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juliawise comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012) - Less Wrong
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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.
Not really. There's a third option - that forbidding things with no evidence that this will improve the world does not correlate either with increased fun or decreased fun, so that we could pass laws on a whim without concern. My claim is that this is not the case - that there is a correlation and the correlation is negative.
Ehh... I am confident asserting that prohibiting things merely on the basis that people are often happier having fewer choices will not in fact general to increased levels of fun. Having fewer choices might make people happier, but being denied choices by their government probably won't - and I'm certainly not optimizing for happiness, in any case.
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?
Considering that I specified that you could only kill your own children, that doesn't seem like much of an argument at all. Really, imagine making that argument and expecting to be taken seriously in any other context. That's exactly like arguing abortion should be illegal because other people might have gotten attached to the fetus, or that it should be illegal to tear down my house and build a new one because the crazy guy down the street might be have some fond memories attached to it.
No, I'm afraid I'm not really buying this argument. Perhaps there ought to be subtleties to the law to handle exceptional cases, but that's nowhere near a sufficiently good argument to prohibit it outright.
No. I've gone into this pretty heavily in some other posts, which I could dig up if you like. Recapping briefly, it certainly seems to me by comparison with other people-things and non-people things that babies younger than ten months unquestionably belong to the latter category, so the fact that I could not tell you a precise point at which non-personhood ends and personhood begins does not prevent me from telling you that babies younger than 10 months are non-persons.
I expect this proposal could be taken seriously: when an owner wants to have a pet put down other than for humanitarian reasons, others who have had a close relationship to the pet, and are willing and able to take responsibility for it, get the right to veto and take custody of the pet.
Ways in which Nancy's argument was not exactly like arguing that abortion should be illegal because other people might have gotten attached to the fetus:
I'm not sure how much I will participate on this topic, it seems like a bit of a mind killer. I'm impressed we've found a more volatile version of the notorious internet abortion debate.
I expect this is a valid point. You can get away with far worse arguments when you have moral high ground to rely on.
Indeed. Look at a scenario like this. What if an adventurous young woman gets an unintended pregnancy, initially decides to have the child, many of her friends and her family are looking forward to it... then either the baby is crippled during birth or the mother simply changes her mind, unwilling to adapt her lifestyle to accommodate child-rearing, yet for some weird reason (selfish or not) refusing to give it up for adoption?
Suppose that she tells the doctor to euthanize the baby. Consider the repercussions in her immediate circle, e.g. what would be her mother's reaction upon learning that she's a grandmother no more (even if she's told that the baby died of natural causes... yet has grounds to suspect that it didn't)?
Completely independent of any of the rest of this, I absolutely endorse the legality of lying to people about why my child died, as well as the ethics of telling them it's none of their damned business, with the possible exception of medical or legal examiners. I certainly endorse the legality of lying to my mother about it.
Further, I would be appalled by someone who felt entitled to demand such answers of a mother whose child had just died (again, outside of a medical or legal examination, maybe) and would endorse forcibly removing them from the presence of a mother whose child has just died.
I would not endorse smacking such a person upside the head, but I would nevertheless be tempted to.
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.
Probably true, but there's something you seem to be neglecting: Living in fear of being killed will significantly reduce the amount of fun you're having. Making it legal to kill non-person entities doesn't introduce this fear. Making it legal to kill person entities does.
Much less significantly, a culture in which you are obliged to either raise your children or see them put through foster care is also a much less fun culture to live in. And it's not clear that adding a person (ETA: particularly a person who would have been killed by their parents while still a baby given the chance) to the universe (as things stand today) will, on average, increase the amount of fun had down the line; this is why you're not obliged to be trying to have as many children as possible at all times.
If I believed the only reason nobody has killed me yet is because it is illegal to kill people, I wouldn't be very happy.
(shrug) We're both neglecting lots of things; we couldn't have this conversation otherwise.
I agree with you that the risk of being killed reduces Fun, at least in some contexts. (It increases Fun in other contexts.) Then again, the risk of my baby being killed reduces Fun in some contexts as well. I don't see any principled reason to consider the first factor in my calculations and not the second (or vice-versa), other than the desire to justify a preselected conclusion.
I agree that it's not clear that adding a person to the universe increases the amount of Fun down the line. It's also not clear that subtracting a person from the universe reduces the amount of Fun. Reasoning sensibly about conterfactuals is hard.
This seems to be pointing out that killing could be even worse due to fear but in fact isn't. It's more of a non-argument in favour of the opposing position than an argument in favour of yours, at least is it is framed as "but something you're neglecting".
Somewhat regardless of our private feelings on the matter, a tip: Forget OKCupid, do you not see how earnestly stating such beliefs in public gives your handle a reputation you might not mind in general, yet greatly want to avoid at some future point of your LW blogging - such as when wanting to sway someone in an area concerning ethical values and empathy?
Now that's pretty certain.
Quite aside from everything else, this line is needlessly grating to anyone who even slightly adheres to the Western culture's traditional values. You could've phrased that differently... somehow. There's a big difference between denouncing what a largely contrarian audience takes as the standards imposed upon them by society at large and denouncing what they perceive to be their own values. This might be hypocritical, but I guess that many LW readers feel just like that.
Go start breeding now. Or, say, manufacture defective condoms. (Or identify your real reason for not killing babies.)
Please re-read the comment thread. If you still think we're talking about my reasons for doing or not doing anything in particular, let me know, and I'll try to figure out how to prevent such misunderstandings in the future.