I think killing babies is uniquely horrible rather than uniquely harmful.
Professor Moriarty’s evil plan to destroy the world and kill everyone is nearing completion. All he has to do is to press the big red button on the world-destroying machine. You are standing nearby with a hand grenade and could kill Moriarty. But, anticipating this sort of problem, he has taken care to have the whole area filled with cute babies.
You should probably throw the hand grenade even though it will kill lots of babies. But if your response to this situation is anything like “Yessss! Finally I get to kill some babies!” then, although I suppose in some sense I’m glad it’s you rather than someone more scrupulous in this bizarre situation, you are a terrible person and the world needs fewer people like you and in the less-artificial contexts that make up maybe 99.9999% of real situations your enthusiasm for baby-killing will not be any sort of advantage to anyone.
(There is a big difference, in principle, between the questions “Will doing X make the world a better place on balance than not doing X?” and “Is X the sort of thing a good rather than a bad person would do?”. Unfortunately, everyday moral discourse doesn’t make that distinction very clearly. Fortunately, in most actually-arising situations (I think) the two questions have similar answers.)
(separate reply, so you can downvote either or both points)
I don’t think anyone’s tried to poll abortion feelings on LW, and expect the topic to be fairly mind-killing. For myself, I tend not to see moment-of-birth as much of a moral turning point—it’s about the same badness to me whether the euthanasia takes place an hour before, or during, or an hour after delivery. Somewhere long before that, the badness of never existing changes to the badness of probably-but-then-not existing, and then to the badness of almost-but-then-not-existing, and then to existing-then-not, and then later to existing-and-understanding-then-not.
It’s a continuum of unpleasant to reprehensible, not a switch between acceptible and not.
I don’t think this is quite the LW norm. We might distinguish several different meanings of right to life:
1: The moral value I place on other peoples’ lives. In this sense “right to life” is just the phrase I use to describe the fact that I don’t want people to kill or die, and the details can easily vary from person to person. If LW users value sentience, this is a fact about demographics, not an argument that should be convincing. This is what we usually mean when we say something is “okay.”
2: The norms that society is willing to enforce regarding the value of a life. Usually fairly well agreed upon, though with some contention (e.g. fertilized ova). This is the most common use of the word “right” by people who understand that rights aren’t ontologically basic. Again, this is a descriptive definition, not a prescriptive one, but you can see how people might decide what to collectively protect based compromises between their own individual values.
3: Something we should protect for game-theoretic reasons. This is the only somewhat prescriptive one, since you can argue that it is a mistake in reasoning to, say, pollute the environment if you’re part of a civilization of agents very similar to you. Although this still depends on individual values, it’s the similarity of peoples’ decisions that does the generalizing, rather than compromise between different people. Values derived in this way can be added to or subtracted from values derived in the other ways. It’s unclear how much this applies to the case of abortion—this seems like an interesting argument.
The mainstream LW idea seems to be that the right to life is based on sentience.
I don’t know if this is mainstream, but IMO it’s massively oversimplified to the point of incorrectness. There’s plenty of controversy over what “right” even means, and how to value sentience is totally unsolved. I tend to use predicted-quality-adjusted-experience-minutes as a rough guideline, but adjust it pretty radically based on emotional distance and other factors.
killing babies is the go-to example of something awful
I think of it more as a placeholder than an example. It’s not an assertion that this is universally awful in all circumstances (though many probably do think that), it’s intended to be “or something else you think is really bad”.
The mainstream LW idea seems to be that the right to life is based on sentience.
At the same time, killing babies is the go-to example of something awful.
Does everyone think babies are sentient, or do they think that it’s awful to kill babies even if they’re not sentient for some reason, or what?
Does anyone have any reasoning on abortion besides, Not sentient being, killing it is okay QED (wouldn’t that apply to newborns, too?)?
I think killing babies is uniquely horrible rather than uniquely harmful.
Professor Moriarty’s evil plan to destroy the world and kill everyone is nearing completion. All he has to do is to press the big red button on the world-destroying machine. You are standing nearby with a hand grenade and could kill Moriarty. But, anticipating this sort of problem, he has taken care to have the whole area filled with cute babies.
You should probably throw the hand grenade even though it will kill lots of babies. But if your response to this situation is anything like “Yessss! Finally I get to kill some babies!” then, although I suppose in some sense I’m glad it’s you rather than someone more scrupulous in this bizarre situation, you are a terrible person and the world needs fewer people like you and in the less-artificial contexts that make up maybe 99.9999% of real situations your enthusiasm for baby-killing will not be any sort of advantage to anyone.
(There is a big difference, in principle, between the questions “Will doing X make the world a better place on balance than not doing X?” and “Is X the sort of thing a good rather than a bad person would do?”. Unfortunately, everyday moral discourse doesn’t make that distinction very clearly. Fortunately, in most actually-arising situations (I think) the two questions have similar answers.)
(separate reply, so you can downvote either or both points)
I don’t think anyone’s tried to poll abortion feelings on LW, and expect the topic to be fairly mind-killing. For myself, I tend not to see moment-of-birth as much of a moral turning point—it’s about the same badness to me whether the euthanasia takes place an hour before, or during, or an hour after delivery. Somewhere long before that, the badness of never existing changes to the badness of probably-but-then-not existing, and then to the badness of almost-but-then-not-existing, and then to existing-then-not, and then later to existing-and-understanding-then-not.
It’s a continuum of unpleasant to reprehensible, not a switch between acceptible and not.
Potential sentience had got to count, or it would be ok to kill sleeping peopje
I don’t think this is quite the LW norm. We might distinguish several different meanings of right to life:
1: The moral value I place on other peoples’ lives. In this sense “right to life” is just the phrase I use to describe the fact that I don’t want people to kill or die, and the details can easily vary from person to person. If LW users value sentience, this is a fact about demographics, not an argument that should be convincing. This is what we usually mean when we say something is “okay.”
2: The norms that society is willing to enforce regarding the value of a life. Usually fairly well agreed upon, though with some contention (e.g. fertilized ova). This is the most common use of the word “right” by people who understand that rights aren’t ontologically basic. Again, this is a descriptive definition, not a prescriptive one, but you can see how people might decide what to collectively protect based compromises between their own individual values.
3: Something we should protect for game-theoretic reasons. This is the only somewhat prescriptive one, since you can argue that it is a mistake in reasoning to, say, pollute the environment if you’re part of a civilization of agents very similar to you. Although this still depends on individual values, it’s the similarity of peoples’ decisions that does the generalizing, rather than compromise between different people. Values derived in this way can be added to or subtracted from values derived in the other ways. It’s unclear how much this applies to the case of abortion—this seems like an interesting argument.
I don’t know if this is mainstream, but IMO it’s massively oversimplified to the point of incorrectness. There’s plenty of controversy over what “right” even means, and how to value sentience is totally unsolved. I tend to use predicted-quality-adjusted-experience-minutes as a rough guideline, but adjust it pretty radically based on emotional distance and other factors.
I think of it more as a placeholder than an example. It’s not an assertion that this is universally awful in all circumstances (though many probably do think that), it’s intended to be “or something else you think is really bad”.
The mainstream moral concept of LW is utilitarianism not deontology to the extend that there’s a LW mainstream moral concept.
I don’t most people here like dualistic thinking but consider being sentient to be a sliding scale.