5 ms·
Even though he says the EEG was flat: I'm mostly horrified at the idea that the pig might still be conscious. Pigs are self aware.
by wonderbear 8y ago
Even though he says the EEG was flat: I'm mostly horrified at the idea that the pig might still be conscious.
Pigs are self aware.
- colanderman 8y agoMaybe someday we as a species will evolve to a point that we recognize the immorality of experimenting on beings which are sentient but do not have the capability to consent. It boggles my mind that the learned individuals performing such experiments (and especially, the ethics boards that green-light them) fail to recognize as false the dichotomy between human and non-human sentience; but, humans have a history of performing experiments on other humans against their consent, so I shouldn't be surprised.
- burkaman 8y agoCan you define sentient? In this case I agree that pigs are obviously sentient, but do you think you could write a non-ambiguous easily-applied rule that prohibits experimenting on sentient life?
- colanderman 8y agoWikipedia has a good overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience Practically questions like these are decided by case law. (This is not very different than the current arguments over abortion in the US.)
- p1esk 8y agoWhat is the alternative? Let thousands of cancer victims die each year because we don’t want to test experimental cancer treatments on pigs? If your loved one was dying from cancer, and the only way to speed up the development of a cure would be testing it on animals, what would you do?
- colanderman 8y agoTest on human volunteers. And your hypothetical makes no sense. Discovering "a cure for cancer" takes much longer than the life expectancy of someone who is "dying from cancer". Beside, my loved ones agree with me. My selfishness for companionship doesn't outweigh their moral stance.
- p1esk 8y agoWhat if there are no human volunteers? Or no human volunteers with this specific condition?
- colanderman 8y ago"What if there were no animals? Or no animals with the specific condition?" Two can play at the hypothetical game. It's stupid. The same reasoning leads to moral acceptance of human organ harvesting. ("There's no willing donors, and those prisoners don't need an extra kidney anyway, and I do!") (Though the concern that so-called animal "models" don't reliably predict the effect of treatments on human is very real.)
- p1esk 8y agoThis is not a "hypothetical game". There are plenty of animals that we can use for testing, and we can create any necessary conditions in them to test our experimental treatments. Yes, this is cruel and sad, but if the alternative is to let humans die, I'll choose animals any day. This is not the same as human organ harvesting, because that would result in death of humans, and we are trying to prevent that. The concern that animal test results don't necessarily apply to humans is real, but it's much better than no tests at all.
- colanderman 8y agoUm, you don't have to kill someone to remove an organ. Many people donate them voluntarily while alive. But if there's no match or no-one willing to donate, we don't extract them from, say, prisoners against their will. (Though some countries do.)
- bigleagueposter 8y agoPig brains are just (dog) food. Morality shouldn't be concerned with food no matter how sentient it is.
- ralusek 8y agoWhy are pig brains dog food? Because they're below the arbitrary threshold of intelligence we have drawn in the sand to determine sentience? What if there was extra-terrestrial life of greater intelligence still that encountered our own species, and subjected us to identical treatment according to the exact same basis of morality?
- colanderman 8y agoI honestly can't tell if you're trolling, since your wording sounds like it's meant to provoke, but I'll answer you earnestly. Why should edibility take precedence over sentience? Humans are edible, after all.
- ikeyany 8y agoWhat a strange argument. Could you not also argue that dog brains are pig food?