You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

palladias comments on 2014 Less Wrong Census/Survey - Call For Critiques/Questions - Less Wrong Discussion

18 Post author: Yvain 11 October 2014 06:39AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (269)
Tags: meta

Comments (269)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: palladias 14 October 2014 02:54:48PM 2 points [-]

"After-birth abortion" turns up sometimes in thought experiments and philosophy papers, and my prior on weird thought experiments turning up on lw is pretty high.

Comment author: TylerJay 14 October 2014 03:35:16PM 2 points [-]

Actually, I remember hearing someone mention that in general LWers are more okay with Infanticide (or post-birth abortion if you prefer) than the average population. The reasoning, I assume, being that their self-awareness is more similar to animals than to a human adult and that you aren't really destroying a full human consciousness. I don't remember where it was posted, but i do remember it sounding like someone was summarizing LW survey results.

Basically, what I'm saying is that I wasn't sure either given the phrasing, since I've heard this kind of thing discussed before on LW.

Comment author: Vulture 14 October 2014 03:53:40PM 3 points [-]

Yeah, the infanticide thing is a classic Peter Singer bit which I imagine a lot of people on Less Wrong have heard and considered before. I think the standard counterargument is that we need a good Schelling fence for when it's okay to kill people - pro-life folks would argue that it should be at conception or something, pro-choice folks would say it should be at birth, but so far nobody's come up with any reasonable one that comes after that. So infanticide should be disallowed for societal reasons, even if we allow that it might be acceptable in various hypothetical scenarios.

Comment author: ChristianKl 15 October 2014 11:08:13AM 2 points [-]

pro-life folks would argue that it should be at conception or something, pro-choice folks would say it should be at birth, but so far nobody's come up with any reasonable one that comes after that

That's very much a description of the US landscape of memes. In the EU the situation is different as our abortions laws are made by elected parliaments.

In most EU states an abortion at 7 months (or 28 weeks) is illegal in the US it's legal. I haven't meet anyone in Germany who argued that Germany should allow abortion in more cases and have birth as the schelling fence.

Comment author: Sarunas 15 October 2014 12:17:18PM *  0 points [-]

Curiously, in some rare cases and under certain very specific circumstances it is more than just a thought experiment (the paper you have linked also briefly mentions it), although it is thought of as a special case of euthanasia rather than an unusual kind of abortion.

The Dutch euthanasia laws require people to ask for euthanasia themselves (voluntary euthanasia), and it is legal for people of 12 years and older. In the Netherlands, euthanasia remains technically illegal for patients under the age of 12.

[...]

In 2005 a review study was undertaken of all 22 reported cases between 1997 and 2004.[7] All cases concerned newborns with spina bifida and hydrocephalus. In all cases, at least 2 doctors were consulted outside the medical team. In 17 of 22 cases, a multidisciplinary spina bifida team was consulted. All parents consented to the termination of life; in 4 cases they explicitly requested it. The mean time between reporting of the case and the decision concerning prosecution was 5.3 months. None of the cases led to prosecution. The study concluded that all cases of active termination of life reported were found to be in accordance with good practice.

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit