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all 43 comments

[–]NewDarkAgesAhead 14 points15 points  (0 children)

A: ... So, we anesthetize Sherry, crack open her skull, and scoop until all that’s left is her spinal cord and brain stem. To be certain, we toss everything into the incinerator. Is Sherry (or her body) still human? Are we guilty of murder?

C: Well… the mind is irretrievably gone. You can’t regrow a brain. But people would still react to her as a human being(1)—the issue is obvious to them—so I would say yes to both.

A: Since the body is no longer human, but something “lower”, something animal at best, surely it follows we can do anything to it that we could do to an animal. We could conduct experiments on it, abandon it in the woods, kill it, butcher and eat it…

C: Stop, stop! Alright, maybe the obvious-and-potential criterion isn’t acceptable after all.(2)

A: ... would you accept the basic principle that some lives get more protection than others?

C: No, I’m not sure I would. A life is a life.(3)

If objective morality and values stemming from religious beliefs are supposed to be discarded during this inquiry, what are the underlying lines of reasoning that decide the Contrarian’s opinions in №2 and №3?


And regarding №1, some people would react to the body as to a human being, while others would see it as nothing more than a body without a mind.

so I would say yes to both.

This implies that whether or not something is human depends on whether or not that something is perceived as being human by some portion of the population. Reducing this to absurdity, imagine a society in which the state propaganda makes the general population believe that a corpse is still a person. Why should their beliefs alone be sufficient to desginate that particular corpse as a human being? Or imagine someone who, for one reason or another, reacts to a stuffed toy as to a human being. Should that person’s reaction to the toy suffice for deeming it a human? If yes, why? Should that toy be granted all the default human rights? And also, should the rights of other people be restricted for the sake of the rights of that toy?

[–]j_says 51 points52 points  (20 children)

I'm always glad to see reasoned arguments where people are willing to bite bullets. But it also creeps me out how readily rationalists are willing to tolerate infanticide.

I'm willing to bite the bullet of varying value to human life. Every triage nurse and disaster coordinator faces that dilemma, and feel free to give my spot on the helicopter to someone healthier when I'm old and dying.

And I get that infants aren't fully baked yet, so I'm not 100% sure where I'd put them in line; no promises that they'd be at the very front.

But geez, of all the kinds of humans, I have to give infants some amount of consideration for being completely blameless, completely helpless, and with the maximum possible potential and life remaining. They don't have cultural baggage, they'll learn whatever language they're around, you can raise them however you need to.

And sure, we're wired to like them. But that's not a random thing. If we have any obligation to help the helpless, then surely it apples most of all to infants.

[–]naraburns[this space left intentionally blank] 34 points35 points  (1 child)

If we have any obligation to help the helpless, then surely it apples most of all to infants.

All the more so when we are causally responsible for their existence. I don't know how far back this reaches into gestation, but it certainly seems to me that by the time a baby is viable, the people responsible for its existence have accrued some obligations in connection with its well-being.

[–]Hdnhdn 0 points1 point  (0 children)

How is it different from breeding animals and raising them to be eaten?

[–]SchizoSocialClub[Tin Man is the Overman] 12 points13 points  (16 children)

You are conflating arguments in a discussion with actions in the real world and then you feel the need to take a public moral stance about it.

The truth is no one is advocating returning to the days when child exposure was as common as abortion is now and no one is turning comatose women in cats.

[–]j_says 28 points29 points  (15 children)

I'd agree if we were talking about 3^^^3 dust specs, but abortion is pretty topical right now and does affect how people vote.

In particular, from the perspective of the pro lifers, late term abortions (and partial birth in particular) are very much like murdering an infant. If it feels entirely theoretical to you but literally like murdering babies to them, that's a good sign we're dealing with a scissor statement.

The sense I used to get was that the modal pro choice position was "sure, abortion is awful. It's just sometimes the least awful alternative, particularly when it's done early, when the fetus is much more a small tissue than a miniature human."

But more recently I've heard several people take the position that even infanticide isn't such a big deal, and birth is just a handy schelling point. That position seems much less morally defensible to me, and much less likely to lead to good compromises. It seems much more polarizing, and likely to leave us with a winner take all regime.

