Several people have alreadt given good answers to your position on infanticide, but they haven’t mentioned what is in my opinion the crucial concept involved here: Schelling points.
We are all agreed that is is wrong to kill people (meaning, fully conscious and intelligent beings). We agree that adult humans beings are people (perhaps excluding those in irreversible coma). The law needs to draw a bright line separating those beings which are people, and hence cannot be killed, from those who are not. Given the importance of the “non-killing” rule to a functioning society. this line needs to be clear and intuitive to all. Any line based on some level of brain development does not satisfy this criterion.
There are only two Schelling points, that is obvious, intuitive places to draw the line: conception and birth. Many people support the first one, and the strongest argument for the anti-abortion position is that conception is in fact in many ways a better Schelling point than birth, since being born does not affect the intrinsic nature of the infant. However, among people without a metaphysical commitment to fetus personhood, most agree that the burdens that prohibition of abortion place on pregnant women are enough to outweigh these considerations, and make birth the chosen Schelling point.
There is no other Schelling point at a later date (your ten-month rule seems arbitrary to me), and a rule against baby infanticide does not place so strong burdens on mothers (giving for adoption is always an option). So there is no good reason to change the law in the direction you propose. Doing it would undermine the strengh of the universal agreement that “people cannot be killed”, since the line separating people from non-people would be obscure and arbitrarily drawn.
But there is no universal agreement on the “age of informed consent”, it varies from country to country! And yes, the fact that the limit is arbitrary does undermine its strength; there are often scenarios of “reasonable” sex (in that most people don’t consider it as wrong) that would be consider statutory rape or whatnot if the law was taken at the letter.
(Also, heck, 10 months is a pretty crappy limit, why not 8 months five days and 42 minutes? 12 months would be much cleaner)
This only holds in a society where people aren’t sufficiently intelligent for “is obviously not a person” not to work as the criterion. We probably live in such a society, but I hope we don’t forever.
People disagree about obviousness of such things. For some people, a fetus is obviously a person too. For others, even a mentally deficient adult might not qualify as being obviously a person. Unlike you, I don’t expect these disagreements to disappear anytime soon, and they are the reason that the law works better with bright Schelling point lines, if such exist.
This was the reason age was chosen, rather than neurological development.
Age is non-ambiguous, but not non-arbitrary.
Re your final objection, I agree that there are cases such as sexual consent where there are no clear Schelling points, and we need arbitrary lines. This does not mean that it is not best to use Schelling points whenever they exist. In the case of sexual consent, the arbitrariness of the line does have some unfortunate effects: for example, since the lines are drawn differently in different jurisdictions, people who move accross jurisdictions and are not epecially well informed might commit a felony without being aware. There are also problems with people not being aware of their partner’s age, etc.
Such problems are not too big and in any case unavoidable, but consider the following counterfactual: if all teenagers underwent a significant and highly visible discrete biological event at exactly age 16, it would make sense (and be an improvement over current law) to have an universal law using this event as trigger for the age of consent, even if the event had no connection to sexual and mental development and these were continuous. The event would be a Schelling point, such as birth is for personhood.
This is a very good response, that allows us to make our disagreement more precise. I agree that choosing menstruation, or its hypothetical unisex counterpart, is unreasonable because it is too early. I disagree that birth is too early in the same way. Pretty much everyone in our society agrees that 12-year olds cannot meaningfully consent to sex (especially with adults), whereas many believe 6-month old children to be people—in fact, many believe fetuses to be people! You might say that they are obviously wrong, but the “obviously” is suspicious when so many disagree with you, at the very least for Aumann reasons.
To put it in another way: What makes you so certain that birth is so far off from what is reasonable as a line for personhood, when you are willing to draw your line at 10 months? That is much closer to birth than 17 is to 12 years old.
Also, I think your analogy needs a bit of amending: the relevant question is, if there was a visible unisex menstruation happening at 17 years old, and an established tradition of taking that as the age of consent, why on earth would a society change the law to make it 16 years and 2 months instead?
While true, I suspect most or all of those people would have a hard time giving a good definition of “person” to an AI in such a way that the definition included babies, adults, and thinking aliens, but not pigs or bonobos. So yes, the claim I am implicitly making with this (or any other) controversial opinion is that I think almost everyone is wrong about this specific topic.
One rough effort at such definition would be: “any post-birth member of a species whose adult members are intelligent and conscious”, where “birth” can be replaced by an analogous Schelling point in the development in an alien species, or by an arbitrary chosen line at a similar stage of development, if no such Schelling point exists.
