Alright, now your turn.
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Originally posted by filtherton
I'm sorry, I was under the impression that the word "ethics" was something other than a synonym for morals. I'm a dunce, please disregard my statements of ethics.
Back to my point, why is medical animal testing immoral? You could compare it to deforestation and consumerism, you'd be completely missing the point. Animal testing is nothing like destroying the planet. I think you'd have a hard time convincing me that it harms anything but the test subject. Its not the tip of the iceberg, it ain't even in the same ocean. Tell me how the impact of animal testing is even remotely close to the impact of global deforestation, or the depletion of our ozone. The fact is that medical testing saves lives. It is also completely sustainable. We can be fairly sure that we will never run out of rats and despite what is probably a lengthly history of medical animal testing, we still need Bob Barker to remind us to have our pets spayed or neutered because there are so many of those fuckers running around.
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Don't fool yourself into thinking that medical testing and deforestation, pollution, and animal harvesting are unrelated simply because their methods of execution are so varied. Animal testing is a symptom - of human
attitude. The entire environmental problem is a result of attitude - until you can get the attitude to change, none of our reforms will do any good.
The current status quo is that the planet is here for our use. We are somehow superior to everyone and everything and therefore are entitled to use nature for our own purposes without heeding the consequences. Hunting is fun, so we hunt. We need roads, so we pave our way through wilderness wherever it is convenient for us. We need some way to deal with our waste, so we dump our sewage into the bays and oceans.
It is the attitude that, hey, we don't have to give a shit about our planet - we're here to have fun and fuck around for our 70 or 80 years and then we die. Who cares?
Medical testing is just one of the logical results of our attitude. Animals are a commodity. Might as well use them to their fullest potential.
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Originally posted by Peryn
You make it sound like we owe these animals something. Like we should be ashamed. We do it because we can, and because it makes sense, and because that is how the world works. It not something that is new with humanity either. Any other species, given the choice, will put its own interests in front of another species' interest.
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Whether or not we owe them anything is beside the point - though I do believe we should be ashamed of the shape our planet is currently in. And the rest of your paragraph says exactly what I've been saying - you do realize that, don't you? We do it because we can - that's the way the world is. But don't try to tell yourself that it's somehow right.
If you're going to argue that, then slavery should still be in effect. Dictators would be heroes. Hitler didn't do anything wrong. Each of them could do it - so they did, and that's how the world works. Given a choice, Hitler would obviously prefer his Master Race to everyone else.
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Originally posted by Peryn
This debate on medical testing is irrelevant because they have actually been testing all types of things on animals for quite some time.
From an opportunity cost perspective we heal the sick because it costs a lot of resources to socialize children into adulthood and people dying prematurely is generally a bigger waste than figuring out how to cure them. We keep the old around because they are generally worth the resources they consume because they help raise the grandchildren. These people are worth more alive than dead. These examples are both oversimplified, but true nonetheless.
As for survival of the fittest, i'm pretty sure that if you believe in evolution you have to acknowledge the fact that natural selection is always in full effect.
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Actually, old people have nothing to offer from a biological standpoint - if you are going to argue that they are useful because they raise children then we should kill off all the old people who aren't. We should kill off everyone that doesn't contribute anything to society and the human race as a whole. The genetically inferior weaken the gene pool, so people with hereditary diseases should be removed. People with disabilities should be removed. And why waste time rehabilitating criminals? Just kill them and be done with it. Drag all the drug dealers and punk kids off the street, line them up against the wall and shoot them all.
All hail Hitler?
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Originally posted by Peryn
The staus quo represents millions of years of evolution. There are no morals in evolution. I too get sad when i see the lion kill the sweet, innocent gazelle on the discovery channel, but i also realize that nature(of which we are a product) could care less about fairness and morality. Might makes right may seem immoral, and in the context of intrahuman interaction most people would agree that it is. However, every species, except for the ones on the bottom of the food chain, owes a lot to "might makes right." You could call it selfish, but you could call it nature too. Everythng animal is alive is alive because something else died to feed it.
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So tell me why it is that 'might makes right' isn't moral in society but is somehow moral when we apply it to nature. You are implicitly claiming that humans are somehow above or removed from nature - not subject to its laws or conditions.
If the status quo is correct, nothing would ever change - since we are automatically assuming that the current state of affairs is the correct one, changing anything would actually be wrong. So if a dictatorship is the status quo, it would be wrong to start a revolution, no matter how corrupt or tyrannical the dictator is.