Bakkot comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012) - Less Wrong
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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".