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The Daily Signal
Many People
Would Save Their Dog Over a Stranger. How Do You Fix That?
Dennis Prager
October 10, 2017
A while ago a human-interest story from South Africa was reported
internationally. As described in The Wall Street Journal:
On Aug. 4, Graham and Sheryl Anley, while yachting off the coast of
South Africa, hit a reef, capsizing their boat. As the boat threatened
to sink and they scrambled to get off, Sheryl’s safety line snagged on
something, trapping her there. Instead of freeing his wife and getting
her to shore, Graham grabbed Rosie, their Jack Russell terrier. (One
media account reported that Sheryl had insisted that the dog go first).
With Rosie safe and sound, Graham returned for Sheryl. All are doing
fine.
Since the 1970s, I have asked students if they would first try to save
their drowning dog or a drowning stranger. And for 40 years I have
received the same results: One-third vote for their dog, one-third for
the stranger, and one-third don’t know what they would do.
In The Wall Street Journal column, Robert M. Sapolsky, a professor of
biology and neurology at Stanford University, reported about another
such experiment:
A recent paper by Richard Topolski at George Regents University and
colleagues, published in the journal Anthrozoos, demonstrates this
human involvement with pets to a startling extent. Participants in the
study were told a hypothetical scenario in which a bus is hurtling out
of control, bearing down on a dog and a human. Which do you save? With
responses from more than 500 people, the answer was that it depended:
What kind of human and what kind of dog?
Everyone would save a sibling, grandparent or close friend rather than
a strange dog. But when people considered their own dog versus people
less connected with them—a distant cousin or a hometown stranger—votes
in favor of saving the dog came rolling in. And an astonishing 40
percent of respondents, including 46 percent of women, voted to save
their dog over a foreign tourist.
To his credit, Sapolsky is not pleased with these results. He concludes:
We can extend empathy to another organism and feel its pain like no
other species. But let’s not be too proud of ourselves. As this study
and too much of our history show, we’re pretty selective about how we
extend our humaneness to other human beings.
So, then, the most important question for human beings to ask is how we
teach ourselves to “extend our humaneness to other human beings.”
Or, to pose the question within the framework of the dog-stranger
question: How do we convince people to save a human being they do not
know rather than the dog they do know and love?
There is only one way.
We need to teach—as we did throughout American history until the
1960s—that human beings are created in God’s image and animals are not.
That is the only compelling reason to save a human being you don’t love
before the dog you do love.
What we have here is the classic tension between feelings and
values—or, more precisely, between feelings and revelation (i.e.
divinely revealed values).
All of us feel more for a being we love than for a being we don’t know,
let alone love. Therefore something must supersede our feelings. That
something must be values.
But these values must be perceived as emanating from something higher
than us—higher than our opinions, higher than our faculty of reason,
and even higher than our conscience.
And that higher source is God.
Once again, let us be clear: There is no compelling reason to save the
stranger first, except for the assertion that human life is infinitely
precious, and infinitely more precious than that of animal life.
Even those who vote to save their dog first live by this assertion.
After all, nearly all of them are meat eaters: They have others kill
animals for their culinary pleasure, but they would never countenance
killing humans for their culinary pleasure.
It is only when their heart gets involved that they abandon their
belief that the value of human life is greater than that of animal life.
Without revelation, we cannot know what is right (we can have opinions
and beliefs about morality but not moral knowledge). And even if we
could know what is right without revelation, our feelings too often
overwhelm that knowledge.
I, too, love my dogs. But I believe that God demands I save any of you
first.
The results of all these polls provide examples of the terrible moral
price we pay thinking that secularism is as good a guide to moral
behavior as revelation.
If you don’t believe me, pose the dog-stranger question to 10 people
who believe Genesis is divine writ and 10 people who believe the Bible
is written entirely by men.
When you tally the results, you will feel safer swimming among
religious Jews and Christians.
Read this and other articles at The Daily Signal
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