Saying chimps should be used "only when there is no other option" is the same as saying chimps should never be used. There are always other options.
No, it isn't the same. The meaning that is expressed by the authors and understood by most of their intended audience obviously includes a certain level of 'not entirely unrealistic or impractical' in what it takes to qualify as an 'option'. The authors are not entirely stupid and are clearly expressing something different to 'should never be used' when making that assertion.
The meaning that is expressed by the authors and understood by most of their intended audience obviously includes a certain level of 'not entirely unrealistic or impractical' in what it takes to qualify as an 'option'.
The problem is that everybody has a different idea of what that level should be. Thus the authors are effectively relying on the illusion of transparency to make their proposal sound more reasonable then it is.
I wouldn't want to go further than to say there should be some sort of ethical process that measures the benefit of the experiment against the suffering it may cause.
It's silly to ban experimentation on chimps completely. To give some sort of context, we experiment on human babies (in certain harmless ways) all the time. Even I've done it. When I was a kid I experimented on my baby sister. (When she saw my face right side up, she smiled - when she saw it upside-down, she started to cry. Made several repetitions to check!). There are plenty of far more sophisticated studies.....
Increasingly it probably makes sense to restrict the invasive stuff, I'd say.
Phil,
What evidence or arguments can you offer to support the claim that "Much of the knowledge described in Luke's recent post on the cognitive science of rationality would have been impossible to acquire under such a ban"? I agree that much of the knowledge described in that post was gained through testing on chimpanzees. It doesn't follow, however, that this knowledge could not have been obtained in ways involving no experimentation on those animals.
I don't quite understand your third point above. Suppose it was true that "Banning chimp testing should thus be done only in conjunction with allowing human testing." Why are you then opposing the ban on chimp testing, rather than advocating a lift on the ban on human testing? In the absence of further elaboration, your position smacks of status quo bias.
Chimps are morally relevantly similar to human babies and toddlers. Since you defend experimentation on chimps, you should also, I believe, defend experimentation on human babies and toddlers. Do you?
More generally, I think we should be cautious of endorsing the conclusions that we reach by considering the merits of arguments for and against animal ex
Um, I doubt any of our knowledge of cognitive science comes from biomedical testing on chimpanzees. I'm not closed off to the possibility that chimp testing really is that important. But my threshold for being okay with this:
By the time he was 19 he had been anesthetized more than 250 times and undergone innumerable biopsies in the name of science. Much of the time he lived alone in a cramped, barren cage. Bobby grew depressed and emaciated and began biting his own arm, leaving permanent scars.
on a widespread scale is really high. No doubt ethics restr...
Bobby "grew up at the Coulston Foundation, a biomedical research facility in Alamogordo, N.M., that was cited for repeated violations of the Animal Welfare Act before it was shuttered in 2002." There are already laws in place to prevent such terrible treatment of chimps, and they have already been used to save Bobby from that treatment.
Hello! I usually read LessWrong posts, however, I'd never felt the need to create an account because I thought I needed to make some comment. However, when I read this one, I saw that, after so much time visiting LW without creating an account, I needed to create one to comment on it.
We have a strong bias in favor of human interests. But when we try to get rid of them we can see things in a different light. The magnitude of the harm humans cause to other animals really is significant and overwhelmingly bigger than the benefits humans obtain from it. It's v...
Experimenting only on nonhuman animals reflects the idea that human interests are more important simply because they are humans. This is a view we must oppose.
Why? I consider that human interests are more important simply because they are humans. What's wrong with speciesism, beyond the superficial analogies to racism?
The theoretical problem with speciesism is that there is no such thing as a species. The traditional proposed equivalence relation of "ability to interbreed" doesn't work because it isn't transitive: every organism would satisfy this relation with respect to its parents, but we have common ancestors with a squid if you just go far enough back. Every animal (and plant, etc...) on Earth is basically part of a single ring species, except that the "rings" of our species are only clear if you picture them arcing through space-time instead of just space. While the ethical status of individuals must have something to do with their biology, there doesn't seem to be anywhere we can put a bright non-arbitrary cutoff line for that status.
The practical problem with speciesism is that we may soon be getting a lot more "species" to worry about, and it would be good to have an appropriate ethical framework for that ahead of time. What kind of modifications can we give to ourselves or our kids before their "post-human interests" lose importance relative to the unmodified? How much more intelligence can we give to our domesticated animals before we shoul...
Experimenting only on nonhuman animals reflects the idea that human interests are more important simply because they are humans. This is a view we must oppose.
I must? I reject any such obligation. You can oppose it if you wish. But as far as I'm concerned I'm free to support or oppose any combination of experimentation on human or non-human animal that I like.
