> If there are so many people dying anyway we should definitely experiment more with humans. That will make all our experiments likely to be more humane.
Im not sure I follow: are you suggesting we raise creatures that take longer, are smarter, and are harder to study just because they're us?
That seems to be increasing the total harm just so it happens to humans rather than rats, ignoring the humans we do it to didnt have any more choice than the rat. I find that far more speciesist than recognizong legitimate differences in human mental powers and complexity from rats.
That being said, we do experiment on humans too, including some pretty radical things on already dying ones.
The problem comes in that if we're going to create a broken mind just to study it, we should a) use a simple mind we can actually perform a non-confounded experiment on and b) use the minimal mind possible to minimize suffering.
Are lab rats treated poorly? My (limited) experience indicates that scientists are generally as humane as they can be, and the rat lifestyle isn't any worse than say... A pet rat. Maybe Im an outlier.
My point is that if your experiment requires a GMO organism, the organism can never have decided to participate, since it would require choice pre-conception.
If GMOing a rat in to a forced experiment is bad, isn't doing that to a human much worse?
It's still worth the cost using humans, but harm reduction would suggest using rats instead.
The question is not about choice w.r.t. a GMO. It's about the underlying moral values behind a seemingly rhetorical question "isn't doing that to a human much worse?"
Im not sure I follow: are you suggesting we raise creatures that take longer, are smarter, and are harder to study just because they're us?
That seems to be increasing the total harm just so it happens to humans rather than rats, ignoring the humans we do it to didnt have any more choice than the rat. I find that far more speciesist than recognizong legitimate differences in human mental powers and complexity from rats.
That being said, we do experiment on humans too, including some pretty radical things on already dying ones.
The problem comes in that if we're going to create a broken mind just to study it, we should a) use a simple mind we can actually perform a non-confounded experiment on and b) use the minimal mind possible to minimize suffering.
So rats rather than 3 year old humans.