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Children choose to save dogs over humans, adults chose 1 human over 100 dogs

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Re: Children choose to save dogs over humans, adults chose 1 human over 100 dogs

#121

Post by athriren »

bigbubba wrote: post #8

Children are ethically immature? Who could have guessed?!?

your entire thread treats the premise of the paper as inane or making a moral implication about what this phenomenon means, but it is actually useful to know that value for human life over other life is socially conditioned.

if you treat it as a given that value for human life is innate then your society may fail to foster the conditions which promote human flourishing. many adults are also ethically immature and if the people who all do care about human life all say “well of course human life is valuable, it is stupid to study” then all those ethically immature adults spend their entire lives trampling on everyone else.

Re: Children choose to save dogs over humans, adults chose 1 human over 100 dogs

#122

Post by serenloss »

mcny wrote: post #87
ourmandave wrote: post #27

This is why we don't give a trolley license to 6-year-olds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem

Lets not be too hasty on this. There are over seven (over eight?) billion (with a B) humans. There are fewer than a billion dogs. Pretty sure the answer is clear: prefer saving dog lives over human lives. Now, if it was chicken vs humans, of course, save human lives. Now take this to another extreme, would you rather save the life of ONE giant panda or one hundred humans? I think all reasonable people will press the…

While no less arbitrary, your metric for comparison seems shallow. I had already decided the panda should die before you finished that question, not the other way around.

The panda won’t be missed by many.

Re: Children choose to save dogs over humans, adults chose 1 human over 100 dogs

#123

Post by mike00632 »

arcturus17 wrote: post #44
notRobot wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, but the question is "is valuing all lives regardless of species ethically immature?"

No, that's not really the question - the question is whether kids can reason morally, which they can't. And it's not that they value all lives equally, it's that they value dogs over humans.

It's more likely that the bulk of adults have stopped reasoning morally and instead go with socially prescribed conclusions. I mean, how else would you explain the killing if trillions of land animals each year?

Re: Children choose to save dogs over humans, adults chose 1 human over 100 dogs

#124

Post by mike00632 »

giantg2 wrote: post #108
minkowski wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Setting aside the obvious questions about how wild vs farmed animals are raised, wolves don't have a choice about what to eat, while humans do. Even if we wanted to improve the status of wild animals, murdering wolves isn't obviously the best way.

So what if they don't have choice? If a mentally deranged person commits a crime because they didn't have a choice, we still remove them from doing further harm from others. Would you not kill a wolf attacking a person? If we are saying that animals are equal, then we should also be protecting the innocent prey.

Are you mentally deranged? Is that why you kill animals?

Re: Children choose to save dogs over humans, adults chose 1 human over 100 dogs

#125

Post by tyu2 »

mike00632 wrote: post #123
arcturus17 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's not really the question - the question is whether kids can reason morally, which they can't. And it's not that they value all lives equally, it's that they value dogs over humans.

It's more likely that the bulk of adults have stopped reasoning morally and instead go with socially prescribed conclusions. I mean, how else would you explain the killing if trillions of land animals each year?

Morality doesn't exist outside of "socially prescribed conclusions", it's actually a pure social thing, it has no other function, but to help individuals make socially acceptable choices.

Re: Children choose to save dogs over humans, adults chose 1 human over 100 dogs

#126

Post by mike00632 »

bigbubba wrote: post #50
aphextron wrote: post #14

I got a puppy when the pandemic hit, since I live alone and figured it'd help me cope with the isolation. This is the first pet I've ever owned. I thought that I would be able to "love" it the way other people seem to. But I can't, and until seeing this article I almost felt like that meant I was sociopathic or something. Sure it's cute, but I would also have no hesitation whatsoever in killing it to save the life of…

You're not alone. To be frank, I think much of the apparent love showered on pets by some people is performative. In public, people compete to show off how great they are at pampering their 'furbaby.' Pampering pets has become a fashion.

Having seen many proposal videos I can say with certainty that love between humans is also often performative.

Re: Children choose to save dogs over humans, adults chose 1 human over 100 dogs

#127

Post by athriren »

arcturus17 wrote: post #44
notRobot wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, but the question is "is valuing all lives regardless of species ethically immature?"

No, that's not really the question - the question is whether kids can reason morally, which they can't. And it's not that they value all lives equally, it's that they value dogs over humans.

kids can absolutely reason morally, they just don’t have all the scaffolding to support doing so well or coming to reasonable conclusions. kids even reason about the nature of the terms themselves (especially around christmas: “why do i have to be good? what does being good mean?”).

but the same five year old who is picking the 10 dogs over the 1 human is also grabbing their toy from their little sister and bopping her on the head with it and making her cry, so i am not trying to defend some notion of a developed sense of toddler morality.

Re: Children choose to save dogs over humans, adults chose 1 human over 100 dogs

#128

Post by athriren »

rixrax wrote: post #55

I assume that this study (based on researchers affiliations) was done in US. I’ll hazard that results are heavily skewed by culture. At least for adult results. For example I would wager that dogs life in Asia or Eastern Europe is much cheaper than in the US. Also, I guess they didn’t include some people on ABC7 news comments section in the study who seemingly would sacrifice any number of humans to save a dogs life.

it would be interesting to do something like this across cultures and see if the kids agree, even accounting for variation among the adult populations who are the ones socially conditioning the children.

Re: Children choose to save dogs over humans, adults chose 1 human over 100 dogs

#129

Post by giantg2 »

mike00632 wrote: post #124
giantg2 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what if they don't have choice? If a mentally deranged person commits a crime because they didn't have a choice, we still remove them from doing further harm from others. Would you not kill a wolf attacking a person? If we are saying that animals are equal, then we should also be protecting the innocent prey.

Are you mentally deranged? Is that why you kill animals?

Are you mentally deranged?

Questions like this are ad hominem attacks and pointless for the sake of discussion.

The main reason I, and many others, kill animals is to eat them.

Re: Children choose to save dogs over humans, adults chose 1 human over 100 dogs

#130

Post by MichaelZuo »

hairofadog wrote: post #93

I haven't heard a great argument explaining why human life is objectively more valuable than animal life. The most common argument I hear, even from otherwise thoughtful people I know, is something along the lines of "because one is a human and the other is an animal , duh!" but I don't consider that to be a persuasive argument. Is it because we value organisms that are "smarter"? If that's the case, is the life of a…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_marginal_cases
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