My daughter was showing personality and preferences in the womb. Kicking in time with music she liked (which she continued to like after birth), kicking out of time with music she didn’t like (which she continued to dislike after birth).
I was amazed. I’d had this vague notion that babies were sort of uninteresting blobs and didn’t manifest a personality until maybe a year old. I have no idea why I thought that, but I was utterly wrong.
Of course, I am strongly predisposed to think highly of my offspring in all regards, and I do try to allow for this. But from birth on, she was manifesting sufficient personality for us to regard her as an individual human with her own preferences. Waiting until age two years to accept such a thing is simply incorrect.
I was amazed. I’d had this vague notion that babies were sort of uninteresting blobs and didn’t manifest a personality until maybe a year old. I have no idea why I thought that, but I was utterly wrong. [...] But from birth on, she was manifesting sufficient personality for us to regard her as an individual human with her own preferences.
“Responds to musical stimuli”, assuming it’s true, is hardly an argument about being a person. A parrot could have similar ability to discriminate between types of music, for all I know.
Edit in response to downvoting: Seriously. There could be correct arguments for your statement, but this is clearly not one of them. This is a point of simple fact: ability to discriminate types of music is not strong (let alone decisive) evidence for the property of being a person. Non-person things can easily have that ability. That this fact argues for a conclusion that offends someone’s sensibilities (or even a conclusion that is clearly wrong, for other reasons!) is not a point against the fact.
It was in response to the assertion that babies could reasonably not be regarded as individual humans until age two. That assertion is ridiculous for all sorts of reasons. It was also noting that until I had actual experience of a baby, my assumptions had also been ridiculous, and that really doesn’t need me putting “and by the way, it’s possible that you’re just saying something simply incorrect due to lack of experience” on the front. I am finding your response difficult to distinguish from choosing to miss the point.
This still entirely misses the point: “responds to musical stimuli in the same way” is an argument about continuity of identity. If someone at 3 years old is a person, and they’re the same just smaller (both physically and mentally) at 1 year old and at −6 months old, then arguments about their personhood at 3 years old apply (though in a limited sense) at 1 year old or −6 months old.
I can’t think of a situation where I would be willing to accept the death/murder of a fetus or infant where I wouldn’t be willing to accept the death/murder of an adult. How low does your discount rate have to be where you would be willing to kill a one year old but not willing to kill a three year old?
This still entirely misses the point: “responds to musical stimuli in the same way” is an argument about continuity of identity.
Counterpoint that it does in fact address the point: write half a dozen different programs that can analyse recordings of music and output a beat that is in time. Run these programs on half a dozen different computers and try to claim that responding the same way is decisive evidence of continuity of identity across all computers and programs.
I can’t think of a situation where I would be willing to accept the death/murder of a fetus or infant where I wouldn’t be willing to accept the death of an adult.
You are opposed to abortion? It seems to me the majority of abortion cases do not constitute moral grounds for the death of an adult. Not a judgement of your possible views, just interested to see if the reasoning is consistent.
Run these programs on half a dozen different computers and try to claim that responding the same way is decisive evidence of continuity of identity across all computers and programs.
Emphasis mine. Illustrative examples are generally not decisive evidence. I have yet to come across someone with significant experience around infants who believes they don’t have personalities until ~2 years old (or whenever infanticide proponents think they develop them), and so until I come across someone with that opinion I feel justified in attributing that opinion to ignorance rather than insight.
I am (and should be) skeptical of someone who says “that doesn’t convince me” instead of “my experience is different.” The first response, which is generally accompanied by hypotheticals instead of examples, does not require any knowledge to create. Generally, experience cannot be conveyed by a few illustrative examples; one should not expect to be convinced by evidence when that evidence is hard to transfer. How, exactly, should one compress memories of interactions with another person over the course of years to transmit to others?
I also find it interesting you have moved the issue from “demonstrates persistent preferences for particular kinds of music” to “detects a beat”- was that intentional? Because if you wrote a program that could classify music into types it didn’t like and types it did, and the classification was predictable/sensible, I wouldn’t have a problem saying that your program preferred one kind of music to another, and that the program is the same even if you run it on a succession of computers with improving hardware.
You are opposed to abortion?
