For the op and others here who consider preservation of human life a terminal goal: do you also consider the creation of human life a terminal goal of the same magnitude? If not, why not?
I find it very unintuitive that something’s creation could be unwarranted but its preservation vital, terminally, independent of any other considerations.
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.
I’m not sure if I’m in the category you call for, but I feel that this comment ought to go somewhere under this post, and this seems like the best fit.
I consider killing an arbitrary person much, much worse than killing a random person, because the latter cannot be used as a weapon to silence people you don’t like. Abortion generally doesn’t discriminate against the baby (although there are cultures where sex-selective abortion is popular, which makes me uncomfortable, and which will be more of a problem as they get more than one bit to discriminate on); a woman aborts not because she dislikes the particular child, but because she doesn’t want to have a child at all.
I don’t like the idea of killing babies, but as long as it’s done indiscriminately with regards to the individual baby, the only important moral difference from abstinence-as-birth-control is that it’s painful to a creature with about the consciousness of a small animal.
Ultimately, I think that monoculture is more dangerous than infanticide. (As a corollary, I have to support the “right” of religious parents to let their toddlers die of easily-curable diseases because they don’t believe in evidence-based medicine. Though once children are able to ask to get out of their parents’ households, they should be offered political asylum if necessary.)
For mostly unrelated reasons, I think abortion should be mandatory if the baby is the product of rape. We can’t afford, as a society, to let rape be a viable reproductive strategy. Yes, it’s horrible and cruel to someone who’s already a victim of a horrible, cruel travesty, but it’s still better than letting rape continue to exist for the entire future.
For mostly unrelated reasons, I think abortion should be mandatory if the baby is the product of rape. We can’t afford, as a society, to let rape be a viable reproductive strategy. Yes, it’s horrible and cruel to someone who’s already a victim of a horrible, cruel travesty, but it’s still better than letting rape continue to exist for the entire future.
How genetically heritable is the property of being a rapist? This seems like an important empirical fact to nail down before advocating this sort of policy.
Precisely! And more than that, even if propensity to rape is both heritable and highly variable in the population (I’ve no idea if this is true), it doesn’t follow that by culling some children of rapes the total number of rapists will go down.
Rapists can have children in normal marriages, like everyone else. And I’ve read somewhere that most rapists commit more than one rape; if true, then the mandatory abortion policy must be enforced in almost 100% of all rapes to drive the numbers of rapists below replacement rates.
Also, since the postulated rapist genes haven’t been selected out of existence, there is probably some balance of rapist vs. none-rapist genes in the population. If we cull some but not all rapists, then we might create incentives for the remaining rapists to breed more to make up. And we’ll be selecting for more successful rapists, resistant to our methods of catching or of punishing them.
I wasn’t aware that things like that could vary in heritability. Rape is not specific to humans, so it can’t be purely cultural; where else would it come from, if not genes?
Rape is not specific to humans, so it can’t be purely cultural; where else would it come from, if not genes?
It only “comes from genes” in the same sense that eating, having a liver, and breathing oxygen “come from genes”.
Eating, having a liver, and breathing oxygen are inherited, but have zero heritability (since they do not vary). They cannot be selected for or against.
Even something that does vary from one person to another (some people commit rape and some do not) and “comes from genes” in this trivial sense may have zero heritability. If it is not heritable, your suggested policy of killing the offspring of rape will have no eugenic effect, and nor will any other policy of trying to breed the behaviour out of the population.
Regarding discrimination: some abortions are due to prenatal screenings for various sorts of disability. Does this bother you?
Regarding mandatory abortion of rapists’ babies: you acknowledge the obvious downside, which is that it constitutes a second assault. Have you considered the incentives it creates, if someone who cannot stand the idea of having an abortion gets raped and considers whether to report the crime?
I hadn’t considered the incentive problem. And, considering the already abysmal reporting rate, I’m going to have to reverse my position on that point until I come across a better third option.
Oh, and regarding disability screenings: as a general rule of thumb, I’d say it’s okay unless there exist many adults with that particular disability who prefer to go on having it rather than be “cured”. For example, I would be extremely wary of aborting intersex fetuses, or those likely to have any kind of cognitive disorder.
I’ll point out that this policy involves a kind of historical contingency that might be problematic.
