Thanks, I’ve been talking with ’em every week :) .
What’s quite clear to me, whether it’s morally justifiable in terms some EAs will agree with, or not:
If we do not let them do some unappealing things to mice, that will cost millions of human lives.
This is a good start about some of the issues, but there is a need to bulk it up with information directly from neuroscientists.
For instance, some very senior people in the Stanford neuroscience community think that an essential difference between animals and people may be that the astrocytes, “helper cells,” are so very different. Among many other things, astrocytes help to create and destroy synapses.
Neuroscientists also routinely do mice experiments, and a few have very sophisticated answers to ethical questions about what they do.
There are a lot of topics in EA ethics that benefit from a grounding in neuroscience and neuroethics. Both of these fields also contain many EA opportunities themselves. If money is being put down, then it’s time to add some expert scientific opinion.