I consider abortions of both the spontaneous and intentional varieties to be tragic. “Accept” was probably a poor word to use because I am not currently in favor of criminalizing abortion and I feel the best response to a great many tragedies is coping. When asked for advice, I advise against abortion but do not rule it out and do not seek to coerce others into avoiding it. My feelings (and advice) on suicide are broadly similar, and so perhaps it would be most illuminating to say I compare it to suicide rather than to homicide.
I also find it interesting you have moved the issue from “demonstrates persistent preferences for particular kinds of music” to “detects a beat”- was that intentional?
Yes. David_Gerard said:
Kicking in time with music she liked (which she continued to like after birth), kicking out of time with music she didn’t like (which she continued to dislike after birth).
Kicking out of time doesn’t suggest she doesn’t like it as much as it suggests she is failing to kick in time. Which is weak evidence that all she is doing is finding a beat in time with the music.
I have yet to come across someone with significant experience around infants who believes they don’t have personalities until ~2 years old … I am (and should be) skeptical of someone who says “that doesn’t convince me” instead of “my experience is different.”
And all the people I have met who have had significant experience around animals believe they have personalities from birth—I am inclined not to trust experience in this matter because of the almost-certain anthropomorphizing that is going on.
Why shouldn’t animals have distinct personalities from each other? It doesn’t take that much brainpower before you can start introducing differences in behavior between specimens without causing their methods of interaction to collapse.
See my response to Vaniver, but in a nutshell: animals do have distinct personalities, but not in the same sense of the word we have when we talk about embryos and babies having the right to live because they have personality.
Sure, it looks odd. But as I think you discerned, I think babies don’t have much complex agenthood—on the order of domestic animals—and people saying they’ve experienced babies having complex agenthood are not to be trusted because people also say that the weather has complex agenthood.
I understand what you are getting at, but am not convinced.
I think a more charitable reading would be something along the lines of:
Given that the way human minds work we ascribe complex motives and personalities to animals (and fire, and objects, and weather) so often that we have a name for it (“anthropomorphism”), why do we expect that a similar thing isn’t happening here?
Similar in what way? Presented with your “more charitable” reading, I would still think the writer was suggesting anthropomorphism is still the problem in this instance.
Also, it might be relevant to my reading that I often caution against anthropomorphizing humans.
There rings a certain absurdity to the phrase “anthropomorphizing humans”: of course it’s not a problem, they’re already anthropomorphic.
My understanding, at this point, is that you are well aware of this, and are enjoying it, but do not consider it an actual argument in the context of the broader discussion. That is, you are remarking on the absurdity of the phrase, not the absurdity of the notion. Is that correct?
I suppose I worry that people will see the absurdity, but misattribute it. When the question is whether a model of a complex thinking, feeling, goal oriented agent is appropriate to some entities we label human in other respects, and someone says “I have interacted with such entities, and the complex model seems to fit”, it is not at all absurd to point out that we’re overeager to apply the model in cases it clearly doesn’t actually fit.
And all the people I have met who have had significant experience around animals believe they have personalities from birth—I am inclined not to trust experience in this matter because of the almost-certain anthropomorphizing that is going on.
Do you have a problem with the idea that animals have continuous “characters” since birth? Because that gets rid of the troublesome word “personality.”
The issue of anthropomorphisation is a tricky one. Even when dealing with other humans, there’s a massive amount of projection that goes on- but it seems to me we can characterize relationships by how much of the other thing’s character you have to generate mentally. For a person you know well, it’s probably low, for an animal you know well, it’s probably moderate, for a machine you know well, it’s probably high. But even your impression of the machine’s character isn’t 100% your mental invention- if a copier jams when placed in a certain situation due to the placing of mechanical parts inside it, it’s practical to describe it as the copier “not liking” that situation despite the copier not being sophisticated enough to “like” or “dislike” things on a level more than “not jamming” or “jamming.”
Under such a model, what would matter is not that you’ve invented 95% of your perception of your relationship with the copier, but whether or not the other 5% that’s actually due to the copier is consistent over time.
Do you have a problem with the idea that animals have continuous “characters” since birth? Because that gets rid of the troublesome word “personality.”
The word ‘personality’ is troublesome when applied to animals. I feel like a lot of the opposition to abortion and early infanticide can be sourced from the phrase “unique personality”. If you say a baby has personality, you are pre-supposing they are a person, which triggers the ingrained right-to-live reflex. Not questioning the right-to-live reflex at all; I think it’s a marvelous thing.
