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Bakkot comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012) - Less Wrong
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Greets, all!
I'm a walking stereotype of a LessWrong reader:
I'm a second-year undergraduate student at a decent public university, double majoring in math and computer science and compensating for the relatively unchallenging material even at the graduate level by taking 2-3x the typical workload; this is allowed by my specific college, which is a fantastic program I'd strongly recommend to high school students who happen to be reading this. (I'll happily go in to more depth if for anyone even slightly interested.)
I'm white, male, atheist, libertarian. I intend to sign up for cryonics once I have a job, because I am having tons of fun and want to continue to do so.
I've been reading LessWrong for three or so years, and have by now read all of the sequences and nearly all of the miscellaneous posts, as well as the most highly-rated discussion threads. I've also read and loved MoR. I could not, at this point, tell you how I found either of them.
I read this site, and study rationality, because I want to win.
I hold almost no views which would be notably controversial with the mainstream here, except perhaps these, presented with the hope of inspiring discussion:
(edit: formatting)
ETA: This is the first LW discussion I've participated in, so I hope you'll forgive my using this space to ask about the conventions of the community broadly. If you look below, a lot of my comments are getting voted down. For statements of opinion, this I understand, at least if the convention is "vote down things you disagree with" as opposed to "vote down things which don't contribute to the discussion". But why are my questions voted down? This one, in particular:
which as I type this is at -1.
Please interpret this as an honest question about community standards, not an implicit rebuke or anything like that.
Would you approve of a man killing a child which his wife recently gave birth to, without the mother's permission, on the grounds that he does not believe himself to be the child's father? That's certainly not sadism.
Or, if genetic testing has been done and the child's biological father is known, would you say it should be legal for the father to kill the child... say, because he disagrees with the married couple's religious beliefs and wants to deny them an easy recruit?
No and no. Easily solved by requiring both parents to consent and/or by not defining "parent" to mean "progenitor".
Both seem rather tangential, in any case.
How would you define "parent," then? It's not a tangent, it's an important edge case. I'm trying to understand exactly where our views on the issue differ.
For what it's worth, I agree with you unreservedly on the age discrimination thing. In fact, I think it's the root of a lot of the current economic problems: a majority of the population is essentially being warehoused during their formative years, and then expected to magically transform into functional, productive adults afterward.
Probably we'd be better served by me explaining why think it's a tangent: The issues related to who has the right to kill the baby have to do with harm done to people other than the baby. The core point I was trying to make was that killing a baby isn't inherently wrong in the way that killing an adult is because the baby isn't a person.
Certainly there are issues to be sorted out, in the same way there are issues to be sorted out related to who has the right to kill a pet dog. But if babies were people these wouldn't be important, relatively speaking: killing babies would be wrong for the same reason killing adults is wrong. As such I think they're tangential: unrelated to the question of "is it wrong to kill babies for the reason that babies are people?".
That said: The legal definition is probably adequate; barring that, perhaps we might say the parents are the people to whom responsibility for raising the baby would fall.
Ah, I was wondering how the welcome thread got to more than 500 comments so quickly!
In other posts in this thread I've discussed infanticide, and proposed ways to reduce parental grief in cultures that would adopt it (I didn't say it should be adopted btw). But only now did I remember that the practice of infanticide where others preform the killing (something I proposed down thread as an implementation that would reduce psychological stress) reminded me of the practice of killing "mingi" (cursed) children in Ethiopia. Many of the individuals exposed to outside culture would prefer to adopt it or at least find ways to not kill the children while still severing them from the parents.
While obviously CNN as always has a progressive-Eurocentric-mind-projection-fallacy spin in its reporting and the tribes in question may be just adopting preferences of higher status tribes and groups rather than because not practising it seems so much better than practising it. I do think this is weak evidence that people prefer to live in societies that don't practice infanticide. Also reading some of the accounts has caused me (rightfully or not) to increase the estimated psychological suffering of parents. But consider that this wasn't a choice in most cases, it isn't that large either. I shouldn't be surprised, humans are built to live in a world where life is cheap after all.
I have no doubt that the practice of mingi historically did indeed help the tribe, taken as a whole traditions do tend to be adaptive in the environment in which they where established, but now that their (social) envrionment has changed, the practice seems to be falling out of favour.
Thanks for updating.
We had a couple of fair-sized threads on infanticide before. I suggest that everyone who hasn't seen them yet skims through before posting further arguments.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/2l/closet_survey_1/1ou
http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ww/undiscriminating_skepticism/1rmf
Also: http://lesswrong.com/lw/35h/why_abortion_looks_more_okay_to_us_than_killing/
(Let's collect academic opinions here)
The utilitarian bioethicist Peter Singer claims that it's pretty much OK to kill a disabled newborn, but states that killing normal infants who are impossible for their parents to raise doesn't follow from that, and, while not being as bad as murdering an adult, is hardly justifiable. Note that he doesn't quite consider any wider social repercussions.
http://www.princeton.edu/~psinger/faq.html
More infanticide advocacy here :
Recently, Francesca Minerva published in the Journal of Medical Ethics arguing the case that :
"what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled."
Random press coverage complete with indignant comments
Actual paper, pdf, freely available
In many (most?) countries abortion is normally only allowed in the first few months of pregnancy. (Also, I can't imagine why anyone would want to carry a pregnancy nine months, give birth to a child and then kill it rather than just aborting as soon as possible, anyway.)
Can you imagine how the experiences of childbirth and being the primary caregiver for a newborn might alter someone's desires with respect to bearing and raising a child?
As for bearing, once the child is born that's a sunk cost; as for “being the primary caregiver for a newborn”... Wait. So we're not talking about killing a child straight after birth but after a while? (A week? A month? A year?)
I can't see why that makes a difference in the context of my question, so feel free to choose whichever interpretation you prefer.
For my part, it seems entirely plausible to me that a person's understanding of what it means to be the primary caregiver for a child will change between time T1, when they are pregnant with that child, and time T2, when the child has been born... just as it seems plausible that a person's understanding of what a three-week stay in the Caribbean will be like will change between time T1, when they are at home looking at brochures, and time T2, when their airplane is touching down. That sort of thing happens to people all the time. So it doesn't seem at all odd to me that they might want one thing at T1 and a different thing at T2, which was the behavior you were expressing incredulity about. That seems even more true the more time passes... say, at time T3, when they've been raising the child for a month.
Incidentally, I certainly agree with you that bearing the child is a sunk cost once the child is born. If you're suggesting that, therefore, parents can't change their desires with respect to bearing the child once it's born, I conclude that our models of humans are vastly different. If, alternatively, you're suggesting that it's an error for parents to change their desires with respect to bearing the child once it's born, you may well be right, but in that case I have to conclude "I can't imagine why" was meant rhetorically.
More like I was assuming too much stuff in the implicit antecedent of the conditional whose consequent is “would want”, but yeah, what I meant is that it's an error for parents to change their desires with respect to bearing the child once it's born.
Hmm. Maybe you could've picked out a more respectable source of "press coverage" than the goddamn Daily Mail.
Singer's position is worth quoting at length (emphasis mine):
Singer's position seems to be pretty much exactly mine with one important exception. He thinks that the reason infanticide in general is wrong is because killing someone else's baby is a great wrong to the parent. This I fully agree with and is why I have repeatedly specified that you should only be able to kill your own child. He further thinks that killing any animal is wrong if it could have a happy life if you chose not to kill it, and for this reason he thinks killing infants is wrong. This second position I disagree with, but I suspect almost anyone here who is not a vegetarian also disagrees. daenerys seems to have come to much the same conclusion as Singer.
ETA: I'm having trouble finding philosophers apart from Singer and Tooley who have written on this topic at all, and both seem to have come to roughly the same conclusions that I did. This is kind of unfortunate, because I'm definitely interested in what the other side is - but as things stand, the most strong arguments against infanticide I've seen have already been presented in this thread and have to do with practical concerns, like the risk of increasing sadistic behaviors and the importance of using Schelling points where practical.
