I think the basic stumbling block in the typical abortion dialog isn’t the criteria of personhood, it’s that people don’t like to deal with the real, practical reasons why you shouldn’t kill people.
The basic reasons why murder is illegal are:
A. In general, people are much more valuable to society alive than dead. This does not apply to unwanted babies.
and
B. Attempts to legally identify the people who would be better off dead are prone to dangerous corruption and irreversible error, the costs of which far exceed the benefits. Again, this does not apply to unwanted babies.
Abortion is ALSO frowned on because
C. It denies someone their potential life. But why is denying an actual person their potential life worse than denying a potential person their potential life? They would both end up as real people, with real lives. Why is one life more valuable? If this makes abortion evil, why isn’t contraception evil?
Finally there is
D. Dying hurts. This isn’t necessarily true, and even if it was, dying hurts a heck of a lot less than living. This objection is rarely explicitly voiced, because it’s very weak.
You left out what I would have said is the most basic reason murder is illegal. Simple self interested cooperation. A wants to be free to kill his enemies but really doesn’t want his enemies to be free to kill him. B wants to be free to kill her enemies but doesn’t want her enemies to be free to kill her. C, D and E have similar preferences. By mutual agreement and alliance they each sacrifice their right to kill other people so that they are less vulnerable to be killed themselves.
Naturally they attempt to wrangle it such that they are an in group who does get to kill people anyway but in Australia at least we have managed to stamp even that sort of behaviour out entirely—at least within our own borders.
In general, people are much more valuable to society alive than dead. This does not apply to unwanted babies.
Why does the fact that the parent does not want the baby imply that it has little value to society? I have a friend that was adopted (which seems to be the main alternative to abortion) that I value very much. If he was aborted as a fetus, then I would (probably) be much worse off than I am. Are him and I (and everyone he engages in mutually beneficial exchange with) not a part of society that is thereby gaining value by his non-death.
Well, sure he’s valuable NOW, but that’s after years and years of investment. It’s not that being unwanted takes a baby from super valuable to negative, babies are just not very valuable regardless.
Yes, but the same could be said of children and the elderly (that they are currently not very valuable to society), but it is still illegal to murder them.
The elderly arguably have grand bargains protecting them. Young people pay into Social Security to meet the promised payments to current old people, in the expectation that future young people will do the same for them, and so on.
Like wills. Why should we execute wills that leave millions to pet dogs or something? The dead person is dead, beyond any caring. Just take their bequest and do something useful with it! But of course, if we did that then people writing wills no longer trust will executors and will disperse their assets in life or just waste them. A grand Newcomb-like bargain.
No such bargains protect children. They haven’t provided anything and won’t be in a position to for a long time after a huge investment. (What’s the estimate of the net society-wide cost to produce a finished high-schooler? A few million? Highly non-trivial, let’s say.)
People on average increase in societal value from conception to childhood, and then it gets more complicated from there depending on how they turn out. And yes, typically their value declines as they become elderly.
But, as in your example with your adopted friend, even a baby that starts out unwanted, if society invests a bit in its welfare, will soon become part of the social fabric and so on and thereby become valued.
Certainly there are some people who literally nobody likes, but even then, there’s still reason B.
As it happens, my best friend was adopted as well. But I hardly think the limiting factor in the number or quality of my friends is society’s production of babies.
D. Dying hurts. This isn’t necessarily true, and even if it was, dying hurts a heck of a lot less than living. This objection is rarely explicitly voiced, because it’s very weak.
Oddly enough, my boyfriend, who is the only person I’ve ever heard seriously attack abortion, uses this as one of his main arguments. According to some research (this was a verbal argument, and we allow each other not to provide citations in such a context) the neural architecture that allows humans to tolerate pain is not as sophisticated in developing fetuses, and so they are capable of feeling pain much more acutely.
On the other side of that argument, a fetus does not have the higher brain function or consciousness that would allow it to experience pain. When an adult is put under general anesthesia for surgery we do not generally consider them to be “experiencing pain” even though the body is still reacting the damage as though they were conscious. They still have brain function, they temporarily lack the higher brain function required for the meaningful experience of pain. A very similar argument could be applied to a fetus.
I agree with your main point (that this is a stumbling block for some people), but there are others who will contend that A and part of B (namely the irreversible error) do apply to unwanted babies (usually, or on average), and that the reason why abortion is more evil than contraception is because it’s an error of commission rather than omission.
Killing adults is less reversible in the sense that if you kill comedian carlos mencia, you can’t get a new carlos mencia if you change your mind. In contrast, babies are basically fungible.
Babies aren’t really fungible; if you have the baby that would have grown up to be Carlos Mencia (to carry on with your example) you can’t grow another would-be Carlos Mencia if you change your mind. You just don’t know what you’re discarding when you discard a baby.
This doesn’t follow. Just because you don’t have data about what counterfactually the baby would have turned into doesn’t mean that the babies are fungible. We don’t in general keep the genetic code of aborted babies or calculate how that would interact with their environment. Just because we can’t easily predict what the distinctions would be doesn’t mean that the babies are all identical.
