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ChristianKl comments on 2014 Less Wrong Census/Survey - Call For Critiques/Questions - Less Wrong
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I don't think abortion post birth is a thing. If it's easier to understand I have no issue with changing it to 12 weeks and 28 weeks.
"After-birth abortion" turns up sometimes in thought experiments and philosophy papers, and my prior on weird thought experiments turning up on lw is pretty high.
Actually, I remember hearing someone mention that in general LWers are more okay with Infanticide (or post-birth abortion if you prefer) than the average population. The reasoning, I assume, being that their self-awareness is more similar to animals than to a human adult and that you aren't really destroying a full human consciousness. I don't remember where it was posted, but i do remember it sounding like someone was summarizing LW survey results.
Basically, what I'm saying is that I wasn't sure either given the phrasing, since I've heard this kind of thing discussed before on LW.
Yeah, the infanticide thing is a classic Peter Singer bit which I imagine a lot of people on Less Wrong have heard and considered before. I think the standard counterargument is that we need a good Schelling fence for when it's okay to kill people - pro-life folks would argue that it should be at conception or something, pro-choice folks would say it should be at birth, but so far nobody's come up with any reasonable one that comes after that. So infanticide should be disallowed for societal reasons, even if we allow that it might be acceptable in various hypothetical scenarios.
That's very much a description of the US landscape of memes. In the EU the situation is different as our abortions laws are made by elected parliaments.
In most EU states an abortion at 7 months (or 28 weeks) is illegal in the US it's legal. I haven't meet anyone in Germany who argued that Germany should allow abortion in more cases and have birth as the schelling fence.
Curiously, in some rare cases and under certain very specific circumstances it is more than just a thought experiment (the paper you have linked also briefly mentions it), although it is thought of as a special case of euthanasia rather than an unusual kind of abortion.
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Well Peter Singer supports it and for some bizarre reason he is considered a moral authority by many lesswrongers.
Hey, Peter Singer is pretty good. Even if you don't agree with all his ideas, his reasoning is refreshingly clear and concrete for a philosopher. If you haven't read Practical Ethics, I strongly recommend it.
I'm aware that Singer basically supports the policy. I'm however not aware that he choses those semantics.