Why not test on death row inmates:
- 1. Limited amount of specimens
Kinda hard to get a good sample base from a very limited amount of people, and also due to point 2. This is exactly why we use lab animals, mostly mice.
We can pretty much breed them indefinitely, therefore we have a controlled sample size.
- 2. The different physical/mental health of inmates
Lab animals are bred just to be used as lab animals. We can be fairly sure that these specimens do not differ in health, therefore we can assume the chemical we are testing will have similiar if not the same effects on all the specimens.
You can hardly say this for inmates who probably had a longer life before getting onto death row, and were exposed to the prison enviroment. Humans generally differ from eachother.
- 3. Just because they are death row inmates doesn't mean they aren't humans
By proposing we test on them, you pretty much state that the life of the [lab] animal which is bred for the single purpose of being tested on is the same as of a human.
This was heavily discussed in the last thread, but we pretty much came to the conclusion that comparing the life of a human to that of an animal is foolish.
Now back to animals. Testing on animals has been, and most likely will be, a big part of science as a whole. From the simpler times were some poor guy had to discover that approaching a lion was dangerous, to more advanced studies, such as
the discovery of Insulin by studying dogs.
On the other side we have cosmetics. I would highly advice that people do not discuss cosmetics here since this is almost purely a moral dillema. Infact, leaving morality out of the general discussion would probably the best course of action, from my perspective.
Why? Because morality is purely subjective. What you see as right, I might see as wrong, or the other way around. All morality discussion would just boil down to "I think 'x' is right/wrong!" which can hardly be called discussion anymore.