Animal Testing

[GutZ]

 

Personally' date=' I dont think you understand why you think morality is subjective <--- this isnt an insult, I just dont think you have the relevant information about morality to make a very informed judgement about whether its subjective, objective, intersubjective, or something else, so its similar to the way creationists criticize evolution without really knowing anything about it.

 

But in any case, even if morality is subjective, it still [i']must[/i] be consistent, otherwise morality breaks down. I wrote about this in another post:

 

I personally think that most peoples moral convictions are a product of their time and culture, and that for the most part they dont have an inkling of rational reasoning behing it (i.e. I notice that people seem to think human life has intrinsic value, but I've asked "why should we bother protecting human life" and gotten the most convoluted replies that tell me that person, for so forcefully believing as they do, has never thought about the question even once). However, thats just people, and theres no reason why morality itself is subjective in principle.

 

After all, moral systems can be abstracted into a particular kind of language (first order predicate calculus to be specific), so that its principles can be analyzed apart from peoples minds and subjective expectations. And this opens up a world of things we can do with morality, namely we can apply the rules of logical inference and deduction to morality in order to evaluate the consistency between moral claims or draw out new claims. And if we can apply the rules of logic to our moral claims, then they are, in principle, resolvable by rational means, and not just by peoples subjective flickers of emotion.

 

Ultimately I agree with you but...

 

Where do you derive the moral standards from to make them logical/reasonable? At some point even within a most apparent logical moral system you have to question whether or not the foundation of that system is true and can be proven to be right.

[iglak]

1)

Because theres no argument that we should care about something before we afford it moral value. Simple example: Do you think the actions of the Nazis were wrong no matter how much or how little they connected with their victims. Do you think terrorists mentally connect with any of the victims they kill? Do you think sociopaths think twice about blowing someones head off? If so, then its pretty easy to see that beings can be wronged, even if their abusers are completely apathetic to their suffering.

 

2)

Because the discrimination is arbitrary and indefensible. Non-human animals are feeling beings with an experiential welfare, and they are the mental and feeling equivalents to human infants, so they have a claim to moral value equal to any infant's. The only difference between animals and non-humans is that they arent a part of our breeding group, but being a member or non-member of our breeding group doesnt mean anything, its not a moral characteristic.

 

3)

I dont understand that question, because its semantic nonsense. For example, the phrases "be less important than" and "is of greater importance" are moral evaluations, but they statement necessity [of animal experimentation] is being morally evalutated against the statement morality, which makes no sense.

 

1) my personal definition of morality in an absolute sense is:

thinking of a life as less than it's potential is immoral when influencing (directly or indirectly) that life.

 

this allows for torturing an murdering animals as long as they are respected for their potential. and most animals are incapable of influencing human culture. and most to-be tested and slaughtered animals are incapable of influencing any animal culture.

 

this also allows for discrimination in the sense of telling someone that i do not want them to influence or be influenced by me, and wish for them to leave permanently.

 

2)human infants have potential to grow into human adults, and are thus not the same as other animals.

 

i also approve of abortion, with the knowledge that they could indeed become great influencial people.

similarly, i approve of murdering humans if they are heavily destructive towards my or my friends' lives; but only in self-defence, not after the fact or before the destruction is necessarily going to occur.

 

and canibalism of someone who has already died has no relation to my absolute moral values, and i approve of it.

 

 

3) you're right. when i think about it that way, it's a very hard question to understand.

i believe Dr. Dalek was referring to 'necessity' with the belief that animal experimentation is a necessity to save human lives, with the potential that oneself might also require the result.

and i believe 'morality' is referring to the belief that every animal should be treated with equal respect.

 

so let's see, the question is asking:

why should survival - which to Dr. Dalek is uninfluenced by moral values, and of a higher priority - be given a moral value weighted less than the moral value of respecting all animals equally; or why should it be given a lower priority, and what are the terms of that priority?

 

or as a summary question, i think:

why is survival of myself and my species less important than survival of individuals from another species?

 

but then i guess that kind of brings us back to the beginning of the thread.

[In My Memory]

Gutz,

Ultimately I agree with you but...

 

Where do you derive the moral standards from to make them logical/reasonable? At some point even within a most apparent logical moral system you have to question whether or not the foundation of that system is true and can be proven to be right.

Your question is too big to be answered in a single post' date=' and actually philosophers have written volumes of books over 1000s of years dedicated to that single question alone. Most people agree that the foundation of ethics can be described by the philosophy of language, but that is really cumbersome to read (if you dont know what I mean, heres a direct quote from a short essay by John Skorupski on the topic, "the only concept of a reason for acting that we have is one that makes a reason a relation between an objective, an actor, and an action, thus: there is a reason for a person P whose objective is O to do X. That will hold when P's doing X is a way of bringing about O. How storng the reason whill depend on how effective X is doing - how probably it makes the acheivement of O"... it goes on like that for 25 more lines in the remaining paragraph, and 25 more pages in the essay).

 

I actually have my own longwinded cumbersome explanation for the foundations of morality as well, but here is the short and sweet explanation:

 

There are some characteristics of objects or events that dont reduce down to matter; but rather, those characteristics are emergent properties of certain interactions. A really simple example of such a characteristic is friendship: a "friendship" isnt a tangible object, its not made of matter or energy, but we can talk about it coherently as if a "friendship" exists. A "friendship" is abstract, but it does actually exist in a non-conventional way: it exists [i']between[/i] people and their interactions. If there werent any people interacting with each other, than friendships wouldnt exist at all.

 

And I think notions of good and bad are similar to friendship: they dont exist concretely, but they are properties which emerge out of the interactions of people (or feeling beings in general). The hard part about ethical systems is explaining how good and bad correspond or emerge from actions, but I think its pretty simple:

 

In the infinite number of actions a being can perform, a being may narrow down a set of actions to persue or avoid; and so, this process describes particular reasons to persue or avoid actions. Reasons for behavior can be attached to actions, and so we have a basis for attaching the properties of good and bad to actions (because good and bad fall under scope of reasons to persue or avoid actions). That in itself is one way to describe the foundation of morality, or at least describe how good and bad correspond to behaviors.

 

After this point, a moral theorists is challenged with describing just what it means to describe good and bad (or equivalent value and disvalue). Fundamentally, in metaethics, we can call something with intrinsic value value something that is persuable in itself without reference to other entities, and intrinsic disvalue is something worth avoiding for itself without reference to other entities. A moral theorists needs to show that some properties or actions are described by those definitions of intrinsic value and disvalue, however once again I think at least a few properties can be taken for granted: for instance, happiness has intrinsic value because its an experience worth persuing for just the experience itself, and likewise pain has intrinsic disvalue. So, actions can be described as good if they are reducable down to an intrinsic value or set of intrinsic values (i.e. giving to charity might be called good by reference to happiness, in the sense that it increases happiness).

 

So, at the very least, we have an metaethic in the making, one which describes the existence of goods and bads emerging from our actions, and so far all discussion has relied on very minimal assumptions, so that we can talk about morality in a materialistic universe just as reasonably as we can talk about friendships.

 

But in actuality, your question depends on what you mean by the foundation of an ethical system. I'm not exactly sure what your idea of "foundation"

 

 

But of course, you're essentially right, we have to question the foundations of morality, and I think at the root of it all, the absolute foundation of morality has to do with being able to interact with other beings, its basically observation that starts with building an ethic. We could always question if other beings exist, or that our sense information actually corresponds to things in the universe.

 

 

 

Iglak,

1) my personal definition of morality in an absolute sense is:

thinking of a life as less than it's potential is immoral when influencing (directly or indirectly) that life.

 

this allows for torturing an murdering animals as long as they are respected for their potential. and most animals are incapable of influencing human culture. and most to-be tested and slaughtered animals are incapable of influencing any animal culture.

 

this also allows for discrimination in the sense of telling someone that i do not want them to influence or be influenced by me, and wish for them to leave permanently.

 

2)human infants have potential to grow into human adults, and are thus not the same as other animals.

 

i also approve of abortion, with the knowledge that they could indeed become great influencial people.

similarly, i approve of murdering humans if they are heavily destructive towards my or my friends' lives; but only in self-defence, not after the fact or before the destruction is necessarily going to occur.

 

and canibalism of someone who has already died has no relation to my absolute moral values, and i approve of it.

At the very least, I dont know what you mean by "influencing culture" --- I for one have a very dim and pessimistic view of humans as a whole, and I think 99.999% of people will live their lives not affecting anything. They wont contribute any scientific, technological, philosophical, artistic, or other kind of knowledge into the world that will affect anything, much less have a redeeming value. Some people live their whole lives amounting to nothing... I think at the very least, you have some loose ends in your philosophy that you need to tie up, such as what it means to influence culture, why influencing culture is morally relevant or be weighted in our moral calculations, and just how much or how little a person has to influence it in order to have a claim to moral value.

 

However, your comments are basically just a reiteration of potential person arguments. On my vegan website, I wrote a direct response to "potential people" arguments here:

http://juliet.php0h.com/article.php?id_article=6

 

However, at the moment, my website isnt working. When it does, you can read my article in full, but for now I hope you'll be satisfied with just the gist of it in this little post: basically the problem with potential people arguments is that they just arent taken to their logical ends, for at least three different reasons:

 

- Do you ever see people arguing that its ok to torture and kill terminally ill babies or the mentally retarded? No matter how you put it, those people wont affect culture, but people still believe their lives are valuable even if they arent potential persons, so the whole potential persons argument is based on a red herring.

