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Vaniver comments on Closet survey #1 - Less Wrong
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I agree with you that character isn't what gives an entity a right to life. But I don't think that's my argument.
To turn a dog into a person you have to do a lot of work. Turning a copier into a person is similarly difficult. But to turn a baby into a person, you just have to wait a few years. It's automatic, so long as you provide it with sufficient fuel.
If we say "We care deeply about protecting butterflies because they are beautiful, but don't care at all about protecting caterpillars because they are ugly" then others have a strong reason to question how much we actually care about protecting butterflies (or know about the world), because there are no butterflies that weren't caterpillars.
And so even though the caterpillar has none of the outward qualities that make us care about butterflies, our feelings about butterflies should extend to them, because they are butterflies, just not yet. But note that we don't extend those feelings to nectar and leaves and air, even though butterflies are composed of the things that they eat and breathe and cannot exist without them, because nectar and leaves and air are fungible and caterpillars are not.
Your primary argument is "caterpillars are ugly," and I agree with that. My claim is that argument is insufficient to reach the conclusion that we should not protect caterpillars: you have to show that caterpillars are not butterflies, and that must be done in such a way that is consistent with the statement "I care about protecting butterflies."
Similarly, we care about persons, and because we do that we should care about babies that turn into persons, even if they aren't persons yet, because those babies are not fungible. When I ask the question "when did I awaken as a person with a mind?" I might point to my earliest memories or when I began thinking independently or some other milestone- but when I ask the question "when did I begin as a continuous being?" there seems to be one obvious answer, and it's when my DNA was assembled for the first time.
If your standard is that something has to be sapient right now in order for it to have any protection, that opens the door to a number of horrors. Can someone kill a sleeping human without moral culpability because while asleep a human only has character, not personality? What about if that human has suffered irreparable necrosis of most brain tissue? If your answers for those differed, it's probably because those represent very different expectations about the future- the sleeping human will probably awaken shortly and resume being a person, but a human with a necrotic brain probably doesn't have any personhood left in them. And so to treat a baby like a human with a necrotic brain is to ignore the important thing that makes us value sleeping humans- the future.
Is your answer any different for identical twins, who of course only separate after fertilization? Conjoined twins that don't fully separate? How about chimeras? (Yes, there have been documented human examples.)
Yes; if I had a twin, my obvious answer would be when I separated from my brother. Were I a chimera, I suspect I would have researched the issue more extensively than I have now, but at my present level of understanding it still seems like there's a discontinuous event- when the cells fuse together to form one organism.
It seems to me that you can find a discontinuous event for most person precursors, and the discontinuity is important for that question (because the components were continuous beforehand, and the composite is continuous afterwards). The main counterexample I can think of is clones- if I create a thousand copies of my DNA and implant them in embryos scrubbed of DNA, then they seem fungible in a way that a thousand unique fertilized embryos are not. And then, because they are fungible, I would ascribe to the group of them the specialness of a single fertilized embryo, and would only have qualms about destroying the last one (or perhaps last few). Note that as soon as they begin to develop, they begin to lose their fungibility (and we could even quantify that level of fungibility/uniqueness), and could eventually become unique people (that share the same genes).
Likewise, the position "every sperm is sacred" seems mistaken because sperm are by nature fungible (and beyond that, we can complain about the word sacred).
In what way are sperm fungible? There is usually a wide variety of difference between two random ones from the same person. After all, half the genetic variability of two siblings is due to the difference in sperm.
It's true that differences are such that we can't easily tell much difference between any two sperm (of the same sex and chromosome number) -- but the same is true of a just fertilized zygote or just divided embryo, which you appear to count as non-fungible when you say that "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."
It seems that "fungibility" needs to be treated as a continuum. I think that just about all reasonable criteria for deciding this turn out on closer inspection to be fairly continuous.
Agreed.
It mostly seems that way because they're massively overproduced, but you are right to question that.
I think I'm going to turn to my claim about future development as important in identifying sperm as more fungible and fertilized eggs and beyond as less fungible, but I agree that claim is weaker than I thought it was when I made it.