Maybe someday we as a species will evolve to a point that we recognize the immorality of experimenting on beings which are sentient but do not have the capability to consent.
It boggles my mind that the learned individuals performing such experiments (and especially, the ethics boards that green-light them) fail to recognize as false the dichotomy between human and non-human sentience; but, humans have a history of performing experiments on other humans against their consent, so I shouldn't be surprised.
And your hypothetical makes no sense. Discovering "a cure for cancer" takes much longer than the life expectancy of someone who is "dying from cancer".
Beside, my loved ones agree with me. My selfishness for companionship doesn't outweigh their moral stance.
And your hypothetical makes no sense. Discovering "a cure for cancer" takes much longer than the life expectancy of someone who is "dying from cancer".
The breakthrough can happen at any point in the future, tomorrow, or in 2 years, or 20 years. We don't know. What we know is that by allowing animal testing we most likely speed up that discovery process.
Experimentation does not necessarily mean killing. (Though lab animals are usually euthanized once they are no longer "useful".)
But we're not talking about experimenting on 15 million volunteer humans. We're talking about experimenting on 15 million animals incapable of consent. That figure should be equally morally repugnant to you.
it is problematic. but 1) we 're mostly talking about mice - higher animals are a lot more regulated and 2) the best we can do is to improve experiment registration and reporting in order to avoid all the redundant work and improve progress , saving those animals. The discussion about replicability, study size and chasing p-values is relevant.
"What if there were no animals? Or no animals with the specific condition?"
Two can play at the hypothetical game. It's stupid. The same reasoning leads to moral acceptance of human organ harvesting. ("There's no willing donors, and those prisoners don't need an extra kidney anyway, and I do!")
(Though the concern that so-called animal "models" don't reliably predict the effect of treatments on human is very real.)
This is not a "hypothetical game". There are plenty of animals that we can use for testing, and we can create any necessary conditions in them to test our experimental treatments. Yes, this is cruel and sad, but if the alternative is to let humans die, I'll choose animals any day.
This is not the same as human organ harvesting, because that would result in death of humans, and we are trying to prevent that.
The concern that animal test results don't necessarily apply to humans is real, but it's much better than no tests at all.
Can you define sentient? In this case I agree that pigs are obviously sentient, but do you think you could write a non-ambiguous easily-applied rule that prohibits experimenting on sentient life?
Wikipedia has a good overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience Practically questions like these are decided by case law. (This is not very different than the current arguments over abortion in the US.)
Why are pig brains dog food? Because they're below the arbitrary threshold of intelligence we have drawn in the sand to determine sentience?
What if there was extra-terrestrial life of greater intelligence still that encountered our own species, and subjected us to identical treatment according to the exact same basis of morality?
It boggles my mind that the learned individuals performing such experiments (and especially, the ethics boards that green-light them) fail to recognize as false the dichotomy between human and non-human sentience; but, humans have a history of performing experiments on other humans against their consent, so I shouldn't be surprised.