ETA2: Here's another paper, which directly addresses Tooley. I can temporarily post it somewhere if people don't have access to JSTOR. The gist of the argument is that Tooley needs to make a consequentialist argument, not just a moral one. The conclusion of the authors is that they don't think such an argument would be hard to make but that Tooley definitely failed to make it. (Incidentally, as far as I can tell and as Multiheaded points out, Singer also fails to spend much consideration on the full societal consequences of legalized infanticide.)
Consider Heinlein:
Good find.
Heinlein and I differ philosophical in a lot of very important ways. For one, the idea of basing morality on "racial survival" terrifies me. (For another, my moral reasoning hasn't lead me to conclude that having a threesome with my 11-year-old genetically modified gender-bent clones would be a fine and dandy thing to do.)
Eh heh heh. So you can be terrified by some kinds of utilitarian reasoning. Well, this one does terrify me too, but in the context of this conversation I'm tempted to cite my people's saying: "What's fine for a Russian would kill a German."
Of course I can. If your core utility function is optimizing something other than mine, it's going to be scary. Mine is optimizing for something that looks roughly like fun, which I imagine is in accordance with almost all of LW. What's yours optimizing for?
It feels pretty complex, and I just self-report as undecided on some preferences, but, although a part of my function seems to be optimizing for LW-"fun" too, another, smaller part is a preference for "Niceness with a capital N", or "the world feeling wholesome".
I'm not good enough at introspection and self-expression to describe this value of "Niceness", but it seems to resonate with some Christian ideals and images ("love your enemies"), the complex, indirect ethical teachings seen in classical literature (e.g. Akutagawa or Dostoevsky; I love and admire both), and even, on an aesthetic level, the modern otaku culture's concept of "moe" (see this great analysis on how that last one, although looking like a mere pop culture craze to outsiders, can tie in into a larger sensibility).
So, there's an ever-present "minority group" in my largely LW-normal values cluster. I can't quite label it with something like "conservative" or "romantic", but I recognize it when I feel it.
...shit, I feel like some kind of ethical hipster now, lol.
Tl;dr: there might be some kind of "Niceness" (permitting "fun" that's not directly fun) a level or so above "fun" for me, just as there is some kind of "fun" above pleasure for most people (permitting "pleasure" that's not directly pleasant). If people don't wirehead so they can have "fun" and not just pleasure, I'm totally able not to optimize for "fun" so I can have "Niceness" and not just "fun".
What benefit, other than satisfaction of sadism, do you see in infanticide of one's own children that wouldn't be satisfied by merely giving them up for adoption?
Look at the youngest children in any adoption photolisting. The kids you usually see there are either part of a sibling group, or very disabled. (Example). There are children born with severe disabilities who are given up by their birth parents and are never adopted. (Example) The government pays foster parents to care for them. That's up to $2,000 per month for care, plus all medical expenses.
Meanwhile, other kids are dying for lack of cheap mosquito nets. This use of money does not seem right to me.
At national level and above, the argument about "use of money" just plain fails. If you're looking for expenses to cut so that the money could be redirected for glaring needs like mosquito nets, foster care can't realistically appear on the cut list next to nuclear submarines and spaceflight.
True. I'd be happy to see those things cut as well. Though foster care is funded at a state level, I believe.
I and others have mentioned some elsewhere in this thread, but more broadly I don't think things should be illegal just because we can't think of a good reason for people to be doing them.
This rule has to be examined very very closely. While it sounds good, it spawns so many strawmen against libertarianism and such, we ought to try and unscrew that applause light of "liberty" from there. Liberty is an applause light to me, too (a reflected one from freedom-in-general), and a fine value it is, but still we'd better clinically examine anything that allows us to sidestep our intuitions so much.
[fucking politics, watch out] *(note that I'm a socialist and rather opposed to libertarianism as well, but I'm very willing to examine and consider its ups and downs)
Well, OK, let's examine it then.
We have some activity.
We see no particular reason to prevent people from doing that activity.
We see no good reason for people to do that activity.
We have a proposed law that makes that activity illegal.
Do I endorse that law?
The only case I can think of where I'd say yes is if the law also performs some other function, the benefit of which outweighs the inefficiencies associated with preventing this activity, and for some reason separating those two functions is more expensive than just preventing the activity. (This sort of thing happens in the real world all the time.)
Can you think of other cases?
I agree with you, by the way, that liberty-as-applause-light is a distraction from thinking clearly about these sorts of questions. Perhaps efficiency is as well, but if so it's one I have much more trouble reasoning past... I neither love that law nor hate it, but it is taking up energy I could use for something else.
Proposed law, or preexisting law?
As pointed out here, tribal traditions tend to have been adopted and maintained for some good reason or other, even if people can't properly explain what that reason is, and that goes double for the traditions that are inconvenient or silly-sounding.
Pace Chesterton, I don't see that much difference, especially when the context changes significantly from decade to decade. If there's a pre-existing law preventing the activity, I will probably devote significantly more effort to looking for a good reason to prevent that activity than for a proposed law, but not an infinite amount of effort; at some point either I find such a reason or I don't endorse the law.
Several people have alreadt given good answers to your position on infanticide, but they haven't mentioned what is in my opinion the crucial concept involved here: Schelling points.
We are all agreed that is is wrong to kill people (meaning, fully conscious and intelligent beings). We agree that adult humans beings are people (perhaps excluding those in irreversible coma). The law needs to draw a bright line separating those beings which are people, and hence cannot be killed, from those who are not. Given the importance of the "non-killing" rule to a functioning society. this line needs to be clear and intuitive to all. Any line based on some level of brain development does not satisfy this criterion.
There are only two Schelling points, that is obvious, intuitive places to draw the line: conception and birth. Many people support the first one, and the strongest argument for the anti-abortion position is that conception is in fact in many ways a better Schelling point than birth, since being born does not affect the intrinsic nature of the infant. However, among people without a metaphysical commitment to fetus personhood, most agree that the burdens that prohibition of abortion place on pregnant women are enough to outweigh these considerations, and make birth the chosen Schelling point.
There is no other Schelling point at a later date (your ten-month rule seems arbitrary to me), and a rule against baby infanticide does not place so strong burdens on mothers (giving for adoption is always an option). So there is no good reason to change the law in the direction you propose. Doing it would undermine the strengh of the universal agreement that "people cannot be killed", since the line separating people from non-people would be obscure and arbitrarily drawn.
I do think there are some advantages to setting the cutoff point just slightly later than birth, even if by just a few hours:
*evaluations of whether a person should come into existence can rest on surer information when the infant is out of the womb
* non-maternal reproductive autonomy - under the current legal personhood cutoff, I can count this as an acceptable loss, as I consider maternal bodily autonomy and the interests of the child to be more important, but with infanticide all three can be reconciled
* psychologically, parents (especially fathers) might feel more buy-in to their status, even if almost none actually end up choosing otherwise, and if infant non-personhood catches on culturally infant deaths very close to births might cause less grief among parents
(All this assumes that late-term abortions are a morally acceptable choice to make in their own right, of course, rather than something which must be legally tolerated to preserve maternal bodily autonomy.)
Perhaps the detachment of the umbilical cord would be a suitably symbolic point?
Mild updating of my original position due to this conversation:
I still don't have many moral qualms about allowing parents to kill children, but realize that actually legalizing it in our current society would lead to some unintended consequences, due to considerations such as the Schelling point, and killing infants as a gateway to further sociopathic behaviours.
Part of my difficulty is that some humans, such as infants, have less blicket than animals. If its ok to kill animals, then there's no reason to say it's not ok to kill blicket-less humans. Then I realize that even though it's legal to kill animals, it's still something I can't do for anything except certain bugs. Even spiders I let be, or take outside.
So maybe a wiser way to reconcile these would be to say that since infants have less blicket than animals, and we don't kill infants, that we also shouldn't kill animals. It's what I live by anyway, and seems to cause less disturbance than saying that since infants have less blicket than animals and we kill animals, that it's ok to kill infants.
I just want to point out this alternative position: Healthy (mentally and otherwise) babies can gain sufficient mental acuity/self-awareness to outstrip animals in their normal trajectory - i.e. babies become people after a while.
