> Such efforts could crush research “critical for human survival and empathy,” says Bertha Madras, a neuroscientist at Harvard who has conducted brain imaging studies of monkeys for decades but doesn’t work directly with Livingstone. “If we’re going to understand how the brain functions, we’re going to have to do experiments that generate visceral reactions,” she says. “We have to be looking at the greater good.”
I'm definitely wary if the best argument for continuing this research is that it supports "the greater good". I could fully understand that the line between, for example, what is an acceptable research protocol, and what crosses the line to cruel, inhumane treatment, is sometimes gray. But I think it's morally wrong to be ok with cruel and inhumane treatment of intelligent, social creatures by just arguing that it "is for the greater good".
That line of thinking has been used as a defense for nearly every horrific undertaking by man for the past couple of centuries.
I am wary too, but of something a little different. I worry about people passionately drawing very sharp, red, punitive moral lines on things that are pretty subjective and that different people will have different opinions on. We're going to be in a bad place if we all draw slightly different lines on various issues, then condemn and work to punish each other for crossing our lines.
I think this ideology of moral maximalism - "everything I object to morally should be punished harshly" - has been pretty disastrous for the human race, if you look at history.
However passionate people are about primates and their resemblance to humans, I don't see how you can draw an objective line that condemns this research but sanctions all the horrible things we do to, say, rats, for the greater good of medical science. Who can claim to have the objective view of how moral obligations to non-human animals increase with their resemblance to humans?
We don't agree on this stuff, and it isn't objective. Can we all find something better to do with our lives than try to punish each other for not toeing the exact line of our individual moral opinions?
Let's calm down, stop taking our moral emotions as legitimate universal prescriptions, and put moral maximalism behind us.
I'm not saying we should never have lines, I'm saying we should not automatically turn all of our moral intuitions into bright red lines which we enforce punitively.
The thing is, your view of this is too anthropocentric. Saying this:
"I worry about people passionately drawing very sharp, red, punitive moral lines on things that are pretty subjective and that different people will have different opinions on. We're going to be in a bad place if we all draw slightly different lines on various issues, then condemn and work to punish each other for crossing our lines."
...doesn't take into consideration the experiences of monkeys and other animals.
So you're going to have to morally justify why we shouldn't care about them.
The argument you are making sounds reasonable if applied to, e.g., cancel culture or something, but it's rather willfully oblivious and glib in this context, IMO.
"Can we all find something better to do with our lives than try to punish each other for not toeing the exact line of our individual moral opinions?"
Wouldn't by definition many moral opinions necessitate that one try to get them enforced in some way? You're kind of just downplaying morality overall, arguably.
Again, I'd be sympathetic to what you're saying in a lot of contexts, either where humans are the only creatures involved or the human actions simply don't directly infringe on anyone else. So, abortion, cancel-culture, gay marriage, etc. This way of thinking could be usefully applied to a lot of hot-button issues where the conduct really doesn't actually harm anyone else, human or otherwise. But if it comes to animal experimentation, genocide (see China), various forms of oppression and discrimination within societies (whether racial or like caste-based, whatever), etc., people are going to become indignant, and if they didn't, we'd all just be amoral and compassion-less in a very dystopian way.
>Wouldn't by definition many moral opinions necessitate that one try to get them enforced in some way? You're kind of just downplaying morality overall, arguably.
No? There are a vast array of moral opinions that can govern your actions but not others. That is to say, you don't have always have moral responsibility for the actions of others.
Similarly, there's a wide array of opinions on what actions are appropriate to curtail a moral behavior of others.
I would agree with the parent post that hard lines governing others can be quite dangerous.
Probably some laws, but not most. A lot of laws and the most important ones are about preventing people from hurting others or damaging their property. Those aren't about moralizing private actions that don't impact anyone else.
So, my argument sounds good re: cancel culture but not re: animal experimentation? Does that mean people who say horrible racist things are not moral monsters deserving of punishment, but a guy who does medical experiments on rats is?