Kang and Kodos actually end up sounding like the reasonable ones: "abortions for some, miniature American flags for others". https://youtu.be/cIgSTjzrmRg

[–][deleted]  (2 children)

[deleted]

    [–]j_says 2 points3 points  (1 child)

    Agreed that many borders have some degree of schelling nature, but if it's /just/ a schelling point then that suggests that convention is the only thing distinguishing it from nearby options. I'd say that inside/outside the womb is definitely not like that, since birth is a serious medical event for both mom and baby.

    Maybe infanticide is a contrarian way of pushing back on the "my body my choice" memes that focus only on the mom. In that sense I'm glad to see people remembering the baby in the calculus, but man, seems like pr rule #1 should be "actual baby murder is /right out/".

    [–]TracingWoodgrainsFirst, do no harm 28 points29 points  (0 children)

    In particular, from the perspective of the pro lifers, late term abortions (and partial birth in particular) are very much like murdering an infant. If it feels entirely theoretical to you but literally like murdering babies to them, that's a good sign we're dealing with a scissor statement.

    Thank you for articulating this. Speaking as someone who is generally pro-life, I do feel pretty much this way. I follow the exact same chain of logic as Gwern, Singer, etc., but extend the arguments against infanticide backwards rather than extending the arguments for abortion forward.

    That is: yes, there's a clear spectrum of potential starting from a skin cell or an unfertilized egg and ending with a full adult human. It is non-controversially immoral to murder an adult human and non-controversially fine to shed skin cells. But I see murder as immoral primarily because of the way it ends future potential. Killing an adult is wrong, in my eyes, primarily because you have a "fully realized" human who has an unspecified amount of future action available, and by killing them that is cut short.

    Trying to quantify it is always a risky business with moral questions, but in the spirit of Gwern's link, I'll take a loose shot at it. My calculation on immorality looks something like "(current "level of humanity") * (chance of becoming "fully human") * (predicted duration of time at current or higher "level of humanity")" as the metric for harm from killing. So--killing animals is wrong along pretty much the scale Scott highlights. Killing children and infants is wrong both for who they are and who they have high potential of becoming. Killing viable unborn children is wrong for the exact same reason, but becomes less so the earlier-stage the abortion is, while killing non-viable unborn children is probably not wrong (but comes with a moral urge to understand better how to allow more to become viable). By the time you get to a skin cell, an unfertilized egg, etc., its current "level of humanity" and its current chance of becoming recognizably human are both so low that despite there being some future potential, it's mostly insignificant in light of present circumstances.

    Similar calculations to Gwern and Singer, but the bullets to bite come from the opposite direction.

    Bringing this all back to /u/SchizoSocialClub's comment: No one is advocating infanticide, but people are advocating late-term abortions, and speaking as someone who sees a line just as blurry as Gwern and Singer see it, they are the main ones I see taking a morally consistent stance and accepting the situation for what it is. I disagree deeply with both, but at least they're acknowledging the implications of the real-life actions that are currently being taken.

    [–]Azuremammal 8 points9 points  (2 children)

    I've spoken to a pro-choicer who claimed that abortion was completely downside-free, that until the moment of birth a "fetus" has absolutely no moral worth at all.

    Later that day, we went to a memorial of a mass shooting and I watched him read the names of those killed. He reached an entry for an unborn child (his mother was pregnant when she was shot) and he was absolutely heartbroken by this news, even more so than for the adults killed.

    My point being, I don't believe anyone actually believes the strong form of the pro-choice position, they're just rationalizing a political stance.

    [–]BadHorseman 3 points4 points  (1 child)

    Did you mean to say pro-choice instead of pro-life? Because as written your last sentence doesn't follow from the preceding story.

    [–]Azuremammal 3 points4 points  (0 children)

    Fixed, thank you

    [–]nullusinverba 12 points13 points  (6 children)

    I've heard several people take the position that even infanticide isn't such a big deal, and birth is just a handy schelling point. That position seems much less morally defensible to me, and much less likely to lead to good compromises

    I think many of the reasons that justify banning murder don't apply that well in the case of, say, a newborn baby with severe congenital maladies. Also, the reasons used to justify abortion for the most part are equally applicable to infanticide so I don't see how birth is really anything but a Schelling point.

