What evidence or arguments can you offer to support the claim that "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 agree that much of the knowledge described in that post was gained through testing on chimpanzees. It doesn't follow, however, that this knowledge could not have been obtained in ways involving no experimentation on those animals.

Knowledge of brain responses can not currently be obtained in other way than by observing brain responses. If you want the results to apply well to humans, you often have to observe either great apes, or humans. It usually isn't practical to observe humans, because the restrictions on human experimentation are even tighter.

I don't quite understand your third point above. Suppose it was true that "Banning chimp testing should thus be done only in conjunction with allowing human testing." Why are you then opposing the ban on chimp testing, rather than advocating a lift on the ban on human testing?

A. There isn't a ban on human testing; it's just very difficult to get approval for anything with any degree of invasiveness.

B. My post says, "Banning chimp testing should thus be done only in conjunction with allowing human testing." Your question doesn't make sense as a response to that.

Chimps are morally relevantly similar to human babies and toddlers. Since you defend experimentation on chimps, you should also, I believe, defend experimentation on human babies and toddlers. Do you?

Definitely. We've learned a lot of important things about human cognitive development from experiments on human babies and toddlers. These are harmless experiments. (Well, since the 1980s, anyway.) Can I assume, for example, that you oppose allowing someone to show different objects to a baby, and measure which object they spend more time looking at? Because these are among the types of experiments that the editors would like to ban.

Since we also have a strong tendency to rationalize the views that we find ourselves subscribing to, it seems advisable to correct for this potential source of bias by being extra skeptical of arguments that appear to show that animal experimentation is morally permissible.

I agree. And I already do that. Doing so does not imply that you will always conclude that animal experimentation is not morally permissible.

Let me ask you a question: Do you ever eat pork?