Is animal testing bad?

[john5746]

MM6 totally owned MrSkeptic on post #20

 

As long as the animals are treated humanely like some people claim they are (and my bio prof has stories about her grad studies that would beg to differ), and they are only tested when absolutely needed, then I would have no problem with it.

 

I don't think so at all. MM6 completely contradicts himself and calls it a glitch, makes completely subjective value judgements on life and calls it scientific and comes to the same conclusion as the rest of us. Animal testing is a necessary evil if you value humanity. Then he suggests Skeptic might be a racist. I think he "owned" himself.

[Lan(r)12]

Well, see...thats the problem I think...you all just can't look at life as another scientific reaction. Such indifference should be relegated to math or other abstract areas. That's what makes humans different from all other species...that's why psychologists can't agree on one basic principle in their field. You have to view life with some emotion in your mind, and thats what MM6 did.

 

If we were to be cold and heartless, then we should destroy any species that isn't beneficial to our survival and use their habitat to expand our own. This is an exxageration of what anyone here is claiming, obviously, but it is still a comparable analogy.

 

Animal testing is horrible, but of coure I would test a million mice if it meant saving a child's life. John, you can't view life without first appropriating some amount of empathy for other species.

[Mr Skeptic]

I'm curious if your bias ends with your species. Would you choose a person with the same background (likes/dislikes, politics, nationality, ethnicity) as you to live over someone more "different" to you? What about someone closely related to you? Do they have more value than others?

 

I think that it goes something like this:

My responsibility is first to myself, my family, my extended family, my Species, Genus, Family, Order, Class, Phylum, earth life, all life.

My responsibility is first to myself, my immediate vicinity, my city, my state, my country, my planet, my solar system, my galaxy.

My responsibility is first to the most in urgent need.

My responsibility is first to the most helpless.

My responsibility is first to my friends, and those with similar philosophy to me. Yes, given the choice between saving a man who has expressed a sincere desire to rape, kill, steal, or a puppy, I think I'd save the puppy.

 

On those lists, I would help one listed on the left rather than one listed on the right if I had to choose. However, between the various lists it would depend largely on circumstances.

 

Briefly, I intend to take care of myself and my own, and expect that others will be responsible for themselves and their own.

[MM6]

I don't think so at all. MM6 completely contradicts himself and calls it a glitch, makes completely subjective value judgements on life and calls it scientific and comes to the same conclusion as the rest of us. Animal testing is a necessary evil if you value humanity. Then he suggests Skeptic might be a racist. I think he "owned" himself.

 

My suggestion to you: work on your reading comprehension.

---

Merged post follows:

Consecutive posts merged

I think that it goes something like this:...

 

I appreciate you response.

[xhenia]

well, it meybe crude to some animals but i think its the right thing to do in the long run.

[VivLin]

http://animaltestingsurvey.blogspot.com/

 

Share your opinion here. (:

[rigney]

http://animaltestingsurvey.blogspot.com/

 

Share your opinion here. (:

 

There is no way to give a cognizant answer to something so misunderstood. Read the following and be careful of what you wish for!

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Mengele

Edited December 8, 2010 by rigney

[Marat]

The argument that failing to treat intelligent animals as equal to humans is just speciesism is clearly disproved, since we treat it as murder if someone kills an anencephalic infant with essentially no brain at all, and treat it as no worse than ordinary kiling if we murder a genius rather than an idiot. So since rights holding has nothing to do with intellect, the fact that some kinds of animals are smart is irrelevant to their having rights.

 

Humans are alone of all species in being able to meet Kant's test for moral significance, which is possessing the ability voluntarily to submit themselves to act not out of any animalistic motivation but just in obedience to a self-constituted rule commanding respect for something ideal and higher than mere desires, which is the rule that we respect the freedom of other humans as of equal worth with our own.

 

I was at a conference once where some scientists presented preliminary experimental results showing that islet cells from pig pancreases could be encapsulated in a differentially permeable membrane to treat diabetes without having to use toxic immunosuppressive drugs to allow the porcine graft to survive. The press rose up in self-righteous outrage to demand how the researchers could harm poor little pigs just to save human lives, until one of the scientists asked how many members of the press that week had eaten a ham sandwich.

