I still think this is an absolute trainwreck in terms of great debates. There is simply no debate for most of the posters, it’s a matter of humble, not so humble or blatantly unhumble opinions.
What irritates me even more is the (cleverly indirect) name calling that several posters have stooped to. Mearlchan is the latest example - you are effectively calling every poster here who chooses to save his/her dog over a stranger a bastard.
Sorry, as soon as I posted that I knew I chose my words badly. I was mostly trying to express the utter shock and disgust I feel at the idea of someone doing such a thing. I don’t think the opinion makes you a bastard, only someone with different values, nor do I wish you any physical harm. But if it left the hypothetical and you actually did that, I’d think you were. I doubt I’d be able to reason through it and see you as someone with just different values then.
If someone chose his loved one over mine, I’d be upset but understand. If someone chose their loved one over 10,000 people, some of whom I knew and cared about, I’d be even more upset and consider him an idiot but kind of understand. Dog? Absolutely no understanding.
Thinking about the question of a retarded person over a dog, I’d still pick the retarded person. Most of the people I’ve known with mental defeciences could still talk and needed help but functioned at the level of a human child. No animal is even at the level of intelligence and sentience as a 3 year old human.
That’s hardly fair – those who have argued to save the stranger recognise the stranger’s capacity to feel pain, to experience fear, to wholly comprehend their pitiful plight and their own mortality. Possibly, they have friends and relatives who will be grief-stricken by their loss, and dependants who will be robbed of a loving parent, disadvantaged in terms of income, support, family structure and pastoral care.
As a society we recognise the inherent greater worth of humans over animals, we work them and eat them and cull them and euthanase them without compunction. This recognition of the superior rights of human beings thoroughly permeates our laws and social constructs.
None of this even hints at advocacy based upon “the fact that the stranger happens to be of the same species as us”.
Why exactly is it that someone with values deviating from your own becomes a bastard and an idiot?
As I expressed before, I cannot understand that someone would rather kill his/her loved one so that five strangers can live. I absolutely utterly cannot understand that. But I respect your choice, and don’t think you’re a heartless cruel moron. Why is it that those in the “human species first” camp DO feel it necessary to tag these insults to those with different thoughts?
The values don’t make you a bastard or idiot in my mind, the actions do. Sorry if that seems like nitpicking, it does even to me. But while I don’t feel that way about you, Dragon Phoenix, as we’re just two people having a discussion, I know I’d feel that way about you if this were to leave the hypothetical.
I suppose our opinions are different because I place value on human life. I believe humanity has intrinsic value and that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the view (great, now I’m mutating into Spock). I couldn’t kill 10,000 people without thinking of the probably literally millions of people who would suffer for my decision, versus me and a few people close to me if I killed my loved one. I’d also think that the person who chose their loved one probably didn’t think it through, especially since I know no one who would choose to live at the price of 10,000 other people’s lives.
If it helps, I’m a secular humanist, to the point that it’s as close to a religion as I have. I believe working to help other humans is the best goal for any person. I also believe cruelty to anything that can feel pain is wrong (for example animals) but a lesser wrong. I’m upset by hearing about an animal getting tortured and killed, I’m livid if I hear about a baby getting tortured and killed.
You have your values and philosophy, I have mine.
You act acoording to yours, I act according to mine.
If you do that, I don’t understand, but accept.
If I do that, you call me a bastard and an idiot and want to kill me.
Hm.
If you kill people or let people, especially people I care about deeply, die in front of you, I’m upset, yes. Although I’m not sure how your argument compares to mine, since yours is “I’d save my dog” and mine is “If you didn’t save my friend, I’d be extremely upset.” There isn’t any reason for you to get upset at my values, the hypothetical situation doesn’t have anything on the line for you, since if I were in this situation I’d be letting my own dog die.
If I let your dog die while I saved a human neither of us knew, would you be upset? If I saved my dog while the person you loved most died, would you accept it?
Let me take your example a step further. Suppose you have a retarded child yourself. Whom would you choose to save form drowning? A stranger (presumably of normal intelligence) or your child?
I’m not trying to create absurd examples. I’m trying to figure out how you values work.
You have explicitly threatened to kill me and my dog if I were to do this in reality. “There isn’t any reason for you to get upset at my values, the hypothetical situation doesn’t have anything on the line for you” - I don’t think so.
If you saved a human instead of my dog, I would be sad for losing my dog, but I would fully understand. If you saved your dog and let my wife die, I’d be heart-broken, but I’d understand. You see - I KNOW what kind of strong bond there can exist bewteen a dog owner and his/her own dog.
OK, I retract the statement about explicitly threatening to kill me. It was a little less clearly put than I remembered.
