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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.
You're not the first one to argue this on LW. I'll find you the link in a second. Why can't sadists kill their babies? Why ten months, precisely? More importantly, why can't we kill babies?
Why do you particularly bring up the "discrimination against youth" thing?
But yeah, welcome to LW and all that.
If anything it would seem more appropriate to prevent sadists from torturing their babies (including before and during the murder).
No, it's an opinion I've seen around, certainly, but it's definitely not "mainstream".
Sadists can't kill their children (or rather, you can't kill your children out of sadism) for the same reason they can't torture pigs: "human deriving pleasure from bacon" is held to trump "pig desire to continue to live", but that still trumps "human deriving pleasure from causing pain"; and it indicates there's something wrong with you.
The ten month line is arbitrary, but picked because you would have a very hard time making a reasonable case that a baby younger than that is already a person.
I'm not sure what you mean by "why can't we kill babies". Why is it illegal in the real world? I'm sure you can write out as good an answer to that as I.
The bit about discrimination against youths is because I was having a conversation about it a few days ago, prompted by an aside in a a short story I was reading. It's not a common belief, and one I've seen only rarely espoused on LW. The story is "The Right Book", specifically, the line being
They're just p-zombies pretending to be people. They only get their soul at 10 months and thereafter are able to detect qualia.
I would vote against this law. I'd vote with guns if necessary. Reason: I like babies. Tiny humans are cute and haven't even done anything to deserve death yet (or indicate that they aren't valuable instances of human). I'd prefer you went around murdering adults (adults being the group with the economic, physical and political power to organize defense.)
If they're p-zombies, they're doing a terrible job of it. Extremely young children are lacking basically all of the traits I'd want a "person" to have.
Tiny kittens are also cute and haven't even done anything to death yet. But if you accidentally lock one in a car and it suffocates, that's merely unfortunate, and should probably not be a crime. The same is true for infants and all other non-person life. If you kill a kitten for some reason other than sadism, well, it's unfortunate that you felt that was necessary, but again, they're not people.
Would you really prefer it to be illegal to murder adults than to murder ten-month-old children? Ten-month-old children can be replaced in a mere twenty months. It takes forty one years to make a new forty-year-old.
Yes. The explanation given was significant.
It takes a 110 years to make a 110 year old . In most cases I'd prefer to keep a 30 year old than either of them. More to the point I don't intrinsically value creating more humans. The replacement cost of a dead human isn't anything to do with the moral aversion I have to murder.
I read your explanation. I'm just somewhat incredulous that this could be your actual belief. Roosters are a lot better prepared to defend themselves than, say, pigs. Is this a good reason to prefer it to be legal to kill roosters than pigs? Not in light of the fact that pigs are vastly more intelligent, capable of abstract reasoning and personality, etc.
The moral aversion I have to murder is twofold, roughly: harm to a person, and harm to society. Babies aren't people by any measure I can see, so the first doesn't apply. The second is where replacement cost comes in.
Do you really think it's wise to have a precedent that allows agents of Type X to go around killing off all of the !X group ? Doesn't bode well if people end up with a really sharp intelligence gradient.
We already have a bunch of those precedents, depending on how you look at it. You're more than free to go around killing ants. No one is going to care. You can even, depending on zoning laws, raise pigs and then slaughter them for their meat. The reason that this is just not a problem in the eyes of the law is that pigs aren't people.
If you look at it another way, we have exactly one precedent: It's generally morally OK to kill members of the !X group if and only if that group consists of agents which are not people.
ETA: I hate that I have to say this, but can people respond instead of just downvoting? I'm honestly curious as to why this particular post is controversial - or have I missed something?
I think you may have taken me to be talking about whether it was acceptable or moral in the sense that society will allow it, that was not my intent. Society allows many unwise, inefficient things and no doubt will do so for some time.
My question was simply whether you thought it wise. If we do make an FAI, and encoded it with some idealised version of our own morality then do we want a rule that says 'Kill everything that looks unlike yourself'? If we end up on the downside of a vast power gradient with other humans do we want them thinking that everything that has little or no value to them should be for the chopping block?
In a somewhat more pithy form, I guess what I’m asking you is: Given that you cannot be sure you will always be strong enough to have things entirely your way, how sure are you this isn’t going to come back and bite you in the arse?
If it is unwise, then it would make sense to weaken that strand of thought in society - to destroy less out of hand, rather than more. That the strand is already quite strong in society would not alter that.
