Page 77 of Animal Liberation Now, by Peter Singer. Steven Pinker tells a story, via Singer, of an incident of "ethical blindness" in which as a student he was instructed to leave a rat overnight in an experiment in which it would be shocked repeatedly unless it pressed a lever. The rat did not learn to press the lever.
Page 78 of Animal Liberation Now, by Peter Singer. Pinker takes the rat to the lab veterinarian, but it dies. He concludes "I had tortured an animal to death" and describes it as "the worst thing I have ever done", concluding that it would've been cruel to subject the rat to the anxiety of having to press the lever all night, even if it had learned to do so. He states that he knew the experiment was ethically dubious at the time and complied with the instruction anyway.
Reading Steven Pinker talk about ethical blindness hits kinda different now.
#AnimalLiberationNow