 

- But of course, think about the argument in the abstract sense: potential person arguments literally say "X is a potential Y, therefore X is morally equal to Y". However, if a baby sets something on fire, people are willing to forgive the baby because it doesnt know what its doing, and it would be irrational to punish the baby because it happens to be a "potential rational adult" -- so, we're treating the baby with exactly the properties that it has right now, not its potential properties. Similarly, you wouldnt believe for a second a persons argument for pedophilia on the basis that "children can potentially consent to sex, therefore they are equivalent to someone who has consented to sex". Heres another one: you are a potential corpse, so it wouldnt be wrong to bury you.

 

If you reject those arguments above, then implicitly you reject the claim that "X being a potential Y is morally equal to Y", and so you reject potential person argument as valid basis for morality.

 

- If we had people being bred for experimentation, then those people are NOT potential members of society, they are only potential experiments. Would you say its wong to save those people? If so, then the value of those people doesnt necessarily depend on what their potential is.

 

 

Of course, you have to understand the mechanics behind a potential person argument to understand why its useless in moral philosophy: potential person arguments state that only influential members of society are valuable; the potential person is not valuable itself, but its only valuable for the sake of bringing into existence. But think about it this way: you cannot harm a person by not bringing them into existence, because there is no person to harm in the first place and you cant harm non-existent people (if you think people are really harmed for not being brought into existence, then your acceptance of abortion is inconsistent, but also you had to object to people using birth control and not breeding as much as humanly possible). So then, what harm is done by killing a potential person? You havent harmed any existent people, and you havent harmed the non-rational human because its only a potential and not of any value --- so the, theres nothing objectionable about killing potential people at all. Ironically, potential person arguments imply that it is morally acceptable to take the lives of babies indiscriminately, so its not an argument for preserving life at all, its very misanthropic!

 

... but then, what if you reject the claim that its ok to kill potential people all you want? You would have to be rejecting the claim on the basis that potential people actually have value in themselves, and not just for what they are potentially, but this concession is a rejection of the potential person argument. And so, the value of babies doesnt depend on the potential, but some other characteristics that makes their continued existence valuable enough to protect... however, I'm almost positive you couldnt state just what any of those characteristics that dont automatically apply to animals.

 

 

I think my comments taken as a whole provide a basis for rejecting potential person argument as a valid moral distinction between animals and people. And more importantly, they make more sense: people believe that abortion is murder and that its just as wrong to take the life of an adult human, however a fetus doesnt share any morally relevant characteristics in common with adult humans, so theres explanation as to how the two are even remotely comparable. A claim can be made that, because the fetus has no mental or feeling capacities, then it has no claim to moral value, so that abortion isnt wrong.

 

why is survival of myself and my species less important than survival of individuals from another species?

I dont think your question is much different than, "why is the survival of my race less important the survival of another race".

 

But in general, the answer to your question and the race question works like this: its not that you're less important, but rather that your interests are being weighted equally against the interests of all the beings you affect, and the moral values you hold dear are being taken to their logical ends.

[GutZ]

But of course' date=' you're essentially right, we have to question the foundations of morality, and I think at the root of it all, the absolute foundation of morality has to do with being able to interact with other beings, its basically observation that starts with building an ethic. We could always question if other beings exist, or that our sense information actually corresponds to things in the universe.[/quote']

 

Well I guess that what I struggle with in terms of morality. I've read alot around here that taking observations of the universe and applying it to our ethic/moral bases is wrong, since nothing in the universe indicates whether or not an action is right or wrong, but more that an action is or isn't. I may have interpeted it wrong. If I held that as a truth though, it seems conflicting in that everything we deem to be the foundation of morals is based on some sort of subjective interpetation of the universe and how we should act, then from that we create some sort of logical system to live by.

 

back to work, add more later.

[Sisyphus]

Non-sequitor for IMM:

 

Sorry if you've already dealt with this (I only scanned the thread), but what about "where do you draw the line" arguments? That is to say, where do you draw the line? It seems to me that a chimpanzee would indeed have "morally relevant characteristics," but, for example, a grasshopper would not. The problem I see arises from the fact that there is no clear line to be drawn somewhere between grasshopper and chimp (or grasshopper and human), that rather, it is more of a continuum with animals that can think and have emotion and understand at one end, and utterly mindless creatures at the other.

 

What this leaves me with is the conclusion that yes, animals have moral value if we do. However it simultaneously leaves me with the conclusion that they do not all have the same moral value. That a human is more important than a chimp, which is more important than a dog, which is more important than a chicken, etc. This kind of moral arithmetic might seem distasteful, but distasteful =/ illogical. Alternatively, to say, for example, that a chimp has the same moral value as a human, is necessarily either a) to include ALL animal life as equal, i.e. to say destroying a city is no worse than destroying an ant's nest, or b) to draw a completely arbitrary (and therefore not logic-based) line somewhere on this continuum.

 

So I guess my question is, do you subscribe to a), b), or something else I haven't thought of?

[iglak]

Iglak,

 

1) At the very least, I dont know what you mean by "influencing culture" --- I for one have a very dim and pessimistic view of humans as a whole, and I think 99.999% of people will live their lives not affecting anything. They wont contribute any scientific, technological, philosophical, artistic, or other kind of knowledge into the world that will affect anything, much less have a redeeming value. Some people live their whole lives amounting to nothing... I think at the very least, you have some loose ends in your philosophy that you need to tie up, such as what it means to influence culture, why influencing culture is morally relevant or be weighted in our moral calculations, and just how much or how little a person has to influence it in order to have a claim to moral value.

 

However, your comments are basically just a reiteration of potential person arguments. On my vegan website, I wrote a direct response to "potential people" arguments here:

http://juliet.php0h.com/article.php?id_article=6

 

However, at the moment, my website isnt working. When it does, you can read my article in full, but for now I hope you'll be satisfied with just the gist of it in this little post: basically the problem with potential people arguments is that they just arent taken to their logical ends, for at least three different reasons:

 

2) - Do you ever see people arguing that its ok to torture and kill terminally ill babies or the mentally retarded? No matter how you put it, those people wont affect culture, but people still believe their lives are valuable even if they arent potential persons, so the whole potential persons argument is based on a red herring.

 

3) - But of course, think about the argument in the abstract sense: potential person arguments literally say "X is a potential Y, therefore X is morally equal to Y". However, if a baby sets something on fire, people are willing to forgive the baby because it doesnt know what its doing, and it would be irrational to punish the baby because it happens to be a "potential rational adult" -- so, we're treating the baby with exactly the properties that it has right now, not its potential properties. Similarly, you wouldnt believe for a second a persons argument for pedophilia on the basis that "children can potentially consent to sex, therefore they are equivalent to someone who has consented to sex". Heres another one: you are a potential corpse, so it wouldnt be wrong to bury you.

 

4) If you reject those arguments above, then implicitly you reject the claim that "X being a potential Y is morally equal to Y", and so you reject potential person argument as valid basis for morality.

 

5) - If we had people being bred for experimentation, then those people are NOT potential members of society, they are only potential experiments. Would you say its wong to save those people? If so, then the value of those people doesnt necessarily depend on what their potential is.

 

 

6) Of course, you have to understand the mechanics behind a potential person argument to understand why its useless in moral philosophy: potential person arguments state that only influential members of society are valuable; the potential person is not valuable itself, but its only valuable for the sake of bringing into existence. But think about it this way: you cannot harm a person by not bringing them into existence, because there is no person to harm in the first place and you cant harm non-existent people (if you think people are really harmed for not being brought into existence, then your acceptance of abortion is inconsistent, but also you had to object to people using birth control and not breeding as much as humanly possible). So then, what harm is done by killing a potential person? You havent harmed any existent people, and you havent harmed the non-rational human because its only a potential and not of any value --- so the, theres nothing objectionable about killing potential people at all. Ironically, potential person arguments imply that it is morally acceptable to take the lives of babies indiscriminately, so its not an argument for preserving life at all, its very misanthropic!

 

7) ... but then, what if you reject the claim that its ok to kill potential people all you want? You would have to be rejecting the claim on the basis that potential people actually have value in themselves, and not just for what they are potentially, but this concession is a rejection of the potential person argument. And so, the value of babies doesnt depend on the potential, but some other characteristics that makes their continued existence valuable enough to protect... however, I'm almost positive you couldnt state just what any of those characteristics that dont automatically apply to animals.

 

1) that's why i said 'potential' to influence culture.

i believe almost everyone has the ability to be who they want to be, and more than that, want to be something fulfilling for themselves. exceptions include: mental illnesses that would prevent that, and humans being bred for experimentation.

people who have absolutely no willpower to be aware of their existence in relation to the world, and whom i do not have an ability to 'save', exist in a no-man's land type of place in relation to my morals. where i will not do anything immoral to them directly, but i won't help them if they get into trouble, maybe even if it's indirectly caused by me.

 

2) when talking about babies or children, one must take into account the parents as well. killing and torturing the child would be morally equivalent to killing and torturing and the parents (because they tend to be connected on such a level).

in the instances where the child is completely unwanted and unloved, then i support killing and torturing them.

 

however, there's a third aspect to this that hasn't been mentioned. when a life empathizes with another life, causing pain to one life will hurt the other. since children are extremely eaesy to empathize with, doctors and experementors would be less inclined to expereiment on them. and not just because they themselves could empathize and be hurt, but also because it would likely get public attention, and most of the public would empathize. so torturing the doomed child is equivalent to hurting all of the people that empathize with it.

 

3) that's why my emphasis is on 'potential'. potential does not mean right now. persons are to be reacted to in response to the current situation, but are to be thought of as their potential. a child's potential is actually different from an adult's potential. a child's potential is to learn, and an adult's potential is to succeed with their dreams.

