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jkaufman comments on The Argument From Marginal Cases - Less Wrong Discussion
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(Killing infants is also bad because we expect them to at some point have moral value, so maximizing over all time means we should include them.)
(Why doesn't this argument also apply to using all of your gametes?)
P(a randomly chosen sperm will result into an adult human) << P(a randomly chosen ovum will result into an adult human) << P(a randomly chosen baby will result into an adult human). Only one of these probabilities sounds large enough for the word “expect” to be warranted IMO.
P (there will be a child who will grow up to be an adult in the next couple years if you decide to conceive one) is for many about the same as P (a randomly chosen baby will grow up to be an adult)
In each case you can take an action with the expected result of a human with moral value, so jkaufman's argument should apply either way. The opportunity cost difference is low.
Steel-man the argument.
Let's say you have a machine that, with absolute certainty, will create an adult human whose life is not worth living, but who would not agree to suicide. Or that is only barely worth living, if you lean towards average utilitarianism.
It currently only has the DNA.
Would you turn it off?
How about if it's already a fetus? A baby? Somewhere along the line, does the actual current state start to matter, and if so where?
...oh.
That highlights certain conflicts among my moral intuitions I hadn't noticed before.
All in all, I think I would turn the machine off, unless the resulting person was going to live in an underpopulated country, or I know that the DNA is taken from parents with unusually high IQ and/or other desirable genetically inheritable traits.
The machine incubates humans until they are the equivalent of 3 months old (the famed 4th trimester).
Would you turn it off at all stages?
(Not saying you misread me, but:)
The way I put it, it creates an adult human with absolute certainty. There may or may not be an actual, physical test tube involved; it could be an chessmaster AI, or whatnot. The implementation shouldn't matter. For completeness, assume it'll be an adult human who'll live forever, so the implementation becomes an evanescent fraction.
The intended exception is that you can turn it off (destroying the (potential-)human at that stage), any time from DNA string to adult. There are, of course, no legal consequences or whatnot; steel-man as appropriate.
Given that, in what time period - if any - is turning it off okay?
Personally, I'll go with "Up until the brain starts developing, then gradually less okay, based on uncertainty about brain development as well as actual differences in value." I care very little about potential people.
I don't know.
I'm so glad that I don't live in the Least Convenient Possible World so I don't have to make such a choice.
There's a difference between an infant, which is already a living, breathing human being & the sperm that are expunged in masturbation. Even if those sperm could have been used to produce more humans, there's no way to prove whether or not they would actually. The woman could fail to conceive, for example. If you wanted to make a law against masturbation, you'd also run into the problem that there is no victim, just the probability of someone that might have existed at some point maybe. I also see a conflict here with autonomy. Can we require people to turn all of their sperm into humans? They didn't choose to produce sperm; it is an accident of biology. On the other hand, people do choose to have children (usually); it requires conscious choice & effort (excluding certain exceptions like the female rape victim).
(Opportunity cost.)
I don't understand. Take just the two gametes which ended up combining into the infant, t-10 months before the scenario in which your "expect them to at some point have moral value, so maximizing over all time means we should include them" applies.
Why doesn't it apply to the two gametes, why does it apply 10 months later? Is it because the pregnancy is such a big investment? What about if the woman finds the pregnancy utilon-neutral, would the argument translate then?
Let's go up a step. I'm some kind of total utilitarian, which means maximizing over all creatures of moral worth over all time. I don't think gametes have moral worth in and of themselves, and very small children probably don't either, but both do have the potential to grow into creatures that can have positive or negative lives. The goal is, in the long term, to have as many such creatures as possible having the best lives possible.
While "using all your gametes" isn't possible, most people could reproduce much more than they currently do. Parenting takes a lot of time, however, and with time being a limited resource there's lots of other things you can do with time. Many of these have a much larger effect on improving welfare or increasing the all-time number of people than raising children. It's also not clear whether a higher or lower rate of human childbirth is ideal in the long term.