When you state it like that is seems unintuitive, but the idea that creating new people is somewhere around morally neutral and that destroying existing people is morally bad is a very strong and common intuition. Do you really not share it?
(Of course, “terminal” is the load-bearing word here. A knife that slices someone’s neck has very different secondary consequences than a knife that rearranges reality such that it was as if the victim was never born, but neither biology nor cultural knowledge personal experience have given us any reason to form intuitions about the latter case.)
Hmm… I’m certainly not SURPRISED by it, but I don’t share it, no. I see it as being a crooked sort of kludge necessitated by the idea that people are equally valuable. “people” is a very big and complicated category, and treating it as a single moral point leads to weirdness.
Practically speaking, a person gets created over an extremely protracted period. It’s not when they’re conceived, it’s not when they’re born, it’s not when they learn to speak or use the internet, it’s the entire process. In contrast, people die close to instantaneously. “creating a human life” only seems morally neutral because the “human life” you’re creating when you make a baby is extremely rudimentary.
But it’s not generally acceptable to talk about people this way, so the difference between a fetus and a piano tuner gets surreptitiously offloaded into a difference between birth and death.
Another difference that gets misplaced onto birth vs. death is the matter of discriminate vs. indiscriminate actions. If people could create people they liked as easily as they could kill people they don’t, we might see this very differently.
When you state it like that is seems unintuitive, but the idea that creating new people is somewhere around morally neutral and that destroying existing people is morally bad is a very strong and common intuition. Do you really not share it?
(Of course, “terminal” is the load-bearing word here. A knife that slices someone’s neck has very different secondary consequences than a knife that rearranges reality such that it was as if the victim was never born, but neither biology nor cultural knowledge personal experience have given us any reason to form intuitions about the latter case.)
Hmm… I’m certainly not SURPRISED by it, but I don’t share it, no. I see it as being a crooked sort of kludge necessitated by the idea that people are equally valuable. “people” is a very big and complicated category, and treating it as a single moral point leads to weirdness.
Practically speaking, a person gets created over an extremely protracted period. It’s not when they’re conceived, it’s not when they’re born, it’s not when they learn to speak or use the internet, it’s the entire process. In contrast, people die close to instantaneously. “creating a human life” only seems morally neutral because the “human life” you’re creating when you make a baby is extremely rudimentary.
But it’s not generally acceptable to talk about people this way, so the difference between a fetus and a piano tuner gets surreptitiously offloaded into a difference between birth and death.
Another difference that gets misplaced onto birth vs. death is the matter of discriminate vs. indiscriminate actions. If people could create people they liked as easily as they could kill people they don’t, we might see this very differently.