I have the feeling that I’ve got to state the following belief in plain text:
Regardless of whether “babies are people” (and yeah, I guess I wouldn’t call them that on most relevant criteria), any parent who proves able to kill their child while not faced with an unbearable alternative cost (a hundred strangers for an altruistic utilitarian, eternal and justified damnation for a deeply brainwashed believer) is damn near guaranteed to have their brain wired in a manner unacceptable to modern society.
Such wiring so strongly correlates with harmful, unsympathetic psychopaths that, if faced with a binary choice to murder any would-be childkillers on sight or ignore them, we should not waver in exterminating them. Of course, a better solution is a blanket application of unbounded social stigma as a first line deterrent and individual treatment of every one case, whether with an attempt at readjustment, isolation or execution.
There is another, quite different, situation where it happens:
Highly stressed mothers of newborns.
The answer to this couldn’t be more clear: humans are very different from macaques. We’re much worse. The anxiety caused by human inequality is unlike anything observed in the natural world. In order to emphasize this point, Robert Sapolsky put all kidding aside and was uncharacteristically grim when describing the affects of human poverty on the incidence of stress-related disease.
“When humans invented poverty,” Sapolsky wrote, “they came up with a way of subjugating the low-ranking like nothing ever before seen in the primate world.”
This is clearly seen in studies looking at human inequality and the rates of maternal infanticide. The World Health Organization Report on Violence and Health reported a strong association between global inequality and child abuse, with the largest incidence in communities with “high levels of unemployment and concentrated poverty.” Another international study published by the American Journal of Psychiatry analyzed infanticide data from 17 countries and found an unmistakable “pattern of powerlessness, poverty, and alienation in the lives of the women studied.”
The United States currently leads the developed world with the highest maternal infanticide rate (an average of 8 deaths for every 100,000 live births, more than twice the rate of Canada). In a systematic analysis of maternal infanticide in the U.S., DeAnn Gauthier and colleagues at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette concluded that this dubious honor falls on us because “extreme poverty amid extreme wealth is conducive to stress-related violence.” Consequently, the highest levels of maternal infanticide were found, not in the poorest states, but in those with the greatest disparity between wealth and poverty (such as Colorado, Oklahoma, and New York with rates 3 to 5 times the national average). According to these researchers, inequality is literally killing our kids.
Interesting. Having suspected that something along these lines was out there, I did mention the possibility of readjustment.
However,
1) sorry and non-vindictive as we might feel for this subset of childkillers, we’d still have to give them some significant punishment, in order not to weaken our overall deterrence factor.
2) This still would hardly push anyone (me included) from “indiscriminating extermination” to “ignore” in a binary choice scenario.
I suspect that “babykilling is OK in and of itself, but it’s a visible marker for psychosis and we want to justify taking action against psychotics and therefore we criminalize babykilling anyway” isn’t a particularly stable thought in human minds, and pretty quickly decomposes into “babykilling is not OK,” “psychosis is not OK,” “babykillers are psychotic,” a 25% chance of “psychotics kill babies,” and two photons.
I know it’s stupid to jump in here, but you don’t mean psychotic or psychosis. You mean psychopathic (a.k.a. sociopathic). Please don’t lump the mentally ill together with evil murderers. Actual psychotic people are hearing voices and miserable, not gleefully plotting to kill their own children. You’re thinking of sociopaths. Psychotics don’t kill babies any more than anyone else. It’s sociopaths who should all be killed or otherwise removed from society.
Some of the traits listed on the wikipedia page for psychopathy are traits that I want and have modified myself towards:
Psychopaths do not feel fear as deeply as normal people and do not manifest any of the normal physical responses to threatening stimuli. For instance, if a normal person were accosted in the street by a gun-wielding mugger, he/she might sweat, tremble, lose control of his/her bowels or vomit. Psychopaths feel no such sensations, and are often perplexed when they observe them in others.
Psychopaths do not suffer profound emotional trauma such as despair. This may be part of the reason why punishment has little effect on them: it leaves no emotional impression on them. There are anecdotes of psychopaths reacting nonchalantly to being sentenced to life in prison.
Some psychopaths also possess great charm and a great ability to manipulate others. They have fewer social inhibitions, are extroverted, dominant, and confident. They are not afraid of causing offense, being rejected, or being put down. When these things do happen, they tend to dismiss them and are not discouraged from trying again.
It’s sociopaths who should all be killed or otherwise removed from society.
Lots of sociopaths as the term is clinically defined live perfectly productive lives, often in high-stimulation, high-risk jobs that neurotypical people don’t want to do like small aircraft piloting, serving in the special forces of their local military and so on. They don’t learn well from bad experiences and they need a lot of stimulation to get a high, so those sorts of roles are ideal for them.
They don’t need to be killed or removed from society, they need to be channelled into jobs where they can have fun and where their psychological resilience is an asset.
Yes, but people with different types of illness vary in whether they are likely to kill other people, which is the question here. This metastudy found half of male criminals have antisocial personality disorder (including sociopaths and psychopaths) and less than 4% have psychotic disorders. In other words, criminals are unlikely to be people who have lost touch with reality and more likely to be people who just don’t care about other people.
Interesting, I knew that the rate was very low for psychotic people, but not that it was so high for sociopathic ones. I still don’t think all sociopaths should be killed.
I was being a bit pedantic. When she says “don’t lump the mentally ill together with evil murderers” I think she means “don’t lump [psychotic] people in with evil murderers”, which I don’t disagree with. However, not all sociopaths are evil murderers. I would even say it’s wrong to lump these mentally ill sociopaths together with evil murderers.
In other words, AspiringKnitter,
Please don’t lump the mentally ill together with evil murderers.
Okay. I’ve never heard of any non-evil sociopaths before, but I’ll accept that they exist if you tell me they do.
What I meant was indeed that psychotic people aren’t any more evil on average than normal people. The point is irrelevant to the thread, but I make it wherever it needs to be made because conflating the two isn’t just sloppy, it harms real people in real life.
I think many sociopaths become high-powered businesspeople.
The other thing that “harms people in real life” is saying stuff like “sociopaths should all be killed or otherwise removed from society”. To say such things, you must override your moral beliefs, which is not a good habit to be in, and not a good image of yourself to cache.
To say such things, you must override your moral beliefs, which is not a good habit to be in, and not a good image of yourself to cache.
This may be a nitpick, but it’s not clear to me that “removing all sociopaths from society” will even be beneficial to the remaining society. It’s entirely possible that our society requires a certain number of sociopaths in order to function.
I have no hard evidence one way or the other, but I’m pretty sure that, historically, plans that involved “remove all X from society” turned out very poorly, for any given X.
yeah. mostly. Though it would be nice to catch murderers before they kill anyone. At this point tho, I dont think we are generally rational enough to figure out in advance who the murderers are without huge collateral disutility.
I’m going to stop discussing this because it is about to get dangerously mindkillery.
Depends how far in advance you’re looking. Aiming a loaded gun, or charging forward while screaming and brandishing something sharp and heavy, provide very solid evidence before any injury is done, and modern medicine can turn what seemed like successful murder back into ‘attempted’ by making it possible to recover after the injury.
The other thing that “harms people in real life” is saying stuff like “sociopaths should all be killed or otherwise removed from society”. To say such things, you must override your moral beliefs, which is not a good habit to be in, and not a good image of yourself to cache.
Good point, although actually, my moral beliefs are consequentialist, and therefore actually formulated as “prevent the greatest possible number of murders” rather than “kill the fewest possible people personally”, so it’s not actually accurate to say I have to override moral beliefs to advocate removing sociopaths from society. But I guess the best idea is to neutralize the threat they pose while still giving them a chance at redemption. You’re right.
I think many sociopaths become high-powered businesspeople.
I thought most high-powered businesspeople were evil. XP
my moral beliefs are consequentialist, and therefore actually formulated as “prevent the greatest possible number of murders” rather than “kill the fewest possible people personally”, so it’s not actually accurate to say I have to override moral beliefs to advocate removing sociopaths from society.
Of course. I agree that one death is preferable to many, no matter who or what does the killing. I am talking about the effects on yourself of endorsing murder, and possibly the less noble real reason you chose that solution.
Maybe you have observed what I am talking about: people having to steel themselves against their moral intuitions when they say or do certain things. You can see it in their faces; a grim, slightly sadistic hatred, I call it the “murder face”. I don’t think people do this because they are strict utilitarians. The murder face is not the reaction you would expect from a utilitarian reluctantly deciding that someone has to be executed.
I don’t think you said “sociopaths should all be killed or otherwise removed from society” for strictly utilitarian reasons either. I would expect a utilitarian to stress out and shit themselves for a few days (or as long as they had, up to years) trying to think of some other way to solve the problem before they would ever even think of murder.
The thing is, trades of one life for many are nearly always false dichotomies. There is some twisted way that humans are unjustifiably drawn to consider murder without even trying to consider alternatives. See the sequence on ethical injunctions.
Thru the known mechanisms of self-image, cached thoughts and so on, proposing murder as a solution just makes this problem worse in the future. You literally become less moral by saying that.
I would expect a utilitarian to stress out and shit themselves for a few days (or as long as they had, up to years) trying to think of some other way to solve the problem before they would ever even think of murder.
But I don’t have to solve the problem. Whatever I think of regarding sociopaths is pretty pointless, since I won’t have the chance to do it anyway, and even if I decided I really did think that was definitely the best course of action (which I’m not certain of; note that I’ve always qualified it with “or otherwise removed from society”, which could include all sorts of other possibilities) after considering all the other possibilities, I doubt that I personally would be able to do it anyway, and if I did I would go to jail and I don’t want that either. So for me to say it is as easy as the trolley problem (am I the only person for whom the trolley problem is easy?).
The thing is, trades of one life for many are nearly always false dichotomies. There is some twisted way that humans are unjustifiably drawn to consider murder without even trying to consider alternatives. See the sequence on ethical injunctions.
Thank you. If I’m ever in a position where killing someone is a course of action that’s even on my radar as something to consider, I’ll bear that in mind.
Thru the known mechanisms of self-image, cached thoughts and so on, proposing murder as a solution just makes this problem worse in the future. You literally become less moral by saying that.
Thank you for pointing that out. Just for the record, not killing people is one of my terminal values, and if I’m ever in a position to deal personally with the sociopath problem, I’ll be considering the other possibilities first.
Yeah, my understanding is that they exist. Just wondering, how would you expect to hear about a non-evil sociopath?
Yeah, I’m totally on board with you there (though I’m not really fond of the word evil). I remember hearing that psychotic people are much more likely to hurt themselves than average, but not more likely to hurt others. And yeah, it’s bad to consider them to be “evil” when they’re not or to contribute to a societal model of them that does the same.
I was being a bit pedantic. When she says “don’t lump the mentally ill together with evil murderers” I think she means “don’t lump [psychotic] people in with evil murderers”, which I don’t disagree with. However, not all sociopaths are evil murderers. I would even say it’s wrong to lump these mentally ill sociopaths together with evil murderers.
Are we talking about psychotic people here or sociopaths (psychopaths)? The two are vastly different. Or are you saying that neither psychotic people nor sociopaths are necessarily evil?
(It’s odd how the words “schizophrenic” and “psychotic” bring up such different connotations even though schizophrenia is the poster-child of psychosis. (Saying this as a schizotypal person with “ultra high risk” of schizophrenia.))
Infanticide has been considered a normal practice in a lot of cultures. The Greeks and Romans, for example, don’t seem to have been run down by psychopaths.
I don’t think we have a good way to know about the later harmful actions of people who kill their infants. Either we find them out and lock them up, in which case their life is no longer really representative of the population, or we don’t know about what they’ve done.
I’ve managed to overlook the most important (and fairly obvious) thing, though!
If the idea of “childkilling=bad” is weakly or not at all ingrained in a culture, it’s easy to override both one’s innate and cultural barriers to kill your child, so most normally wired people would be capable of it ⇒ the majority of childkillers are normal people.
If it’s ingrained as strongly as in the West today, there would be few people capable of overriding such a strong cultural barrier, ⇒ the majority of childkillers left would be the ones who get no barriers in the first place, i.e. largely harmful, unsympathetic psychopaths. The other ones would have an abnormally strong will to override barriers and self-modify, which can easily make them just as dangerous.
Okay, got it. I agree that in a culture that condemns infanticide, people who do it anyway are likely to be quite different from the people who don’t. But Bakkot’s claim was that our culture should allow it, which should not be expected to increase the number of psychopaths.
I’m also not sure that unbounded social stigma is an effective way to deter people who essentially don’t care about other people. We don’t really know of good ways to change psychopathy.
But Bakkot’s claim was that our culture should allow it, which should not be expected to increase the number of psychopaths.