You might say that this definition is an arbtrary kludge that does not “carve Nature at the joints”. My reply would be that ethics is adapted for humans, and does not need to carve Nature at intrinsic joints but at the places that humans find relevant.
Your point about different rates of development is well taken, however. I am also not an expert in this topic, so we’ll have to let it rest for the moment.
For computers, hardware and software can be separated in a way that is not possible with humans (with current technology). When the separation is possible, I agree personhood should be attributed to the software rather than the hardware, so your machine should not be considered a person. If in the future it becomes routinely possible to scan, duplicate and emulate human minds, then killing a biological human will probably also be less of a crime than it is now, as long as his/her mind is preserved. (Maybe there would be a taboo instead about deleting minds with no backup, even when they are not “running” on hardware).
It is also possible than in such a future where the concept of a person is commonly associated with a mind pattern, legalizing infanticide before brain development seats in would be acceptable. So perhaps we are not in disagreement after all, since on a different subthread you have said you do not really support legalization of infanticide in our current society.
I still think there is a bit of a meta diagreement: you seem to think that the laws and morality of this hypothetical future society would be better than our current ones, while I see it as a change in what are the appropriate Schelling points for the law to rule, in response to technological changes, without the end point being more “correct” in any absolute sense than our current law.
Oh, of course. I’ve taken it that you were asking about a case where such software had indeed been installed on the machine. The potential of personhood on its own seems hardly worth anything to me.
Pretty much everyone in our society agrees that 12-year olds cannot meaningfully consent to sex (especially with adults)
As a data point for your statistics, I think that a 12-year old can meaningfully consent to sex. When it comes to issues of pregnancy and having children, the consequences are greater and I don’t think such yound people can consent to this, but fortunately sex and children can be kept separate today with only weak side effects.
I think that a 12-year old from a society with sensible policies would be able to give meaningful consent, but for some reason an enormous amount of work has been put into keeping American 12-year olds dangerously ignorant. That needs to be fixed first.
I do think there are some advantages to setting the cutoff point just slightly later than birth, even if by just a few hours: *evaluations of whether a person should come into existence can rest on surer information when the infant is out of the womb
non-maternal reproductive autonomy—under the current legal personhood cutoff, I can count this as an acceptable loss, as I consider maternal bodily autonomy and the interests of the child to be more important, but with infanticide all three can be reconciled
psychologically, parents (especially fathers) might feel more buy-in to their status, even if almost none actually end up choosing otherwise, and if infant non-personhood catches on culturally infant deaths very close to births might cause less grief among parents
(All this assumes that late-term abortions are a morally acceptable choice to make in their own right, of course, rather than something which must be legally tolerated to preserve maternal bodily autonomy.)
Mild updating of my original position due to this conversation:
I still don’t have many moral qualms about allowing parents to kill children, but realize that actually legalizing it in our current society would lead to some unintended consequences, due to considerations such as the Schelling point, and killing infants as a gateway to further sociopathic behaviours.
Part of my difficulty is that some humans, such as infants, have less blicket than animals. If its ok to kill animals, then there’s no reason to say it’s not ok to kill blicket-less humans. Then I realize that even though it’s legal to kill animals, it’s still something I can’t do for anything except certain bugs. Even spiders I let be, or take outside.
So maybe a wiser way to reconcile these would be to say that since infants have less blicket than animals, and we don’t kill infants, that we also shouldn’t kill animals. It’s what I live by anyway, and seems to cause less disturbance than saying that since infants have less blicket than animals and we kill animals, that it’s ok to kill infants.
Part of my difficulty is that some humans, such as infants, have less blicket than animals. If its ok to kill animals, then there’s no reason to say it’s not ok to kill blicket-less humans. Then I realize that even though it’s legal to kill animals, it’s still something I can’t do for anything except certain bugs. Even spiders I let be, or take outside.
Don’t worry, there would probably be a baby killing service if it were legal. Just like we have other people to kill animals for us.
If its ok to kill animals, then there’s no reason to say it’s not ok to kill blicket-less humans.
I just want to point out this alternative position: Healthy (mentally and otherwise) babies can gain sufficient mental acuity/self-awareness to outstrip animals in their normal trajectory—i.e. babies become people after a while.
Although I don’t wholeheartedly agree with this position, it seems consistent. The stance that such a position would imply is that babies with severe medical conditions (debilitating birth defects, congenital diseases etc.) could be killed with parental consent, and fetuses likely to develop birth defects can be aborted, but healthy fetuses cannot be aborted, and healthy babies cannot be killed. I bring this up in particular because of your other post about the family with the severely disabled 6-year-old.