Whatever people mean when they say an animal has personality other than personality—I will use your term character, it seems to capture the essence of the non-anthropomorphic ideas people have about animals and photocopiers. The unique character of a pet animal isn’t a strong argument for its right to live, because pets with ailments regularly get put down when the cost for treatment gets into four digits. Also, an animal’s character is not a good argument against eating it, because >95% of the world is not vegetarian or vegan.
So I feel like there is some meaning-smuggling going on. The assertion is we shouldn’t kill babies because they have personality like us, and the argument holding it up is that they have personality like animals do.
So I feel like there is some meaning-smuggling going on. The assertion is we shouldn’t kill babies because they have personality like us, and the argument holding it up is that they have personality like animals do.
I agree with you that character isn’t what gives an entity a right to life. But I don’t think that’s my argument.
To turn a dog into a person you have to do a lot of work. Turning a copier into a person is similarly difficult. But to turn a baby into a person, you just have to wait a few years. It’s automatic, so long as you provide it with sufficient fuel.
If we say “We care deeply about protecting butterflies because they are beautiful, but don’t care at all about protecting caterpillars because they are ugly” then others have a strong reason to question how much we actually care about protecting butterflies (or know about the world), because there are no butterflies that weren’t caterpillars.
And so even though the caterpillar has none of the outward qualities that make us care about butterflies, our feelings about butterflies should extend to them, because they are butterflies, just not yet. But note that we don’t extend those feelings to nectar and leaves and air, even though butterflies are composed of the things that they eat and breathe and cannot exist without them, because nectar and leaves and air are fungible and caterpillars are not.
Your primary argument is “caterpillars are ugly,” and I agree with that. My claim is that argument is insufficient to reach the conclusion that we should not protect caterpillars: you have to show that caterpillars are not butterflies, and that must be done in such a way that is consistent with the statement “I care about protecting butterflies.”
Similarly, we care about persons, and because we do that we should care about babies that turn into persons, even if they aren’t persons yet, because those babies are not fungible. When I ask the question “when did I awaken as a person with a mind?” I might point to my earliest memories or when I began thinking independently or some other milestone- but when I ask the question “when did I begin as a continuous being?” there seems to be one obvious answer, and it’s when my DNA was assembled for the first time.
If your standard is that something has to be sapient right now in order for it to have any protection, that opens the door to a number of horrors. Can someone kill a sleeping human without moral culpability because while asleep a human only has character, not personality? What about if that human has suffered irreparable necrosis of most brain tissue? If your answers for those differed, it’s probably because those represent very different expectations about the future- the sleeping human will probably awaken shortly and resume being a person, but a human with a necrotic brain probably doesn’t have any personhood left in them. And so to treat a baby like a human with a necrotic brain is to ignore the important thing that makes us value sleeping humans- the future.
But to turn a baby into a person, you just have to wait a few years. It’s automatic, so long as you provide it with sufficient fuel.
It takes a hell of lot more than sufficient food to get a person out of a baby. If you do that, at best you end up with a feral child. Human certainly, but only questionably a person. More likely you end up with dead baby from any of a number of untreated diseases. We are social animals. Without company, even those of us that are fully formed often go mad.
Your argument suggests that the existence of an ‘uplift box’ that turns dogs into people would give people-rights to dogs, as the process would have been automated. To the extent that turning a baby into a person is automated, it doesn’t mean that any less work is done—it just means that the work has been done by natural selection rather than human ingenuity. So I think the ‘work needed’ measure of how beings of potential value inherit value is somewhat flawed, the flaw coming from thinking about one particular dog and the work needed to raise it to human status, while neglecting the next billion dogs.
As to the caterpillar/butterfly analogy: if we agree that we value butterflies for their beauty, it’s not at all obvious that we shouldn’t breed them for their beauty. Analogously, with limited parental resources, why should humans not produce an excess of babies (or heterogenous fetuses, for that matter) and select based on the predicted characteristics of the adult? Note that in this case we raise our expected utility, whereas in the case of killing a sleeping human we most definitely lower it.
EDIT: I should make my own position clear on this. I vigorously oppose infanticide based in large part on the great psychological and social harm it inflicts. I have basically no problem with zygote selection.
Your argument suggests that the existence of an ‘uplift box’ that turns dogs into people would give people-rights to dogs, as the process would have been automated.
