Obviously Unethical

I started reading a cognitive psychology textbook recently. I like brains, I guess.

One thing in particular struck me. In going over the various methods that the brain is studied (fMRI, EEG, etc), the author, some guy at Yale, mentioned studies on animals. Electrodes are placed in their brains to measure neuron activity, parts of monkey and cat brains are intentionally lesioned or lobotomized, among various other invasive techniques. The author then says, "obviously we cannot use these techniques on people."

Well why not? It's unethical, right? Why is it unethical? Obvious reasons (human rights, etc). So then why is it ethical to perform such tests on animals?

The predominant view of consciousness is the higher order thought theory. Consciousness is having thoughts about your mental states. To have a pain, you must think, however inchoate this thought might be, "I have a pain." Since animals, so far as we know, don't have higher order thoughts, they don't feel pain. Sure, they squirm, yelp, and whimper, but they don't feel pain. You see, all those things that animals do when they appear to be in pain are just preprogrammed actions.

First, we know just as little about animal consciousness as we do about human (animal) consciousness.

Second, you know who else lacks higher order thoughts? Little kids until they're around two to three years old, and many retarded adults. Why is it unethical to experiment on them, but ethical to experiment on animals?

Animals are enough like us to warrant studying their brains to learn about our own. Yet, they are apparently different enough to make it ethical to perform extremely cruel experiments on them.

Since the number of neurons doesn't seem to play a role in this demarcation, I guess it's nothing but a sort of species chauvinism. Or maybe it's even less than that, for while it's "obvious" that invasive experiments on the human brain are unethical, maybe it's only obvious because of the various laws preventing such a practice. I bet the obviousness would go away quickly if scientists were allowed to treat human subjects the way they treat their animal subjects.