When you’re considering a decision of exchanging two babies, you’re making it based on what you know to anticipate. If you know nothing relevant, you’re ambivalent between exchanging and not exchanging, which is what “fungible” means.
(The dollar bills are also not identical, and where one bill can buy you a snack, another won’t work by being suspected counterfeit in a manner you didn’t expect. Such considerations don’t make cash non-fungible.)
If you know nothing relevant, you’re ambivalent between exchanging and not exchanging, which is what “fungible” means.
I see where you’re coming from, but I’m not sure that’s a useful use of the concept of “fungible”. The reason why it’s useful to think of dollar bills as fungible is because we can use them to think about more complicated exchanges (i.e. dollars → cow → cow + milk → cow + dollars → …) and figure out a net result by comparing before and after quantities of the highly fungible little notes. Sure, it’s possible that a given dollar might turn out to be counterfeit, but it only takes a little knowledge and a few moments of examination to become very confident about whether or not that’s the case for a given note.
On the other hand, I’d be very reluctant to use babies as a unit of exchange even if I ignored the obvious moral problems: babies are much much harder to compare for equality than dollars.
After reading the entire debate this comment spawned… if the goal is to determine whether we should support abortion legalization and fewer restrictions (possibly up to infanticide? (!)), or perhaps support more heavy regulation, it seems like arguing over whether an action is reactive, proactive, etc can’t possibly have any relevance, and seems like a particularly virtuist way of looking at things.
Are we not solely interested in consequences? What are our values and how do we maximize them? Clearly saying we value “human life” isn’t enough, and we need to be more narrow. What do we actually value? If we say we value all potential humans, should we be spending all of our time impregnating women, being pregnant, or researching how to shorten pregnancy and/or grow humans in a test tube? If we draw the line in what we value somewhere else, do we end up with post-pregnancy abortions? Is that okay? I feel like there are real questions, and the reason those questions are interesting is because we can’t just take the copout answer of “proactive actions bad, acts of omission okay” because consequentialism won’t let us.
Hmm. I guess I had not considered people on this forum might not be consequentialists. And yet you are somewhat of a known community figure, and not as a contrarian. Is consequentialism not evident? I ask as an honest inquiry to someone whose username I recognize (being a sort of lesswrong == sequences person myself) and therefore is at least aware of the Standard position for certain, and yet is not known for the reason of contradicting the Standard position (like Caledonian might be).
To me, the knowledge of human psychology which makes clear why humans find acts of omission acceptable, while humans find proscriptive acts with the same consequences unacceptable, is enough to make me a consequentialist. Is its not the same for you?
Here’s some background reading with more details about my personal views in the comments. I consider consequentialistic shut-up-and-multiply kind of thinking appropriate for questions of prudence and simply don’t think it constitutes morality. I’m definitely an oddity within LW.
What could an ethical framework be if not the way you decide what actions to take in order to maximize your values? Obviously consequentialism has nothing to say about what those values are, but it rules out the idea that an act of omission with consequence ‘foo’, and a proscriptive act also with consequence ‘foo’, can be morally distinguished.
Alright. I can see the usefulness of deontology in determining if an abortion doctor acted in a way worthy of praise or blame, but I feel as though the issue isn’t whether or not we put abortion doctors in prison, or whether we allow mothers to have abortions. The issue comes down to whether we want to live in a world where every possible potential human is realized, and has the opportunity to exist. Since humans are just a pattern of neurons, this goal isn’t realizable today, since the possible human “JohnWittle who, while writing a comment on a blog, got randomly teleported to the 1800s” doesn’t exist and doesn’t get to live out his experiences, while we might wish that he did. Every aborted human would have lived a whole life full of experiences, and maybe we would prefer to live in the world where that human had gotten to have those experiences.
Would a superintelligence later be able to simulate all of the possible humans we aborted, and all of the possible (good) experiences those humans might have had, along with every human which could have been made by you and I mating, you and King Loius XIV mating, King Loius XIV and some random peasant in feudal Japan mating, and all the potential offspring of all those potential people, algorithmically generating every possible brainstate which we would call ‘good’? Maybe.
In that case, perhaps we are not losing those experiences in an irrecoverable manner. How likely is it to happen this way? Who knows? Is the possibly temporary, possibly permanent loss of those people worth the increase in standard of living for whoever would be affected negatively by being forced to invest in that human? Is having an abortion morally equivalent to simply not conceiving the human in the first place? According to “simplified humanism”, we know that Life is Good, regardless of whether the life in question is 20 or 120 or 1020. Does that also apply to life that doesn’t exist but could? If we want to believe life is good, period, does that mean we should be creating as much life as possible? Is contraception morally equivalent to abortion? Is abstinence morally equivalent to contraception? Should people not willing to work on the immortality problem be spending all of their time conceiving as many humans as is possible? By not doing so, are we behaving suboptimally towards maximizing our values in the world around us?