That is, to pick an extreme example for clarity: if in 1900 ~100% of people with property X choose to have it “cured,” and in 2000 ~100% of people with property X choose to go on having it, it seems to follow that you endorse preventing their births in 1900 but not in 2000. Of course, if the program of preventing their births in 1900 is actually implemented, then there aren’t any people with property X in 2000, and so their births get prevented as well, even though (in some weird counterfactual sense) you don’t endorse that.
I’m not sure how much that actually matters, but it seems at least worth acknowledging.
Any action you take prevents the birth of an infinite number of counterfactual future humans. If you’re going to analyze things this way, you’ll have to estimate e.g. whether the total number of people born, and their utilities, in scenario 1 (people with X are born in 1900) are greater than in scenario 2 (people with X not born).
That sort of preference seems equivalent to preferring to be hit over the head with a baseball bat to me.
Which is difference more in connotative judgement than in nature from preferring to be tied up and hit with straps and various leather paraphernalia...
The preference is evidence that the “disability” really isn’t, like homosexuality.
It can also be evidence that humans use ‘sour grapes’ as a coping mechanism.
Near one end of the spectrum of advantage, novel difference and unambiguous disorder is schizophrenia. There are those who declare that cognitive problem to be just a difference to be embraced or even something that can produce special success but I claim it is something that really is purely a negative thing. People can be successful despite schizophrenia, but not because of it. I would not make the same judgement with respect to, say, ADHD or Aspergers.
(A claim the evaluation of which does weigh 300 wedrifid-subjective pounds! I don’t care much at all what you do to yourself but what you do to other people against their will I do consider to be my business!)
For mostly unrelated reasons, I think abortion should be mandatory if the baby is the product of rape. We can’t afford, as a society, to let rape be a viable reproductive strategy. Yes, it’s horrible and cruel to someone who’s already a victim of a horrible, cruel travesty, but it’s still better than letting rape continue to exist for the entire future.
Apart from me finding this personally morally repugnant in its own right it is clearly inconsistent with your earlier statements about selective abortion and assumes a consequentialist evaluation that is too superficial to even correctly support your own terminal values.
You write a whole paragraph about how it is important that “it’s done indiscriminately with regards to the individual baby”, because “a woman aborts not because she dislikes the particular child, but because she doesn’t want to have a child at all”. You don’t want a women to be permitted to discriminate on bits of information about their own potential child but propose to enforce a discrimination based on one bit of information about one of the parents. The DNA of the fetus (necessarily) gives far more information about possible future behaviour of a child than a single instance of behaviour of the father—particularly when the father takes no part in raising the child.
But far more important is the effect that such a mandate would have on the outcome of rape. Rape is already grossly under-reported (citation is, I assume, not needed). There are strong psychological pressures against reporting it, even aside from the additional trauma from being involved in extensive legal proceedings. Making a gross abuse of her person the consequence of reporting a rape would (and should) make rape even more under-reported.
If you are a women living in a mandatory abortion dystopia then the right thing to do is to refrain from reporting a rape until a) you can confirm that you did not conceive or b) you decide for yourself that you want an abortion. If necessary, lie. “Oh, I said yes. I wanted him bad and I just love it rough. And if I wanted to stop I would have said ‘flugelhorn’!” A rape victim being forced to defend her rapist is a horrible, cruel, travesty but it is what she needs to do to protect herself from what is quite possibly a greater violation.
Unfortunately someone else may report to the authorities that you have been raped—either because they are a misguided do-gooder or outright malicious. The rapist could be convicted (and your unborn child sentenced) based on the testimony from others and despite your own declarations of willingness. In such cases, where practical, it is ethical to do whatever it takes to stop them ie. Cryopreserve anyone who gets in your way!
it is clearly inconsistent with your earlier statements about selective abortion
Ouch, truth.
On the other hand, there’s a difference between discriminating and discriminatory, indiscriminate and nondiscriminatory. (No less ambiguous terms immediately occur to me, and I was not strict with this usage in the grandparent.) I don’t particularly object to discriminating against serial killers, for example.
But the perverse-incentive argument holds in full force. Perhaps I should edit the grandparent so people don’t keep trying to re-dissuade me of something I’ve already disclaimed?
Evolution can work quickly under artificial selection.
But perhaps you were talking about transhumanism displacing inherited psychology? In that case, I’d observe that probably either (1) many rapists would choose to become more effective rapists, rather than alter their utility functions, or (2) we’d probably need some sort of government screening upgrades or something, which leads back into the monoculture problem. There may be no good solution.