    Hypothetical: in a future with infallible genetic testing, couples are able to rule out birth defects with perfect certainty in the first week of pregnancy. A couple pre-commits to abortion in the case of any severe genetic issues. Their embryo does, in fact, have these issues but, due to a clerical error, the couple is told that everything is fine. As soon as the newborn exits the womb, its condition is apparent. The child will live for about a decade in constant pain and will bring the parents no joy. They (and the state) will spends millions to keep him alive. The parents will have not have resources for raising an additional child at the same time and by the end of the 10 years are to old to have another.

    Traditional reasons why we would not want to allow killing and why they don't obviously apply:

    • We don't want murder to be legal because it means we can be killed. (1) We are not newborns so allowing infanticide does not increase our chances of being murdered. (2) an argument that permits late-term abortion because the fetus does not have sufficient mental capacity to desire not to die presumably applies to a newborn as well.
    • We don't like murder because it hurts those surviving who care about the deceased. In our hypothetical, the parent(s) desire the infanticide so this does not apply.
    • Someone murdered has no ability to reproduce and we may value increasing human population. The newborn in question has no chance of reproducing.

    Harder to defend against is the argument that someone murdered has no chance to experience whatever positive utility they would have otherwise experienced. But we have to consider the opportunity cost of the couple not having a "replacement" child whom we would expect to have a normal life.

    I mean, obviously this can go off the rails and may be hard to implement well. But I don't think a naive sanctity of life argument necessarily works out better when it causes, e.g. consanguineous couples to produce scores of disabled children.

    So anyway, birth as just a Schelling point seems defensible to me, though I agree it's highly polarizing and not something that can or should be argued for in public.

    [–]j_says 11 points12 points  (3 children)

    Agreed, that's a difficult edge case for a simple sanctity of life argument. I've bitten the bullet of varying values for human lives though, so your example is consistent with my position; it's a tragic situation and depending on the suffering and cost of care it may be better to withhold life prolonging care and let the child die under palliative care.

    I'm told this is actually the standard position of Sweden's national health system for children born premature before a certain date. (Which raises the stakes quite a lot for people who oppose socialized health care, incidentally).

    [–]nullusinverba 7 points8 points  (2 children)

    it may be better to withhold life prolonging care and let the child die under palliative care.

    I'm told this is actually the standard position of Sweden's national health system for children born premature before a certain date

    I decided to look it up and it seems like this is at best a misrepresentation.

    Most countries have some recommendations or standards for lowest gestation period that would warrant care. An implication that Sweden is either unique or extreme in its approach is warranted only in the opposite direction. See for example these charts, showing a lower age cutoff for elective resuscitation and a lower cutoff for mandatory (i.e. regardless of parents' wishes) resuscitation. Sweden also seems to have perhaps the highest preterm survival rate.

    ...

    I also saw this article from the Karolinska Institute that is very pleased with how many premature babies they are saving but there seems to be an undertone of concern for the disgenic implications:

    Researchers have identified a number of risk factors at group level. The most important of these factors is genetic - 20-30% of all premature births can be attributed to genetics.

    "Ideally mothers would be 24 when they give birth, but it's not that common these days in Sweden," says Lagercrantz. "Apart from among immigrants, who frequently have babies at this age, and also have fewer problems in this respect."

    The group as a whole has a slightly lower IQ than other children.

    "We can see that many of them have problems with their working memory, for example. Attention-deficit problems similar to ADHD or autism are also more common in this group than in other children."

    "People talk about miracle babies and are so happy, but when they hit school age there can be a whole host of problems - problems that are often different to normal disabilities"

    Under Swedish law, a woman may abort a foetus up until week 22. However, babies born in week 22 do actually survive on the neonatal wards.

    [–]j_says 3 points4 points  (1 child)

    Thanks for correcting me on that!

