Projective Ethics: On Pain

Look for a moment at what we use to create, usually, our system of ethics. If testing on an animal will cause it pain, will make it suffer, after a point of our own decision, we say that is enough. We have hurt the animal to an extent we're not comfortable with and that is wrong. But what is pain, exactly? Simply, the firing of neurons from some stimulation that are interpreted in our brain as something that is [perhaps fundamentally] phobic. However, people who lack these connections exist, and people have different thresholds for pain, different levels of interpretation if you will. And if you were to encounter some disease without pain, that still gave you a fatal recourse, there would be something supercedingly wrong about that, too.

What I mean to say is that using pain as a medium of comparison for ethics is not accurate, and furthermore I would argue that it only comes back to our own feelings of pain and is therefore entirely self-serving, where the idea behind preventative ethics is to think of others *before* ourselves.

The idea of pain as an empathic distraction supposes that there is something fundamentally behind ethics, an objective belief that we are taking a meandering path through the woods to get to. What I mean to say is this: using animals and subjecting them to pain is not what we should consider the marking of an unethical practice, rather it is the idea that we are affecting or impinging on another being's life... its existence. If you don't believe me, ask yourself this: if we could sever the nerve channels that relay pain to an organism, can we then do whatever we like to it? And if so, how far can we take that? Could we do it to a human?

Something I've noticed is that the closer we get to our own species (i.e., rats -> sheep -> monkeys, etc.) being used in eventually fatal experiments, or irreversibly damaging experiments (and the key word is damaging, as you will see in a minute)... the closer we get to using our own species in these experiments, the more wary we become. And as for humans, the idea of euthanizing and dissecting, or a potentially dangerous experiment in the name of discovery, is horrible. To most people, anyway. I'd say the baser instinct is horror.

Anyway, what does this reflect? Certainly there is a definite, quantifiable difference between humans and animals (in some senses; in others, they do exist on a spectrum, but for the sake of my argument I would prod to ask you to understand why we look through certain spectrums under certain times, and others... yada yada). Anyway, assuming there exists a quantifiable difference between humans and animals (and other humans and ourselves), what evokes this uneasiness about the usage of such subjects in our experiments? Psychology, once again: empathy, revealing itself as a projective defense mechanism against the fear of death, or fear or the unknown, or whatever you would call that blackness or however you visualize it. It's all beyond, words anyway, so what I'm performing is what's known as an exercise in futility.

My last point I'd like to make is getting back to what I was saying about what labels & experiments we shun and perhaps how we reach these labels, perhaps not. Anyway, I know I've written at least moderately on the idea of grandeur, wanderlust, utopia and all that. Simply put, experiments to potentially better the subject, such as robotic enhancements, play to our utopian-seeking id, and that contrasts with the empathy-used-as-defense-mechanism that perceived stress on the part of the subject would play to. Two opposing ids; a desire for supremacy with a fear of personal endangerment. Oh, to send our children off to war! :D

But, seriously, getting back to my underlying theme, look at the people of the fascist states, empowered by strong id-seeking (rather than shunning) behaviors, who were able to perform such experiments on people to test out potential gains for themselves at no emotional loss due to empathy - all because they were so empowered that they lost all inhibitory impulses. A black mark on the history books, I know, but fascinating (fascistnating (fascist-nation)), truly fascinating to look at for what it exposes within ourselves.