What I personally find of value is human-like mind. It doesn’t matter what it’s implemented in: silicon, cells, whatever. A human child has a mind that’s too primitive to be of any value, and that’s only when the brain is developed. So its death seems to me to be an insignificant loss (aside from personal loss for the parents, etc..., of course).
If I have a choice to save a fully grown human (let’s say 30 years old, the issue becomes more moot the older the person gets) or a child (yes, even a born child), I would sooner save the adult. A dead child is a waste of 9 months to 2 or 3 years of resources. A dead adult is a waste of many more years of resources. An adult is at the pick of their productivity, the child is not and won’t be for many years to come.
If I have a choice to save a fully grown human (let’s say 30 years old, the issue becomes more moot the older the person gets) or a child (yes, even a born child), I would sooner save the adult. A dead child is a waste of 9 months to 2 or 3 years of resources. A dead adult is a waste of many more years of resources. An adult is at the pick of their productivity, the child is not and won’t be for many years to come.
While I agree with your first paragraph—the human mind is what matters—it might still make sense to save the child. In today’s world where people die at 80, the child will probably live more years between now and death than the adult. If you factor in the fact that people who are younger today have a slightly greater chance of becoming immortal, this consideration becomes much more important. Of course, if the child is young enough that it doesn’t have a human-like mind, the adult then has a greater “right to life” (quotation marks because not everyone thinks rights are a useful heuristic).
I’ve thought about this some more and the point isn’t who will live more years, but rather how much utility can each one produce. If it’s a choice between a 4 month old child and a 30 year old adult, and we choose to save the adult, then in a year we can have another 4 month old (and not that much different), while the adult is continuing to provide utility. If we save the child, then it will be about 18 years before the child’s rate of utility output can come close to the adult’s, and meanwhile we lost all the utility from the adult. If I thought about this more, I could probably write a function, which will determine who you would save.
The 4 month old will produce 80 years of utility if saved, for 18 years of investment: if this is a bad bargain, reproduction always is. The adult, if saved, will produce 50 years of utility for 0 further investment. This means a higher rate of return on the adult, but a higher total future “utility revenue” from the child. Depending on who’s making the investment and whether that matters to you, the answer could be either way. But now that I’ve written it out like this, I can see your point: the adult does have a higher rate of return.
Creating things, be they X Y or Z, usually has diminishing marginal returns. You can only make so many Xs before it becomes a worse idea than Ys, and only so many Ys and Xs before Zs become better ideas.
Unfortunately, if your factory workers have aesthetic fondness for Xs, or Ys are accidentally produced by the coffeemakers in the break room, or if Bob of the Church of the SubGenius commands Zs be made rather than As, you may wind up with a suboptimal productions. In such a situation, someone may come to you and suggest that you make Zs, but you say no. But if this is a bad bargain, Zs always are!
Of course, the right answer is, ‘conditions right now mean that Zs are not the greatest marginal return for investment, but Zs are still pretty nifty, and if Zs fell down to some level N such as 0, then maybe Zs would return to being the best investment’.
In this analogy, Zs are babies. Arguably they are not a very good investment in the First World or anywhere. Populations don’t need to grow. It’d be fine if populations gradually shrunk. But if birth rates were zero then that’s different, and would cause in not terribly long a catastrophic decline, and if it continued for more than a few decades, it would literally cause the extinction of the human race. It’s hard to argue that babies didn’t become the best possible investment at some point along the way to extinction. But that doesn’t mean they are the best investment now.
My wording in the grandparent was misleading.
This:
The 4 month old will produce 80 years of utility if saved, for 18 years of investment: if this is a bad bargain, reproduction always is.
Was meant to refer only to having a baby in current conditions regardless of whether or not it would be sacrificed to save an adult. I meant that if 80 years of production minus 18 years of investment was a net negative or a net positive, that wouldn’t change whether you saved the adult or the baby.
What I personally find of value is human-like mind. It doesn’t matter what it’s implemented in: silicon, cells, whatever. A human child has a mind that’s too primitive to be of any value, and that’s only when the brain is developed. So its death seems to me to be an insignificant loss (aside from personal loss for the parents, etc..., of course).
If I have a choice to save a fully grown human (let’s say 30 years old, the issue becomes more moot the older the person gets) or a child (yes, even a born child), I would sooner save the adult. A dead child is a waste of 9 months to 2 or 3 years of resources. A dead adult is a waste of many more years of resources. An adult is at the pick of their productivity, the child is not and won’t be for many years to come.
While I agree with your first paragraph—the human mind is what matters—it might still make sense to save the child. In today’s world where people die at 80, the child will probably live more years between now and death than the adult. If you factor in the fact that people who are younger today have a slightly greater chance of becoming immortal, this consideration becomes much more important. Of course, if the child is young enough that it doesn’t have a human-like mind, the adult then has a greater “right to life” (quotation marks because not everyone thinks rights are a useful heuristic).
I’ve thought about this some more and the point isn’t who will live more years, but rather how much utility can each one produce. If it’s a choice between a 4 month old child and a 30 year old adult, and we choose to save the adult, then in a year we can have another 4 month old (and not that much different), while the adult is continuing to provide utility. If we save the child, then it will be about 18 years before the child’s rate of utility output can come close to the adult’s, and meanwhile we lost all the utility from the adult. If I thought about this more, I could probably write a function, which will determine who you would save.
The 4 month old will produce 80 years of utility if saved, for 18 years of investment: if this is a bad bargain, reproduction always is. The adult, if saved, will produce 50 years of utility for 0 further investment. This means a higher rate of return on the adult, but a higher total future “utility revenue” from the child. Depending on who’s making the investment and whether that matters to you, the answer could be either way. But now that I’ve written it out like this, I can see your point: the adult does have a higher rate of return.
Creating things, be they X Y or Z, usually has diminishing marginal returns. You can only make so many Xs before it becomes a worse idea than Ys, and only so many Ys and Xs before Zs become better ideas.
Unfortunately, if your factory workers have aesthetic fondness for Xs, or Ys are accidentally produced by the coffeemakers in the break room, or if Bob of the Church of the SubGenius commands Zs be made rather than As, you may wind up with a suboptimal productions. In such a situation, someone may come to you and suggest that you make Zs, but you say no. But if this is a bad bargain, Zs always are!
Of course, the right answer is, ‘conditions right now mean that Zs are not the greatest marginal return for investment, but Zs are still pretty nifty, and if Zs fell down to some level N such as 0, then maybe Zs would return to being the best investment’.
In this analogy, Zs are babies. Arguably they are not a very good investment in the First World or anywhere. Populations don’t need to grow. It’d be fine if populations gradually shrunk. But if birth rates were zero then that’s different, and would cause in not terribly long a catastrophic decline, and if it continued for more than a few decades, it would literally cause the extinction of the human race. It’s hard to argue that babies didn’t become the best possible investment at some point along the way to extinction. But that doesn’t mean they are the best investment now.
My wording in the grandparent was misleading. This:
Was meant to refer only to having a baby in current conditions regardless of whether or not it would be sacrificed to save an adult. I meant that if 80 years of production minus 18 years of investment was a net negative or a net positive, that wouldn’t change whether you saved the adult or the baby.