Item — HN Reader

Morality is a human concept that should serve human ends--individually and socially. As such, performing experiments on a dog to gain more knowledge is moral.

If life arrives on Earth from elsewhere, and is much more intelligent than us, let us hope they don't consider us to be dogs.

1 comments

Agreed.

I think the same arguments that establish that humans have rights would still hold, even for the aliens. I also think that they would apply to the aliens, so that we should recognize that they have rights. But all that is just "possibly," because it's hard to speculate about a case like that.

Or it may be that when they hear us debating with each other about their ability to have 'rights', they think it's as comical as we would listening to dogs debate among themselves.