I’m not terribly concerned about that case, and I think my framework handles it pretty gracefully. If dogs have unique characters and can become people in a non-fungible way just like babies have unique characters and can become people in a non-fungible way, then dogs deserve baby rights.
But there’s an underlying issue that highlights: whether our ethics are focused on conservation or, for lack of a better word, quality. A conservation-centered ethic sees people as irreplaceable and expensive; a quality-centered ethic sees people as replaceable. If you can make a million unique sapient simulated people at the push of a button, then the conservationalist ethic simply doesn’t seem appropriate- they’re eminently replacable, and so they’ve become fungible in the way I suggest sperm are, even though they’re cognizant enough to be people. Likewise, by the time the ability exists to turn a dog into a person, it’s not clear that personhood will be sufficient to grant the rights that it does now.
As to the caterpillar/butterfly analogy: if we agree that we value butterflies for their beauty, it’s not at all obvious that we shouldn’t breed them for their beauty. Analogously, with limited parental resources, why should humans not produce an excess of babies (or heterogenous fetuses, for that matter) and select based on the predicted characteristics of the adult?
Note that while butterflies are valuable because of their beauty, people have rights because of their uniqueness/irreplaceability. I don’t see anything wrong with designer babies or human genetic engineering; I just have a moderate preference for gamete selection over zygote selection, and think that if we have reached a point where we are willing to kill undesirable babies we will probably also have reached a point where we are willing to kill undesirable adults, as eroding one protection appears like it will erode the other.
but when I ask the question “when did I begin as a continuous being?” there seems to be one obvious answer, and it’s when my DNA was assembled for the first time.
Is your answer any different for identical twins, who of course only separate after fertilization? Conjoined twins that don’t fully separate? How about chimeras? (Yes, there have been documented human examples.)
Is your answer any different for identical twins, who of course only separate after fertilization? How about chimeras?
Yes; if I had a twin, my obvious answer would be when I separated from my brother. Were I a chimera, I suspect I would have researched the issue more extensively than I have now, but at my present level of understanding it still seems like there’s a discontinuous event- when the cells fuse together to form one organism.
It seems to me that you can find a discontinuous event for most person precursors, and the discontinuity is important for that question (because the components were continuous beforehand, and the composite is continuous afterwards). The main counterexample I can think of is clones- if I create a thousand copies of my DNA and implant them in embryos scrubbed of DNA, then they seem fungible in a way that a thousand unique fertilized embryos are not. And then, because they are fungible, I would ascribe to the group of them the specialness of a single fertilized embryo, and would only have qualms about destroying the last one (or perhaps last few). Note that as soon as they begin to develop, they begin to lose their fungibility (and we could even quantify that level of fungibility/uniqueness), and could eventually become unique people (that share the same genes).
Likewise, the position “every sperm is sacred” seems mistaken because sperm are by nature fungible (and beyond that, we can complain about the word sacred).
Likewise, the position “every sperm is sacred” seems mistaken because sperm are by nature fungible (and beyond that, we can complain about the word sacred).
In what way are sperm fungible? There is usually a wide variety of difference between two random ones from the same person. After all, half the genetic variability of two siblings is due to the difference in sperm.
It’s true that differences are such that we can’t easily tell much difference between any two sperm (of the same sex and chromosome number) -- but the same is true of a just fertilized zygote or just divided embryo, which you appear to count as non-fungible when you say that “I can’t think of a situation where I would be willing to accept the death/murder of a fetus or infant where I wouldn’t be willing to accept the death/murder of an adult.”
It seems that “fungibility” needs to be treated as a continuum. I think that just about all reasonable criteria for deciding this turn out on closer inspection to be fairly continuous.
It seems that “fungibility” needs to be treated as a continuum.
Agreed.
In what way are sperm fungible?
It mostly seems that way because they’re massively overproduced, but you are right to question that.
I think I’m going to turn to my claim about future development as important in identifying sperm as more fungible and fertilized eggs and beyond as less fungible, but I agree that claim is weaker than I thought it was when I made it.
Excellent point. I can even see in where I went wrong; I had an opaque concept in mind that “human lives are valuable” and was treating the baby as fungible in the sense that it doesn’t appear to be a human now, so it isn’t instrinsically valuable and can be replaced with another baby, later, at no loss the potential futures.
