Reflective Journal

I thought it was very interesting when we discussed the burning house dilemma in class; this dilemma was also brought up in one of my psychology classes to prove the theory of Social Darwinism. However instead of asking whether or not we would save our dog or our child, or our dog and a random child, we were asked whether we would save our mother or our significant other. The catch in this situation was that we would only have known our significant other for about a year. It seemed obvious to me that almost all the students in the class would inevitably choose to save their parent, and the results proved just this. Our professor stated; however, that if this were to happen in real life more people would end up saving their significant other. He said this would be the case because our instincts would lead us to save the person that we could potentially procreate with rather than someone we could not. I found this to be rather disturbing, and wish there were someway to test this hypothesis in a more real life matter rather than asking it in a philosophical way. Perhaps this type of experiment could be tested in some sort of virtual reality simulation, in order for experimenters to achieve more accurate results.

Since I had seen this dilemma before, I guessed that most people would choose to save the child in both situations. However considering that the majority of people in our class are very involved in animal rights, I hypothesized that more, but probably not the majority, of people would save their dog rather than a random child, than would be the case in the general population. I was somewhat surprised when the majority of people chose to save their dog. Later I went online and looked up this dilemma and found that it is often used to prove the hierarchy of moral value in various situations. In this circumstance it was used to prove the theory of speciesism. In some cases it used to show that animal rights activists can be hypocritical as most people would still save a child over their dog; even though, they advocate the equality of species. Again it is very interesting to find that this finding did not hold true in our class, as when we had a moral attachment to the dog and not to the child the majority of us chose to save the dog. I am curious though to see what the results in our classroom would be if it were both a random child and a random dog in the burning house.