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?
Because these are among the types of experiments that the editors would like to ban.
Would you be okay with a compromise ban that says great apes can be experimented on only in similar circumstances to those we allow for experiments on toddlers?
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.