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DuncanS comments on Don't ban chimp testing - Less Wrong Discussion
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I wouldn't want to go further than to say there should be some sort of ethical process that measures the benefit of the experiment against the suffering it may cause.
It's silly to ban experimentation on chimps completely. To give some sort of context, we experiment on human babies (in certain harmless ways) all the time. Even I've done it. When I was a kid I experimented on my baby sister. (When she saw my face right side up, she smiled - when she saw it upside-down, she started to cry. Made several repetitions to check!). There are plenty of far more sophisticated studies.....
Increasingly it probably makes sense to restrict the invasive stuff, I'd say.
Upvoted because anecdote made me laugh. Not having object permanence must be so confusing!
I agree with your stance here, and I'm self-admittedly probably one of the very few people on the site who extends ethical weight to the mindstates and experiences of nonhuman animals -- not all experiments are necessarily harmful, and some research in primatology is relatively benign.
Same time, it takes a certain kind of obliviousness to deny that these beings suffer horribly, on a routine basis, in the course of much research. I've got a friend in primatology who calls it "nightmare stuff" -- the kinds of invasive and painful experiments conducted even today are frightening, and chimps have very long lives.