I think this is the shortest post you have ever written.
Declan
Shooting the gorilla was most probably the “right” decision despite that a rare gorilla has, by some measures, more intrinsic worth than a child in our over-populated world. But I don’t think comparative “sentience” is the reason. If the gorilla was known to be especially clever and the child had Down’s Syndrome, would your argument change?
The reason saving the human was correct is that we live in a human society run for humans (and in which humans can hire lawyers :eek: ). Obviously the decision would be reversed in a gorilla-run zoo where gorillas bring their families to look at captive humans.
Basically might makes right.
I agree, humans collectively are not rare. But one single human is.
Ultimately, yeah. If the gorillas had rifles too… (Wait, didn’t they make a movie…)
The trick is to imagine that this was your own kid, and the shooter (standing next to you) with crosshair pointing at the endangered ape’s skull, rests his finger on the trigger and says “Yep, got a clear shot. Altrighty, Inbred Mm domesticus… your call”.
Yes. (And if right-wingers would acknowledge this precept explicitly, political threads here would have less cognitive dissonance.)
I’m not inclined to get bogged down in discussions of “worth” or “value”, which seem prone to tangents. I see nothing wrong with humans giving human lives a higher priority than non-human lives.
Neither do I, but then again I’m biased. I assume that gorillas would think it’s the other way around.
The value of a human life is less than the value of a gorilla. Your neighbor will shoot you if you complain about his dog. A human’s life is not even worth as much as a dog’s life. You can be killed for even less than that.
Agree with the OP.
I think part of the reason for the strange concept of morality some people have with WRT animals, is that we anthropomorphize them, including imagining them having compassionate thoughts and feelings. Except, that is, when an animal behaves aggressively, in which case it’s just following its instincts. Viewed in these terms it’s inevitable that some see them as better than us, at least in terms of behaviour.
I’m not saying let’s be callous towards animal life, but I think humans should count more as we are simply animals but plus the whole sentience thing, which makes us more important in most of the ways we measure importance.
The arguments about economic value don’t work: moral worth and market price are not the same thing. No-one would consider it morally acceptable to go murder people if it meant you could built a $10 million bridge, say (yes, I’m aware historically this was not always the case).
We certainly do.
You’re oversimplifying what is a complex issue. Sure you’ll get a lot of agreement that in this specific instance shooting the gorilla was the right thing to do, and those thinking the kid was worth less are overly sentimental, but by the logic you employ we should exterminate every large predator on the planet. The existence of tigers and bears lead to human deaths every year, why not kill them all? They are, after all, worth less than us.
And what about other considerations. People are dying every day from lack of food, clean water, medicines in areas where these could be had for the price of a cup of coffee and if you’re like me you have money to spare for quite a few things that rationally are worth less than a human life, like cups of coffee, but we choose the coffee over the lives of those random persons. How can you then claim it’s irrational and sentimental to choose a gorilla over some random child. Are cups of coffee worth more than gorillas?
There’s also a rash of instant experts on teh Interwebs with a bunch of “why didn’t they just…” statements - people who believe that there “must have been some way” to save BOTH the kid and the gorilla and that if zoo officials had just tried harder they would have been able to do this.
I would tend, on the other hand, to believe that zoo employees are in their jobs because they love and value animals, really really hate having to make that kind of decision, and would not have sacrificed the gorilla unless they sincerely thought it necessary to save the child.
Some people don’t appear to believe in hard decisions.
Perhaps some feel that way. But others (such as myself) may disfavor the way the human species despoils our planet and our fellow inhabitants, for our short-term comfort or convenience, or even just sport. We are capable of so much more than any other species, yet in many ways hold ourselves to a lower standard, not exercising our capabilities responsibly.
In response to the OP, most human lives are worth more than any gorilla’s. But not all. I’ve met and read about some pretty worthless humans. In fact, some that the world would be just fine without.
I am also willing to give the 4 y.o. a break due to his youth and potential. If he were some stupid, drunk adult who climbed into the cage, I’d be fine with him bearing the implications of his choices/actions.
WRT the current gorilla situation, I think that the outcome was sad. There are other outcomes that could have been more or less sad, but the choices made were appropriate and understandable, even if they were not the only options. As Apidistra just said, it was a hard decision. Nothing about it was callous or negligent. Nor was it a big referendum on the value of human lives, or animal lives. It was just people making what felt like the best choice available to them to solve the problem at hand.
That said, I don’t believe in some absolute scale that puts an individual human life above an individual animal’s life in all situations. The OP and others seem to suggest that there is never a question about what life is more important, humans are more important always because they are, well, more human than other creatures. That’s a pretty arbitrary foundation for decision making, and could lead to some pretty poor or repugnant choices.
Can I ask what your PhD is actually in? And did you go to a competitive school? Just curious.
Yep. Maybe not completely arbitrary, because we do base them on what can loosely be called “human nature”-- that is, what we are, as a species.
And let’s mix “value” with “worth”, where the latter is the price on the open market. However, if we really want to go there, let’s imagine we are selling shares in whom to kill: 4-year-old human kid or gorilla. While “gorilla” might score some points with certain individuals, there is no doubt in my mind that “4-year-old human kid” would trade at a higher price. On the open market, that is.
This whole argument is insane. If an adult human were endangering the kid and there was no likely way to stop that adult he would have been shot also. In this case the species of the animal shot was irrelevant, and it has nothing to do with their comparative worth. We can also take a look at the laws, they do not specify that non-humans may be shot in different circumstances than humans based on relative worth, the laws are based moral/religious reasoning, which may be misplaced or inconsistent at times, but don’t distinguish between the different relative values of different humans in any kind of rational manner.
When the apes take over the planet, we’ll have no-one to blame but ourselves.