That is a very debatable assertion, but it's also practically unfalsifiable at this point. Nonhuman slavery is absolutely ubiquitous in today's world. There's hardly any area of medicine that doesn't enslave, murder, and torture nonhumans for one purpose or another (or didn't do it at some point in the past). So how would we even know if slavery is necessary if we haven't carefully and consistently examined the alternatives? In order to make more or less accurate speculations, we would have to ban animal use in medicine for some time, and determine if we still find cures for diseases etc. But at this point, the necessity of vivisection should not be taken as a fact.EquALLity wrote:I hate that it's necessary at the moment, but from my understanding it is.
A strong reason to have an inaccurate view on this, is the biased media coverage. We are more likely to hear about success stories that are linked to animal experimentation, than we are to hear about failures that happened because of animal experimentation. As an example, studies in the 60s concluded that there is a correlation between lung cancer and smoking, but failed to develop an animal model of lung cancer. That led researchers to reject the validity of the theory that smoking caused lung cancer for years. We see people praising animal research successes, but we don't hear about animal research failures. Perhaps there's a vested interest in continuing to exploit animals in medicine, just like in areas of food, clothing, and entertainment, which results in biased coverage.
A big reason for the failures is that there are many biological differences between humans and other animals, so there is always a problem extrapolating the results of animal experiments to humans. It is indisputable that the data that we get from nonhumans is less reliable than the data we would get from humans. Think about it: if we want to find cures for diseases of dogs, would we experiment on dogs or on raccoons? If we wanted to cure cats, would we experiment on cats or on mice?
So if we want to cure human diseases, why don't we experiment on humans instead? One could argue that we would need to use less humans to achieve the same result, due to an increased accuracy. Do you have any objection to using severely mentally handicapped humans in biomedical research, if that was shown to be better than using nonhuman animals?
This is also an assertion that should not be taken as a fact, a priori. Do you have the data on how many nonhuman animals are used and tortured in animal experiments (note that many of them don't even count rats and mice)? Do you have the data on how many human animals benefited from that, and in what ways? In order to make a cost-benefit analysis, we have to know those numbers, and it seems to me the situation is rather vague. So what makes you so sure that the amount of good outweighs the amount of harm?EquALLity wrote:It makes sense because it produces more good than harm
Until those questions are answered, we shouldn't assume that animal experimentation is morally justified by default. The default that it causes enormous direct harm to animals. Unless and until it is proven to be necessary and good (taking into account interests of nonhumans as well, and not just of humans), it should be abolished and banned.