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siduri comments on An Abortion Dialogue - Less Wrong Discussion
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I think the last part of the dialogue is unconvincing: the Apologist weasels away from addressing the slippery slope argument. He seems to be saying that children aren't "human" until sometime after puberty--when they can "act all the acts, think all the thoughts, and feel all the feelings people can." The obvious response for the Contrarian is to ask whether the Apologist is opposed to infanticide, and if so, exactly where he draws the bright line between infanticide and abortion.
Fair enough. I already alluded to it and wanted to present my own novel slippery slope argument using parthenogenesis, but I guess it was a loose end.
I've added a little ordinary enough description of infanticide and acceptance. (Only really interesting thing is the Malthusian material.) The new material is at the bottom roughly where you'd expect it.
Yep. The new material is internally consistent, but of course you're going to lose the people--and I'm pretty sure this would be a majority of all people--who have a strong moral intuition against infanticide.
One of my unstated goals is to show that both speakers are wrong about personal identity; the pro-lifer is incoherent or absurd, and the other is consistent but as you point out infanticide clashes with naive intuitions. The second is 'less wrong', but that's still not 'all right'.
Or perhaps you've illustrated that naive intuitions about infanticide are wrong.
Perhaps our naive intuitions about the babyeaters are also wrong.
Well, at least some of my naive intuitions about babyeaters I'm fairly certain are wrong. Eating babies seems much much much worse than simply killing them, for example.