Monday, May 30, 2016

WOULD YOU SAVE YOUR PET OR A STRANGER'S CHILD? MORAL DILEMMA

Would You Save a Puppy or a Child From a Burning Building?

Moral Dilemma: If you were in a burning building and had a chance to save either your own pet or a neighbor's child ~  which would you save?

But.. I would like to tally the responses for sociological research on a movie I'm writing.





I guess we are animals, after all, and I shouldn't be so shocked that we might not save the stranger's child.  I am making no moral judgment here.

Here is a great article https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/animals-and-us/201306/would-you-save-puppy-or-child-burning-building


A new study shows when we choose pets over people. 
Posted Jun 17, 2013 


Back To the Burning Building
Now let’s return to the yelping dog and the screaming baby in the burning building. For me, this one is a no-brainer. I am going to grab the kid and head for the nearest exit (even if it was my dog and kid was a brat). The animal activist Joan Dunayer would charge me with being a speciesist for reflexively saving the child. In her book Speciesism, she proposes a different approach to solving tough moral issues involving animals. She says that when faced with rescuing a child or a dog from death by fire you should reach in your pocket for a quarter -- and flip the coin. After all, Dunayer argues, the child and the dog have the same moral value.
I disagree. What do you think?
Hal Herzog is professor of psychology at Western Carolina University and the author of Some We Love, Some We Hate, and Some We Eat: Why It’s So Hard To Think Straight About Animals.