[gptgpp]

Oooh I love moral philosophy.

Here's one deontological perspective you could take:

It is always wrong to cause unecessary suffering to others.

Now, the subjective traits to be considered here are "unecessary" and "suffering."

It used to be a common belief that animals lacked the capacity to suffer as humans do. They could feel pain, nocioception sure, but whether it caused complex psychological suffering (torment) used to be contenious.

Today, this is certainly not contentious for our closest relatives. All primates possess a theory of mind, long memory, emotional states, complex social behavior like lasting bonds and altruism, and other traits necessary to suffer in significant ways.

So the focus (as long as we are considering primates, obviously nobody cares about model species like drosophilia as they have a greatly dimished capacity to suffer (edit: although I should mention that ranking things based on capacity to suffer leads to pretty awful territories too. Eg, if a human is severely mentally disabled, is more permissible to experiment on them? I think most of us would say no, which raises the question why it's okay to do so for other species)) shifts to whether causing them immense physical pain and torture is necessary.

And this is where I think things get pretty murky, and I will leave the rest up to you! I wish more people were curious about moral philosophy and creating their own consistent ethical framework for the world... I think it's especially important in science and engineering.

Of course, you could use a different model like utilitarianism, but utilitarianism still requires some level of deontological principles or you end up with a pretty extremist moral philosophy (same goes for just having Kantian deontology with no room for utilitarianism, IMO).

edit 2: come to think of it, Jainists would certainly have an issue with experimentation even on drosophilia, so I take that back that "nobody" cares. IIRC they even have a mouth covering to prevent swallowing and killing any insects that might accidentally fly into their mouths, as well as a specialized stick to gently move things like spiders and other insects out of the way. I know most people would scoff at that, but I think their deep respect for all forms of life is beautiful.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Nice analysis, shame about the cop-out ("I will leave the rest up to you!"). You're like- here's how to use morality, actually using it is left as an exercise to the reader :P

Re Jainism, adherents practice lacto-vegetarianism, but they, for example, don't eat tubers because they consider them too advanced, if I understand correctly. A deep respect for all forms of life is hard to get right in a world where every living thing eats some other living thing, or dies.

[gptgpp]

It was just getting way too long lol. I rarely see comments that length on this site. I could get some of my old university readings for you if you're interested? They come from a science and ethics course, there were some really good discussions on what makes animal research ethical, varying from it never being ethical, to it being ethical only if certain precautions are taken (minimizing pain, treating animals with dignity, not using them on frivolous things like cosmetics, etc.).

edit: there are also just SO many ways moral philosophies start to diverge at that point. Like we're talking about what is "necessary" animal experimentation. It's an important question, and one that really does boil down to a personal exercise.

Like... Personally I have no idea how to answer it. If you remove animal experimentation, well there goes a bunch of carcinogen studies which could result in a lot of human suffering. I also would need to do a ton of research to figure out if BCI research is at a level where primate brains are necessary instead of simpler organisms.

I also need to examine my own lifestyle, since hypocrisy severely undermines moral positions and having integrity/cogent beliefs and actions is essential if we are to engage with these subjects honestly.

For example, personally I have sometimes consumed meat in the last year (although I generally avoid it). Supporting factory farming absolutely violates my deontological moral imperative that "it is wrong to cause unnecessary suffering to others", in a ton of different ways. So who am I to espouse views on how people should behave with regards to animal research, when my own behaviour is in such a state of disarray?

Anyways... Getting pretty long again lol. Hope that response is helpful I know it's a bit rambling.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Thanks :) for the time being I find more than I need by following links on wikipedia articles. I don't think I have the patience for a careful reading of moral philosophy literature.

[gptgpp]

No problem! Just a heads up that one thing I've noticed about Wikipedia articles on philosophers is that they're not super accessible, and sometimes go on weird tangents.

Like moral imperatives are essential to understanding Kantian Deontology, but the wikipedia article on it goes on a weird tangent about a "Global Economic Moral Imperative," which I have never head of before and is absolutely not something somebody trying to wrap their head around Kantian moral philosophy should be distracted with. I'm kind of annoyed it's even on there, it's absolutely not something Kant ever talked about.

If you want a better highly detailed resource I would recommend the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy at https://plato.stanford.edu

But if that's too much (it is VERY detailed)... I can highly recommend chatGPT. For whatever reason it genuinely excels at philosophy. I've used it to discuss different absurdist philosophers before and it did an excellent job, which surprised me because I find it to be otherwise unreliable for a lot of subjects.

You can ask it to compare and contrast philosophies like Utilitarianism, social contractionism, deontology, etc, and tell it to simplify or summarize things, it is impressive how good it is.

Another approach is, also surprisingly, Youtube!

The channel PBS Crash Course Philosophy is at the level of an introductory philosophy course at a University and has good episodes on concepts like Kant's Categorical Imperatives (a favorite of mine):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bIys6JoEDw

Also the channel the School of Life has fun little overviews of different philosophers that I can vouch for like this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxrmOHJQRSs

And for longer format documentaries the BBC has great documentaries like this one on Nietzche that are similarly entertaining:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9f1F5jUzaM

So I would recommend trying these different resources and seeing what combination you like.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Thanks. I think I prefer the Standord encyclopedia of philosophy (SEoP) to ChatGPT and youtube.

For the record, my background is in mathematical logic (first order predicate calculus and all that) but from a computer science, rather than philosophical point of view, so I find the SEoP accessible. I just don't have any background in moral philosophy (except of course that I'm Greek and so grew up with the classics, because you can't avoid that).