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Science should foremost follow a moral and ethical attitude instead of just trying out what seems to be possible. Who gives them the right to destroy the brain

Science should foremost follow a moral and ethical attitude instead of just trying out what seems to be possible. Who gives them the right to destroy the brain of an ape for dubious activities. More empathy please if science should take us somewhere better.

jakeogh 9y ago
Fire good, explosions bad?
- runesoerensen 9y ago
  This isn't really responsive to grandparent's comment, which seem more concerned with the scientific process than the actual findings. Also, explosions can be good, too. The Nobel prize wasn't named after a terrorist :)
  - jakeogh 9y ago
    Sure it is, the point is you cant separate discovery between good and bad until after the fact with an opinion. GP thinks morals should guide self censorship of discovery before the discovery, like somehow discovers know repercussions beforehand and should avoid particular avenues because that will somehow stop others who ignored the review board. It wont happen. Someone will try it. What does saying "dont look here" do?
    - runesoerensen 9y ago
      That depends entirely on the ethics and morals you choose to adopt. There are certainly ethics that allow you to assess the moral worth of an action prior to knowing the result. For instance, deontologists like Kant would not care about the outcome to determine whether an action is right or wrong. "Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law" Utilitarianists such as Mill would seek to maximize utility and would very much factor in the end result.
      - jakeogh 9y ago
        Namedropping philosophers like it's an argument is only relevant in theater. Will n scientists deciding not to look into something prevent it's discovery?
        runesoerensen 9y ago
        > Namedropping philosophers like it's an argument is only relevant in theater I'm not namedropping for the sake of namedropping, and I don't know why you'd say philosophers are only relevant in theater. We're discussing ethics and failing to understand the contributions of philosophy in that context is a major mistake (your reasoning is primarily utilitarianist and I'm not saying that's wrong, just what it is. Utilitarianism is very widely used in modern societies). We're also debating science. Who do you think developed ideas of scientific processes; what knowledge is and how we attain it? > Will n scientists deciding not to look into something prevent it's discovery? If getting to a discovery requires unreasonably horrible actions I hope it'll at least be delayed until such time it can be made without such horrible actions. Many have suffered throughout history in the name of scientific progress. Plenty of ethics are implemented in science already. That's a good and ever-evolving thing.
        jakeogh 9y ago
        Point taken. I cant help but build my morals into my assumptions, so I assume we are not talking about doing things on individuals against their will. You kinda pointed at that possibility and I appreciate it. This (what GP and this story is about) is voluntary. Like letting a primitive android into your house so you can order pizza, or carrying around a sophisticated connected computer that informs you. The next step is always tighter integration. Pretending that an ethical review board is going to prevent "closed source humans" is not going to work. People understanding it is the only way I can see to prevent it (it's already the status quo). I'm honestly looking for suggestions.
        icebraining 9y ago
        This (what GP and this story is about) is voluntary. How can a monkey give consent?
    - icebraining 9y ago
      Klasiaster's point isn't about the results and its repercussions, it's about the process itself.
wadkar 9y ago
I hope, if not sure, they followed IRB (institutional review board) for their experiment. You’re right in your point that we, as scientists, shouldn’t simply do whatever is possible. On the other hand processes like IRB provides a mechanism for oversight where ethical issues such as those raised by you are considered.
- frisco 9y ago
  It was for sure governed by their Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC). IRBs are the human equivalent. Also, pedantic, but macaques are not apes; research on apes is extremely restricted today. Last I saw the NIH standards, they involved demonstrating that the research being done would benefit that individual animal, not just humans or even the species.
fsloth 9y ago
Science is not supposed to make anyone better. Science is a tool that can be wielded for any task, dubious or divine. Just like a knife. Turn to philosophy or religion for morals.
- dwaltrip 9y ago
  People were "moral" before those words existed. Morals are simply emergent normative behavior. Science is a human endeavor, and thus is affected by understood norms, like any other human endeavor.
  - ben_w 9y ago
    Perhaps. If a morality fails in the forest and nobody has language to describe it… is morality the equivalent of “sound is a pressure wave”, or the equivalent of “sounds is an auditory experience”? Moral codes have changed wildly over the years (and by place in any year). Slavery was “fine”, until it wasn’t. The death penalty is a thing in some places today, but seen as repugnant in others. Shellfish were forbidden, until someone had a vision of god berating them for turning it down. Bestiality was legal in half of Europe twenty years ago, but not today. Weed and gay marriage were unbelievable twenty years ago, but are increasingly acceptable today. I’m vegetarian (trying to be vegan) just in case animals have that hard to describe thing commonly called consciousness or self-awareness or personhood, but I don’t have enough certainty to condemn anyone who thinks I’m being silly by worrying about that. Heck, I don’t even have a concrete definition of the thing I worry animals might have in order to test against. What is morality? Really?
    - Baeocystin 9y ago
      Poorly-defined turtles all the way down. (This is a more serious answer than it reads.)
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      Assuming no supernatural things, all thinking a human does happens in their brain. Therefore, a very reductive approach: morality is our high-level generalization of what makes us feel bad or good. Things like: - murder is wrong, because any given human wants to live (self-preservation drive), and also usually wants people they care about to live (them dying causes feelings of hurt) - theft is wrong, because if you take something from me that I need, or feel connection to, I feel hurt - etc. Our social drive ensures that if you generalize things like these into more abstract code and enforce it, less of those bad things happen. This - both dislike for things that tend to be a part of pretty much all moral codes, and the tendency to create those codes - seems to be built into our brain's firmware. Under this reductive view, the only actual claim morality has to universality is that all of us have pretty much the same hardware/firmware, and thus share the same basic moral principles. That is, hypothetical sentient aliens from outer space would likely have a different moral code due to the different process through which their brain-equivalent appeared.
