Adults, by choosing to live in a society that punishes non-cooperators, implicitly accept a social contract that allows them to be punished similarly. While they would prefer not to be punished, most societies don’t offer asymmetrical terms, or impose difficult requirements such as elections, on people who want those asymmetrical terms.
Children, on the other hand, have not yet had the opportunity to choose the society that gives them the best social contract terms, and wouldn’t have sufficient intelligence to do so anyways. So instead, we model them as though they would accept any social contract that’s at least as good as some threshold (goodness determined retrospectively by adults imagining what they would have preferred). Thus, adults are forced by society to give implied consent to being punished if they are non-cooperative, but children don’t give consent to be eaten.
Children, on the other hand, have not yet had the opportunity to choose the society that gives them the best social contract terms, and wouldn’t have sufficient intelligence to do so anyways.
What if I could guess, with 100% accuracy, that the child will decide to retroactively endorse the child-eating norm as an adult? To 99.99% accuracy?
It is not the adults’ preference that matters, but the adults’ best model of the childrens’ preferences. In this case there is an obvious reason for those preferences to differ—namely, the adult knows that he won’t be one of those eaten.
In extrapolating a child’s preferences, you can make it smarter and give it true information about the consequences of its preferences, but you can’t extrapolate from a child whose fate is undecided to an adult that believes it won’t be eaten; that change alters its preferences.
It is not the adults’ preference that matters, but the adults’ best model of the childrens’ preferences.
Do you believe that all children’s preferences must be given equal weight to that of adults, or just the preferences that the child will retroactively reverse on adulthood?
I would use a process like coherent extrapolated volition to decide which preferences to count—that is, a preference counts if it would still hold it after being made smarter (by a process other than aging) and being given sufficient time to reflect.
Adults, by choosing to live in a society that punishes non-cooperators, implicitly accept a social contract that allows them to be punished similarly. While they would prefer not to be punished, most societies don’t offer asymmetrical terms, or impose difficult requirements such as elections, on people who want those asymmetrical terms.
Children, on the other hand, have not yet had the opportunity to choose the society that gives them the best social contract terms, and wouldn’t have sufficient intelligence to do so anyways. So instead, we model them as though they would accept any social contract that’s at least as good as some threshold (goodness determined retrospectively by adults imagining what they would have preferred). Thus, adults are forced by society to give implied consent to being punished if they are non-cooperative, but children don’t give consent to be eaten.
What if I could guess, with 100% accuracy, that the child will decide to retroactively endorse the child-eating norm as an adult? To 99.99% accuracy?
It is not the adults’ preference that matters, but the adults’ best model of the childrens’ preferences. In this case there is an obvious reason for those preferences to differ—namely, the adult knows that he won’t be one of those eaten.
In extrapolating a child’s preferences, you can make it smarter and give it true information about the consequences of its preferences, but you can’t extrapolate from a child whose fate is undecided to an adult that believes it won’t be eaten; that change alters its preferences.
Do you believe that all children’s preferences must be given equal weight to that of adults, or just the preferences that the child will retroactively reverse on adulthood?
I would use a process like coherent extrapolated volition to decide which preferences to count—that is, a preference counts if it would still hold it after being made smarter (by a process other than aging) and being given sufficient time to reflect.
And why do you think that such reflection would make the babies reverse the baby-eating policies?