I think the reason why the abortion debate is interesting is because there are all of these consequentialism issues surrounding it. If you are in favor of a woman’s being able to abort, does that mean you don’t actually value life, or are you banking on a future superintelligence giving those potential humans a better life than they would have had in the present time, or is that just a rationalization so you can say you value life when really you just want to maximize your own or your girlfriend’s quality of life? If you are against a woman’s ability to abort because you value life, are you also against abstinence because you value life? If you value life, does that not mean that you would prefer the presence of life to its absence? Should we be spending our effort on creating more life (through sex, or antiagathics research, or research into shortening pregnancy and/or moving the prenatal stage outside of the woman so she can conceive sooner afterward)?
Even while just looking at the problem through consequentialist eyes, there are still lots of issues to discuss. I had hoped to discuss some of them here, since I personally am a consequentialist who has yet to make up his mind. But if instead we’re arguing about deontological issues, then I’ll look elsewhere.
and yet is not known for the reason of contradicting the Standard position (like Caledonian might be).
Alicorn is reasonably well-known as a local non-consequentialist, I think. At least, I know her that way, and I’m not deeply plugged into the LW social milieu.
Abstinence, when used as birth control, still looks like commission to me (although the concept of ‘commission’ isn’t the most well-defined of terms).
Suppose that you would have sex in the hypothetical case that you were sterile. Then, in the real world where you aren’t sterile, renouncing sex in favour of sleeping doesn’t seem any less of a ‘commission’ than putting a latex barrier between your genitals while you have sex.
Ah, yes indeedy true. I guess I was thinking of abstinence. So wrong distinction. More likely, then: abortion is done to a specific embryo who is thereby prevented from being, and it’s done reactively; there’s no question that when you have an abortion it’s about deciding to kill this particular embryo. Contraceptive use on the other hand is nonspecific and proactive; it doesn’t feel like “I discard these reproductive cells which would have become a person!”, it feels like exerting prudent control over your life.
Every time contraception is used, it prevents a specific multitude of “potential humans” from existing. Sure, most of them would have been prevented from existing by other factors, but contraception still actively contributes to that. It’s also done reactively, in that it’s a reaction to someone’s desire to have sex with a lower risk of pregnancy. It may not feel the same way as abortion, but that’s just because it’s easier for humans to value fetuses than sperm and egg cells. Both abortion and contraception have specific and reactive components, in principle.
It seems to me that we mean different things by the words “reactive” (as opposed to proactive) and “specific”. A weak attempt at a reductio: I proactively do X to avoid facing Y; I am thus reacting to my desire to avoid facing Y. And is Y general or specific? Y is the specific Y that I do X to avoid facing.
A person doesn’t want to have a baby, so she has an abortion to stop the fetus from developing into one.
A person doesn’t want to have a fetus, so she uses contraception to stop the ovum and sperm from developing into one.
If 1 is reactive, then so is 2.
For a given fetus, there is a finite possibility space of all the persons into which it could develop, taking into account different values of unknown future parameters. The same can be said of any combination of sperm and ova; it’s just that the possibility space is larger. How would one derive a concept of “specific” that discriminates between the fetus space and the sperm/ova space without drawing an arbitrary line based on the size of the space?
Do you have an instance of “I proactively do X” where you do not class it as reactive? Do you have an instance of “I wish to avoid Y” where you do not class it as specific?
I don’t like conversations about definitions. I was using these words to describe a hypothetical inner experience; I don’t claim that they aren’t fuzzy. You seem to be pointing at the fuzziness and saying that they’re meaningless; I don’t see why you’d want to do that.
My point is that 1 and 2 above don’t seem to differ fundamentally in either of the two descriptors you used.
Conversations about definitions of words are not useful, but definitions of concepts are necessary. I’m pointing at the fuzziness because it indicates to me that the supposed distinction is not being made based on any principle, but simply to rationalize a preexisting bias.
I wasn’t trying to present a principled distinction, or trying to avoid bias. What I was saying isn’t something I’m going to defend. The only reason I responded to your criticism of it was that I was annoyed by the nature of your objection. However, since now I know you thought I was trying to say more than I actually was, I will freely ignore your objection.
I think taking birth control precautions is pretty comission-y.
I must concur. We’ve been judging the wasting of sperm as an act of commission at least as far back as when Genesis was written.
Onan knew that the offspring would not be his; so when he went in to his brother’s wife, he wasted his seed on the ground in order not to give offspring to his brother. But what he did was displeasing in the sight of the LORD; so He took his life also.
There’s a little debate on what Onan was being punished for, whether it was the not-impregnating-and-disobeying-the-Lord or the spilling-seed part. I incline to the disobedience explanation; as the Wikipedia entry mentions, Leviciticus’s punishment for spilling seeds is very far from ‘execution’.
Let me turn your question around. If your utility function puts value in the mere existence of people, regardless of how they interact with the larger world, doesn’t that mean having babies is as wonderful as killing people is terrible? Is somebody with 12 kids a hero?
I’m actually pretty sure some people who have had 12 kids are heroes or at least very altruistic when objectively analysed.
