1. You clearly aren't reading thoroughly before replying. Please go back and reread what I said, and find where you think I said anything about someone getting killed.
2. You are arguing with your perception of the collective consciousness of Hacker News, not discussing something with an individual.
I don't have a problem with experimenting on a mouse if there's a reasonable chance the end result will save lives or meaningfully help people, and precautions are taken to prevent suffering.
I just happen to think this experiment was stupid and unlikely to provide useful data, and the only reason the researcher used a live mouse was for publicity.
>That’s a non sequitur
The it might somehow kill someone is a non sequitur because you just made that up. My actual argument is that if you say that if you are going to make a utilitarian argument that something provides more benefit than harm overall, you need to weigh the possible benefit against the possible harm.
Your argument was that we can't say for sure there will be a benefit, so lets assume some minute expected benefit.
My argument is that you can't do that without assuming some minute expected harm also exists.
Sure you can essentially ignore the minute expected harm if you believe the expected benefit dwarfs it. But that wasn't your argument, your argument was "let's agree on this minute expected benefit". I believe the expected benefit to be so small as to be immeasurable. And my belief is that it is more likely that the publicity from this result leads other people to perform similar experiments also without any measurable benefit, than that anyone benefits from it.