I think it becomes a little more complicated when we’re talking about situations in which we have the ability to impart self-awareness that was previously not there. On the practical level I certainly wouldn’t want to force a family to either face endless debt from an expensive procedure or a lifetime of grief from a child that can’t function in day to day tasks. It also brings up the question of whether to make animals self-aware, which is… kind of interesting but probably starting to drift off topic.
Infanticide of one’s own children should be legal (if done for some reason other than sadism) for up to ten months after birth. Reason: extremely young babies aren’t yet people.
I would recommend against expressing this opinion in your OKCupid profile.
Yeah, opinions deliberately selected to be my most controversial were exactly what I was planning to use when trying to make new friends. But now that you mention it, that’s probably a bad idea, huh?
Infanticide of one’s own children should be legal (if done for some reason other than sadism) for up to ten months after birth. Reason: extremely young babies aren’t yet people.
Arbitrary limits like “ten months” don’t make for good rules—especially when there’s a natural limit that’s much more prominent: childbirth.
What exactly counts as “people” is a matter of convention; it’s best to settle on edges that are as crisp as possible, to minimize potential disagreement and conflict.
Also “any reason other than sadism”, eh? Like “the dog was hungry” would be okay?
EDIT: in the ensuing discussion, we came to an agreement that the psychopathy argument is only true of our present society, and, while strengthening our reasons to keep infanticide illegal right now, wouldn’t apply to someplace without a strong revulsion to infanticide in the first place. I’ve updated my stance and switched to other arguments against infanticide-in-general.
I’m sorry, I just can’t parse your sentence, especially “anyone who seriously doesn’t understand why punishing all parents able to kill their infant is an incredibly good idea”. I suspect you chained too many clauses together and ended up saying the opposite of what you meant.
I broadly agree that babies aren’t people, but I still think infanticide should be illegal, simply because killing begets insensitivity to killing. I know this has the sound of a slippery slope argument, but there is evidence that desire for sadism in most people is low, and increases as they commit sadistic acts, and that people feel similarly about murder.
From The Better Angels of Our Nature: “Serial killers too carry out their first murder with trepidation, distaste, and in its wake, disappointment: the experience had not been as arousing as it had been in their imaginations. But as time passes and their appetite is rewhetted, they find the next on easier and more gratifying, and then they escalate the cruelty to feed what turns into an addiction.”
I don’t think we want to encourage or allow killing of anything anywhere near as close to people as babies. The psychological effects on people who kill their own children and on a society that views the killing of babies as good are too potentially terrible. Without actual data, I can say I would never want to live in a society that valued people as little as Sparta did.
We’re not talking about making new laws, and we’re certainly not encouraging the government to make in-discriminatory laws about things that are possibly bad. This is a law that already exists, where changing it would lead to a worse world. Feel free to campaign against those other laws you talked about coming into existence if someone tries to make them happen, but you shouldn’t be trying to get baby killing legalized.
I don’t think we want to encourage or allow killing of anything anywhere near as close to people as babies.
By what criterion do you consider babies sufficiently “close to people” that this is an issue, but not late term fetuses or adult animals? Specific example, an adult bonobo seems to share more of the morally relevant characteristics of adult humans than a newborn baby but are not afforded the same legal protection.
I don’t think killing bonobos should be particularly legal.
As far as fetuses, since my worry is psychological, I don’t think there’s a significant risk of desensitization to killing people since the action of going under surgery or taking plan b is so vastly removed from the act of murder.
What if only surgeons are licensed for infanticide on request, which must be done in privacy away from parent’s eyes?
That way desensitisation isn’t worse than with surgeons or doctors who preform abortion, especially if aesthetics or poison is used. Before anyone raises the Hippocratic oath as an objection, let me give them a stern look and ask them to consider the context of the debate and figure out on their own why it isn’t applicable.
I’m afraid you may have your bottom line written already. In the age of ultrasound and computer generated images or even better in the future age of transhuman sensory enhancement or fetuses being grown outside the human body the exact same argument can be used against abortion.
Especially once you remember the original context was a 10 month old baby, not say a 10 year old child.
In the age of ultrasound and computer generated images or even better in the future age of transhuman sensory enhancement or fetuses being grown outside the human body the exact same argument can be used against abortion
Then I might well have to use it against abortion at some point, for the same reason: we should forbid people from overriding this part of their instincts.
