Are people seriously suggesting you need to have children to appreciate the moral choice in the game? Oh my.
The problem is that the choice is meaningless because when you save the girl you get effectively the same resources as if you don't, and you get effectively 99.9% the exact same gaming experience. It has nothing to do with empathy or lack of empathy, it has to do with a blatantly shallow black and white perception of morality. That little girl is there ONLY to manipulate the audience in the most unsubtle way imaginable, and I'm not surprised parents are the easiest to deceive into believing they made a meaningful choice. It has been done in movies for ages, and some people will always appreciate handholding and explicit morality tales over an approach dealing with a plausible reality.
I wouldn't have had a problem with this aspect if it hadn't been for the extreme underlining Irrational did at every chance of the sophisticated moral choices in the game. I personally don't care all that much about this kind of thing, because I don't need games to show me what morality is, but considering the level of hype it's quite disappointing that they couldn't come up with something more interesting than this.
For the choice to have ANY meaning at all, saving girls should have had a significant cost, since that's the core of the dilemma. I'm the kind of guy who plays the good path unvariably, but it would perhaps have made an impact if I felt I had to suffer for my "goodness". With the Adam and extra plasmids I got, I felt I was rewarded for taking the only route that was moral. That's hardly interesting storytelling, but maybe Levine didn't get that far during his stint in Hollywood.