> They would say the ends justify the means. Now, in 2015, very few people would say that. To be fair, I'm at least consistent in that I think human experiment

> They would say the ends justify the means. Now, in 2015, very few people would say that. To be fair, I'm at least consistent in that I think human experimentation is prudent and should be done, precisely because I think it's unethical to stall some of the research questions it would answer. Of course, we actually /do/ human experimentation, including experimentation we're not sure will work or which is not directly consented to by the human, moderated by the utility we get out of it and the risk to the human. > But still, it's an issue of ends justifying the means. What else is there to justify (or condemn) them? We are but passing minds, waves cresting and breaking in a sea of chemicals. I view it as a duty to try and see as many healthy and happy minds as I can, and to be a net increase on that. There simply is no reality except the one here, and our net impact on that all that matters. There's no cosmic tally after about how good you meant to be. So while it would break my heart to, I would push down the plunger to kill everyone one of my pet rats so I didn't have to see so many skeletal faces in the children's cancer ward anymore. > I don't know if humans have the right to effectively (metaphorically) cannibalize other species in order to improve our own, just because we're more intelligent. At the end of the day, my views are really the emotional, monsterous ones: I simply value human lives at over a million rats to a human, so I'm willing to kill billions of them a year on the alter of saving those children. Once I have that valuation, the rest is pretty easy deductions about what allows the advance of research in the biochemistry. So I'm curious: do you not regard the people who die through your inaction to be your fault? and if they are your fault, how many human children is a rat worth?