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CronoDAS comments on Closet survey #1 - Less Wrong
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Here's something else I can't normally say in public:
Infants are not people because they do not have significant mental capacities. They should be given the same moral status as, say, dogs. It's acceptable to euthanize one's pet dog for many reasons, so it should be okay to kill a newborn for similar reasons.
In other words, the right to an abortion shouldn't end after the baby is born. Infants probably become more like people than like dogs some time around two years of age, so it should be acceptable to euthanize any infant less than two years old under any circumstances in which it would be acceptable to euthanize a dog.
Do you really deny that there are probably benefits, given limits to average human condition, to at least some hard legal lines corresponding to continuous realities?
/me shrugs... I suppose it is useful to have a line, and once you decide to have a line, you do have to draw it somewhere, but I don't see why viability is a particularly meaningful place to draw it.
Similar arguments are often used to argue in favor of animal rights; some humans don't have brains that work better than animals' brains, so if humans with defective or otherwise underdeveloped brains (the profoundly mentally retarded, infants, etc.) have moral status, then so do animals such as chimpanzees and dogs.
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_marginal_cases
I would put the cutoff at ~1 week after birth rather than 2 years, simply for a comfortable margin of safety, but yes.
However, as I've written about before elsewhere, this kind of thinking does lead to the amusing conclusion that cutting off a baby's limb is more wrong than killing it (because in the former case there's a full-human who's directly harmed, which is not true in the latter case).
You say that like it's an unexpected conclusion. Which is more wrong: cutting off one of a dog's legs, or euthanizing it? Most people, I suspect, would say the former.
What happens is that we apply different standards to thinking, feeling life forms of limited intelligence based on whether or not the organism happens to be human.
Personally, I would say that neither of those is wrong (per se, anyway), and I don't think the situations are very analogous. But I certainly agree with your last sentence (both that we apply different standards, and that we shouldn't).
This suggests the following argument: if it's wrong to cut off a baby's limb, surely (the possibility of negative quality of life aside) it's wrong to give the baby a permanent affliction that prevents it from ever thinking, having fun, etc? That's exactly the kind of affliction that death is.
I think many philosophical questions would be clearer, or at least more interesting, if we reconceptualized death as "Persistent Mineral Syndrome".
No, because the baby (by assumption) has no moral weight. The entity with moral weight is the adult which that baby will become. Preventing that adult from existing at all is not immoral (if it were, we'd essentially have to accept the repugnant conclusion), whereas causing harm to that adult, by harming the baby nonfatally, is.
Well, on this view the baby does grow into an adult, it's just that the adult is a death patient (and, apparently, discriminated against for this reason).
Too pseudo-clever?
This isn't an argument for death being the worst of the possible outcomes. For example, you may be turned into a serial killer zombie, which is arguably worse than being dead.
There should be an option to downvote your own comments.
To achieve the same effect with current technology, upvote everyone else.
Do you mean that you no longer believe that being a serial killer zombie is arguably worse than being dead? I believe that.
Who do I get to kill as said zombie?
Being turned into a serial killer zombie actually sounds pretty awesome, assuming an appropriate soundtrack.
I didn't present it as one. I agree death isn't the worst of the possible outcomes.
In America, infants have a special privileged moral status, as evidenced by the "Baby On Board" signs people put on their autos. "Oh, there's a baby in that car! I'll plow into this car full of old people instead."
Here's why this is distasteful:
That infant has either experienced enough to affect their development, or has shown individuality of some kind that will be developed further as they mature. An infant is always in the stage of 'becoming,' and as such their future selves are to some degree already in evidence. Lose the infant, lose the future -- and that is the loss that most people find tragic.
My daughter was showing personality and preferences in the womb. Kicking in time with music she liked (which she continued to like after birth), kicking out of time with music she didn't like (which she continued to dislike after birth).
I was amazed. I'd had this vague notion that babies were sort of uninteresting blobs and didn't manifest a personality until maybe a year old. I have no idea why I thought that, but I was utterly wrong.
Of course, I am strongly predisposed to think highly of my offspring in all regards, and I do try to allow for this. But from birth on, she was manifesting sufficient personality for us to regard her as an individual human with her own preferences. Waiting until age two years to accept such a thing is simply incorrect.
"Responds to musical stimuli", assuming it's true, is hardly an argument about being a person. A parrot could have similar ability to discriminate between types of music, for all I know.