For the op and others here who consider preservation of human life a terminal goal: do you also consider the creation of human life a terminal goal of the same magnitude? If not, why not?
I find it very unintuitive that something’s creation could be unwarranted but its preservation vital, terminally, independent of any other considerations.
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.
I’m not sure if I’m in the category you call for, but I feel that this comment ought to go somewhere under this post, and this seems like the best fit.
I consider killing an arbitrary person much, much worse than killing a random person, because the latter cannot be used as a weapon to silence people you don’t like. Abortion generally doesn’t discriminate against the baby (although there are cultures where sex-selective abortion is popular, which makes me uncomfortable, and which will be more of a problem as they get more than one bit to discriminate on); a woman aborts not because she dislikes the particular child, but because she doesn’t want to have a child at all.
I don’t like the idea of killing babies, but as long as it’s done indiscriminately with regards to the individual baby, the only important moral difference from abstinence-as-birth-control is that it’s painful to a creature with about the consciousness of a small animal.
Ultimately, I think that monoculture is more dangerous than infanticide. (As a corollary, I have to support the “right” of religious parents to let their toddlers die of easily-curable diseases because they don’t believe in evidence-based medicine. Though once children are able to ask to get out of their parents’ households, they should be offered political asylum if necessary.)
For mostly unrelated reasons, I think abortion should be mandatory if the baby is the product of rape. We can’t afford, as a society, to let rape be a viable reproductive strategy. Yes, it’s horrible and cruel to someone who’s already a victim of a horrible, cruel travesty, but it’s still better than letting rape continue to exist for the entire future.
How genetically heritable is the property of being a rapist? This seems like an important empirical fact to nail down before advocating this sort of policy.
Precisely! And more than that, even if propensity to rape is both heritable and highly variable in the population (I’ve no idea if this is true), it doesn’t follow that by culling some children of rapes the total number of rapists will go down.
Rapists can have children in normal marriages, like everyone else. And I’ve read somewhere that most rapists commit more than one rape; if true, then the mandatory abortion policy must be enforced in almost 100% of all rapes to drive the numbers of rapists below replacement rates.
Also, since the postulated rapist genes haven’t been selected out of existence, there is probably some balance of rapist vs. none-rapist genes in the population. If we cull some but not all rapists, then we might create incentives for the remaining rapists to breed more to make up. And we’ll be selecting for more successful rapists, resistant to our methods of catching or of punishing them.
I wasn’t aware that things like that could vary in heritability. Rape is not specific to humans, so it can’t be purely cultural; where else would it come from, if not genes?
Not just can. Almost everything with any degree of complexity varies in heritability, especially things that are behavioural.
It only “comes from genes” in the same sense that eating, having a liver, and breathing oxygen “come from genes”.
Eating, having a liver, and breathing oxygen are inherited, but have zero heritability (since they do not vary). They cannot be selected for or against.
Even something that does vary from one person to another (some people commit rape and some do not) and “comes from genes” in this trivial sense may have zero heritability. If it is not heritable, your suggested policy of killing the offspring of rape will have no eugenic effect, and nor will any other policy of trying to breed the behaviour out of the population.
Regarding discrimination: some abortions are due to prenatal screenings for various sorts of disability. Does this bother you?
Regarding mandatory abortion of rapists’ babies: you acknowledge the obvious downside, which is that it constitutes a second assault. Have you considered the incentives it creates, if someone who cannot stand the idea of having an abortion gets raped and considers whether to report the crime?
I hadn’t considered the incentive problem. And, considering the already abysmal reporting rate, I’m going to have to reverse my position on that point until I come across a better third option.
Oh, and regarding disability screenings: as a general rule of thumb, I’d say it’s okay unless there exist many adults with that particular disability who prefer to go on having it rather than be “cured”. For example, I would be extremely wary of aborting intersex fetuses, or those likely to have any kind of cognitive disorder.
I’ll point out that this policy involves a kind of historical contingency that might be problematic.
That is, to pick an extreme example for clarity: if in 1900 ~100% of people with property X choose to have it “cured,” and in 2000 ~100% of people with property X choose to go on having it, it seems to follow that you endorse preventing their births in 1900 but not in 2000. Of course, if the program of preventing their births in 1900 is actually implemented, then there aren’t any people with property X in 2000, and so their births get prevented as well, even though (in some weird counterfactual sense) you don’t endorse that.