No. But we do want a rule that says something like "the closer things are to being people, the more importance should be given to them". As a consequence of this rule, I think it should be legal to kill your newborn children.
Oh, and I'm never encouraging killing your newborns, just arguing that it should be allowed (if done for something other than sadism).
You did not answer me on the human question - how we’d like powerful humans to think .
This sounds fine as long as you and everything you care about are and always will be included in the group of, ‘people.’ However, by your own admission, (earlier in the discussion to wedrifid,) you've defined people in terms of how closely they realise your ideology:
You’ve made it something fluid; a matter of mood and convenience. If I make an AI and tell it to save only ‘people,’ it can go horribly wrong for you - maybe you’re not part of what I mean by ‘people.’ Maybe by people I mean those who believe in some religion or other. Maybe I mean those who are close to a certain processing capacity - and then what happens to those who exceed that capacity? And surely the AI itself would do so....
There are a lot of ways it can go wrong.
You observe yourself to be a person. That’s not necessarily the same thing as being observably a person to someone else operating with different definitions.
The opinion you state may influence what sort of AI you end up with. And at the very least it seems liable to influence the sort of people you end up with.
-shrug- You’re trying to weaken the idea that newborns are people, and are arguing for something that, I suspect, would increase the occurrence of their demise. Call it what you will.
I haven't seen anyone respond to your request for feedback about votes, so let me do so, despite not being one of the downvoters.
By my lights, at least, your posts have been fine. Obviously, I can't speak for the site as a whole... then again, neither can anyone else.
Basically, it's complicated, because the site isn't homogenous. Expressing conventionally "bad" moral views will usually earn some downvotes from people who don't want such views expressed; expressing them clearly and coherently and engaging thoughtfully with the responses will usually net you upvotes.
I haven't downvoted, for what it is worth. Sure, you may be an evil baby killing advocate but it's not like l care!
I think you accidentally a word.
Well, it sure looks like babies have a lot of things in common with people, and will become people one day, and lots of people care about them.
If your definition of "people" is going to include AI's but exclude pigs, then babies don't really have much in common with people at all.
The "will become people" discussion is being had elsewhere in this thread, but recapping briefly: if the reason for not killing babies is that they're going to become people, then (it seems to me) one must conclude that the morally correct thing to do is to create as many people as possible, since the argument is (as far as I can tell) that increasing the number of people in the world is a net positive.
I don't agree with this conclusion, and I doubt you do either. For me, I reject the premise; this nicely explains my rejection of the conclusion. Do you reject the premise, or that the conclusion follows from the premise? Why?
If this is all we're left with, it's a weak argument indeed. What if society started caring a lot about moths? Does this lend significant weight to the proposition that it should be illegal to kill moths?
Most adults don't have traits I'd want a "person" to have. At least with babies there is a chance they'll turn out as worthwhile people.
Adults have a small chance of acquiring those traits too. Due to selection effects adults that don't have traits have a much lower probability than a fresh new baby of turning out this way.
In a few decades genetic technology and better psychology and sociology may let us make decent probabilistic predictions about how they will turn out as adults. Are you ok with babies with very low probabilities of getting such traits being killed?
As well as, of course, as having far less malleable minds that have yet to crystallize the habits their upbringing gives them.
Far less averse, particularly in an environment where negative externalities cannot be easily prevented. Mind you I would still oppose legalization of killing people (whether babies or adults) just because they are Jerks. Not because of the value of the Jerks themselves (which is offset by their effects on others) but because it isn't just Jerks that would be killed. I don't want other people to have the right to choose who lives and who dies and I'm willing to waive that right myself by way of cooperation in order to see it happen.
I'm not sure why this is getting down voted. "Person" is basically LW speak for "particular kind of machine that has value to me in of itself". I don't see any good reason why I personally should value all people equally. I can see some instrumental value in living in a society that makes rules that operate on this principle.
But generally I do not love my enemies and neighbours like myself. I'm sorry, I guess that's not very Christian of me. ;)
Yeah, I get it, you don't consider babies people and I do. So pretty much we just throw down (ie. trying to reason each other into having the same values as ourselves would be pointless). You vote for baby killing, I vote against it. If there is a war of annihilation and I'm forced to choose sides between the baby killers and the non-baby killers and they seem evenly matched then I choose the non-baby killers side and go kill all the baby killers. If I somehow have the option to exclude all consideration of your preferences from the optimisation function of an FAI then I take it. Just a plain ol' conflict of terminal values.
