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 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.