Time to question bioengineering.

[theVOID]

Void, when reason is given for me to seriously evaluate my thinking, I will always say thank you.

Good principle

I realize that I am making a rather emotional argument here, and yet something in me does not see this as inherently wrong, somehow. In a way, I see the difference as that between burglary and robbery, wherein killing the animal to use it seems (yes, I realize the tendentious nature of that verb) more like the former and removing its own motivations while leaving it alive more like the latter. Both are thefts, but one seems more violative.

I appreciate you fellows walking me around this thing.

In a sense you can only make an emotional argument when expressing your own values, or even when trying to persuade others to adopt your own values, that's just the nature of value as a purely subjective experience, all the values you have are based on your desires and as your desires often differ from others it can be hard to convince someone to adopt your values, for instance; A desire to see justice may directly or indirectly lead someone to believe in Karma and if their desire for justice outweighs their desire to have true beliefs it will likely be extremely difficult to persuade them otherwise - Similarly, your desire that living creatures be free from suffering seems to outweigh your desire to see scientific advancement and that leads you to make statements concerning it being morally bad to manipulate beings for the advancement of knowledge, whereas I am someone who tends to value scientific knowledge over the suffering of animals we would tend to disagree in that regard - The only way to resolve any debates would be to either find a common desire and work from there looking at consistency of beliefs relative to our desires, play off our shared desires such as the desire to have true beliefs and see if we can find some reason to change our desires or update our beliefs about various propositions related to these desires.

Now, if we want to know what values are good or bad relative to other values, as in which desires we have are ones that tend to promote or thwart other desires, then we can start making some objective statements about value, but that's a discussion I don't have time for right now