As Human beings, what are the circumstances in which we should value an animals life over another human’s life. If we consider there are such circumstances are we being moral or not?
I have spent money and given food to animals which could have instead been given to a charity such as Oxfam for instance that would have used it to save human rather than animal life. I think this is a common thing for allmost anyone to do, but is it immoral?
Morality is relative to one’s moral code. Therefore, it may be immoral according to one moral code, but not according to another. Which moral code are you asking about?
Do we REALLY need another thread on this? Is one train wreck not enough?
I agree w/ Dragon. Try some other subject. Three strikes and you’re out!
OK, I didn’t feel the others were train-crashing, and thought the OP question would be too much a hijack away from their OP’s of “What would you do” to this OP of “What is the morality”. But I see from the responses that I was incorrect.
Could a Mod please close this thread, thankyou.
When you have an obligation to the animal. I have agreed to take care of my pets. I have not agreed to take care of random people. I would if I had infinite resources, but I don’t, and my obligations are important to me.
But your pets don’t know that. If you were somehow in a position where you had to choose between your pet and a stranger, your pet wouldn’t know what the hell was going on, beyond its immediate situation. It wouldn’t be expecting you to save it, nor would it have any conception of the consequences of it being rescued vs. not being rescued. It would only have an awareness that it didn’t like the situation it was in.
The stranger, on the other hand, would fully comprehend the situation, and (if they were a religious) would likely be praying with all their might to be able to see their children, parents, or husband/wife one last time. They probably have plans to go to dinner with their friends, or to go on vacation to Yellowstone. They have goals and dreams.
You pet, on the other hand, has no goals or dreams. In fact, it has very little concept that anything called “the future” even exists. It doesn’t contemplate its own mortality. It doesn’t have any regrets.
So if you had to choose between your pet or a stranger, it’s obviously much crueler to let the stranger die. The only thing that’s keeping you from saving the stranger is your sense of responsibility toward you pet. A sense or responsibility that is, in reality, pretty much one-sided. Your dog likely thinks of you as the leader of its pack, not a dear friend. People just have a tendancy to anthropomorphize their pets way too much.
The dogs family is also less likely to sue, claiming you had an opportunity to save the person but chose your dog instead…
Unless we’re talking about mass muderers, serial murderers, rapists, child molesters, or pedophiles, there are absolutley no circumstances in which an animal could ever be more valuable than a human.
The only exceptions, as described above, are considered by me to be animals, thus the discrepancies.
Moderator’s Note: Since we already have some similarly-themed threads going, and at the request of the OP, I’m closing this one.