I am not sure what units are best for measuring a value of human life, so let’s just say that a life of average adult person has value 1. What would be your estimate of value of a 3-month fetus, 6-month fetus, 9-month fetus, a newborn child, 1⁄2 year old child, 1 year old child, etc.?
If you say that a fetus has less value than an adult person, but still a nonzero value, for example it could be 0.01, then killing 100 fetuses is like killing 1 adult person, and killing 100 000 fetuses is like killing 1 000 adult people. Calling the killing of 1 000 adult people “crime against humanity” would be perhaps exaggerated, but not exactly absurd.
If you have strong opinions on this topic, I would like to see your best try to estimate the shape of “human life value” curve for fetuses and small childs. At what age does killing a human organism become worse than having a proverbial dustspeck in rationalist’s eye?
Thousands of adults are in fact killed in auto accidents every year, and yet it seems to me very strange indeed to call auto accidents a crime against humanity.
Thousands of adults are killed in street crimes, and it seems very strange to me to call street crime a crime against humanity.
Etc., etc., etc.
I conclude that my intuitions about whether something counts as a “crime against humanity” aren’t especially well calibrated, and therefore that I should be reluctant to use those intuitions as evidence when thinking about scales way outside my normal experience.
And of course, the value-to-me of an individual can vary by many orders of magnitude, depending on the individual. I would likely have chosen to allow my nephew’s fetal development to continue rather than preserve the life of a randomly chosen adult, for example, but I don’t generally value the development of a fetus more than an adult.
But leaving the “crimes against humanity” labeling business aside, and assuming some typical value for a fetus and an adult, then sure, if I value a developing fetus 1/N as much as I value a living adult, then I prefer to allow 1 adult to die rather than allow the development of N fetuses to be terminated.
What exactly makes it absurd?
I am not sure what units are best for measuring a value of human life, so let’s just say that a life of average adult person has value 1. What would be your estimate of value of a 3-month fetus, 6-month fetus, 9-month fetus, a newborn child, 1⁄2 year old child, 1 year old child, etc.?
If you say that a fetus has less value than an adult person, but still a nonzero value, for example it could be 0.01, then killing 100 fetuses is like killing 1 adult person, and killing 100 000 fetuses is like killing 1 000 adult people. Calling the killing of 1 000 adult people “crime against humanity” would be perhaps exaggerated, but not exactly absurd.
If you have strong opinions on this topic, I would like to see your best try to estimate the shape of “human life value” curve for fetuses and small childs. At what age does killing a human organism become worse than having a proverbial dustspeck in rationalist’s eye?
Thousands of adults are in fact killed in auto accidents every year, and yet it seems to me very strange indeed to call auto accidents a crime against humanity.
Thousands of adults are killed in street crimes, and it seems very strange to me to call street crime a crime against humanity.
Etc., etc., etc.
I conclude that my intuitions about whether something counts as a “crime against humanity” aren’t especially well calibrated, and therefore that I should be reluctant to use those intuitions as evidence when thinking about scales way outside my normal experience.
And of course, the value-to-me of an individual can vary by many orders of magnitude, depending on the individual. I would likely have chosen to allow my nephew’s fetal development to continue rather than preserve the life of a randomly chosen adult, for example, but I don’t generally value the development of a fetus more than an adult.
But leaving the “crimes against humanity” labeling business aside, and assuming some typical value for a fetus and an adult, then sure, if I value a developing fetus 1/N as much as I value a living adult, then I prefer to allow 1 adult to die rather than allow the development of N fetuses to be terminated.