 

"children can potentially consent to sex". no, children potentially learn and ask 'why?' and expect an answer, but consent deals with the 'right now'. children can potentially learn to consent to sex, but they can't consent to sex because they are still learning, and easier to take advantage of.

 

"you are a potential corpse, so it wouldnt be wrong to bury you." "less than my potential" means anything less than the best possible scenario. death is the fourth worst scenario. mental death is the third worst scenario. emotional death is the second worst scenario. motivation death is the worst scenario. combinations exist.

 

4) i do not advocate "X is a potential Y, therefore X is morally equivalent to Y"

i instead advocate "X desires to fulfill X's potential of Y, therefore X is morally equivalent to Y".

 

again, and for clarity, i state that i believe every person desires their potential, 'less they are motivationally dead (as is common in today's society). i also believe that everyone can be motivationally revived. however, if i am not able to revive them, and i am not able to find someone who is able to revive them, then they have no desires, and are morally thought of as useless (though not physically dead).

 

children desire to learn and experiment. children cannot desire to have sex, because they don't know enough about it until they become teenagers.

 

please keep in mind when i am saying this that i am not saying "teenagers should be told to have sex all the time".

i am instead not saying anything in relation to what teenagers are taught and suggested. instead, i am saying thatteenagers should be respected as desiring the potential to make decisions equal to adults, and also desiring the potential to learn everything they can.

 

5) people bred for experimentation have an invalid desire for potential. they can never achieve it (unless they break free, but that is irrelivent). i support breeding humans for experimentation (although it would be hard to morally start the process, because the first person wouldn't exactly be morally bred).

 

6) abortion is a touchy subject. many people believe that fetuses are capable of feeling and thinking in the most basic sense (very basic desires).

so my stance on abortion is: as long as you are aware that the child is yours and is capalbe of growing into an adult (satisfies the possibility of desiring potential for growth), torture and kill him/her all you want.

fetuses are in transition from non-existance to existance.

 

actually, scratch that. i am going to start having a defined stance on abortion as of now:

fetuses with a brain stem have the desire (in the most basic sense) to continue growing. stopping the transition from non-existance to existance is exactly that, and morally equivalent to exactly that. it's not murder, but it is not morally negligable.

destroying a fetus without a brain stem is almost morally equivalent to other forms of birth control, or masturbating, which have no relation to morality because the potential life has no desires and cannot have any desires at that time. although the fetus is transitioning into having desires, so it has minor moral basis.

 

7) good thing this doesn't apply to me.

my morlity is that "X desires to fulfill X's potential of Y, therefore X is morally equivalent to Y".

the characteristic in my morality not found in animals is the 'desire' part. most animals simply desire to live. higher desires should be treated with higher respect. but a desire to simply live and nothing else is low priority.

[Dr. Dalek]

No I'm not. If I cant understand your question, I cant answer it.

 

?

 

Your not actualy arguing about the point your just leading people around to make them frustrated and quit debating so that you can claim victory. This will not work on ME!

 

If you or someone else finds a way to make these so called "crulty free methods" suficently equal in accuracy, or superior in accuracy to curent animal testing methods then I wil support it. Because dispite the fact that it seems that animal testing at the moment is neccisary, I like animals too. Some I like because they make decent pets, or stews, but I like them just the same. In the mean time neccesity is of greater importance than morality.

 

I didn't ask a question.

 

Let me sumerize my point. . .

 

1) As of right now there is no reliable way to replace animal testing, all other alternatives leave too much room for risk to human lives

2) It does not matter weather it is moraly right or not to do what is neccisary, necesity, by definition, is neccisary, or if you don't do it things go wrong.

3) The only way to stop animal testing is to make it not neccisary.

 

So what I'm saying is more of a suggestion. Instead of demonizing animal testing you could get an education, and develope a "crutly free" method that could make animal testing obsolete than there would be no more issue.

 

But your attatude seems to indicate that you don't want to do anything about it yourself, you also seem not to be able to support your point properly, your just going around in circles with your argument, seeminly trying to tire you opponants instead of convincing them.

[In My Memory]

Sisyphus,

What this leaves me with is the conclusion that yes' date=' animals have moral value if we do. However it simultaneously leaves me with the conclusion that they do not all have the same moral value. That a human is more important than a chimp, which is more important than a dog, which is more important than a chicken, etc. This kind of moral arithmetic might seem distasteful, but distasteful =/ illogical. Alternatively, to say, for example, that a chimp has the same moral value as a human, is necessarily either a) to include ALL animal life as equal, i.e. to say destroying a city is no worse than destroying an ant's nest, or b) to draw a completely arbitrary (and therefore not logic-based) line somewhere on this continuum.

 

So I guess my question is, do you subscribe to a), b), or something else I haven't thought of?[/quote']

At least for me, I tend to view the value of things on a continuum, where the value of a being depends directly on its mental and feeling capacities. So a grasshopper probably doesnt have the same claim to moral value as a newborn infant (because its not clear that grasshoppers have cognitive capacities or a remotely comparable capacity to feel pain or satisfaction as an infant), and a newborn infant would have less claim than an adult dog, and an adult dog would have less claim than a child, and a child less claim than an adult. This is based strictly on the quantity and intensity of the morally relevant characteristics a being has to take into consideration.

 

However, people get the wrong idea about that kind of view (called the perfectionist view), they seem to think that if being A has a greater claim to moral value than being B, then A has is justified in exploiting B for its own gain. It only means you can harm being A in ways that dont apply to B (for instance, if A likes opera music and B doesnt have a capacity to either enjoy or cringe to opera music, then you can harm A by depriving it of opera music but you cant harm B by doing the same thing). If two beings share two characteristics such as having a similar capacity to feel pain, but they are unequal other respects (i.e. one is rational and the other is not), then you harm them to the same degree by causing them equal amounts of pain; theres no reason to take into consideration any other characteristics like rationality if they arent affected by the action.

 

I made similar comments about this in post #39:

if a being is worth more than that one, then its ok for that being to kill the lesser one, right? a lesser beings suffering doesnt matter as much, right?".

 

The answer is no, because the intuitional belief completely ignores the fact that we're bound to other moral principles, such as minimizing the harm that we cause to feeling beings; we're still bound to minimize the harm we cause to beings even if they dont have as strong of a claim to moral value as we do.

 

More importantly, an argument can be made to say that beings who are capable of making moral decisions have special duties to non-rational beings, and they are obligated to protect lesser-rational feeling beings in a paternalistic way. I dont really think of it much differently from the fact that we make special accomodations for the severly mentally disabled, when despite the fact that they cant take care of themselves or be rational beings, we actually think its worse to abuse or exploit the mentally disabled than a rational adult. What would be the point of abusing a mentally retarded person, even if they are less rational they you?

 

So in a way, peoples ability to make moral decisions makes them more valuable, but it also makes them more responsible for protecting non-rational beings.

 

I'm not sure if this answered the question in the way you wanted

 

 

 

iglak,

when talking about babies or children' date=' one must take into account the parents as well. killing and torturing the child would be morally equivalent to killing and torturing and the parents (because they tend to be connected on such a level).

[/quote']

I dont think theres an argument that torturing and killing a child is the same thing as torturing and killing the parents, that to me sounds sophistry and word play. I dont see where the argument comes from.

 

in the instances where the child is completely unwanted and unloved, then i support killing and torturing them.

Ummm... I dont even know how to respond to that. How do you justify that?

 

however, there's a third aspect to this that hasn't been mentioned. when a life empathizes with another life, causing pain to one life will hurt the other. since children are extremely eaesy to empathize with, doctors and experementors would be less inclined to expereiment on them. and not just because they themselves could empathize and be hurt, but also because it would likely get public attention, and most of the public would empathize. so torturing the doomed child is equivalent to hurting all of the people that empathize with it.

So in other words, torturing and killing children isnt wrong because it hurts the children, but only because it hurts people sympathetic to children? I have to admit, thats really counterintuitive...

 

... however, you open yourself up to a number of objections:

- too much empahsis is placed on others feelings, and almost no emphasis at all is being placed on the feelings of the tortured being.

 

- you dont have a conceivable objection to secret killings, where no one ever knows that children are tortured and killed at all. We could imagine that couple have a child, but dont care for it, so they burn its face off with a blowtorch and no one ever discovers the murder... theres not anything obviously wrong with that based on what you said, and in fact it might be considered to the right thing to do (after all, if peoples feelings matter so much, you would take obviously steps to conceal your actions and avoid hurting peoples feelings).

 

- its not clear that you have an argument for animal experimentation, because I and a few million others definitely sympathize with the lives of animals, and it hurts us very much. But then you dont have an argument for abortion either, because some people empathize with the life of an unborn fetus.

 

I've criticized a lot of peoples ethical systems for being internally inconsistent and naive, but yours is the first I've seen that is almost wantonly cruel.

 

i do not advocate "X is a potential Y' date=' therefore X is morally equivalent to Y"

i instead advocate "X desires to fulfill X's potential of Y, therefore X is morally equivalent to Y".[/quote']

This is almost more confusing than the first one, because children are oftentimes naive about their potential, and probably many teenagers too, and so now your original comment that killing infants because they are potential adults doesnt make any sense at all. You said that the claim "children can potentially consent to sex" is invalid until children understand concepts of sex and consent, but how is that infants are moral equals to adults when they dont even have the mental capacity to fathom adulthood or even see themselves over time? Infants have no capacity to desire abstract things like influencing culture, so they dont fall under the scope of your potential person argument, and they are actually excluded from a claim of moral value precisely by your potential person argument.