In any case much like we find pictures or videos of abortion distasteful, I’m sure future baby-killing society would still find videos of baby killings distasteful. We could legislate infanticide needs to be done by professionals away from the eyes of parents and other onlookers to avoid psychological damage. Also forbid media depicting it except for educational purposes.
We could legislate infanticide needs to be done by professionals away from the eyes of parents and other onlookers to avoid psychological damage.
For legal reasons, there’d just have to be a clear procedure where parents would take or refuse the decision, probably after being informed of the baby’s overall condition and potential in the presence of a witness. I can’t imagine how it could be realistically practiced without one. Such a procedure could ironically wind up more psychologically damaging than, say, simply distracting one’s parental instinct with something like intoxication and personally abandoning/suffocating/poisoning the baby.
Also forbid media depicting it except for educational purposes.
Potential for tension and cognitive dissonance. Few things in our culture are censored this way, not even executions and torture. Would feel unusually hypocritical.
For legal reasons, there’d just have to be a clear procedure where parents would take or refuse the decision, probably after being informed of the baby’s overall condition and potential in the presence of a witness. I can’t imagine how it could be realistically practiced without one.
Humans are pretty ok with making cold decisions in the abstract that they could never carry out themselves due to physical revulsion and/or emotional trauma.
The number of people that would sign a death order is greater than the number of people that would kill someone else personally.
Potential for tension and cognitive dissonance. Few things in our culture are censored this way, not even executions and torture.
Does society feel conflicted bothered that child pornography is censored? We can even extend existing child pornography laws with a few good judicial decisions to cover this.
Does society feel conflicted bothered that child pornography is censored? We can even extend existing child pornography laws with a few good judicial decisions to cover this.
In my own country pornography involving animals is illegal. It shows no signs of being legalized soon. And I live in a pretty liberal central European first world country.
I live in Russia and here the legal status of all pornography is murky but no law de facto prosecutes anything but production and distribution of child porn, and simple possession of child porn is not illegal. There’s nothing about animals, violence, or such.
The number of people that would sign a death order is greater than the number of people that would kill someone else personally.
Much greater? I think that people signing death orders for criminals could generally execute those criminals themselves if forced to choose between that and the criminal staying alive.
Does society feel conflicted bothered that child pornography is censored?
4chan could be an argument that it’s beginning to feel so :) Society just hasn’t thought it through yet.
1) such foetuses would likely only be seen by a surgeon if the abortion is done properly
2) they probably instinctively appear much less “person-like” or “likely to become a human” even if the mother sees one while doing a crude abortion on her own—maybe even for an evolutionary reason—so that she wouldn’t be left with a memory of killing something that looks like a human.
they probably instinctively appear much less “person-like” or “likely to become a human” even if the mother sees one while doing a crude abortion on her own—maybe even for an evolutionary reason—so that she wouldn’t be left with a memory of killing something that looks like a human.
blinks
How can a LWer even think this way? I suggest you reread this. I’m tempted to ask you to think 4 minutes by the physical clock about this, but I’ll rather just spell it out.
Lets say you are 8 months pregnant in the early stone age. What is a better idea for you, fitness wise, wait another month to terminate reproduction attempt or try to do it right now?
I’m even tempted to say there is a reason women kill their own children more often than men.
More or less. I’m pretty sure that controlling for certainty of the child being “yours” and time spent with them, men would on average find killing their children a greater psychological burden in the long run than women.
More or less. I’m pretty sure that controlling for certainty of the child being “yours” and time spent with them, men would on average find killing their children a greater psychological burden in the long run than women.
Because after all that time spent with them some start to find them really damn annoying?
We get attached to children and lovers with exposure due to oxytocin. Only when the natural switches for releasing it are shut off does exposure cease to have this effect.
We get attached to children and lovers with exposure due to oxytocin. Only when the natural switches for releasing it are shut off does exposure cease to have this effect.
I’m trying to relate this to your theory that men find it harder to kill their infants than women do. The influence of oxytocin discourages killing of those you are attached to and mothers get more of this than fathers if for no other reason than a crap load getting released during childbirth.
Infanticide of one’s own children should be legal (if done for some reason other than sadism) for up to ten months after birth. Reason: extremely young babies aren’t yet people.
They’re just p-zombies pretending to be people. They only get their soul at 10 months and thereafter are able to detect qualia.
I would vote against this law. I’d vote with guns if necessary. Reason: I like babies. Tiny humans are cute and haven’t even done anything to deserve death yet (or indicate that they aren’t valuable instances of human). I’d prefer you went around murdering adults (adults being the group with the economic, physical and political power to organize defense.)