Although I don't wholeheartedly agree with this position, it seems consistent. The stance that such a position would imply is that babies with severe medical conditions (debilitating birth defects, congenital diseases etc.) could be killed with parental consent, and fetuses likely to develop birth defects can be aborted, but healthy fetuses cannot be aborted, and healthy babies cannot be killed. I bring this up in particular because of your other post about the family with the severely disabled 6-year-old.
I think it becomes a little more complicated when we're talking about situations in which we have the ability to impart self-awareness that was previously not there. On the practical level I certainly wouldn't want to force a family to either face endless debt from an expensive procedure or a lifetime of grief from a child that can't function in day to day tasks. It also brings up the question of whether to make animals self-aware, which is... kind of interesting but probably starting to drift off topic.
Yeah, that's roughly my stance also.
I was really hoping someone would come to this conclusion :). I don't agree with it, but it does seem the obvious consistent alternative to my position. Unfortunately, at least if you want to understand your moral position so well that you could build an FAI, you're still not entirely out of the woods - you have to describe a criterion for "ok to destroy" vs "not okay to destroy", ideally one that generalizes to machines and aliens. And "has sufficient amount of blicket" is still probably the best you can do. Certainly it's the best I can do.
Are you aware that in many countries it's illegal to kill animals without good reason, and that wanting to get rid of a pet does not qualify?
Don't worry, there would probably be a baby killing service if it were legal. Just like we have other people to kill animals for us.
A good argument, but there's (at least) two little things I object to and a major flaw:
This only holds in a society where people aren't sufficiently intelligent for "is obviously not a person" not to work as the criterion. We probably live in such a society, but I hope we don't forever.
This was the reason age was chosen, rather than neurological development. Because I'm arguing only that parents should be able to kill their own children, I'm pretty sure this law wouldn't give rise to any confusion.
Your whole argument is significantly weakened by the fact that there are other extremely important rules which don't have obvious Schelling points, like "don't have sex with people who can't give informed consent". I don't think that drawing some reasonable line in the sand (say, age 17) has, as you say, undermined the strength of the universal agreement that "we shouldn't have sex with people who can't give informed consent", despite the line separating people able to give informed consent and people not able to give informed consent being absolutely obscure and arbitrarily drawn.
People disagree about obviousness of such things. For some people, a fetus is obviously a person too. For others, even a mentally deficient adult might not qualify as being obviously a person. Unlike you, I don't expect these disagreements to disappear anytime soon, and they are the reason that the law works better with bright Schelling point lines, if such exist.
Age is non-ambiguous, but not non-arbitrary.
Re your final objection, I agree that there are cases such as sexual consent where there are no clear Schelling points, and we need arbitrary lines. This does not mean that it is not best to use Schelling points whenever they exist. In the case of sexual consent, the arbitrariness of the line does have some unfortunate effects: for example, since the lines are drawn differently in different jurisdictions, people who move accross jurisdictions and are not epecially well informed might commit a felony without being aware. There are also problems with people not being aware of their partner's age, etc.
Such problems are not too big and in any case unavoidable, but consider the following counterfactual: if all teenagers underwent a significant and highly visible discrete biological event at exactly age 16, it would make sense (and be an improvement over current law) to have an universal law using this event as trigger for the age of consent, even if the event had no connection to sexual and mental development and these were continuous. The event would be a Schelling point, such as birth is for personhood.
I don't expect them to disappear any time soon, certainly. The point is taken, but I'm not entirely convinced that birth is sufficiently close to reasonable that we should use it.
As it happens, there is a discrete biological event that happens to women, which even pertains (in a way) to sex. Namely, first menstruation. It's not highly visible, but it's certainly a lot less arbitrary than just picking age 16, which how a lot of places do it. So why use age 16 instead of menstruation, at least for women? I'd argue that the reason is that this point is so far off from what's reasonable that we shouldn't be using it. (We could suppose, counterfactually, that menstruation happened to both men and women and was extremely visible for the rest of their lives, but still happened around age 12 or 13. This would still be an unreasonable point to use. This would also be unreasonable if it were too far in the other direction - age 22 or 23, say.)
And by a similar token, I'd argue that birth is so far off from what's reasonable for personhood that we shouldn't be using it either.
This is a very good response, that allows us to make our disagreement more precise. I agree that choosing menstruation, or its hypothetical unisex counterpart, is unreasonable because it is too early. I disagree that birth is too early in the same way. Pretty much everyone in our society agrees that 12-year olds cannot meaningfully consent to sex (especially with adults), whereas many believe 6-month old children to be people -- in fact, many believe fetuses to be people! You might say that they are obviously wrong, but the "obviously" is suspicious when so many disagree with you, at the very least for Aumann reasons.
To put it in another way: What makes you so certain that birth is so far off from what is reasonable as a line for personhood, when you are willing to draw your line at 10 months? That is much closer to birth than 17 is to 12 years old.
Also, I think your analogy needs a bit of amending: the relevant question is, if there was a visible unisex menstruation happening at 17 years old, and an established tradition of taking that as the age of consent, why on earth would a society change the law to make it 16 years and 2 months instead?
As a data point for your statistics, I think that a 12-year old can meaningfully consent to sex. When it comes to issues of pregnancy and having children, the consequences are greater and I don't think such yound people can consent to this, but fortunately sex and children can be kept separate today with only weak side effects.
I think that a 12-year old from a society with sensible policies would be able to give meaningful consent, but for some reason an enormous amount of work has been put into keeping American 12-year olds dangerously ignorant. That needs to be fixed first.
While true, I suspect most or all of those people would have a hard time giving a good definition of "person" to an AI in such a way that the definition included babies, adults, and thinking aliens, but not pigs or bonobos. So yes, the claim I am implicitly making with this (or any other) controversial opinion is that I think almost everyone is wrong about this specific topic.
Only if you think development happens linearly. From my knowledge of biology - which is extremely suspect, so do correct me if I'm wrong - the changes between 0 months after birth and 10 months after birth are vastly larger than the changes between 12 years after birth and 17 years after birth.
Of course our selection of analogies is reflective of our positions. From my point of view, the most relevant analogy would be a visible unisex menstruation happening at 30 years old*, and an established tradition of taking that as the age of consent, and I'm arguing that no, it should really be 16.
*(This is based on the assumption that you go through about as many developmental changes between ages 16 and 30 as you do between 0 months and 10 months, which - again from my extremely suspect recollection of biology - is roughly correct.)
(edit:formatting)
One rough effort at such definition would be: "any post-birth member of a species whose adult members are intelligent and conscious", where "birth" can be replaced by an analogous Schelling point in the development in an alien species, or by an arbitrary chosen line at a similar stage of development, if no such Schelling point exists.
You might say that this definition is an arbtrary kludge that does not "carve Nature at the joints". My reply would be that ethics is adapted for humans, and does not need to carve Nature at intrinsic joints but at the places that humans find relevant.
Your point about different rates of development is well taken, however. I am also not an expert in this topic, so we'll have to let it rest for the moment.
Problem: There's no particular reason to expect speciation to be as widespread or as clear-cut as it is in the case of Earth and humans in particular. Certainly not for machine intelligences.
It might so happen that there could be software written for the computer I'm typing this on which could give it intelligence and consciousness. (Unlikely, but not out of the realm of possibility.) Should this machine be considered a person?
The reason I'm being so nit-picky is that what I consider the natural definition (namely, "an agent capable of intelligence and consciousness", or something like that) doesn't have this problem at all. I think it's a problem your definition has only because you were forced to deviate from the natural definition to include something that doesn't really seem like it belongs in that group - namely, newborns.
For computers, hardware and software can be separated in a way that is not possible with humans (with current technology). When the separation is possible, I agree personhood should be attributed to the software rather than the hardware, so your machine should not be considered a person. If in the future it becomes routinely possible to scan, duplicate and emulate human minds, then killing a biological human will probably also be less of a crime than it is now, as long as his/her mind is preserved. (Maybe there would be a taboo instead about deleting minds with no backup, even when they are not "running" on hardware).
