How do you feel for wild mice, who typically have short lives of borderline starvation before they are eaten by a snake, bird, or other predator?

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voidUpdate 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I mean, at least that pain isn't being forced upon them by some higher being for the purpose of scientific fraud or similar, or be deliberately bred to be immunocompromised

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virgildotcodes 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Should hunter gatherers be thankful if we kidnapped them and tortured them to death in our labs?

What about people from Gaza?

Is it acceptable to do human testing as long as you pull the humans out of say east Africa during a famine?

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Dylan16807 16 hours ago | parent [-]

These examples don't work. Hunter gatherers didn't suffer, and the other two are in outlier bad situations. Set them free in a stable situation and they'll live happy lives.

If that description of wild mice is accurate, there is no happy free life. The baseline is very different. I'm not going to try to say how that should affect the rest of the ethics, but it's an important point to consider, and not as easily dismissed as your examples would imply.

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virgildotcodes 9 hours ago | parent [-]

> Hunter gatherers didn't suffer

Of course they did and still do. They have far higher rates of infant and child mortality, death from curable disease, starvation, and violent death.

It’s inconsistent to call the natural condition of wild animals, surviving and dying in nature, "no happy free life," then exempt humans living under that same fundamental condition.

How do we draw the line, from which principle that isn’t ex post facto? Do no wild animals have a happy free life? Do all humans? Most? A minority? Across all of human history?

Even in the most cherry-picked minority of cases, someone born into a wealthy developed country, people are frequently born with or develop agonizing diseases. They die of cancer and dementia despite their wealth. They live in grinding poverty, or barely cling to existence through depression, anxiety and alienation. Many suffer so greatly in fact that they commit suicide.

Suffering isn't a state of existence reserved for animals that humans are exempt from except in rare cases.

So if it is not, then is the fact that people suffer tremendously just as a normal fact of life justification for nonconsensual fatal human testing?

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Dylan16807 8 hours ago | parent [-]

You're trying too hard to find suffering. It should have been clear I was comparing to "short lives of borderline starvation before they are eaten" and "torture", not to a paradise without disease.

Most humans and most medium to large animals live pretty comfortable lives by default. It's easy and simple to draw a line where they're above the line.

The claim above is about mice. I don't know if nervous tiny prey have consistently worse lives than lab treatment in the wild, but it's not an immediately outrageous claim.

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virgildotcodes 7 hours ago | parent [-]

> You're trying too hard to find suffering

I don't know how you can say this, frankly, unless you do not see or experience any of this suffering yourself. If not, you should be extremely grateful for your luck.

You don't have to try hard, at all, to find it.

> Most humans and most medium to large animals live pretty comfortable lives by default. It's easy and simple to draw a line where they're above the line.

How are you defining this, and again by which principle do you draw this line which isn't some ex post facto version of "well humans are here, so I'm going to say everything to the left of here"?

> I don't know if nervous tiny prey have consistently worse lives than lab treatment in the wild, but it's not an immediately outrageous claim

We should be extremely skeptical of this claim because it's so convenient.

It absolves us of the guilt for the tremendous harms we're causing them by proposing something which we would see as obviously absurd if it were applied to us:

"A short, miserable life of having all sorts of horrifying experiments performed on you in a lab is better than being free to live your life and die in the world at large." - Person who benefits from performing experiments on you in a lab

	▲	Dylan16807 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Sure, I'm skeptical of the claim. But your attempts to equate it to the human experience are a waste of time. Nobody actually thinks humans (or cats, or bison) face the experience that SoftTalker was trying to describe. When we go by the actual intent of the statement, either it's true and mice but not humans face that, or it's false and neither mice nor humans face that. Any experience that you can say is the human default in full honesty, is not the experience SoftTalker was trying to convey.