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Strange7 comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012) - Less Wrong
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Would you approve of a man killing a child which his wife recently gave birth to, without the mother's permission, on the grounds that he does not believe himself to be the child's father? That's certainly not sadism.
Or, if genetic testing has been done and the child's biological father is known, would you say it should be legal for the father to kill the child... say, because he disagrees with the married couple's religious beliefs and wants to deny them an easy recruit?
No and no. Easily solved by requiring both parents to consent and/or by not defining "parent" to mean "progenitor".
Both seem rather tangential, in any case.
How would you define "parent," then? It's not a tangent, it's an important edge case. I'm trying to understand exactly where our views on the issue differ.
For what it's worth, I agree with you unreservedly on the age discrimination thing. In fact, I think it's the root of a lot of the current economic problems: a majority of the population is essentially being warehoused during their formative years, and then expected to magically transform into functional, productive adults afterward.
Probably we'd be better served by me explaining why think it's a tangent: The issues related to who has the right to kill the baby have to do with harm done to people other than the baby. The core point I was trying to make was that killing a baby isn't inherently wrong in the way that killing an adult is because the baby isn't a person.
Certainly there are issues to be sorted out, in the same way there are issues to be sorted out related to who has the right to kill a pet dog. But if babies were people these wouldn't be important, relatively speaking: killing babies would be wrong for the same reason killing adults is wrong. As such I think they're tangential: unrelated to the question of "is it wrong to kill babies for the reason that babies are people?".
That said: The legal definition is probably adequate; barring that, perhaps we might say the parents are the people to whom responsibility for raising the baby would fall.