It is also possible than in such a future where the concept of a person is commonly associated with a mind pattern, legalizing infanticide before brain development seats in would be acceptable. So perhaps we are not in disagreement after all, since on a different subthread you have said you do not really support legalization of infanticide in our current society.
I still think there is a bit of a meta diagreement: you seem to think that the laws and morality of this hypothetical future society would be better than our current ones, while I see it as a change in what are the appropriate Schelling points for the law to rule, in response to technological changes, without the end point being more "correct" in any absolute sense than our current law.
Well, yes. This seems obvious to me.
But there is no universal agreement on the "age of informed consent", it varies from country to country! And yes, the fact that the limit is arbitrary does undermine its strength; there are often scenarios of "reasonable" sex (in that most people don't consider it as wrong) that would be consider statutory rape or whatnot if the law was taken at the letter.
(Also, heck, 10 months is a pretty crappy limit, why not 8 months five days and 42 minutes? 12 months would be much cleaner)
But isn't birth - or first menstruation, or what have you - a much cleaner line? Shouldn't we be going by those, instead? No? Of course we shouldn't; sometimes the obvious choices for where to draw a line are so off from what would be reasonable that we're forced to be arbitrary.
Isn't 20 years a much cleaner line than 17, for age of consent and drinking age? Why not go with those? You have to pick something.
Please let me know if I've missed a discussion of this point; it seems important, but I haven't seen it answered.
What is the particular and demonstrable quality of personhood that defines this okay to kill/not okay to kill threshold? In short, what is blicket?
It's not precisely a threshold because it's not binary. The quality is "personhood". Defining personhood is obviously an incredibly difficult thing to do, so I've been avoiding doing so in this thread. However, any reasonable definition I can come up with does not include very young infants. If you think that newborns are people, I'd be interested in hearing why - but I haven't come up with a sufficiently good wording for what I think personhood is to have a debate about it.
I won't argue that newborns are people, because I have the same problem defining person that you seem to have. But until I can come up with a cogent reduction distilling person to some quality or combination of qualities that actually exist -- some state of a region of the universe -- then it seems prudent to err on the side of caution.
Agreed, but ten months seems to be erring pretty hard on the side of caution to me - dolphins seem far more like people than ten month old babies, but I don't think killing a dolphin should be treated as the same crime as killing a (eta adult) human.
Well, one relatively simple question that might help clarify some things: do I remain a person when I'm asleep?
Yes - even while sleeping, your brain contains all the structure and information necessary for personhood, as is easily empirically demonstrated by waking you up.
Cool. Would I still be a person while in a coma that I will naturally come out of in five years but not before? (I recognize that no observer could know that this was the case, I'm just asking whether in fact I would be, if it were. Put another way: after I woke up, would we conclude that I'd been a person all along?)
Obviously this is a difficult question. I'd say you're very nearly a person while in a coma, because with very minor modifications to your brain you could have returned to being a person.
OK, cool... that clarifies matters. Thanks.
Why not permit the killing of babies not your own, for the same reason?
The more interesting question is what to do when parents disagree about infanticide and the complications that come about from custody.
Also adoption contracts would probably need to have a "don't kill my baby that I've given up clause" lest some people wouldn't want to give up children for adoption.
Because its illegal to kill other people's pets or destroy their property? Duh.
Actually selling your baby on the adoption market should probably be legal too.
So, premeditated killing of someone else's child should be criminal damage rather than murder?
What monetary value does the child have, for the purpose of calculating damages I wonder? We should do early testing to see how much status the parents were likely to gain via the impressiveness of their possession in the future. Facial symmetry, genetic indicators...
The emotional investment a parent makes in their child must be huge, and the damages similarly so. It seems perfectly reasonable for a parent to say, "There's nothing available that I value more than I valued my child, consequently no sum of money will suffice to cover my damages. Whatever you give me it's still going to work out as a loss."
This is reasoning we may use now. But it does not apply in the spirit of the weirdtopia where we evaluate children only as property without moral value beyond that.
Where did we start talking about weirdtopia?
And then we're back to the bit I was responding to. But we all seem to be talking about what should be the case, where we want to end up. The reasoning we can apply at the moment seems the relevant thing to that. If weirdtopia doesn't look like a place our reasoning would work, if we wouldn't want to live there.... Well, so much the worse for weirdtopia.
A weirdtopia. The premises that lead to the reasoning and conclusions here are only premises I could consider reasoning from from the perspective of a weird alternate reality. I certainly don't endorse anything we're talking about here myself but do suggest that they are incompatible with the nice sounding "Whatever you give me it's still going to work out as a loss" kind of moral expressions you mention - at least to the extent that they are embedded in the law.
Testing would be a lot of work and potential corruption for comparatively little gain in nailing down the sig figs. The EPA is already willing to put an approximate dollar value on the life of a random citizen shortened by pollution (for cost-benefit purposes when evaluating proposed cleanup plans), so I'd say just estimate the average or typical value and use that as the standard, preferably showing your work well enough to allow adjustments over time or judicial discretion in unusual cases.
This is a situation in which "Speak for yourself!" would apply. In the weirdtopia where killing other people's children is criminal damage and such damages are calculated being able to prove higher value of said property would and should influence the amount of recompense they receive. For the same reason that Shane Warne could insure his finger for more than I could insure my finger an owner of an impressive child would be able to have that child evaluated and treated as a more valuable piece of property than an inferior child. They would aggressively and almost certainly successfully fight any attempt to make their child evaluated as a mediocre child.
That's what I meant by 'judicial discretion in unusual cases.'
Setting the default value a standard deviation or three above the actual average would probably be sensible. Cuts down on expensive investigations and appeals, since most bereaved parents would realize on some level that they won't actually gain by nitpicking, and erring on the side of punitive damages would help appease the victim and discourage recklessness.
Downvoted for sarcasm. I was under the impression that (unsubtle forms of) sarcasm in non-humorous discussions are outlawed on LW, and that's very OK with me.
Downvoted for being a wet blanket and incorrect assumption of sarcasm. If it's ok to talk about the implications of legalizing infanticide then it is ok to follow the weirdtopia through and have fun with it. I adamantly refuse to take on a sombre tone just because people are talking about killing babies. My due diligence to the seriousness of babykilling with my expression of clear opposition - with that out of the way I am (and should be) free to join Konk and Jayson counterfactual wherein the actual logical implications related to killing other people's non-people infants are considered.
On a related note - of all the movies I was forced to endure and study in high school the only one I don't resent as a boring waste of my time is Gattaca!
I'm being a fucking idiot tonight.
If I downvote you for calling a valuable lesswrong contributor a fucking idiot is that a compliment or a criticism? ;)
If I tell you you have a perverse wit will you hold it against me?
I'd never agree with being called a fucking-idiot-in-general! :D It's just an observation that my mind feels numb and sluggish tonight, probably because of the weather.
Leaving aside the amusing notion of LW outlawing sarcasm, I'm curious about how you concluded that wedrifid's comment was (unsubtle) sarcasm.
(Just to be clear: I'm not contesting your freedom to downvote the comment for that reason or any other, including simply being irritated by people saying such things about children.)
He started "investigating" a child's value to parents with things like the status they could gain from it, instead of obvious things like their instinctive emotional response to it, etc. That's manifestly not what most parents think and feel like.
Emotional distress caused does seem like another important consideration when calculating damages received for baby/property destruction. It probably shouldn't be the only consideration. Just like if I went and cut someone's arm off it would be appropriate to consider the future financial and social loss to that person as well as his emotional attachment to his arm.
It doesn't seem very egalitarian but it may be a bigger crime to cut off the arm of a world class spin bowler (or pitcher) than the arm of a middle manager. It's not like the latter does anything that really needs his arm.
True enough, but it simply doesn't feel to me that a child can be meaningfully called "property" at all. Hell, I'm not completely sure that a pet dog can be called property.
While I don't fully disagree, I'm not sure that's a meaningful objection. One implication of the status-signaling frame is that our instinctive emotional responses (among other cognitive patterns) are calibrated at least partly in terms of maximizing status; it doesn't require any conscious attention to status at all, let alone an explicit campaign of manipulation.
