There's a term for that: speciesism.

Humans have generally used consciousness, the level of intelligence and companionship to gauge how much of sympathy an organism gets from humanity. This is used to determine which abortion is okay, why it is not okay to kill and eat dogs while other animals are, and why humans are considered above other organisms. If we are to be consistent here, would not it follow that experiment on monkeys deserve more scrutiny over the experiments on monkeys who are demonstrably more closer to us while also having higher level of intelligence than pigs?

Is it "speciesm" to care more for the suffering of humans than that of bacteria? If not, where do you draw the line and why?

Speciesm is when we care more for one animal species over another. For example people in the west will generally have more of a moral issue over eating dogs compared to pigs.

So - caring more for a human or ape versus a mosquito, for example, would be speciesm?

It would be, at least to an extent. Even vegans (which I am) still recognise that some animals are smarter than others, which can result in different moral weights given to them. And it doesn't normally include humans.

I see, so vegans recognize that speciesism is "true" in the sense that some animals do have more valuable lives than others, and harms to some animals are worse than harms to others? Makes it a bit hard to know what the term is designed to achieve. Is it just an attempt to get us to re-evaluate our emotional attachment to some species (e.g. dogs) in comparison to others (pigs) - when it turns out that upon further analysis there's no objective justification for doing so?

> Is it just an attempt to get us to re-evaluate our emotional attachment to some species (e.g. dogs) in comparison to others (pigs) - when it turns out that upon further analysis there's no objective justification for doing so?

Yes it's more just this. It might but I don't think it has a particularly large philosophical underpinning, it's more just used as activism

elwooddogmeat.com is a good example of its use in my opinion.

Don't fall for the rhetorical trick employed here: just because we can call this "specieism", doesn't make it wrong.

That is the point that my example was intended to illustrate.

The thing is that intelligence is kinda orthogonal to the ability to feel pain. Bacteria don't seem to have a nervous system, so that would be a place to draw a first line.

Pork might have been a better food to make this comparison with, and in this particular example I get that monkeys being closer to humans is a lot of what makes this controversial, but the phenomenon I’m describing is still pertinent. There are undoubtably other experiments using monkeys in far less scrupulous ways for far less beneficial purposes, but of course Neuralink gets the spotlight due to Musk.

I used to think a lot of ostensibly moral decision making which had a net detrimental effect was something that would change if people better understood the full picture and where moral outrage would be most impactful, but I’ve seen envy dominate decision making over and over enough to learn that a lot of people are in fact quite content to harm everyone on net if it means the outliers are harmed more.

What beneficial purpose are you exactly talking about here? From what I've read, the science to make the products Neuralink is working on feasible is still decades away, according to most neuroscientists. Attainability of those goals should be a primary factor when deciding whether experimenting on animals, especially highly developed animals such as monkeys, is reasonable.

The beneficial purposes are improving prosthetics.

And the only thing that makes those goals attainable and products better is experimentation.

If they are needlessly experimenting and making no progress, that’d be tragic, and comparable to existing tragedies that happen in labs all over the world.

The timing, intended audience, and flavor of the criticism suggests this is much less about any ethical breaches and much more about reigning in someone who is perceived to be breaking out of bureaucratic control.