Hello! I usually read LessWrong posts, however, I'd never felt the need to create an account because I thought I needed to make some comment. However, when I read this one, I saw that, after so much time visiting LW without creating an account, I needed to create one to comment on it.
We have a strong bias in favor of human interests. But when we try to get rid of them we can see things in a different light. The magnitude of the harm humans cause to other animals really is significant and overwhelmingly bigger than the benefits humans obtain from it. It's very likely that in the future we will increase this gap between the magnitude of the harms we inflict on animals and the significantly smaller benefits we obtain. Therefore, debunking speciesism is a very important task we need to engage in if we want a future with more wellbeing and less suffering.
Experimenting only on nonhuman animals reflects the idea that human interests are more important simply because they are humans. This is a view we must oppose. And banning chimp testing actually questions this idea. For this reason, we should welcome very much such a ban. Campaining against may have terrible effects. The gains that might be acquired by harming chimps would be greatly outweighed by the significantly negative effect that the promotion of a speciesist viewpoint has. All this, of course, setting aside considerations regarding whether all the harm entailed by chimp testing is really going to prove so beneficial.
Given all this, my recommendation is that those who read this write to Scientific American to show their support of the ban on chimp testing.
Experimenting only on nonhuman animals reflects the idea that human interests are more important simply because they are humans. This is a view we must oppose.
I must? I reject any such obligation. You can oppose it if you wish. But as far as I'm concerned I'm free to support or oppose any combination of experimentation on human or non-human animal that I like.
The October 2011 Scientific American has an editorial from its board of editors called "Ban chimp testing", that says: "In our view, the time has come to end biomedical experimentation on chimpanzees... Chimps should be used only in studies of major diseases and only when there is no other option." Much of the knowledge described in Luke's recent post on the cognitive science of rationality would have been impossible to acquire under such a ban.
I encourage you to write to Scientific American in favor of chimp testing. Some points that I plan to make:
I also encourage you to adopt a tone of moral outrage. Rather than taking the usual apologetic "we're so sorry, but we have to do this awful things in the name of science" tone, get indignant at the editors who intend to harm uncountable numbers of innocent people. For advanced writers, get indignant not just about harm, but about lost potential, pointing out the ways that our knowledge about how brains work can make our lives better, not just save us from disease.
You can comment on this here, but comments are AFAIK not printed in later issues as letters to the editor. Actual letters, or at least email, probably have more impact. You can't submit a letter to the editor through the website, because letters are magically different from things submitted on a website.
ADDED: Many people responded by claiming that banning chimp experimentation occupies some moral high ground. That is logically impossible.
To behave morally, you have to do two things:
1. Figure out, inherit, or otherwise acquire a set of moral goals are - let's say, for example, to maximize the sum over all individuals i of all species s of ws*[pleasure(s,i)-pain(s,i)].
2. Act in a way directed by those moral goals.
If you really cared about the suffering of sentient beings, you would also care about the suffering of humans, and you would realize that there's a tradeoff between the suffering of those experimented on, and of those who benefit, which is different for every experiment. That's what a moral decision is—deciding how to make a tradeoff of help and harm. People who call for a ban on chimp testing are really demanding we forbid (other) people from making moral judgements and taking moral actions. There are a wide range of laws and positions that could be argued to be moral. But just saying "We are incapable of making moral decisions, so we will ban moral decision-making" is not one of them.