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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Grainne who wrote (106257)	6/18/2005 11:01:35 PM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Did you not start the discussion of animal testing by asserting that it was a positive in the sense that it caused good drugs to be produced? Forgive me if I misunderstood your premise--I don't have the energy now to go back to the beginning of the posts about this. Perhaps you could restate it. Close, but not quite. I don't think it causes good drugs to be produced (but see below). I think it does help -- help, not cause, note -- ineffective or dangerous drugs not to be produced. At a certain stage in the development of a drug which looks promising by all laboratory measures, you have to decide either to test it on animals, or to go ahead and put it on the market. I think in those cases, for at least some drugs, the animal testing will show very harmful effects which could not have been predicted or identified without animal testing. In those cases, frankly I'm willing to sacrifice some animals in order to protect what may be huge numbers of humans, many of them children. I think the testing should be done as humanely as possible, but I think it should be done. There is one category of drugs, now I think of it, in which animals indeed may cause good drugs to be produced. I'm no expert here, but I have read that certain animals produce toxins and other substances which have been found to have very beneficial effects for humans. In these cases, the observation may be of only a few instances, but in order to investigate and verify you have to raise or capture a significant number of animals to get sufficient amounts of the substance to test. So in some case, yes, I think animal -- maybe testing isn't the right word, but involvement -- does help identify good new drugs which otherwise wouldn't be identified or produced. I am by no means a supporter of unrestricted animal testing. I think it is immoral to test merely cosmetic products on animals. But when we are talking about drugs which may save human lives, I do think that animal testing, carried out as humanely as possible, is appropriate. I realize that you disagree with this. Which is fair enough. But you asked me to clarify my view, and I have tried to.

To: Grainne who wrote (106257)	6/18/2005 11:04:28 PM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

England is being forced to change its entire approach to medical research, because animal activists are much more active there, and a larger percentage of the population seems to be aware of this as an issue, and to support the anti-vivisectionists. England relies on us to produce many of the drugs which they rely on. As does most of the world. We are not the only country doing medical and drug research, but we are by far the leaders. Without our drug research and production over the past fifty years, hundreds of millions of people around the world would have died or suffered quite severely.

To: Grainne who wrote (106257)	6/18/2005 11:17:25 PM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Do you fancy yourself a traditionalist, or a free thinker of some sort, incidentally? You are a bit hard to figure out. I don't fancy myself either a traditionalist or a free thinker. Actually, I guess I don't really know what you mean by those terms. You probably can't figure me out because I don't fit easily into any pigeonhole. I try to approach things witha pragmatic philosophy, merging a variety of philosophic approaches, depending on the issue, including but very much not limited to Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Hume, Hobbes, Locke, Pascal, Spinoza, Kant, and others as the need arises. While I resist pigeonholing, those who know me best generally consider me a classical liberal -- that is, having the liberal views of Kennedy-Humphrey-Stevenson era in which it was a very liberal position to "ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." I know of no contemporary liberal politician who could make that speech without breaking out giggling at how stupid it made them feel. I follow no political leader or thinker, but the person whose views tend most often to meet with my agreement, which means usually about 30% of the time, is Nat Hentoff.