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Multiheaded comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012) - Less Wrong
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Comments (1430)
(Let's collect academic opinions here)
The utilitarian bioethicist Peter Singer claims that it's pretty much OK to kill a disabled newborn, but states that killing normal infants who are impossible for their parents to raise doesn't follow from that, and, while not being as bad as murdering an adult, is hardly justifiable. Note that he doesn't quite consider any wider social repercussions.
http://www.princeton.edu/~psinger/faq.html
Singer's position is worth quoting at length (emphasis mine):
Singer's position seems to be pretty much exactly mine with one important exception. He thinks that the reason infanticide in general is wrong is because killing someone else's baby is a great wrong to the parent. This I fully agree with and is why I have repeatedly specified that you should only be able to kill your own child. He further thinks that killing any animal is wrong if it could have a happy life if you chose not to kill it, and for this reason he thinks killing infants is wrong. This second position I disagree with, but I suspect almost anyone here who is not a vegetarian also disagrees. daenerys seems to have come to much the same conclusion as Singer.
ETA: I'm having trouble finding philosophers apart from Singer and Tooley who have written on this topic at all, and both seem to have come to roughly the same conclusions that I did. This is kind of unfortunate, because I'm definitely interested in what the other side is - but as things stand, the most strong arguments against infanticide I've seen have already been presented in this thread and have to do with practical concerns, like the risk of increasing sadistic behaviors and the importance of using Schelling points where practical.
ETA2: Here's another paper, which directly addresses Tooley. I can temporarily post it somewhere if people don't have access to JSTOR. The gist of the argument is that Tooley needs to make a consequentialist argument, not just a moral one. The conclusion of the authors is that they don't think such an argument would be hard to make but that Tooley definitely failed to make it. (Incidentally, as far as I can tell and as Multiheaded points out, Singer also fails to spend much consideration on the full societal consequences of legalized infanticide.)
Consider Heinlein:
Good find.
Heinlein and I differ philosophical in a lot of very important ways. For one, the idea of basing morality on "racial survival" terrifies me. (For another, my moral reasoning hasn't lead me to conclude that having a threesome with my 11-year-old genetically modified gender-bent clones would be a fine and dandy thing to do.)
Eh heh heh. So you can be terrified by some kinds of utilitarian reasoning. Well, this one does terrify me too, but in the context of this conversation I'm tempted to cite my people's saying: "What's fine for a Russian would kill a German."
Of course I can. If your core utility function is optimizing something other than mine, it's going to be scary. Mine is optimizing for something that looks roughly like fun, which I imagine is in accordance with almost all of LW. What's yours optimizing for?
It feels pretty complex, and I just self-report as undecided on some preferences, but, although a part of my function seems to be optimizing for LW-"fun" too, another, smaller part is a preference for "Niceness with a capital N", or "the world feeling wholesome".
I'm not good enough at introspection and self-expression to describe this value of "Niceness", but it seems to resonate with some Christian ideals and images ("love your enemies"), the complex, indirect ethical teachings seen in classical literature (e.g. Akutagawa or Dostoevsky; I love and admire both), and even, on an aesthetic level, the modern otaku culture's concept of "moe" (see this great analysis on how that last one, although looking like a mere pop culture craze to outsiders, can tie in into a larger sensibility).
So, there's an ever-present "minority group" in my largely LW-normal values cluster. I can't quite label it with something like "conservative" or "romantic", but I recognize it when I feel it.
...shit, I feel like some kind of ethical hipster now, lol.
Tl;dr: there might be some kind of "Niceness" (permitting "fun" that's not directly fun) a level or so above "fun" for me, just as there is some kind of "fun" above pleasure for most people (permitting "pleasure" that's not directly pleasant). If people don't wirehead so they can have "fun" and not just pleasure, I'm totally able not to optimize for "fun" so I can have "Niceness" and not just "fun".
More infanticide advocacy here :
Recently, Francesca Minerva published in the Journal of Medical Ethics arguing the case that :
"what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled."
Random press coverage complete with indignant comments
Actual paper, pdf, freely available
In many (most?) countries abortion is normally only allowed in the first few months of pregnancy. (Also, I can't imagine why anyone would want to carry a pregnancy nine months, give birth to a child and then kill it rather than just aborting as soon as possible, anyway.)
Can you imagine how the experiences of childbirth and being the primary caregiver for a newborn might alter someone's desires with respect to bearing and raising a child?
As for bearing, once the child is born that's a sunk cost; as for “being the primary caregiver for a newborn”... Wait. So we're not talking about killing a child straight after birth but after a while? (A week? A month? A year?)
I can't see why that makes a difference in the context of my question, so feel free to choose whichever interpretation you prefer.
For my part, it seems entirely plausible to me that a person's understanding of what it means to be the primary caregiver for a child will change between time T1, when they are pregnant with that child, and time T2, when the child has been born... just as it seems plausible that a person's understanding of what a three-week stay in the Caribbean will be like will change between time T1, when they are at home looking at brochures, and time T2, when their airplane is touching down. That sort of thing happens to people all the time. So it doesn't seem at all odd to me that they might want one thing at T1 and a different thing at T2, which was the behavior you were expressing incredulity about. That seems even more true the more time passes... say, at time T3, when they've been raising the child for a month.
Incidentally, I certainly agree with you that bearing the child is a sunk cost once the child is born. If you're suggesting that, therefore, parents can't change their desires with respect to bearing the child once it's born, I conclude that our models of humans are vastly different. If, alternatively, you're suggesting that it's an error for parents to change their desires with respect to bearing the child once it's born, you may well be right, but in that case I have to conclude "I can't imagine why" was meant rhetorically.
More like I was assuming too much stuff in the implicit antecedent of the conditional whose consequent is “would want”, but yeah, what I meant is that it's an error for parents to change their desires with respect to bearing the child once it's born.
Hmm. Maybe you could've picked out a more respectable source of "press coverage" than the goddamn Daily Mail.