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DanielLC comments on Blues, Greens and abortion - Less Wrong Discussion
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I figure death is instrumentally bad. It's impossible to be happy when you're dead. The thing is, it's just as impossible if you're dead because you haven't been conceived, and if you're dead because you died. As such, having an abortion is no worse than not conceiving (unless the baby is in fact conscious, and doesn't like being stuck in a womb for nine months).
That said, I consider the fact that it's legal a bad sign. If you're pro-choice, you think preventing abortions are forcing someone to be uncomfortable for nine months. If you're pro-life, you think an abortion is murder. Shouldn't they easily be able to pass a law making abortion illegal, but otherwise doing everything for the pro-choice crowd?
"Pro-life" people wear that belief, believe in that belief, but don't take the idea seriously. They don't act as though fetal death is equivalent to a person's death in all cases, and they focus almost exclusively on the legality of abortion when other actions (e.g. increasing access to reliable birth control) are far more likely to have a large, immediate impact.
I'm not sure that failing to aim at the target of greatest impact is a great indicator of not taking ideas seriously (at least in the sense of sincerely believing them). It seems like a separate, if possibly correlated, malady of not doing research and optimizing.
This is one of those times where you have to look at statistics rather than individuals. The existence of people who focus on abortion over fetal death doesn't mean much. The fact that there are many people who do so, together with the conspicuous absence of people who focus on fetal death over abortion, does mean something.
If someone claims to believe thousands of equivalent-person deaths are occurring every day and being ignored, even facilitated by society, and ey doesn't do the research and optimize, I have a difficult time finding em to be sincere.
Pavitra makes the important point:
This actually seems to describe on the order of every member of the "pro-life" movement.
Mm?
I'm pretty confident that human societies are facilitating huge numbers of actual deaths of adult human beings as we speak, but I don't devote much of my time to figuring out how many -- indeed, I wouldn't hazard a confident guess as to order of magnitude -- or where or who or how to stop it.
You'd certainly have grounds to challenge my sincerity if I claimed to care about their deaths, though I think it's more complicated than that.
But do you really challenge the sincerity of my claim that I believe those deaths are happening?
No.
Society and societies aren't quite the same thing. I'm referring to the specific society in which the person resides and acts.
The distinction between believing the deaths are happening and caring about the deaths is an important one. I should have been clearer.