I respect your opinion (which may not be exactly what I suggested above), but can't you see how easily someone else could think very differently?
How far should we go to enforce our exact individual moral opinions that so many other humans don't share? It's a hard question that deserves input from thought and not just moral emotions. That's all I want to point out.
Saying things doesn't inflict a harm of the same nature as the experiments. The line-drawing is not so impossible or purely subjective that it cannot or should not be undertaken.
Kind of moderate. Seems like a thornier moral issue to me than the kind of animal experimentation at issue.
I can see how people can maintain hardline stances on abortion. That's their prerogative. I don't think there would necessarily be anything categorically impermissible about an abortion ban; I would just disagree with such a ban substantively. It's not where I would draw the line. But I don't think it's out of the question or harmful that someone would want to draw the line there.
I think this position is generally consistent with the tack I take above, though open to being wrong--in which case, I would sooner adjust my views on abortion than on animal experimentation haha
It's hard to moralize in someone else's shoes, but I tend to think that consistency would mean taking a hard line on both. A fetus past the first trimester seems like it may well be about as sentient as most non-human animals, and definitely by the end of the second trimester.
And I'm not persuaded by that old "violinist" argument. In fact I find it morally repulsive. If you cause another sentient being to come into existence, even unintentionally, you can't just deny responsibility and feel free to terminate their life, as if a random person were strapped to you against your will. It's not a remotely comparable situation.
Personally I am OK with abortion and animal experimentation, but I think they stand and fall together, based on how far you extend out your circle of concern to fellow sentient beings.
I appreciate the fact that you're trying to be the voice of reason, but I disagree completely with what you're saying.
For starters, it's very common for criminals to have a different "opinion" about their crimes than the victims. Society doesn't just stop fighting crime because a consensus is hard to find with the perpetrators.
Secondly, in the case of that specific "research", the reason why they're using monkeys and not, say, fruit flies, is because they are studying "empathy" and they feel, rightly, that there is a lot of similarity between empathy and feelings in monkeys as in humans. It's that sameness that they're after, but because those beings are called "monkeys" then it's suddenly ok to torture them.
The sole purpose of the idea that we're of a different essence from the non-humans, is to relieve us of any moral burden and responsibility. In concentration camps and in many psychiatric hospitals, inmates weren't considered humans, and therefore one could do anything to them. (This is still the case in many prisons today.) How we treat non-humans, we eventually, always, treat humans.
> For starters, it's very common for criminals to have a different "opinion" about their crimes than the victims. Society doesn't just stop fighting crime because a consensus is hard to find with the perpetrators.
There's a bit of begging the question going on here. My whole point is that we shouldn't take all of our moral intuitions and call those who violate them criminals. And the question of which "crimes" have "victims" is sometimes ambiguous, e.g. with abortion and medical experimentation.
Some of our moral intuitions should be enforced. Others shouldn't. We have a responsibility to think about which is which. It doesn't mean there has to be universal agreement. But there does have to be some pragmatism, otherwise we just fight forever because we can't agree on everything and no progress gets made - or worse, the world is consumed with violence, one of the main outcomes we were trying to avoid.
> How we treat non-humans, we eventually, always, treat humans.
This is simply not true. People who work in animal medical testing don't turn into worse people than the rest of us.
The logic of weighing cost and benefits is sound, but the PR blunder of saying “the greater good” is astounding. The only correct thing is to talk about the human suffering that you hope to alleviate. Let the listener operate their own moral balance.
The idea that the greater good is a singular knowable thing and she represents it is patently offensive.
> The logic of weighing cost and benefits is sound
I disagree, though that's obviously been a central question in philosophy since Aristotle.
Is the logic of weighing costs and benefits sound if they had been experimenting on human babies instead of monkeys? I think most people would argue not. So if it's that you're arguing that because they're monkeys that's different, and that might be OK, but the whole reason they've chosen monkeys here is precisely because they believe their brain and neurological systems are close enough to our own that they would react similarly, for example, to having a child stolen from its mother.