    [–]susasusa 4 points5 points  (0 children)

    in addition, when they're talking about resuscitation they mean it. the smallest premature infants are basically guaranteed to die on their own without extremely invasive interaction. the dynamic is more "they'll die by default unless we intervene" than "they'll live by default unless we intervene". It's not just a matter (with present tech) of providing nutrition and an incubator.

    [–]SkookumTree 0 points1 point  (1 child)

    You might call this euthanasia.

    [–]nullusinverba 1 point2 points  (0 children)

    I agree. I avoided using that word because it kind of bypasses the issue, like The Worst Argument in the World.

    [–]professorgermwill fail to enlighten you. 3 points4 points  (0 children)

    But it also creeps me out how readily rationalists are willing to tolerate infanticide.

    Negative utilitarian rationalists are willing to tolerate *omnicide* as an option that reduces the suffering of the universe.

    I used to be in favor of principles until I started reading rationalists, at which point I became highly suspicious of anyone that held their beliefs too firmly.

    [–]TrannyPornOAMAB 5 points6 points  (1 child)

    /u/Gwern

    Under point 5 I think you meant to put "subtly" not "subtlety," right?

    [–]gwern 6 points7 points  (0 children)

    Yes.

    [–]khafra 18 points19 points  (0 children)

    The Peter Singer reference at the end is apropos; I wish this kind of conversation were ok to have in public, without at least one participant losing their job and future employability.

    [–]Alexander_Columbus 11 points12 points  (1 child)

    Setting aside the issue of souls (I'm an atheist).

    Whenever someone chooses to have an abortion they know that if they do not act, a human being will come into the world. If they have an abortion then they are making the decision to stop a human being from, well... happening. I don't agree that counts as murder, but at the same time, I don't feel as though that's in any way ethical. It becomes even less ethical when the would-be mother is having the abortion not because of rape or incest, but out of personal preference. They're effectively deciding, "My lifestyle is more important than your life." Obviously, the further into the pregnancy, the less ethical it becomes.

    And I find the current apologetics of the pro-choice crowd to be particularly incoherent. I'm sorry, but it cannot simultaneously be a "clump of cells" and "the most important choice a woman will ever make".

    [–]Ninety_Three 1 point2 points  (0 children)

    If making a decision to prevent a human being from happening is unethical, are you also against contraception?

    [–]barkappara 4 points5 points  (3 children)

    When I read, e.g., Wesley J. Smith writing for First Things, my impression is that the project is to ground the doctrine of ensoulment in natural law by focusing on the creation of a genomically unique human life at the moment of conception. That is to say, the argument hinges essentially on the zygote having DNA that matches no cell in either parent's body, and moreover no other potential zygote from those two parents; if the organism with this DNA is destroyed, it cannot be recreated. I don't find this argument very convincing, but it's not directly addressed by the dialogue.

    [–]gwern 4 points5 points  (2 children)

    How is that supposed to work with identical twins, clones, or mutations?

    [–]cowtung 4 points5 points  (0 children)

    The model should probably be extended to note that once born, twins will be regarded as separate due to non replicable divergence in brain make up (or whatever).

    [–]barkappara 1 point2 points  (0 children)

    I have to really tie my brain into knots to model this worldview, so I might be getting this wrong --- you might want to talk to someone who believes in natural law. (I would be very interested in a dialogue on abortion and personhood between a scientifically literate religious conservative, a mainstream liberal, and a transhumanist.)

    Mutations are not too threatening to this view: the "genome" doesn't have to be the exact sequence down to the bit, but rather the appropriate clopen ball in edit distance around the zygote's sequence that one would expect in the course of "natural" mutations.

    Identical twins and clones are tricky. I think probably the move to make is to say that they have value from some additional source, but that genomic uniqueness is still a source of personhood besides this, and therefore abortion is still wrong.

    [–]JTarrou 24 points25 points  (7 children)

    That's........remarkably silly. Kids are just like cancer, ergo killing kids is fine, be happy we only do abortion.

    I appreciate the ideas of the rationalist sphere generally, but this one falls into the " There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them"* category.

    The argument proves entirely too much. No limiting principle at all.

