, wouldn't we basically be obligated to destroy the natural ecosystem even more than we already do? The natural environment is, for something living it, absolutely horrendous. Not in the same way as things for a farm animal, but still, natural ecosystems tend to result in a situation where organisms must constantly fend of starvation, predation, parasites and infection, and few creatures live as long as they potentially could. If we really cared much about the well being of all the animals out there, we'd basically have to destroy the natural biosphere completely and keep all remaining animals in idealized captive conditions, like pets or zoo animals, to keep them free of predators and disease.
We can’t call other species unethical because they are either ethical nor unethical.
And so no, although nature is brutal, we are not obligated to destroy it (though some actually do hold this position on the grounds that it would reduce suffering).
The only creature we can judge ethically is ourselves. My point is that we ket ourselves off the hook on treatment of animals. Because they have no ethical function, they are like objects to us, and we do (vaguely gestures at this post) whatever to them. Our logic seems to be “until you’re capable ethics I don’t need to treat you with any, even though I’m capable.” It’s a neat little self-serving loophole we love to exploit.
Everyone is rushing in here to say it’s fine because we eat meat too. But I find this whole thing g very revealing of attitudes we usually just don’t think about. We’d never farm organs in human embryos because GASP consent and GASP sanctity of life. But we’ll farm organs cross species, which is surely more difficulty, because we’re so comfortable doing all that to animals.
You can take the perspective that it’s fine because meat. Or you can use this to take a second look at eating meat and suddenly it seems pretty fucked up.
I eat meat. Am not talking down to anyone. I just do actually think about the ethics.
I take the perspective that it's fine because human life is more important and valuable than animal life.
Same reason we should eradicate most mosquitos on the planet to end malaria
That’s not a perspective though, it’s a bald assertion. “It’s fine because we’re important” is like saying “it’s fine because it’s fine,” or more to the point “it’s fine because I say so.”
What makes us important?
A lot of people don’t seem to understand that their logic is circular. Ask someone why they chose the car they did, and half of them will say “well it’s the one I wanted.”
Animals are things and humans are people.
You're allowed to devalue your own existence all you want but anyone entertaining the idea that all life is equal is fundamentally stupid in my opinion
You’ve graduated from bald assertions and circular logic to ad hominems.
It’s ironic what a shit job you’re doing of demonstrating our higher functions and supposed superiority.
“HUMAN GOOD! NOT HUMAN BAD.”
Have a great day there, Socrates.
Not bad, just not as valuable as a human.
Even if that claim is true, it can still be bad to eat them.
All morality ultimately comes down to assertions like that though. Ethics aren't properties inherit in the universe that can be objectively measured like the laws of physics. One can construct ethical frameworks, like utilitarianism or deontology or such, as useful tools to help one decide what one should do in an unclear situation, but ultimately, the choice of what framework to use or the rules of that framework comes down to certain things just not feeling right to a given person, and other things feeling okay.
You’re right but there’s a difference between asserting rules for all actors and asserting arbitrary value assignments to different actors.
That ethics can't be objectively measured is wrong, though. That's like saying math is not logical because we made it up and you can't observe it in nature.
It's very difficult and it's not possible to do it in practice since we can not look at every variable of every sentient being at all times. But in theory it would be possible to find the most ethical solution to every problem every time and therefore it is measurable.
it would be possible to find the most ethical solution to a problem given all the variables only if you have already selected a system to determine which combinations of values for each variable are more or less ethical. That is to say, if one goes with ultilitarianism, one could hypothetically objectively measure how much happiness or suffering results from a given situation and pick the one that maximized or minimized it, or do the equivalent for a different ethical system, but you cannot objectively decide if utilitarianism, or deontology, or whatever other ethical system one may wish to use, is even the right system to use in the first place. Before your hypothetical measurements of every variable can actually be used to determine what solution to an ethical problem is best, one has to decide what a solution even looks like, and that decision is ultimately arbitrary.