Honestly, I think trying to defend this in a morally consistent framework requires some mental gymnastics I'm not capable of.
If it is consistency you are after, then join PETA.
The logic of weighing cost and benefits is always sound, but there are cases where it is so one sided that it is offensive to pose the question. Experimenting on babies falls in that category.
I suppose at this point my personal opinion on this issue is relevant to you. I am personally okay with Neuralink because it isn’t implausibility far from someone walking from a wheelchair. This specific research miles apart both from the welfare side (it requires emotional harm to the monkeys) and the benefits are far less tangible. I think this research should be put up for review and if I were a reviewer I’d start from a position that this needs to stop.
I suppose my meta point is that it is okay to have red lines and argue them, but peppering the discussion with arguments against logic unnecessarily makes your commentary less persuasive to me.
> So if it's that you're arguing that because they're monkeys that's different, and that might be OK, but the whole reason they've chosen monkeys here is precisely because they believe their brain and neurological systems are close enough to our own that they would react similarly, for example, to having a child stolen from its mother.
>The idea that the greater good is a singular knowable thing and she represents it is patently offensive.
Yet you have no qualms making absolute statements about the greater good, that denies their opinion. You seem very certain that there is no singular truth that they are wrong
Monkeys aren't humans though. It's disgusting, I don't like animal abuse, but it'd not the same thing. And wishing we'd go extinct is hardly the moral high ground here.
How do you feel about dairy cows being separated from their young after birth?
It turns out, they've managed to gather a lot of data quite on the impacts of infant separation in cows (I wonder how that happened?). To sum up, separating them almost immediately after birth results in less psychological trauma than separating them after a few days. Letting them stay together for much longer promotes better long-term health outcomes for both the mother and calf, but dairies are not equipped for that.
> Separating the calf from the cow shortly after birth is a routine practice on dairy farms around the world. In brief, calves are separated from their dams within a few hours following birth and then housed in a separate location and fed artificially (with milk or milk replacer). Advocates of this practice argue that it prevents cow and calf from forming a strong bond, and thus reduces the stress associated with separation when it does occur. The results from a series of studies on the short-term acute affects support this claim (e.g. [21,22,23]). Other arguments in support of early separation include better supervision of calf colostrum and milk intake [24]. One economic argument frequently presented by farmers is that the practice facilitates harvesting the maximum amount of milk available for sale [25]. Moreover, currently used housing and husbandry systems are not designed for keeping cow-calf pairs, making a change in practice difficult. Others have also argued that immediate separation reduces the risk of disease transfer to the calf, including paratuberculosis [26].
> Arguments for later separation emphasize allowing more natural living of cow and calf [25], including emotional benefits for both [27]. Furthermore, some research has shown biological benefits for calves, including better weight gains [28] and fewer bouts of diarrhea when separated later [21], as well as improved udder [29] and uterine health [24] for cows.
Between this is the recent Boston University work on playing with covid, I'm worried about the judgement of scientists around "crucial" work necessary to understand something and the safeguards we have to make sure research is safe and ethical.
Instead of making vague connections to human disorders, I wish the scientists could pinpoint exactly the critical questions answered by the experiments. As the article says, the harms are definite while the benefits are "potential."
So the "greater good" as they phrase it does not include other primates besides ourselves? Or any other animals? That is remarkably unempathical and selfish.
42 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 95.4 ms ] thread> Such efforts could crush research “critical for human survival and empathy,” says Bertha Madras, a neuroscientist at Harvard who has conducted brain imaging studies of monkeys for decades but doesn’t work directly with Livingstone. “If we’re going to understand how the brain functions, we’re going to have to do experiments that generate visceral reactions,” she says. “We have to be looking at the greater good.”
I'm definitely wary if the best argument for continuing this research is that it supports "the greater good". I could fully understand that the line between, for example, what is an acceptable research protocol, and what crosses the line to cruel, inhumane treatment, is sometimes gray. But I think it's morally wrong to be ok with cruel and inhumane treatment of intelligent, social creatures by just arguing that it "is for the greater good".