glorkk 9y ago
> Science should foremost follow a moral and ethical attitude And who should be the arbiter of what constitutes a “moral and ethical attitude”? You?
- mythrwy 9y ago
  The problems with "moral and ethical" is all to often it turns into "give me money or make me the king". I try to behave morally and ethically as I understand them but grow suspicious when others start bringing these things up.
matz1 9y ago
Not everyone care about animal well being, I certainly don't, to me they are less than human.
- matte_black 9y ago
  If you think this way about an animal, then you have the foundation to think this way about some groups of humans.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    Really? So when looking at the trolley problem, it's irrelevant to you if on the side track is a slug rather than a person?
    - matte_black 9y ago
      You can kill the slug and still feel bad that a living organism was destroyed.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    When you use a knife to cut bread, you have the foundation to go and slaughter people. It's literally the same principle of action. It doesn't imply you'll do it. Similarly, being able to do moral value comparisons doesn't imply you'll find human lives inferior.
TeMPOraL 9y ago
Who gives any right for anything? The question is, how much moral value you want to grant to a life of a monkey (not ape in this case). Most people wouldn't give it anything close to human-life level, at which point we're potentially open for experiments like these. Assuming they're not doing it just for the kicks, but actually trying to make helpful discoveries about brains, the moral calculus will favour this experiment. And if you do think a monkey's life is as important as human life, then well... you'll find many other more important moral violations to solve that have nothing to do with scientific experiments.
- ada1981 9y ago
  They are doing it for dopamine. The specific dopamine pathway is probably one linked to social status.
  - taneq 9y ago
    An oversimplification, but yeah. The same reason anyone does anything: Because somehow and in some way it makes them feel good (or at least they anticipate that it will do so).
snarfy 9y ago
I have a hard time arguing the ethics of animal research knowing I ate a cheeseburger yesterday and didn't finish it. An animal died to be thrown away. Without animal research I probably would have never been born, having been wiped out by some plague centuries ago.
stinos 9y ago
just trying out what seems to be possible This done a) to increase knowledge and b) because that knowledge might eventually help humans.(just like you have in your life used multiple medical solutions which originated in animal research). Now you can argue that you don't care about this, which is your good right, but making it sound like they do it just for the sake of it is factually wrong. Who gives them the right to destroy the brain of an ape for dubious activities. It's a monkey, and 'destroy' is such an exaggeration it makes me think you don't actually know the hardware used for these experiments work. These electrode tips are in the micrometer scale and while I don't know the exact amount of neurons actually damaged it is a fraction of te total amount in that given region of the brain.
vinchuco 9y ago
Science is about how things are, not how they should be. Does the sun revolve around the Earth?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
taneq 9y ago
Who gives you the right to destroy the brain of a cow or an octopus for eating? Humans kill animals all the time, animals kill animals all the time, if this one ape happened to die slightly differently and got us all closer to data nirvana then isn't that a nobler way to go?
- the_gastropod 9y ago
  I think this is a simplistic view. Extend your argument one step further. "If this one human happened to die slightly differently and got us all closer to data nirvana then isn't that a nobler way to go?" Maybe? But it's definitely morally problematic.
  - taneq 9y ago
    (I wanted to reply to this last night but I hit the rate limiter, heh.) Whether your extension is morally problematic depends entirely on your moral framework. Modified trolley problems are a good way to examine this: Given a chance to save N people by killing 1, what would N need to be before you'd take that chance? Most people would be outraged at N=5 or maybe even N=100. I think a significant portion would accept at N=100,000.
VikingCoder 9y ago
Different arguments you could make will work for different people, but I have to say - my daughter needed heart surgery when she was two, but scientists had experimented on animals to perfect a procedure that allowed the surgery to be done through a catheter, rather than open-heart. That gave my daughter a much greater chance of surviving the procedure, without complications. So I'm delighted they did the experiments. I greatly appreciate how much scientists try to reduce suffering when they perform these experiments - you should really look in to what the approval process is for experimentation here in the US, and the extent that any given animal can be experimented on. But when it comes down to it, my family is not vegan, we eat meat, we rescue animals (four cats so far), we donate to the Humane Society, and we're THRILLED scientists experimented on animals to learn how to save our daughter. Some day illness could rob her of sight or hearing, and some day these experiments could lead to restoring her senses. This is not a difficult equation for me. I absolutely will agree that science needs moral and ethical oversight, but this is far from "just trying out what seems to be possible." And I personally think they should have permission to experiment like this on the brain of an ape, and I do not consider these activities dubious. So, perhaps your arguments will work on other people. But probably not on anyone like me who has had their child's life so dramatically improved by science just like this.
clydethefrog 9y ago
In 1944 Adorno and Horkheimer already described that domination of nature is a central characteristic of instrumental rationality in Western civilization, and thanks to globalisation it is slowly becoming a global norm. We will see if our augmented brains, trusted and synced on the blockchain, will see the flooding of data centres coming. Makes you wonder how all this fossil fuel powering all this became fossils.

