Would experimenting on little girls actually help that much?
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The answer is not obviously biased towards "experiment on little girls.". In fact, I'd say it's still biased towards "experiment on mice."
So your answer is that in fact it would not work. That is a reasonable response to an outrageous hypothetical. Yet James A. Donald suggested a realistic scenario, and beside it, the arguments you come up with look rather weak.
Would experimenting on little girls actually help that much? Also consider that many people consider a child's life more valuable than an adult one
Given the millions killed by malaria and at most thousands of experimental subjects, it takes a heavy thumb on the scales of this argument to make the utilitarian calculation come out against.
...evade legal problems and deal with psychological costs...
This is a get-out-of-utilitarianism-free card. A real utilitarian simply chooses the action of maximum utility. He would only pay a psychological cost for not doing that. When all are utilitarians the laws will also be utilitarian, and an evaluation of utility will be the sole criterion applied by the courts.
You are not a utilitarian. Neither is anyone else. This is why there would be psychological costs and why there are legal obstacles. You feel obliged to pretend to be a utilitarian, so you justify your non-utilitarian repugnance by putting it into the utilitarian scales.
caring for little humans is significantly more expensive then caring for little mice
But not any more expensive than caring for chimpanzees. Where, of course, "care for" does not mean "care for", but means "keep sufficiently alive for experimental purposes".
This looks like motivated reasoning. The motivation, to not torture little children, is admirable. But it is misapplied.
Morality isn't like physics
Can you expand on what you see as the differences?
Given the millions killed by malaria and at most thousands of experimental subjects, it takes a heavy thumb on the scales of this argument to make the utilitarian calculation come out against.
If it would result in a timely cure for malaria which would result in the disease's global eradication or near-eradication, I would say that it would be worth kidnapping a few thousand children. But not only would a world where you could get away with doing so differ from our own in some very significant ways, I honestly doubt that a few thousand captive test subjects constitute a decisive and currently limiting factor in the progress of the research.
Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are: