Hmmmmmmmmmm........Not long ago, I was giving a lecture on animal rights at a local college. I was arguing that the use of animals in biomedical research could not be justified. During the question and answer period, one of the students asked, "If you were forced to choose between a stranger and a dog, which would you choose?" Now, if I had a nickel for every time I was asked that over the years, I could probably afford to have retired years ago.I am sure that the student who asked the question on this particular occasion was in earnest, but I am sure that virtually everyone else who has ever asked me that question also asked it seriously and sincerely. The problem is that this question can do little to help us to understand the issues involved in the human/animal relationship.Let's think about it for a second.First of all, the choice is illusory in a very practical sense. It is very difficult--if not impossible--to show any clear causal link between the use of animals in research and finding cures for human diseases. There is considerable and legitimate controversy about the precise role that animals have played in this respect. To suggest that we are generally confronted with the real choice of a dog's life or a stranger's life is simply not accurate.But let's assume that the hypothetical is not as ridiculous as it is in fact. Let us assume just for argument that we are confronted with a real choice of which life to save--a stranger's or a dog's life. For example, researchers have been saying for a decade now that they are on the verge of a successful cross-species organ transplant, but these have thus far been a miserable failure. It is, I suppose, logically possible at least that science will one day progress to the point where it will be possible to transplant an organ successfully from a nonhuman to a human. And now you are confronted with the following choice: do you kill the dog or the pig or the chimpanzee to save a stranger?Why of course you would kill the animal to save a stranger.But think about it. Most people, if confronted with a choice of whether to save their child or someone else's child, or a thousand other children, would choose to save their own over ALL others. That is simply how people behave and that behavior is understandable. We favor ourselves and those close to us over others. But that understandable favoritism should not--indeed, cannot--serve as the basis for social policy. After all, just because you would choose your kid's life over that of your neighbor's kid in a situation of true emergency does not mean that you would favor allowing certain kids to be sacrificed for other kids as a matter of social policy.Consider how this false choice can be manipulated to work in other ways that should justify our suspicion about it. Assume that you are in a lifeboat with a dog, not just any dog but a longtime and deeply loved canine companion. The third occupant in the boat is Jim Finn. There is enough food and water only for two people. This is a true emergency. Whom do you ask to leave the lifeboat? Or do you yourself commit suicide and jump overboard? I know which option that I believe most desirable in that particular emergency situation, but that does not mean that I would be in favor of a rule of social policy that said that it was always OK to sacrifice the interests of all crappy fullbacks over all dogs. But, in the case of my dog or Jim, I am simply responding by favoring someone I love, someone I care about, a nonhuman member of my family, over a stranger.When someone asks the question "a stranger or a dog," that does not, I am afraid, settle the question of whether animals have rights. The implication of the false choice, however, very much begs that very question simply by assuming that it is always inappropriate to undervalue the life of an animal over that of a human. Sure, we have been taught by both the religious and the scientific that it is somehow blasphemous or anti-intellectual to question human superiority. But human superiority is a normative myth made up and pushed by humans. We all think that each of us, however low our level of functioning, is "superior" to every other animal, however developed its functioning. But that is just yet another human prejudice, quite similar to the view, still held by certain fascist types that any white male is "superior" to any person of color. It is a prejudice. And all prejudices need to be examined. Especially the ones that we all share.There may be cases where the dog in the lifeboat is a healthy puppy and the human being "alive" but in a state of irreversible coma. In such a case, to say that morality requires that you systematically decide in favor of brain-dead humans means that we need to examine our moral notions with a bit more scrutiny.Finally, I fail to understand how whatever we would do in a true emergency in which we had to make a choice between a stranger and a dog is relevant to whether we should continue to engage in the activity that consumes the most animal life: the eating of meat. When you sit down to dinner tonight, you will probably not be eating in a lifeboat and fighting for your food with a hungry canine companion. There is no moral emergency. And, therefore, we cannot use any such moral emergency to justify eating meat, which is neither necessary nor even desirable for human health.
So, Does that mean it just comes down to personal preference?... to answer your question, a dog can't provide for a family the way the stranger may be able to. Instead of looking for the bad in everyone, maybe you should look for the good.
I would have read it all in full if I had my ADD medicine, but the part I did read.... ohh, check it out, a penny.
Regardless, I save the human being.
