Survival vs. High moral

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Most likely I'd save myself over the other person/people and be miserable living with the guilt for the rest of my life. I think it would be right to save the other people and sacrifice oneself.. I wouldn't be able to do the right thing because of cowardice and selfishness and the survival instinct. I love animals but I certainly wouldn't save a non-human animal's life instead of a human being -myself or anyone else. If it were my mum's life or mine that would be different and I don't know what I'd do. This is assuming we're talking about me vs. a person/people I don't know, as Hanyo *and Dillogic-just saw his post* mentioned.

Yeah, I get that--that you have to know somebody in order to care about them--but I don't really understand why.

I've read that chimps are capable of maintaining about 30 relationships at once; humans, about 120, and the more there are, the shallower they are. Some aspect of the brain leaves us unable to bond with more than a certain number of people at once. So to care about people beyond that limit you have to somehow care about "people in general" or about some abstract concept of a person which you apply to people you don't know.

Most people seem to care to some extent about people they've never met, or nobody would ever send money to feed people halfway across the world. But even then, charities seem to try to establish some kind of personal connection with pictures or videos or just detailed stories about the people they want you to help.

I don't really think it would come down to dry moral reasoning for anybody in a situation like that. It'd be more like, "I don't want to die," or else, "I can't let those people die," and it'd be a lot of emotions and it would depend on which one won out and whether you managed to act quickly enough. I can go and talk about philosophy all I like, but when it comes down to it, it's more of a visceral reaction.

Would it make a difference if you had to, say, watch the people die? Or if you had talked to them, however briefly, before that? If you somehow could know them as well as you know your loved ones, would that change your reaction?

To be perfectly honest I would be willing to sacrifice every human being in the world except for my mother and maybe my father, in exchange for my life. I'd have more difficulty sacrificing an animal in order to live because I generally like and care about animals.

I think the vast majority of people (possibly everyone if you forced them to be honest) would be more than willing to sacrifice everyone they don't care about for themselves. That's just basic survival instinct. I know I would. It doesn't hurt to know what a blessing it would be for the planet either. So 10 000? No problem.

Survival instinct is not an absolute rule, nor the only rule that guides our behavior.

Some people smoke even though they know it raises their cancer risk. Some people don't exercise even though they know it hurts their health. Others drive too fast and ignore their seat belts. Some people go to war, or take dangerous jobs. Some people commit violent crimes; some attempt suicide. All of those things reduce the probability of survival, and people do them anyway.

So I conclude that we are not bound to always do the thing which improves the odds that we will live longer.

I don't like these questions.

I believe in the James Kirk solution to the Kobayashi Maru exercise. Don't accept the conditions. Find another way. If there is no other way, make one. Break the rules to do it.

Throw a person in front of a train to save a group of others? Ridiculous a person can't stop a train! Don't these ethicists know even the most basic phyics? Then they add dumb extras like "it's a very heavy man" --then I can't throw him anywhere! And even a 1,000 pound man is not going to stop a train, even if you can hoist him with a crane and drop him at just the right spot.... A 6-7,000 pound car cant even slow a train, how the heck is a man going to. So then they say something like--you can push him so he falls on the switch that controls the points. Do you know how points operate? Is there a switch? Oh look, it's got a control box wired to the control room... there is a manual override, but the falling fat guy is not going to work it.

The situation is contrived, so I will contrive a solution that saves everyone.

Would I sacrifice my life to save other people? Yes, maybe, depending on the circumstances.

I would sacrifice myself to save my family. I might sacrifice myself to save other people--again, depending on circumstances.

If I knew there was a terrorist nuke in Manhattan and I could stop it from going off but not without receiving a lethal dose of radiation... I would disarm the bomb. And write a letter of apology to my children and ask for their understanding that I had to do it, despite the fact that I was now letting them down by not being there.

I would not allow my kids to die even if it looked like I had choice between saving them and saving 10,000 people (or whatever). It is my duty as their dad to make sure they survive until they are adults and can fend for themselves. I can't imagine that situation really happening, but I would not sacrifice them to have a chance to save others, no.

The problem with these hypotheticals is that life happens so fast and extreme events of the life threatening kind happen so fast--how would you know that your estimation of the situation was correct? What if you sacrificed yourself or threw the fat man in front of the train and then it didn't have the effect you imagined (perhaps you never heard of f=ma or could not imagine the mass of a train.)

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaUM0opLHA0[/youtube]

Throw a man in front of a train! You might as well ask "would you murder someone stupidly because you imagine impossible solutions to bad problems?"

No animal has ever done to me, or contemplated doing to me what humans have. Therefore, I'd save the cat and to hell with the rest of humanity.

I wouldn't normally let anyone else die to save myself - unless the other person were, say, Adolf Hitler. Since I'd go back in time in order to kill Hitler if I could - thus saving millions of lives - I'd be happy to let Hitler die to save myself. Or a few other people like that. (Stalin, Pol Pot, etc.)

But I wouldn't let even Hitler's cat die to save myself. Attack that if you like; the cat is an innocent creature, with no responsibility for Hitler's deeds.

I'm guessing it's the vegetarians who are saying that they would count a cat on the same level as other humans... I disagree; I don't think it's wrong to kill an animal for a good reason (like, you're going to eat it, or that it's going to save people's lives to do it) but I can't exactly disrespect that decision. You'd have to be a vegetarian if you put cats and humans on the same level of value, or it wouldn't be consistent.

I am very aware that animals are vulnerable to abuse and thus should be protected. Very few of them can be said to be sentient in the way humans are, capable of understanding their own existence, and none of those are ones we routinely kill for food. Still, when it comes to animal suffering, it doesn't really matter if they have a the ability to think about their own existence. Suffering exists even in the absence of sentience, and our own ability to think about others' mental states gives us the responsibility to ensure that the animals under our care do not suffer.