Many many people that made great contributions have come from large families of overachievers. Genetics and upbringing matter a lot. And productivity gains made by lets say 6 of the kids can easily overshadow anything that one individual could have done (even when adjusted for the fact that the kids start contributing later).
However overall if we look at the world today, the vast majority of people having 12 kids aren’t heroes.
If this is really what you really believe, as opposed to merely a fake utility function, the as far as I’m concerned you may as well be a pebble sorter or a baby eater.
It can’t be an accident that the rhetorical form your disagreement took is a dehumanization of your opponent. Just saying …
Also, I want to point out that the moral issues are nowhere near as clear-cut as you (and Kant) seem to think. Even if you axiomatically assert that people have terminal value, you still need to explain why people have that value, whereas trees (for example) do not. And also clarify the boundaries of that protected class “people”. (Does it include fetuses, conceptuses, persons cryonically frozen, HeLa cultures, etc.?)
Is it possible to answer these questions without once veering into the realm of instrumental values?
Also, I want to point out that the moral issues are nowhere near as clear-cut as you (and Kant) seem to think. Even if you axiomatically assert that people have terminal value, you still need to explain why people have that value, whereas trees (for example) do not. And also clarify the boundaries of that protected class “people”. (Does it include fetuses, conceptuses, persons cryonically frozen, HeLa cultures, etc.?)
What if I were to ask the same question about why society should be valued?
Is it possible to answer these questions without once veering into the realm of instrumental values?
If you keep trying to justify values instrumentally, you’ll wind up in an infinite regress.
Maybe what I would discover instead, if I actually charted out my value structure, that all of the things I value exist in an interlocking network that doesn’t ground out in any special real, true, honest-to-goodness, fundamental, basic, not-dependent-on-anything, terminal values.
While I’m not committed to the absence of terminal values, I consider the possibility plausible, and I don’t find the “well, there’s got to be something at the bottom of the stack!” argument for their presence convincing.
Absolutely true. Was responding to the last bit of your comment and ended up completely disregarding your greater context… sorry.
This is a bit of a hobbyhorse of mine at the moment, especially since so much of the discussion about ethics here seems predicated on the existence of terminal values that can’t be interpreted in terms of anything else.
Maybe what I would discover instead, if I actually charted out my value structure, that all of the things I value exist in an interlocking network that doesn’t ground out in any special real, true, honest-to-goodness, fundamental, basic, not-dependent-on-anything, terminal values.
It sounds like your value structure represents (hazily specified) terminal values.
What if I were to ask the same question about why society should be valued?
Then you would probably be asking a good question.
As a Humean, who bases his moral philosophy on rational self-interest, I would answer that ‘society’ is simply a shorthand for all of the other rational agents who might react positively or negatively to my actions. As such, society is not something that should be ‘valued’ as such, but it is something that a prudent self-interested person will want to take into account.
But I’m sure that people (I’m sure there are some) who actually value society without valuing individual persons—those people would find your question difficult to answer.
Actually I don’t think infanticide is as universally evil as its cracked up to be.
Don’t get me wrong judging by my personal ethics infaticide is wrong and once we will have artificial uterus’s and genetic therapy abortion will also be wrong on about the same order of magnitude.
But going by general human behavior rather than specific ethical systems both infanticide and abortion where generally accepted far more than today. Not only that the specific notion that something magical happens when a organism passes through the birth canal making it worthy of moral consideration seems to be a very modern and Eurocentric thing.
These moral sentiments are emotions [...] caused by contemplating the person or action to be evaluated without regard to our self-interest, and from a common or general perspective [...]
Regarding Eugene’s point about terminal value, I agree with the following clarification: the primary reason murder is wrong is because it deprives somebody of the rest of their life.
This still allows us to distinguish between murder and failure to create new lives, provided that we see a difference between someone who already exists and someone who merely might exist.
If this is really what you really believe, as opposed to merely a fake utility function, then as far as I’m concerned you may as well be a pebble sorter or a baby eater.
Are you saying that this then would no longer be a question of figuring out how to best satisfy our moral principles, but a difference in moral principles themselves?
Information can be used to change a moral position because you can discover that something does or doesn’t satisfy your moral principles. But in theory, information shouldn’t change your moral principles—they are independent of facts and logical justification.
If a fetus has innate intrinsic value, then wouldn’t that be a moral principle? People might argue in pro-life debates that the fetus has value because it is human, or because it has potential, or reason X, or reason Y, but perhaps none of these reasons are the real reason, because the value of a fetus isn’t derivative. In which case, this would explain something to me about the apparent lack of logic when people discuss pro-life arguments. People could be making the mistake that morality has ‘reasons’ and that moral principles can be justified via argument. When all they really need to say is that the life of a baby is sacred.
(By the way the lack of logic I was referring to is that some subset of pro-life proponents, that many of my family members happen to represent, argue sincerely that fetuses should be protected because human life is sacred, but then they support fighting in wars. They will argue that soldiers make a choice, and another people or culture are threatening our way of life, etc, but these seem like after-the-fact excuses. Logically, the bottom line is not that human life must be protected, no matter what. So it doesn’t matter that fetuses are ‘human’. It would make sense that it only matters that they’re human babies.)
