| >The building isn't burning. We don't have to choose between our children and mice. Well we're off to a bad start, because this is just literally incorrect. I remember way back in elementary school we had a fire chief come in and talk about fire safety, about having a plan, etc. Inevitably the question about saving pets comes up, and we heard them talk about how fire safety means prioritizing safety of humans. I just did a quick google about fire safety and pets and if you want to play the Google Stuff game, there are numerous sites with guidance on fire safety that reaffirm this. Secondly, for goodness sake, it's a hypothetical intended to highlight an underlying principle. Because sure, of course you want to save everybody in all cases. But insisting that you don't even want to consider the premise of a hypothetical is just a fundamental misunderstanding of the entire point of the hypothetical that is focused on precisely the situations where you don't have that luxury of avoiding all possible harms. Despite your protestations to the contrary, our lives are entangled with the lives of animals in ways that present tradeoffs. Here on HN there was recently an article about the beneficial impact of wolves on ecosystems, in part because they hunt deer, and make driving safer for humans. Figuring out how to protect Atlantic Salmon in rivers depends upon "cover species" such as eels and other fish, so that predators don't just focus on salmon. Indigenous tribes support protections for Atlantic salmon in part because they personally benefit from having salmon available as a natural resource they can fish for. Only in the context of an internet comment section would somebody seriously try to insist that we aren't interrelated in these ways, that we don't have to think about these choices, and expect it to be treated like a respectable position. |