First, any single relaxed taboo feels to me like a blow against the entire net of ethical inhibitions, both in a neurotypical person and in a culture (proportional to the taboo’s strength and gravity, that is). Therefore, I think it could be a slippery slope into antisociality for some people who previously behaved acceptably. Second, we could be taking one filter of existing psychopaths from ourselves while giving the psychopaths a safe opportunity to let their disguise down. Easier for them to evade us, harder for us to hunt them down.
I’m also not sure that unbounded social stigma is an effective way to deter people who essentially don’t care about other people.
Successful psychopaths do understand that society’s opinion of them can affect their well-being, this is why they bother to conceal their abnormality in the first place.
If “hunting down” psychopaths is our goal, we’d do better to look for people who torture or kill animals. My understanding is that these behaviors are a common warning sign of antisocial personality disorder, and I’m sure it’s more common than infanticide because it’s less punished. Would you advocate punishing anyone diagnosed with antisocial personality right away, or would you want to wait until they actually committed a crime?
I’d put taboos in three categories. Some taboos (e.g. against women wearing trousers, profanity, homosexuality, or atheism) seem pointless and we were right to relax them. Some taboos, like those against theft and murder, I agree we should hold in place because they produce so little value for the harm they produce. Some, like extramarital sex and abortion, are more ambiguous. They probably allow some people to get away with unnecessary cruelty. But because the the personal freedom they create, I think they produce a net good.
I put legalized infanticide in the third category. I gather you put it in the second? In other words, do you believe the harm it would create from psychopaths killing babies and generally being harder to detect would be greater than the benefit to people who don’t raise unwanted children?
In other words, do you believe the harm it would create from psychopaths killing babies and generally being harder to detect would be greater than the benefit to people who don’t raise unwanted children?
I believe that legalized infanticide would be harmful, at least, to our particular culture for many reasons, some of which I’m sure I haven’t even thought of yet. I’m not even sure whether the strongest reason for not doing it is connected to psychopathic behaviour at all. Regardless, I’m certain about fighting it tooth and nail if need be, at at least a 0.85.
By the way, have you considered the general memetic chaos that would erupt in Western society if somehow infanticide was really, practically made legal?
More broadly, I think having fewer things prohibited correlates with more fun unless there’s some reason the prohibition increases the amount of fun in the universe.
That’s pretty much tautological—you could as well express it as “forbidding things correlates with more fun unless there’s some reason allowing something increases the amount of fun in the universe”. What you really need for this argument to work is a way of showing that people attach intrinsic utility to increased latitude of choice, which in light of the paradox of choice looks questionable.
Aside from any other possible issues, you’re leaving out the possibility that one person may want to kill a baby that another person is very attached to.
Do you have an age or ability level at which you think being a person begins?
I expect this proposal could be taken seriously: when an owner wants to have a pet put down other than for humanitarian reasons, others who have had a close relationship to the pet, and are willing and able to take responsibility for it, get the right to veto and take custody of the pet.
Ways in which Nancy’s argument was not exactly like arguing that abortion should be illegal because other people might have gotten attached to the fetus:
She didn’t say: therefore it should be completely prohibited.
There can be more interaction by non-mothers with a baby than a fetus.
I’m not sure how much I will participate on this topic, it seems like a bit of a mind killer. I’m impressed we’ve found a more volatile version of the notorious internet abortion debate.
The standard reply to “But I like your fetus, don’t kill it!” is “I’d let you have it, but we don’t have the tech for me to give it to you now. My only options are going through several months of pregnancy plus labor, or killing it now. So down the drain it goes.”. This suggests that inasmuch are there are people attached to fetuses not inside themselves, we should work on eviction tech.
That’s legal now (though we tend to offer status and supportive work like childcare, not money). Libertarianism mandates that refusing the transaction at any price and aborting also remains legal (unless embryos turn out to be people at typical abortion age, in which case they are born in debt).
To which I can see people responding by getting pregnant, getting others attached, threatening abortion and collecting compensation just to make money. Especially if pro-lifers run around paying off as many would-be aborters as possible.
Maybe. Maybe society would create new norms to fix that.
I’d like to mention that I’m emphatically not a libertarian (in fact identifying as socialist), and find many absurdities with its basic concept (see Yvain’s “Why I Hate Your Freedom); however, I’d always like to learn more about how it could plausibly work from its proponents, and am ready to shift towards it if I hear some unexpectedly strong arguments.
I’m impressed we’ve found a more volatile version of the notorious internet abortion debate.
Odd to hear that about a community upon which one member unleashed an omnipotent monster from the future that could coerce folks who know the evidence for its existence to do its bidding. And where, upon an attempt to lock said monster away, about 6000 random people were sorta-maybe-kinda-killed by another member as retaliation for “censorship”.
Aside from any other possible issues, you’re leaving out the possibility that one person may want to kill a baby that another person is very attached to.
Indeed. Look at a scenario like this. What if an adventurous young woman gets an unintended pregnancy, initially decides to have the child, many of her friends and her family are looking forward to it… then either the baby is crippled during birth or the mother simply changes her mind, unwilling to adapt her lifestyle to accommodate child-rearing, yet for some weird reason (selfish or not) refusing to give it up for adoption?
Suppose that she tells the doctor to euthanize the baby. Consider the repercussions in her immediate circle, e.g. what would be her mother’s reaction upon learning that she’s a grandmother no more (even if she’s told that the baby died of natural causes… yet has grounds to suspect that it didn’t)?
Completely independent of any of the rest of this, I absolutely endorse the legality of lying to people about why my child died, as well as the ethics of telling them it’s none of their damned business, with the possible exception of medical or legal examiners. I certainly endorse the legality of lying to my mother about it.
Further, I would be appalled by someone who felt entitled to demand such answers of a mother whose child had just died (again, outside of a medical or legal examination, maybe) and would endorse forcibly removing them from the presence of a mother whose child has just died.
I would not endorse smacking such a person upside the head, but I would nevertheless be tempted to.
Crap, now that was ill-thought. Yeah, definitely agreed. I removed the last two sentences. The rest of my argument for babies occasionally having great value to non-parents still stands.
If I kill a person, the number of Fun-having-person-moments in the universe is reduced by the remaining lifetime that person would potentially have had. If I kill a baby, the number of Fun-having-person-moments in the universe is reduced by the entire lifetime of the person that baby would potentially have become.
Reasoning sensibly about counterfactuals is hard, but it isn’t clear to me why the former involves less total Fun than latter does. If anything, I would expect that removing an entire lifetime’s worth of Fun-having reduces total Fun more than removing a fraction of a lifetime’s worth.
I mean that a world where there is someone who would want to kill me, and the only reason why they don’t is that they’re afraid of ending up in jail, is not so much of a world in which I’d like to live.
It’s not that anyone hates you; they might kill you because they’re afraid of you killing them first, if there were no legal deterrent against killing.
In particular, if you had any conflict with someone else in a world where killing was legal, it would quite possibly spiral out of control: you’re worried they might kill you, so you’re tempted to kill them first, but you know they’re thinking the same way, so you’re even more worried, etc.
It’s not that anyone hates you; they might kill you because they’re afraid of you killing them first, if there were no legal deterrent against killing.
At least in my country, killing someone for self-defence is already legal. (Plus, I don’t think I’m going to threaten to kill someone in the foreseeable future, anyway.)
I’m not sure where you live, but is killing someone who you think will try to kill you some day actually considered self-defense for legal purposes there? I’m pretty sure self-defense doesn’t cover that in the US.
At least in my country, killing someone for self-defence is already legal.
Right, but “I accidentally ran over his dog, and I was worried that he might kill me later for it, so I immediately backed up and ran him over” probably won’t count as self-defense in your country. But it’s the sort of thing that traditional game theory would advise if killing was legal.
This really is a case where imposing an external incentive can stop people from mutually defecting at every turn.
(Plus, I don’t think I’m going to threaten to kill someone in the foreseeable future, anyway.)
If killing were legal (in a modern state with available firearms, not an ancient tribe with strong reputation effects), threatening to kill someone would be the stupidest possible move. Everyone is a threat to kill you, and they’ll probably attempt it the moment they become afraid that you might do the same.
But it’s the sort of thing that traditional game theory would advise if killing was legal.
I don’t get it… He wouldn’t gain anything by killing you (ETA: other than what your father/wife/whoever would gain by killing him after he kills you), so why would you be afraid he would do that? (Also, I’m not sure the assumptions of traditional game theory apply to humans.)
This really is a case where imposing an external incentive can stop people from mutually defecting at every turn.
If this was the case, I would expect places with less harsh penalties, or with lower probabilities of being convicted, to have a significantly higher homicide rate (all other things being equal). Does anyone have statistics about that? (Though all other things are seldom equal… Maybe the short/medium term effects of a change in legislation within a given country would be better data.)
If this was the case, I would expect places with less harsh penalties, or with lower probabilities of being convicted, to have a significantly higher homicide rate (all other things being equal). Does anyone have statistics about that?
I don’t get it… He wouldn’t gain anything by killing you, so why would you be afraid he would do that? (Also, I’m not sure the assumptions of traditional game theory apply to humans.)
Have you seen The Dark Knight? This is exactly the situation with the two boats. (Not going into spoiler-y detail.) Causal decision theory demands that you kill the other person as quickly and safely (to you) as possible, just as it demands that you always defect on the one-shot (or known-iteration) Prisoner’s Dilemma.
Anyway, I think you shouldn’t end up murdering each other even in that case, and if everyone were timeless decision theorists (and this was mutual knowledge) they wouldn’t. But among humans? Plenty of them would.
As opposed to this world. I don’t think that, right now, there’s anyone who would want to kill me.
We can’t yet do personality modifications that deep.
So, if Alice murdered Bob, she had always wanted to kill him since she was born (as opposed to her having changed her mind at some point)? Probably we can’t deliberately do personality modifications that deep (or do we? The results of Milgram’s experiment lead me to suspect it wouldn’t be completely impossible for me to convince someone to want to kill me—not that I can imagine a reason for me to do that).
(shrug) We’re both neglecting lots of things; we couldn’t have this conversation otherwise.
I agree with you that the risk of being killed reduces Fun, at least in some contexts. (It increases Fun in other contexts.) Then again, the risk of my baby being killed reduces Fun in some contexts as well. I don’t see any principled reason to consider the first factor in my calculations and not the second (or vice-versa), other than the desire to justify a preselected conclusion.
I agree that it’s not clear that adding a person to the universe increases the amount of Fun down the line. It’s also not clear that subtracting a person from the universe reduces the amount of Fun. Reasoning sensibly about conterfactuals is hard.
Then again, the risk of my baby being killed reduces Fun in some contexts as well.
You’ve struck onto something here (taking into account your update about the risk only coming from yourself)
1) Under the current system, parents are somewhat Protected From Themselves. What if a mother, while suffering a state of affect, consciously and subconsciously knew that she was allowed to kill her baby, so she did it, then was hit with regret&remorse?
2) Under the current system, parents feel like society is pressuring them not to commit especially grave failures of parenting, which gives them a feeling of fairness.
If the only thing stopping a parent from killing their child is the illegalization of said act, then they shouldn’t be parents anyway. If you can’t control yourself with an infant, then the probability is pretty high that you are going to be some type of abusive parent. The child is likely going to be a net drain on society because of the low-level of upbringing.
It is probably better for the baby (and society) for it to be killed while it is a blicketless infant, than to grow up under the “care” of such a parent.
I can easily visualize that, in our world, some very quickly passing one-in-a-lifetime temptation to get rid of an infant is experienced by many even slightly unstable or emotionally volatile parents, then forgotten.
Would you really want to give that temptation a chance to realize itself in every case when the (appropriately huge—we’re talking about largely normal people here) social stigma extinguishes the temptation today?
Oh, and in no way it’s “only the illegalization”, it’s the meme in general too.
Suppose, for example, that what you’re describing here as instability/emotional volatility—or, more operationally, my likelihood of doing something unrecoverable-from which I generally abhor based on a very quickly passing once-in-a-lifetime temptation—is hereditable (either genetically or behaviorally, it doesn’t matter too much).
In that case, I suspect I would rather that infants born to emotionally volatile/unstable parents ten million years ago had not matured to breeding age, as I’d rather live in a species that’s less volatile in that way. So it seems to follow that if the social stigma is a social mechanism for compensating for such poor impulse control in humans, allowing humans with poor impulse control to successfully raise their children, I should also prefer that that stigma not have been implemented ten million years ago.
Of course, I’m not nearly so dispassionate about it when I think about present-day infants and their parents, but it’s not clear to me why I should endorse the more passionate view.
Incidentally, I also don’t think your hypothetical has much to do with the real reasons for an infanticide social stigma. I support the meme, I just don’t think this argument for it holds water.