 

And yet, theres still no connection as to how something desiring to fulfill its potential makes it morally equal to its potential. Just a simple example: Bob desires to become a president of the United States, but he is not entitled to a private jet and round-the-clock bodyguards 24/7, therefore Bob cannot make a claim that he is actually equal to the president. IMM desires to retire in the future, but she is not morally wronged for being denied the benefits given to retirees right now. Joe the factory worker desires to be the CEO of Worldcom, but Joe is not entitled to actually be treated as a CEO of worldcom. All of these desires to fulfill a potential dont seem to mean anything, and it seems rational to treat the people with precisely the characteristics they actually have than the ones they only desire and have yet to obtain.

 

 

I apologize for being presumptuous and arrogantly stating your beliefs for you, but I genuinely dont believe that when you wrote "human infants have potential to grow into human adults" that you actually mean "human infants desire to fulfill their potentials to grow into adults" at the time. I think you actually meant "X is a potential Y, therefore X is morally equal to Y" when you originally made your comment, but then you shifted your goalposts around when it became clear that "X is a potential Y..." isnt a valid moral principle... you made a mostly ad hoc redefinition of your original claim to hold on to your point. However, based on your comments so far --- and please dont take this as rude --- I really dont think you understand your beliefs or have thought them out very much.

 

my morlity is that "X desires to fulfill X's potential of Y' date=' therefore X is morally equivalent to Y".

the characteristic in my morality not found in animals is the 'desire' part. most animals simply desire to live. higher desires should be treated with higher respect. but a desire to simply live and nothing else is low priority.[/quote']

At the very least, you're comments come closer to an actual kind of morality called preference utilitarianism, but you've still got gaps. For instance, you dont exactly state what a higher desire is or how to identify one (is the desire to masturbate in public a higher desire than a desire to live?), and certainly its reasonable that animals have all the same simple desires as mentally similar humans (i.e. desire for continued existence, to be free from suffering, to be sheltered from harm, to have something to eat, to be comfortable, etc). So again, its not obvious to me how animals are any worse off than mentally similar humans.

 

 

 

Dr Dalek,

Let me sumerize my point. . .

 

1) As of right now there is no reliable way to replace animal testing' date=' all other alternatives leave too much room for risk to human lives

2) It does not matter weather it is moraly right or not to do what is neccisary, necesity, by definition, is neccisary, or if you don't do it things go wrong.

3) The only way to stop animal testing is to make it not neccisary.

 

So what I'm saying is more of a suggestion. Instead of demonizing animal testing you could get an education, and develope a "crutly free" method that could make animal testing obsolete than there would be no more issue.[/quote']

I'd love to do that... but I'd also love to donate millions of dollars to charity and end world hunger.

 

However, I dont buy your argument that animal testing is necessary, you dont even state what you mean by it, or even give the remotest inkling of proof that animal testing is necessary for anything. People can and have got along just fine without animal testing, and communities like the Amish thrive without it; people like me voluntarily abstain from animal tested products, and survive just fine.

 

But also, I notice that your definition of "necessary" is meaningless, because its appears to be subjective and warped by peoples wants and desires. For example

- the Nazis had an objective to win a war, so it was necessary to perform medical experiments on POWs and transfer the data toward saving German lives.

- if a person Bob has a rare disease that is destroying his lungs, and there are no donations available for him, then it is necessary for him to take someone else lungs by force to preserve his survival.

- if a person, Bill, is thrilled by torturing and killing people, then it is necessary for him to torture and kill people to be thrilled.

- if a person, Joe, wants to steal your money, then it is necessary for Joe to actually steal your money in order to satisfy his want

- if the US has a desire to kill all the Muslims and Mexicans in the country, then it is necessary for the US to kill all Muslims and Mexicans in the country to satisfy the desire

 

I dont see how your comments that animal experimentation is necessary differ from anything above. I think your comments or more a less a word game, but fall short of actually justifying animal experimentation.

 

Of course, you probably havent even considered that your idea of "necessary" is subjective and fundamentally anthropocentric. Theres no denying that its necessary from an animals point of view to abolish experimentation in order to preserve their lives.

 

However, the most important reason why your comments are morally irrelevant is because you're actually stating that your statement is true "weather it is moraly right or not to do"; this means you CANNOT be be making a moral statement, at best you're making declarative statement. If we accept that "it is necessary to experiment on animals to save human lives", then we will certainly have no problem accepting "it is necessary to abolish animal experimentation to protect animals from being harmed"; we can take both statements to be true simultaneously with or without morality, because they aren't prescriptive statements, they're purely descriptive. When you say is animal experimentation is necessary but you say it outside the context of a moral evaluation: you're only making a descriptive statement only.

 

I can say that its necessary to torture people endless in order to make them suffer, and thats a true statment, which is fundamentally equivalent to your comments on animal experimentation by the same principles. However, notice that your argument (and my "torture is necessary" argument) is actually a disguised form of an is-ought fallacy and a little bit of shifty definition: you're stating that X is descriptively necessary to obtain Y, but then you say its prescriptively necessary on the grounds that whatever is implies what ought to be. Theres no way you can accept your argument as valid without accepting that its also prescritively necessary to torture people so that they'll suffer, or that its prescriptively necessary for people to kill you and harvest their organs just to preserve their own lives. Your comments are interesting, but you should be able to see why they dont justify animal experimentation.

[GutZ]

ok to kind of continue from where I left off and last point.

 

Ultimately I can't see morality having any relevance outside the intellectual human species or above. Because of that I can't see it being based on logic unless there is a collected agreement amoungst the species. This will be essentially subjective and baised. If we valve life and want to minimize harm then from that I can only conclude that animal testing is wrong.

 

I agree with that. essentially it seem as hookie as like with honour and pride, but I like that sort of stuff too so...yeehaw!

[iglak]

iglak,

 

1) I dont think theres an argument that torturing and killing a child is the same thing as torturing and killing the parents, that to me sounds sophistry and word play. I dont see where the argument comes from.

 

 

2) Ummm... I dont even know how to respond to that. How do you justify that?

 

 

So in other words, torturing and killing children isnt wrong because it hurts the children, but only because it hurts people sympathetic to children? I have to admit, thats really counterintuitive...

 

3) ... however, you open yourself up to a number of objections:

- too much empahsis is placed on others feelings, and almost no emphasis at all is being placed on the feelings of the tortured being.

 

- you dont have a conceivable objection to secret killings, where no one ever knows that children are tortured and killed at all. We could imagine that couple have a child, but dont care for it, so they burn its face off with a blowtorch and no one ever discovers the murder... theres not anything obviously wrong with that based on what you said, and in fact it might be considered to the right thing to do (after all, if peoples feelings matter so much, you would take obviously steps to conceal your actions and avoid hurting peoples feelings).

 

4) - its not clear that you have an argument for animal experimentation, because I and a few million others definitely sympathize with the lives of animals, and it hurts us very much. 5) But then you dont have an argument for abortion either, because some people empathize with the life of an unborn fetus.

 

6) I've criticized a lot of peoples ethical systems for being internally inconsistent and naive, but yours is the first I've seen that is almost wantonly cruel.

 

 

7) This is almost more confusing than the first one, because children are oftentimes naive about their potential, and probably many teenagers too, and so now your original comment that killing infants because they are potential adults doesnt make any sense at all. You said that the claim "children can potentially consent to sex" is invalid until children understand concepts of sex and consent, but how is that infants are moral equals to adults when they dont even have the mental capacity to fathom adulthood or even see themselves over time? 8) Infants have no capacity to desire abstract things like influencing culture, so they dont fall under the scope of your potential person argument, and they are actually excluded from a claim of moral value precisely by your potential person argument.

 

9) And yet, theres still no connection as to how something desiring to fulfill its potential makes it morally equal to its potential. Just a simple example: Bob desires to become a president of the United States, but he is not entitled to a private jet and round-the-clock bodyguards 24/7, therefore Bob cannot make a claim that he is actually equal to the president. IMM desires to retire in the future, but she is not morally wronged for being denied the benefits given to retirees right now. Joe the factory worker desires to be the CEO of Worldcom, but Joe is not entitled to actually be treated as a CEO of worldcom. All of these desires to fulfill a potential dont seem to mean anything, and it seems rational to treat the people with precisely the characteristics they actually have than the ones they only desire and have yet to obtain.

 

 

10) I apologize for being presumptuous and arrogantly stating your beliefs for you, but I genuinely dont believe that when you wrote "human infants have potential to grow into human adults" that you actually mean "human infants desire to fulfill their potentials to grow into adults" at the time. I think you actually meant "X is a potential Y, therefore X is morally equal to Y" when you originally made your comment, but then you shifted your goalposts around when it became clear that "X is a potential Y..." isnt a valid moral principle... you made a mostly ad hoc redefinition of your original claim to hold on to your point. However, based on your comments so far --- and please dont take this as rude --- I really dont think you understand your beliefs or have thought them out very much.

 

 

11) At the very least, you're comments come closer to an actual kind of morality called preference utilitarianism, but you've still got gaps. For instance, you dont exactly state what a higher desire is or how to identify one (is the desire to masturbate in public a higher desire than a desire to live?), and certainly its reasonable that animals have all the same simple desires as mentally similar humans (i.e. desire for continued existence, to be free from suffering, to be sheltered from harm, to have something to eat, to be comfortable, etc). So again, its not obvious to me how animals are any worse off than mentally similar humans.

 

1) empathy is the ability to feel someone else's emotions, pleasures, and pains. parents tend to heavily empathize with their offspring.

