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komponisto comments on Just a reminder: Scientists are, technically, people. - Less Wrong
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Scientists also have highly unrepresentative personalities, high in openness to experience, and tend not to care about conservative values like respect for authority, group loyalty, and various taboos. Delegation of decision-making power to representative samples of elite scientists will thus favor those values more than the policies that would be adopted by a set of comparably informed people with values representative of the population.
This is a good summary of the bioethicists' argument; but I find their argument unconvincing. My suspicion is that the values of "comparably informed people" would inevitably tend to resemble those of scientists -- at least for practical purposes.
Concretely, for instance, it seems that much if not most of the opposition to embryonic stem-cell research is based on a failure to grasp the empirical fact that personhood resides in brain structure: no neurons, no person.
Maybe in principle there could still be moral arguments worth having that don't directly depend on the science; and maybe scientists would be biased toward certain stances in such arguments. But I don't think that's what's really going on here.
[Pedant Alert:]
...the empirical fact that personhood resides in brain structure...
Which specific experiments have shown that there is such a thing as personhood and that it somehow resides in the brain?
The notion of personhood is a philosophical concept, not a scientific one.
Bryan Caplan's research on differences of opinion between expert economists and others finds (in his datasets) that there are big effects of education and IQ, bigger than liberal or conservative ideological effects, but the latter still remain: people with graduate degrees agree more with economists, but conservative PhDs in industry and liberal PhDs in academia tend to disagree with each other.
"a failure to grasp the empirical fact that personhood resides in brain structure: no neurons, no person."
Do you think that personhood is really an 'empirical fact'? How would you empirically measure when a developing fetus or infant's (or toddler's, depending on your view of personhood) brain becomes a person without a value-laden definition? Likewise for temporary or permanent brain damage.
I wouldn't claim that current science easily resolves all questions about personhood; but it does locate the phenomenon within the brain as opposed to anywhere else. Neurons (or, more broadly, things with a similar function) are a necessary condition that may or may not be sufficient. The extent to which a fetus, toddler, or Alzheimer's patient possesses personhood may be legitimately debatable -- but the question of whether or not an embryo is a person is surely settled: it isn't.
I think you have a different concept of 'person' in mind than needed. We can define 'person' as "that which can think, reason, and has personality" or something similar (this is roughly what I think you mean by 'person'), but that isn't really relevant to the question. Like Carl said, we are looking for a value laden definition here - something to tell us whether we should use those embryos or not.
Honestly, all of this definition nonsense is misleading. We don't really care about the definition of 'person.' What we want is to sort out our values. Embryo's certainly aren't in my utility function, and that's all that matters. Defining 'person' is superfluous.
Is personhood really a binary proposition at all, or a matter of degree?
Of course, for almost any non-incoherent definition of personhood, the degree of personhood during the first trimester is roughly nil.
We need laws that incorporate continuous functions.
If personhood resides in brain structure then a brain-in-a-vat would be a person. Presumably its personhood would be postulated on the grounds of it having some sort of subjective experience. But that's not an empirical fact so I don't think personhood residing in brain structure can be classed as an empirical fact either.
if you're treating "brain in a vat=person" as a reductio, you've either got a lot to learn, or you've got a lot of explaining to do before this crowd's going to take you seriously.
It's not an empirical fact that a brain-in-a-vat has subjective experience. It's a thought experiment. Thought experiments don't establish empirical facts.
"It's not an empirical fact that a brain-in-a-vat has subjective experience."
If we could watch what the BIAV gets up to in its simulated world, we could see it interacting with its simulated environment. This would give us the same level of confidence in its having subjective experience as we have for any normal person.