How can I live with a clear conscience knowing that animals have suffered unremitting torture to bring about a product that improves my life?
When is it ‘justified’ to use such drugs that were tested on animals? Where is your personal boundary for saying its justified. Ie when you have an annoying headache and its convenient to use that paracetamol? If you have a chronic condition? if you have a possibly terminal illness?
Ways I have thought about justifying it are- desperate times call for desperate measures. There are other examples of desperate times for instance in plane crashes where humans end up turning to cannibalism. The situation drove them to it. Theyd much prefer not to but it had to be done.
I’ve had terrible depression for years now and have been considering trying anti depressants but it somehow feels so wrong that I would gain pleasure from it when the condition isnt immediately life threatening. Suicide is life threatening and I seem to be drawing closer to those thoughts with passing months but still it feels so wrong.
I’ve had a sinus infection this week and seem to keep getting them recurrently as well but I resisted taking sudafed which I knew would help it in order to maintain a clear conscience. I have been working at alot lower efficiency due to this but does that justify the use of those drugs? But really I know that taking that or not makes no difference in the grand scheme of things so what does it matter? it does matter to me but it doesnt seem rational so why do I do it?
Does one just accept life is vile and evil and just ‘go with the flow’?
Its a pretty much inescapable fact that you are going to get ill now and then and worse and worse as you get older so it will be more and more relevant to need these drugs. so do you just have to accept it?
Do you think these two segments are related? It could well be that your objections (that you don’t wholly understand yourself) are symptoms of depression. Are you strictly vegan, or does animal welfare principally strike you in the field of medical testing? Do you campaign against animal testing in general, or just think negatively about yourself for profiting from it?
If it’s the latter of both options, I’d suggest that you’re looking for ways to perpetuate negative thoughts about yourself, and therapy would be more useful than philosophy.
Boycotting the medicine won’t affect any animal lives - the animal testing phase is already long over for approved medicines, and whether or not there is demand for a particular pill will not cause more testing to be done.
Even if you are a vegetarian you will be responsible for the mass murder of millions of creatures.
Everytime the wheat is harvested or the grass is cut for hay, or ploughed for cultivation animals die. Their little bodies are cut up into salami thick slices: field mice, voles, lizards, snakes and slo-worms. But how many insects - no one can tell.
If they do not mechanically die then they soon will from loss of habitat as their homes have gone under the plough.
Then there are all the birds of pray whose meals are now rotting in the dirt.
But surely you have to eat something? You have to live somewhere. Every part of your life involves the destruction of the environment and the murder and torture of furry little animals. Ask yourself what was on the earth before your house was on it!
Humean makes great points. Also, maybe it could help to look at it this way: If people didn’t actually use the drugs that had been tested on animals, those animals would have suffered for nothing.
Are you an animal? I guess that you would consider yourself on a level playing field with animals, at least, if not superior. As you said, whether you do or do not take these drugs will not make any difference to any animal ‘in the grand scheme of things’. However, not taking the medicine willcause you suffering.
Given your goal is to reduce overall suffering amongst animals, and you are an animal, the rational conclusion would be that the most moral choice is to take the medicine. This reduces your suffering, and has no effect on any other animal/being on the planet, contributing to a net reduction in the amount of suffering amongst animals/beings.
Personally, I am not a utilitarian, but you seem to be and therefore your current course of action does not seem logical to me.
You have to imagine the alternative. Would you feel better knowing humans were tortured to bring it about?
There are three options.
Do nothing. Humans (and animals! we give them medication too!) die from horrible diseases and suffer endlessly.
Human testing. Some smaller number of humans suffer to bring about medications for humans to help with these diseases. Definitely less bad than before!
Animal (and human) testing. Some small number of animals suffer to bring about medication. Less bad than even the previous option.
The only thing you lose with option 3 compared to option 2 is possibly consent, though I doubt humans would consent to as much medical testing as we actually need to bring new drugs into market.
I’m not sure how much these animals actually suffer and how “tortured” they are - I’m not saying that some of them don’t depending on the testing but you would appear to be allowing yourself to suffer because of this and you’re torturing yourself over something you have no control of. Whatever control you can have about it try to do something about it. Write about it, I don’t mean in here, picket at an animal testing place.
How far will you let your depression go abusing yourself in the process because you dwell so much on this?
Statitech made good sense. By allowing your depression to continue without help (which is not reasonable or wise at all I might add) you’re letting what those animals have to experience be for nothing. Maybe I don’t really want to say THAT to you though. But you can try to make what they go through mean something by utilizing the drugs when it’s really necessary for you too.
Within that same “flow” is also the good. We counteract the vile by adding to the good. Do something.