jakeogh 9y ago

Fire good, explosions bad?

runesoerensen 9y ago
This isn't really responsive to grandparent's comment, which seem more concerned with the scientific process than the actual findings. Also, explosions can be good, too. The Nobel prize wasn't named after a terrorist :)
- jakeogh 9y ago
  Sure it is, the point is you cant separate discovery between good and bad until after the fact with an opinion. GP thinks morals should guide self censorship of discovery before the discovery, like somehow discovers know repercussions beforehand and should avoid particular avenues because that will somehow stop others who ignored the review board. It wont happen. Someone will try it. What does saying "dont look here" do?
  - runesoerensen 9y ago
    That depends entirely on the ethics and morals you choose to adopt. There are certainly ethics that allow you to assess the moral worth of an action prior to knowing the result. For instance, deontologists like Kant would not care about the outcome to determine whether an action is right or wrong. "Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law" Utilitarianists such as Mill would seek to maximize utility and would very much factor in the end result.
    - jakeogh 9y ago
      Namedropping philosophers like it's an argument is only relevant in theater. Will n scientists deciding not to look into something prevent it's discovery?
      - runesoerensen 9y ago
        > Namedropping philosophers like it's an argument is only relevant in theater I'm not namedropping for the sake of namedropping, and I don't know why you'd say philosophers are only relevant in theater. We're discussing ethics and failing to understand the contributions of philosophy in that context is a major mistake (your reasoning is primarily utilitarianist and I'm not saying that's wrong, just what it is. Utilitarianism is very widely used in modern societies). We're also debating science. Who do you think developed ideas of scientific processes; what knowledge is and how we attain it? > Will n scientists deciding not to look into something prevent it's discovery? If getting to a discovery requires unreasonably horrible actions I hope it'll at least be delayed until such time it can be made without such horrible actions. Many have suffered throughout history in the name of scientific progress. Plenty of ethics are implemented in science already. That's a good and ever-evolving thing.
        jakeogh 9y ago
        Point taken. I cant help but build my morals into my assumptions, so I assume we are not talking about doing things on individuals against their will. You kinda pointed at that possibility and I appreciate it. This (what GP and this story is about) is voluntary. Like letting a primitive android into your house so you can order pizza, or carrying around a sophisticated connected computer that informs you. The next step is always tighter integration. Pretending that an ethical review board is going to prevent "closed source humans" is not going to work. People understanding it is the only way I can see to prevent it (it's already the status quo). I'm honestly looking for suggestions.
        icebraining 9y ago
        This (what GP and this story is about) is voluntary. How can a monkey give consent?
  - icebraining 9y ago
    Klasiaster's point isn't about the results and its repercussions, it's about the process itself.