I think the basic stumbling block in the typical abortion dialog isn’t the criteria of personhood, it’s that people don’t like to deal with the real, practical reasons why you shouldn’t kill people.
The basic reasons why murder is illegal are:
A. In general, people are much more valuable to society alive than dead. This does not apply to unwanted babies.
and
B. Attempts to legally identify the people who would be better off dead are prone to dangerous corruption and irreversible error, the costs of which far exceed the benefits. Again, this does not apply to unwanted babies.
Abortion is ALSO frowned on because
C. It denies someone their potential life. But why is denying an actual person their potential life worse than denying a potential person their potential life? They would both end up as real people, with real lives. Why is one life more valuable? If this makes abortion evil, why isn’t contraception evil?
Finally there is
D. Dying hurts. This isn’t necessarily true, and even if it was, dying hurts a heck of a lot less than living. This objection is rarely explicitly voiced, because it’s very weak.
You left out what I would have said is the most basic reason murder is illegal. Simple self interested cooperation. A wants to be free to kill his enemies but really doesn’t want his enemies to be free to kill him. B wants to be free to kill her enemies but doesn’t want her enemies to be free to kill her. C, D and E have similar preferences. By mutual agreement and alliance they each sacrifice their right to kill other people so that they are less vulnerable to be killed themselves.
Naturally they attempt to wrangle it such that they are an in group who does get to kill people anyway but in Australia at least we have managed to stamp even that sort of behaviour out entirely—at least within our own borders.
Yeah, this is more or less what I meant by B, with the caveat that alice and bob may fundamentally disagree on who’s better off dead.
Why does the fact that the parent does not want the baby imply that it has little value to society? I have a friend that was adopted (which seems to be the main alternative to abortion) that I value very much. If he was aborted as a fetus, then I would (probably) be much worse off than I am. Are him and I (and everyone he engages in mutually beneficial exchange with) not a part of society that is thereby gaining value by his non-death.
Well, sure he’s valuable NOW, but that’s after years and years of investment. It’s not that being unwanted takes a baby from super valuable to negative, babies are just not very valuable regardless.
Yes, but the same could be said of children and the elderly (that they are currently not very valuable to society), but it is still illegal to murder them.
The elderly arguably have grand bargains protecting them. Young people pay into Social Security to meet the promised payments to current old people, in the expectation that future young people will do the same for them, and so on.
Like wills. Why should we execute wills that leave millions to pet dogs or something? The dead person is dead, beyond any caring. Just take their bequest and do something useful with it! But of course, if we did that then people writing wills no longer trust will executors and will disperse their assets in life or just waste them. A grand Newcomb-like bargain.
No such bargains protect children. They haven’t provided anything and won’t be in a position to for a long time after a huge investment. (What’s the estimate of the net society-wide cost to produce a finished high-schooler? A few million? Highly non-trivial, let’s say.)
People on average increase in societal value from conception to childhood, and then it gets more complicated from there depending on how they turn out. And yes, typically their value declines as they become elderly.
But, as in your example with your adopted friend, even a baby that starts out unwanted, if society invests a bit in its welfare, will soon become part of the social fabric and so on and thereby become valued.
Certainly there are some people who literally nobody likes, but even then, there’s still reason B.
As it happens, my best friend was adopted as well. But I hardly think the limiting factor in the number or quality of my friends is society’s production of babies.
Oddly enough, my boyfriend, who is the only person I’ve ever heard seriously attack abortion, uses this as one of his main arguments. According to some research (this was a verbal argument, and we allow each other not to provide citations in such a context) the neural architecture that allows humans to tolerate pain is not as sophisticated in developing fetuses, and so they are capable of feeling pain much more acutely.
On the other side of that argument, a fetus does not have the higher brain function or consciousness that would allow it to experience pain. When an adult is put under general anesthesia for surgery we do not generally consider them to be “experiencing pain” even though the body is still reacting the damage as though they were conscious. They still have brain function, they temporarily lack the higher brain function required for the meaningful experience of pain. A very similar argument could be applied to a fetus.
I agree with your main point (that this is a stumbling block for some people), but there are others who will contend that A and part of B (namely the irreversible error) do apply to unwanted babies (usually, or on average), and that the reason why abortion is more evil than contraception is because it’s an error of commission rather than omission.
Killing adults is less reversible in the sense that if you kill comedian carlos mencia, you can’t get a new carlos mencia if you change your mind. In contrast, babies are basically fungible.
Babies aren’t really fungible; if you have the baby that would have grown up to be Carlos Mencia (to carry on with your example) you can’t grow another would-be Carlos Mencia if you change your mind. You just don’t know what you’re discarding when you discard a baby.
This doesn’t follow. Just because you don’t have data about what counterfactually the baby would have turned into doesn’t mean that the babies are fungible. We don’t in general keep the genetic code of aborted babies or calculate how that would interact with their environment. Just because we can’t easily predict what the distinctions would be doesn’t mean that the babies are all identical.