    People forget that we're talking about law here, not strictly morality. Law in our country being a matter mostly voted on, go ahead and tell the public you'd like to make killing infants under the age of six a misdemeanor, a class-D felony for school-age kids, and not proper murder until they get a college degree, a job, a spouse and a kid you can kill for a ticket of their own and see how far it gets you.

    Not only is it wildly immoral, it's the worst sort of immoral, the impractical kind that does more damage to one's own side than any other.

    If anything, this level of pro-abortion analysis makes me suspect there is less rigor underpinning the ideas than commonly thought. If this is the best a smart person can do with the idea, I may have to adjust my priors in the other direction.

    *Orwell

    [–]barkappara 10 points11 points  (1 child)

    Just to clarify, my religion is against infanticide, so I'm against it too.

    That said, I think the way cultures that practice infanticide handle this problem is by setting up a single bright line: there is some moment at which the infant is recognized as a person, after which it has the rights of a person. For the Netsilik Inuit, this moment is the naming of the child: the child becomes ensouled (with the spirit of an ancestor) through naming, after which killing the child is an offense against its spirit.

    [–]JTarrou 18 points19 points  (0 children)

    Absolutely, I get this, and it provides the basis of most legal standards in most cultures. Pregnancy is the process whereby one person becomes two, so the moment at which that second bit becomes a person is important both legally and morally. Given the gradual nature and lengthy process of pregnancy, it's hard to draw bright lines, but that is what we need as a society to be able to make rules about it.

    Right now there are two duelling ideas present in legislation about abortion that represent two positions. The first is the subject of mass hysteria, as the bright line is quite restrictive, and is "heartbeat". Personally, I think that's an emotional appeal wrapped as an argument, but hey, at least it's a line. Fertilization is a line as well, but we're so far back in the process that it's not one with a ton of cachet other than religious dogma.

    The other is the Virginia law, which has no bright line, but very purposely extends the line somewhere past birth. Governor Northam was very clear when he spoke about it. We're talking full live birth, complete separation, followed by what he calls a "conversation" that will take place "between a woman and her doctors" about whether they let a fully alive, birthed, separate person live any further.

    Now, I fully confess I don't know where the proper line is. But I know where it isn't. I know that any claim a woman has to "bodily autonomy" cannot possibly extend to the child once it is alive, in the open air and not connected to her in any way. At the absolute latest, the instant that umbilical cord is cut, there is no longer any physical connection, and we can cleanly dismiss any claims of bodily autonomy. Two bodies, two autonomies.

    The argument the linked OP advances is that if one can make an argument that someone isn't "fully" human, we can morally kill them has some long and illustrious history, but few people like it being applied to them, thus failing Rawls' test. I could easily fabricate an argument that autistic people, not having access to the full spectrum of human emotion and experience, are something less than human and so not worthy of protection as "real" people. The author of that piece presumably would disagree.

    [–]sohois 4 points5 points  (3 children)

    I'm not sure how you read that dialogue and came away with the argument that we should kill kids because they have some similarities to tumours.

    The argument involving cancer is that a reason why we should protect unborn fetuses or zygotes is because they contain human DNA inside of another human. However, many other blobs of cells contain human DNA and are inside of a human, so using this argument does very little to specify what we should protect and what we should not.

    The infanticide argument comes much later and arises from the discussion of continuous versus discrete personhood. The cancer argument leads into this, by pointing out that using a discrete definition of personhood is practically extremely difficult and prone to numerous exceptions, and so a continuous definition is more appropriate. As such, it necessarily follows that young children will not have full personhood either. To me, this is a pro-life argument! Since, as you point out, we can assume that almost nobody would agree to infanticide, many pro-choice advocates who argue for late term arbortions may be inconsistent since they seem to make a hard cutoff as soon as a baby is born.

    Overall, it seems to me that you have badly misconstrued the points of this dialogue

    [–]JTarrou 4 points5 points  (2 children)

    Sounds to me like I construed it perfectly, but you're being far kinder (or blinder) about the motivations and goals of the real people involved than I am. One side of the aisle is pushing extremely tight restrictions on abortion, which I don't support, and the other is pushing past birth as a restriction. This is already the political reality we live in, it is not charity to ignore it, but denial.