Well, I think that self-signaling especially - and likely even signaling to very close people like family members too - is one of the basic needs of humans, and, being as entangled with human worldview as it is, deserves to be counted under the blanket term "emotional response".
Agreed on both counts, and thanks for clarifying.
For my own part, in the hypothetical context Konkvistador and Jayson_Virissimo established, of infanticide being a property crime, it seems at least superficially reasonable to consider how our legal system would assess damages for infanticide and how that would differ from the real world where infanticide isn't a property crime.
And evaluating the potential gain that could in the future be obtained by the destroyed property is a pretty standard way of assessing such damages, much as damages found if someone accidentally chops my arm off generally take into account my likely future earnings had I kept both arms.
So I guess I'm saying that while I'm fairly sure wedrifid was being ironic (especially since I think he's come out elsewhere as pro-babies and anti-infanticide on grounds other than potential gain to their parents), I found his use of irony relatively subtle.
Again, that doesn't in any way preclude your objecting to his post.
The funny thing is, I haven't felt even a tingle of outrage/whatever, I only objected to tone, on a formal principle, for a stupid reason which seems to have already vanished somewhere.
Maybe.
Maybe we could just keep it murder, I don't know. There is no law (heh) we have to be consistent about this. In many places across the world killing a pregnant women is tried as a double murder (I think this includes some US states).
I would vote this up if not for the retract... accept my pseodo-vote.
Feel free to up vote other comments in this thread where I say basically the same thing.
I weakly agree, if only for the reason that it sounds better than foster care and could well curb infanticide. On the other hand, in countries that have a problem with slavery it could weaken any injunction against slave trade, by the same argument as the one I support against infanticide. Or it could harm the sacredness of the child-parent bond in general. Well, on the whole it seems just about worth it to me, and no part of it even feels creepy or alarmingly counterintuitive.
The slave trade thing might be prevented by specifically forbidding the quick or anonymous sale of children. Have the current and prospective parents jump through some hoops, get interviewed by a social worker, etc. and the whole thing thoroughly documented. Find an equilibrium that keeps the nonmonetary transaction costs high enough that low-level slave traders won't think it's worth the trouble to 'go legit,' and the paper trail thick enough that corrupt aristocrats won't want to take the risk of public humiliation, without actually making it more difficult for the beleaguered biological parents than raising an unwanted child themselves.
The ultimate slavery counter: red tape!
Working from the assumption that slave-traders are in it for the money? Yeah. Slavery stops happening when it becomes more cost-effective to pay the workers directly, than to pay guards to coerce them.
The main use of slave labor is agriculture, because it's easy to have a large group within a single overseer's line of sight, and output is easy to measure. Child labor has historically succeeded there because of the low skill requirement, and because an individual child's lower productivity was matched by lower housing and food costs. If a child costs more to acquire than an adult - specifically if that difference in up-front costs outweighs the net present value of that slim productivity-per-upkeep-cost advantage - anyone who keeps using children for unpaid ag labor will simply be driven out of the market by competitors willing to do the math.
The app people worry about is sex. Police and prosecuting attorneys (in the US, at least) are already willing to resort to extremely dubious tactics to score a pedophile conviction; this would give them a legitimate audit trail to follow. Someone seeking to purchase a child for such purposes would not dare attract so much official attention... unless they were suicidally stupid, which is the sort of problem that solves itself.
Hell no, it does not; only the label might change. If the only employers are would-be slavers with no financial, public or moral pressure to look to their workers' welfare, then wage slavery is little better than traditional slavery - in fact it's often worse because a capitalist employer, unlike a slaver, has zero investment in a slave, drawing from a huge pool of unskilled manpower with no acquisition cost. You don't need any guards if a person has no choice but work for you, work for another employer like you or starve!
Picture related.
I said "slavery stops," not "quality of life improves." Getting employers to compete in a way that benefits workers is a different problem, and obtaining for the workers the freedom to choose to starve (rather than, say, being executed as an example to others) is only the first step.
Quality of life for workers is also a very different problem from quality of life for open-market-adopted children, which was the original topic.
Link broken.
Better now?
Ah the rapid response prevented me from deleting my post (I wanted to do so because the points have been raised elsewhere and I didn't want to bloat the debate, not because I didn't think the post was relevant).
I just made this point deep in one of the other subthreads, actually. The reason is that killing someone else's child does significant harm to them. It's the roughly same reason you should be able to tear down your house but not someone else's, but orders of magnitude more major (assuming that most people are orders of magnitude more attached to their newborns than to their houses).
It causes me a certain level of distress when a baby is harmed or killed, even if it is of no relation to me. Many people (perhaps almost all people) experience a similar amount of distress. Is it your point of view that the aggregate amount of harm caused in this way is not large enough to justify the prohibition on killing babies?
Perhaps what you mean to argue with the house analogy is not that the parent is harmed, but that his property rights have been violated.
Don't worry, in the right culture and society this distress would be pretty minor.
I disagree with that statement on at least two points.
1) How can you so easily predict others' level of distress if you don't feel much distress from that source in the first place?
2) Don't forget about scale insensitivity. Don't forget that some scale insensitivity can be useful on non-astronomical scales, as it gives bounds to utility functions and throws a light on ethical injunctions.
Looking at other humans. Perhaps even humans in actually existing different cultures.
This is a good counter point. I just think applying this principle selectively is too easy to game a metric, to put too much weight to it in preliminary discussion.
Ah, but the culture you'd want and are arguing for here is way, way closer to our current culture than to any existing culture where distress to people from infanticide is "minor"!
How can you be so sure? Historically speaking, infanticide is the human norm.
It is just the last few centuries that some societies have gotten all upset over it.
In some respects modern society is closer in norms to societies that practised infanticide 100 years ago than to Western society of 100 years ago and we consider this a good thing. Why assume no future changes or no changes at all would go in this direction? And that likewise we'll eventually consider these changes good?
It is certainly weak evidence in favour of a practice being nasty that societies which practice it are generally nasty in other ways. But it is just that, weak evidence.
Doesn't look that way to me at all, and never did. For every example you list (polyamory, etc) I bet I can find you a counterexample of equivalent strength.
Yes. Similarly for abortion.
Well... the violation of his property rights is the harm.
Are those property rights transferable? Would you permit a market in infants?
Sure, adoption markets basically already exist, why not make them legal?
Not only are wealthier people better candidates on average because they can provide for the material needs much better and will on average have a more suitable psychological profile (we can impose legal screening of adopters too, so they need to match other current criteria before they can legally buy on the adoption market if you feel uncomfortable with "anyone can buy"). It also provides incentives for people with desirable traits to breed, far more than just subsidising them having kids of their own.
One of the standard topics in economic approaches to the law is to discuss the massive market failures caused by not permitting markets in infants; see for example, Landes and Richard Posner's "The Economics of the Baby Shortage". I thought their analysis pretty convincing.
I think I may not have gotten the point I was trying to make across - I don't think all harm is of the form "violation of property rights", I think the reason "property rights" are a thing we care about is because their violation is harmful.
An interesting question, but not one I've thought about. If what I've said above is tells you what you want to know, I'm not going to try discussing this here. Otherwise I will.
I broadly agree that babies aren't people, but I still think infanticide should be illegal, simply because killing begets insensitivity to killing. I know this has the sound of a slippery slope argument, but there is evidence that desire for sadism in most people is low, and increases as they commit sadistic acts, and that people feel similarly about murder.
From The Better Angels of Our Nature: "Serial killers too carry out their first murder with trepidation, distaste, and in its wake, disappointment: the experience had not been as arousing as it had been in their imaginations. But as time passes and their appetite is rewhetted, they find the next on easier and more gratifying, and then they escalate the cruelty to feed what turns into an addiction."
Similarly, cathartic violence against non-person objects (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharsis#Therapeutic_uses) can lead to further aggression in personal interactions.
I don't think we want to encourage or allow killing of anything anywhere near as close to people as babies. The psychological effects on people who kill their own children and on a society that views the killing of babies as good are too potentially terrible. Without actual data, I can say I would never want to live in a society that valued people as little as Sparta did.
