If there were both a dog and a baby dying, and you could only save one, which would you choose?
People are always asking variations on this dilemma in the context of animal rights because for most people the answer is simple — our moral intuitions tell us that regardless of what sort of moral principles or system we subscribe to, the answer is clearly the baby.
Animal rights types tend to disagree. Tom Regan was famously asked if he were aboard a lifeboat and had to throw either a dog or a baby overboard, which one he’d choose. He answered, “(If) it were a retarded baby, and a bright dog, I’d save the dog.”
That was bad enough, but University of Texas-El Paso philosophy professor Steven Best apparently won’t even be bothered with concerns over whether or not the infant is retarded and/or the dog is especially bright.
According to the Daily Iowan, Best recently appeared at the University of Iowa and,
His statements generated a flurry of questions and criticism from the audience, which was made up of doctors, psychology students, animal-rights activists, and medical students. “If you saw a baby dying and a dog dying, which would you save?” one audience member asked.
“You need to be more specific with your question,” Best replied. If a house with his dog and someone he didn’t know was burning, he said he would save his dog, prompting another wave of gasps.
Best was talking at the University of Iowa — and I’m not making this up — as part of that university’s celebration of the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. According to the Daily Iowan,
Demanding the “total pursuit of animal emancipation,” he praised the front’s actions and compared the freeing of animals to the Boston Tea Party and the Underground Railroad. Best said no progress can come about without a large movement, even if it means violence, but called death threats toward researchers “problematic.” He contended that the Animal Liberation Front was not violent.
“The animal-rights movement is growing whether you like it or not – it’s unstoppable,” he said in his opening remarks at the IMU. His lecture, “The New Abolitionism: Civil Rights, Animal Liberation, and Moral Progress,” drew an audience of more than 100 as part of the UI Martin Luther King Human Rights Week.
“Real violence is what people do to animals,” he said, acknowledging that his definition differs from King’s. “Violence is not always right – yet it’s not always wrong, either.”
The sad thing is that the people in attendance were apparently shocked that such views are held by people in academia. In fact I’ve had a number of academics complain in e-mail that I’m invoking a straw man when I claim that it won’t be long before you have biologists and others at universities under siege from animal rights terrorists, while across campus animal rights philosophers and others will provide an intellectual defense that such violence is, in fact, peaceful protest.
Hopefully these folks will wake up before its too late.
Source:
Animal-rights speaker provokes disbelief. Julie Zare, The Daily Iowan, January 21, 2005.