Save women first? Not in modern Britain…

IT’S a noble principle from our seafaring past – in perilous situations, women and children should be saved first.

But it seems that in modern Britain, it no longer applies.

For while children would still get preferential treatment, women and men are now more likely to be seen as having an equal right to survive, a study suggests.

The trend was seen in many developed countries in research into the moral decision-making of more than two million people around the world.

In France, however, women’s lives are still rated as much more important than those of men.

The research was conducted by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US to help designers create driverless vehicles that can make split-second decisions on what to do in the moments before an accident.

They created computer simulations of scenarios where an accident is imminent and the car must opt for one of two potentially fatal options – for example, swerving towards a couple of people rather than into a large group.

They used data from the survey that highlighted how morality differs around the world. In a ranking of 117 countries, Britain came 71st in sparing the lives of women rather than men, and 34th for saving a child rather than an adult. By contrast, France was in first place for swerving to spare the life of a child over an adult and second for saving a woman.

When it came to sparing a human life over an animal’s, the UK was in 56th place.

Britons were more likely to take no action than in many countries, coming 16th in the rankings of ‘preferring inaction’, compared with 70th for the French. The UK came tenth for preferring to swerve to spare a large number of people rather than fewer.

The researchers found a less pronounced tendency to favour younger people, rather than the elderly, in what they defined as an ‘ eastern’ cluster of countries including many in Asia.

Lead author Dr Edmond Awad, of the MIT Media Lab, said: ‘There are three elements people seem to approve of the most. These were that human lives are spared over animals, the lives of many people are spared rather than a few, and preserving the lives of the young rather than the old.

‘The main preferences were to some degree universally agreed upon. But the degree to which they agree with this or not varies among different groups or countries.’

The study, entitled the Moral Machine Experiment, is published in the journal Nature.