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Sewing-Machine comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012) - Less Wrong
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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?
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.
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.
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.
I think you mean "for every example you are likley to list", I didn't list any.
What exactly would that accomplish? I said more similar in some respects, didn't I? I didn't say on net or overall.
Yup.
That's the rub. I repeat my claim: the culture you want is, on net or overall, closer to our society than to societies that are OK with infanticide. It's evidence against your extrapolated-volition utopia being OK with infanticide. (unless I have absolutely zero understanding of Bayes)
sigh
Look two comments up.
Tsk tsk tsk, not very multicultural of you.
Please please just for a second try to look at your own society as the alien one for the purposes of analysis, to ascertain is rather than should when it comes to such questions. I find this has helped me more than anything else in thinking about social questions and avoiding political thinking.