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Eugine_Nier comments on An Abortion Dialogue - Less Wrong Discussion
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So do you believe that people only have no terminal value and instrumental value only in so far as they benefit society?
If this is really what you really believe, as opposed to merely a fake utility function, the as far as I'm concerned you may as well be a pebble sorter or a baby eater.
Let me turn your question around. If your utility function puts value in the mere existence of people, regardless of how they interact with the larger world, doesn't that mean having babies is as wonderful as killing people is terrible? Is somebody with 12 kids a hero?
Or a serial killer with a large family? "Sure he might have killed 3 people -- but he's a father of 5!"
I'm actually pretty sure some people who have had 12 kids are heroes or at least very altruistic when objectively analysed.
Many many people that made great contributions have come from large families of overachievers. Genetics and upbringing matter a lot. And productivity gains made by lets say 6 of the kids can easily overshadow anything that one individual could have done (even when adjusted for the fact that the kids start contributing later).
However overall if we look at the world today, the vast majority of people having 12 kids aren't heroes.
It can't be an accident that the rhetorical form your disagreement took is a dehumanization of your opponent. Just saying ...
Also, I want to point out that the moral issues are nowhere near as clear-cut as you (and Kant) seem to think. Even if you axiomatically assert that people have terminal value, you still need to explain why people have that value, whereas trees (for example) do not. And also clarify the boundaries of that protected class "people". (Does it include fetuses, conceptuses, persons cryonically frozen, HeLa cultures, etc.?)
Is it possible to answer these questions without once veering into the realm of instrumental values?
What if I were to ask the same question about why society should be valued?
If you keep trying to justify values instrumentally, you'll wind up in an infinite regress.
Not necessarily.
Maybe what I would discover instead, if I actually charted out my value structure, that all of the things I value exist in an interlocking network that doesn't ground out in any special real, true, honest-to-goodness, fundamental, basic, not-dependent-on-anything, terminal values.
While I'm not committed to the absence of terminal values, I consider the possibility plausible, and I don't find the "well, there's got to be something at the bottom of the stack!" argument for their presence convincing.
That still doesn't answer the question of why that value structure as opposed to some other.
Absolutely true. Was responding to the last bit of your comment and ended up completely disregarding your greater context... sorry.
This is a bit of a hobbyhorse of mine at the moment, especially since so much of the discussion about ethics here seems predicated on the existence of terminal values that can't be interpreted in terms of anything else.
It sounds like your value structure represents (hazily specified) terminal values.
It doesn't sound that way to me, so if you unpack it I'd be interested.
Then you would probably be asking a good question.
As a Humean, who bases his moral philosophy on rational self-interest, I would answer that 'society' is simply a shorthand for all of the other rational agents who might react positively or negatively to my actions. As such, society is not something that should be 'valued' as such, but it is something that a prudent self-interested person will want to take into account.
But I'm sure that people (I'm sure there are some) who actually value society without valuing individual persons - those people would find your question difficult to answer.
Two points.
1:
Why is this any less arbitrary?
2:
So if I handed you a baby and offered you $10 to kill it, assuming no one else would ever find out, would you do it?
If the answer is some variation on "no, because I would feel bad about it", I can throw in a pill that keeps you from feeling bad about it.
The scenario in 2 is too implausable to be useful, in my opinion.
w! Definitely a w.
I don't understand the reference to w. What does that letter have to do with the context?
The homophone is broken.
Oh! Throw in a pill, not through in. I got it.
Thanks, Fixed.
Hume wouldn't be a Humean if rational self-interest were the standard. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy writes:
Regarding Eugene's point about terminal value, I agree with the following clarification: the primary reason murder is wrong is because it deprives somebody of the rest of their life.
This still allows us to distinguish between murder and failure to create new lives, provided that we see a difference between someone who already exists and someone who merely might exist.