Even accepting the premise that this is an indication of having a distinct personality, I don’t think that’s an adequate basis to afford infants personhood. Cats have distinct personalities as well, although this fact suggests that we could really use a better word than “personality.” In fact, while there might be counterexamples that are not coming to mind, I’m inclined to suspect that every properly functioning vertebrate organism, as well as many invertebrates, has a distinct personality, albeit not necessarily one recognizable to humans.
My daughter was showing personality and preferences in the womb. Kicking in time with music she liked (which she continued to like after birth), kicking out of time with music she didn’t like (which she continued to dislike after birth).
Babies can do that? Is it (or something related) something that has been studied? There seem like possible confounding factors regarding this kind of observation but ability to respond overtly like that to stimulus has implications.
IIRC, Pinker in The Blank Slate discusses how babies come out of the womb predisposed for their language’s particular set of sounds based on what they could hear of speech in the womb. That’s learning based on sounds in the womb, so if they can develop preferences about verbal sounds, not too implausible they could develop preferences about other sounds too.
My daughter was showing personality and preferences in the womb. Kicking in time with music she liked (which she continued to like after birth), kicking out of time with music she didn’t like (which she continued to dislike after birth).
I was amazed. I’d had this vague notion that babies were sort of uninteresting blobs and didn’t manifest a personality until maybe a year old. I have no idea why I thought that, but I was utterly wrong.
Of course, I am strongly predisposed to think highly of my offspring in all regards, and I do try to allow for this. But from birth on, she was manifesting sufficient personality for us to regard her as an individual human with her own preferences. Waiting until age two years to accept such a thing is simply incorrect.
“Responds to musical stimuli”, assuming it’s true, is hardly an argument about being a person. A parrot could have similar ability to discriminate between types of music, for all I know.
Edit in response to downvoting: Seriously. There could be correct arguments for your statement, but this is clearly not one of them. This is a point of simple fact: ability to discriminate types of music is not strong (let alone decisive) evidence for the property of being a person. Non-person things can easily have that ability. That this fact argues for a conclusion that offends someone’s sensibilities (or even a conclusion that is clearly wrong, for other reasons!) is not a point against the fact.
It was in response to the assertion that babies could reasonably not be regarded as individual humans until age two. That assertion is ridiculous for all sorts of reasons. It was also noting that until I had actual experience of a baby, my assumptions had also been ridiculous, and that really doesn’t need me putting “and by the way, it’s possible that you’re just saying something simply incorrect due to lack of experience” on the front. I am finding your response difficult to distinguish from choosing to miss the point.
Reading these comment chains somehow strongly reminds of listening to Louis CK.
This still entirely misses the point: “responds to musical stimuli in the same way” is an argument about continuity of identity. If someone at 3 years old is a person, and they’re the same just smaller (both physically and mentally) at 1 year old and at −6 months old, then arguments about their personhood at 3 years old apply (though in a limited sense) at 1 year old or −6 months old.
I can’t think of a situation where I would be willing to accept the death/murder of a fetus or infant where I wouldn’t be willing to accept the death/murder of an adult. How low does your discount rate have to be where you would be willing to kill a one year old but not willing to kill a three year old?
Counterpoint that it does in fact address the point: write half a dozen different programs that can analyse recordings of music and output a beat that is in time. Run these programs on half a dozen different computers and try to claim that responding the same way is decisive evidence of continuity of identity across all computers and programs.
You are opposed to abortion? It seems to me the majority of abortion cases do not constitute moral grounds for the death of an adult. Not a judgement of your possible views, just interested to see if the reasoning is consistent.
Emphasis mine. Illustrative examples are generally not decisive evidence. I have yet to come across someone with significant experience around infants who believes they don’t have personalities until ~2 years old (or whenever infanticide proponents think they develop them), and so until I come across someone with that opinion I feel justified in attributing that opinion to ignorance rather than insight.
I am (and should be) skeptical of someone who says “that doesn’t convince me” instead of “my experience is different.” The first response, which is generally accompanied by hypotheticals instead of examples, does not require any knowledge to create. Generally, experience cannot be conveyed by a few illustrative examples; one should not expect to be convinced by evidence when that evidence is hard to transfer. How, exactly, should one compress memories of interactions with another person over the course of years to transmit to others?
