This argument is valid forwards, but not universally backwards. Otherwise you could repeat it with pigs and ants, and then with ants and bacteria.

There is a spectrum of life, on one end you have self-propagating chemical reactions, on the other you have beings with moral significance. Whether or not experiments on animals are morally justified depend on where those animals lie on this spectrum, and the form and goal of the experiment.

I'm not trying to say here where pigs lie on the spectrum, just that this discussion needs to happen on a much deeper level of details than "humans are more important than pigs" vs. "but aliens could say the same thing about us" for it to be useful.

(Personally, as long as the brains remain comatose all the way through, I don't feel there's a problem here. If they were active... that would be animal cruelty to me. But that's just my individual moral intuition.)

Obviously, this is very sticky moral ground, and I don't claim to absolutely have the answers....

But I think there is merit to the idea of personage. Types of dolphins have been declared non-human persons, as have some primates, by several governments. There is some significant evidence that elephants may also belong in this grouping.

I think that at some point, an individuals awareness and potential for moral autonomy becomes significant enough that it deserves recognition as such by others with similar capabilities.

I don't pretend to know exactly how to judge this, but I think it is possible as we gain knowledge about the nature of intelligence to make judgements on this criteria.

I think that all animals (and plants) should be treated humanely within the practical possibility of doing so (I subscribe to the "if you can't fix it, try not to break it" philosophy) but I think it is farsical to attempt to equivilize the moral significance of dogs and pigs with that of humans and primates.

Others have already touched upon a few other points in your argument, but quite frankly, intelligence is not a good metric.

And neither is a creature's ability to measure morality.

Do we know how a pig measures morals? Do we know how to measure a pig's awareness? To an extent, we can measure a pig's intelligence, but is it simply 'doing what is repeated over and over' or is there actual understanding of the why behind an action?

Quite frankly, we don't know. We're not even close to understanding how to measure such things.

Because, right now, humans only really understand humans and how the human brain works. We can measure morality, intelligence, and awareness in humans, to a point. And yet...Shit, the brain is one of the least understood parts in humans still.

And we have very, very limited understanding of how animals "see" awareness, consciousness, intelligence, and moral ambiguity.

That isn't even why we need to do more brain research on animals.

Humans need to survive. That's our base-code. Survive. And quite frankly, humanity is on the verge of our own mass-extinction. Maybe brain research wont save us in the end, but it might help us find ways to continue living as a species when the Earth is a ball of dust.

And even then, the potential to understand ourselves, and animals, even more has amazing possibilities. Yes, five hundred years from now, we might look back and think, 'Damn, they did that to an animal?!'

But we would also understand why we had to do it, just like how we understand why people a hundred years ago experimented on animals and humans to develop our scientific knowledge to where it is today.

If theory of mind is the issue, some pigs display some attributes that could be interpeted as theory of mind.

In any case, your argument fell apart because there is no metric you can pick to justify what we do to animals other than: it is wrong but it is the least of evils right now (from a legal standpoint), which is different to "humans are more important than pigs".

Your argument is a slippery slope that leads to very dark places: can the rich experiment on the poor?, can we experiment on the disabled or mentally ill?... if being "important" justifies abuse, we would live in a world of abuse.

That is important because when simulations can solve the problem, we could outlaw experimentation in-vivo.

>where the average individual is N times more intelligent than you.

Nobody said anything about intelligence ratios except for you. Of course that’s a stupid metric. How many times more intelligent are you than a mushroom? Why is that an acceptable amount and not this pig ratio.

>Of course you would not do that.

Don’t call people liars without evidence to turn them into straw men that are easier to tear down.

>Variations of that same argument were used to enslave, abuse and kill millions of people. It is sad your comment is the most upvoted. Our society sucks.

It’s not op’s argument. It’s yours. Nobody said anything about intelligence ratios except for you. You then disregarded the part where op said he/she would volunteer because it didn’t fit your narrative.