 

2) i was referring to "child" in response to your question about children who are mentally or physically 100% incapable of influencing culture, now or in the future.

your argument is invalid.

 

3) emphasis is prioritized on the target's desires to fulfill their potential.

emphasis is prioritized as second to that on empathy with the target in that respect.

 

4) sympathize is different from empathize.

i have no emphasis on pain. pain and death are not related to my morality. inflicting pain and death when motivated by purely mechanical or logical means is also unrelatede to my morality.

thus, things that are unrelated: machines killing. sociopaths killing. killing sociopaths who hurt or kill. 99.99999% of animals killing. killing plants or anything from any other kingdom. empathy of physical pain.

 

5) i never said (paraphrasing) "everyone should get abortions" that's actually quite the opposite of what i said. i said (paraphrasing) "be aware, then make the choice"

 

6) no, just places emphasis on logic and mechanics being unrelated to morality, while emotions and potentials are related.

 

7)

"because children are oftentimes naive about their potential"

hence why they can't make important decisions like that.

 

"and so now your original comment that killing infants because they are potential adults doesnt make any sense at all."

i never said that. i said "killing infants becuse they desire to fulfill their potential to grow (on a very basic level)"

 

"but how is that infants are moral equals to adults when they dont even have the mental capacity to fathom adulthood or even see themselves over time?"

they're not moral equals to adults. i never said they were. i said they were morally equal to their growth potential. when i say "growth potential" (specifically growth, not anything else) i'm thinking approximately the derivative of the curve of growth over time at that point in time.

 

8) "Infants have no capacity to desire abstract things like influencing culture, so they dont fall under the scope of your potential person argument, and they are actually excluded from a claim of moral value precisely by your potential person argument."

that's because i don't HAVE a potential persons argument.

you're attributing my potential argument to mean an equal potential between all living beings, and that's just wrong. the potential changes over time, and even changes subjects over time.

 

9) "it seems rational to treat the people with precisely the characteristics they actually have than the ones they only desire and have yet to obtain."

that's why i said that people should be responded to in "the now", yet morally treated as their desire to fulfill their potential.

and because morals are unrelated to mechanical and logical responses like the ones you mentioned, all of these arguments are unrelated to my morality and invalid.

 

also, those aren't exactly desires to fulfill potentials. because when i say that, i am also not talking about mechanical and logical things, i am talking about emotional and... the level above that which doesn't have a good word for it.

 

10) no problem. it gives me the opporotunity to clarify my morals, and see if i can actually communicate them in words.

 

""X is a potential Y, therefore X is morally equal to Y" when you originally made your comment, but then you shifted your goalposts around when it became clear that "X is a potential Y..." isnt a valid moral principle... you made a mostly ad hoc redefinition of your original claim to hold on to your point."

i never specified one or the other until my last post. what i did in my last post was clarify my position to hopefully not allow for the same misunderstandings. i assure you, i have not changed moral positions, i have only clarified my wording.

 

 

"However, based on your comments so far --- and please dont take this as rude --- I really dont think you understand your beliefs or have thought them out very much."

i underestand my beliefs perefectly, but the problem is that they are contained within a higher system than words can define.

when i respond, evereything i say makes perfect sense to me, but that's because i'm aware of my emotions, context, and subtle definitions of words.

every word that is not specifically referring to mechanical motions has a gradient in which every pereson applies a slightly different meaning.

the words i am using make perfect sense to me, but i can't communicate my emotions, context, or subtle meanings through them.

words can only communicate mechanical and logical processes clearly. because my morality is unrelated to mechanical and logical processes, and insteaed uses the 2 levels above that, i have to try to use words to create a 2d picture of a 4d scene where the 2 dimentions that are visible are unimportant.

it's extremely hard, because everyone interperets the 3d words slightly differently.

 

11) i don't think i can state what a higher desire is. masturbating, however, is a mechanical desiree, and thus unrelated.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

here is the context in which i created the definition of my moral code:

 

the 7 deadly sins are literally painful to me, both when i use them and when others use them.

through a LOT of thinking, i descovered that the sole connecting force between all of them is that they dehumanize the target.

in contrast, the 7 heavenly virtues humanize the target.

 

as a side note, the 7 deadly sins have counterparts that do not dehumanize, but instead provide motivation for the user.

 

from my experience, every instance i have seen where someone is dehumanized, it results in them feeling depressed one way or another.

depression, as i have experienced myself, leads to a feeling of a complete loss of individuality, or the ability to make choices. or as i describe it: death of mentality (the forth dimention in this context).

 

but i also thought a lot about mechanical processes and reasoning in relation to morality. i realized that the only reason we think of killing or torturing as immoral is because we think about it a lot, and we ascribe emotions and mentalities to it. so what is it that seperates immoral murder from self-defence or hunting? the conclusion i came to is that it is dehumanization of the target. hunting does not dehumanize, it is instead completely unrelated to humanizing or dehumanizing (proper hunting, not those sadistic ones).

sociopaths logically kill or hurt, unless they have no recognition of utilitarianism either, in which case they kill indescriminately; can we really call them immoral if they have no recognition of morality? they are killing purely mechanically and logically. additionally, because they have no recognition of emotions or mentalities, they can't be dehumanized, and are thus also immune to morality.

so the actions themselves are unrelated to morality, it is simply what we ascribe to them which makes them moral or immoral.

 

so the grand answer to 'what is immoral?' by me is: dehumanization.

but what about animals? they can't be dehumanized because they aren't humans. so how do i allow for animals too?

 

i know! "thinking of a life as less than it's potential". that allows for animals to be immorally treated too, but not as easily as humans.

 

but then the question that i didn't relize is: how do we define 'potential'?

well, i don't know if i can, because i'm thinking of a specific use of the word, one that isn't exactly common, and the definition of that use requires the use of words similar to potential, which will have different definitions for different people.

[Dr. Dalek]

[Dr Dalek,

 

I'd love to do that... but I'd also love to donate millions of dollars to charity and end world hunger.

Excuses excuses, if you don't want to do anything about it but complain, thats fine by me. Trust me when I say no one will care..

 

You could at least try. As of right now all you have done is complain, smear, and demonize. Even protesting is just a way of presuring other people to do something. If your realy so ritious and passionate about saving these animals you would at least try.

 

How old are you? Do you have a college level education? If not you could always get one, scholarships are easy to come by these days, payment plans. I'm in college right now. Its hard work but I'm getting it done. Why can't you try to educate yourself in medical research and do something to help your furry firends?

 

However, I dont buy your argument that animal testing is nessary, you dont even state what you mean by it, or even give the remotest inkling of proof that animal testing is necessary for anything. People can and have got along just fine without animal testing, and communities like the Amish thrive without it; people like me voluntarily abstain from animal tested products, and survive just fine.

 

People also got along fine for millenia without, fire, cars, computers, agriculture, and shampoo. However in the context of the modern world cars are necisary to move long distances so people can do their jobs. Computers in the context of modern society are necisary to send information long distances and do many jobs. In a different society things would be just fine without animal testing, but their of billions of chronically sick people out there and hypochondiracts who need medicines of all kinds. They have to be produced as quickly as possible and tested as thoughrougly as possible.

 

I'm sure there are people who can get along fine without animal tested drugs, but there also many people who can get along just fine without any medication for years. I for instance am the only one in my family not on somekind of medicatiopn right now. How much do these groups overlap?

 

 

But also, I notice that your definition of "necessary" is meaningless, because its appears to be subjective and warped by peoples wants and desires.

Necessary: Something that is a required condition for something else to be the case.

Okay lets go over this (wikipedia)

 

1) Animals can be put in controlled situations for testing. Human lives vary and cannot be subjected to scientific controll in order to acuratly study any detail, or combination thereof.

 

2)There is no substitute for the living systems necessary to study interaction among cells, tissue, and organs. Animals are good surrogates because of their similarities to humans.

 

3)It would be unethical to test substances or drugs with potentially adverse side-effects on human beings.

 

4)There is no substitute for psychiatric studies (e.g., antidepressant clinical trials) that require behavioral data.

 

5)Animals can be bred especially for animal-testing purposes, meaning they arrive at the laboratory free from disease.

 

6)Animals receive more sophisticated medical care because of animal tests that have led to advances in veterinary medicine.

 

7)Humans that use medicine derived from animal research are healthier.

 

8)Alternatives to certain kinds of animal testing are unknown.

 

A great many medical breakthroughs have depended on the use of laboratory animals and much of the medical research being done today still depends on them. Yet this research faces increasingly hostile campaigns by those who' date=' through lack of understanding, would seek to ban all animal research. It is very important that we examine the facts.

 

For every £1 spent on medical research, only 5p is spent on animal experiments, which are vital and complement computer studies, test tube experiments and studying people. If we look at the number of laboratory animals used, and the potential improvements in quality of life for both humans and other animals arising from such research, then we can see that the benefits far outweigh the costs. The following facts bring animal experimentation into a realistic focus:

 

It is estimated that two million cats and dogs are abandoned as unwanted pets every year, and even more animals are destroyed as vermin. The RSPCA alone has to handle 2,000 cats and dogs every day

Last year 800 million animals were slaughtered for human consumption but only 2.6 million animals were used in medical research. That's roughly equivalent to one mouse per person every 20 years

Of all the areas of animal use, including agriculture, pets, sports and animal research, the standards of welfare and veterinary care laid down are the highest for animals kept in laboratories for research.

http://www.simr.org.uk/pages/research/

 

I dont see how your comments that animal experimentation is necessary differ from anything above. I think your comments or more a less a word game, but fall short of actually justifying animal experimentation.

