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Politics : Evolution -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: Solon who wrote (7505)6/16/2010 8:11:26 PM
From: Brumar89  Respond to of 69300
 
Why It’s Better to Experiment on Orphans Babies than on Animals

More from today's pre-eminent freethinking "ethicist":

Would the abolitionist be prepared to let thousands die if they could be saved by experimenting on a single animal? The way to reply to this purely hypothetical question is to pose another: Would the experimenter be prepared to perform his experiment on an orphaned human infant, if that were the only way to save many lives? (I say “orphan” to avoid the complication of parental feelings, although in doing so l am being overfair to the experimenter, since the nonhuman subjects of experiments are not orphans.) If the experimenter is not prepared to use an orphaned human infant, then his readiness to use nonhumans is simple discrimination, since adult apes, cats, mice, and other mammals are more aware of what is happening to them, more self-directing and, so far as we can tell, at least as sensitive to pain, as any human infant. There seems to be no relevant characteristic that human infants possess that adult mammals do not have to the same or a higher degree. (3)

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