The following is an answer and/or comment by inhahe aka ColorStorm (inhahe.com - myriachromat.wordpress.com).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=110&v=QYIQ2w-UCaU when does science start going to far? what do you see as being right or wrong in terms in the things we do. should we sacrifice animal life for human life?

----

I dunno, it's hard to draw a line. There seems to be endless possibilities with what you can do with biology, and there's no clear line between when it's just manipulating matter and when you're playing God with life (or at least doing things with life that are ethically questionable). There's also no clear line between when something is a minor, harmless modification to something living and when it's more like an abomination of nature (ur unnature).

One thing that can be said is that such things are shocking and provoke an immediate reaction of being objectionable. Maybe we should regard those emotions or perceptions as having merit, rather than just ignoring them or getting used to the offenses in question?

I don't know if we should sacrifice animal life for human life. I mean it's obviously anthropocentric, short-sighted and selfish, at least when it gets taken to a certain degree. Like blinding bunny rabbits just so we can safely put shit on our faces to make us look prettier. That's clearly wrong and should be illegal. But in some cases (especially when testing life-saving remedies), you could argue that animal life is objectively less important than human life.

Why should this be? Well, consider that it doesn't seem important to us to squash a bug or poison a cockroach. Let alone cleanse some bacteria. And every other animal is on some place on the spectrum between bacteria or bugs and humans in terms of their intelligence, or self-awareness, or size, or amount of conciousness, or fairness (as in 'the fairer sex', only in this case it's 'the fairer species'), or whatever criterion you want to use.

So how do we know where we should draw the line regarding what kinds of animals it's okay to sacrifice? And of course it wouldn't necessarily be one single line; where we place the line should obviously depend on how much good ultimately comes out of the experiment..

But I'm just saying that's something you should argue. I'm not saying I necessarily feel that we should be sacrificing animals for our own needs. It does seem pretty unempathetic and cavalier.