When you’re considering a decision of exchanging two babies, you’re making it based on what you know to anticipate. If you know nothing relevant, you’re ambivalent between exchanging and not exchanging, which is what “fungible” means.
(The dollar bills are also not identical, and where one bill can buy you a snack, another won’t work by being suspected counterfeit in a manner you didn’t expect. Such considerations don’t make cash non-fungible.)
I see where you’re coming from, but I’m not sure that’s a useful use of the concept of “fungible”. The reason why it’s useful to think of dollar bills as fungible is because we can use them to think about more complicated exchanges (i.e. dollars → cow → cow + milk → cow + dollars → …) and figure out a net result by comparing before and after quantities of the highly fungible little notes. Sure, it’s possible that a given dollar might turn out to be counterfeit, but it only takes a little knowledge and a few moments of examination to become very confident about whether or not that’s the case for a given note.
On the other hand, I’d be very reluctant to use babies as a unit of exchange even if I ignored the obvious moral problems: babies are much much harder to compare for equality than dollars.
The nonfungibility of adults is more visible than the nonfungibility of babies, but babies are not identical either.
I think taking birth control precautions is pretty comission-y. Abstinence would be the omission version of not having babies.
After reading the entire debate this comment spawned… if the goal is to determine whether we should support abortion legalization and fewer restrictions (possibly up to infanticide? (!)), or perhaps support more heavy regulation, it seems like arguing over whether an action is reactive, proactive, etc can’t possibly have any relevance, and seems like a particularly virtuist way of looking at things.
Are we not solely interested in consequences? What are our values and how do we maximize them? Clearly saying we value “human life” isn’t enough, and we need to be more narrow. What do we actually value? If we say we value all potential humans, should we be spending all of our time impregnating women, being pregnant, or researching how to shorten pregnancy and/or grow humans in a test tube? If we draw the line in what we value somewhere else, do we end up with post-pregnancy abortions? Is that okay? I feel like there are real questions, and the reason those questions are interesting is because we can’t just take the copout answer of “proactive actions bad, acts of omission okay” because consequentialism won’t let us.
What you mean we, consequentialist?
Hmm. I guess I had not considered people on this forum might not be consequentialists. And yet you are somewhat of a known community figure, and not as a contrarian. Is consequentialism not evident? I ask as an honest inquiry to someone whose username I recognize (being a sort of lesswrong == sequences person myself) and therefore is at least aware of the Standard position for certain, and yet is not known for the reason of contradicting the Standard position (like Caledonian might be).
To me, the knowledge of human psychology which makes clear why humans find acts of omission acceptable, while humans find proscriptive acts with the same consequences unacceptable, is enough to make me a consequentialist. Is its not the same for you?
Here’s some background reading with more details about my personal views in the comments. I consider consequentialistic shut-up-and-multiply kind of thinking appropriate for questions of prudence and simply don’t think it constitutes morality. I’m definitely an oddity within LW.
What could an ethical framework be if not the way you decide what actions to take in order to maximize your values? Obviously consequentialism has nothing to say about what those values are, but it rules out the idea that an act of omission with consequence ‘foo’, and a proscriptive act also with consequence ‘foo’, can be morally distinguished.
You are asking extremely basic questions. Try again after you’ve read the post I linked.
Alright. I can see the usefulness of deontology in determining if an abortion doctor acted in a way worthy of praise or blame, but I feel as though the issue isn’t whether or not we put abortion doctors in prison, or whether we allow mothers to have abortions. The issue comes down to whether we want to live in a world where every possible potential human is realized, and has the opportunity to exist. Since humans are just a pattern of neurons, this goal isn’t realizable today, since the possible human “JohnWittle who, while writing a comment on a blog, got randomly teleported to the 1800s” doesn’t exist and doesn’t get to live out his experiences, while we might wish that he did. Every aborted human would have lived a whole life full of experiences, and maybe we would prefer to live in the world where that human had gotten to have those experiences.
Would a superintelligence later be able to simulate all of the possible humans we aborted, and all of the possible (good) experiences those humans might have had, along with every human which could have been made by you and I mating, you and King Loius XIV mating, King Loius XIV and some random peasant in feudal Japan mating, and all the potential offspring of all those potential people, algorithmically generating every possible brainstate which we would call ‘good’? Maybe.
In that case, perhaps we are not losing those experiences in an irrecoverable manner. How likely is it to happen this way? Who knows? Is the possibly temporary, possibly permanent loss of those people worth the increase in standard of living for whoever would be affected negatively by being forced to invest in that human? Is having an abortion morally equivalent to simply not conceiving the human in the first place? According to “simplified humanism”, we know that Life is Good, regardless of whether the life in question is 20 or 120 or 1020. Does that also apply to life that doesn’t exist but could? If we want to believe life is good, period, does that mean we should be creating as much life as possible? Is contraception morally equivalent to abortion? Is abstinence morally equivalent to contraception? Should people not willing to work on the immortality problem be spending all of their time conceiving as many humans as is possible? By not doing so, are we behaving suboptimally towards maximizing our values in the world around us?
