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by meowface
2381 days ago
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I understand the parent is wrong and that correcting them was needed, but I find all this hand-wringing about ethics in animal experiments kind of absurd, since it's so obviously fundamentally unethical in the first place (or at least I know of none that aren't unethical). I suspect it's mostly just a defense mechanism to shield the human mind from the trauma of continuously inflicting mass suffering and death, much like how the Nazis established gas chambers as a less traumatic way of perpetrating genocide compared to firing squad units going village to village and potentially developing symptoms of PTSD. In both cases, zero or less value is attributed to the lives and minds that are being assaulted and extinguished on a loop (though the value is below zero in the Nazi case and sits roughly at zero in the animal experiment case). This isn't entirely fair, since I'm sure most researchers do attempt to prevent animal suffering from being the most utterly barbaric it can be due to ethical rather than selfish reasons, but I think anything that's moderately barbaric or below is still considered justifiable in their minds and I think attempts to "soften" it do mostly fall into the selfish defense mechanism category. I understand the great benefit to scientific progress afforded by such experiments, but there was some long-term benefit from human experimentation during WWII, as well, and there probably could've been much more future benefit if those regimes had won. |
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I don’t know any researcher that likes sacrificing animals though every single one is painfully aware of the moral weight. They also go out of their way to minimize suffering, for ethical reasons, for selfish reasons, and even to improve the quality of the data. The reason I jumped down the parent's throat is because it reinforces the mistaken idea that scientists are okay with “moderately barbaric” things and indifferent to suffering. We aren’t!
And what’s the alternative to animal research? Computational modeling isn’t there yet and in vitro experiments have pretty stark limitations too. In any case, both would need animal data to determine if they’re correct. Waiting for another Nazi regime[0], as you proposed(!), doesn’t seem like a viable—-or ethical—-option.
[0] Incidentally, I have read that most of that “data” was scientifically useless, not just because of its moral provenance, but also because the stuff that was done was more akin to torture than controlled research.