Emotionally volatile people shouldn’t be automatically assumed to fail upon most such temptations, after all (when they fail in a big way, that’s when we hear about it the most), and might not even be a net negative for society in other spheres (although yeah, they probably are… still, it’s awfully cold just to unapologetically thin their numbers with eugenics. I know that a lot of things LWians (incl. me) would do or intend to do are awfully cold, but hell, this one concerns me directly!).
The “volatility” of one’s behavior is a sum of the individual’s psychological make-up—which might or might not be largely hereditary—and the weakness or strength of one’s tendency for self-control—which is definitely largely cultural/environmental.
Look at the Far Eastern and Scandinavian societies. Wouldn’t an emotionally unstable person being raised in one of them be trained to control their emotions to a much greater degree than e.g. in Southern Europe?
Further on the “hereditability” part; I’m really emotionally unstable (as you might have witnessed), but my parents are really stable and cool-headed most of the time; however, my aunt from my mother’s side is a whole lot like me. I attribute most of my mental weirdness to birth trauma (residual encephalopathy, I don’t know if it’s pre- or post-natal), but I don’t know whether part of it might be due to some recessive gene that manifested in my aunt and me, but not at all in my mother.
I agree that we shouldn’t assume that emotionally volatile people fail upon most such temptations. I agree that my reasoning here is cold (indeed, I said as much myself, though I used the differently-loaded word “dispassionate”). I agree that if impulse control is generally nonhereditable (and, again, I don’t just mean genetically), the argument I use above doesn’t apply. I agree that different cultures train their members to “control their emotions” to different degrees. (Or, rather, I don’t think that’s true in general, but we’ve specifically been talking about the likelihood of expressing transient rage in the form of violence, and I agree that cultures differ in terms of how acceptable that is.)
I understand that, independent of any of the above, you don’t like my reasoning. It doesn’t make me especially happy either, come to that.
I still, incidentally, don’t believe that the stigma against infanticide is primarily intended to protect infants from transient murderous impulses in their parents.
I still, incidentally, don’t believe that the stigma against infanticide is primarily intended to protect infants from transient murderous impulses in their parents.
Neither do I; the reasons for its development do need a lot of looking into. I just listed a function that it can likely accomplish with some success once it’s already firmly entrenched.
...”control their emotions” to different degrees. (Or, rather, I don’t think that’s true in general, but we’ve specifically been talking about the likelihood of expressing transient rage in the form of violence, and I agree that cultures differ in terms of how acceptable that is.)
Yeah. I used “control” in the meaning of “steer”, not “rule over”.
Does the regret and remorse in case 1 actually matter? If it does, what do you want to say about parents who would feel less regret or remorse given the death of their child than given his or her continued life?
If their life is that terrible, there ought to be social services to take the child away from them and a good mechanism of adoption to place the child into. And I’m willing to pay a huge lot for that in various ways before legalizing infanticide becomes a reasonable alternative to me.
So I repeat my question: does the regret and remorse in case 1 actually matter? For example, what if a parent was regretful and remorseful about having their child forcibly put up for adoption; would that change your position?
I understand the argument that the infant’s life is valuable, and am not challenging that here. It was your invoking the parent’s regret and remorse as particularly relevant here that I was challenging.
So I repeat my question: does the regret and remorse in case 1 actually matter?
Depends of what kind of parent and what kind of person they would’ve been if not for that incident. There’s certainly evidence that their parenting could’ve been poor, but I believe that it could’ve been just fine for a significant minority of cases. I don’t sympathize much with completely worthless parents, but what we have here is not a strong enough proof of worthlessness. And I feel really terrible for the “mostly-normal” parent here that I thought of (while somewhat modeling one on myself).
Huh? Would someone please explain how is this disagreeable at all? Look, I’m ready to change my mind if it’s the wise thing to do, I just don’t understand; where to, and why, do you want me to shift?
Does the regret and remorse in case 1 actually matter?
Enormously. For once, it could plausibly drive most people who did that to suicide.
If it does, what do you want to say about parents who would feel more regret or remorse given the death of their child than given his or her continued life?
Is there a miscommunication here? parents who would feel more regret or remorse given the death of their child than given his or her continued life—that sounds to be, like, most parents in general, and ALL the parents whom society approves of.
I’ve never held that other people should be allowed to kill your baby, for precisely that reason
(rereads thread) Why, so you haven’t. I apologize; the fear of having my baby killed (well, by anyone other than me, anyway) is as you say irrelevant to your point. My error.
Probably true, but there’s something you seem to be neglecting: Living in fear of being killed will significantly reduce the amount of fun you’re having. Making it legal to kill non-person entities doesn’t introduce this fear. Making it legal to kill person entities does.
This seems to be pointing out that killing could be even worse due to fear but in fact isn’t. It’s more of a non-argument in favour of the opposing position than an argument in favour of yours, at least is it is framed as “but something you’re neglecting”.
Fear is frequently fun—ask any carnival promoter, or fans of Silent Hill. (That’s small-f fun; from a big-F standpoint, we’d be looking at fear as an aspect of sensual engagement or emotional involvement, but I think the argument still holds.) Without taking into account secondary effects like grief, it’s not at all clear to me that an environment containing a suitably calibrated level of lethal interpersonal threats would be less fun or less (instantaneously) Fun than one that didn’t, and this holds whether or not the subject is adult.
I do think those secondary effects would end up tipping the balance in favor of adults, though, once we do take them into account. There’s also a fairly obvious preference-utilitarian solution to this problem.
But the fear you get from Silent Hill is fear you can walk away from and know you’re not going to be attacked by zombies and nor will your loved ones. You choose when to feel it. You choose whether to feel it at all, and how often. Making fear that is known to be unfounded available on demand to those who choose it is not even in the same ballpark as making everyone worry that they’re going to be killed.
True enough, and I’m not going to rule out the existence of people calibrated to enjoy low or zero levels of simulated threat (I’m pretty sure they’re common, actually). It’s also pretty obvious that there are levels of fear which are unFun without qualification, hence the “suitably calibrated” that I edited into the grandparent. But—and forgive me for the sketchy evopsych tone of what I’m about to say—the response is there, and I find it unlikely that for some reason we’ve evolved to respond positively to simulated threats and negatively to real ones.
Being a participant in one of the safer societies ever to exist, I don’t have a huge data set to draw on. But I have been exposed to a few genuinely life-threatening experiences without intending to (mostly while free climbing), and while they were terrifying at the time I think the final fun-theoretic balance came out positive. My best guess, and bear in mind that this is even more speculative, is that levels of risk typical to contemporary life would have been suboptimal in the EEA.
How would you feel about a society otherwise similar to our own which included some designated spaces with, essentially, a sign on the door saying “by entering this room, you waive all criminal and civil liability for violent acts committed against you by other people in this room” and had a subculture of people who hung out in such places, intermittently mutilating and murdering each other?
I think I’d be okay with it in principle, in the absence of some well-established psychology showing strong negative externalities and in the presence of some relatively equitable system for mitigating the obvious physical externalities (loss of employment due to disability, etc.), preferably without recourse to the broader society’s resources. I probably wouldn’t participate in the subculture, though—my own level of fun calibration relative to threat isn’t that high.
Well, keep in mind, even inside such a room social norms would rapidly evolve against letting things get too exciting, it’s just that there wouldn’t be any recourse to a larger legal system to resolve the finer points.
Maybe a big guy sits down in the corner with a tattoo across his bare chest saying “I am the lawgiver, if anyone in the room I watch is injured or killed without appropriate permission I will break the aggressor’s arms” and mostly follows through on that. When somebody kicks the lawgiver’s ass without taking over the job, everybody else votes with their feet.
a few genuinely life-threatening experiences [..] I think the final fun-theoretic balance came out positive
Death represents pretty significant disutility; if the experience was significantly life-threatening, you’re attributing some correspondingly significant utility to the experience of surviving. How confident are you?
Ah. I probably should have been clearer about that. Above I haven’t been talking about expected utilities (which are likely negative, although I’d need a clearer picture of the risks than I have to do the math); in the last paragraph of the grandparent I was discussing the sum of fun-theoretic effects applying to me in the local Everett branch, and previously I’d been talking about what I assumed to be the utilitarianism of Bakkot’s hypothetical (which seemed to make the most sense as an average-utilitarian framework with little or no attention given to future preferences).
My preferences do contain a large negative term for death (and I don’t free climb anymore, incidentally). I’m not that reckless.
Okay, yes. However, I’m almost certain that having killers running around unchecked will not produce the optimal level and type of fear in the greatest possible number of people.
I find it unlikely that for some reason we’ve evolved to respond positively to simulated threats and negatively to real ones.
Why? A simulated threat prompts an immediate response, but killers on the loose prompts a lot of worrying over a long period of time. While fighting off a murderer might spike your adrenaline, that’s not what killers on the loose will do. Instead people will lock their doors. They’ll fear for their safety. They’ll be afraid to let strangers into their home. They’ll worry about what happens if they have a fight with their friend—because the friend can commit murder with impunity. They’ll look over their shoulders. Parents will spend every second worrying about their children. The children will have little or no freedom, because the parents won’t leave them alone and may just keep them inside all the time, which is NOT optimal. People will have a lot of cortisol, depressing immune systems and promoting obesity.
That’s NOT THE SAME as a single burst of adrenaline, whether from falling while climbing or from watching a movie or even from fighting for your life. So I guess you’re right that it’s not about whether it’s real or not (though if it’s a game, then when it gets too intense, you can just turn it off, and you can’t turn off real life), but about the type of threat. However, the simulated threat doesn’t actually make you less likely to continue living, whereas a real threat does.
Well, of course I don’t think that allowing murder without restriction is going to make everyone fun-theoretically better off, let alone maximally satisfy their preferences over the utilitarian criteria I actually believe in. My original claim was a lot narrower than that, and in any case I’m mostly playing devil’s advocate at this point; although I really do think that fun-theoretic optimization is best approached without reflexively minimizing things like fear or pain on grounds of our preexisting heuristics. That said, I’m not sure this is always going to be true:
A simulated threat prompts an immediate response, but killers on the loose prompts a lot of worrying over a long period of time. While fighting off a murderer might spike your adrenaline, that’s not what killers on the loose will do. Instead people will lock their doors [...] People will have a lot of cortisol, depressing immune systems and promoting obesity.
We know about a lot of societies with a lot of different accepted levels of violence. The most violent that I know of present up to about a 30% chance of premature death, so much higher than anything Western society presents that it’s scarcely conceivable (even front-line soldiers don’t have those death rates, although front-line service is more dangerous per unit time). But there’s very much not a monotonic relationship between level of violence and cultural paranoia, or trust of strangers, or freedom given to children. Early medieval Iceland, for example, had murder rates orders of magnitude higher than what we see now (implicit in textual sources, and confirmed by skeletal evidence); but children worked and traveled independently there, and hospitality to strangers was enshrined in law and custom. The same seems to go for more contemporary societies if the murder rates I’ve seen are at all accurate, although I don’t have as rich a picture for most of them. Our cultural fears of violence are very poorly correlated with actual expectations, as even a cursory glance over the most recent child molestation scare should show.
If studies of relative cortisol levels have ever been performed, I don’t know about them; but the cultures themselves don’t seem to show evidence of that kind of stress. I’d expect to see more paranoia following a recent uptick in violence, but I wouldn’t expect to see it well correlated with the base rate.
Early medieval Iceland, for example, had murder rates orders of magnitude higher than what we see now (implicit in textual sources, and confirmed by skeletal evidence); but children worked and traveled independently there, and hospitality to strangers was enshrined in law and custom. The same seems to go for more contemporary societies if the murder rates I’ve seen are at all accurate, although I don’t have as rich a picture for most of them.
Okay. What kind of murder are we talking about? What made up most of the extra—was it all sorts of things or was it duels? And was it accepted or was it frowned on? Were murderers prosecuted? Did victims’ families avenge them?
I’d expect to see more paranoia following a recent uptick in violence, but I wouldn’t expect to see it well correlated with the base rate.
Okay. What kind of murder are we talking about? What made up most of the extra—was it all sorts of things or was it duels? And was it accepted or was it frowned on? Were murderers prosecuted? Did victims’ families avenge them?
I’m not historian enough to say for sure, unfortunately. Judicial duels were part of the culture there, but the textual sources indicate that informal feuds were common, as were robbery and various other forms of informal violence. You could bring suit upon a murderer or other criminal in order to compel them to pay blood money or suffer in kind, but there was much less central authority than we’re used to, and nothing resembling a police force.
Yes. Don’t get too hung up on the specific example, though; I chose it only because it’s a time and place that I’ve actually studied. The pattern (or, really, lack of a pattern) I’m trying to point to is much more general, and includes many cultures that don’t have a strong emphasis on honor.
Much less significantly, a culture in which you are obliged to either raise your children or see them put through foster care is also a much less fun culture to live in.