Oh, and to clarify the extent of my disagreement: When I say "You vote for baby killing, I vote against it" that assumes I don't live in some backwards country without compulsory voting. If voting is optional then I'm staying home. Other people killing babies is not my problem - because I don't have the power to stop a mob of humans from killing babies and I'm not interested in making the token gesture.
I'm curious now, though. What do you think defines an agent as a person, for the moral calculus? How is it that ten-month-old babies meet this definition? Do, say, pigs also meet this definition?
If babies were made of bacon then I'd have to rerun the moral calculus all over again! ;)
Well, they are made of eggs. Actual eggs and counterfactual bacon are an important part of this nutritious breakfast.
How do you know?
It is a core belief of Bakkot's - nothing is going to change that. His thinking on the matter is also self consistent. Only strong social or personal influence has a chance of making a difference (for example, if he has children, all his friends have children and he becomes embedded in a tribe where non-baby-killing is a core belief). For my part I understand Bakkot's reasoning but do not share his preference based premises. As such changing my mind regarding the conclusion would make no sense.
More succinctly I don't expect reasoning with each other to change our minds because neither of us is wrong (in the intellectual sense). We shouldn't change our minds based on intellectual arguments - if we do then we are making a mistake.
Yes, and my question is how do you know? Admittedly I haven't read the entire thread from the beginning, but in the large part I have, I see nothing to suggest that there is anything particularly immutable about either of your positions such that neither of you could possibly change your mind based on normal moral-philosophical arguments. What makes you so quick to dismiss your interlocutor as a babyeating alien?
I trust his word.
You're spinning this into a dismissal, disrespect of Bakkot's intellectual capability or ability to reason. Yet disagreement does not equal disrespect when it is a matter of different preferences. It is only when I think an 'interlocutor' is incapable of understanding evidence and reasoning coherently (due to, say, biases or ego) that observing that reason cannot persuade each other is a criticism.
He is a [babykilling advocate]. He says he is a babykilling advocate. He says why. That I acknowledge that he is an advocate of infanticide rights is not, I would hope, offensive to him.
I note that while Bakkot's self expression is novel, engaging and coherent (albeit contrary to my values), your own criticism is not coherent. You asked "how do you know?" and I gave you a straight answer. Continued objection makes no sense.
The question was "how do you know?", not "what do you mean?". Aliens are almost certain to fundamentally disagree with humans in a variety of important matters, by simple virtue of not being genetically related to us. Bakkot is a human. Different priors are called for.
What do you think of abortion?
I have to say, http://lesswrong.com/lw/47k/an_abortion_dialogue/ seems relevant to this entire comment tree.
Your link (in the Discussion post) is broken.
! I didn't realize I'd broke all the old .html links - turned out that when I thought I was removing the gzip encoding, I also removed the Apache rewrite rules. I've fixed that and also pointed the Discussion at the most current URL, just in case.
This link works. http://www.gwern.net/An%20Abortion%20Dialogue
Better late than never?
(From the looks of gwern's link I'm more interested in homophones.)
Once we get artificial uteri I think it should be illegal except in cases of rape, but it should be legal to renounce all responsibility for it and put it up for adoption or let the other biological parent finance the babies coming to term. This has the neat and desirable effect of equalizing the position of the biological father and the biological mother.
Uteri?
Not a native speaker. And uterus is a surprisingly sparingly used word.
Uterus. Uterus. Uterus.
Thanks for the correction! :)
Any time ;)
Just remember that if it ends with -us, it probably pluralizes to -i. That's only for latin-based words. Greek-based words, like octopus, can either be pluralized to octopuses or octopodes (pronounced Ahk-top-o-dees). And sometimes you have a new or technical latin-based word like "virus" which just pluralizes to "viruses." It's perfectly fine to pluralize uterus to uteruses, too, since it's so uncommon. English is a bitch.
[Edited to give a longer explanation]
Why is sadism worse than indifference? Are we punishing people for their mental states?
We're punishing people for their motives, which seems like a reasonable thing to do.
Why does that seem like a reasonable thing to do? Isn't that just an incentive to lie about motives?
Of course it's an incentive to lie about motives, but some inferences can be made.