[small bang]

Cosmetics- Wrong

 

Medicine- Right

[Marat]

The problem with the notion that animals have rights which humans have to respect is that it can readily be shown to lead to impossible or unacceptable conclusions if taken to its full logical implications. For humans not only injure animals in testing medicines and cosmetics, or in eating them or killing them for their fur, but also in clearing land for houses and roads, which always kills a number of animals, as does the expansion of human settlement generally, since it deprives animals of their feeding grounds and condemns them to death by slow starvation, which is probably a greater torture to them than they endure in medical experiments. But why stop there? If animals have rights to survive and thrive, doesn't it then become the moral duty of humans to rescue them even from natural as well as man-made harms, so we have to prevent the vicious killing of mice by cats which don't eat them, but just want to torment them to death? We would have to run a gigantic police force, roaming through nature and rounding up all the creatures which were killing or abusing more prey animals than they reasonably needed to survive.

 

In short, animal rights, strictly enforced, would make human existence impossible.

[lemur]

In short, animal rights, strictly enforced, would make human existence impossible.

Imo, violating animal rights is little different than violating human rights. You do it when you think that the benefit outweighs the detriment. The amazing thing to me is how often people can justify the detriment of killing an animal for the benefit of enjoying a piece of meat. You would think that ethical people would only eat meat in situations of famine but they do it for pleasure.

[Marat]

First you have to develop a philosophically rigorous criterion for what kind of being can be a rights-holder. Having intelligence obviously won't do as a criterion, since humans with no intellect at all, such as anencephalic infants, are still treated by the law as having the full rights of human beings, and we don't vary civil rights according to IQ.

 

Does having mere existence as an animal justify being a rights-holder? Would that mean that we couldn't give a human dying of syphillis an anti-biotic to save his life, since that would kill hundreds of millions of 'beings' just to save one? If you were a helicopter pilot and could fly to save the creatures living in only one tower of a burning building, would you choose to rescue 10 dogs on one tower rather than one person on the other tower because you would be saving more 'beings' and thus promoting and sustaining 'life' more by going to the dog tower?

 

Kant suggests a clarification. The criterion for being a rights-holder is the possession of the capacity for freedom, which humans demonstrate by choosing to respect other people's equal freedom rather than always just pursuing their own practical or genetically programmed goals.

[lemur]

If you were a helicopter pilot and could fly to save the creatures living in only one tower of a burning building, would you choose to rescue 10 dogs on one tower rather than one person on the other tower because you would be saving more 'beings' and thus promoting and sustaining 'life' more by going to the dog tower?

The more practically framed question would be if the tower with the 10 dogs was on the way to the tower with the human, would you skip picking up the dogs to get the human first and then return to pick up the dogs. You may think that people would always choose the human over the dogs but everyday people spend money on their pets that they would not spend on alleviating human suffering. It really comes down to the specific of the actual situation and how the person making the choice thinks about their options.

[Marat]

But since we are discussing ethics here rather than psychology, the question has to be, what should a person do when confronted by the choice between saving either 10 dogs or 1 human? I think the vast majority of the population would react with outrage if the helicopter pilot had preferred to save the 10 dogs rather than the 1 human on the grounds that he was saving 9 additional lives by electing the former option, while we would all support his decision if he had saved 10 people on one burning tower rather than 1 person on another tower by the same logic of increasing the number of lives saved.

 

I remember when I was living in England, where the animal rights movement is especially strong for some cultural reasons I cannot fathom, some animal rights activists broke into a lab and took 20 pigs from it to rescue them from 'cruel medical experiments just to save sick humans.' When they found out from the news story published the next day that these pigs were being experimented on to develop a cure for a major illness causing enormous suffering and death to pigs, they returned the animals. So evidently killing some members of one species to cure a disease in another is wrong, but killing in the course of medical experiments within the same species is just fine.

 

The source of this irrational thinking seems to lie in the obsession of Western culture over the last 50 years with racism, which is based on the idea that humans have such high moral dignity that they must all be treated equally just by virtue of their common humanness, and which has now been illogicaly extended to the very different notion that because all animals have such high moral dignity they must all be treated equally just because of their common animality.

 

This ignores the major advance which occurred in Western culture around the time when Christianity developed and Roman law came to value universal human rights under the ius gentium concept -- which was that humanness is a special value superior to all others. As a result, religions made a transition from worshipping animal gods (like the Ancient Egyptians) and sacrificing humans to non-human interests imagined to be superior to them (like the Aztec Sun God) to viewing humanness as the supreme value. It is thus no criticism of this view to say that it is 'speciesism,' because this view explicitly affirms that humans are the supreme focus of value.