Somewhat regardless of our private feelings on the matter, a tip: Forget OKCupid, do you not see how earnestly stating such beliefs in public gives your handle a reputation you might not mind in general, yet greatly want to avoid at some future point of your LW blogging—such as when wanting to sway someone in an area concerning ethical values and empathy?
And it’s not clear that adding a person to the universe (as things stand today) will, on average, increase the amount of fun had down the line; this is why you’re not obliged to be trying to have as many children as possible at all times.
I’d hope that LessWrong is a community in which having in the past been willing to support controversial opinions would increase your repute, not decrease it.
Giving respect to controversy for the sake of controversy is just inviting more trolling and flamewars.
I have respect for true ideas, whether they are outmoded or fashionable or before their time. I don’t care whether an idea is original or creative or daring or shocking or boring, I want to know if it’s sound.
The fact that you seem to expect increased respect because of controversial opinions makes me think that you when you wrote about your support for infanticide, you were motivated more by the fact that many people disagreed with you, than by the fact that it’s actually a good idea that would make the world a better place.
Libertarians are a contentious lot, in many cases delighting in staking ground and refusing to move on the farthest frontiers of applying the principles of noncoercion and nonaggression; resolutely finding the most outrageous and obnoxious position you could take that is theoretically compatible with libertarianism and challenging anyone to disagree. If they are not of the movement, then you can enjoy having shocked them with your purism and dedication to principle; if they are of the movement, you can gleefully read them out of it.
...whereas my positions on Newcomb’s paradox… are not
two-box
Let’s not go off on that tangent in here, but two-boxing is hardly uncontroversial on LW: lots of one-boxers here, including Yudkowsky. I’m one too. Also, didn’t you say you “want to win”?
I’d hope that LessWrong is a community in which having in the past been willing to support controversial opinions would increase your repute, not decrease it. If we always worry about our reputation when having discussions about possibly controversial topics, we’re not going to have much discussion at all.
We don’t mind. You aren’t actually going to kill babies and you aren’t able to make it legal either (ie. “mostly harmless”). Just don’t count too much on your anonymity! Assume that everything you say on the internet will come back to haunt you in the future—when trying to get a job, for example. Or when you are unjustly accused of murder in Italy.
EDIT: Pardon me, when I say “we” don’t mind I am speaking for myself and guessing at an overall consensus. I suspect there are one or two who do mind—but that’s ok and I consider it their problem.
Really? What’s your estimate of the probability that Bakkot’s inclusion in a CEV-calculating-algorythm’s target mind-space will make it more likely for the resulting CEV to tolerate infanticide?
Call P1 the probability that Bakkot’s inclusion in a CEV-calculating-algorythm’s target mind-space will make it more likely for the resulting CEV to tolerate infanticide. Call P2 the probability that Bakkot isn’t capable of making infanticide legal, disregarding P1.
You seem to be saying P1 approximately equals 0 (which is what I understand “negligible” to mean), and P2 approximately equals 1, and that P2-P1 does not approximately equal 1.
I don’t see how all three of those can be true at the same time.
Edit: if the downvotes are meant to indicate I’m wrong, I’d love a correction as well. OTOH, if they’re just meant to indicate the desire for fewer comments like these, that’s fine.
Multiheaded said “That only has a certainty approaching 1 if we all went and forgot about CEV and related prospects.” I understand “that” to refer to “bakkot isn’t able to make make infanticide legal”. I conclude that the probability that Bakkot isn’t capable of making infanticide legal, if we forget about CEV and related prospects, is approximately 1. P2 is the probability that Bakkot isn’t capable of making infanticide legal, if we disregard the probability that Bakkot’s inclusion in a CEV-calculating-algorythm’s target mind-space will make it more likely for the resulting CEV to tolerate infanticide. I conclude that P2 is approximately 1.
I’d hope that LessWrong is a community in which having in the past been willing to support controversial opinions would increase your repute, not decrease it.
Not always. For any random Lesswrongian with a contrarian position you’re nearly sure to find a Lesswrongian with a meta-contrarian one.
Also, notice that your signaling now is so bad from a baseline human standpoint that people’s sociopath/Wrong Wiring alarms are going off, or would go off if there’s more of such signaling. I think that my alarm’s just kinda sensitive* because I had it triggered by and calibrated on myself many times.
*(Alas, this could also be evidence that along the line I subconsciously tweaked this bit of my software to get more excuses for playing inquisitor with strangers)
FWIW, I disagree with you but you don’t set off my “sociopath alarm”. I think you and Multiheaded may not be able to have a normal conversation with each other, but each of you seems to get along fine with the rest of LW.
I think you and Multiheaded may not be able to have a normal conversation with each other
If it helps, I can pretty much envision what’s needed for such a conversation, and understand full well that the reasons it’s not actually happening are all in myself and not in Bakkot. But I don’t have the motivation to modify myself that specific way. On the other hand, it might come along naturally if I just improve in all areas of communication.
If it helps, my opinion of you has been raised by this thread, rather than lowered. I think very few LWians actually think less of you for this discussion, but that could just be me projecting typical mind fallacy.
I think very few LWians actually think less of you for this discussion
That’s lumping a whole lot of things together. I’d gladly hire Bakkot if I was running pretty much any kind of IT business. I’d enjoy some kinds of debate with him. I’d be interested in playing an online game with him. I probably wouldn’t share a beer. I definitely would participate in a smear campaign if he was running for public office.
Do you mean that it’s pretty certain that I’m not obliged to be trying to have as many children as possible at all times?
Or that it’s pretty certain that the fact that it’s not clear that adding a person to the universe (as things stand today) will, on average, increase the amount of fun had down the line is why I’m not obliged to be trying to have as many children as possible at all times?
Or both?
Also: how important is it to you to manage your handle’s reputation in such a way as to maximize your ability to sway someone on LW in areas concerning ethical values and empathy?
Also: how important is it to you to manage your handle’s reputation in such a way as to maximize your ability to sway someone on LW in areas concerning ethical values and empathy?
Unimportant, because I’m poor at persuading the type of people who care about their status on LW anyway, and am only at all likely to make an impact on the type of person who, like me, cares little/sporadically about their signaling here.
Much less significantly, a culture in which you are obliged to either raise your children or see them put through foster care is also a much less fun culture to live in.
Quite aside from everything else, this line is needlessly grating to anyone who even slightly adheres to the Western culture’s traditional values. You could’ve phrased that differently… somehow. There’s a big difference between denouncing what a largely contrarian audience takes as the standards imposed upon them by society at large and denouncing what they perceive to be their own values. This might be hypocritical, but I guess that many LW readers feel just like that.
If I kill a person, the number of Fun-having-person-moments in the universe is reduced by the remaining lifetime that person would potentially have had. If I kill a baby, the number of Fun-having-person-moments in the universe is reduced by the entire lifetime of the person that baby would potentially have become.
Go start breeding now. Or, say, manufacture defective condoms. (Or identify your real reason for not killing babies.)
Please re-read the comment thread. If you still think we’re talking about my reasons for doing or not doing anything in particular, let me know, and I’ll try to figure out how to prevent such misunderstandings in the future.
Right now, I simply can’t help but feel that if everyone who’d find it preferable to our world was (in real life) hit by a truck tomorrow, my utility function would increase.
if everyone who’d find it preferable to our world was (in real life) hit by a truck tomorrow, my utility function would increase.
Downvoted.
You just said that you want me dead in real life.
I don’t see how this is at all acceptable. Having a different viewpoint than you (note: I have never killed any babies, nor do I have any desire to) does not make saying these things towards me, and others with my view, ok.
If it should happen that tomorrow I find myself in the state of believing I would be happier were you dead, what do you think I ought to do about that?
I mean, I think we can agree that I ought not take steps to end your life, nor should I threaten to do so. (Multiheaded did neither of these things.)
But would it really be unacceptable for me to observe out loud that that was the state I was in? Why?
But would it really be unacceptable for me to observe out loud that that was the state I was in?
That depends on what it contributes to the discussion. “I’m too tired to talk about this now” or “I find it distressing that you think a world with less stigma against infanticide would be fun” help us understand where the other is coming from, even if they don’t help us understand the topic better.
“I wish you were dead” detracts from the discussion.
Multiheaded said his/her (it’s her, right? >_>) utility would increase, not happiness. If this is true, then, ignoring oppurtunity costs dead is what daenerys and other baby killing advocators ought be, subjectively-objectively for multiheaded.
edit: but it’s almost definetely not true. Utility was probably being conflated with something, or Multiheaded was biased by emotional state (was REAL MAD, in less technical terms.)
Can somebody else please give answering this a crack? Because I think I am too upset that this question is even disputed to be able to provide a clear answer. Best shot:
To me it seems obvious that there falls a category of Things You Shouldn’t Say To People. “I wish you were dead” and it’s variants definitely falls under that category. The utility you get from saying it is less than the disutility I get from hearing it. Also it leads to a poisonous society that no one wants to participate in.
Edit: I am amused that my post admitting to having an emotional reaction affect my reasoning abilities got downvoted.
For what it’s worth, I don’t believe you deserved the downvote. I also don’t believe most of the other comments in this thread deserved to be downvoted, especially since it makes it far less likely that anyone else will give answering my question a crack, since it’s mostly invisible now.
That said, I do understand the “it’s OK for it to be true but you can’t say it” mainstream social convention, which is what you seem to be invoking.
It just doesn’t seem to fit very well with the stated goals of this site. For my own part, if someone wants me dead, I want to know they want me dead. We can’t engage with or improve a reality we’re not allowed to even admit to. (Which is also why I dispute the “poisonous society” claim. A society where it’s understood that people might want me dead and there’s no way for me to know because of course they won’t ever say it seems far more poisonous to me.)
I never declared Crocker’s Rules on this site. If you would like to, you can, and people can tell you when they want you dead.
However blanket statements such as “I wish everyone with were dead” are never ok, because you can’t know that absolutely everyone who holds Position X has declared Crocker’s Rules. Even if everyone who participated in the discussion under position X has declared Crocker’s Rules, there might be lurkers who haven’t.
I suppose an exception to that might be “I wish everyone who has declared Crocker’s Rules was dead”, but I can’t see why anyone would make that statement.
I’m still curious, however, about your answer to my original question. If it should happen that tomorrow I find myself in the state of believing I would be happier were you dead, what do you think I ought to do about that?
Or, if the answer is different: If it should happen that tomorrow you find myself in the state of believing you would be happier were I dead, what do you think you ought to do about that? (Given that I too have not declared Crocker’s Rules.)
I mean, I understand that you don’t think we should actually tell each other about it, but I’m wondering if that’s all there is to say on the matter… just keep the feeling secret and go on about our business normally?
For my own part, that’s not the threshold I consider Crocker’s Rules to endorse crossing, but I suppose reasonable people can disagree on where that threshold is and over time the actual threshold will come to resemble some aggregated function of our opinions on the matter, and announcements like yours are part of that process.
Well, you, ceteris paribus, would want people—including, in particular, emotionally volatile people like me—free to kill their children in real life. I’d hate that more than I’d regret your death, indeed!
(Although at no point and in no way am I going to be insane enough to really kill you, just as you’re not insane enough to personally kill babies)
if everyone who’d find it preferable to our world was (in real life) hit by a truck tomorrow, my utility function would increase.
I think you should take that back, personally. I can understand you saying it out of frustration, but saying that you want people dead is generally a bad thing to do.
Oh, and you’re creating significant emotional turmoil in me right now. I’m stepping away and going to sleep, although I don’t suspect that this turmoil is any sign of me being less rational than you in regards to our respective values right now.
The other ones would have an abnormally strong will to override barriers and self-modify, which can easily make them just as dangerous.
You are overlooking the extreme situations some people are forced into. Looking at the act as being primarily a function of a person’s internal state state can be a poor approximation. As nearly as I can tell, if an arbitrarily selected person in the West were put in a situation as dire as these infanticidal mothers had been forced into, they would quite probably do the same thing.
Note that the geographical variation in infanticide rates is more plausibly consistent with
external factors driving the rates than internal factors. The populations of the USA and Canada
are not hugely different, yet there is a 2X difference in the rates between them (as I quoted from
the article that I cited before).
I strongly doubt that the proportion of psychopaths and extreme self-modifiers differs so strongly
between the two nations—but the US has been shredding its social safety nets for years.
This is easy enough to check. Do most poor, fairly desperate people whose situation is sufficiently alike that of our hypothetical normal childkiller, in fact, kill their children?
(No, I can’t quite define “sufficiently alike” right off the bat. Wouldn’t mind working it out together.)
The Greeks and Romans, for example, don’t seem to have been run down by psychopaths.
With genocide of any foreigners and mass torture for entertainment also having been considered perfectly acceptable, the Roman culture in the flesh would certainly feel alien enough to us that an utilitarian, altruistic time traveler could likely be predicted to attempt to sway it, with virtually any means justifying the end for them.*
I know I would, and I know that I’m not an unusual decision maker for the LW community.
