alienist comments on Compartmentalizing: Effective Altruism and Abortion - Less Wrong

23 Post author: Dias 04 January 2015 11:48PM

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Comment author: joaolkf 05 January 2015 06:43:37PM *  4 points [-]

It’s a nice post with a sound argumentation towards an unconformable conclusion to many EA/rationalists. We certainly need more of this.However, this isn't the first time someone has tried to sketch some probability calculus in order to account for moral uncertainty when analysing abortion. In the same way as the previous attempts, yours seems to be surreptitiously sneaking in some controversial assumptions into probability estimates and numbers. This is further evidence to me that trying to do the math in cases where we still need more conceptual clarification isn't really as useful as it would seem. Here are a few points you have sneaked/ignored:

  • You are accepting some sort of Repugnant Conclusion, as mentioned here

  • You are ignoring the real life circumstances in which abortion takes place. Firstly, putting your kid for adoption isn't always available. Additionally, I believe that in practice people are mostly choosing between having an abortion and raising an unwanted child with scare resources (which probably has a negative moral value).

  • You are not accounting for the fact that even if adoption successfully takes place, adopted children have very low quality of life.

Overall, I think you are completely ignoring the fact that abortion can (perhaps more correctly) be characterized by the choice between creating a new life of suffering (negative value) or creating nothing (0 value). At the very least there is a big uncertainty there as well, so not aborting would perhaps have a value ranging from -77 to +77 QUALYs. The moral value of aborting would then depend on the expected quality of life of the new life being created (and on the probability that not aborting would preclude having a wanted child later on). Therefore, it would be determined case by case. I would expect that wealth and the moral value of abortion are inversely correlated. This would mean abortion is permissible in countries were it should't, and impermissible in countries were it should be permissible.

Comment author: alienist 06 January 2015 02:24:26AM 15 points [-]

You are accepting some sort of Repugnant Conclusion,

If you have a utiliterian framework that rejects the "Repugnant Conclusion" without coming to even more repugnant conclusions (of the kill the poor variety), I'd love to see it.

Comment author: joaolkf 10 January 2015 02:28:43PM 1 point [-]

Maybe the second paragraph here will help clarify my line of thought.

Comment author: joaolkf 08 January 2015 06:06:30PM 0 points [-]

We are not evaluating ethical systems but intuitions about abortion.