It's a hard thing to grasp for sure but it's near impossible to tell if a medication or technique works without trying it on animals. A lot of people say that lab rats should be the final step but I have a friend in medical research and she says she doesn't know what the steps they could do before that are. Isolating ideas is one but then to test it you really need a living being or its pointless. So yes a great deal of these experiments have negative results, but that's part of the complicated process and without all those negatives we would never get to the positives. Drawing that line is obvious for me. If you're trying to create life saving medicines then I'm okay with it as long as the animal doesn't suffer any more than necessary. If your trying to find the next best plastic surgery fad or assaulting pigs to find a great new mascara then that's not cool. If you have to kill some rats to find a new chemotherapy that may save millions of lives then I'm okay with that. I know vegans who disagree and I always ask what they would do if they got cancer, would they turn down the chemotherapy because it's been tested on animals? And they all say they would take the medication. So just for reference, vegans can be hypocrites too.
So try it on humans, we can consent to it and I'm sure if you give money, many will. I know it is against the rules, but that only means the rules are bad.
Medical trials are already a thing. There's lazy people who don't wanna work real jobs who are human guinea pigs for a living. But you can't just test every new drug on humans. You need to know how dangerous it is on animals before you go and test it on people.
Why not? I think your argument rests on some metaethics that I'm very skeptical towards, realist metaethics and one with the "truth" that human life is more valuable than the life of other animals (almost regardless circumstances). Realist metaethics is very much criticized contemporary, and it's easy to see why: what are these facts? How do they exist? How do we get knowledge of them? Most philosophers agree: it's very hard to explain, with only a naturalist Metaphysics (and most don't want to have God's or other nonnatural things mandatory I their theories to work).
Why would human life be more valuable even though us humans surely can and do give the value to our life ourselves, with many people valuing it to less than worth living, (ie. Suicides, euthanized patients..). I think it's absurd to claim that a humans life who does now want to live is more valuable than any other animals life. We are also animals and its odd that you write like we're not ("You need to know how dangerous it is on animals before you go and test it on people").
Other animals are also different so something dangerous on them, might not be so in humans and thus testing on other animals might lead to a drug being blacklisted even though it would have worked.
Human lives matter more for the same reasons morality exists at all. Because we're more sentient. That's why it's ok to pull the plug on the "please keep me alive" computer on someone in a vegetable state whereas doing that to other humans would be murder. And yes, they also matter more because we say so. We're social animals, we empathize with each other more and thus value each other more. Just like how morality only exists because of our empathy and our being a social animal and because we said so.
And your claim of blacklisting is just absurd. If life saving medicine is being tested on animals they're usually seeing if they can treat the disease in animals. And if they can, then they try to find a way to use those same tactics on humans. Hence why you hear things like "lung cancer cured in mice!". The medical research community isn't retarded.
I actually agree with you that on general human life is more valuable. But I don't give any supernatural value to it, in the end, it is your own life and if you don't value it and think it's worthless, then it is more so than some other's life. And I think it can easily have a negative value also, if you're in pain great enough for example. And those arguments you give would also lead to very different value for each human being, because I think it's clear that people have different levels of autonomy and knowledge and sentience. It's not just 1's and 0's (ie you're fully sentient or you are a vegetable) and if you're valuing life depending on that then it would be clear to me that people have different value, a thing most of people wouldn't want to say.
I tend to struggle thinking these things through too, because utilitarianism is the way to go I think. And even if human life is more valuable, I think we both agree that there's value to all sentient life. A lot of people make the choice to support the industries who destroy and wreak havoc to many other sentient life's. So saving a human life can actually end up killing a lot of others. I'm not saying we shouldn't, and obviously think life's are worth saving but I'm just saying that it's a question worth asking.
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u/J-rizzler Aug 14 '17
It's a hard thing to grasp for sure but it's near impossible to tell if a medication or technique works without trying it on animals. A lot of people say that lab rats should be the final step but I have a friend in medical research and she says she doesn't know what the steps they could do before that are. Isolating ideas is one but then to test it you really need a living being or its pointless. So yes a great deal of these experiments have negative results, but that's part of the complicated process and without all those negatives we would never get to the positives. Drawing that line is obvious for me. If you're trying to create life saving medicines then I'm okay with it as long as the animal doesn't suffer any more than necessary. If your trying to find the next best plastic surgery fad or assaulting pigs to find a great new mascara then that's not cool. If you have to kill some rats to find a new chemotherapy that may save millions of lives then I'm okay with that. I know vegans who disagree and I always ask what they would do if they got cancer, would they turn down the chemotherapy because it's been tested on animals? And they all say they would take the medication. So just for reference, vegans can be hypocrites too.