I think the reason why the abortion debate is interesting is because there are all of these consequentialism issues surrounding it. If you are in favor of a woman’s being able to abort, does that mean you don’t actually value life, or are you banking on a future superintelligence giving those potential humans a better life than they would have had in the present time, or is that just a rationalization so you can say you value life when really you just want to maximize your own or your girlfriend’s quality of life? If you are against a woman’s ability to abort because you value life, are you also against abstinence because you value life? If you value life, does that not mean that you would prefer the presence of life to its absence? Should we be spending our effort on creating more life (through sex, or antiagathics research, or research into shortening pregnancy and/or moving the prenatal stage outside of the woman so she can conceive sooner afterward)?
Even while just looking at the problem through consequentialist eyes, there are still lots of issues to discuss. I had hoped to discuss some of them here, since I personally am a consequentialist who has yet to make up his mind. But if instead we’re arguing about deontological issues, then I’ll look elsewhere.
Alicorn is reasonably well-known as a local non-consequentialist, I think. At least, I know her that way, and I’m not deeply plugged into the LW social milieu.
Abstinence, when used as birth control, still looks like commission to me (although the concept of ‘commission’ isn’t the most well-defined of terms).
Suppose that you would have sex in the hypothetical case that you were sterile. Then, in the real world where you aren’t sterile, renouncing sex in favour of sleeping doesn’t seem any less of a ‘commission’ than putting a latex barrier between your genitals while you have sex.
Ah, yes indeedy true. I guess I was thinking of abstinence. So wrong distinction. More likely, then: abortion is done to a specific embryo who is thereby prevented from being, and it’s done reactively; there’s no question that when you have an abortion it’s about deciding to kill this particular embryo. Contraceptive use on the other hand is nonspecific and proactive; it doesn’t feel like “I discard these reproductive cells which would have become a person!”, it feels like exerting prudent control over your life.
Every time contraception is used, it prevents a specific multitude of “potential humans” from existing. Sure, most of them would have been prevented from existing by other factors, but contraception still actively contributes to that. It’s also done reactively, in that it’s a reaction to someone’s desire to have sex with a lower risk of pregnancy. It may not feel the same way as abortion, but that’s just because it’s easier for humans to value fetuses than sperm and egg cells. Both abortion and contraception have specific and reactive components, in principle.
It seems to me that we mean different things by the words “reactive” (as opposed to proactive) and “specific”. A weak attempt at a reductio: I proactively do X to avoid facing Y; I am thus reacting to my desire to avoid facing Y. And is Y general or specific? Y is the specific Y that I do X to avoid facing.
A person doesn’t want to have a baby, so she has an abortion to stop the fetus from developing into one.
A person doesn’t want to have a fetus, so she uses contraception to stop the ovum and sperm from developing into one.
If 1 is reactive, then so is 2.
For a given fetus, there is a finite possibility space of all the persons into which it could develop, taking into account different values of unknown future parameters. The same can be said of any combination of sperm and ova; it’s just that the possibility space is larger. How would one derive a concept of “specific” that discriminates between the fetus space and the sperm/ova space without drawing an arbitrary line based on the size of the space?
Do you have an instance of “I proactively do X” where you do not class it as reactive? Do you have an instance of “I wish to avoid Y” where you do not class it as specific? I don’t like conversations about definitions. I was using these words to describe a hypothetical inner experience; I don’t claim that they aren’t fuzzy. You seem to be pointing at the fuzziness and saying that they’re meaningless; I don’t see why you’d want to do that.
My point is that 1 and 2 above don’t seem to differ fundamentally in either of the two descriptors you used.
Conversations about definitions of words are not useful, but definitions of concepts are necessary. I’m pointing at the fuzziness because it indicates to me that the supposed distinction is not being made based on any principle, but simply to rationalize a preexisting bias.
I wasn’t trying to present a principled distinction, or trying to avoid bias. What I was saying isn’t something I’m going to defend. The only reason I responded to your criticism of it was that I was annoyed by the nature of your objection. However, since now I know you thought I was trying to say more than I actually was, I will freely ignore your objection.
I must concur. We’ve been judging the wasting of sperm as an act of commission at least as far back as when Genesis was written.
Apparently that sperm really was sacred.
There’s a little debate on what Onan was being punished for, whether it was the not-impregnating-and-disobeying-the-Lord or the spilling-seed part. I incline to the disobedience explanation; as the Wikipedia entry mentions, Leviciticus’s punishment for spilling seeds is very far from ‘execution’.
So do you believe that people only have no terminal value and instrumental value only in so far as they benefit society?
If this is really what you really believe, as opposed to merely a fake utility function, the as far as I’m concerned you may as well be a pebble sorter or a baby eater.
Let me turn your question around. If your utility function puts value in the mere existence of people, regardless of how they interact with the larger world, doesn’t that mean having babies is as wonderful as killing people is terrible? Is somebody with 12 kids a hero?
Or a serial killer with a large family? “Sure he might have killed 3 people—but he’s a father of 5!”
I’m actually pretty sure some people who have had 12 kids are heroes or at least very altruistic when objectively analysed.