Me? Word game? Ypur the one who has been questioning and playing with definitions and leading people in rhetorical circles.

 

Of course, you probably havent even considered that your idea of "necessary" is subjective and fundamentally anthropocentric. Theres no denying that its necessary from an animals point of view to abolish experimentation in order to preserve their lives.

Everything is subjective! Even if you try to see things from a Universal perspective, or other perspective in general the perspective you see is corrupted by your own perspective on the other perspective!

Humans look out for #1. Animals look out for #1. Plants look out for #1.

Untill we have a better system animal testing will continue.

[Cyberman]

^^^^^ sometimes there are some really funny examples of when people argue against human experimentation and animal rights. For example' date=' lucaspa's posts above are almost verbatim a discussion I had with my co-workers son, and it went like this:

 

IMM: Seriously, how can you even defend eating meat, theres nothing morally consistent about it at all.

 

Guy: Morally consistent? Guess what, veganism kills animals too, animals get killed when harvesting farmland. Now doesnt that make you a hypocrite?

 

IMM: Who are you to call me a hypocrite? You just said two seconds ago that its wrong to kill people, but you drive a car and dont think twice about the fact that people kill each other on the road everyday. Now who's the hypocrite?

 

Guy: That doesnt even make sense, and it doesnt have anything to do with what I said about killing people. Car accidents are completely unintentional and--and you cant call someone a hypocrite for accidentally killing someone.

 

IMM: so then what were you saying about farming?

 

Guy: wait, I didnt say... @#$%, nevermind I dont know.

 

IMM: lol, you just got totally pwn3d by a girl in a skirt, stfu[/quote']

 

So your basicaly saying that if the killing of animals is incidental and you have no controll over it then there is nothing wrong with it. So why don't you eat meat? Those animals are being killed anyway and you have no way of stoping it; Why not turn adversity into advantage and eat a hamburger?

[ecoli]

So your basicaly saying that if the killing of animals is incidental and you have no controll over it then there is nothing wrong with it. So why don't you eat meat? Those animals are being killed anyway and you have no way of stoping it; Why not turn adversity into advantage and eat a hamburger?

 

Don't be so sure that eating a hamburger is to your advantage.

[bascule]

So your basicaly saying that if the killing of animals is incidental and you have no controll over it then there is nothing wrong with it. So why don't you eat meat?

 

By that logic, there's no difference between first degree murder and involuntary manslaughter.

[Cyberman]

By that logic, there's no difference between first degree murder and involuntary manslaughter.

Exactly my point.

[Dr. Dalek]

Exactly my point.

 

I'm not sure I get your meaning.

[Cyberman]

I'm not sure I get your meaning.

 

I'm trying to demonstrait that logic can be used to support or refute almost any opinion, it seems almost redundant when you consider that everyone here trying to logicaly argu there point, yet none of them may actualy be right or wrong.

 

I say each of us here just should continue to live there lives as they see fit. It is not necisary for you to convince IMM that you are right or for IMM to convince you that she is right. As long as you live your live as you see fit whether you are right or wrong is redundant.

[gcol]

I'm trying to demonstrait that logic can be used to support or refute almost any opinion, .

 

Not sure I completely understand that point, but my viewpoint is that logic is cold, hard and impersonal. When logic does not support prejudice, and conflicts with items on our personal wish-list, we tend to tie ourselves in knots trying to escape its consequences. trying to live by logic puts us at odds with most of the whims of the human condition.

[Dr. Dalek]

Not sure I completely understand that point, but my viewpoint is that logic is cold, hard and impersonal. When logic does not support prejudice, and conflicts with items on our personal wish-list, we tend to tie ourselves in knots trying to escape its consequences. trying to live by logic puts us at odds with most of the whims of the human condition.

 

What I think Cyberman is getting at is that when you put logic into a context of opinions and emotions you can use it to substanciate your claim, but how logical your argument is, is redundant because other people can also apply logic in the context of their emotions and opinions which are different than yours.

 

This seems relivant to our debate because we could easily go on forever arguming logicaly about morality, which is based on emotions and opinions wich differ from person to person.

[In My Memory]

iglak,

empathy is the ability to feel someone else's emotions, pleasures, and pains. parents tend to heavily empathize with their offspring.

Yes it is, but still, its a little too much to say that torture and murder of child is no different from torture and murdering the parents. Parents always suffer less.

 

emphasis is prioritized on the target's desires to fulfill their potential.

emphasis is prioritized as second to that on empathy with the target in that respect.

I'm sorry' date=' I cant parse that. What are you trying to say?

 

sympathize is different from empathize.

i have no emphasis on pain. pain and death are not related to my morality.

Ummm... yes it is, you said this in your last post: "when talking about babies or children, one must take into account the parents as well. killing and torturing the child would be morally equivalent to killing and torturing and the parents (because they tend to be connected on such a level).". When you talk about the torture and killing of another person, you are talking about pain and death... but if pain and death dont figure into your moral system, then what you said before doesnt make any sense, because the torture and killing of another person wouldnt have a moral consequence.

 

i never said (paraphrasing) "everyone should get abortions" that's actually quite the opposite of what i said. i said (paraphrasing) "be aware, then make the choice"

I'm sorry, I dont follow. You posted that quote above as a reply to my comment that you dont have an argument justifying abortion. Remember, in your last posts, you said you had no problem with people having abortions (even if the fetus could potentially affect society), but then you posted that its wrong to kill children because parents would be upset and feel hurt --- you cant have both of those at the same time, because some people feel hurt when others have abortion (or kill animals), and that makes it wrong by the principle you stated earlier. Dont take this wrong way (believe me, everyone has this problem), but I dont think you've thought about your moral beliefs very much, and so you tend to contradict yourself left and right.

 

"because children are oftentimes naive about their potential"

hence why they can't make important decisions like that.

 

"and so now your original comment that killing infants because they are potential adults doesnt make any sense at all."

i never said that. i said "killing infants becuse they desire to fulfill their potential to grow (on a very basic level)"

 

"but how is that infants are moral equals to adults when they dont even have the mental capacity to fathom adulthood or even see themselves over time?"

they're not moral equals to adults. i never said they were. i said they were morally equal to their growth potential. when i say "growth potential" (specifically growth' date=' not anything else) i'm thinking approximately the derivative of the curve of growth over time at that point in time.[/quote']

I think this is a redefinition of what you said in your previous post (which itself was a redefinition in the post before it too), but now this one is even harder to follow. Heres what you said in your last part:

 

my morlity is that "X desires to fulfill X's potential of Y, therefore X is morally equivalent to Y".

the characteristic in my morality not found in animals is the 'desire' part.

To avoid conceding that children being potential sex partners means its ok to have sex with them, you said "children cannot desire to have sex, because they don't know enough about it until they become teenagers". Generally speaking, you're saying that a being needs to have some conception of its potential, before it can be considered equal to its potential. Infants dont have a concept of adulthood...

 

... however, now you're saying they are equal to adults in their growth potential... but I think we both agree that infants have no conception of their growth potential either. So they're no better off in the last post than they are now, and so theres no objection to killing them.

 

that's because i don't HAVE a potential persons argument.

you're attributing my potential argument to mean an equal potential between all living beings' date=' [/quote']

First, you do have a potential person argument, the one you posted in post #52 that states "human infants have potential to grow into human adults, and are thus not the same as other animals". Second, I'm not conflating your potential person argument for all beings, I dont even see in any of my posts where you gleaned that interpretation.

 

i don't think i can state what a higher desire is. masturbating, however, is a mechanical desiree, and thus unrelated.

I'd be interested as to how you identify mechanical desires or what that term even means, or how a mechanical desire like masturbating in public differs from (presumably) non-mechanical desires like listening to music...

 

so the grand answer to 'what is immoral?' by me is: dehumanization.

but what about animals? they can't be dehumanized because they aren't humans. so how do i allow for animals too?

I do appreciate your attempt to lay out your moral system' date=' but at the very least words like "dehumanize" and "humanize" havent really been defined. And when you say animals cant be dehumanized, then I think that whatever unstated definition "dehumanize" you have in mind must be an incredibly loaded term, think of it this way: by whatever process, such as killing a person or torturing them endlessly, leads to dehumanizing that person, the same process can be (and usually is) done to animals and affects the animals in exactly the same way --- but the only difference between torturing the animal and torturing the person is that they belong to different breeding groups. Thats it, just a difference in breeding groups. So how exactly does a trivial difference like belong to different breeding groups determine whether a being matters morally or not?

 

As far as I can see, whatever you mean by "dehumanize" involves some arbitrary presumptions, such as turning someones membership to a breeding group into a moral characteristic. The fact something is a human or not means nothing, because species membership isnt a moral characteristic.

 

(Also, I'm pretty sure that most of the things you accept as normal, like someone doing a factory job day-in and day-out, are pretty dehumanizing too.)

 

 

Dr Dalek,

Excuses excuses' date=' if you don't want to do anything about it but complain, thats fine by me. Trust me when I say no one will care..

 

You could at least try. As of right now all you have done is complain, smear, and demonize. Even protesting is just a way of presuring other people to do something. If your realy so ritious and passionate about saving these animals you would at least try.

