Pomp

spin,

Morality involves the benefit and protection of the most possible Jeffrey Dahmers; where conflicts arise, morality involves resolving them with the least damage to those Jeffrey Dahmers.

Yes, that is yet another objective system of morality that allows for the slaughter of non-human animals. What is your point?

Corwin

A baby is human.

Yes... humans ARE more important than other animals.

If you won't put your own species ahead of others, do all the other animals on the planet a favor and stop wasting oxygen.

If you feel that other animals are as important as your own species, or more so, possibly you'd like to be the first to make more room for them by eliminating yourself?

spin

PB:
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Actually, spin, given your stated moral position, I would think that you would find it acceptable to use non-human animals in medical research, provided that the expected number of lives saved exceeded the number of lives lost to the research.
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The animal is never in a position to object to being hacked up, used as a pin-cushion, drugged however way you want to imagine, and then finally usually being killed because there is no use in them for experimentation any more. As they can't choose, yeah, sure why not, justify it. Nobody is going to defend them. You're not going to get a rebellion of rampant rabbits raping your world, so you can feel safe. You feel no responsibility toward animals, so you don't have any. And they're not going to assert their own rights. Heck, let's just kill the little fuckers.

Pomp

marduck,

Well maybe not a full grown human, but a baby perhaps? why not? there are plenty more where they came from and their perceptions of pain & fear are on par with a rabbit? why not then?

I can think of at least three reasons why we might object to the use of babies for dangerous medical research:

<ol type="1">[*]Babies tend to have parents who value them too highly to expose them to dangerous situations.[*]If the baby survives the research, chances are it will grow up to be an adult with serious mental problems which the rest of us will have to deal with.[*]Even allowing for the possibility that some parents might willingly give their babies up for medical research and that such babies would grow up without serious problems, most of us feel a strong instinctive repulsion toward such use of human babies, which outweighs any perceived benefit of the research.[/list=a]

Corwin

So what responsibilities do rabbits have Spin?

spin

spin:
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Morality involves the benefit and protection of the most possible Jeffrey Dahmers; where conflicts arise, morality involves resolving them with the least damage to those Jeffrey Dahmers.
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PB:
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Yes, that is yet another objective system of morality that allows for the slaughter of non-human animals. What is your point?
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For some reason you have restricted the options left available to the Jeffrey Dahmers of the world.

(Probably this is a refection of a general perception problem.)

Corwin

4. Societies that endorse unrestricted cannibalism/sadism/etc. within their own group tend to fall apart from cultural paranoia. (Would YOU want to live, work, hunt, etc with people who considered you to be food?) So control of these things is vital to the evolution of a society. Do we see cultures with unrestricted cannibalism? No. Could such societies have existed? Possibly, but the internal stresses of such a situation would have made it such that such a society wouldn't last long.

spin

corwin:
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Given the radical difference in the level of consciousness between the two [PB and a rabbit]... could you possibly elaborate just a bit?
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Both are conscious of their own species and have no regard outside that consciousness.

Marduk

A baby is human
so? human; a species of primate.
why do so many here find it such fun to torture helpless animals?? Are the egos so fragile that like fundys and other apes you must pound your chest "me the best, me sit on top of food chain, me kill little critter because me can" (sounds like the Bible God "because I can"
the baby thing was an exageration, I would not put anything alive in a microwave.
What the fuck is wrong with mercy, compassion for something else that can feel pain??

Pomp

spin,

The animal is never in a position to object to {long list of horros to which such animals are exposed}

How is that relevant? Your stated moral position:

...makes no mention of any beings being in the position to object their treatment. If we can benefit and protect, say, 10,000 humans by subjecting, say, 1,000 baboons to medical research, then isn't this the moral thing to do, according to your moral system? Conversely, if we could benefit and protect 10,000 baboons by subjecting 1,000 humans to such testing, is that not the moral thing to do as well?

I'm not being flippant here. I'm trying to draw out the details of your moral system.