You would let a person die to save your pet?
If someone told me they don't love their child but consider it cute I'd also wonder if they should remain the child's guardian.
This is the problem. Children are not pets, and pets are not children. Children are humans, and human lives are infinitely more valuable than the lives of animals. Children have personalities, consciousness, and intelligence. They have the capacity to give and receive actual love. They are fundamentally different things. I would never, ever feel that way about a child.
Maybe only humans experience human love. But animals have emotions that seem similar.
So yeah. I'd consider it.
How do you choose to save a stranger's life without knowing anything about them and what they're like?
No. Because I still would have made the best decision possible at the time given all available information. This is the same argument essentially as the death penalty question. Someone else's violent act can never vindicate your own. That's only valid in the case of immediate self defense. Although if you take this argument to it's logical conclusion, which would be "Kill a thousand dogs, or hang Hitler", I'd have to admit it becomes pretty indefensible. So the real moral choice probably lies somewhere in-between.
>How do you choose to save a stranger's life without knowing anything about them and what they're like?
It's faith in the fact that any single given human life has more intrinsic value than any number of any animals. I'm essentially putting myself in that situation. Would I be ok with dying to save a dog? No, never. And so I extend that to every other person. Obviously this only works with animals. Would I feel the same about a person I love instead? Absolutely not.
Thanks again.
Say you choose your dog over a stranger. Then your dog went and killed another person. Would you regret your decision?
But yes, I would regret it if he went and killed someone after I chose his life over a human's.
I would also deeply regret it if I chose a stranger over my dog and then that person turned out to be a Bad Guy.
Statistically speaking, dogs are much less likely per capita to injure/kill a human, than a human doing the same to another human.
Humans are violent apes, whereas dogs (with very few breeds being exceptions) have been bred for 5,000 years for docility/companionship.