I'm sure this discussion has been had on LW before, but there's a few reasons motives are important in considering what should be punished. In particular:
We accept as given that infanticide is something broadly to be discouraged. So we should only be accepting sufficiently good excuses.
Allowing sadists to kill their babies creates incentive to produce babies for the sole purpose of killing them, which is a behavior which is long-run going to be very damaging to society.
I don't understand your reasoning for either of those dot points.
Let me try again, then.
We want to discourage infanticide. Say you kill your baby because, say, you unexpectedly found yourself unable to support it but were familiar with the foster care system and didn't want any more people to go through that than necessary. That's unfortunate, but that's an excuse we can accept. By accepting this excuse we've basically committed to accepting all excuses which are equally good. But there's no way for you to exploit this commitment for your own benefit, and so we're OK making this commitment. The same could not be said to a commitment to accepting sadism as a reason to kill your children.
This point is less important. The idea is that a woman repeatedly getting pregnant and then killing the child is putting a lot of strain on society, both in terms of resources and in terms of comfort. We allow a lot of privileges for pregnant women and new mothers, with the expectation that they're trying to bring new people into society, something we encourage. If you're killing your kid out of sadism, you're not doing this, and society will have to adjust how all pregnant women are treated.
I'd think that that the bulk of the resource cost of a newborn is the physiological cost (and medical risks) the mother endured during pregnancy. The general societal cost seems small in comparison.
Sure, that seems true. Note that Bakkot didn't say that the costs to everyone else outweighed the costs to the mother, merely that the costs to everyone else were also substantial.
We already treat accidental pregnant women basically the same as those who planned their pregnancy. Clearly we should distinguish and discriminate between them rather than lump them into the "pregnant woman" category (I take a lighter tone in some of my other posts here to provoke thought, but I'm dead serious about this).
Also many people are way to stuck in their 21st century Eurocentric frame of mind to comprehend the personhood argument for infanticide properly. Let me help:
Its illegal to torture an animal. Why wouldn't it be illegal to torture a baby while killing him? If a sadist can get jollies out of killing with painless poison his children and keeps making them for that purpose, I can't really see how this harms wider society if he pays for the pills and children himself.
Please rethink this. E.g. are you at all confident that this sadist wouldn't slip and go on to adults after their 10th child? Wouldn't you, personally, force people who practice this to wear some mandatory identification in public, so you don't have to wonder about every creepy-looking stranger? Don't you just have an intuition about the myriad ways that giving sadists such rights could undermine society?
Fine make it illegal for this to be done except by experts.
No, why?
We already give sadists lots of rights to psychologically and physical abuse people when this is done with consent or when we don't feel like being morally consistent or when there is some societal benefit to be had.
For your own safety, in every regard that such people could threaten it.
Well, I've always thought that it's enormously and horribly wrong of us.
I don't think society considers that a valid reason for discrimination.
Also please remember surgeons can do nasty things to me without flinching if they wanted to, people do also occasionally have such fears since we even invoke this trope in horror movies.
I generally agree.
But on the other hand I think we should give our revealed preference some weight as well, remember we are godshatter, maybe we should just accept that perhaps we don't care as much about other people's suffering as we'd like to believe or say we do.
What's your discount rate?
(That is, if I offered you $100 now, or $X a year from now, what is the lowest value of X that would make you choose the latter option?)
Assuming I have a good expectation that you're equally likely to deliver in each scenario, my discount rate is about 1.3, I think. (That is, $X = $130.) (Edit: On consideration, it's closer to 2.0 in light of the fact that I expect to have significantly more money next year than this year (for whatever value of "this year" we're using), so the marginal utility of each dollar goes down, etc. It would be 1.3 or so if I expected to have the same amount of money next year as this year; 1.3 is the more relevant value.)
I'm guessing I know what point you're trying to make here, but let me go ahead and say that most of the reason murder in general ought to be illegal is because you're killing a person. Babies probably will be people, but they're not yet; you're not doing harm to a person by infanticide any more than you are by using contraception.
I would love to loan you money at 20% interest. Send me a private message if you're interested.
When playing chess, how many moves ahead do you look?
A man produces about 47 billion sperm a year; a woman releases 13 eggs a year; a couple that tries to become pregnant over the course of a year will have a 75% chance of live birth pregnancy if the female is 30. So each feasible sperm-egg combination over the course of a year has about a trillionth chance of making it to a live birth. *
As soon as conception happens, then you've got a zygote which is very likely to make it to live birth. And once it makes it to live birth, it's very likely to make it to adulthood. So there seems to be a very bright line at conception. (Contraceptives prevent conception; condoms by preventing sperm from entering, the pill by preventing ovulation, and so on.)