It's not arbitrary, though. It is just hard to define. Ethic theory uses certain axioms that aren't subjective. I am not talking about your moral values, but whether or not certain behaviour is ethical or not.
As a drastic example, driving over a person because it is faster than driving around them. We can certainly decide for some cases whether that is ethically good or not. For the harder to decide cases it's again just a matter of not knowing all variables. If we would know all variables, we could put each reason for driving over a person on a scale of "ethical goodness". Since we have certain axioms in ethics you can logically conclude a result for all ethical questions (in theory).
This is not more made up than mathematics are made up. The quantity (not the mass!) of objects, for example, is also just a thought we put onto objects. It's not in the nature of objects to have a quantity. And if we didn't had an inherent concept of mathematics, quantity would not exist for us. In that way, it's different from gravity and other such physical realities. It is the same with ethics.
Quantities do exist in nature, outside of our concepts though. if there exist two electrons in a given area of space vs only one electron in a differen equivalent area of space, the implications of that on everything interacting with them would exist regardless of if we had a word for what two was.
That aside though, I think that what you have just said confirms what I am trying to say, because you yourself state that ethics are based on axioms. The thing about axioms is that they are not proven, they are statements simply assumed to be true from which all else follows. Mathematics is similarly founded to my understanding, but mathematics can also be compared to measured reality to confirm if the system derived from a certain set of axioms describes that reality (for example, euclidian geometry follows logically from a set of axioms, but since the discovery of relativity seems to show that physical space does not always perfectly follow euclidian geometry, it can be shown by observation of the physical universe that this mathematical model doesn't completely fit reality. It's still useful of course, and it does still logically follow from it's axioms- but those axioms can be verified as fitting observable reality or not, it isn't arbitrary if you accept those axioms, if you're talking about our universe that is. But ethical axioms are a different matter. Sure, you can have an objective ethical system, based on a set of ethical axioms, but to do this you have to accept that particular set of axioms in the first place. If one was to use a different set of axioms, you'd get different ethics.
Suppose we were to meet some aliens- intelligent and technologically sophisticated aliens, in the same way and degree that we are. They'd probably posses ethics of some kind (since ethics are ultimately a tool for deciding what one should and should not do, and the aliens should need to make such decisions just as we do). They'd also probably posses mathematics, since they're using science and technology. It might not look like our mathematics, having different symbols and phrasing and ways to manipulate those symbols, but it should have roughly equivalent concepts, since they're using it to model the same universe as us. We can assume with reasonable certainly that the axioms used by their mathematics when describing reality will translate to be the same as ours, assuming we both take the measurements needed to confirm if our models fit, there's not room for them to take arbitrarily different axioms here, because if they do, their results just won't be useful except as a mathematical curiosity. However, there's no particular reason that I can see to assume they have to accept equivalent ethical axioms to us (if you can think of a reason to assume that they do have to arrive at the same ones, I'd be interested in hearing it). If they can create a completely different set of ethics starting with different axioms, and don't run into any contradiction with observed reality in using that different model, that would seem to imply that the choice of which axioms to use is ultimately arbitrary, and that we can just choose whatever set of them results in an ethical system that we happen to like.
It’s just another version of the food chain
Yeah, but you see; the animals are useful in a new way so ethics doesn't matter. We'll worry about that in 50 years when we no longer need them to grow new organs for us
Yes that would be appropriate.
It's definitely fucked up. It reminds me of the WKUK breakfast pig sketch.
I would see a million pigs die before one human.
That's basically the attitude that is resulting in the 6th mass extinction right now.
Pigs are in no danger of extinction.
And wanting to preserve natural ecosystems does not imply wanting to improve the treatment of livestock. Incidentally, the end of meat consumption would most likely lead to the extinction of multiple species of livestock.
We brought pigs into existence for the benefit of human conditions, we will take them out of it if and when it becomes necessary.
How many pigs would be too many? What is the precise pig to human exchange rate?