It’s a nice post with a sound argumentation towards an unconformable conclusion to many EA/rationalists. We certainly need more of this.However, this isn’t the first time someone has tried to sketch some probability calculus in order to account for moral uncertainty when analysing abortion. In the same way as the previous attempts, yours seems to be surreptitiously sneaking in some controversial assumptions into probability estimates and numbers. This is further evidence to me that trying to do the math in cases where we still need more conceptual clarification isn’t really as useful as it would seem. Here are a few points you have sneaked/ignored:
You are accepting some sort of Repugnant Conclusion, as mentioned here
You are ignoring the real life circumstances in which abortion takes place. Firstly, putting your kid for adoption isn’t always available. Additionally, I believe that in practice people are mostly choosing between having an abortion and raising an unwanted child with scare resources (which probably has a negative moral value).
You are not accounting for the fact that even if adoption successfully takes place, adopted children have very low quality of life.
Overall, I think you are completely ignoring the fact that abortion can (perhaps more correctly) be characterized by the choice between creating a new life of suffering (negative value) or creating nothing (0 value). At the very least there is a big uncertainty there as well, so not aborting would perhaps have a value ranging from −77 to +77 QUALYs. The moral value of aborting would then depend on the expected quality of life of the new life being created (and on the probability that not aborting would preclude having a wanted child later on). Therefore, it would be determined case by case. I would expect that wealth and the moral value of abortion are inversely correlated. This would mean abortion is permissible in countries were it should’t, and impermissible in countries were it should be permissible.
You are accepting some sort of Repugnant Conclusion,
If you have a utiliterian framework that rejects the “Repugnant Conclusion” without coming to even more repugnant conclusions (of the kill the poor variety), I’d love to see it.
You are accepting some sort of Repugnant Conclusion, as mentioned here
Reaching a repugnant conclusion is not a proof that the conclusion is wrong. Dias does make several assumptions along the way (QALY looks like first world estimates while most abortions happen in developing countries, no particular psychological impact of producing and giving up a child, etc.) and it’s always worth while to tweak those assumptions to see how they impact the conclusion, but just getting an answer you don’t want isn’t a good reason to discount the argument (from an EA perspective, if your goal is to justify your beliefs or discount an opponents beliefs then this is actually a fairly effective tool).
You are ignoring the real life circumstances in which abortion takes place. Firstly, putting your kid for adoption isn’t always available. Additionally, I believe that in practice people are mostly choosing between having an abortion and raising an unwanted child with scare resources (which probably has a negative moral value).
Since Diases argument makes the assumption that adoption is available, you could simply view that as a given for the circumstances under which this decision is correct. Where adoption isn’t possible, that row on the table doesn’t apply and you’re just left with the inconvenience of birthing and raising a child vs. the potential moral value of murdering a human.
From an EA perspective, if raising a child with scarce resources produces negative moral value, then people with scarce resource should be sterilized or otherwise stopped from reproducing, even if they object to it.
You are not accounting for the fact that even if adoption successfully takes place, adopted children have very low quality of life.
Can you provide some sort of source for this? As an adult who was adopted as a baby and has talked with a lot of other adoptees about their experience, your proposition stands in opposition to basically all of my experience. That’s not to say that I’ve never met an adoptee who wishes they’d never been born. I have, but the percentages don’t seem so much higher for adoptees than non-adoptees that I’d say that adopted children have very low quality of life in comparison to anyone else.
Adoptees scored only moderately higher than nonadoptees on quantitative measures of mental health. Nevertheless, being adopted approximately doubled the odds of having contact with a mental health professional (odds ratio [OR], 2.05; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.48-2.84) and of having a disruptive behavior disorder (OR, 2.34; 95% CI, 1.72-3.19). Relative to international adoptees, domestic adoptees had higher odds of having an externalizing disorder (OR, 2.60; 95% CI, 1.67-4.04).
Thank you for linking the study. It seems like most of the adopted children did not have any measurable difference from the natural children. Additionally, the two disorders that were more significantly more prevalent (ODD and ADHD) generally aren’t considered to cripple people so badly that a life with them should be considered worse than not living at all. It hardly seems like that would justify claiming that “adopted children have very low quality of life” in the context of a debate on the acceptability of abortion. It comes off as though you’re arguing that being more susceptible to those disorders is a reason to choose abortion over adoption—that you’ve got the potential future persons best interest in mind when you decide whether the life should be allowed or not, but to make this argument from this pseudo-utility perspective, you’d need to show that the poor quality of the disordered adoptees life causes more suffering than the normal quality of the natural children causes enjoyment, but I don’t think this shows that. Or did I misconstrue the general thrust of your argument?
When I made my initial comment I wasn’t aware adoptees’ quality of life wasn’t that bad. I would still argue it should be worse than what could be inferred from that study. Cortisol levels on early childhood are really extremely important and have well documented long-term effects on one’s life. You and your friends might be in the better half, or even be an exception.
I can’t really say for sure whether reaching the repugnant conclusion is necessarily bad. However, I feel like unless you agree on accepting it as a valid conclusion you should avoid that your argument independently reaches it. That certain ethical systems reach this conclusion is generally regarded as a nearly reductio ad absurdum, therefore something to be avoided. If we end up fixing this issue on theses ethical systems then we surely will no long find acceptable arguments that independently assume/conclude it. Hence, we have some grounds for already finding those arguments unacceptable.