    [–]sohois 1 point2 points  (1 child)

    I'm not sure what political reality has to do with a hypothetical dialogue, though? Gwern's writing is attempting to uncover the philosophical issues surrounding abortion, not deal with politics.

    And for my part, I have no interest in the politics either since I'm not from the US and abortion is a fringe issue for a tiny minority in the UK.

    [–]JTarrou 4 points5 points  (0 children)

    If that's the strongest philosophical case for abortion, there is no hope for pro-abortion ideals. Simple as that.

    As I said originally, this argument proves every genocidal and eugenic argument in history. All lines may be arbitrary to some degree, but if you bite the bullet that some separate people with lives of their own aren't "really" people, there is no bottom to that slope.

    [–]Lykurg480Man does not strive for happiness, only the Anglos do that 5 points6 points  (5 children)

    A: But fetuses still aren’t human. Most fetuses wind up being shed with the uterus’s lining, or just dying, or are so damaged they never come to term. There’s a chance they’ll become human, but the cumulative odds are low. Mother Nature is the greatest abortionist of all.1 Possibility

    C: Many things in life are low odds. Let’s just say “is possible for it to become a human being”. That sounds reasonable to me. If you accept that, then you must condemn abortion!

    A: Which finally brings me to my point: so isn’t it true, then, that any cell in the body has the “potential” to become a human? Even the lowly skin cell, shed after just 2 weeks, can aspire to personhood if placed in the right broth of chemicals.

    Im not sure this is quite necessary. Even if normally fertilised eggs only had a 1% chance of making it to humanhood, thats still orders of magnitude above the skin cell. We could value them in proportion to their propability of becoming human rather then have a cutoff, and still mostly ignore the skin cell. OTOH a quater-human fetus would render pretty much all abortions unacceptable. Even at 1%, abortion for purely economic reasons wouldnt be justified.

    (Just to be clear, Im not actually a utilitarian, and dont endorse this conclusion)

    Interestingly, the diachronic dutch book requires your values not to predictably change, which seemingly implies that you have to do something like the above if you value somethings preferences once it is fully human (i.e. youd have to value them in proportion to their odds). This gets... really weird if you have control over that propability. It technically allows you to get out of the dutch book, but you have to be willing to let the dutch bookie decide which potential beings you actualise, even with arbitrarily small trades. If OTOH you want to stick with the proportional valuing, you would sometimes deliberately make it uncertain whether someone will exist.

    [–]Jiro_T 0 points1 point  (4 children)

    A fertilized egg has a 0% chance of becoming human by itself without the proper environment. With the proper environment it has a high chance. The same is true for the skin cell.

    [–]ultramagnum 14 points15 points  (0 children)

    Same is true for an infant.

    [–][deleted] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

    Interestingly fertilized eggs are near exclusively found in the appropriate conditions 🤔 pure coincidence though not relevant of course

    [–]Lykurg480Man does not strive for happiness, only the Anglos do that 4 points5 points  (0 children)

    Read literally the next paragraph.

    [–]SpiritofJames 8 points9 points  (0 children)

    But the "proper environment" for a zygote is one that is likely to exist as a part of the natural order of things. The "proper environment" required for a skin cell to become a human is one so artificial, novel, and contrived as to be almost incomparable in any meaningful way.

    [–]ralf_ 1 point2 points  (0 children)

    An additional factor driving down birth rates (and also of course driving up death rates) was the Chinese practice of female infanticide. For example, based on the imbalance between recorded male and female births an estimated 20–25% of girls died from infanticide in Liaoning. Evidence that the cause was conscious female infanticide ... …Female infanticide meant that, while nearly all women married, almost 20% of men never found brides.

    First thought: this is horrible! Second thought, wait, did this have a selection effect? Not on the girls side, they were infanticided randomly. But what would be the effect if every generation the (bottom?) quintile of men were outcompeted for women?

    [–]Chad_Nine 1 point2 points  (0 children)

    That article went into bizarre hypothetical land. I couldn't take the arguments seriously. Especially when the writer started talking about changing Terry Schaivo into a cat.