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Bakkot comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012) - Less Wrong
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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).
Because he, like some who have posted here, is sympathetic to the baby-killing mothers under certain circumstances and doesn't mind helping them avoid prosecution? I wouldn't judge him, heavens forbid. I'd likely do the opposite in his place, but I respect his position.
How much overlap do you think there is between "influential members of the criminal justice system" and "people who are sympathetic to infanticide"? Especially considering how far from mainstream the infanticide position is.
Labelling a suicide as an accident isn't legally trivial. It is, at least in some cases, an action that favors the interests of the heirs of suicides and disfavors the interests of life insurance companies.
I agree that it isn't legally trivial. But the social consequences of labeling a death as suicide are much more immediate than any financial consequences from labeling a death as accidental. Also, I'm not sure what percentage of the suicidal have life insurance, so I'm not sure how much weight the hypothetical coroner would place on the life insurance issue.
I'm not saying the position is rational or morally correct, but it wouldn't surprise me that an influential person like a coroner held a position vaguely like "screw insurance companies." (>>75%)
By contrast, I would be extremely surprised to learn that a coroner was willing to ignore an infanticide, absent collusion (i.e. bribery) of some kind (<<<1%)
If it works that way with euthanasia...
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.
The fact that infanticide has been practiced so widely suggests strongly that most people don't "instinctively" see babies as people. It is at best a weak instinct supported by a strong social convention in most Western societies.
But yes, point taken. Even so, TimS was talking about "the cluster of values we've currently adopted", which, as you say, most people never think about at all. So my post should be taken to refer to people who have given any thought whatsoever to the question of why they're OK with killing pigs but not killing adult humans. I'd wager their conclusion is almost universally "because pigs aren't people".
NO! As you have yourself correctly pointed out, it is because most cultures, with ours being a notable exception, assign a low value to "useless" people or people who they feel are a needless drain on society. (mistake fixed)