The concern isn't about trading monkey lives for human lives, but instead that the component of needless torture and suffering is okay if it aids progress regardless of the effecacy of the outcome. I don't think people have as huge of a problem with monkeys being tested and dying in their trials more than they do about the lack of humanity and care about their position to the point of being dismissive.
yeah, I'd always trade monkey lives for human lives, but I'd also like the lives I trade to have been considered viable and worthwhile decisions to make from an ethical approach instead of being another number correlating to a large amount of attempts done. Saying similar to "I don't care if we kill 1000x more if anything at all improves" shows more of a lack of care to monkeys (i.e. their lives are being considered meaningless) than it does to defend the stance that killing more would be necessary to improve human lives.
I’m fine with for example cooking lobsters or prawns and other seafood that needs to be basically cooked alive. Because they are less sentient and less closer to human. I’m not fine with cooking chicken alive. There is a grey area about eating dogs and cats. I am generally fine with that, other people aren’t.
Monkeys are closer to human.
I think some amount of experimentation is necessary and can be good for science experiments. Monkeys are not human after all, never will be; but they are close.
I think excessive and useless experiments are bad.
But there is a gradient and I guess it’s hard to define. I don’t think sacrificing one monkey is evil. I also don’t think that needlessly torturing it is fine. There are gradients.
You can’t make parallel with experiments on human in 2nd world war though; that is a mockery of those people actually tortured back then. Saying that they are on monkey level
> I’m fine with for example cooking lobsters or prawns and other seafood that needs to be basically cooked alive
Just want to point out here: No, they don't need to be cooked alive. The human way to cook lobster is to run a knife through its head first. But most people don't have the stomach for this and choose to believe that boiling it alive is more humane.
It is also pretty bad calculus. Monkeys have almost the same level of intelligence we have (and probably more in some departments) so killing even one monkey is a debt that cannot be equalised with even one saved human.
yeah, I'd always trade monkey lives for human lives, but I'd also like the lives I trade to have been considered viable and worthwhile decisions to make from an ethical approach instead of being another number correlating to a large amount of attempts done. Saying similar to "I don't care if we kill 1000x more if anything at all improves" shows more of a lack of care to monkeys (i.e. their lives are being considered meaningless) than it does to defend the stance that killing more would be necessary to improve human lives.