That line of thinking has been used as a defense for nearly every horrific undertaking by man for the past couple of centuries.
I think this ideology of moral maximalism - "everything I object to morally should be punished harshly" - has been pretty disastrous for the human race, if you look at history.
However passionate people are about primates and their resemblance to humans, I don't see how you can draw an objective line that condemns this research but sanctions all the horrible things we do to, say, rats, for the greater good of medical science. Who can claim to have the objective view of how moral obligations to non-human animals increase with their resemblance to humans?
We don't agree on this stuff, and it isn't objective. Can we all find something better to do with our lives than try to punish each other for not toeing the exact line of our individual moral opinions?
Let's calm down, stop taking our moral emotions as legitimate universal prescriptions, and put moral maximalism behind us.
Surely there is a middle-ground to be found between your extreme and the other?
The thing is, your view of this is too anthropocentric. Saying this:
"I worry about people passionately drawing very sharp, red, punitive moral lines on things that are pretty subjective and that different people will have different opinions on. We're going to be in a bad place if we all draw slightly different lines on various issues, then condemn and work to punish each other for crossing our lines."
...doesn't take into consideration the experiences of monkeys and other animals.
So you're going to have to morally justify why we shouldn't care about them.
The argument you are making sounds reasonable if applied to, e.g., cancel culture or something, but it's rather willfully oblivious and glib in this context, IMO.
"Can we all find something better to do with our lives than try to punish each other for not toeing the exact line of our individual moral opinions?"
Wouldn't by definition many moral opinions necessitate that one try to get them enforced in some way? You're kind of just downplaying morality overall, arguably.
Again, I'd be sympathetic to what you're saying in a lot of contexts, either where humans are the only creatures involved or the human actions simply don't directly infringe on anyone else. So, abortion, cancel-culture, gay marriage, etc. This way of thinking could be usefully applied to a lot of hot-button issues where the conduct really doesn't actually harm anyone else, human or otherwise. But if it comes to animal experimentation, genocide (see China), various forms of oppression and discrimination within societies (whether racial or like caste-based, whatever), etc., people are going to become indignant, and if they didn't, we'd all just be amoral and compassion-less in a very dystopian way.
No? There are a vast array of moral opinions that can govern your actions but not others. That is to say, you don't have always have moral responsibility for the actions of others.
Similarly, there's a wide array of opinions on what actions are appropriate to curtail a moral behavior of others.
I would agree with the parent post that hard lines governing others can be quite dangerous.
This could be logically extended to support the notion we shouldn't have laws or something.
I respect your opinion (which may not be exactly what I suggested above), but can't you see how easily someone else could think very differently?
How far should we go to enforce our exact individual moral opinions that so many other humans don't share? It's a hard question that deserves input from thought and not just moral emotions. That's all I want to point out.
I can see how people can maintain hardline stances on abortion. That's their prerogative. I don't think there would necessarily be anything categorically impermissible about an abortion ban; I would just disagree with such a ban substantively. It's not where I would draw the line. But I don't think it's out of the question or harmful that someone would want to draw the line there.
I think this position is generally consistent with the tack I take above, though open to being wrong--in which case, I would sooner adjust my views on abortion than on animal experimentation haha
And I'm not persuaded by that old "violinist" argument. In fact I find it morally repulsive. If you cause another sentient being to come into existence, even unintentionally, you can't just deny responsibility and feel free to terminate their life, as if a random person were strapped to you against your will. It's not a remotely comparable situation.
Personally I am OK with abortion and animal experimentation, but I think they stand and fall together, based on how far you extend out your circle of concern to fellow sentient beings.
For starters, it's very common for criminals to have a different "opinion" about their crimes than the victims. Society doesn't just stop fighting crime because a consensus is hard to find with the perpetrators.
Secondly, in the case of that specific "research", the reason why they're using monkeys and not, say, fruit flies, is because they are studying "empathy" and they feel, rightly, that there is a lot of similarity between empathy and feelings in monkeys as in humans. It's that sameness that they're after, but because those beings are called "monkeys" then it's suddenly ok to torture them.
