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aelephant comments on Why Eat Less Meat? - Less Wrong
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To be completely honest, I agree with you but find it hard to come up for a good argument for why that should be. One way I've thought about it in the past is that the parents or caretakers of a child are sort of like stewards of a property that will be inherited one day. If I'm going to inherit a mansion from my grandfather on my 18th birthday, my parents can't arbitrarily decide to burn it down when I'm 17 & 364 days old. Harming children (physically or emotionally) is damaging the person they will be when they are an adult in a similar way.
What about a mentally disabled person, or other groups of humans who will never be capable of consciously entering into a 'moral agreement' with society? Should they also be considered 'outside the realm of morality'? What makes them different from an animal, other than anthropocentricism?
Yes, I consider them outside the realm of morality. If a mentally disabled person committed murder, for example, he or she could not be held morally liable for their actions -- instead the parent or guardian has the moral & legal responsibility for making sure that he or she doesn't steal, kill, etc.
So are you saying it should only be considered "wrong" to torture mentally disabled people because of agreements made between non-mentally-disabled people, and if non-mentally-disabled people made a different agreement, then it would be okay?
Say the only beings in existence are you and a mentally disabled person. Are you bound by any morality in how you treat them?
By this reasoning, if the child is 5 years old but the world is going to be hit by an asteroid tomorrow, unavoidably killing everyone, it would be okay to be cruel to the child.
To save the original idea, I'd suggest modifying it to distinguish between having impaired ability to come to agreements and not having the ability to come to agreements. Children are generally in the former category, at least if they can speak and reason. This extends to more than just children; you shouldn't take advantage of someone who's stupid, but you can "take advantage" of the fact that a stick of broccoli doesn't understand what it means to be eaten and can't run away anyway.
Right. Like I said, I find it hard to come up with a good argument. I don't like arguments that extend things into the future, because everything has to get all probabilistic. Is it possible to prove that any particular child is going to grow into an adult? Nope.
But if we're 99.9% confident that a child is going to die (say, they have a very terminal disease), is being cruel to the child 99.99% less bad?
No.
(If this is making some clever rhetorical point then perhaps consider a quotation? Right now it is just a rather easy question.)