Can't this same be said of last trimester abortions?
In any case much like we find pictures or videos of abortion distasteful, I'm sure future baby-killing society would still find videos of baby killings distasteful. We could legislate infanticide needs to be done by professionals away from the eyes of parents and other onlookers to avoid psychological damage. Also forbid media depicting it except for educational purposes.
For legal reasons, there'd just have to be a clear procedure where parents would take or refuse the decision, probably after being informed of the baby's overall condition and potential in the presence of a witness. I can't imagine how it could be realistically practiced without one. Such a procedure could ironically wind up more psychologically damaging than, say, simply distracting one's parental instinct with something like intoxication and personally abandoning/suffocating/poisoning the baby.
Potential for tension and cognitive dissonance. Few things in our culture are censored this way, not even executions and torture. Would feel unusually hypocritical.
Humans are pretty ok with making cold decisions in the abstract that they could never carry out themselves due to physical revulsion and/or emotional trauma.
The number of people that would sign a death order is greater than the number of people that would kill someone else personally.
Does society feel conflicted bothered that child pornography is censored? We can even extend existing child pornography laws with a few good judicial decisions to cover this.
Read more Robin Hanson.
Good point. If they aren't even people...
In my own country pornography involving animals is illegal. It shows no signs of being legalized soon. And I live in a pretty liberal central European first world country.
I live in Russia and here the legal status of all pornography is murky but no law de facto prosecutes anything but production and distribution of child porn, and simple possession of child porn is not illegal. There's nothing about animals, violence, or such.
Much greater? I think that people signing death orders for criminals could generally execute those criminals themselves if forced to choose between that and the criminal staying alive.
4chan could be an argument that it's beginning to feel so :) Society just hasn't thought it through yet.
Don't think so, because
1) such foetuses would likely only be seen by a surgeon if the abortion is done properly
2) they probably instinctively appear much less "person-like" or "likely to become a human" even if the mother sees one while doing a crude abortion on her own - maybe even for an evolutionary reason - so that she wouldn't be left with a memory of killing something that looks like a human.
blinks
How can a LWer even think this way? I suggest you reread this. I'm tempted to ask you to think 4 minutes by the physical clock about this, but I'll rather just spell it out.
Lets say you are 8 months pregnant in the early stone age. What is a better idea for you, fitness wise, wait another month to terminate reproduction attempt or try to do it right now?
I'm even tempted to say there is a reason women kill their own children more often than men.
Higher expected future resource investment per allelle carried?
More or less. I'm pretty sure that controlling for certainty of the child being "yours" and time spent with them, men would on average find killing their children a greater psychological burden in the long run than women.
Because after all that time spent with them some start to find them really damn annoying?
We get attached to children and lovers with exposure due to oxytocin. Only when the natural switches for releasing it are shut off does exposure cease to have this effect.
Finding them annoying is a separate effect.
I'm trying to relate this to your theory that men find it harder to kill their infants than women do. The influence of oxytocin discourages killing of those you are attached to and mothers get more of this than fathers if for no other reason than a crap load getting released during childbirth.
By what criterion do you consider babies sufficiently "close to people" that this is an issue, but not late term fetuses or adult animals? Specific example, an adult bonobo seems to share more of the morally relevant characteristics of adult humans than a newborn baby but are not afforded the same legal protection.
I don't think killing bonobos should be particularly legal.
As far as fetuses, since my worry is psychological, I don't think there's a significant risk of desensitization to killing people since the action of going under surgery or taking plan b is so vastly removed from the act of murder.
What if only surgeons are licensed for infanticide on request, which must be done in privacy away from parent's eyes?
That way desensitisation isn't worse than with surgeons or doctors who preform abortion, especially if aesthetics or poison is used. Before anyone raises the Hippocratic oath as an objection, let me give them a stern look and ask them to consider the context of the debate and figure out on their own why it isn't applicable.
I would probably be ok with this, though I don't see particularly strong incentives to put effort in to legalize it.
The damage would've been already done elsewhere by that point. The parent would likely have already
1) seen their born, living infant, experiencing what their instincts tell them to (if wired normally in this regard)
2) made the decision and signed the paperwork
3) (maybe) even taken another look at the infant with the knowledge that it's the last time they see it
I feel that every one of those little points could subtly damage (or totally wreck) a person.
I'm afraid you may have your bottom line written already. In the age of ultrasound and computer generated images or even better in the future age of transhuman sensory enhancement or fetuses being grown outside the human body the exact same argument can be used against abortion.
Especially once you remember the original context was a 10 month old baby, not say a 10 year old child.
Then I might well have to use it against abortion at some point, for the same reason: we should forbid people from overriding this part of their instincts.
Upvoted for bullet-biting.
Why is overriding of instincts inherently bad?
http://lesswrong.com/lw/v0/ethical_inhibitions/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/v1/ethical_injunctions/
First, I'm understandably modeling this on myself, and second, it doesn't really make this speculation any less valid in itself.
(Separated from my other reply because it's a sparate point.)
Personally, I strongly doubt the incidence of infanticide-inspired sadism would be sufficiently higher in a culture in which infanticide were legal to justify keeping it illegal in this culture.
And I don't want to live in a society which views the killing of babies as good, or which values people less. I just don't want it to be illegal. I don't want to live in a society which encourages suicide, either, but I do think it ought to be legal.
This is definitely the strongest argument I've been able to come up with for making infanticide illegal.
Unfortunately, there's a second slippery slope to watch out for: outlawing things which have the potential to lead to things which are illegal is a dangerous position for a government to take. The children of single mothers are a lot more likely to grow up criminal - should it be illegal to raise a child in a family without two parent figures? Working in retail makes you much more likely to commit violent crimes against the people you work with - should it be illegal to work in a retail job?
Certainly I don't think so, and I doubt you or other reasonable people do either. These things are certainly much less likely to lead to future crimes than infanticide is, but it's a difference of quantity, not quality. The problem is that I don't trust the government enough to make "doing this increases the likelihood that you'll commit a crime in the future" a sufficiently good reason to make something illegal.
We're not talking about making new laws, and we're certainly not encouraging the government to make in-discriminatory laws about things that are possibly bad. This is a law that already exists, where changing it would lead to a worse world. Feel free to campaign against those other laws you talked about coming into existence if someone tries to make them happen, but you shouldn't be trying to get baby killing legalized.
Fair point, but if your position on infanticide and the reasons for the illegality thereof were accepted, I strongly suspect the government would start using this as a justification for passing other less savory laws. So this only works so long as the government doesn't make any effort to justify existing laws - which is, I suppose, probably going to be the case for the indefinite future.
Thanks a lot. I fully support your line of thinking, all of your points and your conclusion.
On infanticide, is this a reasonable summary of your position:
Yup. Although it's not binary, of course; fetuses/babies do not go from non-blicket-creatures to blicket-creatures in a single instant.
Ok. I agree with you on the empirical assertions (I actually suspect that 10-month-olds also lack blicket). But my moral theory gives significant weight to blicket-potential (because blicket is that awesome), while your system does not appear to do so. Why not?
You mentioned to someone that the current system of being forced to provide for a child or place the child in foster care is suboptimal. I assume a substantial part of that position is that foster care is terrible (i.e. unlikely to produce high-functioning adults).
I agree that one solution to this problem is to end the parental obligation (i.e. allow infanticide). This solution has the benefit of being very inexpensive. But why do you think that solution is better than the alternative solution of fixing foster care (and low quality child-rearing practice generally) so that it is likely to produce high-quality adults?
One day in the future, if we somehow survive the existential threats that await us and a Still More Glorious Dawn does, in fact, dawn, one day we might have machines akin to 3D printers that allow us to construct, atom-by-atom, anything we desire so long has we know its composition and structure.
Suppose I take one of these machines and program it to build me a human, then leave when it's half done. Does the construction chamber have blicket-potential?
Sure. Unborn babies have blicket-potential. Heck, the only reason I don't say that unconceived babies have blicket potential is that I'm not sure that the statement is coherent.