Edit in response to downvoting: Seriously. There could be correct arguments for your statement, but this is clearly not one of them. This is a point of simple fact: ability to discriminate types of music is not strong (let alone decisive) evidence for the property of being a person. Non-person things can easily have that ability. That this fact argues for a conclusion that offends someone's sensibilities (or even a conclusion that is clearly wrong, for other reasons!) is not a point against the fact.
It was in response to the assertion that babies could reasonably not be regarded as individual humans until age two. That assertion is ridiculous for all sorts of reasons. It was also noting that until I had actual experience of a baby, my assumptions had also been ridiculous, and that really doesn't need me putting "and by the way, it's possible that you're just saying something simply incorrect due to lack of experience" on the front. I am finding your response difficult to distinguish from choosing to miss the point.
This still entirely misses the point: "responds to musical stimuli in the same way" is an argument about continuity of identity. If someone at 3 years old is a person, and they're the same just smaller (both physically and mentally) at 1 year old and at -6 months old, then arguments about their personhood at 3 years old apply (though in a limited sense) at 1 year old or -6 months old.
I can't think of a situation where I would be willing to accept the death/murder of a fetus or infant where I wouldn't be willing to accept the death/murder of an adult. How low does your discount rate have to be where you would be willing to kill a one year old but not willing to kill a three year old?
Counterpoint that it does in fact address the point: write half a dozen different programs that can analyse recordings of music and output a beat that is in time. Run these programs on half a dozen different computers and try to claim that responding the same way is decisive evidence of continuity of identity across all computers and programs.
You are opposed to abortion? It seems to me the majority of abortion cases do not constitute moral grounds for the death of an adult. Not a judgement of your possible views, just interested to see if the reasoning is consistent.
Emphasis mine. Illustrative examples are generally not decisive evidence. I have yet to come across someone with significant experience around infants who believes they don't have personalities until ~2 years old (or whenever infanticide proponents think they develop them), and so until I come across someone with that opinion I feel justified in attributing that opinion to ignorance rather than insight.
I am (and should be) skeptical of someone who says "that doesn't convince me" instead of "my experience is different." The first response, which is generally accompanied by hypotheticals instead of examples, does not require any knowledge to create. Generally, experience cannot be conveyed by a few illustrative examples; one should not expect to be convinced by evidence when that evidence is hard to transfer. How, exactly, should one compress memories of interactions with another person over the course of years to transmit to others?
I also find it interesting you have moved the issue from "demonstrates persistent preferences for particular kinds of music" to "detects a beat"- was that intentional? Because if you wrote a program that could classify music into types it didn't like and types it did, and the classification was predictable/sensible, I wouldn't have a problem saying that your program preferred one kind of music to another, and that the program is the same even if you run it on a succession of computers with improving hardware.
I consider abortions of both the spontaneous and intentional varieties to be tragic. "Accept" was probably a poor word to use because I am not currently in favor of criminalizing abortion and I feel the best response to a great many tragedies is coping. When asked for advice, I advise against abortion but do not rule it out and do not seek to coerce others into avoiding it. My feelings (and advice) on suicide are broadly similar, and so perhaps it would be most illuminating to say I compare it to suicide rather than to homicide.
Yes. David_Gerard said:
Kicking out of time doesn't suggest she doesn't like it as much as it suggests she is failing to kick in time. Which is weak evidence that all she is doing is finding a beat in time with the music.
And all the people I have met who have had significant experience around animals believe they have personalities from birth - I am inclined not to trust experience in this matter because of the almost-certain anthropomorphizing that is going on.
Why shouldn't animals have distinct personalities from each other? It doesn't take that much brainpower before you can start introducing differences in behavior between specimens without causing their methods of interaction to collapse.
See my response to Vaniver, but in a nutshell: animals do have distinct personalities, but not in the same sense of the word we have when we talk about embryos and babies having the right to live because they have personality.
Not the first time on this site that someone has been accused of anthropomorphizing humans.
ETA: remarking upon the absurdity of the phrase, not the absurdity of the notion.
Sure, it looks odd. But as I think you discerned, I think babies don't have much complex agenthood - on the order of domestic animals - and people saying they've experienced babies having complex agenthood are not to be trusted because people also say that the weather has complex agenthood.
Have you heard my new band, Complex Agenthood?
I don't think they were.
Do you have a problem with the idea that animals have continuous "characters" since birth? Because that gets rid of the troublesome word "personality."
The issue of anthropomorphisation is a tricky one. Even when dealing with other humans, there's a massive amount of projection that goes on- but it seems to me we can characterize relationships by how much of the other thing's character you have to generate mentally. For a person you know well, it's probably low, for an animal you know well, it's probably moderate, for a machine you know well, it's probably high. But even your impression of the machine's character isn't 100% your mental invention- if a copier jams when placed in a certain situation due to the placing of mechanical parts inside it, it's practical to describe it as the copier "not liking" that situation despite the copier not being sophisticated enough to "like" or "dislike" things on a level more than "not jamming" or "jamming."
