Animal experimentation is immoral.

Thanks to Pro for his arguments this round, and I'm going to launch straight into this. Pro is fundamentally misunderstanding my arguments, which is the entire reason he sees contradictions. From the outset, no, I did not agree that the utility of animal experimentation is irrelevant. That's a necessary portion of understanding my arguments in support of utilitarianism. If it doesn't have utility, it can't also be utilitarian. Let's go through the summary points he provides. Point 1) The magnitude of the lives saved is larger than the ones sacrificed during the experiment. (Or as I call it the 'moral math' argument) It is, in part, a math argument on lives saved and quality of life gained. This one is mostly correct. Point 2) Use of animals is the only realistic viable solution for the problem of consent. Not my point. Never once said the word "viable" beyond responding to Pro's question. I said that consent, across the board, is impossible to gain from both humans and animals at this stage, meaning that any harms that come from a lack of consent apply no matter the circumstance, which means consent issues are not unique to my case. Point 3) A human life weighs more than an animal life. Pro keeps saying this, yet I've never once, in this debate, made this argument. I've stated that we, like all animals, are self-interested. I've stated that we, unlike other animals, can do research into how to protect from and treat disease. That doesn't make us higher weight, it just emphasizes the very purpose for which we are having this debate. I don't understand where he's getting this point from. I don't know how Pro completely left out my arguments about a lack of available alternatives and the contextual issues, which were integral to my last round, since these were central to my argumentation. Now, let's look at those contradictions: 1) Lives lost contradiction Yes, I did concede that number of lives is not the SOLE factor for deciding morality. Leaving out that word "sole" is a big problem, because he's straw manning my argument. I'm not saying lives lost don't connect to morality - they do. They apply in the Hitler-Stalin example; both men are immoral chiefly for the number of people they killed, though that is not the sole factor to assess with regards to their morality. I mentioned context multiple times throughout my last post and assessed its importance. That doesn't mean that I contradicted any of my former claims about life lost presenting a moral harm. I really don't understand why I have to present every mitigating factor up front - this was a direct response to your analogy. I wasn't about to spend my first post assessing all of the means by which morality is affected in a utilitarian sense. I don't see why my lack of detail shows that I'm "hid[ing my] contradiction," especially since said contradiction doesn't exist. We can evaluate utilitarianism in context without saying that lives lost don't matter. 2) "Realistically viable" Here, again, he uses this strange verbiage. "Realistically viable." He quoted it in the last round as though it came from me, but I never said that line. There's a difference between viability and utility. Viability is the capacity to be operated or be sustained. Utility is usefulness, the ability of something to satisfy needs or wants. In this case, we're talking about utility for needs. The fact that it can be sustained doesn't make it moral - it just makes it effective. It's as simple as that. 3) The Island Considering that the third premise is completely wrong, no, I didn't contradict my own point here. He also misunderstands my response. The majority of it is to show that there is utility to a situation where humans are created and not just plucked from the general population in order to benefit other humans. I also stated that this is most moral when a clone is created without a brain, therefore lacking personhood. Pro is nonresponsive to these points. 4) The injection analogy Pro is mishandling this argument. It doesn't matter who the beneficiary is, or who is the victim. Pro is presenting a deontological argument where he can separate out a means and evaluate its morality without looking forward or backward in time for context. At the point that the injection occurs, there is no beneficiary. It's not until later that the victim becomes the beneficiary. Ergo, as long as I evaluate morality before looking forward to the beneficial effects of the drug, the injection is net harmful. What's worse, he actually contradicts himself here. Remember in the previous post when he was making a distinction between a moral cause and an immoral act, stating that a moral cause - even one that saves billions of lives - isn't sufficient to make an act moral. Yet here, he justifies intrusion on a person's consent for the purposes of injection of something beneficial. He can't have it both ways. 5) Damage to non-humans for the sake of humans is unconscionable Pro asserts this, but never provides a reason why this is specifically problematic enough to call the entire practice immoral. The asymmetry of information and power is nonunique - human beings assert that power over rodents in everyday life. Changing this is not going to suddenly empower rodents. What this does do is provide some protection for rodent pets (which, last I checked, is still a benefit for some rodents). 6) Context is relative This point is just plain confounding. Pro looks at the complicated context of a lion eating prey, and uses it to say that ALL contextual morality is relative. He never shows how context isn't straightforward in this case. It's not enough to use an analogy - he can't simply state that the context of this particular case is relative by analyzing another. The only point he makes in this regard is that "it is safe to assume that by necessity we must assume that there is an absolute moral standard whose jurisdiction stretches beyond the boundaries of both species," but this is absolute nonsense. We're focusing on humans and their effects on animals of interest. We don't need an absolute moral standard for this because other species outside of this research and its effects don't play a role; we must simply evaluate the effects on life and its quality lost (which, I would say, is an absolute moral standard anyway, though it doesn't have to be). And no, it doesn't validate your approach. Just because it's more difficult to evaluate across species doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. Your simplicity by comparison doesn't make your evaluation the correct one. The legal understanding of murder is actually strong support for my view. We have to look at the cause and intentions of the research, and not just at the morality of the research itself in a vacuum. 7) Concession on equivalency Pro keeps misunderstanding this point. I've already stated my views on equivalency as completely as I can manage, and no, it's not a concession - Pro assumed from the start of this debate that my position on this issue was opposite his. The reason I said that human experimentation was mainly immoral had to do with utility - using more humans and taking longer to test due to longer life cycles. Another reason I didn't mention is that, unlike with rodents, we can't just breed humans in a lab environment for the purpose of research, and we certainly can't genetically modify them to be identical, or to have certain characteristics of interest for specific tests. We've become effective at these things for rodents, and already have populations available. To do the same for humans would simply compound the problems of captivity and experimentation. Overall, my opponent has tried, time and time again, to peg my arguments as faulted utilizing his views of what my arguments should be. He points out flaws that don't exist (though I'll admit, my arguments are far from perfect), and uses false analogies as attempts to point out more. Last time, back to Pro.