Agreed. But there are many less-destructive ways of promoting this bias. Far better to become a vegetarian. If you aren't, then I don't think you're entitled to write that letter to Scientific American on that basis.
It is not remotely reasonable to declare people not entitled to write letters discouraging abusive treatment of chimpanzees because they happen to eat meat. People are not obliged to care about all animals equally. Caring a lot about chimpanzees perhaps means you should be a non-chimp-eater, not a vegetarian. Even then it is not at all inconsistent to have a moral aversion to ongoing painful treatment of a creature while considering it ok to breed the same creature for food.
I also encourage you to adopt a tone of moral outrage.
I don't think that's a good idea. That would make them act defensive. I can't remember where it was, but there was an article on here that talked about how if you claim someone is an idiot for believing in God, they can either believe they're an idiot, or believe you're wrong. People don't like to believe they're idiots. People don't like to believe they're harming uncountable innocents either.
Incidentally, the position I take with animal research is to just have a fine that's as costly as the pain to the animal. If it's worth doing, they'll be able to afford the fine. If it's not, they won't.
That would make them act defensive.
You're not trying to convince the editorial board. This is politics, throw out your white hat.
If you ban chimp testing, you are forbidding people from making moral decisions. If you really cared about the suffering of sentient beings, you would also care about the suffering of humans; and you would realize that there is a tradeoff between the suffering from those experimented on, and those who benefit, that is different for every experiment.
Banning testing on our closest living relatives is a powerful moral decision in itself. By resisting a ban, you are forbidding people from making moral decisions. You may as well apply your argument to any ba...
get indignant at the editors who intend to do harm to uncountable numbers of innocent people
There are factors here beyond just "harm" - namely the idea of personal liberty/rights. As a society, we've generally come to the conclusion that kidnapping innocent people against their will and forcing them to endure great personal risk, even if it is for the "greater good", is the domain of super villains. (Ostensibly we also make an exception for politicians who wish to draft soldiers for war, but at least in the US it's been decades and was widely opposed the last time)
"don't harm sentient creatures"
This is a nice rule in principle, but in practice becomes tough. First, how do we define sentience? Second, what constitutes don't harm? Is there an action/in-action distinction here? If is it morally unacceptable to let humans in the developing world starve do we have a similar moral obligation to chimps? If not, why not?
. the guy who invented the smallpox vaccine did something horribly unethical, which we should not allow on a regular basis, especially not today when we have more options for testing
I'm not sure what you are talking about here. Can you expand?
This is a nice rule in principle, but in practice becomes tough.
Oh in practice it's definitely tough. Optimal morality is tough. I judge myself and other individuals on the efforts they've made to improve from the status quo, not on how far they fall short of what they might hypothetically be able to accomplish with infinite computing power.
In my ideal world, suffering doesn't happen, period, except to the degree that some amount of suffering is necessary bring about certain kinds of happiness. (i.e. everyone, animals included, gets exactly as much as t...
The October 2011 Scientific American has an editorial from its board of editors called "Ban chimp testing", that says: "In our view, the time has come to end biomedical experimentation on chimpanzees... Chimps should be used only in studies of major diseases and only when there is no other option." Much of the knowledge described in Luke's recent post on the cognitive science of rationality would have been impossible to acquire under such a ban.
I encourage you to write to Scientific American in favor of chimp testing. Some points that I plan to make:
I also encourage you to adopt a tone of moral outrage. Rather than taking the usual apologetic "we're so sorry, but we have to do this awful things in the name of science" tone, get indignant at the editors who intend to harm uncountable numbers of innocent people. For advanced writers, get indignant not just about harm, but about lost potential, pointing out the ways that our knowledge about how brains work can make our lives better, not just save us from disease.
You can comment on this here, but comments are AFAIK not printed in later issues as letters to the editor. Actual letters, or at least email, probably have more impact. You can't submit a letter to the editor through the website, because letters are magically different from things submitted on a website.
ADDED: Many people responded by claiming that banning chimp experimentation occupies some moral high ground. That is logically impossible.
To behave morally, you have to do two things:
1. Figure out, inherit, or otherwise acquire a set of moral goals are - let's say, for example, to maximize the sum over all individuals i of all species s of ws*[pleasure(s,i)-pain(s,i)].
2. Act in a way directed by those moral goals.
If you really cared about the suffering of sentient beings, you would also care about the suffering of humans, and you would realize that there's a tradeoff between the suffering of those experimented on, and of those who benefit, which is different for every experiment. That's what a moral decision is—deciding how to make a tradeoff of help and harm. People who call for a ban on chimp testing are really demanding we forbid (other) people from making moral judgements and taking moral actions. There are a wide range of laws and positions that could be argued to be moral. But just saying "We are incapable of making moral decisions, so we will ban moral decision-making" is not one of them.