The sole purpose of the idea that we're of a different essence from the non-humans, is to relieve us of any moral burden and responsibility. In concentration camps and in many psychiatric hospitals, inmates weren't considered humans, and therefore one could do anything to them. (This is still the case in many prisons today.) How we treat non-humans, we eventually, always, treat humans.
There's a bit of begging the question going on here. My whole point is that we shouldn't take all of our moral intuitions and call those who violate them criminals. And the question of which "crimes" have "victims" is sometimes ambiguous, e.g. with abortion and medical experimentation.
Some of our moral intuitions should be enforced. Others shouldn't. We have a responsibility to think about which is which. It doesn't mean there has to be universal agreement. But there does have to be some pragmatism, otherwise we just fight forever because we can't agree on everything and no progress gets made - or worse, the world is consumed with violence, one of the main outcomes we were trying to avoid.
> How we treat non-humans, we eventually, always, treat humans.
This is simply not true. People who work in animal medical testing don't turn into worse people than the rest of us.
The idea that the greater good is a singular knowable thing and she represents it is patently offensive.
I disagree, though that's obviously been a central question in philosophy since Aristotle.
Is the logic of weighing costs and benefits sound if they had been experimenting on human babies instead of monkeys? I think most people would argue not. So if it's that you're arguing that because they're monkeys that's different, and that might be OK, but the whole reason they've chosen monkeys here is precisely because they believe their brain and neurological systems are close enough to our own that they would react similarly, for example, to having a child stolen from its mother.
Honestly, I think trying to defend this in a morally consistent framework requires some mental gymnastics I'm not capable of.
I suppose at this point my personal opinion on this issue is relevant to you. I am personally okay with Neuralink because it isn’t implausibility far from someone walking from a wheelchair. This specific research miles apart both from the welfare side (it requires emotional harm to the monkeys) and the benefits are far less tangible. I think this research should be put up for review and if I were a reviewer I’d start from a position that this needs to stop.
I suppose my meta point is that it is okay to have red lines and argue them, but peppering the discussion with arguments against logic unnecessarily makes your commentary less persuasive to me.
Exactly this.
Yet you have no qualms making absolute statements about the greater good, that denies their opinion. You seem very certain that there is no singular truth that they are wrong
If Bethda hasn't figured out empathy yet, I doubt she ever will.
It turns out, they've managed to gather a lot of data quite on the impacts of infant separation in cows (I wonder how that happened?). To sum up, separating them almost immediately after birth results in less psychological trauma than separating them after a few days. Letting them stay together for much longer promotes better long-term health outcomes for both the mother and calf, but dairies are not equipped for that.
> Separating the calf from the cow shortly after birth is a routine practice on dairy farms around the world. In brief, calves are separated from their dams within a few hours following birth and then housed in a separate location and fed artificially (with milk or milk replacer). Advocates of this practice argue that it prevents cow and calf from forming a strong bond, and thus reduces the stress associated with separation when it does occur. The results from a series of studies on the short-term acute affects support this claim (e.g. [21,22,23]). Other arguments in support of early separation include better supervision of calf colostrum and milk intake [24]. One economic argument frequently presented by farmers is that the practice facilitates harvesting the maximum amount of milk available for sale [25]. Moreover, currently used housing and husbandry systems are not designed for keeping cow-calf pairs, making a change in practice difficult. Others have also argued that immediate separation reduces the risk of disease transfer to the calf, including paratuberculosis [26].
> Arguments for later separation emphasize allowing more natural living of cow and calf [25], including emotional benefits for both [27]. Furthermore, some research has shown biological benefits for calves, including better weight gains [28] and fewer bouts of diarrhea when separated later [21], as well as improved udder [29] and uterine health [24] for cows.
1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5354428/
Your argument would be much solid if you sign a paper renouncing to any benefit that could happen by their research, for you or your family.
If not, well... "They should kill their children to save mine" sounds a little hypocritical (and pretty unhinged also).