Blicket and blicket-potential are markers that special moral considerations apply. They don't control the moral decision without any reference to context.
Mine does, just, I suspect, less than yours. It's a tricky issue. I think this will help establish where our positions are in relation to each others':
Do you think abortion should be legal? If so, up until what point, and why?
That would be preferable. Ideally we'd do both, so that people would have as little incentive as possible to kill their newborns. But we should still keep infanticide lega, for unforeseen circumstances.
If you go too far in the direction of weighting blicket-potential, you start obliging people to try to have as many babies as possible - outlawing contraception, say, because it reduces the potential for more blicket. That, I think, is bad. This extends to outlawing infanticide being bad - they're not the same, obviously, but they're definitely on the same scale.
I agree there is a scale about how much weight to give blicket-potential. But I support a meta-norm about constructing a morality that the morality should add up to normal, absent compelling justification.
That is, if a proposed moral system says that some common practice is deeply wrong, or some common prohibition has relatively few negative consequences if permitted, that's a reason to doubt the moral construction unless a compelling case can be made. It's not impossible, but a moral theory that says we've all doing it wrong should not be expected either.
The fact that my calibration of my blicket-potential sensitivity mostly adds up to normal is evidence to me that the model is a fairly accurate description of the morality people say they are applying.
Oh, I'd agree in general. But keep in mind these are beliefs I've specifically presented as things which most people disagree with - that is, these are the specific things I've thought about and concluded that, yes, other people's moral systems are wrong/inconsistent. This is particularly reasonable in light of the fact that making infanticide illegal is something which appears to be a very Judeo-Christian affection, rather than a moral universalism.
This is a historical claim that requires a bit more evidence in support. I don't doubt that infanticide has a rich historical pedigree. But I don't think infanticide was ever justified on a "human autonomy" basis, which seems to be your justification. For example, the relatively recent dynamic of Chinese sex-selection infanticide has not been based on any concept of personal autonomy, as far as I can tell.
In general, I suspect that most cultures that tolerated infanticide were much lower on the human-autonomy scale than our current civilization (i.e. valued individual human life less than we do).
It's difficult to make conclusions about this, because most historical cultures made fairly little effort to support their conventions at all. However, it's certainly been my impression that a lot more cultures were OK with casual infanticide than casual murder. This suggests strongly to me that the view of newborns as people is not universal.
Probably, but I'd be surprised if most of that effect were to do with anything beyond the fact that infanticide was more common historically than it is today and respect for individual human life is higher today that it was historically. That's certainly not a very strong argument that infanticide being morally wrong is indeed basically a moral universalism.
Sigh. How did the post-modern moral nihilist become the defender of moral universalism? My argument is more that infanticide fits extremely poorly within the cluster of values that we've currently adopted.
I am highly skeptical that this is true.
Cultures are often fine with killing wives and children too, if they get too far out of line. They are yours after all.
I did some reading on the ancients and infanticide, and the picture is murky - the Christians were not responsible for making infanticide illegal, that seems to have preceded them, but they claimed the laws were honored mostly in the breach, so whether you give any credit to them depends on your theories of causality, large-scale trends, and whether the Christians made any meaningful difference to the actual infanticide rate.
If you say you don't want to kill an infant because of its potential for blicket, then you would also have to apply that logic to abortion and birth control, and come to the conclusion that these are just as wrong as killing infants, since they both destroy blicket-potential.
Fetus- does not have blicket, has potential for blicket - killing it is legal abortion
Infant- does not have blicket (you agreed with this), has potential for blicket - killing it is illegal murder
Does not compute. One or the other outcomes needs to be changes, and I'm sure not going to support the illegalization of birth control.
Note: I apologize if this is getting too close to politics, but it is a significant part of the killing babies debate, and not mentioning it just to avoid mentioning a political issue would not give accurate reasons.
At a certain level, all morality is about balancing the demands of conflicting blicket-supported desires. So the balance comes out different at different stages. Yes, the difference between stages is quite arbitrary (and worse: obviously historically contingent).
In short, I wish I had a better answer for you than I am comfortable with arbitrary distinctions (why is the speed limit 55 mph rather than 56?). From an outsider perspective, I'm sure it looks like I've been mind-killed by some version of "The enemy of my enemy (politically active religious conservatives) is my friend."
Somebody did some math about reaction times, kinetic energy from impacts, and fuel economy. That turned out to be a good place to draw the line. For practical purposes, people can drive 60 in a 55 zone under routine circumstances and not get in trouble.
So, Alejandro's response is correct, but all of this seems rather tangential to the question you quote. The reason the speed limit is 55 rather than 56 or 54 is because we have a cultural preference for multiples of 5... which is also why all the other speed limits I see posted are multiples of 5. Seeing a speed limit sign that read "33" or something would cause me to do a potentially life-threatening double-take.
They're unusual but they do happen. The "19 MPH" one happens to be from the campus of my alma mater.
Huh. Some of these I can understand, but I'm really curious about the 19mph one... is there a story behind that? (If I had to guess I'd say it relates to some more global 20mph limit.)
Actually...
(edit)
I have the feeling that I've got to state the following belief in plain text:
Regardless of whether "babies are people" (and yeah, I guess I wouldn't call them that on most relevant criteria), any parent who proves able to kill their child while not faced with an unbearable alternative cost (a hundred strangers for an altruistic utilitarian, eternal and justified damnation for a deeply brainwashed believer) is damn near guaranteed to have their brain wired in a manner unacceptable to modern society.
Such wiring so strongly correlates with harmful, unsympathetic psychopaths that, if faced with a binary choice to murder any would-be childkillers on sight or ignore them, we should not waver in exterminating them. Of course, a better solution is a blanket application of unbounded social stigma as a first line deterrent and individual treatment of every one case, whether with an attempt at readjustment, isolation or execution.
Infanticide has been considered a normal practice in a lot of cultures. The Greeks and Romans, for example, don't seem to have been run down by psychopaths.
I don't think we have a good way to know about the later harmful actions of people who kill their infants. Either we find them out and lock them up, in which case their life is no longer really representative of the population, or we don't know about what they've done.
Not sure I'd agree, there. Rome had institutionalized blood sports, and mass rioting when the entertainment was interrupted.
I've managed to overlook the most important (and fairly obvious) thing, though!
If the idea of "childkilling=bad" is weakly or not at all ingrained in a culture, it's easy to override both one's innate and cultural barriers to kill your child, so most normally wired people would be capable of it => the majority of childkillers are normal people.
If it's ingrained as strongly as in the West today, there would be few people capable of overriding such a strong cultural barrier, => the majority of childkillers left would be the ones who get no barriers in the first place, i.e. largely harmful, unsympathetic psychopaths. The other ones would have an abnormally strong will to override barriers and self-modify, which can easily make them just as dangerous.
Okay, got it. I agree that in a culture that condemns infanticide, people who do it anyway are likely to be quite different from the people who don't. But Bakkot's claim was that our culture should allow it, which should not be expected to increase the number of psychopaths.
I'm also not sure that unbounded social stigma is an effective way to deter people who essentially don't care about other people. We don't really know of good ways to change psychopathy.
(edited for clarity)
First, any single relaxed taboo feels to me like a blow against the entire net of ethical inhibitions, both in a neurotypical person and in a culture (proportional to the taboo's strength and gravity, that is). Therefore, I think it could be a slippery slope into antisociality for some people who previously behaved acceptably. Second, we could be taking one filter of existing psychopaths from ourselves while giving the psychopaths a safe opportunity to let their disguise down. Easier for them to evade us, harder for us to hunt them down.
Successful psychopaths do understand that society's opinion of them can affect their well-being, this is why they bother to conceal their abnormality in the first place.
If "hunting down" psychopaths is our goal, we'd do better to look for people who torture or kill animals. My understanding is that these behaviors are a common warning sign of antisocial personality disorder, and I'm sure it's more common than infanticide because it's less punished. Would you advocate punishing anyone diagnosed with antisocial personality right away, or would you want to wait until they actually committed a crime?