Many many people that made great contributions have come from large families of overachievers. Genetics and upbringing matter a lot. And productivity gains made by lets say 6 of the kids can easily overshadow anything that one individual could have done (even when adjusted for the fact that the kids start contributing later).
However overall if we look at the world today, the vast majority of people having 12 kids aren’t heroes.
It can’t be an accident that the rhetorical form your disagreement took is a dehumanization of your opponent. Just saying …
Also, I want to point out that the moral issues are nowhere near as clear-cut as you (and Kant) seem to think. Even if you axiomatically assert that people have terminal value, you still need to explain why people have that value, whereas trees (for example) do not. And also clarify the boundaries of that protected class “people”. (Does it include fetuses, conceptuses, persons cryonically frozen, HeLa cultures, etc.?)
Is it possible to answer these questions without once veering into the realm of instrumental values?
What if I were to ask the same question about why society should be valued?
If you keep trying to justify values instrumentally, you’ll wind up in an infinite regress.
Not necessarily.
Maybe what I would discover instead, if I actually charted out my value structure, that all of the things I value exist in an interlocking network that doesn’t ground out in any special real, true, honest-to-goodness, fundamental, basic, not-dependent-on-anything, terminal values.
While I’m not committed to the absence of terminal values, I consider the possibility plausible, and I don’t find the “well, there’s got to be something at the bottom of the stack!” argument for their presence convincing.
That still doesn’t answer the question of why that value structure as opposed to some other.
Absolutely true. Was responding to the last bit of your comment and ended up completely disregarding your greater context… sorry.
This is a bit of a hobbyhorse of mine at the moment, especially since so much of the discussion about ethics here seems predicated on the existence of terminal values that can’t be interpreted in terms of anything else.
It sounds like your value structure represents (hazily specified) terminal values.
It doesn’t sound that way to me, so if you unpack it I’d be interested.
Then you would probably be asking a good question.
As a Humean, who bases his moral philosophy on rational self-interest, I would answer that ‘society’ is simply a shorthand for all of the other rational agents who might react positively or negatively to my actions. As such, society is not something that should be ‘valued’ as such, but it is something that a prudent self-interested person will want to take into account.
But I’m sure that people (I’m sure there are some) who actually value society without valuing individual persons—those people would find your question difficult to answer.
Two points.
1:
Why is this any less arbitrary?
2:
So if I handed you a baby and offered you $10 to kill it, assuming no one else would ever find out, would you do it?
If the answer is some variation on “no, because I would feel bad about it”, I can throw in a pill that keeps you from feeling bad about it.
The scenario in 2 is too implausable to be useful, in my opinion.
w! Definitely a w.
I don’t understand the reference to w. What does that letter have to do with the context?
The homophone is broken.
Oh! Throw in a pill, not through in. I got it.
Thanks, Fixed.
You are not making points. You are issuing challenges.
I’m not sure I understand the question. You are not asking why I would value my own interests, are you?
I respectfully decline the challenge.
Actually I don’t think infanticide is as universally evil as its cracked up to be.
Don’t get me wrong judging by my personal ethics infaticide is wrong and once we will have artificial uterus’s and genetic therapy abortion will also be wrong on about the same order of magnitude.
But going by general human behavior rather than specific ethical systems both infanticide and abortion where generally accepted far more than today. Not only that the specific notion that something magical happens when a organism passes through the birth canal making it worthy of moral consideration seems to be a very modern and Eurocentric thing.
Hume wouldn’t be a Humean if rational self-interest were the standard. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy writes:
Regarding Eugene’s point about terminal value, I agree with the following clarification: the primary reason murder is wrong is because it deprives somebody of the rest of their life.
This still allows us to distinguish between murder and failure to create new lives, provided that we see a difference between someone who already exists and someone who merely might exist.
Are you saying that this then would no longer be a question of figuring out how to best satisfy our moral principles, but a difference in moral principles themselves?
Information can be used to change a moral position because you can discover that something does or doesn’t satisfy your moral principles. But in theory, information shouldn’t change your moral principles—they are independent of facts and logical justification.
If a fetus has innate intrinsic value, then wouldn’t that be a moral principle? People might argue in pro-life debates that the fetus has value because it is human, or because it has potential, or reason X, or reason Y, but perhaps none of these reasons are the real reason, because the value of a fetus isn’t derivative. In which case, this would explain something to me about the apparent lack of logic when people discuss pro-life arguments. People could be making the mistake that morality has ‘reasons’ and that moral principles can be justified via argument. When all they really need to say is that the life of a baby is sacred.
(By the way the lack of logic I was referring to is that some subset of pro-life proponents, that many of my family members happen to represent, argue sincerely that fetuses should be protected because human life is sacred, but then they support fighting in wars. They will argue that soldiers make a choice, and another people or culture are threatening our way of life, etc, but these seem like after-the-fact excuses. Logically, the bottom line is not that human life must be protected, no matter what. So it doesn’t matter that fetuses are ‘human’. It would make sense that it only matters that they’re human babies.)