*(cue obvious SF story idea with the time traveler ending up as Jesus)
But these seem to have been larger cultural phenomena, not the unchecked actions of a few psychopaths. Psychopathy affects around 1% of the population, and I doubt so few people could have swayed the entire culture if the rest of them had no interest in killing people.
You’re right that we don’t have data on the incidence of psychopathy in ancient Rome, and our data its current incidence is pretty sketchy. (Unlike most mental illnesses, psychopathy is more a problem for other people than the person who has it, so psychopaths have no reason to get treatment. Not that we really have any treatment if they did.)
But there seem to be both genetic and social components (e.g. being abused as a child), so probably those same genetic opportunities got triggered in some people throughout history. Possibly at different rates than here and now.
I suspect a lot of the people who would agree with this sentiment would change their minds in the face of a sufficiently compelling argument that there exists some scenario under which they would be able to kill their child.
I’ve worked with parents of very disabled children, and it’s not an easy life. For mothers especially, it becomes your career. I can imagine a lot of parents might consider infanticide if they knew that was going to be their life.
Ditto, as someone who works in disability care and child care (including infant care), I support the baby-killing scenario.
I worked for a family that had a severely mentally and physically disabled 6-year old. She was at infant-level cognition, practically blind, and had very little control over her body. There was almost nothing going on mentally, but she was very volatile about sounds/music/surroundings. You could tell if she was happy or sad by whether she was laughing or crying, and she cried a LOT.
Trying to get her to STOP crying was extremely difficult, because there was no communication, and she never wanted the SAME things. However it was also very important to get her calm QUICKLY because if she cried too long she would have a “meltdown”, be near inconsolable, throw up, and then you’d have to vent her stomach.
Her parents were the best at reading her. They trained people by pretty much putting you in a room with her, until you developed an ineffable intuitive ability to keep her happy. When I moved to a different city, it took them about 3-4 months to find a replacement for me who wouldn’t quit by the second day. I was driving back to my old city once a week to work for them during that time.
Her existence had a terrible effect on her family. They had to hire around the clock care. As in, amazingly patient care-givers that were hard to find, to cover about 100 hours a week. I would get stressed covering 2 shifts a week, and I don’t know how her parents were managing to cope.
This child was a drain on society and on everyone around her. Because of her parents’ religious values, they wouldn’t kill her even if it were legal. But their lives would have been dramatically improved if it were otherwise.
Also, I agree that infants have less or equal personhood than many animals. The way I handle the discrepancy is by being a vegetarian. But since most people aren’t vegetarians, they don’t really have a strong supporting reason to be against legalized infanticide.
So, my position is that the necessary standard to justify ending a 10 month old’s life is only a bit lower than that of ending a 18 year old’s life, and is only a bit higher than the necessary standard to justify ending a fetus’s life. I’m patient. But what that statement often obscures is that I’m willing to let people meet that standard. I would support ending the individual you described at ages of 6 years, 60 years, 6 months, or 6 months after conception.
But the acknowledgement that not every life should be continued is very different from a “return policy” sort of infanticide which Bakkot is justifying by saying “well, they’re not people yet.” Sometimes it’s best to kill people, too, and so personhood isn’t the true issue.
(edit)
I have the feeling that I’ve got to state the following belief in plain text:
Regardless of whether “babies are people” (and yeah, I guess I wouldn’t call them that on most relevant criteria), any parent who proves able to kill their child while not faced with an unbearable alternative cost (a hundred strangers for an altruistic utilitarian, eternal and justified damnation for a deeply brainwashed believer) is damn near guaranteed to have their brain wired in a manner unacceptable to modern society.
Such wiring so strongly correlates with harmful, unsympathetic psychopaths that, if faced with a binary choice to murder any would-be childkillers on sight or ignore them, we should not waver in exterminating them. Of course, a better solution is a blanket application of unbounded social stigma as a first line deterrent and individual treatment of every one case, whether with an attempt at readjustment, isolation or execution.
There is another, quite different, situation where it happens: Highly stressed mothers of newborns.
Interesting. Having suspected that something along these lines was out there, I did mention the possibility of readjustment. However,
1) sorry and non-vindictive as we might feel for this subset of childkillers, we’d still have to give them some significant punishment, in order not to weaken our overall deterrence factor.
2) This still would hardly push anyone (me included) from “indiscriminating extermination” to “ignore” in a binary choice scenario.
I suspect that “babykilling is OK in and of itself, but it’s a visible marker for psychosis and we want to justify taking action against psychotics and therefore we criminalize babykilling anyway” isn’t a particularly stable thought in human minds, and pretty quickly decomposes into “babykilling is not OK,” “psychosis is not OK,” “babykillers are psychotic,” a 25% chance of “psychotics kill babies,” and two photons.
I know it’s stupid to jump in here, but you don’t mean psychotic or psychosis. You mean psychopathic (a.k.a. sociopathic). Please don’t lump the mentally ill together with evil murderers. Actual psychotic people are hearing voices and miserable, not gleefully plotting to kill their own children. You’re thinking of sociopaths. Psychotics don’t kill babies any more than anyone else. It’s sociopaths who should all be killed or otherwise removed from society.
Some of the traits listed on the wikipedia page for psychopathy are traits that I want and have modified myself towards:
Lots of sociopaths as the term is clinically defined live perfectly productive lives, often in high-stimulation, high-risk jobs that neurotypical people don’t want to do like small aircraft piloting, serving in the special forces of their local military and so on. They don’t learn well from bad experiences and they need a lot of stimulation to get a high, so those sorts of roles are ideal for them.
They don’t need to be killed or removed from society, they need to be channelled into jobs where they can have fun and where their psychological resilience is an asset.
Huh, okay. Thanks.
Aren’t sociopaths mentally ill too?
Yes, but people with different types of illness vary in whether they are likely to kill other people, which is the question here. This metastudy found half of male criminals have antisocial personality disorder (including sociopaths and psychopaths) and less than 4% have psychotic disorders. In other words, criminals are unlikely to be people who have lost touch with reality and more likely to be people who just don’t care about other people.
Interesting, I knew that the rate was very low for psychotic people, but not that it was so high for sociopathic ones. I still don’t think all sociopaths should be killed.
If you say they are, it’s in a totally different way. Taboo “mentally Ill”.
I was being a bit pedantic. When she says “don’t lump the mentally ill together with evil murderers” I think she means “don’t lump [psychotic] people in with evil murderers”, which I don’t disagree with. However, not all sociopaths are evil murderers. I would even say it’s wrong to lump these mentally ill sociopaths together with evil murderers.
In other words, AspiringKnitter,
Okay. I’ve never heard of any non-evil sociopaths before, but I’ll accept that they exist if you tell me they do.
What I meant was indeed that psychotic people aren’t any more evil on average than normal people. The point is irrelevant to the thread, but I make it wherever it needs to be made because conflating the two isn’t just sloppy, it harms real people in real life.
I think many sociopaths become high-powered businesspeople.
The other thing that “harms people in real life” is saying stuff like “sociopaths should all be killed or otherwise removed from society”. To say such things, you must override your moral beliefs, which is not a good habit to be in, and not a good image of yourself to cache.
This may be a nitpick, but it’s not clear to me that “removing all sociopaths from society” will even be beneficial to the remaining society. It’s entirely possible that our society requires a certain number of sociopaths in order to function.
I have no hard evidence one way or the other, but I’m pretty sure that, historically, plans that involved “remove all X from society” turned out very poorly, for any given X.
yeah good point. Not all sociopaths are murderers, just cut the middleman and do whatever with the murderers.
Proxy tests (are you a sociopath, are you black, do you have a shaved head, etc) are a terrible idea.
By “murderer,” here, do you mean someone who has actually committed murder?
yeah. mostly. Though it would be nice to catch murderers before they kill anyone. At this point tho, I dont think we are generally rational enough to figure out in advance who the murderers are without huge collateral disutility.
I’m going to stop discussing this because it is about to get dangerously mindkillery.
Depends how far in advance you’re looking. Aiming a loaded gun, or charging forward while screaming and brandishing something sharp and heavy, provide very solid evidence before any injury is done, and modern medicine can turn what seemed like successful murder back into ‘attempted’ by making it possible to recover after the injury.
Good point, although actually, my moral beliefs are consequentialist, and therefore actually formulated as “prevent the greatest possible number of murders” rather than “kill the fewest possible people personally”, so it’s not actually accurate to say I have to override moral beliefs to advocate removing sociopaths from society. But I guess the best idea is to neutralize the threat they pose while still giving them a chance at redemption. You’re right.
I thought most high-powered businesspeople were evil. XP
Of course. I agree that one death is preferable to many, no matter who or what does the killing. I am talking about the effects on yourself of endorsing murder, and possibly the less noble real reason you chose that solution.
Maybe you have observed what I am talking about: people having to steel themselves against their moral intuitions when they say or do certain things. You can see it in their faces; a grim, slightly sadistic hatred, I call it the “murder face”. I don’t think people do this because they are strict utilitarians. The murder face is not the reaction you would expect from a utilitarian reluctantly deciding that someone has to be executed.
I don’t think you said “sociopaths should all be killed or otherwise removed from society” for strictly utilitarian reasons either. I would expect a utilitarian to stress out and shit themselves for a few days (or as long as they had, up to years) trying to think of some other way to solve the problem before they would ever even think of murder.
The thing is, trades of one life for many are nearly always false dichotomies. There is some twisted way that humans are unjustifiably drawn to consider murder without even trying to consider alternatives. See the sequence on ethical injunctions.
Thru the known mechanisms of self-image, cached thoughts and so on, proposing murder as a solution just makes this problem worse in the future. You literally become less moral by saying that.
But I don’t have to solve the problem. Whatever I think of regarding sociopaths is pretty pointless, since I won’t have the chance to do it anyway, and even if I decided I really did think that was definitely the best course of action (which I’m not certain of; note that I’ve always qualified it with “or otherwise removed from society”, which could include all sorts of other possibilities) after considering all the other possibilities, I doubt that I personally would be able to do it anyway, and if I did I would go to jail and I don’t want that either. So for me to say it is as easy as the trolley problem (am I the only person for whom the trolley problem is easy?).
Thank you. If I’m ever in a position where killing someone is a course of action that’s even on my radar as something to consider, I’ll bear that in mind.
Thank you for pointing that out. Just for the record, not killing people is one of my terminal values, and if I’m ever in a position to deal personally with the sociopath problem, I’ll be considering the other possibilities first.
Or, high powered politicians or the upper echelons of any religion’s leadership.
Yeah, my understanding is that they exist. Just wondering, how would you expect to hear about a non-evil sociopath?
Yeah, I’m totally on board with you there (though I’m not really fond of the word evil). I remember hearing that psychotic people are much more likely to hurt themselves than average, but not more likely to hurt others. And yeah, it’s bad to consider them to be “evil” when they’re not or to contribute to a societal model of them that does the same.
Are we talking about psychotic people here or sociopaths (psychopaths)? The two are vastly different. Or are you saying that neither psychotic people nor sociopaths are necessarily evil?
I am saying that neither are necessarily evil.
OK.
(It’s odd how the words “schizophrenic” and “psychotic” bring up such different connotations even though schizophrenia is the poster-child of psychosis. (Saying this as a schizotypal person with “ultra high risk” of schizophrenia.))
Where did the two photons come from?
The photons come from unjustified pattern-matching.
Oooh.
Exhibit A: me.
In the end, I just feel that it’s incompatible with my terminal values, one way or the other.
Infanticide has been considered a normal practice in a lot of cultures. The Greeks and Romans, for example, don’t seem to have been run down by psychopaths.
I don’t think we have a good way to know about the later harmful actions of people who kill their infants. Either we find them out and lock them up, in which case their life is no longer really representative of the population, or we don’t know about what they’ve done.
I’ve managed to overlook the most important (and fairly obvious) thing, though!
If the idea of “childkilling=bad” is weakly or not at all ingrained in a culture, it’s easy to override both one’s innate and cultural barriers to kill your child, so most normally wired people would be capable of it ⇒ the majority of childkillers are normal people.
If it’s ingrained as strongly as in the West today, there would be few people capable of overriding such a strong cultural barrier, ⇒ the majority of childkillers left would be the ones who get no barriers in the first place, i.e. largely harmful, unsympathetic psychopaths. The other ones would have an abnormally strong will to override barriers and self-modify, which can easily make them just as dangerous.
Okay, got it. I agree that in a culture that condemns infanticide, people who do it anyway are likely to be quite different from the people who don’t. But Bakkot’s claim was that our culture should allow it, which should not be expected to increase the number of psychopaths.
I’m also not sure that unbounded social stigma is an effective way to deter people who essentially don’t care about other people. We don’t really know of good ways to change psychopathy.