I'd put taboos in three categories. Some taboos (e.g. against women wearing trousers, profanity, homosexuality, or atheism) seem pointless and we were right to relax them. Some taboos, like those against theft and murder, I agree we should hold in place because they produce so little value for the harm they produce. Some, like extramarital sex and abortion, are more ambiguous. They probably allow some people to get away with unnecessary cruelty. But because the the personal freedom they create, I think they produce a net good.
I put legalized infanticide in the third category. I gather you put it in the second? In other words, do you believe the harm it would create from psychopaths killing babies and generally being harder to detect would be greater than the benefit to people who don't raise unwanted children?
I believe that legalized infanticide would be harmful, at least, to our particular culture for many reasons, some of which I'm sure I haven't even thought of yet. I'm not even sure whether the strongest reason for not doing it is connected to psychopathic behaviour at all. Regardless, I'm certain about fighting it tooth and nail if need be, at at least a 0.85.
By the way, have you considered the general memetic chaos that would erupt in Western society if somehow infanticide was really, practically made legal?
I think we're probably all in agreement that making infanticide legal in most modern Western societies (the anthropologist in me can't help but pointing out that really, really that needs to be plural) would cause chaos.
But I do think a world exactly like ours except without the strong social stigma attached to infanticide would be a more fun place to live.
Huh. I don't follow the reasoning. Why do you expect social stigma attached to infanticide to correlate with less fun?
This is not an uncontested statement.
Thanks for catching me, adjusted.
You are overlooking the extreme situations some people are forced into. Looking at the act as being primarily a function of a person's internal state state can be a poor approximation. As nearly as I can tell, if an arbitrarily selected person in the West were put in a situation as dire as these infanticidal mothers had been forced into, they would quite probably do the same thing.
Note that the geographical variation in infanticide rates is more plausibly consistent with external factors driving the rates than internal factors. The populations of the USA and Canada are not hugely different, yet there is a 2X difference in the rates between them (as I quoted from the article that I cited before). I strongly doubt that the proportion of psychopaths and extreme self-modifiers differs so strongly between the two nations - but the US has been shredding its social safety nets for years.
This is easy enough to check. Do most poor, fairly desperate people whose situation is sufficiently alike that of our hypothetical normal childkiller, in fact, kill their children?
(No, I can't quite define "sufficiently alike" right off the bat. Wouldn't mind working it out together.)
With genocide of any foreigners and mass torture for entertainment also having been considered perfectly acceptable, the Roman culture in the flesh would certainly feel alien enough to us that an utilitarian, altruistic time traveler could likely be predicted to attempt to sway it, with virtually any means justifying the end for them.*
I know I would, and I know that I'm not an unusual decision maker for the LW community.
*(cue obvious SF story idea with the time traveler ending up as Jesus)
But these seem to have been larger cultural phenomena, not the unchecked actions of a few psychopaths. Psychopathy affects around 1% of the population, and I doubt so few people could have swayed the entire culture if the rest of them had no interest in killing people.
One percent of the modern population. How much historical data is there?
You're right that we don't have data on the incidence of psychopathy in ancient Rome, and our data its current incidence is pretty sketchy. (Unlike most mental illnesses, psychopathy is more a problem for other people than the person who has it, so psychopaths have no reason to get treatment. Not that we really have any treatment if they did.)
But there seem to be both genetic and social components (e.g. being abused as a child), so probably those same genetic opportunities got triggered in some people throughout history. Possibly at different rates than here and now.
See my reply's second comment.
I suspect a lot of the people who would agree with this sentiment would change their minds in the face of a sufficiently compelling argument that there exists some scenario under which they would be able to kill their child.
I've worked with parents of very disabled children, and it's not an easy life. For mothers especially, it becomes your career. I can imagine a lot of parents might consider infanticide if they knew that was going to be their life.
Ditto, as someone who works in disability care and child care (including infant care), I support the baby-killing scenario.
I worked for a family that had a severely mentally and physically disabled 6-year old. She was at infant-level cognition, practically blind, and had very little control over her body. There was almost nothing going on mentally, but she was very volatile about sounds/music/surroundings. You could tell if she was happy or sad by whether she was laughing or crying, and she cried a LOT.
Trying to get her to STOP crying was extremely difficult, because there was no communication, and she never wanted the SAME things. However it was also very important to get her calm QUICKLY because if she cried too long she would have a "meltdown", be near inconsolable, throw up, and then you'd have to vent her stomach.
Her parents were the best at reading her. They trained people by pretty much putting you in a room with her, until you developed an ineffable intuitive ability to keep her happy. When I moved to a different city, it took them about 3-4 months to find a replacement for me who wouldn't quit by the second day. I was driving back to my old city once a week to work for them during that time.
Her existence had a terrible effect on her family. They had to hire around the clock care. As in, amazingly patient care-givers that were hard to find, to cover about 100 hours a week. I would get stressed covering 2 shifts a week, and I don't know how her parents were managing to cope.
This child was a drain on society and on everyone around her. Because of her parents' religious values, they wouldn't kill her even if it were legal. But their lives would have been dramatically improved if it were otherwise.
Also, I agree that infants have less or equal personhood than many animals. The way I handle the discrepancy is by being a vegetarian. But since most people aren't vegetarians, they don't really have a strong supporting reason to be against legalized infanticide.
So, my position is that the necessary standard to justify ending a 10 month old's life is only a bit lower than that of ending a 18 year old's life, and is only a bit higher than the necessary standard to justify ending a fetus's life. I'm patient. But what that statement often obscures is that I'm willing to let people meet that standard. I would support ending the individual you described at ages of 6 years, 60 years, 6 months, or 6 months after conception.
But the acknowledgement that not every life should be continued is very different from a "return policy" sort of infanticide which Bakkot is justifying by saying "well, they're not people yet." Sometimes it's best to kill people, too, and so personhood isn't the true issue.
There is another, quite different, situation where it happens: Highly stressed mothers of newborns.
Interesting. Having suspected that something along these lines was out there, I did mention the possibility of readjustment. However,
1) sorry and non-vindictive as we might feel for this subset of childkillers, we'd still have to give them some significant punishment, in order not to weaken our overall deterrence factor.
2) This still would hardly push anyone (me included) from "indiscriminating extermination" to "ignore" in a binary choice scenario.
If the problem is that almost everyone who could kill their ten-month-old kid is psychotic (something I'd disagree with particularly in light of the above and in light of the fact that it currently means defying one of our society's strongest taboos, but leaving that aside for now)...
Then why, exactly, are we trying to deter killing your babies? It's not going to have any effect on the number of psychotic people out there.
I suspect that "babykilling is OK in and of itself, but it's a visible marker for psychosis and we want to justify taking action against psychotics and therefore we criminalize babykilling anyway" isn't a particularly stable thought in human minds, and pretty quickly decomposes into "babykilling is not OK," "psychosis is not OK," "babykillers are psychotic," a 25% chance of "psychotics kill babies," and two photons.
I know it's stupid to jump in here, but you don't mean psychotic or psychosis. You mean psychopathic (a.k.a. sociopathic). Please don't lump the mentally ill together with evil murderers. Actual psychotic people are hearing voices and miserable, not gleefully plotting to kill their own children. You're thinking of sociopaths. Psychotics don't kill babies any more than anyone else. It's sociopaths who should all be killed or otherwise removed from society.
Lots of sociopaths as the term is clinically defined live perfectly productive lives, often in high-stimulation, high-risk jobs that neurotypical people don't want to do like small aircraft piloting, serving in the special forces of their local military and so on. They don't learn well from bad experiences and they need a lot of stimulation to get a high, so those sorts of roles are ideal for them.
They don't need to be killed or removed from society, they need to be channelled into jobs where they can have fun and where their psychological resilience is an asset.
Huh, okay. Thanks.
Some of the traits listed on the wikipedia page for psychopathy are traits that I want and have modified myself towards:
(It's odd how the words "schizophrenic" and "psychotic" bring up such different connotations even though schizophrenia is the poster-child of psychosis. (Saying this as a schizotypal person with "ultra high risk" of schizophrenia.))