Open thread, Jan. 16 - Jan. 22, 2016

MrMind

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If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

4. Unflag the two options "Notify me of new top level comments on this article" and "Make this post available under..." before submitting.

At what age do you all think people have the greatest moral status? I'm tempted to say that young children (maybe aged 2-10 or so) are more important than adolescents, adults, or infants, but don't have any particularly strong arguments for why that might be the case.

this may be an odd counter position to the normal.

I think that adults are more morally valuable because they have proven their ability to not be murderous etc. Or possibly also to not be the next ghandi. Children could go either way.

0ChristianKl9y

It depends very much on the context. In many instances where we want to save lives QALY are a good metric. In other cases like deciding how should be able to sit down in a bus, the metric is worthless.

2btrettel9y

If you think in terms of QALYs, that could be one reason to prefer interventions targeted at children. Your average child has more life to live than your average adult, so if you permanently improve their quality of life from 0.8 QALYs per year to 0.95 QALYs per year, that would result in a larger QALY change than the same intervention on the adult. This argument has numerous flaws. One which comes to mind immediately are that many interventions are not so long lasting, so both adults and children would presumably gain the same. It also is tied to particular forms of utilitarianism one might not subscribe to.