5 ms·

If you look more than 50 years into the past, to any civilization on earth, there are a number of behaviors and norms that were totally acceptable to the people

If you look more than 50 years into the past, to any civilization on earth, there are a number of behaviors and norms that were totally acceptable to the people of the time that modern man/woman would consider morally repugnant. Not allowing gays to marry, not allowing people of different races to marry, not allowing women to vote, slavery, ritual sacrifice, etc. It follows then, that there are likely things we view as morally OK that future generations of humans will condemn us for. It's a healthy exercise to imagine what those things might be. Reading about this research makes me think that this sort of animal experimentation will certainly be one of those things.

roryisok 10y ago
And probably eating animals. Once we have lab grown meat it'll be easy to take the moral high ground on that.
- bitL 10y ago
  What sucks is that everything around/in us fights for survival by eating all living things it could. So even if we manage to avoid animals, plants will still send distress signals once we collect them, nuts will still contain powerful allergens, viruses will still eat us from inside etc. Simply that's how life works; to change it we would need to go beyond Universe and reprogram it from outside.
  - neom 10y ago
    "to change it we would need to go beyond Universe and reprogram it from outside." - that was quite beautiful.
  - devoply 10y ago
    Original sin was when the first living creature decided to eat another living creature instead of getting energy directly from the source like the sun or a thermal vent.
  - rifung 10y ago
    I thought the point of avoiding the consumption of animals was so we wouldn't have to murder things which have similar concepts of fear and pain as we do. Why would plants sending distress signals or nuts with allergens be an issue?
SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
I dont think they'll condemn us for it, just that they'll do it a better way. People suffer and die from things that animal research can help us study, and I don't think that killing a dozen or a hundred or a thousand rats per lifetime we save is too many. (A human lives about 30 times as long as a rat, and Id say a human year is worth 30 times a rat year. A little self-centered, but probably not genuinely that awful.) Something like 600,000 people in the US die each year of cancer. If you figure on average they'd get ten more years, that's about 75,000 human lifetimes a year lost. So Id be okay with a literal rat holocost: 75,000,000 rats a year on the altar of science for as long as we can get useful knowledge about cancer from them. In actuality, I expect we're killing less than 1 rat per human lifetime lost each year -- and Im so absolutely okay with that cost to make progress against scourges like cancer, it's legitimately hard for me to understand the other view. Do you really believe that future humans will condemn us for killing less than 1 rat per human lost to try and stem the loss of human potential? Or is your position that it's just not sufficiently useful to do things about mental disorders (which cause lifetimes of suffering and disability, instead of immediate death)?
- rifung 10y ago
  > Do you really believe that future humans will condemn us for killing less than 1 rat per human lost to try and stem the loss of human potential? I think it's possible that they could condemn us for forcing rats to suffer and die for our own benefit. I don't think it's as likely as future humans looking down upon us for the awful way we treat animals we eat and maybe eating meat at all, but I can see it happening. It seems like there's a tradeoff between ethics and the pace of progress. After all, if we only cared about progress then we'd experiment on humans. On the other hand, medicine would probably stall without any experimentation on live animals, and so we choose to do it on rats.
  - FullMtlAlcoholc 10y ago
    If our descendants our truly more enlightened than we are, I doubt that they would condemn us for our comparatively barbaric behavior in the same way that we dont judge predators for playing with their prey. Just as playing with the prey improves their hunting ability, so to do we learn from our mistakes, eventually. The Romans are not universally condemned for causing the extinction of the Tencteri, Usipetes, Carthaginians. Similarly, we do not condemn our ancestors for the likely genocide of the Neanderthals, Denosivans, and all the other hominids. Judging people from the pass through the scanner of modern morality is counter-productive ti understanding history. The historian, Herbert Butterfield, put it best when he said "real historical understanding is not achieved by the subordination of the past to the present but rather by making the past our present and it's tempting to see life with the eyes of another Century than our own" In the end, society is what makes us civilized. We are still the same species we were 70,000 years ago. If society fell and we somehow experienced the same material conditions as they did, we would behave more or less the same. When we have wars and conflicts that are so intense that civil society breaks down, every one of us is more than capable of committing the most horrific atrocities. The 20th century is littered with examples of that. If you need any more evidence, I'll leave you with this description of what happened to a 13 yr old peaceful protestor in Syria Video posted online shows his battered, purple face. His skin is scrawled with cuts, gashes, deep burns and bullet wounds that would probably have injured but not killed. His jaw and kneecaps are shattered, according to an unidentified narrator, and his penis chopped off.
red75prime 10y ago
Brain has no pain receptors. Mice probably have no ability to reflect on the fact that they are being experimented upon. So it is probably your own icky feeling about that experiment that bothers you, not a real problem.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- ingr3d 10y ago
  I like your style. Your remorseless capacity to rationalize the destruction of another orginsm's experience makes you a suitable candidate for an experiment I'm designing. In this experiment, you'll be required to watch hours of cell phone videos in which Central American drug cartels torture their rivals in dungeon-like warehouses. Afterward, we'll ask you to rationalize in a fatalistic , whether or not people should feel "icky" about second-hand footage and general evidence of events that have already transpired, which they can do nothing about, and also have you form similar opinions about the fact that comparable events are likely to be transpiring as we speak, although by nature we lack the capacity to anticipate where and when they will occur next. Finally, after having you participate in the rationalization of said events, ex-post-facto, we'll permit our researchers to place you in blinded version of the famous Milgram experiment, involving deception and empathy with regard to the suffering of others, and gauge how well you perform, as compared to the control group. Hopefully you won't feel too icky afterward.
  - Ntrails 10y ago
    Wouldn't you want to just do a before and after Milgram to get context? Otherwise it's hard to know if I was lacking empathy beforehand compared to the control group. Happy to play though, what's the pay like?
  - pavel_lishin 10y ago
    > In this experiment What hypothesis is this experiment testing? Are there controls?
darawk 10y ago
I couldn't disagree more. Not because human lives are worth more than rats. They aren't. The only thing that gives human lives value is the fact that each one of us wants to preserve our own. The best way of ensuring this is entering into a collective agreement against homicide. That is the source of this 'moral' position. Rats, not being able to kill us, do not benefit from this agreement.
fdsak 10y ago
True, changing the nature in this way, we might produce sth with side effects beyond our control and more dangerous is detecting it early, because we are playing with a huge and complex circuitry of nature,and probably we assume we know enough, but I suspect we know less that one percent.
mentos 10y ago
Would these advanced future generations exist without this sort of research?

roryisok 10y ago

And probably eating animals. Once we have lab grown meat it'll be easy to take the moral high ground on that.

bitL 10y ago
What sucks is that everything around/in us fights for survival by eating all living things it could. So even if we manage to avoid animals, plants will still send distress signals once we collect them, nuts will still contain powerful allergens, viruses will still eat us from inside etc. Simply that's how life works; to change it we would need to go beyond Universe and reprogram it from outside.
- neom 10y ago
  "to change it we would need to go beyond Universe and reprogram it from outside." - that was quite beautiful.
- devoply 10y ago
  Original sin was when the first living creature decided to eat another living creature instead of getting energy directly from the source like the sun or a thermal vent.
- rifung 10y ago
  I thought the point of avoiding the consumption of animals was so we wouldn't have to murder things which have similar concepts of fear and pain as we do. Why would plants sending distress signals or nuts with allergens be an issue?

SomeStupidPoint 10y ago

I dont think they'll condemn us for it, just that they'll do it a better way. People suffer and die from things that animal research can help us study, and I don't think that killing a dozen or a hundred or a thousand rats per lifetime we save is too many. (A human lives about 30 times as long as a rat, and Id say a human year is worth 30 times a rat year. A little self-centered, but probably not genuinely that awful.) Something like 600,000 people in the US die each year of cancer. If you figure on average they'd get ten more years, that's about 75,000 human lifetimes a year lost. So Id be okay with a literal rat holocost: 75,000,000 rats a year on the altar of science for as long as we can get useful knowledge about cancer from them. In actuality, I expect we're killing less than 1 rat per human lifetime lost each year -- and Im so absolutely okay with that cost to make progress against scourges like cancer, it's legitimately hard for me to understand the other view. Do you really believe that future humans will condemn us for killing less than 1 rat per human lost to try and stem the loss of human potential? Or is your position that it's just not sufficiently useful to do things about mental disorders (which cause lifetimes of suffering and disability, instead of immediate death)?

