An ethical debate that’s turning very sour
(Okay, this has more or less run its course. Deleting the post.)
http://lesswrong.com/lw/90l/welcome_to_less_wrong_2012/5kk8
Right now I seem to be losing my last scraps of clear-headedness concerning the topic.
I’d dearly like anyone who feels they’re up to it to 1) step in to provide a more rounded perspective and 2) help me the hell out in whatever way you consider useful, because such moral predicaments are known to be a point of obsession for me and haunt me for a long time (see my first post on LW).
Relevant: some of the exchange I just had with Orthonormal, with him inquiring about a possible factor to my behavior:
Orthonormal:
I’m not going to do this publicly (for several obvious reasons), but I want to ask: do you occasionally worry that you have some sociopathic impulses?
Me:
I certainly do (and I don’t view that in a solely negative light at that), and I understand that I might be exhibiting some complexly motivated cognition here. But this understanding isn’t swaying my opinion.
Orthonormal:
Oh, I wasn’t arguing against you- I was just curious.
I noticed that you had an unusual amount of passion on this topic, and wanted to test the generalization that the most passionate proponents of prohibiting something (or keeping it prohibited) are often those who feel some temptation themselves- both because an external prohibition seems like it helps their internal self-control, and because it signals to themselves and others that they’re not the sort of person who would do that thing. (Getting evidence for that theory was more significant to me than any actual info about sociopathic impulses.)
EDIT: thanks to everyone who responded.
I’ll be coming back to this. In the meanwhile, to make my post less bad-useless-kind-of-meta, here’s a comment by drethelin that offers a better arguments for and summary of my position than any of mine:
I broadly agree that babies aren’t people, but I still think infanticide should be illegal, simply because killing begets insensitivity to killing. I know this has the sound of a slippery slope argument, but there is evidence that desire for sadism in most people is low, and increases as they commit sadistic acts, and that people feel similarly about murder.
From The Better Angels of Our Nature: “Serial killers too carry out their first murder with trepidation, distaste, and in its wake, disappointment: the experience had not been as arousing as it had been in their imaginations. But as time passes and their appetite is rewhetted, they find the next on easier and more gratifying, and then they escalate the cruelty to feed what turns into an addiction.”
Similarly, cathartic violence against non-person objects (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharsis#Therapeutic_uses) can lead to further aggression in personal interactions.
I don’t think we want to encourage or allow killing of anything anywhere near as close to people as babies. The psychological effects on people who kill their own children and on a society that views the killing of babies as good are too potentially terrible. Without actual data, I can say I would never want to live in a society that valued people as little as Sparta did.
I’m not sure we need a discussion post that does little more than ask for participation in a thread that already has contributions from many different people.
Such discussions are easier once every participant has realized that there are no such things as moral facts. This realization makes it much easier to distinguish factual disagreements from emotional attachments.
It’s not clear to me, and I suspect others, just what particular point you’re interested in.
If you would summarize the relevant points, and your particular conundrum you find yourself in, it would allow others like myself to know where to start, and would likely clarify your own thoughts on the matter as well.
Yes. It sounds like you (Multihead) might find a conversation on controlling emotional volatility helpful. Or meta-ethics about moral disagreement. Or validation that your emotional response to the moral question is appropriate.
The problem is that the downside of guessing wrong is that you feel worse, which isn’t my goal.
All of the above, please, and a beer too!
1) I’ve found cognitive-behavioral therapy very helpful. YMMV.
Brief summary of what I found helpful: Recently there was a post in Main on recognizing negative thoughts. The point was not to stop have the negative thoughts (CBT says that’s probably impossible). Instead, notice the thought as a way of reducing its emotional weight. (Or its logical weight, if you think the concern is sufficiently unlikely—the point is to avoid double counting the negative thought as both logical and emotional).
3) Your position is the overwhelming majority in the current community (both LessWrong and the Western world as a whole). There’s a funny story that just about any parent will tell you about how babies are so cute because of how much work they are. The truth of that fact doesn’t mean babies are not cute or that cuteness is not compelling to you.
2) Later, sorry—I think my son is waking from his nap.
That one sure blew off a third of my tension by itself! :) Thanks.
I’ll attempt to whip up something more coherent tomorrow, honest.
Yes, precisely this.
… Even if true, I’m not sure that applies when it comes to the legalization of infanticide
Ok. I fail to see your predicament.
While drethelin’s comments aren’t mainstream (the mainstream would be that killing infants is “just wrong”, or “God says so”, or some such), they seem mainstream and reasonable enough for this list.
Are you worried that it makes you a “bad person” to even entertain the idea that you might go along with the killing of infants?
What about holding this position makes you uncomfortable? Where’s the rub?
I would like to have some clarification on why you think personhood is what drives the immorality of killing. (At least, that was the impression I got from reading through the earlier thread.) More concretely, I would like to know what you think about the following sorts of consideration:
(1) The argument that what makes killing being X prima facie seriously morally wrong is that being X would have future experiences worth having were it not killed. Interestingly, this tracks in the opposite direction as your replacement calculation: younger beings are more valuable than older beings.
(2) The argument that destruction of any kind is prima facie morally wrong and that the wrongness tracks the complexity of the thing destroyed. One might have the view that the destruction of things like cats, computers, Rembrandt paintings, tables, and so forth requires some justification and that without justification, acts of destruction should be penalized, say by fines or imprisonment. I guess what I want here is some more precision about your “if done for some reason other than sadism” clause: what sorts of reasons, on which side does the law err if there is controversy about the goodness of the reasons, etc.
(3) I know that you are ducking giving an account of what makes something a person, but it would be very helpful if you at least sketch some of your thoughts. You said a few times something along the lines that you couldn’t come up with a definition of person that would make babies people, but that claim is a bit empty until we’ve seen some of your thinking.