It’s just an arbitrary moment in the child’s development.
That kind of talk is crazy talk, irrespective of your position on abortion. There are a number of hugely significant and factually obvious differences that divide the period prior to birth and the period after. Feeding is just one example that comes to mind within 10 seconds of thinking about it.
To say “the moment of birth is not special with respect to personhood” is to reveal a tacit conclusion about personhood: that your personhood predicate is not relational but solely based on intrinsic properties of the organism.
Empirically, it turns out that many of the nodes associated with the node “personhood” hinge on relational factors: a baby who has no one to talk to will not develop language, for instance (the “critical period hypothesis”).
Similarly to say that the moment of birth is not special, with respect to how one should view the act of killing a baby, is to reveal a tacit assumption about what makes killing a baby “right” or “wrong”: that only the difference it makes to the baby’s future prospects should be taken into account.
Empirically, a death before or after the moment of birth makes a huge amount of difference as far as the mother’s interests are concerned, for the same type of reasons that make the moment of birth special: feeding and other caretaking behaviours kick in at that moment. (Granted, some forms of bonding start well before birth. The psychological aspects of pregnancy are complex, as the phenomenon of pregnancy denial illustrates strikingly.)
My intuition is that (as social animals) there is much more to our attitudes toward babies’ deaths than our unconscious evaluations of their reproductive potential, and the conclusion that “if our attitudes were allowed to drift toward a new evolutionary equilibrium which took account of technology, we’d come to hate abortions again” strikes me as seriously unfounded.
I don’t understand your third paragraph. The moment of birth doesn’t affect the unborn baby’s chances of having someone to talk to, conditioned on survival.
And I don’t understand your last paragraph. Try this thought experiment: how would you design a human whose only goal were to have more kids in the modern world? What would be its attitude toward abortion? Or you could look at groups of humans who reproduce faster than average today, like the Amish or Orthodox Jews, and their attitudes toward abortion. They are probably a good indicator of the evolutionary equilibrium we would converge on.
I don’t understand your third paragraph. The moment of birth doesn’t affect the unborn baby’s chances of having someone to talk to, conditioned on survival.
A baby prior to birth hasn’t yet started the process of learning how to relate with others. A baby after birth has, and this takes many forms in even the first few hours; including being held, being talked to, being cared for.
Try this thought experiment: how would you design a human whose only goal were to have more kids in the modern world?
What I mean is that our attitudes toward a given act are not necessarily determined by any evolutionary equilibrium. I’m not sure anyway in what sense you think our attitudes toward abortion at some previous times were dictated by an “old” evolutionary equilibrium, and in what sense we’d hate abortion “again”.
Try another thought experiment—imagine there existed a plant in our environment, which when ingested reliably caused the termination of pregnancies (or, perhaps, only early pregnancies). On what basis would we predict that, upon involving language and tool use, we wouldn’t have learned to take advantage of this plant when doing so served a purpose?
It seems the word “again” in the post was a stupid mistake. No idea why I wrote it. Struck it out.
When humans first learned language and tool use, they couldn’t breed very fast because they didn’t have enough food. So using the plant would be okay for them. But if I were told today that some unknown group of humans is breeding much faster than average, I’d bet (at moderately strong odds) that they frown upon use of the plant.
That kind of talk is crazy talk, irrespective of your position on abortion. There are a number of hugely significant and factually obvious differences that divide the period prior to birth and the period after. Feeding is just one example that comes to mind within 10 seconds of thinking about it.
To say “the moment of birth is not special with respect to personhood” is to reveal a tacit conclusion about personhood: that your personhood predicate is not relational but solely based on intrinsic properties of the organism.
Empirically, it turns out that many of the nodes associated with the node “personhood” hinge on relational factors: a baby who has no one to talk to will not develop language, for instance (the “critical period hypothesis”).
Similarly to say that the moment of birth is not special, with respect to how one should view the act of killing a baby, is to reveal a tacit assumption about what makes killing a baby “right” or “wrong”: that only the difference it makes to the baby’s future prospects should be taken into account.
Empirically, a death before or after the moment of birth makes a huge amount of difference as far as the mother’s interests are concerned, for the same type of reasons that make the moment of birth special: feeding and other caretaking behaviours kick in at that moment. (Granted, some forms of bonding start well before birth. The psychological aspects of pregnancy are complex, as the phenomenon of pregnancy denial illustrates strikingly.)
My intuition is that (as social animals) there is much more to our attitudes toward babies’ deaths than our unconscious evaluations of their reproductive potential, and the conclusion that “if our attitudes were allowed to drift toward a new evolutionary equilibrium which took account of technology, we’d come to hate abortions again” strikes me as seriously unfounded.
I don’t understand your third paragraph. The moment of birth doesn’t affect the unborn baby’s chances of having someone to talk to, conditioned on survival.
And I don’t understand your last paragraph. Try this thought experiment: how would you design a human whose only goal were to have more kids in the modern world? What would be its attitude toward abortion? Or you could look at groups of humans who reproduce faster than average today, like the Amish or Orthodox Jews, and their attitudes toward abortion. They are probably a good indicator of the evolutionary equilibrium we would converge on.
A baby prior to birth hasn’t yet started the process of learning how to relate with others. A baby after birth has, and this takes many forms in even the first few hours; including being held, being talked to, being cared for.
What I mean is that our attitudes toward a given act are not necessarily determined by any evolutionary equilibrium. I’m not sure anyway in what sense you think our attitudes toward abortion at some previous times were dictated by an “old” evolutionary equilibrium, and in what sense we’d hate abortion “again”.
Try another thought experiment—imagine there existed a plant in our environment, which when ingested reliably caused the termination of pregnancies (or, perhaps, only early pregnancies). On what basis would we predict that, upon involving language and tool use, we wouldn’t have learned to take advantage of this plant when doing so served a purpose?
Babies’ Language Learning Starts From The Womb
It seems the word “again” in the post was a stupid mistake. No idea why I wrote it. Struck it out.
When humans first learned language and tool use, they couldn’t breed very fast because they didn’t have enough food. So using the plant would be okay for them. But if I were told today that some unknown group of humans is breeding much faster than average, I’d bet (at moderately strong odds) that they frown upon use of the plant.