I reject treating human life, or preservation of the human life, as a "terminal goal" that outweighs the "intermediate goal" of human freedom.
Hmm... not a viewpoint that I share, but one that I empathise with easily. I approve of freedom because it allows people to make the choices that make them happy, and because choice itself makes them happy. So freedom is valuable to me because it leads to happiness.
I can see where you're coming from though. I suppose we can just accept that our utility functions are different but not contradictory, and move on.
In some sense, they are contradictory. Or at least mutually opposed.
That is, if you and I uncovered the Visitors' plan to forcibly prevent humans from engaging in any activity that lowers our expected lifespans, you would (I infer) endorse that plan, and I might not. Depending on the situation, I might even act to disrupt that plan, and you might act to stop me.
Of course, that's not going to happen. But you might vote and donate money to support criminalizing unhealthy practices (because doing so buys life at the cost of mere freedom) while I vote/donate t...
Abortion is one of the most politically-charged debates in the world today - possibly the most politically charged, though that's the subject for another thread. It's an excellent way of advertising whether you are Green or Blue. As a sceptical atheist who thinks guns should be banned and gay marriage should be legalised, I naturally take a stance against abortion. It's easy to see why: a woman's freedom is less important than another human's right to live.
Wait... that sounds off.
I really am an atheist, with good reasons to support gun bans and gay marriage. But while pondering matters today, I realised that my position on abortion was a lot more shaky than it had previously seemed. I'm not sure one way or the other whether a mother's right to make decisions that can change her life trumps the life of a human embryo or fetus. On the one hand, a fetus isn't quite a person. It has very little intelligence or personality, and no existence independent of its mother, to the point where I am comfortable using the pronoun "it" to describe one. On the other hand, as little as it is, it still represents a human life, and I consider preservation of human life a terminal goal as opposed to the intermediate goal that is personal freedom. The relative utilities are staggering: I wouldn't allow a mob of 100,000 to kill another human no matter how much they wanted to and even if their quality of life was improved (up to a point). So: verify my beliefs, LessWrong.
If possible, I'd like this thread to be not only a discussion about abortion and the banning or legalisation thereof, but also about why I didn't notice this before. For all my talk about examining my beliefs, I wasn't doing very well. I only believed verifying my beliefs was good; I wasn't doing it on any lower level.
This post can't go on the front page, for obvious reasons: it's highly inflammatory, and changing it so as not to refer to a particular example would result in one of the posts I linked to above.