Re: Animal Research
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I'm talking about tendencies. If we had a tendency to harm babies without remorse, we'd be less successful amongst the various life forms on the planet that do not slaughter their own.
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How would experimenting on babies make us "less successful amongst the various life forms on the planet that do not slaughter their own?" Seems to me we dominate them so bad right now that, barring stuff like nuclear holocaust it doesn't really matter what we do we'll always be kings of the hill.
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It's not taught and is mostly true. Very few people do not think babies are cute, and it is difficult to harm something that you think is cute. What's the simpler explanation?
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I can't offer a simpler explanation, but I think its reasonable to suppose that thinking babies are cute is a product of environment rather than genes. At least, both explanations seem plausible to me. So if you want to say that one is true and the other is not, you gotta cite research or show why the other is false. Even if the other is false, that still doesn't make it necessarily true. And if you want to make scientific claims, they gotta be necessarily true. [see Kripke: Identity and Necessity if you're curious about my last statement, its really, really interesting and definitely controversial] But even if Kripke is wrong about identity statements, you gotta have some empirical evidence to make scientific claims.
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Because killing babies regularly would not be a successful evolutionary strategy, and we likely wouldn't have lasted this long to have the discussion.
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This simply doesn't matter today.
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I don't think evolutionary arguments are very good for this issue. I mean, evolution can't explain everything about us and to apply it overly strictly to how we should conduct ourselves seems kind of silly I think. Besides, we are in such a dominant position over the rest of the species on the planet right now that we don't have to worry about being wiped out by them, at least not so much that we can't afford to crack a few baby skulls.
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