wadkar 9y ago

I hope, if not sure, they followed IRB (institutional review board) for their experiment. You’re right in your point that we, as scientists, shouldn’t simply do whatever is possible. On the other hand processes like IRB provides a mechanism for oversight where ethical issues such as those raised by you are considered.

frisco 9y ago
It was for sure governed by their Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC). IRBs are the human equivalent. Also, pedantic, but macaques are not apes; research on apes is extremely restricted today. Last I saw the NIH standards, they involved demonstrating that the research being done would benefit that individual animal, not just humans or even the species.

fsloth 9y ago

Science is not supposed to make anyone better. Science is a tool that can be wielded for any task, dubious or divine. Just like a knife. Turn to philosophy or religion for morals.

dwaltrip 9y ago
People were "moral" before those words existed. Morals are simply emergent normative behavior. Science is a human endeavor, and thus is affected by understood norms, like any other human endeavor.
- ben_w 9y ago
  Perhaps. If a morality fails in the forest and nobody has language to describe it… is morality the equivalent of “sound is a pressure wave”, or the equivalent of “sounds is an auditory experience”? Moral codes have changed wildly over the years (and by place in any year). Slavery was “fine”, until it wasn’t. The death penalty is a thing in some places today, but seen as repugnant in others. Shellfish were forbidden, until someone had a vision of god berating them for turning it down. Bestiality was legal in half of Europe twenty years ago, but not today. Weed and gay marriage were unbelievable twenty years ago, but are increasingly acceptable today. I’m vegetarian (trying to be vegan) just in case animals have that hard to describe thing commonly called consciousness or self-awareness or personhood, but I don’t have enough certainty to condemn anyone who thinks I’m being silly by worrying about that. Heck, I don’t even have a concrete definition of the thing I worry animals might have in order to test against. What is morality? Really?
  - Baeocystin 9y ago
    Poorly-defined turtles all the way down. (This is a more serious answer than it reads.)
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    Assuming no supernatural things, all thinking a human does happens in their brain. Therefore, a very reductive approach: morality is our high-level generalization of what makes us feel bad or good. Things like: - murder is wrong, because any given human wants to live (self-preservation drive), and also usually wants people they care about to live (them dying causes feelings of hurt) - theft is wrong, because if you take something from me that I need, or feel connection to, I feel hurt - etc. Our social drive ensures that if you generalize things like these into more abstract code and enforce it, less of those bad things happen. This - both dislike for things that tend to be a part of pretty much all moral codes, and the tendency to create those codes - seems to be built into our brain's firmware. Under this reductive view, the only actual claim morality has to universality is that all of us have pretty much the same hardware/firmware, and thus share the same basic moral principles. That is, hypothetical sentient aliens from outer space would likely have a different moral code due to the different process through which their brain-equivalent appeared.

glorkk 9y ago

> Science should foremost follow a moral and ethical attitude And who should be the arbiter of what constitutes a “moral and ethical attitude”? You?

mythrwy 9y ago
The problems with "moral and ethical" is all to often it turns into "give me money or make me the king". I try to behave morally and ethically as I understand them but grow suspicious when others start bringing these things up.

matz1 9y ago

Not everyone care about animal well being, I certainly don't, to me they are less than human.

matte_black 9y ago
If you think this way about an animal, then you have the foundation to think this way about some groups of humans.
- icebraining 9y ago
  Really? So when looking at the trolley problem, it's irrelevant to you if on the side track is a slug rather than a person?
  - matte_black 9y ago
    You can kill the slug and still feel bad that a living organism was destroyed.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  When you use a knife to cut bread, you have the foundation to go and slaughter people. It's literally the same principle of action. It doesn't imply you'll do it. Similarly, being able to do moral value comparisons doesn't imply you'll find human lives inferior.

