Not the OP, but your question got me thinking. I think ends frequently justify means, though I’m guessing that the real question in that adage should be “does the end justify any means?”
Our entire decision system relies on endings justifying meanings. I want a steady job that pays well, so I concede to going to a 4-year institution and paying a decent amount in order for that end to be so. The end justifies the sacrifice in time and finances, so the decision is justified in my mind. If the end were that I had only obtained unemployable skills or knowledge, then that particular end would not have justified the means for me.
So I suppose that when people say the ends don’t justify the means, they’re not really saying it categorically—just that the particular ends being argued don’t justify the particular means.
With the case of animal testing to improve human quality of life, it’s hard to say. Dogs were routinely experimented on and killed to first link diabetes to the pancreas, and later to discover insulin was a substance that could be transferred to preserve life. These medical results have saved hundreds of thousands of lives in the past hundred years. Whether the neuralink experimentation is justified in its potential for quality-of-life improvements in paralysis victims years into the future really depends on where you weigh animal well-being and life in relation to future improvements to human life, as well as whether you believe their experiments are too gratuitous and could be carried out more safely/ effectively on fewer animals.
Sorry, I can't answer that as a yes/no since there is a whole package of connotation with such statement that I don't necessarily agree with in either case.
I thought my argument was clear, but I can try to make it more clear:
- I eat pork. Unfortunately because of people like me there are many many suffering pigs.
- I believe that it is more justified to make a pig suffer for neuroscience research than to be made into a McRoyal. (Let's assume that the suffering is comparable. Please also assume that the suffering is necessary for the particular research and that research has actual potential for useful applications. If there is evidence of unnecessary abuse then I'm not defending such abuse.)
- Therefore it seems silly to me to attack neuroscience researchers instead of me, an omnivore who could be vegetarian/vegan.
I understand that one can argue for both positions at the same time -- argue against research on animals and argue against eating meat. But I think the latter one is much more important than the former. And yet you probably wouldn't attack me for my meat-eating habit. (Maybe because doing so would be impolite.)
- The ends justify the means - Meaning we could justify torture if it prevents terrorism for example. Some people would consider this fine, others not.
- Some moral principles or duties have intrinsic value independent of their outcomes - For example, telling the truth might be considered right not because of its consequences, but because honesty itself is inherently valuable.
- Both means and ends matter - Actions are justified when there's moral harmony between how we act and what we achieve. This suggests that good ends achieved through ethical means have a different moral quality than the same ends achieved through harmful means.
Probably I'd put myself in the latter camps, rather than the first two. But then I haven't thought about this too deeply myself, so happy to hear the opinions of others who might have thought about it more :)
I have just refused to answer in a different reply to you, but actually when you describe it like this, the third camp resonates with me the most. So I'm with you there.
However, wouldn't most people say that? It is kind of a cop-out because it let's you decide on each moral dilemma in a case by case basis -> which I think is actually necessary since you can't say that ends justify/don't justify means blankly.
Do you by any chance know Alex O'Connor? I listened to an ethics episode of his podcast and it was quite interesting and well-spoken in my opinion. (It is about veganism again, I suppose it is a useful theme for ethical arguments.)
I believe in a true moral field that pervades reality, but I don't believe that "good" or "not good" can be expresssed in a finite sentence in some human understandable language. I believe the complexities require one to attend to the context as well as the action and so on. There's very few cases where I'd find it good to kill some human no matter the ends; but even just listening to someone patiently with attention instead of begging off due to being busy can be quite important to get right; these ordinary daily issues are where a clear feeling for the ends you live for and a feeling for your own actual physical limits on being patient or having enough energy for various tasks are useful. And I believe that two perspectives I find very useful are missing from many moral analyses: 1) my decisions change who I am, so the reason not to murder is not a strictly utilitarian balancing of the person's likely future actions, but also includes the change to my habits and tolerances, and 2) in the prisoner's dilemma, there is nothing that special about me being me - I could as easily be someone else, so when I am deciding I am picking between a world where x% of people make choice "cooperate" or x% of people make choice "defect."
This latter approach also extends very nicely to probabilistic methods - if I pass garbage on the beach, I can pick it up with probability Y%, and adjust Y so that if most a lot of people make the same choice, then all the garbage will be picked up.
Do you believe that killing a pig for bad or sloppy neuroscience research that provides no useful data is worth it?
To use an extreme example, say I have a theory that the brain is an unnecessary organ. Can I go around removing pig brains in the name of “neuroscience research” and get a free pass?
Okay, now suppose I want to test if my new brain implant that I intend to attach with known acutely neurotoxic binding agent is safe for long term use. I then observe that the acutely neurotoxic binding agent causes acute brain damage like it said it would and thus my implant is unsafe for long term use. Do I get a free pass for that even though I killed an animal to learn something the manual already told me?
Okay, now suppose I want to test if implant A is safe for long term use. But when I go to do the surgery I insert implant B because I took the wrong implants out of the storehouse because I did not follow standard practice and go through my checklist as any competent doctor should. I then repeat this say 24 more times before realizing that I have inserted the wrong implants into around half of the test subjects. I then kill the animals when I realize my mistake because no useful data can be drawn due to my mistake. Do I get a free pass for “experiments” that even I acknowledge are worthless because I made a mistake because I ignored standard practice that has practices explicitly designed to cheaply and easily avoid the class of mistake I made?
Killing a pig for high-quality neuroscience research can be worth more than eating it. However, there are plenty of forms of “neuroscience research” that are objectively useless that confer less benefit than eating it or are even actively harmful and thus confer only harm. These forms of “neuroscience research” can still be unethical even if we, as a society, continue to eat meat.
> Say I have a theory that the brain is an unnecessary organ. Can I go around removing pig brains in the name of “neuroscience research” and get a free pass?
Of course there are proposal review processes for research involving animals, that considers the potential benefits versus the harm done.
> However, there are plenty of forms of “neuroscience research” [involving animals] that are objectively useless
Says who?
You may disagree with the standards and decisions of review processes, but they are ubiquitous today.
> Do you believe that killing a pig for bad or sloppy neuroscience research that provides no useful data is worth it?
No, but Neuralink has proven results and proven useful applications. If you believe that they should publish more data or that there has been a specific misconduct then that is a different argument.
Great, so you agree that there exist classes of neuroscience research and experiments that are “worse” than eating animals, so the fact that animals are eaten in bulk does not give a free pass to all classes of “neuroscience research”?
We actually need to evaluate the “neuroscience research” and processes to determine if it constitutes one of these classes?
If no, please explain how my first example is clearly morally superior to eating an animal.
If yes, then please answer the other two concrete hypotheticals I proposed and evaluate their practical and moral content.
I contend that such practices would be unethical and practically worthless, with the benefits being either practically zero or actively negative from engaging in such research practices. So, eating an animal would be morally superior to such bad research practices. Such practices would, furthermore, be strongly dominated by well-known, standard practices which are more ethical, practically useful, and cheaper; thus harm minimization and utility maximization both support the use of standard, known practices in preference.
I also contend that such deviation from standard practices would only be morally justified if you were intentionally attempting to evaluate the standard practices themselves, but that would require both a specific nuanced argument and would preclude such experiments from testing new innovations to avoid disqualifying confounding variables. As such, the proposed hypotheticals do not fit this criteria as they are attempts to “research” some other non-process factor. So you can only argue this point if you wish to argue that intentionally confounding process and research variables is good science.