PhilGoetz comments on A Normative Rule for Decision-Changing Metrics - Less Wrong

1 Post author: FrankAdamek 05 August 2009 05:07AM

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Comment author: PhilGoetz 05 August 2009 07:56:51PM 1 point [-]

Are you making the error that all humans must be persons for all definitions of "person"?

That is the usual form that this error takes. If you choose to define people differently, but still as a binary predicate, you're just going to have some other horrible results elsewhere in your ethical system.

Comment author: Alicorn 05 August 2009 07:59:00PM 2 points [-]

If you choose to define people differently, but still as a binary predicate, you're just going to have some other horrible results elsewhere in your ethical system.

I'd like to see some support for this.

Comment author: Jonathan_Graehl 05 August 2009 10:24:49PM 3 points [-]

It's much nicer to be able to say that a sperm+egg only gradually become a person, than to have to argue about when its personhood transitions from 0 to 1.

Comment author: Alicorn 05 August 2009 11:12:38PM *  1 point [-]

I don't think this eliminates much real inconvenience, although it might soothe ruffled feathers in very superficial discussions. If you can have fractional people, that creates the following problems:

  • The temptation to do math with them.
  • The same sort of icky skeeviness you get when you read history books and note that at one time, for population count purposes, blacks counted as 3/5 of a person each.
  • Disagreement about whether someone is 1/2 or 5/8 of a person could easily get as heated as disagreement about whether they are a person or not.
  • Depending on what factors increase or decrease personhood, widespread acceptance of a belief in fractional people could lead to attempts to game the system and be "personier".
Comment author: Cyan 05 August 2009 11:24:23PM *  2 points [-]

The idea of fractional people is less common that the idea that personhood is a cluster of properties in thingspace, and various beings partake of those properties to a greater or lesser extent.

This seems to carve reality at its joints more than the idea of fractional people, but is certainly still problematic.

Comment author: gwern 06 August 2009 11:43:30AM 1 point [-]

It may seem difficult, but we already, in practice, have many classes of fractional persons and it doesn't seem too problematic.

Juveniles, for example, or the handicapped (who have rights in varying degrees - a permanent vegetable doesn't have the right to not be killed by another person, but a low-functioning autistic most certainly does); and past examples of attempts to make someone personier haven't been too bad. (I think here of Terri Schiavo, and the attempts by right-wingers to make her seem less brain-dead than she was - remember Frist's diagnosis-via-videotape?)

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