(edited for clarity)
First, any single relaxed taboo feels to me like a blow against the entire net of ethical inhibitions, both in a neurotypical person and in a culture (proportional to the taboo’s strength and gravity, that is). Therefore, I think it could be a slippery slope into antisociality for some people who previously behaved acceptably. Second, we could be taking one filter of existing psychopaths from ourselves while giving the psychopaths a safe opportunity to let their disguise down. Easier for them to evade us, harder for us to hunt them down.
Successful psychopaths do understand that society’s opinion of them can affect their well-being, this is why they bother to conceal their abnormality in the first place.
If “hunting down” psychopaths is our goal, we’d do better to look for people who torture or kill animals. My understanding is that these behaviors are a common warning sign of antisocial personality disorder, and I’m sure it’s more common than infanticide because it’s less punished. Would you advocate punishing anyone diagnosed with antisocial personality right away, or would you want to wait until they actually committed a crime?
I’d put taboos in three categories. Some taboos (e.g. against women wearing trousers, profanity, homosexuality, or atheism) seem pointless and we were right to relax them. Some taboos, like those against theft and murder, I agree we should hold in place because they produce so little value for the harm they produce. Some, like extramarital sex and abortion, are more ambiguous. They probably allow some people to get away with unnecessary cruelty. But because the the personal freedom they create, I think they produce a net good.
I put legalized infanticide in the third category. I gather you put it in the second? In other words, do you believe the harm it would create from psychopaths killing babies and generally being harder to detect would be greater than the benefit to people who don’t raise unwanted children?
I believe that legalized infanticide would be harmful, at least, to our particular culture for many reasons, some of which I’m sure I haven’t even thought of yet. I’m not even sure whether the strongest reason for not doing it is connected to psychopathic behaviour at all. Regardless, I’m certain about fighting it tooth and nail if need be, at at least a 0.85.
By the way, have you considered the general memetic chaos that would erupt in Western society if somehow infanticide was really, practically made legal?
Huh. I don’t follow the reasoning. Why do you expect social stigma attached to infanticide to correlate with less fun?
That’s pretty much tautological—you could as well express it as “forbidding things correlates with more fun unless there’s some reason allowing something increases the amount of fun in the universe”. What you really need for this argument to work is a way of showing that people attach intrinsic utility to increased latitude of choice, which in light of the paradox of choice looks questionable.
Aside from any other possible issues, you’re leaving out the possibility that one person may want to kill a baby that another person is very attached to.
Do you have an age or ability level at which you think being a person begins?
I expect this proposal could be taken seriously: when an owner wants to have a pet put down other than for humanitarian reasons, others who have had a close relationship to the pet, and are willing and able to take responsibility for it, get the right to veto and take custody of the pet.
Ways in which Nancy’s argument was not exactly like arguing that abortion should be illegal because other people might have gotten attached to the fetus:
She didn’t say: therefore it should be completely prohibited.
There can be more interaction by non-mothers with a baby than a fetus.
I’m not sure how much I will participate on this topic, it seems like a bit of a mind killer. I’m impressed we’ve found a more volatile version of the notorious internet abortion debate.
The standard reply to “But I like your fetus, don’t kill it!” is “I’d let you have it, but we don’t have the tech for me to give it to you now. My only options are going through several months of pregnancy plus labor, or killing it now. So down the drain it goes.”. This suggests that inasmuch are there are people attached to fetuses not inside themselves, we should work on eviction tech.
Or, in any even slightly libertarian weirdtopia, it could be a matter of compensation for bearing the child.
That’s legal now (though we tend to offer status and supportive work like childcare, not money). Libertarianism mandates that refusing the transaction at any price and aborting also remains legal (unless embryos turn out to be people at typical abortion age, in which case they are born in debt).
To which I can see people responding by getting pregnant, getting others attached, threatening abortion and collecting compensation just to make money. Especially if pro-lifers run around paying off as many would-be aborters as possible.
Maybe. Maybe society would create new norms to fix that.
I’d like to mention that I’m emphatically not a libertarian (in fact identifying as socialist), and find many absurdities with its basic concept (see Yvain’s “Why I Hate Your Freedom); however, I’d always like to learn more about how it could plausibly work from its proponents, and am ready to shift towards it if I hear some unexpectedly strong arguments.
Odd to hear that about a community upon which one member unleashed an omnipotent monster from the future that could coerce folks who know the evidence for its existence to do its bidding. And where, upon an attempt to lock said monster away, about 6000 random people were sorta-maybe-kinda-killed by another member as retaliation for “censorship”.
:D
(take a stupid picture I made, based on this)
I expect this is a valid point. You can get away with far worse arguments when you have moral high ground to rely on.
Indeed. Look at a scenario like this. What if an adventurous young woman gets an unintended pregnancy, initially decides to have the child, many of her friends and her family are looking forward to it… then either the baby is crippled during birth or the mother simply changes her mind, unwilling to adapt her lifestyle to accommodate child-rearing, yet for some weird reason (selfish or not) refusing to give it up for adoption?
Suppose that she tells the doctor to euthanize the baby. Consider the repercussions in her immediate circle, e.g. what would be her mother’s reaction upon learning that she’s a grandmother no more (even if she’s told that the baby died of natural causes… yet has grounds to suspect that it didn’t)?
Completely independent of any of the rest of this, I absolutely endorse the legality of lying to people about why my child died, as well as the ethics of telling them it’s none of their damned business, with the possible exception of medical or legal examiners. I certainly endorse the legality of lying to my mother about it.
Further, I would be appalled by someone who felt entitled to demand such answers of a mother whose child had just died (again, outside of a medical or legal examination, maybe) and would endorse forcibly removing them from the presence of a mother whose child has just died.
I would not endorse smacking such a person upside the head, but I would nevertheless be tempted to.
Crap, now that was ill-thought. Yeah, definitely agreed. I removed the last two sentences. The rest of my argument for babies occasionally having great value to non-parents still stands.
If I kill a person, the number of Fun-having-person-moments in the universe is reduced by the remaining lifetime that person would potentially have had. If I kill a baby, the number of Fun-having-person-moments in the universe is reduced by the entire lifetime of the person that baby would potentially have become.
Reasoning sensibly about counterfactuals is hard, but it isn’t clear to me why the former involves less total Fun than latter does. If anything, I would expect that removing an entire lifetime’s worth of Fun-having reduces total Fun more than removing a fraction of a lifetime’s worth.
If I believed the only reason nobody has killed me yet is because it is illegal to kill people, I wouldn’t be very happy.
I mean that a world where there is someone who would want to kill me, and the only reason why they don’t is that they’re afraid of ending up in jail, is not so much of a world in which I’d like to live.
It’s not that anyone hates you; they might kill you because they’re afraid of you killing them first, if there were no legal deterrent against killing.
In particular, if you had any conflict with someone else in a world where killing was legal, it would quite possibly spiral out of control: you’re worried they might kill you, so you’re tempted to kill them first, but you know they’re thinking the same way, so you’re even more worried, etc.
At least in my country, killing someone for self-defence is already legal. (Plus, I don’t think I’m going to threaten to kill someone in the foreseeable future, anyway.)
I’m not sure where you live, but is killing someone who you think will try to kill you some day actually considered self-defense for legal purposes there? I’m pretty sure self-defense doesn’t cover that in the US.
No. I guess I misunderstood what orthonormal meant by “afraid of you killing them first”...
Right, but “I accidentally ran over his dog, and I was worried that he might kill me later for it, so I immediately backed up and ran him over” probably won’t count as self-defense in your country. But it’s the sort of thing that traditional game theory would advise if killing was legal.
This really is a case where imposing an external incentive can stop people from mutually defecting at every turn.
If killing were legal (in a modern state with available firearms, not an ancient tribe with strong reputation effects), threatening to kill someone would be the stupidest possible move. Everyone is a threat to kill you, and they’ll probably attempt it the moment they become afraid that you might do the same.
I don’t get it… He wouldn’t gain anything by killing you (ETA: other than what your father/wife/whoever would gain by killing him after he kills you), so why would you be afraid he would do that? (Also, I’m not sure the assumptions of traditional game theory apply to humans.)
If this was the case, I would expect places with less harsh penalties, or with lower probabilities of being convicted, to have a significantly higher homicide rate (all other things being equal). Does anyone have statistics about that? (Though all other things are seldom equal… Maybe the short/medium term effects of a change in legislation within a given country would be better data.)
I haven’t read it yet, but I think this is basically the thesis of Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature.
Have you seen The Dark Knight? This is exactly the situation with the two boats. (Not going into spoiler-y detail.) Causal decision theory demands that you kill the other person as quickly and safely (to you) as possible, just as it demands that you always defect on the one-shot (or known-iteration) Prisoner’s Dilemma.
Anyway, I think you shouldn’t end up murdering each other even in that case, and if everyone were timeless decision theorists (and this was mutual knowledge) they wouldn’t. But among humans? Plenty of them would.
As opposed to where? We can ban or allow murder. We can’t yet do personality modifications that deep.
As opposed to this world. I don’t think that, right now, there’s anyone who would want to kill me.
So, if Alice murdered Bob, she had always wanted to kill him since she was born (as opposed to her having changed her mind at some point)? Probably we can’t deliberately do personality modifications that deep (or do we? The results of Milgram’s experiment lead me to suspect it wouldn’t be completely impossible for me to convince someone to want to kill me—not that I can imagine a reason for me to do that).
(shrug) We’re both neglecting lots of things; we couldn’t have this conversation otherwise.
I agree with you that the risk of being killed reduces Fun, at least in some contexts. (It increases Fun in other contexts.) Then again, the risk of my baby being killed reduces Fun in some contexts as well. I don’t see any principled reason to consider the first factor in my calculations and not the second (or vice-versa), other than the desire to justify a preselected conclusion.
I agree that it’s not clear that adding a person to the universe increases the amount of Fun down the line. It’s also not clear that subtracting a person from the universe reduces the amount of Fun. Reasoning sensibly about conterfactuals is hard.
You’ve struck onto something here (taking into account your update about the risk only coming from yourself)
1) Under the current system, parents are somewhat Protected From Themselves. What if a mother, while suffering a state of affect, consciously and subconsciously knew that she was allowed to kill her baby, so she did it, then was hit with regret&remorse?
2) Under the current system, parents feel like society is pressuring them not to commit especially grave failures of parenting, which gives them a feeling of fairness.
If the only thing stopping a parent from killing their child is the illegalization of said act, then they shouldn’t be parents anyway. If you can’t control yourself with an infant, then the probability is pretty high that you are going to be some type of abusive parent. The child is likely going to be a net drain on society because of the low-level of upbringing.
It is probably better for the baby (and society) for it to be killed while it is a blicketless infant, than to grow up under the “care” of such a parent.
I can easily visualize that, in our world, some very quickly passing one-in-a-lifetime temptation to get rid of an infant is experienced by many even slightly unstable or emotionally volatile parents, then forgotten.
Would you really want to give that temptation a chance to realize itself in every case when the (appropriately huge—we’re talking about largely normal people here) social stigma extinguishes the temptation today?
Oh, and in no way it’s “only the illegalization”, it’s the meme in general too.
Maybe.
Suppose, for example, that what you’re describing here as instability/emotional volatility—or, more operationally, my likelihood of doing something unrecoverable-from which I generally abhor based on a very quickly passing once-in-a-lifetime temptation—is hereditable (either genetically or behaviorally, it doesn’t matter too much).
In that case, I suspect I would rather that infants born to emotionally volatile/unstable parents ten million years ago had not matured to breeding age, as I’d rather live in a species that’s less volatile in that way. So it seems to follow that if the social stigma is a social mechanism for compensating for such poor impulse control in humans, allowing humans with poor impulse control to successfully raise their children, I should also prefer that that stigma not have been implemented ten million years ago.
Of course, I’m not nearly so dispassionate about it when I think about present-day infants and their parents, but it’s not clear to me why I should endorse the more passionate view.
Incidentally, I also don’t think your hypothetical has much to do with the real reasons for an infanticide social stigma. I support the meme, I just don’t think this argument for it holds water.
Sorry, but I don’t like your reasoning.
Emotionally volatile people shouldn’t be automatically assumed to fail upon most such temptations, after all (when they fail in a big way, that’s when we hear about it the most), and might not even be a net negative for society in other spheres (although yeah, they probably are… still, it’s awfully cold just to unapologetically thin their numbers with eugenics. I know that a lot of things LWians (incl. me) would do or intend to do are awfully cold, but hell, this one concerns me directly!).
The “volatility” of one’s behavior is a sum of the individual’s psychological make-up—which might or might not be largely hereditary—and the weakness or strength of one’s tendency for self-control—which is definitely largely cultural/environmental.
