A sleeping man. A cryonics patient. A nonverbal 3-year-old. A drunk, passed out.
I think these are all people, they’re pretty close to babies, and we shouldn’t kill any of them.
The reason they all feel like babies to me, from the perspective of “are they people?”, is that they’re in a condition where we can see a reasonable path for turning them into something that is unquestionably a person.
EDIT: That doesn’t mean we have to pay any cost to follow that path—the value we assign to a person’s life can be high but must be finite, and sometimes the correct, moral decision is to not pay that price. But just because we don’t pay that cost doesn’t mean it’s not a person.
I don’t think the time frame matters, either. If I found Fry from Futurama in the cryostasis tube today, and I killed him because I hated him, that would be murder even though he isn’t going to talk, learn, or have self-awareness until the year 3000.
Gametes are not people, even though we know how to make people from them. I don’t know why they don’t count.
EDIT: oh shit, better explain myself about that last one. What I mean is that it is not possible to murder a gamete—they don’t have the moral weight of personhood. You can, potentially, in some situations, murder a baby (and even a fetus): that is possible to do, because they count as people.
I’ve never seen a compiling AI, let alone an interrupted one, even in fiction, so your example isn’t very available to me. I can imagine conditions that would make it OK or not OK to cancel the compilation process.
This is most interesting to me:
From these examples, I think “will become a person” is only significant for objects which were people in the past
I know we’re talking about intuitions, but this is one description that can’t jump from the map into the territory. We know that the past is completely screened off by the present, so our decisions, including moral decisions, can’t ultimately depend on it. Ultimately, there has to be something about the present or future states of these humans that makes it OK to kill the baby but not the guy in the coma. Could you take another shot
at the distinction between them?
This question is fraught with politics and other highly sensitive topics, so I’ll try to avoid getting too specific, but it seems to me that thinking of this sort of thing purely in terms of a potentiality relation rather misses the point. A self-extracting binary, a .torrent file, a million lines of uncompiled source code, and a design document are all, in different ways, potential programs, but they differ from each other both in degree and in type of potentiality. Whether you’d call one a program in any given context depends on what you’re planning to do with it.
Gametes are not people, even though we know how to make people from them.
I’m not at all sure a randomly selected human gamete is less likely to become a person than a randomly selected cryonics patient (at least, with currently-existing technology).
Might be better to talk about this in terms of conversion cost rather than probability. To turn a gamete into a person you need another gamete, $X worth of miscellaneous raw materials (including, but certainly not limited to, food), and a healthy female of childbearing age. She’s effectively removed from the workforce for a predictable period of time, reducing her probable lifetime earning potential by $Y, and has some chance of various medical complications, which can be mitigated by modern treatments costing $Z but even then works out to some number of QALYs in reduced life expectancy. Finally, there’s some chance of the process failing and producing an undersized corpse, or a living creature which does not adequately fulfill the definition of “person.”
In short, a gamete isn’t a person for the same reason a work order and a handful of plastic pellets aren’t a street-legal automobile.
Consider this set:
A sleeping man. A cryonics patient. A nonverbal 3-year-old. A drunk, passed out.
I think these are all people, they’re pretty close to babies, and we shouldn’t kill any of them.
The reason they all feel like babies to me, from the perspective of “are they people?”, is that they’re in a condition where we can see a reasonable path for turning them into something that is unquestionably a person.
EDIT: That doesn’t mean we have to pay any cost to follow that path—the value we assign to a person’s life can be high but must be finite, and sometimes the correct, moral decision is to not pay that price. But just because we don’t pay that cost doesn’t mean it’s not a person.
I don’t think the time frame matters, either. If I found Fry from Futurama in the cryostasis tube today, and I killed him because I hated him, that would be murder even though he isn’t going to talk, learn, or have self-awareness until the year 3000.
Gametes are not people, even though we know how to make people from them. I don’t know why they don’t count.
EDIT: oh shit, better explain myself about that last one. What I mean is that it is not possible to murder a gamete—they don’t have the moral weight of personhood. You can, potentially, in some situations, murder a baby (and even a fetus): that is possible to do, because they count as people.
I’ve never seen a compiling AI, let alone an interrupted one, even in fiction, so your example isn’t very available to me. I can imagine conditions that would make it OK or not OK to cancel the compilation process.
This is most interesting to me:
I know we’re talking about intuitions, but this is one description that can’t jump from the map into the territory. We know that the past is completely screened off by the present, so our decisions, including moral decisions, can’t ultimately depend on it. Ultimately, there has to be something about the present or future states of these humans that makes it OK to kill the baby but not the guy in the coma. Could you take another shot at the distinction between them?
This question is fraught with politics and other highly sensitive topics, so I’ll try to avoid getting too specific, but it seems to me that thinking of this sort of thing purely in terms of a potentiality relation rather misses the point. A self-extracting binary, a .torrent file, a million lines of uncompiled source code, and a design document are all, in different ways, potential programs, but they differ from each other both in degree and in type of potentiality. Whether you’d call one a program in any given context depends on what you’re planning to do with it.
I’m not at all sure a randomly selected human gamete is less likely to become a person than a randomly selected cryonics patient (at least, with currently-existing technology).
Might be better to talk about this in terms of conversion cost rather than probability. To turn a gamete into a person you need another gamete, $X worth of miscellaneous raw materials (including, but certainly not limited to, food), and a healthy female of childbearing age. She’s effectively removed from the workforce for a predictable period of time, reducing her probable lifetime earning potential by $Y, and has some chance of various medical complications, which can be mitigated by modern treatments costing $Z but even then works out to some number of QALYs in reduced life expectancy. Finally, there’s some chance of the process failing and producing an undersized corpse, or a living creature which does not adequately fulfill the definition of “person.”
In short, a gamete isn’t a person for the same reason a work order and a handful of plastic pellets aren’t a street-legal automobile.
What’s the cutoff probability?
You are right; retracted.