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Bakkot comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012) - Less Wrong
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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?
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.
Absolutely. Keep in mind, I'm not trying to justify infanticide by saying it used to be common. I'm saying TimS objected to my moral reasoning because it didn't add up to normal, and I was objecting to his characterization of accepted infanticide as highly abnormal. That's 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.
An uncle of mine who is a doctor said that SIDS is a codeword for infanticide and that many of his colleagues admit as much.
Either my model is false or this story is wrong.
Specifically, I can't understand why a coroner would not take actions to facilitate the prosecution of a crime (infanticide is murder), because that is one of the jobs of a coroner.
By contrast, I've heard that coroners are quite wiling to label a death as accidental when they believe it was suicide, because any legal violations are not punishable (suicide is generally illegal, but everyone agrees that prosecution is pointless).
Not really. Particularly not if we're OK with abortion. In fact, that infanticide is currently illegal seems more like a historical accident than anything: our current standard seems to be "don't kill people", and human babies are by far the most exceptional element of the set of things we'd consider people.
Well, certainly not that's been recorded, and I don't think most cultures could really be said to have had a thinker who spoke for the entire culture*. Most people did or did not go along with infanticide purely as a product of what other people were doing.
* And in fact if you discount Jewish and Christian (ETA: and Islamic) thinkers in general and Western thinkers after 1400 or so, I'm having trouble finding a single respected thinker who was explicitly opposed: certainly Plato and Aristotle seemed to support it.
It looks like I misread you. I thought you were referring to moral conventions generally, while you seem to have been referring to moral conventions on infanticide. I agree that many historical cultures did not oppose infanticide as strongly as the current culture.
Major objection. When talking about society at large and not the small cluster of "rationalist" utilitarians (who are ever tempted to be smarter than their ethics), the current standard is "don't kill what our instincts register as people". The distinction being that John Q. Public hardly reflects on the matter at all. I believe that it's a hugely useful standard because it strengthens the relevant ethical injunctions, regardless of any inconveniences that it brings from an act utilitarian standpoint.
If you say you don't want to kill an infant because of its potential for blicket, then you would also have to apply that logic to abortion and birth control, and come to the conclusion that these are just as wrong as killing infants, since they both destroy blicket-potential.
Fetus- does not have blicket, has potential for blicket - killing it is legal abortion
Infant- does not have blicket (you agreed with this), has potential for blicket - killing it is illegal murder
Does not compute. One or the other outcomes needs to be changes, and I'm sure not going to support the illegalization of birth control.
Note: I apologize if this is getting too close to politics, but it is a significant part of the killing babies debate, and not mentioning it just to avoid mentioning a political issue would not give accurate reasons.
At a certain level, all morality is about balancing the demands of conflicting blicket-supported desires. So the balance comes out different at different stages. Yes, the difference between stages is quite arbitrary (and worse: obviously historically contingent).
In short, I wish I had a better answer for you than I am comfortable with arbitrary distinctions (why is the speed limit 55 mph rather than 56?). From an outsider perspective, I'm sure it looks like I've been mind-killed by some version of "The enemy of my enemy (politically active religious conservatives) is my friend."
Somebody did some math about reaction times, kinetic energy from impacts, and fuel economy. That turned out to be a good place to draw the line. For practical purposes, people can drive 60 in a 55 zone under routine circumstances and not get in trouble.
Actually...
So, Alejandro's response is correct, but all of this seems rather tangential to the question you quote. The reason the speed limit is 55 rather than 56 or 54 is because we have a cultural preference for multiples of 5... which is also why all the other speed limits I see posted are multiples of 5. Seeing a speed limit sign that read "33" or something would cause me to do a potentially life-threatening double-take.
They're unusual but they do happen. The "19 MPH" one happens to be from the campus of my alma mater.
Huh. Some of these I can understand, but I'm really curious about the 19mph one... is there a story behind that? (If I had to guess I'd say it relates to some more global 20mph limit.)
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.