Look at the Far Eastern and Scandinavian societies. Wouldn’t an emotionally unstable person being raised in one of them be trained to control their emotions to a much greater degree than e.g. in Southern Europe?
Further on the “hereditability” part; I’m really emotionally unstable (as you might have witnessed), but my parents are really stable and cool-headed most of the time; however, my aunt from my mother’s side is a whole lot like me. I attribute most of my mental weirdness to birth trauma (residual encephalopathy, I don’t know if it’s pre- or post-natal), but I don’t know whether part of it might be due to some recessive gene that manifested in my aunt and me, but not at all in my mother.
I agree that we shouldn’t assume that emotionally volatile people fail upon most such temptations.
I agree that my reasoning here is cold (indeed, I said as much myself, though I used the differently-loaded word “dispassionate”).
I agree that if impulse control is generally nonhereditable (and, again, I don’t just mean genetically), the argument I use above doesn’t apply.
I agree that different cultures train their members to “control their emotions” to different degrees. (Or, rather, I don’t think that’s true in general, but we’ve specifically been talking about the likelihood of expressing transient rage in the form of violence, and I agree that cultures differ in terms of how acceptable that is.)
I understand that, independent of any of the above, you don’t like my reasoning. It doesn’t make me especially happy either, come to that.
I still, incidentally, don’t believe that the stigma against infanticide is primarily intended to protect infants from transient murderous impulses in their parents.
Neither do I; the reasons for its development do need a lot of looking into. I just listed a function that it can likely accomplish with some success once it’s already firmly entrenched.
Yeah. I used “control” in the meaning of “steer”, not “rule over”.
Before I respond to this, can you reassure me that you’re actually interested in my honest response to it?
Yes, and by asking this you already tipped me off that it’s likely to be unpleasant to me, so please fire away.
Does the regret and remorse in case 1 actually matter? If it does, what do you want to say about parents who would feel less regret or remorse given the death of their child than given his or her continued life?
If their life is that terrible, there ought to be social services to take the child away from them and a good mechanism of adoption to place the child into. And I’m willing to pay a huge lot for that in various ways before legalizing infanticide becomes a reasonable alternative to me.
So I repeat my question: does the regret and remorse in case 1 actually matter? For example, what if a parent was regretful and remorseful about having their child forcibly put up for adoption; would that change your position?
I understand the argument that the infant’s life is valuable, and am not challenging that here. It was your invoking the parent’s regret and remorse as particularly relevant here that I was challenging.
Depends of what kind of parent and what kind of person they would’ve been if not for that incident. There’s certainly evidence that their parenting could’ve been poor, but I believe that it could’ve been just fine for a significant minority of cases. I don’t sympathize much with completely worthless parents, but what we have here is not a strong enough proof of worthlessness. And I feel really terrible for the “mostly-normal” parent here that I thought of (while somewhat modeling one on myself).
Huh? Would someone please explain how is this disagreeable at all? Look, I’m ready to change my mind if it’s the wise thing to do, I just don’t understand; where to, and why, do you want me to shift?
Is there a miscommunication here? parents who would feel more regret or remorse given the death of their child than given his or her continued life—that sounds to be, like, most parents in general, and ALL the parents whom society approves of.
Indeed you’re right; I mis-wrote. Fixed.
(rereads thread) Why, so you haven’t. I apologize; the fear of having my baby killed (well, by anyone other than me, anyway) is as you say irrelevant to your point. My error.
This seems to be pointing out that killing could be even worse due to fear but in fact isn’t. It’s more of a non-argument in favour of the opposing position than an argument in favour of yours, at least is it is framed as “but something you’re neglecting”.
The phrase “but there’s something you seem to be neglecting” does not make sense as a reply to the comment you quote.
Fear is frequently fun—ask any carnival promoter, or fans of Silent Hill. (That’s small-f fun; from a big-F standpoint, we’d be looking at fear as an aspect of sensual engagement or emotional involvement, but I think the argument still holds.) Without taking into account secondary effects like grief, it’s not at all clear to me that an environment containing a suitably calibrated level of lethal interpersonal threats would be less fun or less (instantaneously) Fun than one that didn’t, and this holds whether or not the subject is adult.
I do think those secondary effects would end up tipping the balance in favor of adults, though, once we do take them into account. There’s also a fairly obvious preference-utilitarian solution to this problem.
But the fear you get from Silent Hill is fear you can walk away from and know you’re not going to be attacked by zombies and nor will your loved ones. You choose when to feel it. You choose whether to feel it at all, and how often. Making fear that is known to be unfounded available on demand to those who choose it is not even in the same ballpark as making everyone worry that they’re going to be killed.
True enough, and I’m not going to rule out the existence of people calibrated to enjoy low or zero levels of simulated threat (I’m pretty sure they’re common, actually). It’s also pretty obvious that there are levels of fear which are unFun without qualification, hence the “suitably calibrated” that I edited into the grandparent. But—and forgive me for the sketchy evopsych tone of what I’m about to say—the response is there, and I find it unlikely that for some reason we’ve evolved to respond positively to simulated threats and negatively to real ones.
Being a participant in one of the safer societies ever to exist, I don’t have a huge data set to draw on. But I have been exposed to a few genuinely life-threatening experiences without intending to (mostly while free climbing), and while they were terrifying at the time I think the final fun-theoretic balance came out positive. My best guess, and bear in mind that this is even more speculative, is that levels of risk typical to contemporary life would have been suboptimal in the EEA.
How would you feel about a society otherwise similar to our own which included some designated spaces with, essentially, a sign on the door saying “by entering this room, you waive all criminal and civil liability for violent acts committed against you by other people in this room” and had a subculture of people who hung out in such places, intermittently mutilating and murdering each other?
I think I’d be okay with it in principle, in the absence of some well-established psychology showing strong negative externalities and in the presence of some relatively equitable system for mitigating the obvious physical externalities (loss of employment due to disability, etc.), preferably without recourse to the broader society’s resources. I probably wouldn’t participate in the subculture, though—my own level of fun calibration relative to threat isn’t that high.
Well, keep in mind, even inside such a room social norms would rapidly evolve against letting things get too exciting, it’s just that there wouldn’t be any recourse to a larger legal system to resolve the finer points.
Maybe a big guy sits down in the corner with a tattoo across his bare chest saying “I am the lawgiver, if anyone in the room I watch is injured or killed without appropriate permission I will break the aggressor’s arms” and mostly follows through on that. When somebody kicks the lawgiver’s ass without taking over the job, everybody else votes with their feet.
Death represents pretty significant disutility; if the experience was significantly life-threatening, you’re attributing some correspondingly significant utility to the experience of surviving. How confident are you?
Ah. I probably should have been clearer about that. Above I haven’t been talking about expected utilities (which are likely negative, although I’d need a clearer picture of the risks than I have to do the math); in the last paragraph of the grandparent I was discussing the sum of fun-theoretic effects applying to me in the local Everett branch, and previously I’d been talking about what I assumed to be the utilitarianism of Bakkot’s hypothetical (which seemed to make the most sense as an average-utilitarian framework with little or no attention given to future preferences).
My preferences do contain a large negative term for death (and I don’t free climb anymore, incidentally). I’m not that reckless.
Okay, yes. However, I’m almost certain that having killers running around unchecked will not produce the optimal level and type of fear in the greatest possible number of people.
Why? A simulated threat prompts an immediate response, but killers on the loose prompts a lot of worrying over a long period of time. While fighting off a murderer might spike your adrenaline, that’s not what killers on the loose will do. Instead people will lock their doors. They’ll fear for their safety. They’ll be afraid to let strangers into their home. They’ll worry about what happens if they have a fight with their friend—because the friend can commit murder with impunity. They’ll look over their shoulders. Parents will spend every second worrying about their children. The children will have little or no freedom, because the parents won’t leave them alone and may just keep them inside all the time, which is NOT optimal. People will have a lot of cortisol, depressing immune systems and promoting obesity.
That’s NOT THE SAME as a single burst of adrenaline, whether from falling while climbing or from watching a movie or even from fighting for your life. So I guess you’re right that it’s not about whether it’s real or not (though if it’s a game, then when it gets too intense, you can just turn it off, and you can’t turn off real life), but about the type of threat. However, the simulated threat doesn’t actually make you less likely to continue living, whereas a real threat does.
Well, of course I don’t think that allowing murder without restriction is going to make everyone fun-theoretically better off, let alone maximally satisfy their preferences over the utilitarian criteria I actually believe in. My original claim was a lot narrower than that, and in any case I’m mostly playing devil’s advocate at this point; although I really do think that fun-theoretic optimization is best approached without reflexively minimizing things like fear or pain on grounds of our preexisting heuristics. That said, I’m not sure this is always going to be true:
We know about a lot of societies with a lot of different accepted levels of violence. The most violent that I know of present up to about a 30% chance of premature death, so much higher than anything Western society presents that it’s scarcely conceivable (even front-line soldiers don’t have those death rates, although front-line service is more dangerous per unit time). But there’s very much not a monotonic relationship between level of violence and cultural paranoia, or trust of strangers, or freedom given to children. Early medieval Iceland, for example, had murder rates orders of magnitude higher than what we see now (implicit in textual sources, and confirmed by skeletal evidence); but children worked and traveled independently there, and hospitality to strangers was enshrined in law and custom. The same seems to go for more contemporary societies if the murder rates I’ve seen are at all accurate, although I don’t have as rich a picture for most of them. Our cultural fears of violence are very poorly correlated with actual expectations, as even a cursory glance over the most recent child molestation scare should show.
If studies of relative cortisol levels have ever been performed, I don’t know about them; but the cultures themselves don’t seem to show evidence of that kind of stress. I’d expect to see more paranoia following a recent uptick in violence, but I wouldn’t expect to see it well correlated with the base rate.
Okay. What kind of murder are we talking about? What made up most of the extra—was it all sorts of things or was it duels? And was it accepted or was it frowned on? Were murderers prosecuted? Did victims’ families avenge them?
Good point.
I’m not historian enough to say for sure, unfortunately. Judicial duels were part of the culture there, but the textual sources indicate that informal feuds were common, as were robbery and various other forms of informal violence. You could bring suit upon a murderer or other criminal in order to compel them to pay blood money or suffer in kind, but there was much less central authority than we’re used to, and nothing resembling a police force.
Was it by any chance a culture of honor?
Yes. Don’t get too hung up on the specific example, though; I chose it only because it’s a time and place that I’ve actually studied. The pattern (or, really, lack of a pattern) I’m trying to point to is much more general, and includes many cultures that don’t have a strong emphasis on honor.
Okay.
Somewhat regardless of our private feelings on the matter, a tip: Forget OKCupid, do you not see how earnestly stating such beliefs in public gives your handle a reputation you might not mind in general, yet greatly want to avoid at some future point of your LW blogging—such as when wanting to sway someone in an area concerning ethical values and empathy?
Now that’s pretty certain.
Giving respect to controversy for the sake of controversy is just inviting more trolling and flamewars.
I have respect for true ideas, whether they are outmoded or fashionable or before their time. I don’t care whether an idea is original or creative or daring or shocking or boring, I want to know if it’s sound.
The fact that you seem to expect increased respect because of controversial opinions makes me think that you when you wrote about your support for infanticide, you were motivated more by the fact that many people disagreed with you, than by the fact that it’s actually a good idea that would make the world a better place.
You remind me of Hanson (well, Doherty actually) on Libertarian Purity Duels
Let’s not go off on that tangent in here, but two-boxing is hardly uncontroversial on LW: lots of one-boxers here, including Yudkowsky. I’m one too. Also, didn’t you say you “want to win”?
We don’t mind. You aren’t actually going to kill babies and you aren’t able to make it legal either (ie. “mostly harmless”). Just don’t count too much on your anonymity! Assume that everything you say on the internet will come back to haunt you in the future—when trying to get a job, for example. Or when you are unjustly accused of murder in Italy.
EDIT: Pardon me, when I say “we” don’t mind I am speaking for myself and guessing at an overall consensus. I suspect there are one or two who do mind—but that’s ok and I consider it their problem.
That only has a certainty approaching 1 if we all went and forgot about CEV and related prospects.
Really? What’s your estimate of the probability that Bakkot’s inclusion in a CEV-calculating-algorythm’s target mind-space will make it more likely for the resulting CEV to tolerate infanticide?
Pretty negligible, but still orders of magnitude above Bakkot just altering society to tolerate infanticide on his own.
I would tend to agree for what it’s worth.
I think I’m not understanding you.
Call P1 the probability that Bakkot’s inclusion in a CEV-calculating-algorythm’s target mind-space will make it more likely for the resulting CEV to tolerate infanticide. Call P2 the probability that Bakkot isn’t capable of making infanticide legal, disregarding P1.
You seem to be saying P1 approximately equals 0 (which is what I understand “negligible” to mean), and P2 approximately equals 1, and that P2-P1 does not approximately equal 1.