rifung 10y ago
> Do you really believe that future humans will condemn us for killing less than 1 rat per human lost to try and stem the loss of human potential? I think it's possible that they could condemn us for forcing rats to suffer and die for our own benefit. I don't think it's as likely as future humans looking down upon us for the awful way we treat animals we eat and maybe eating meat at all, but I can see it happening. It seems like there's a tradeoff between ethics and the pace of progress. After all, if we only cared about progress then we'd experiment on humans. On the other hand, medicine would probably stall without any experimentation on live animals, and so we choose to do it on rats.
- FullMtlAlcoholc 10y ago
  If our descendants our truly more enlightened than we are, I doubt that they would condemn us for our comparatively barbaric behavior in the same way that we dont judge predators for playing with their prey. Just as playing with the prey improves their hunting ability, so to do we learn from our mistakes, eventually. The Romans are not universally condemned for causing the extinction of the Tencteri, Usipetes, Carthaginians. Similarly, we do not condemn our ancestors for the likely genocide of the Neanderthals, Denosivans, and all the other hominids. Judging people from the pass through the scanner of modern morality is counter-productive ti understanding history. The historian, Herbert Butterfield, put it best when he said "real historical understanding is not achieved by the subordination of the past to the present but rather by making the past our present and it's tempting to see life with the eyes of another Century than our own" In the end, society is what makes us civilized. We are still the same species we were 70,000 years ago. If society fell and we somehow experienced the same material conditions as they did, we would behave more or less the same. When we have wars and conflicts that are so intense that civil society breaks down, every one of us is more than capable of committing the most horrific atrocities. The 20th century is littered with examples of that. If you need any more evidence, I'll leave you with this description of what happened to a 13 yr old peaceful protestor in Syria Video posted online shows his battered, purple face. His skin is scrawled with cuts, gashes, deep burns and bullet wounds that would probably have injured but not killed. His jaw and kneecaps are shattered, according to an unidentified narrator, and his penis chopped off.

red75prime 10y ago

Brain has no pain receptors. Mice probably have no ability to reflect on the fact that they are being experimented upon. So it is probably your own icky feeling about that experiment that bothers you, not a real problem.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
ingr3d 10y ago
I like your style. Your remorseless capacity to rationalize the destruction of another orginsm's experience makes you a suitable candidate for an experiment I'm designing. In this experiment, you'll be required to watch hours of cell phone videos in which Central American drug cartels torture their rivals in dungeon-like warehouses. Afterward, we'll ask you to rationalize in a fatalistic , whether or not people should feel "icky" about second-hand footage and general evidence of events that have already transpired, which they can do nothing about, and also have you form similar opinions about the fact that comparable events are likely to be transpiring as we speak, although by nature we lack the capacity to anticipate where and when they will occur next. Finally, after having you participate in the rationalization of said events, ex-post-facto, we'll permit our researchers to place you in blinded version of the famous Milgram experiment, involving deception and empathy with regard to the suffering of others, and gauge how well you perform, as compared to the control group. Hopefully you won't feel too icky afterward.
- Ntrails 10y ago
  Wouldn't you want to just do a before and after Milgram to get context? Otherwise it's hard to know if I was lacking empathy beforehand compared to the control group. Happy to play though, what's the pay like?
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  > In this experiment What hypothesis is this experiment testing? Are there controls?

darawk 10y ago

I couldn't disagree more. Not because human lives are worth more than rats. They aren't. The only thing that gives human lives value is the fact that each one of us wants to preserve our own. The best way of ensuring this is entering into a collective agreement against homicide. That is the source of this 'moral' position. Rats, not being able to kill us, do not benefit from this agreement.

fdsak 10y ago

True, changing the nature in this way, we might produce sth with side effects beyond our control and more dangerous is detecting it early, because we are playing with a huge and complex circuitry of nature,and probably we assume we know enough, but I suspect we know less that one percent.

mentos 10y ago

Would these advanced future generations exist without this sort of research?