Under such a model, what would matter is not that you've invented 95% of your perception of your relationship with the copier, but whether or not the other 5% that's actually due to the copier is consistent over time.
The word 'personality' is troublesome when applied to animals. I feel like a lot of the opposition to abortion and early infanticide can be sourced from the phrase "unique personality". If you say a baby has personality, you are pre-supposing they are a person, which triggers the ingrained right-to-live reflex. Not questioning the right-to-live reflex at all; I think it's a marvelous thing.
Whatever people mean when they say an animal has personality other than personality - I will use your term character, it seems to capture the essence of the non-anthropomorphic ideas people have about animals and photocopiers. The unique character of a pet animal isn't a strong argument for its right to live, because pets with ailments regularly get put down when the cost for treatment gets into four digits. Also, an animal's character is not a good argument against eating it, because >95% of the world is not vegetarian or vegan.
So I feel like there is some meaning-smuggling going on. The assertion is we shouldn't kill babies because they have personality like us, and the argument holding it up is that they have personality like animals do.
Even accepting the premise that this is an indication of having a distinct personality, I don't think that's an adequate basis to afford infants personhood. Cats have distinct personalities as well, although this fact suggests that we could really use a better word than "personality." In fact, while there might be counterexamples that are not coming to mind, I'm inclined to suspect that every properly functioning vertebrate organism, as well as many invertebrates, has a distinct personality, albeit not necessarily one recognizable to humans.
Which is a really good argument for granting other vertebrates personhood.
Babies can do that? Is it (or something related) something that has been studied? There seem like possible confounding factors regarding this kind of observation but ability to respond overtly like that to stimulus has implications.
IIRC, Pinker in The Blank Slate discusses how babies come out of the womb predisposed for their language's particular set of sounds based on what they could hear of speech in the womb. That's learning based on sounds in the womb, so if they can develop preferences about verbal sounds, not too implausible they could develop preferences about other sounds too.
Meh, this is why I tend to endorse speciesism. I mean I can pretend that I actually value humans over X in a situation because of silly reasons like "intelligence" or ability to suffer or "having a soul" or just mine one excuse after the other, but at the end of the day I'm human so other stuff that I recognize as human gets an instant boost in its moral relevance.
That said, I can further observe that I seem to differentially value various nonhuman species.
Simple speciesism is a step in the direction of capturing that, but it ends up with a list of (species, value) ordered pairs, which is a very clunky way of capturing the information and not very useful for predictive purposes.
OTOH, if I analyze that list for attributes that correlate with high value, I may end up with a list of attributes that I seem to value in isolation (then again, I might not). For example, it might turn out that I value fluffy animals, and social ones, and ones with hands, and ones with faces, and various other things.
If I do this analysis well enough, I might be able to predict how much I would value a novel species based on nothing but an evaluation of this species on those terms ("oh, scale-backed lemoriffs are spiny, asocial, lack hands and faces? I probably won't value a scale-backed lemosaur very much."). Then again, I might discover that there were parameters I hadn't taken into consideration in my analysis, and that when faced with the actual species my value judgment might be completely different because of that. ("wait, you didn't tell me that scale-backed lemoriffs are also about as smart as humans and that 10% of Internet users I enjoy interacting with were in fact scale-backed lemoriffs... crap. Now I wish we hadn't eradicated them. I'll add 'intelligent' to the list next time.")
Given that substantial variance may exist between individuals, isn't birth (or within a day of birth) a rather efficient bright line? I fail to see the gain to permitting more widespread infanticide, even taking your argument as generally correct.
Substantial variance exists between individuals, but it's not such that month-old babies are different enough from fetuses to merit legal protection.
Medical research, perhaps?
There have been several studies indicating that the neocortex is the part of the brain responsible for self-awareness. People with a lesion on the Visual 1 section of their cortex are "blind" but if you toss a ball at them they'll catch it. And if you have them walk through an obstacle-laden hallway, they'll avoid all obstacles, but be completely unaware of having done so. They can see, but are unaware of their own sight. So I would say the point at which a baby cannot be euthanized is dependent on the state of their neocortex. Further study needs to be done to determine that point, but I would say by two years old the neocortex is highly developed.
I guess what would also matter is the relative level of development of the human neocortex at that age as compared to chimpanzees or dogs.