I’m not sure how much that actually matters, but it seems at least worth acknowledging.
Any action you take prevents the birth of an infinite number of counterfactual future humans. If you’re going to analyze things this way, you’ll have to estimate e.g. whether the total number of people born, and their utilities, in scenario 1 (people with X are born in 1900) are greater than in scenario 2 (people with X not born).
That’s certainly true, but I don’t understand how it relates to the policy I was referring to (Pavitra’s in the great-grandparent).
The usefulness of the rule of thumb relies in part on that mostly not happening.
That sort of preference seems equivalent to preferring to be hit over the head with a baseball bat to me.
Which is difference more in connotative judgement than in nature from preferring to be tied up and hit with straps and various leather paraphernalia...
You mean “which is different”, right?
Edit: if ‘which is difference’ isn’t a typo then I can’t parse your sentence...
The preference is evidence that the “disability” really isn’t, like homosexuality.
It can also be evidence that humans use ‘sour grapes’ as a coping mechanism.
Near one end of the spectrum of advantage, novel difference and unambiguous disorder is schizophrenia. There are those who declare that cognitive problem to be just a difference to be embraced or even something that can produce special success but I claim it is something that really is purely a negative thing. People can be successful despite schizophrenia, but not because of it. I would not make the same judgement with respect to, say, ADHD or Aspergers.
I am influenced, for example, by this Stanford lecture.
(A claim the evaluation of which does weigh 300 wedrifid-subjective pounds! I don’t care much at all what you do to yourself but what you do to other people against their will I do consider to be my business!)
Apart from me finding this personally morally repugnant in its own right it is clearly inconsistent with your earlier statements about selective abortion and assumes a consequentialist evaluation that is too superficial to even correctly support your own terminal values.
You write a whole paragraph about how it is important that “it’s done indiscriminately with regards to the individual baby”, because “a woman aborts not because she dislikes the particular child, but because she doesn’t want to have a child at all”. You don’t want a women to be permitted to discriminate on bits of information about their own potential child but propose to enforce a discrimination based on one bit of information about one of the parents. The DNA of the fetus (necessarily) gives far more information about possible future behaviour of a child than a single instance of behaviour of the father—particularly when the father takes no part in raising the child.
But far more important is the effect that such a mandate would have on the outcome of rape. Rape is already grossly under-reported (citation is, I assume, not needed). There are strong psychological pressures against reporting it, even aside from the additional trauma from being involved in extensive legal proceedings. Making a gross abuse of her person the consequence of reporting a rape would (and should) make rape even more under-reported.
If you are a women living in a mandatory abortion dystopia then the right thing to do is to refrain from reporting a rape until a) you can confirm that you did not conceive or b) you decide for yourself that you want an abortion. If necessary, lie. “Oh, I said yes. I wanted him bad and I just love it rough. And if I wanted to stop I would have said ‘flugelhorn’!” A rape victim being forced to defend her rapist is a horrible, cruel, travesty but it is what she needs to do to protect herself from what is quite possibly a greater violation.
Unfortunately someone else may report to the authorities that you have been raped—either because they are a misguided do-gooder or outright malicious. The rapist could be convicted (and your unborn child sentenced) based on the testimony from others and despite your own declarations of willingness. In such cases, where practical, it is ethical to do whatever it takes to stop them ie. Cryopreserve anyone who gets in your way!
Ouch, truth.
On the other hand, there’s a difference between discriminating and discriminatory, indiscriminate and nondiscriminatory. (No less ambiguous terms immediately occur to me, and I was not strict with this usage in the grandparent.) I don’t particularly object to discriminating against serial killers, for example.
But the perverse-incentive argument holds in full force. Perhaps I should edit the grandparent so people don’t keep trying to re-dissuade me of something I’ve already disclaimed?
I’m not sure you understand how long Biology would have to remain in the driver’s seat for these things to remotely matter...
Evolution can work quickly under artificial selection.
But perhaps you were talking about transhumanism displacing inherited psychology? In that case, I’d observe that probably either (1) many rapists would choose to become more effective rapists, rather than alter their utility functions, or (2) we’d probably need some sort of government screening upgrades or something, which leads back into the monoculture problem. There may be no good solution.
The more humane version : The rapist should be forced to pay for the child’s upbringing, while deprived of usual father rights.
Extremely hard to argue against, and puts a limit on the bad action.
Still, it might not be enough...