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

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

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Comment author: Dias 08 January 2015 02:00:49AM 4 points [-]

As someone who's had a very nuanced view of abortion, as well as a recent EA convert who was thinking about writing about this, I'm glad you wrote this. It's probably a better and more well-constructed post than what I would have been able to put together.

Thanks! It took a long time - and was quite stressful. I'm glad you liked it.

The argument in your post though, seems to assume that we have only two options, either to totally ban or not ban all abortion,

I actually deliberately avoided discussing legal issues (ban or not ban) because I felt the purely moral issues were complicated enough already.

Actually, I can imagine that a manner of integrating EA considerations into my old ideas would be to weigh the value of the fetus not only by its "personhood", but also its "potential personhood given moral uncertainty".and its expected QALYs.

Yeah, if you want to do both you need a joint probability distribution, which seemed a little in-depth for this (already very long!) post.

Comment author: Darklight 12 January 2015 04:07:39AM 2 points [-]

I had another thought as well. In your calculation, you only factor in the potential person's QALYs. But if we're really dealing with potential people here, what about the potential offspring or descendants of the potential person as well?

What I mean by this is, when you kill someone, generally speaking, aren't you also killing all that person's future possible descendants as well? If we care about future people as much as present people, don't we have to account for the arbitrarily high number of possible descendants that anyone could theoretically have?

So, wouldn't the actual number of QALYs be more like +/- Infinity, where the sign of the value is based on whether or not the average life has more net happiness than suffering, and as such, is considered worth living?

Thus, it seems like the question of abortion can be encompassed in the question of suicide, and whether or not to perpetuate or end life generally.

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