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I would also answer "Human lives are worth the same as animal lives", simply because Humans are animals.
Never trust the answers to questionnaires with such basic mistakes.
Yeah, I'd like to see the results from the question : I have a gun pointed at your long time childhood friend and one pointed at this cow, now is this cow's life worth the same as your friends life?
I have a gun pointed at your dog and another pointed at a guy that's going around eating people's pets...
You are mixing the rational component of the question in general with the emotional attachments of particular situations. This kind of "I know it in my heart" drive is the same that drives things like racism and xenophobia.
Their point still works though, just reword it for less unnecessary baggage if you prefer.
Do you press the button which saves some random human somewhere in the world, or the button which saves some random cow? I'm pretty sure most people choose the human
Most people would also press a button that will save a random human of their country over a random human from another country. Does that mean people have different value depending on which country they are from?
Well, yes, not surprising at all. It's a monkeysphere thing.
(That article really changed how I view people.)
That's so weird. I would just pick one at random because they are both people I know nothing about besides country status. I understand emotional bias (choosing to save a friend over another random human, and frankly I can understand why: both are a life saved, but one is a person whose death will cause you suffering, and you presumably think the friend is a good person while the random human is a total wildcard). But with the country one… where is the benefit to you, hmm? Where's the educated guess based on your judgment that this person is good? I don't think people from my country are more or less moral than someone from another country. And given how many people there are both are probably strangers. I get no benefit or satisfaction from picking the human of my own country over someone else…
What if your childhood friend is the cow and the other entity at gunpoint is an unfamiliar human?
The cow of course, fuck that person.
A better comparison would be if the human in question was a random dude you pulled off the streets. If this was a cow that I grew up with and shared a bond with, then yeah, I'd obviously pick the cow over some dude I don't know. If it's a childhood friend versus a random cow I don't know? Same thing but in reverse.
You know what it means, though.
True. But I would never answer a survey based on my presumed understanding of the surveyors intentions. I would always answer exactly on the wording in the question.
If you answer on what you think the question means, and not as it is written, you throw a lot of noise into the statistics.