I also find it interesting you have moved the issue from “demonstrates persistent preferences for particular kinds of music” to “detects a beat”- was that intentional? Because if you wrote a program that could classify music into types it didn’t like and types it did, and the classification was predictable/sensible, I wouldn’t have a problem saying that your program preferred one kind of music to another, and that the program is the same even if you run it on a succession of computers with improving hardware.
I consider abortions of both the spontaneous and intentional varieties to be tragic. “Accept” was probably a poor word to use because I am not currently in favor of criminalizing abortion and I feel the best response to a great many tragedies is coping. When asked for advice, I advise against abortion but do not rule it out and do not seek to coerce others into avoiding it. My feelings (and advice) on suicide are broadly similar, and so perhaps it would be most illuminating to say I compare it to suicide rather than to homicide.
Yes. David_Gerard said:
Kicking out of time doesn’t suggest she doesn’t like it as much as it suggests she is failing to kick in time. Which is weak evidence that all she is doing is finding a beat in time with the music.
And all the people I have met who have had significant experience around animals believe they have personalities from birth—I am inclined not to trust experience in this matter because of the almost-certain anthropomorphizing that is going on.
Why shouldn’t animals have distinct personalities from each other? It doesn’t take that much brainpower before you can start introducing differences in behavior between specimens without causing their methods of interaction to collapse.
See my response to Vaniver, but in a nutshell: animals do have distinct personalities, but not in the same sense of the word we have when we talk about embryos and babies having the right to live because they have personality.
Not the first time on this site that someone has been accused of anthropomorphizing humans.
ETA: remarking upon the absurdity of the phrase, not the absurdity of the notion.
Sure, it looks odd. But as I think you discerned, I think babies don’t have much complex agenthood—on the order of domestic animals—and people saying they’ve experienced babies having complex agenthood are not to be trusted because people also say that the weather has complex agenthood.
Have you heard my new band, Complex Agenthood?
You’re opening Saturday night for Emergent Intelligence at the Rationalist’s Rationally Rational Rationality of Rationalness, right?
We don’t actually tell people when or where we’re playing; we just provide enough evidence for a perfect Bayesian reasoner to figure it out.
I don’t think they were.
I think the analogy only holds if “anthropomorphizing” is the problem in both cases.
I understand what you are getting at, but am not convinced.
I think a more charitable reading would be something along the lines of:
Similar in what way? Presented with your “more charitable” reading, I would still think the writer was suggesting anthropomorphism is still the problem in this instance.
Also, it might be relevant to my reading that I often caution against anthropomorphizing humans.
There are perhaps a few things going on here.
There rings a certain absurdity to the phrase “anthropomorphizing humans”: of course it’s not a problem, they’re already anthropomorphic.
My understanding, at this point, is that you are well aware of this, and are enjoying it, but do not consider it an actual argument in the context of the broader discussion. That is, you are remarking on the absurdity of the phrase, not the absurdity of the notion. Is that correct?
I suppose I worry that people will see the absurdity, but misattribute it. When the question is whether a model of a complex thinking, feeling, goal oriented agent is appropriate to some entities we label human in other respects, and someone says “I have interacted with such entities, and the complex model seems to fit”, it is not at all absurd to point out that we’re overeager to apply the model in cases it clearly doesn’t actually fit.
Correct.
Do you have a problem with the idea that animals have continuous “characters” since birth? Because that gets rid of the troublesome word “personality.”
The issue of anthropomorphisation is a tricky one. Even when dealing with other humans, there’s a massive amount of projection that goes on- but it seems to me we can characterize relationships by how much of the other thing’s character you have to generate mentally. For a person you know well, it’s probably low, for an animal you know well, it’s probably moderate, for a machine you know well, it’s probably high. But even your impression of the machine’s character isn’t 100% your mental invention- if a copier jams when placed in a certain situation due to the placing of mechanical parts inside it, it’s practical to describe it as the copier “not liking” that situation despite the copier not being sophisticated enough to “like” or “dislike” things on a level more than “not jamming” or “jamming.”
Under such a model, what would matter is not that you’ve invented 95% of your perception of your relationship with the copier, but whether or not the other 5% that’s actually due to the copier is consistent over time.
The word ‘personality’ is troublesome when applied to animals. I feel like a lot of the opposition to abortion and early infanticide can be sourced from the phrase “unique personality”. If you say a baby has personality, you are pre-supposing they are a person, which triggers the ingrained right-to-live reflex. Not questioning the right-to-live reflex at all; I think it’s a marvelous thing.