 

How old are you? Do you have a college level education? If not you could always get one, scholarships are easy to come by these days, payment plans. I'm in college right now. Its hard work but I'm getting it done. Why can't you try to educate yourself in medical research and do something to help your furry firends?[/quote']

At first I thought you were criticizing me for doing something impossible, instead of doing things that were actually in my capacity. But now I see you're just trying to find reasons to talk down to me for doing nothing, just sitting around in my house shaking my fists around... maybe, just maybe you'd have a point, but you dont, because you dont know what I do at all:

 

- I participate in protests against fur and animal testing

- I voluntarily abstain from animal products and encourage others to do the same

- I donate a lot of money to PETA every month to fight animal abuse

- I volunteer at animal shelters and take care of animals

- I've done some things (that I wont mention) on behalf of ALF, some of its directly related to animal testing.

 

I do those kinds of things because I am passionate about animal rights.

 

So, when you thought you had a reason to talk down to me for doing nothing, you were wrong. And FYI, I'm older than you, I have more degrees than you, and I've been involved with animal rights debates than you.

 

In a different society things would be just fine without animal testing, but their of billions of chronically sick people out there and hypochondiracts who need medicines of all kinds. They have to be produced as quickly as possible and tested as thoughrougly as possible.

No, we dont, because there are moral constraints on what we can do. To put in perspective, there are thousands and thousands of people who need organs and blood everyday, and they die because theres just not enough needed material to go around and there are no other alternative... would it be justified for the government to harvest people off the street so that their blood and organs can be used in someone else? No, of course not, that would be completely intolerable, even if the number of people saved by such acts greatly exceeded the number of people killed.

 

I'd LOVE to hear whether you think the government should propose an organ harvesting program, because after all it is a paramount necessity that people have organ transplants and blood donations to preserve their lives. If you think the government should be doing that in spite of the necessity, I'd like to hear why, and I'd like to hear how your explanation doesnt automatically apply to animal experimentation.

 

 

 

At least for me, heres why I think the government has never proposed a government harvesting program to save dying people: because preserving peoples right to life and experiential welfare is of paramount necessity, but simultaneously it is also worse to kill people than to let them die (thats part of the reason why failing to send food to starving people overseas is not the same thing as sending those same people poisoned food). In the context of preserving life, it takes more effort to save a person than it takes to refrain from killing them, so we can state that a person is more at fault if they kill another than if they are unable to save them, so we do people more harm by killing them than not saving them.

 

From the principles above, in a case where a doctor who refuses to kill people on the street to save other patients, the doctor does less harm to the patients he fails to save than the harm we would do to the people he killed. However, people usually believe that if a doctor killed a person and saved 10 others, it would still be wrong, which indicates that killing people is wrong on a significant magnitude almost to the point where killing is categorically wrong. This can be generalized to animal experimentation, where doctors do less harm to the people they fail to save than to the animals they kill, and killing the animals is signifantly outweighs the benefit of saving others lives (<--- this is compounded by the fact that animal research frequently doesnt save lives, such as in the case of psychological and cosmetics testing which exterminates millions and millions of animals a year but saves not a single persons life or contributes to a single inkling of comfort in a persons life).

 

However, some other principles can be considered. For instance, someone might say that if a person is pulled off the street for harvest, then they are wronged in ways that dont apply to a person who needs those organs; for instance, pulling a person off the street moves them from a position of safety to a position of danger which violates their rights, but the rights of a person who needs organs arent violated because they arent moved out of a position of safety into anymore danger for not having access to others' organs. In this way, we can say that a person is harmed for being killed and harvested, but a person isnt harmed at all (or not so significantly) for not being saved; perhaps the principle would be true if people were bred for experimentation, because they are being deliberately deprived of their lives where they would otherwise be in a position of safety. And these principles generalize to animal experimentation too, where animals are harmed for being the subjects of experiments, but people are not harmed for not being saved.

 

1) Animals can be put in controlled situations for testing. Human lives vary and cannot be subjected to scientific controll in order to acuratly study any detail' date=' or combination thereof.

 

2)There is no substitute for the living systems necessary to study interaction among cells, tissue, and organs. Animals are good surrogates because of their similarities to humans.

 

3)It would be unethical to test substances or drugs with potentially adverse side-effects on human beings.

 

4)There is no substitute for psychiatric studies (e.g., antidepressant clinical trials) that require behavioral data.

 

5)Animals can be bred especially for animal-testing purposes, meaning they arrive at the laboratory free from disease.

 

6)Animals receive more sophisticated medical care because of animal tests that have led to advances in veterinary medicine.

 

7)Humans that use medicine derived from animal research are healthier.

 

8)Alternatives to certain kinds of animal testing are unknown.[/quote']

Blah, mindless talking points which equally justify testing on human experimentation:

 

1) This is spurious, especially in light of the fact that vivisectionists themselves say medicines need to be tested on humans. Human trials are used, so either your statement categorically invalidates all the human trials ever devised, or you dont genuinely believe the comment you've just written.

 

2) Cognitive dissonance is when people say "animals are so similar to humans that they are rightfully the subjects of experimentation" and insist that "animals are so dissimilar that its ok to test on them". If we sectioned off a small portion of the population for experimentation, the statement "these sectioned off humans are good surrogates because of their similarities to humans". However, no matter how good of surrogates animals and certain humans can make, it would be wrong to use them.

 

3) Theres no ethical argument against human experimentation that doesnt automatically apply to animal experimentation.

 

4) Ummmm... clinical trials are antidepressants do use people and their behavioral data (thats what a clinical trial is).

 

5) Irrelevant, because theres no indicataion that they should be bred. If humans were bred in controlled settings, they'd arrive just as disease free, but you'd probably have ethical problems with that, wouldnt you?

 

6) You might be interested in this:

Freezing Experiments

 

Prisoners were immersed into tanks of ice water for hours at a time, often shivering to death, to discover how long German pilots downed by enemy fire could survive the frozen waters of the North Sea. It was generally known at the time that human beings did not survive immersion in the North Sea for more than one to two hours.3

 

Doctor Sigmund Rascher attempted to duplicate these cold conditions at Dachau, and used about 300 prisoners in experiments recording their shock from the exposure to cold. About eighty to ninety of the subjects died as a result.4

 

Doctor Rascher once requested the transfer of his hypothermia lab from Dachau to Auschwitz, which had larger facilities, and where the frozen subjects might cause fewer disturbances. Apparently, Rascher's concentration was constantly interrupted when the hypothermia victims shrieked from pain while their extremities froze white

 

---------------------

 

POZOS' CHILLING DILEMMA

 

Doctor Robert Pozos is the Director of the Hypothermia Laboratory at the University of Minnesota of Medicine at Duluth. His research is devoted to methods of rewarming frozen victims of cold. Much of what he and other hypothermia specialists know about rescuing frozen victims is the result of trial and error performed in hospital emergency rooms. Pozos believes that many of the existing rewarming techniques that have been used thus far lack a certain amount of critical scientific thinking.

 

Pozos points out that the major rewarming controversy has been between the use of passive external rewarming (which uses the patient's own body heat) and active external rewarming (which means the direct application of exogenous heat directly to the surface of the body). Hospitals have thus far microwaved frozen people, used warm blankets, induced warm fluids into body cavities (through the pertinium, rectum or urinary bladder), performed coronary bypass surgery, immersed the frozen bodies into hot bath tubs, and used body-to-body rewarming techniques.11 Some victims were saved, some were lost. This might be due to the lack of legitimate information on the effects of cold on humans, since the existing data is limited to the effects of cold on animals. Animals and humans differ widely in their physiological response to cold. Accordingly, hypothermia research is uniquely dependent on human test subjects. Although Pozos has experimented on many volunteers at his hypothermia lab, he refused to allow the subject's temperature to drop more than 36 degrees. Pozos had to speculate what the effects would be on a human being at lower temperatures. The only ones that put humans through extensive hypothermia research (at lower temperatures) were the Nazis at Dachau.

 

The Nazis immersed their subjects into vats of ice water at sub-zero temperatures, or left them out to freeze in the winter cold. As the prisoners excreted mucus, fainted and slipped into unconsciousness, the Nazis meticulously recorded the changes in their body temperature, heart rate, muscle response, and urine.12

 

The Nazis attempted rewarming the frozen victims. Doctor Rascher did, in fact, discover an innovative "Rapid Active Rewarming" technique in resuscitating the frozen victims. This technique completely contradicted the popularly accepted method of slow passive rewarming. Rascher found his active rewarming in hot liquids to be the most efficient means of revival.13

 

The Nazi data on hypothermia experiments would apparently fill the gap in Pozos' research. Perhaps it contained the information necessary to rewarm effectively frozen victims whose body temperatures were below 36 degrees. Pozos obtained the long suppressed Alexander Report on the hypothermia experiments at Dachau. He planned to analyze for publication the Alexander Report, along with his evaluation, to show the possible applications of the Nazi experiments to modern hypothermia research. Of the Dachau data, Pozos said, "It could advance my work in that it takes human subjects farther than we're willing."14

 

Pozos' plan to republish the Nazi data in the New England Journal of Medicine was flatly vetoed by the Journal's editor, Doctor Arnold Relman.15 Relman's refusal to publish Nazi data along with Pozos' comments was understandable given the source of the Nazi data and the way it was obtained.

 

http://www.jlaw.com/Articles/NaziMedEx.html

Like almost every argument for animal experimentation, it applies equally to human experimentation. Human experimentation can and has benefitted humans, in fact I picked the freezing experiments above because they had the most relevant applications: the German army noticed that whenever their soldiers went through the water and stormed the coast, they'd die 10 minutes to a half hour later from hypothermia, so the Nazis performed experiments on concentration camp victims to develop ways to prevent that problem. All of the benefits the Nazis discovered were translated directly toward saving more German lives.

 

The data today could still be useful, but medical journals just wont publish it because of the unethical ways the data was collected... so experimenters recreate the freezing experiments on animals.

