Animal experimentation is immoral.

It is to my pleasure that we have finally arrived at the core of this topic: the definition of morality. But before I make an attack on that area, I must first address the apparent incongruences and contradictions in my opponent's arguments. Now that we have both agreed that both the utility of animal experimentation, and whether we should ban it or not, are not relevant issues, I will consider all his points in regards to utility as irrelevant. What I will now examine is his moral arguments only. My opponent had initially used a moral defense that had its basis on utilitarianism, all of which boil down to these three basic points. 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)Point 2) Use of animals is the only realistic viable solution for the problem of consent. Point 3) A human life weighs more than an animal life. In the last round, he contradicted himself on all three of these points, which I will now elaborate upon. He first conceded that number of lives is not the deciding factor for morality. It is curious that he accuses me of using a false analogy on the Hitler-Stalin example. I had used the Hitler vs Stalin example precisely because I had aimed to exhibit that the number of lives taken is not a relevant factor in deciding whether Hitler was less immoral than Stalin. His answer to my rhetorical question was that it is the intention of mass killing that is relevant, not the number, and in doing so, contradicted his claims on his use of number of lives for moral judgment. While he mentions all other mitigating factors, he had not mentioned these mitigating factors initially when he presented his model, which leads me to the conclusion that he introduces these factors as a means to hide his contradiction. For his second point, I had formed it into a question to ask back at my opponent, for which he stated that being realistically viable is not a valid moral defense. Hence he rejects the relevance of his second premise in judging the morality of the act at hand. The third premise is contradicted when he responds to my example of the movie The Island, where human clones are created for organ harvesting. He stated that he finds both the breeding of human clones in the movie and the oncomice and transgenic pigs a moral equivalent. I believe the life of a human clone can safely be considered a human life, so I can also safely assume that he has unintentionally conceded that human and animal lives are moral equivalents. Those are not the only flaws in his argument, however. In light of his accusations of my analogies as ‘false’, it is interesting that he makes a false analogy of his own: the injection analogy. This analogy fails because both the victim and the beneficiary happens to be the same subject. What is interesting is that this point actually fits perfectly with my separation of the moral cause and immoral act. The lack of consent, and the intrusion into the body with foreign material does pose a small immoral act. Yet the moral cause is overwhelmingly beneficial to the subject that the immoral act can be overlooked. This only occurs because the receiving end is also the one making concessions. But this is not the case here. The one being damaged are the non-humans, and the ones who reap the benefits are humans, or as I have previously asserted, those affiliated with human interests. As much as my opponent states that the rodent species benefits from human research, as long as humans cannot communicate or educate the rodent community of these pearls of wisdom, no realistic benefits occur on the rodent community, which for sake of non-human parties exclude pets. This creates an asymmetry of information and power, and it is of no actual dispute that the rodent population suffers more than it gains from animal experimentation. Now I must make my advance on his notion of “contextual morality. ”While this model of relative morality may seem apparently valid, it carries a fundamental flaw that my opponent cannot avoid: the relative nature of ‘context. ’The use of ‘context’ makes it implausible to make a moral judgment. Context is relative. The same context can yield different moral conclusions. Let us take my opponent’s lion example. The lion’s prey has its own rights to life, while the lion of course has it too. The lion’s defense for its actions is that in order to live, he must hunt others to survive. The prey’s moral attack will be that it too has its own rights to live. Who then has the moral high ground? Considering the chain of consumption in the biosphere, this is a very pertinent question. If one party’s moral right is in clash with another's, in my opponent’s model of morality, we cannot determine which moral standard – the prey’s or the predator’s – supersedes the other. This means that we can either make no judgments on all killings of prey, or conclude that all killings are inherently immoral. As this debate is contingent upon a moral decision, it is safe to assume that by necessity we must assume that there exists an absolute moral standard whose jurisdiction stretches beyond the boundaries of each species, even if that species is the Homo sapiens. This completely validates my approach in morality: the separation of the morality of the act and the cause (or perhaps intentions broadly). This is in line with our legal understanding of murder, for example. While the act itself is considered a violation, the punitive measures against it is evaluated according to the morality of the cause and intentions. If the immoral act is determined to carry an intention of self-defense, punishments cannot be made, for example. My opponent has – unintentionally – conceded that an animal life is a moral equivalent to a human life. He has also conceded that an alternative is experimentation on humans. Using an anthropocentric view, he assumes an a priori knowledge that this is inherently immoral, which I, as a fellow human, agree wholeheartedly. Then I have also shown that if human experimentation is immoral, animal experimentation is equally immoral. One cannot be more immoral than the other. With that, I hand the debate over to my opponent.