Honestly, I felt that the ethics board part was implied. In western universities it's very hard to do animal testing. No one just strolls down to Pets Mart and picks up some mice. The Animal Welfare Act governs animal testing in the United States, and school risk funding if they don't follow the law. To be honest, I don't know the ins and outs of the specific programs. I just know they had to present and get their protocol (experiment) approved. It was a serious thing to present, not a rubber stamp process. If you want more details, I found this doc from my school. Purdue does biomedical testing and is also a premiere large animal veterinary school.

https://www.purdue.edu/research/regulatory-affairs/animal-re...

I know University of Calgary had a bio professor who got in hot water for abusing animals (essentially: he encouraged his student to not anaesthetize animals before surgery to fudge numbers). So there are definitely grad students who will happily torture animals if it can help their career.

Not sure where it came from, but there is a popular notion that scientists are somehow more moral than everyone else. Obviously that's not true. A lot of terrible things were made and many terrible acts committed by scientists. They can be just as depraved as the rest of us.

The two things you mention are not necessarily in opposition:

The average scientist could be much more moral than the average human, and you could still get the occasional mad man; just need a large enough population of scientists.

Damn, they require you to tell them how many mice you've got so you can get that many anaesthesis doses? That rule wasn't thought through.

It is common to use ketamine for anesthesia in animal testing. It's a controlled drug, so you have to keep a pretty good log of it's use.

How many Mice do you have?

800,000.

You used ketamine for all of them?

YES.

Thats a lot of ketamine

YES.

Can you show us the mice?

NO.

Why not

We disposed of their bodies after the experiment.

Then how can we verify the data from the experiment?

Give us ketamine for 800,000 more mice

Given the amounts of bureaucracy involved, you are probably better off getting your ketamine on the black market.

lol that's it? If they said something like "how you feel about it is inconsequential" I would accept it as a pragmatic/stoic way to look at it. There is no way a life in a lab can be even remotely good, well cared or not, but it's hard to compare when a typical life of a pig ends with being slaughtered, only to end up expired pieces of meat most of the times.

How do you think a life of a pig would end if it wasn't being slaughtered? Most likely it would be half-eaten alive by a predator and the rest left to rot or be taken by scavengers. The same thing will happen now (the expired pieces of meat will mostly become food for insect larvae) except it's a human doing the slaughtering and the animal is killed before being eaten.

the life of such pig would not even begin, which is a good thing, if wasn't for human to have so much meat on display that it gets expired.

This line of argument also supports the extermination of all living beings because it prevents all future suffering. Think about that before you use it.

I see it a bit different. Using your own sentence structure:

"The line of argument supports the prevention of the existence of an undefined number of living beings to max. the quality of life of other existing living beings."

The argument doesn't seem to me as simple as you are portraying it and I don't see where you got the extermination part from.

> the life of such pig would not even begin, which is a good thing

The comment I was responding to said nothing about increasing the quality of life of any living beings. It only asserted that non-existence is a good thing. I made the assumption that they came to that conclusion based on the reasoning that a pig that does not exist cannot suffer. I made the extension that you can also prevent suffering by immediately ending a life. Yes, there is a distinction between failing to breed another generation and immediately killing all members of the current generation but the end result is the same.

> It only asserted that non-existence is a good thing

this phrasing is really disingenuous. What I said was non-existence in case of farm pigs is a good thing. Try to make less sweeping over-generalized statements, especially when responding to people who aren't doing that

> I made the extension that you can also prevent suffering by immediately ending a life

oh cool thought, did you just bring that up to argue with yourself? Because no one said anything like that prior.

No, because I never claimed that preventing suffering is the only goal. Just add one more goal which is potentially experiencing pleasure then you can justify most lives, well except that of those pigs

In which case it becomes an optimization problem where you have to find the optimal number of living beings to exterminate in order to provide the maximal amount of pleasure for those remaining. Not any better.

> find the optimal number of living beings to exterminate

you are conflating birth control with "exterminate", not the same thing. Birth control has its roles, does it not?

> in order to provide the maximal amount of pleasure for those remaining.

I never said that, pleasure is an example, society is optimized for way more variables that suffering and pleasure.

In the context of farm animals, it looks like the only purpose for the pigs to exist is to be food, then when the food is over-produced and wasted, then you have to question why have that many of them born into a miserable life then die pointlessly.

> Not any better

just say it like that, no explanation? What is not good? Optimization?

Morality doesn’t exist. It arises from the emotional responses of those with the power to prevent actions they disagree with or perpetuate ones they do agree with. Social contract theory.

and? How am I suppose to think and act if I believe in that theory?

Wishing you had never been born is one thing, wishing someone/something else had never been born is not a response of empathy but rather personal guilt.

Empathy does not result in anyone trying to end suffering of another being but the own personal suffering they have through the empathetic connection, and thus they seek to end the suffering of others only because it causes them to suffer.

also they said it as if the validity of our ideas is determined from our motivation, guilt is bad, empathy is good

This is not even a question, being born into a life of slavery and ultimately being slaughtered is worse than not being born. Think about it, you are born into a prison and given no chance to even develop a proper consciousness. This is very different than a fully aware human getting locked up in a prison.

However since the individual being born is not making the choice, it falls to the individual or group benefitting from the individual being born into the circumstance you described. Universal morality is a form of anthropomorphization, or projecting human characteristics onto an amoral natural world.

This is like the pro life argument.

I love it when people are so argumentative about such a simple thing. We are talking about birth control, there is no individual exists to make any choice.

> Projecting human characteristics onto an amoral natural world.

this is not a bad thing comparing to the alternative which is assuming that animals are too dumb to be sympathize with

I don't know that all slaves would agree with you.

I made that last sentence just to preemptively respond to your argument.

Also live stock is much worse than slavery

Sorry, I didn't understand what you mean. Can you type more carefully? English is not my first language and I can't guess what you're trying to say.

Do you EAT pig?

Yes, frequently.