TeMPOraL 9y ago

Who gives any right for anything? The question is, how much moral value you want to grant to a life of a monkey (not ape in this case). Most people wouldn't give it anything close to human-life level, at which point we're potentially open for experiments like these. Assuming they're not doing it just for the kicks, but actually trying to make helpful discoveries about brains, the moral calculus will favour this experiment. And if you do think a monkey's life is as important as human life, then well... you'll find many other more important moral violations to solve that have nothing to do with scientific experiments.

ada1981 9y ago
They are doing it for dopamine. The specific dopamine pathway is probably one linked to social status.
- taneq 9y ago
  An oversimplification, but yeah. The same reason anyone does anything: Because somehow and in some way it makes them feel good (or at least they anticipate that it will do so).

snarfy 9y ago

I have a hard time arguing the ethics of animal research knowing I ate a cheeseburger yesterday and didn't finish it. An animal died to be thrown away. Without animal research I probably would have never been born, having been wiped out by some plague centuries ago.

stinos 9y ago

just trying out what seems to be possible This done a) to increase knowledge and b) because that knowledge might eventually help humans.(just like you have in your life used multiple medical solutions which originated in animal research). Now you can argue that you don't care about this, which is your good right, but making it sound like they do it just for the sake of it is factually wrong. Who gives them the right to destroy the brain of an ape for dubious activities. It's a monkey, and 'destroy' is such an exaggeration it makes me think you don't actually know the hardware used for these experiments work. These electrode tips are in the micrometer scale and while I don't know the exact amount of neurons actually damaged it is a fraction of te total amount in that given region of the brain.

vinchuco 9y ago

Science is about how things are, not how they should be. Does the sun revolve around the Earth?

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

taneq 9y ago

Who gives you the right to destroy the brain of a cow or an octopus for eating? Humans kill animals all the time, animals kill animals all the time, if this one ape happened to die slightly differently and got us all closer to data nirvana then isn't that a nobler way to go?

the_gastropod 9y ago
I think this is a simplistic view. Extend your argument one step further. "If this one human happened to die slightly differently and got us all closer to data nirvana then isn't that a nobler way to go?" Maybe? But it's definitely morally problematic.
- taneq 9y ago
  (I wanted to reply to this last night but I hit the rate limiter, heh.) Whether your extension is morally problematic depends entirely on your moral framework. Modified trolley problems are a good way to examine this: Given a chance to save N people by killing 1, what would N need to be before you'd take that chance? Most people would be outraged at N=5 or maybe even N=100. I think a significant portion would accept at N=100,000.

VikingCoder 9y ago

Different arguments you could make will work for different people, but I have to say - my daughter needed heart surgery when she was two, but scientists had experimented on animals to perfect a procedure that allowed the surgery to be done through a catheter, rather than open-heart. That gave my daughter a much greater chance of surviving the procedure, without complications. So I'm delighted they did the experiments. I greatly appreciate how much scientists try to reduce suffering when they perform these experiments - you should really look in to what the approval process is for experimentation here in the US, and the extent that any given animal can be experimented on. But when it comes down to it, my family is not vegan, we eat meat, we rescue animals (four cats so far), we donate to the Humane Society, and we're THRILLED scientists experimented on animals to learn how to save our daughter. Some day illness could rob her of sight or hearing, and some day these experiments could lead to restoring her senses. This is not a difficult equation for me. I absolutely will agree that science needs moral and ethical oversight, but this is far from "just trying out what seems to be possible." And I personally think they should have permission to experiment like this on the brain of an ape, and I do not consider these activities dubious. So, perhaps your arguments will work on other people. But probably not on anyone like me who has had their child's life so dramatically improved by science just like this.

clydethefrog 9y ago

In 1944 Adorno and Horkheimer already described that domination of nature is a central characteristic of instrumental rationality in Western civilization, and thanks to globalisation it is slowly becoming a global norm. We will see if our augmented brains, trusted and synced on the blockchain, will see the flooding of data centres coming. Makes you wonder how all this fossil fuel powering all this became fossils.