I don’t see how all three of those can be true at the same time.
Edit: if the downvotes are meant to indicate I’m wrong, I’d love a correction as well. OTOH, if they’re just meant to indicate the desire for fewer comments like these, that’s fine.
Where do you get “P2 approximately equals 1”?
Multiheaded said “That only has a certainty approaching 1 if we all went and forgot about CEV and related prospects.”
I understand “that” to refer to “bakkot isn’t able to make make infanticide legal”.
I conclude that the probability that Bakkot isn’t capable of making infanticide legal, if we forget about CEV and related prospects, is approximately 1.
P2 is the probability that Bakkot isn’t capable of making infanticide legal, if we disregard the probability that Bakkot’s inclusion in a CEV-calculating-algorythm’s target mind-space will make it more likely for the resulting CEV to tolerate infanticide.
I conclude that P2 is approximately 1.
Not always. For any random Lesswrongian with a contrarian position you’re nearly sure to find a Lesswrongian with a meta-contrarian one.
Also, notice that your signaling now is so bad from a baseline human standpoint that people’s sociopath/Wrong Wiring alarms are going off, or would go off if there’s more of such signaling. I think that my alarm’s just kinda sensitive* because I had it triggered by and calibrated on myself many times.
*(Alas, this could also be evidence that along the line I subconsciously tweaked this bit of my software to get more excuses for playing inquisitor with strangers)
FWIW, I disagree with you but you don’t set off my “sociopath alarm”. I think you and Multiheaded may not be able to have a normal conversation with each other, but each of you seems to get along fine with the rest of LW.
If it helps, I can pretty much envision what’s needed for such a conversation, and understand full well that the reasons it’s not actually happening are all in myself and not in Bakkot. But I don’t have the motivation to modify myself that specific way. On the other hand, it might come along naturally if I just improve in all areas of communication.
Heck, I might be speaking in Runglish. Bed tiem.
I’m curious: did you?
If it helps, my opinion of you has been raised by this thread, rather than lowered. I think very few LWians actually think less of you for this discussion, but that could just be me projecting typical mind fallacy.
That’s lumping a whole lot of things together. I’d gladly hire Bakkot if I was running pretty much any kind of IT business. I’d enjoy some kinds of debate with him. I’d be interested in playing an online game with him. I probably wouldn’t share a beer. I definitely would participate in a smear campaign if he was running for public office.
Do you mean that it’s pretty certain that I’m not obliged to be trying to have as many children as possible at all times?
Or that it’s pretty certain that the fact that it’s not clear that adding a person to the universe (as things stand today) will, on average, increase the amount of fun had down the line is why I’m not obliged to be trying to have as many children as possible at all times?
Or both?
Also: how important is it to you to manage your handle’s reputation in such a way as to maximize your ability to sway someone on LW in areas concerning ethical values and empathy?
Hmm. Ehhh? …Feels like both.
Unimportant, because I’m poor at persuading the type of people who care about their status on LW anyway, and am only at all likely to make an impact on the type of person who, like me, cares little/sporadically about their signaling here.
OK, thanks for clarifying.
Quite aside from everything else, this line is needlessly grating to anyone who even slightly adheres to the Western culture’s traditional values. You could’ve phrased that differently… somehow. There’s a big difference between denouncing what a largely contrarian audience takes as the standards imposed upon them by society at large and denouncing what they perceive to be their own values. This might be hypocritical, but I guess that many LW readers feel just like that.
Go start breeding now. Or, say, manufacture defective condoms. (Or identify your real reason for not killing babies.)
Please re-read the comment thread. If you still think we’re talking about my reasons for doing or not doing anything in particular, let me know, and I’ll try to figure out how to prevent such misunderstandings in the future.
Oh blast it, I’ll just be honest.
Right now, I simply can’t help but feel that if everyone who’d find it preferable to our world was (in real life) hit by a truck tomorrow, my utility function would increase.
Downvoted.
You just said that you want me dead in real life.
I don’t see how this is at all acceptable. Having a different viewpoint than you (note: I have never killed any babies, nor do I have any desire to) does not make saying these things towards me, and others with my view, ok.
If it should happen that tomorrow I find myself in the state of believing I would be happier were you dead, what do you think I ought to do about that?
I mean, I think we can agree that I ought not take steps to end your life, nor should I threaten to do so. (Multiheaded did neither of these things.)
But would it really be unacceptable for me to observe out loud that that was the state I was in?
Why?
That depends on what it contributes to the discussion. “I’m too tired to talk about this now” or “I find it distressing that you think a world with less stigma against infanticide would be fun” help us understand where the other is coming from, even if they don’t help us understand the topic better.
“I wish you were dead” detracts from the discussion.
Multiheaded said his/her (it’s her, right? >_>) utility would increase, not happiness. If this is true, then, ignoring oppurtunity costs dead is what daenerys and other baby killing advocators ought be, subjectively-objectively for multiheaded.
edit: but it’s almost definetely not true. Utility was probably being conflated with something, or Multiheaded was biased by emotional state (was REAL MAD, in less technical terms.)
Can somebody else please give answering this a crack? Because I think I am too upset that this question is even disputed to be able to provide a clear answer. Best shot:
To me it seems obvious that there falls a category of Things You Shouldn’t Say To People. “I wish you were dead” and it’s variants definitely falls under that category. The utility you get from saying it is less than the disutility I get from hearing it. Also it leads to a poisonous society that no one wants to participate in.
Edit: I am amused that my post admitting to having an emotional reaction affect my reasoning abilities got downvoted.
For what it’s worth, I don’t believe you deserved the downvote. I also don’t believe most of the other comments in this thread deserved to be downvoted, especially since it makes it far less likely that anyone else will give answering my question a crack, since it’s mostly invisible now.
That said, I do understand the “it’s OK for it to be true but you can’t say it” mainstream social convention, which is what you seem to be invoking.
It just doesn’t seem to fit very well with the stated goals of this site. For my own part, if someone wants me dead, I want to know they want me dead. We can’t engage with or improve a reality we’re not allowed to even admit to. (Which is also why I dispute the “poisonous society” claim. A society where it’s understood that people might want me dead and there’s no way for me to know because of course they won’t ever say it seems far more poisonous to me.)
Slightly better next day answer:
I never declared Crocker’s Rules on this site. If you would like to, you can, and people can tell you when they want you dead.
However blanket statements such as “I wish everyone with were dead” are never ok, because you can’t know that absolutely everyone who holds Position X has declared Crocker’s Rules. Even if everyone who participated in the discussion under position X has declared Crocker’s Rules, there might be lurkers who haven’t.
I suppose an exception to that might be “I wish everyone who has declared Crocker’s Rules was dead”, but I can’t see why anyone would make that statement.
I’m still curious, however, about your answer to my original question. If it should happen that tomorrow I find myself in the state of believing I would be happier were you dead, what do you think I ought to do about that?
Or, if the answer is different: If it should happen that tomorrow you find myself in the state of believing you would be happier were I dead, what do you think you ought to do about that? (Given that I too have not declared Crocker’s Rules.)
I mean, I understand that you don’t think we should actually tell each other about it, but I’m wondering if that’s all there is to say on the matter… just keep the feeling secret and go on about our business normally?
That’s fair.
For my own part, that’s not the threshold I consider Crocker’s Rules to endorse crossing, but I suppose reasonable people can disagree on where that threshold is and over time the actual threshold will come to resemble some aggregated function of our opinions on the matter, and announcements like yours are part of that process.
Sorry to have upset you. Thanks for answering my question.
Believe me, I really feel that sentiment much stronger in regards to infanticide than you feel it in regards to passive-aggressive rudeness.
Well, you, ceteris paribus, would want people—including, in particular, emotionally volatile people like me—free to kill their children in real life. I’d hate that more than I’d regret your death, indeed!
(Although at no point and in no way am I going to be insane enough to really kill you, just as you’re not insane enough to personally kill babies)
I think you should take that back, personally. I can understand you saying it out of frustration, but saying that you want people dead is generally a bad thing to do.
Oh, and you’re creating significant emotional turmoil in me right now. I’m stepping away and going to sleep, although I don’t suspect that this turmoil is any sign of me being less rational than you in regards to our respective values right now.
I’m sorry about your turmoil, but I don’t take responsibility for “creating” it.
This is not an uncontested statement.
Thanks for catching me, adjusted.
You are overlooking the extreme situations some people are forced into. Looking at the act as being primarily a function of a person’s internal state state can be a poor approximation. As nearly as I can tell, if an arbitrarily selected person in the West were put in a situation as dire as these infanticidal mothers had been forced into, they would quite probably do the same thing.
Note that the geographical variation in infanticide rates is more plausibly consistent with external factors driving the rates than internal factors. The populations of the USA and Canada are not hugely different, yet there is a 2X difference in the rates between them (as I quoted from the article that I cited before). I strongly doubt that the proportion of psychopaths and extreme self-modifiers differs so strongly between the two nations—but the US has been shredding its social safety nets for years.
This is easy enough to check. Do most poor, fairly desperate people whose situation is sufficiently alike that of our hypothetical normal childkiller, in fact, kill their children?
(No, I can’t quite define “sufficiently alike” right off the bat. Wouldn’t mind working it out together.)
With genocide of any foreigners and mass torture for entertainment also having been considered perfectly acceptable, the Roman culture in the flesh would certainly feel alien enough to us that an utilitarian, altruistic time traveler could likely be predicted to attempt to sway it, with virtually any means justifying the end for them.*
I know I would, and I know that I’m not an unusual decision maker for the LW community.
*(cue obvious SF story idea with the time traveler ending up as Jesus)
But these seem to have been larger cultural phenomena, not the unchecked actions of a few psychopaths. Psychopathy affects around 1% of the population, and I doubt so few people could have swayed the entire culture if the rest of them had no interest in killing people.
One percent of the modern population. How much historical data is there?
You’re right that we don’t have data on the incidence of psychopathy in ancient Rome, and our data its current incidence is pretty sketchy. (Unlike most mental illnesses, psychopathy is more a problem for other people than the person who has it, so psychopaths have no reason to get treatment. Not that we really have any treatment if they did.)
But there seem to be both genetic and social components (e.g. being abused as a child), so probably those same genetic opportunities got triggered in some people throughout history. Possibly at different rates than here and now.
See my reply’s second comment.
Not sure I’d agree, there. Rome had institutionalized blood sports, and mass rioting when the entertainment was interrupted.
I suspect a lot of the people who would agree with this sentiment would change their minds in the face of a sufficiently compelling argument that there exists some scenario under which they would be able to kill their child.
I’ve worked with parents of very disabled children, and it’s not an easy life. For mothers especially, it becomes your career. I can imagine a lot of parents might consider infanticide if they knew that was going to be their life.
Ditto, as someone who works in disability care and child care (including infant care), I support the baby-killing scenario.
I worked for a family that had a severely mentally and physically disabled 6-year old. She was at infant-level cognition, practically blind, and had very little control over her body. There was almost nothing going on mentally, but she was very volatile about sounds/music/surroundings. You could tell if she was happy or sad by whether she was laughing or crying, and she cried a LOT.
Trying to get her to STOP crying was extremely difficult, because there was no communication, and she never wanted the SAME things. However it was also very important to get her calm QUICKLY because if she cried too long she would have a “meltdown”, be near inconsolable, throw up, and then you’d have to vent her stomach.
Her parents were the best at reading her. They trained people by pretty much putting you in a room with her, until you developed an ineffable intuitive ability to keep her happy. When I moved to a different city, it took them about 3-4 months to find a replacement for me who wouldn’t quit by the second day. I was driving back to my old city once a week to work for them during that time.
Her existence had a terrible effect on her family. They had to hire around the clock care. As in, amazingly patient care-givers that were hard to find, to cover about 100 hours a week. I would get stressed covering 2 shifts a week, and I don’t know how her parents were managing to cope.
This child was a drain on society and on everyone around her. Because of her parents’ religious values, they wouldn’t kill her even if it were legal. But their lives would have been dramatically improved if it were otherwise.
Also, I agree that infants have less or equal personhood than many animals. The way I handle the discrepancy is by being a vegetarian. But since most people aren’t vegetarians, they don’t really have a strong supporting reason to be against legalized infanticide.
So, my position is that the necessary standard to justify ending a 10 month old’s life is only a bit lower than that of ending a 18 year old’s life, and is only a bit higher than the necessary standard to justify ending a fetus’s life. I’m patient. But what that statement often obscures is that I’m willing to let people meet that standard. I would support ending the individual you described at ages of 6 years, 60 years, 6 months, or 6 months after conception.
But the acknowledgement that not every life should be continued is very different from a “return policy” sort of infanticide which Bakkot is justifying by saying “well, they’re not people yet.” Sometimes it’s best to kill people, too, and so personhood isn’t the true issue.