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juliawise comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012) - Less Wrong
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Comments (1430)
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.
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.
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?
All of the reasons given above: Babies aren't people, so making it outright illegal to kill them even in unusual circumstances decreases people's personal freedom without increasing anyone's fun.
More broadly, I think having fewer things prohibited correlates with more fun unless there's some reason the prohibition increases the amount of fun in the universe. Killing people significantly reduces the amount of fun for a number of reasons. Killing babies doesn't.
Oh, and I'm using "fun" in a somewhat specialized way.
That's pretty much tautological -- you could as well express it as "forbidding things correlates with more fun unless there's some reason allowing something increases the amount of fun in the universe". What you really need for this argument to work is a way of showing that people attach intrinsic utility to increased latitude of choice, which in light of the paradox of choice looks questionable.
Aside from any other possible issues, you're leaving out the possibility that one person may want to kill a baby that another person is very attached to.
Do you have an age or ability level at which you think being a person begins?
If I kill a person, the number of Fun-having-person-moments in the universe is reduced by the remaining lifetime that person would potentially have had. If I kill a baby, the number of Fun-having-person-moments in the universe is reduced by the entire lifetime of the person that baby would potentially have become.
Reasoning sensibly about counterfactuals is hard, but it isn't clear to me why the former involves less total Fun than latter does. If anything, I would expect that removing an entire lifetime's worth of Fun-having reduces total Fun more than removing a fraction of a lifetime's worth.
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.
Not sure I'd agree, there. Rome had institutionalized blood sports, and mass rioting when the entertainment was interrupted.