Week 3 - Ethics (The Dark Side)

Question 1

What were Peter Singers main ideas regarding the balancing of animal vs human life?

Answer 1

1) Preserve equality by raising the status of animals
2) Preserve equality by reducing the status of humans
3) Abandon the idea of equality and adopt a graduated viewpoint - that increasing cognitive ability can be associated with higher moral status.

Question 2

What are some of the benefits to using animals in research?

Answer 2

1) Animal brains (particularly mammal brains) can be quite similar to the human brain.
2) Easier to determine a causal effect in animal studies (cant do the same in human brains). For instance, in the study of OCD, you can deactivate a certain part of the frontal cortex in mice and observe increased ‘checking’ behaviours associated with OCD.
3) We need to create new medications/therapies to ease certain types of human suffering and this can be made possible in animal studies (and can be done in an ethical manner - sometimes).
4) Animal studies allow cause and effect / Human studies only allow us to establish correlations

Question 3

What are some of the consequences / criticisms of using animals in research?

Answer 3

1) A lot of the supposed beneficial ideas found from animal studies don’t actually translate into humans.
2) The quality of findings / methodologies from animal research projects can be questionable (low rates of proper blinding, random allocation, high usage of male animals instead of female)
3) Obvious point is the fact that we can cause large amounts of suffering to animals that have the capacity to show emotion, empathy, engage in social interaction and have quite high intellience.

Question 4

What are some of the benefits in including vulnerable populations of people in research?

Answer 4

1) If proper consent is acquired and the aims and processes of the experiment are explained appropriately, including vulnerable people in research can elucidate important findings that can benefit these populations of people.

Question 5

What are some of the consequences/criticisms of including vulnerable populations of people in research?

Answer 5

1) People with some types of psychiatric conditions may have trouble providing informed consent (e.g., schizophrenia)
2) Vulnerable people may not be fully aware of what is involved in the research experiment

Question 6

What are some of the supposed benefits raised by operational psychologists as to why psychologically-based techniques should be used in torture?

Answer 6

1) That the harm inflicted upon a small number of people was far outweighed by the number of lives saved via the information received from those being interrogated.
2)

Question 7

What are some of the negatives of using psychologically-based techniques in torture?

Answer 7

1) If someone doesn’t actually have valuable information, they’ll provide misleading information (anything they can) to possibly get them out of there.
2) Techniques like ‘waterboarding’ have been shown to provide no additional information above what had already been found out via ‘positive’ techniques like cognitive-interviewing.