Whatever people mean when they say an animal has personality other than personality—I will use your term character, it seems to capture the essence of the non-anthropomorphic ideas people have about animals and photocopiers. The unique character of a pet animal isn’t a strong argument for its right to live, because pets with ailments regularly get put down when the cost for treatment gets into four digits. Also, an animal’s character is not a good argument against eating it, because >95% of the world is not vegetarian or vegan.
So I feel like there is some meaning-smuggling going on. The assertion is we shouldn’t kill babies because they have personality like us, and the argument holding it up is that they have personality like animals do.
I agree with you that character isn’t what gives an entity a right to life. But I don’t think that’s my argument.
To turn a dog into a person you have to do a lot of work. Turning a copier into a person is similarly difficult. But to turn a baby into a person, you just have to wait a few years. It’s automatic, so long as you provide it with sufficient fuel.
If we say “We care deeply about protecting butterflies because they are beautiful, but don’t care at all about protecting caterpillars because they are ugly” then others have a strong reason to question how much we actually care about protecting butterflies (or know about the world), because there are no butterflies that weren’t caterpillars.
And so even though the caterpillar has none of the outward qualities that make us care about butterflies, our feelings about butterflies should extend to them, because they are butterflies, just not yet. But note that we don’t extend those feelings to nectar and leaves and air, even though butterflies are composed of the things that they eat and breathe and cannot exist without them, because nectar and leaves and air are fungible and caterpillars are not.
Your primary argument is “caterpillars are ugly,” and I agree with that. My claim is that argument is insufficient to reach the conclusion that we should not protect caterpillars: you have to show that caterpillars are not butterflies, and that must be done in such a way that is consistent with the statement “I care about protecting butterflies.”
Similarly, we care about persons, and because we do that we should care about babies that turn into persons, even if they aren’t persons yet, because those babies are not fungible. When I ask the question “when did I awaken as a person with a mind?” I might point to my earliest memories or when I began thinking independently or some other milestone- but when I ask the question “when did I begin as a continuous being?” there seems to be one obvious answer, and it’s when my DNA was assembled for the first time.
If your standard is that something has to be sapient right now in order for it to have any protection, that opens the door to a number of horrors. Can someone kill a sleeping human without moral culpability because while asleep a human only has character, not personality? What about if that human has suffered irreparable necrosis of most brain tissue? If your answers for those differed, it’s probably because those represent very different expectations about the future- the sleeping human will probably awaken shortly and resume being a person, but a human with a necrotic brain probably doesn’t have any personhood left in them. And so to treat a baby like a human with a necrotic brain is to ignore the important thing that makes us value sleeping humans- the future.
It takes a hell of lot more than sufficient food to get a person out of a baby. If you do that, at best you end up with a feral child. Human certainly, but only questionably a person. More likely you end up with dead baby from any of a number of untreated diseases. We are social animals. Without company, even those of us that are fully formed often go mad.
I am willing to call interaction with people ‘fuel’; I chose that delightfully stretchy word on purpose.
Your argument suggests that the existence of an ‘uplift box’ that turns dogs into people would give people-rights to dogs, as the process would have been automated. To the extent that turning a baby into a person is automated, it doesn’t mean that any less work is done—it just means that the work has been done by natural selection rather than human ingenuity. So I think the ‘work needed’ measure of how beings of potential value inherit value is somewhat flawed, the flaw coming from thinking about one particular dog and the work needed to raise it to human status, while neglecting the next billion dogs.
As to the caterpillar/butterfly analogy: if we agree that we value butterflies for their beauty, it’s not at all obvious that we shouldn’t breed them for their beauty. Analogously, with limited parental resources, why should humans not produce an excess of babies (or heterogenous fetuses, for that matter) and select based on the predicted characteristics of the adult? Note that in this case we raise our expected utility, whereas in the case of killing a sleeping human we most definitely lower it.
EDIT: I should make my own position clear on this. I vigorously oppose infanticide based in large part on the great psychological and social harm it inflicts. I have basically no problem with zygote selection.
I’m not terribly concerned about that case, and I think my framework handles it pretty gracefully. If dogs have unique characters and can become people in a non-fungible way just like babies have unique characters and can become people in a non-fungible way, then dogs deserve baby rights.