Thank you for retracting that. I phrased it strongly, but what I meant was that I would be outraged to the point of feeling like doing so, not that I would do so. And if I did so it would be wrong in my value system, but I might be beyond reason with anger if I discovered this happened.
Almost definitely my child for maternal reasons, and also because the child is less capable of saving itself out of the two. But as I said, a retarded child who isn’t my own is still of higher value in my mind than any animal, and the child is much closer to the stranger in ‘value’ to me than the dog. And I can’t say for sure what I’d do in this situation, it would be a very difficult and horribly painful choice. If I ‘let’ another human being die, I’d probably feel guilty for the rest of my life, be it my child or the stranger. With the dog, I’d feel guilty for a very very long time (possibly years) but I would probably move on and get another dog and love it as a pet, which is a step below family member or fellow human who is probably someone else’s family member or friend.
I find it hard to believe that you’d be understanding of your wife’s death in the name of saving a dog, but I accept that you feel that way. I assume you’d save your wife over your dog. And you seem to see that the pain of losing your dog, for you, is less than the pain of losing your wife.
To me, the fact that I’d save my own wife/child/best friend over the dog means I would save another human being, because that human being probably means as much to someone else. I’ve lost both pets and loved humans, and the pain from the death of the humans has gone further and stayed with me more strongly than even the most cared for pet. I believe my pain of losing my loved pet is less than the pain of whoever might care about this theoretical person. Maybe this person has no family or friends, but that seems unlikely. The pet will be mourned only by myself and maybe some close family members, and we’ll move on.
My ranking in terms of saving would be:
I would risk my life (trying to save someone from drowning is risking your life after all) for 1-5. I would expect them to do the same for me. I do not expect a stranger to risk his/her life to save me, and I don’t do it for them. I certainly would not risk my life for a dog that’s not mine.
I have saved someone from drowning before, but I confess it was a friend and not a stranger. It wasn’t easy but I didn’t have time to think about the danger until I was already pulling him to safety and trying not to breathe too much water. I did finally think we might both die, but that was after my urge to save him kicked in and I was already committed.
I imagine it would be the same for me if I saw another human drowning, and no one else was around to help pull them to safety. By the time I had thought about the danger, I’d probably already be in the water. I might be less likely if it were a very large man who seemed stronger than me, and I had good reason to believe I couldn’t possibly save him. But I doubt I’d think it through that well.
If I saw another human die, and knew it was at least possible for me to try to save him/her, and knew I let them die anyway, I would feel guilt for the rest of my life. Especially if I met the friends and family or read about the funeral in the paper. Multiply guilt by the number of people allowed to die.
You list all strangers below your dog. Does that include children?
That’s something I have been asking myself since it first came up in this thread. Rationally, I would not save them. Emotionally - yes, I would most likely go in.
That makes me, also irrationally, feel better. 
Maybe this is just the battle of objectivism versus utilitarianism.
I would stand and wait and see which one starts drowning first. Then I’d save that one, man or beast. Hopefully it would be the beast… I prefer to support the underdog.
in that case, i would stand and try to determine which one is female, human or dog… i prefer to save the damsel in distress.
(On the issue of feeding your dog = starving a stranger to death)
jsgoddess, sghoul: If take a day’s worth of the worldwide pet food supply, and use it to feed a million hungry people for one day, what do you get tomorrow? A million hungry people waiting for breakfast.
Treating the symptoms won’t cure the disease. The uneven distribution of resources of the world can be eased with free trade, globalization, etc… These solutions cannot be realized by just throwing more money at the problem (just ask the IMF or the World Bank).
And if you continue to do so?
My point is that some of the world’s resources are being dedicated to pets. If humans should always come first, we shouldn’t feel okay about dedicating resources to pets. That resource, be it money or food, could help a human being.
In this thread, quite a few people have said that not helping a human being when it’s possible is digusting. Not only do I disagree, I can provide examples of times these same people put their pets in front of humanity. They go strangely silent.
Julie
One thing everyone is forgetting is that I do have a minimal legal responsiblity to save my dog, but no legal responsibility to save a stranger. Rarely will the criminal law impose an affirmative duty on someone unless it is their actual profession. In this case a lifeguard would have to make reasonable efforts to save the drowning person, not me.
I just don’t buy the premise of the question. You always try to save them both. Just because I throw my dog onshore first doesn’t mean I’m a bastard, it means I know I can’t do CPR on my dog. Furthermore, why is that idiot out there drowning in the first place? If you follow “watch this” type behavior, sometimes people are just destined to kill themselves. I’m not getting dragged under by one of them.
When someone above threw “retarded” into the mix above I felt a greater sense of responsibility. Then, at least, I know one quality about the so-called “stranger.” Then I feel I have some duty to him/her. Being retarded makes this person more an innocent victim than a “Jackass” co-star.