 

Of course, your comment also implies that when the animals themselves benefit from animal experimentation, its almost like you're saying you're doing the animals a favor by killing them, like the animals are martyrs for their own kind. That kind of statement is almost a parody of morality, and it betrays an almost macabre irony:

If there be one bright spot, one refreshing oasis, in the discussion of this dreary subject, it is the humorous recurrence of the old threadbare fallacy of '' better for the animals themselves.'' Yes, even here, in the laboratory of the vivisector, amidst the baking and sawing and dissection, we are sometimes met by that familiar friend—the proud plea of a single-hearted regard for the interests of the suffering animals ! Who knows but what some beneficent experimentalist, if only he be permitted to cut up a sufficient number of victims, may discover some potent remedy for all the lamented ills of the animal as well as of the human creation ? Can we doubt that the victims themselves, if once they could realize the noble object of their martyrdom, would vie with each other in rushing eagerly on the knife ? The only marvel is that, where the cause is so meritorious, no human volunteer has as yet come forward to die under the hands of the vivisector !

 

(Henry Salt)

 

8) Just as irrelevant as the fact that there are no alternatives to harvesting people off the street for organs and blood.

 

Me? Word game? Ypur the one who has been questioning and playing with definitions and leading people in rhetorical circles.

Nonsense, all of my replies have been direct, too the point, and intellectually honest. However, all of the replies to my posts have been almost pitifully non-academic, full of internal contradictions and naive leaps in logic (and yet this is supposed to be a science board!). However, I actually appreciate the posts by iglak because he at least tries to be nice, but you are almost too willing to take potshots at me.

 

And yet, when you're taking potshots at me, you're also sacrificing you're integrity at the same time; for example, I think its a very poignant observation that your use of the word "necessity" is just a descriptive statement and not a prescriptive one, making the statements "its necessary to experiment on humans to save lives" no more remarkable than the statement "its necessary to torture humans so they will suffer" (both are descriptive, not prescriptive statements). But, rather than take the time to defend your initial comments, or to show that I misread you, you uncritically replied "no, you're the one playing with definitions!!!!". You can see then, that if you are unwilling to put together at least a half-honest defense of your comment, that I might think that you dont actually have an argument for animal experimentation, and that your "necessity" argument amounts to nothing at best.

 

 

And in any case, necessities go both ways, so lets take two "necessities" together: its necessary to preserve human lives, but its also necessary to categorically abolish animal experimentation. So far as I can tell, you dont have a single argument as to why the first claim should be preferred over the second, which is why your argument from necessity is just a word game and nothing more profound. The necessity of animal experimentation has nothing to do with its continued practice, because its also necessary to preserve animals lives, its continued practice has EVERYTHING to do with the fact that animals cant defend themselves. Of course, when humans attack and exploit other humans who cant defend themselves, like the mentally retarded or babies or unarmed women, people fall all over themselves to punish the exploiters no matter how much more powerful they are.

 

 

Sisyphus,

So your basicaly saying that if the killing of animals is incidental and you have no controll over it then there is nothing wrong with it. So why don't you eat meat? Those animals are being killed anyway and you have no way of stoping it

I dont think animals being killed in factories is just "incidental", its willful and intentional. The goal of factories is to kill as many animals as they can for profit, but thats not the same goal as a farmer. In any case, you might as well say "if peoples deaths in car accidents are incidental, why not just run them over your car on purpose", it just doesnt make sense.

 

 

 

Cyberman,

I say each of us here just should continue to live there lives as they see fit. It is not necisary for you to convince IMM that you are right or for IMM to convince you that she is right. As long as you live your live as you see fit whether you are right or wrong is redundant.

Say that when someones idea of living as they see fit means killing you and your whole family for sport.

[Cyberman]

Cyberman[/b]' date='

 

Say that when someones idea of living as they see fit means killing you and your whole family for sport.[/quote']

 

Dosn't matter to me what they believe all I know is that if that situation came to pass I would fight back!

And if I lose no big deal; death brings no sorrow; I believe in reincaration.

[Dr. Dalek]

- I participate in protests against fur and animal testing

Protesting isn't doing something, its trying to encourage other people to do something for you, somewhat analogious of a child throwing a fit. (Not trying to sound offensive)

- I voluntarily abstain from animal products and encourage others to do the same

Good for you, just don't try to force me to do that and I have no problem with you.

- I donate a lot of money to PETA every month to fight animal abuse

Sounds very nice of you, but dosn't most of that money go to administrative costs?

- I volunteer at animal shelters and take care of animals

Thats good, I have no objections or cynical remarks about that.

- I've done some things (that I wont mention) on behalf of ALF, some of its directly related to animal testing.

ALF? Isn't that a terrorist organization? (I'm not trying to sound accusative right now I'm actualy asking)

 

So, when you thought you had a reason to talk down to me for doing nothing, you were wrong. And FYI, I'm older than you, I have more degrees than you, and I've been involved with animal rights debates than you.

What degrees? Are they related to biomedical reasearch?

 

 

No, we dont, because there are moral constraints on what we can do. To put in perspective, there are thousands and thousands of people who need organs and blood everyday, and they die because theres just not enough needed material to go around and there are no other alternative... would it be justified for the government to harvest people off the street so that their blood and organs can be used in someone else? No, of course not, that would be completely intolerable, even if the number of people saved by such acts greatly exceeded the number of people killed.

I don't think I'd mind so much if the people they forcably took organs from were already dead, with some respects paid to the families religion and the departed last wishes reguarding burial. Other wise . . .

 

 

 

Now I must retreat to think, I was actualy surprised that I feel I must establish my opinion in my own mind befor continuing. I've always had an opinion on this, but I seem to not be able to articulate it that well. I thought I might have been coming off as a bit illogical sounding befor, but bear in mind I'm smart but I've been accused of being a bit scatter brained. I'll try to be more concise and reasonable from now on.

[In My Memory]

Dr Dalek,

ALF? Isn't that a terrorist organization? (I'm not trying to sound accusative right now I'm actualy asking)

Yes, but they are doing the right thing.

 

What degrees? Are they related to biomedical reasearch?

Bachelors in Finance and Business, associates in Economics, and a specialized degree in technical and fundamental analysis (<--- techniques to predict stock patterns) which I earned as an intern for TD Waterhouse and California College of Business. I earn a living as a professional technical analyst (read that as "stock investor")...

 

... so if you ever needed a broker, I'm the girl you can count on... but no, they have nothing to do with biomedical research. (And if you wanted to know, I work for an investing firm who emphasize in "ethical investing", so we try to invest mostly in Green funds, or environmentally friendly corporations.)

 

Now I must retreat to think, I was actualy surprised that I feel I must establish my opinion in my own mind befor continuing. I've always had an opinion on this, but I seem to not be able to articulate it that well. I thought I might have been coming off as a bit illogical sounding befor, but bear in mind I'm smart but I've been accused of being a bit scatter brained. I'll try to be more concise and reasonable from now on.

*** huggles ***

 

Good, I'm glad you're at least taking the time to think (And thank you for being very kind and polite in this post, I appreciate it )

[iglak]

iglak

1) I do appreciate your attempt to lay out your moral system, but at the very least words like "dehumanize" and "humanize" havent really been defined. And when you say animals cant be dehumanized, then I think that whatever unstated definition "dehumanize" you have in mind must be an incredibly loaded term, think of it this way: by whatever process, such as killing a person or torturing them endlessly, leads to dehumanizing that person, the same process can be (and usually is) done to animals and affects the animals in exactly the same way.

 

2) (Also, I'm pretty sure that most of the things you accept as normal, like someone doing a factory job day-in and day-out, are pretty dehumanizing too.)

 

1) the point i am trying to make is that there is no such thing as a process or action that is dehumanizing. it is all about emotions and mentalities.

 

the secondary point i am trying to make involves the difference in potential emotions and mentalities between species (in a potential persons way).

 

let me rephrase something about my potential persons-esque argument: actions and logical thoughts are not a part of the definitions i am using for 'potential', 'desire', 'fulfill', 'morally', and 'equivalent'.

 

2) exactly. anything and everything that is dehumanizing is immoral. that is my moral code.

but keep in mind that all actions and logical thoughts can be either dehumanizing or not, depending on the emotions and mentalities involved.

therefore, all actions and logical thoughts are immune from my morality.

 

 

 

that's all i'm going to respond to, because everything else is a misunderstanding based on poor communication (on your part or mine, or both)

[Dr. Dalek]

First of all I'd like to apologise IMM, I feel as if I've been opposing your veiw point for the sake of opposing you, something I hate to have other people do to me.

 

Secondly I'd like to say that upon consideration even my "Evolution Based Moral Theory" sugests that animal testing, and many drugs and medical treatment ingeneral are not nesicary.

After all a lot of people who medical science wants to save are people who have inherint genetic flaws whose presence will ultimatly weaken our species as a whole, aslo I know more than a few anecdotes (and perhaps later on some statistics) that show that in many cases medical treatment isn't necisary. One example would be my mother who took medical treatment for an autoimmune disorder that (according to one doctor) easily could have gotten better on its own. She ended up worse off because of some of the drugs she was taking.

Also is the interesting case of my old substatute teacher, Mr. Karr, who hasn't seen a Doctor in decades and still has a fairly normal life dispite is potentialy life threatening allergies and sever asthma.

 

There are a few things I still disagree with you on, as I have mentioned I am a hunter, but not a sport hunter, or a trophy hunter, I hunt for food, and conectivity with nature. I don't know if you stil find fault with that, but as I have said I feel that humans, dispite their higher thinking are still inherintly animal.