(I should note that I think there are sound reasons to treat a risk that will end one out of a trillion people chosen at random as less of a concern than a risk that is certain to end a certain person, and that this line of reasoning depends heavily on this premise, but it would take too long to go into those reasons here. I can in another comment if you're interested.)
*Noting that 'potential resulting individual DNAs' are individually much less likely than just sperm-egg combinations.
One or two, but for me deciding which move to make is practically instinct, less lookahead. Also I'm not entirely sure how this is relevant.
We seem to be arguing from different axioms. For me, it seems that if you're confident that having more people in the world is a net positive, then as a necessary conclusion the moral thing to do is to try to have as many children as possible. If you're not sure of this, I don't undersand how you can conclude it's a moral wrong to destroy something which is not yet a person but merely has the potential to become one. For what reason is this latter situation immoral?
What role should the future play in decision-making?
It is not clear to me that prohibiting murder derives from that position or mandates birth.
By quantification of "merely." If we determine that a particular coma patient has a 90% chance of reawakening and becoming a person again, then it seems almost as bad to end them as it would be to end them once they were awake. If we determine that a particular coma patient has a 5% chance of reawakening and becoming a person again, then it seems not nearly as bad to end them. If we determine that a particular coma patient has a 1e-6 chance of reawakening and becoming a person again, then it seems that ending them has little moral cost.
If infants are nearly guaranteed to become people, then failing to protect them because we are impatient does not strike me as wisdom.
Expected values are important. Obviously. Couldn't you have asked that, instead of bandying about with discount rates and chess?
I don't think prohibiting murder is the thing to do because having more people in the world is a net positive. I think it's the thing to do because prohibiting murder is a net positive, for reasons I've gone in to elsewhere and will happily repeat for you if you'd like. But I don't see that prohibiting infanticide has the same positives. If the reason you're against infanticide is that you think increasing the number of people in the world is gives a positive expected value, that's fine - but then shouldn't you be having as many children as possible? If not, I'm having trouble seeing what relevance it is that a fetus is going to be a person.
I believe this addresses the rest of your post, also.
From the NIH:
So your bright line should be heartbeat, or at least zygote implantation. This does not significantly affect your conclusions.
The jump from 1e-12 to .5 seems brighter to me than the jump from .5 to .8. (.5 is also historically significant, as only about half of born children would live to see puberty for much of human history.)
I would recommend against expressing this opinion in your OKCupid profile.
Arbitrary limits like "ten months" don't make for good rules - especially when there's a natural limit that's much more prominent: childbirth.
What exactly counts as "people" is a matter of convention; it's best to settle on edges that are as crisp as possible, to minimize potential disagreement and conflict.
Also "any reason other than sadism", eh? Like "the dog was hungry" would be okay?
EDIT: in the ensuing discussion, we came to an agreement that the psychopathy argument is only true of our present society, and, while strengthening our reasons to keep infanticide illegal right now, wouldn't apply to someplace without a strong revulsion to infanticide in the first place. I've updated my stance and switched to other arguments against infanticide-in-general.
I'm sorry, I just can't parse your sentence, especially "anyone who seriously doesn't understand why punishing all parents able to kill their infant is an incredibly good idea". I suspect you chained too many clauses together and ended up saying the opposite of what you meant.
Followed up with a clarification here.
(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.
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.
Exhibit A: me.
Where did the two photons come from?
The photons come from unjustified pattern-matching.
Oooh.
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.
OK.
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.
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.
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.
See my reply's second comment.
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.
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.)
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.
This is not an uncontested statement.
Thanks for catching me, adjusted.
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?
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?
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."
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).
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.
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.
Cultures are often fine with killing wives and children too, if they get too far out of line. They are yours after all.
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.
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.
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.
Thanks a lot. I fully support your line of thinking, all of your points and your conclusion.
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.
(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.
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.
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.
First, I'm understandably modeling this on myself, and second, it doesn't really make this speculation any less valid in itself.
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.
Why is overriding of instincts inherently bad?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why not permit the killing of babies not your own, for the same reason?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
So, premeditated killing of someone else's child should be criminal damage rather than murder?
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).
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Well, yes. This seems obvious to me.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.)
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?
(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