I agree we should, ideally, prevent people with scare resources from reproducing. Except the transition costs for bringing this about are huge, so I don’t think we should be moving in that direction right now. It’s probably less controversial to just eliminate poverty.
Sorry but I don’t have the time to continue this discussion right now. I’m sorry also if anything I said caused any sort of negative emotion on you, I can be very curt at times and this might be a sensitive subject.
It’s a nice post with a sound argumentation towards an unconformable conclusion to many EA/rationalists. We certainly need more of this.However, this isn’t the first time someone has tried to sketch some probability calculus in order to account for moral uncertainty when analysing abortion. In the same way as the previous attempts, yours seems to be surreptitiously sneaking in some controversial assumptions into probability estimates and numbers. This is further evidence to me that trying to do the math in cases where we still need more conceptual clarification isn’t really as useful as it would seem. Here are a few points you have sneaked/ignored:
You are accepting some sort of Repugnant Conclusion, as mentioned here
You are ignoring the real life circumstances in which abortion takes place. Firstly, putting your kid for adoption isn’t always available. Additionally, I believe that in practice people are mostly choosing between having an abortion and raising an unwanted child with scare resources (which probably has a negative moral value).
You are not accounting for the fact that even if adoption successfully takes place, adopted children have very low quality of life.
Overall, I think you are completely ignoring the fact that abortion can (perhaps more correctly) be characterized by the choice between creating a new life of suffering (negative value) or creating nothing (0 value). At the very least there is a big uncertainty there as well, so not aborting would perhaps have a value ranging from −77 to +77 QUALYs. The moral value of aborting would then depend on the expected quality of life of the new life being created (and on the probability that not aborting would preclude having a wanted child later on). Therefore, it would be determined case by case. I would expect that wealth and the moral value of abortion are inversely correlated. This would mean abortion is permissible in countries were it should’t, and impermissible in countries were it should be permissible.
If you have a utiliterian framework that rejects the “Repugnant Conclusion” without coming to even more repugnant conclusions (of the kill the poor variety), I’d love to see it.
Maybe the second paragraph here will help clarify my line of thought.
We are not evaluating ethical systems but intuitions about abortion.
Reaching a repugnant conclusion is not a proof that the conclusion is wrong. Dias does make several assumptions along the way (QALY looks like first world estimates while most abortions happen in developing countries, no particular psychological impact of producing and giving up a child, etc.) and it’s always worth while to tweak those assumptions to see how they impact the conclusion, but just getting an answer you don’t want isn’t a good reason to discount the argument (from an EA perspective, if your goal is to justify your beliefs or discount an opponents beliefs then this is actually a fairly effective tool).
Since Diases argument makes the assumption that adoption is available, you could simply view that as a given for the circumstances under which this decision is correct. Where adoption isn’t possible, that row on the table doesn’t apply and you’re just left with the inconvenience of birthing and raising a child vs. the potential moral value of murdering a human.
From an EA perspective, if raising a child with scarce resources produces negative moral value, then people with scarce resource should be sterilized or otherwise stopped from reproducing, even if they object to it.
Can you provide some sort of source for this? As an adult who was adopted as a baby and has talked with a lot of other adoptees about their experience, your proposition stands in opposition to basically all of my experience. That’s not to say that I’ve never met an adoptee who wishes they’d never been born. I have, but the percentages don’t seem so much higher for adoptees than non-adoptees that I’d say that adopted children have very low quality of life in comparison to anyone else.
http://archpedi.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=379446
This paper is already a major update from the long standing belief adoptees had lower quality of life, i.e. this is as optimistic as it gets.
Given that stress during early childhood has a dramatic impact on an individual’s adult life, I think this is something very uncontroversial.
Thank you for linking the study. It seems like most of the adopted children did not have any measurable difference from the natural children. Additionally, the two disorders that were more significantly more prevalent (ODD and ADHD) generally aren’t considered to cripple people so badly that a life with them should be considered worse than not living at all. It hardly seems like that would justify claiming that “adopted children have very low quality of life” in the context of a debate on the acceptability of abortion. It comes off as though you’re arguing that being more susceptible to those disorders is a reason to choose abortion over adoption—that you’ve got the potential future persons best interest in mind when you decide whether the life should be allowed or not, but to make this argument from this pseudo-utility perspective, you’d need to show that the poor quality of the disordered adoptees life causes more suffering than the normal quality of the natural children causes enjoyment, but I don’t think this shows that. Or did I misconstrue the general thrust of your argument?
When I made my initial comment I wasn’t aware adoptees’ quality of life wasn’t that bad. I would still argue it should be worse than what could be inferred from that study. Cortisol levels on early childhood are really extremely important and have well documented long-term effects on one’s life. You and your friends might be in the better half, or even be an exception.
I can’t really say for sure whether reaching the repugnant conclusion is necessarily bad. However, I feel like unless you agree on accepting it as a valid conclusion you should avoid that your argument independently reaches it. That certain ethical systems reach this conclusion is generally regarded as a nearly reductio ad absurdum, therefore something to be avoided. If we end up fixing this issue on theses ethical systems then we surely will no long find acceptable arguments that independently assume/conclude it. Hence, we have some grounds for already finding those arguments unacceptable.
I agree we should, ideally, prevent people with scare resources from reproducing. Except the transition costs for bringing this about are huge, so I don’t think we should be moving in that direction right now. It’s probably less controversial to just eliminate poverty.
Sorry but I don’t have the time to continue this discussion right now. I’m sorry also if anything I said caused any sort of negative emotion on you, I can be very curt at times and this might be a sensitive subject.