But there’s an underlying issue that highlights: whether our ethics are focused on conservation or, for lack of a better word, quality. A conservation-centered ethic sees people as irreplaceable and expensive; a quality-centered ethic sees people as replaceable. If you can make a million unique sapient simulated people at the push of a button, then the conservationalist ethic simply doesn’t seem appropriate- they’re eminently replacable, and so they’ve become fungible in the way I suggest sperm are, even though they’re cognizant enough to be people. Likewise, by the time the ability exists to turn a dog into a person, it’s not clear that personhood will be sufficient to grant the rights that it does now.
Note that while butterflies are valuable because of their beauty, people have rights because of their uniqueness/irreplaceability. I don’t see anything wrong with designer babies or human genetic engineering; I just have a moderate preference for gamete selection over zygote selection, and think that if we have reached a point where we are willing to kill undesirable babies we will probably also have reached a point where we are willing to kill undesirable adults, as eroding one protection appears like it will erode the other.
Is your answer any different for identical twins, who of course only separate after fertilization? Conjoined twins that don’t fully separate? How about chimeras? (Yes, there have been documented human examples.)
Yes; if I had a twin, my obvious answer would be when I separated from my brother. Were I a chimera, I suspect I would have researched the issue more extensively than I have now, but at my present level of understanding it still seems like there’s a discontinuous event- when the cells fuse together to form one organism.
It seems to me that you can find a discontinuous event for most person precursors, and the discontinuity is important for that question (because the components were continuous beforehand, and the composite is continuous afterwards). The main counterexample I can think of is clones- if I create a thousand copies of my DNA and implant them in embryos scrubbed of DNA, then they seem fungible in a way that a thousand unique fertilized embryos are not. And then, because they are fungible, I would ascribe to the group of them the specialness of a single fertilized embryo, and would only have qualms about destroying the last one (or perhaps last few). Note that as soon as they begin to develop, they begin to lose their fungibility (and we could even quantify that level of fungibility/uniqueness), and could eventually become unique people (that share the same genes).
Likewise, the position “every sperm is sacred” seems mistaken because sperm are by nature fungible (and beyond that, we can complain about the word sacred).
In what way are sperm fungible? There is usually a wide variety of difference between two random ones from the same person. After all, half the genetic variability of two siblings is due to the difference in sperm.
It’s true that differences are such that we can’t easily tell much difference between any two sperm (of the same sex and chromosome number) -- but the same is true of a just fertilized zygote or just divided embryo, which you appear to count as non-fungible when you say that “I can’t think of a situation where I would be willing to accept the death/murder of a fetus or infant where I wouldn’t be willing to accept the death/murder of an adult.”
It seems that “fungibility” needs to be treated as a continuum. I think that just about all reasonable criteria for deciding this turn out on closer inspection to be fairly continuous.
Agreed.
It mostly seems that way because they’re massively overproduced, but you are right to question that.
I think I’m going to turn to my claim about future development as important in identifying sperm as more fungible and fertilized eggs and beyond as less fungible, but I agree that claim is weaker than I thought it was when I made it.
I have a friend who’s a chimera. I used her as an example for this sort of question when I TA’ed intro ethics and my students found her fascinating.
Awesome. Having “near” examples can be quite handy in helping people take hypotheticals seriously.
Excellent point. I can even see in where I went wrong; I had an opaque concept in mind that “human lives are valuable” and was treating the baby as fungible in the sense that it doesn’t appear to be a human now, so it isn’t instrinsically valuable and can be replaced with another baby, later, at no loss the potential futures.
Even accepting the premise that this is an indication of having a distinct personality, I don’t think that’s an adequate basis to afford infants personhood. Cats have distinct personalities as well, although this fact suggests that we could really use a better word than “personality.” In fact, while there might be counterexamples that are not coming to mind, I’m inclined to suspect that every properly functioning vertebrate organism, as well as many invertebrates, has a distinct personality, albeit not necessarily one recognizable to humans.
Which is a really good argument for granting other vertebrates personhood.
Babies can do that? Is it (or something related) something that has been studied? There seem like possible confounding factors regarding this kind of observation but ability to respond overtly like that to stimulus has implications.
IIRC, Pinker in The Blank Slate discusses how babies come out of the womb predisposed for their language’s particular set of sounds based on what they could hear of speech in the womb. That’s learning based on sounds in the womb, so if they can develop preferences about verbal sounds, not too implausible they could develop preferences about other sounds too.