Most adults don’t have traits I’d want a “person” to have. At least with babies there is a chance they’ll turn out as worthwhile people.
Adults have a small chance of acquiring those traits too. Due to selection effects adults that don’t have traits have a much lower probability than a fresh new baby of turning out this way.
In a few decades genetic technology and better psychology and sociology may let us make decent probabilistic predictions about how they will turn out as adults. Are you ok with babies with very low probabilities of getting such traits being killed?
Adults have a small chance of acquiring those traits too. Due to selection effects adults that don’t have traits have a much lower probability than a fresh new baby of turning out this way.
As well as, of course, as having far less malleable minds that have yet to crystallize the habits their upbringing gives them.
Are you ok with babies with very low probabilities of getting such traits being killed?
Far less averse, particularly in an environment where negative externalities cannot be easily prevented. Mind you I would still oppose legalization of killing people (whether babies or adults) just because they are Jerks. Not because of the value of the Jerks themselves (which is offset by their effects on others) but because it isn’t just Jerks that would be killed. I don’t want other people to have the right to choose who lives and who dies and I’m willing to waive that right myself by way of cooperation in order to see it happen.
I’m not sure why this is getting down voted. “Person” is basically LW speak for “particular kind of machine that has value to me in of itself”. I don’t see any good reason why I personally should value all people equally. I can see some instrumental value in living in a society that makes rules that operate on this principle.
But generally I do not love my enemies and neighbours like myself. I’m sorry, I guess that’s not very Christian of me. ;)
Would you really prefer it to be legal to murder adults than to murder ten-month-old children?
Yes. The explanation given was significant.
Ten-month-old children can be replaced in a mere twenty months. It takes forty one years to make a new forty-year-old.
It takes a 110 years to make a 110 year old . In most cases I’d prefer to keep a 30 year old than either of them. More to the point I don’t intrinsically value creating more humans. The replacement cost of a dead human isn’t anything to do with the moral aversion I have to murder.
Do you really think it’s wise to have a precedent that allows agents of Type X to go around killing off all of the !X group ? Doesn’t bode well if people end up with a really sharp intelligence gradient.
ETA: I hate that I have to say this, but can people respond instead of just downvoting? I’m honestly curious as to why this particular post is controversial—or have I missed something?
I haven’t downvoted, for what it is worth. Sure, you may be an evil baby killing advocate but it’s not like l care!
I haven’t seen anyone respond to your request for feedback about votes, so let me do so, despite not being one of the downvoters.
By my lights, at least, your posts have been fine. Obviously, I can’t speak for the site as a whole… then again, neither can anyone else.
Basically, it’s complicated, because the site isn’t homogenous. Expressing conventionally “bad” moral views will usually earn some downvotes from people who don’t want such views expressed; expressing them clearly and coherently and engaging thoughtfully with the responses will usually net you upvotes.
I think you may have taken me to be talking about whether it was acceptable or moral in the sense that society will allow it, that was not my intent. Society allows many unwise, inefficient things and no doubt will do so for some time.
My question was simply whether you thought it wise. If we do make an FAI, and encoded it with some idealised version of our own morality then do we want a rule that says ‘Kill everything that looks unlike yourself’? If we end up on the downside of a vast power gradient with other humans do we want them thinking that everything that has little or no value to them should be for the chopping block?
In a somewhat more pithy form, I guess what I’m asking you is: Given that you cannot be sure you will always be strong enough to have things entirely your way, how sure are you this isn’t going to come back and bite you in the arse?
If it is unwise, then it would make sense to weaken that strand of thought in society—to destroy less out of hand, rather than more. That the strand is already quite strong in society would not alter that.
You did not answer me on the human question—how we’d like powerful humans to think .
No. But we do want a rule that says something like “the closer things are to being people, the more importance should be given to them”. As a consequence of this rule, I think it should be legal to kill your newborn children.
This sounds fine as long as you and everything you care about are and always will be included in the group of, ‘people.’ However, by your own admission, (earlier in the discussion to wedrifid,) you’ve defined people in terms of how closely they realise your ideology:
Extremely young children are lacking basically all of the traits I’d want a “person” to have.
You’ve made it something fluid; a matter of mood and convenience. If I make an AI and tell it to save only ‘people,’ it can go horribly wrong for you—maybe you’re not part of what I mean by ‘people.’ Maybe by people I mean those who believe in some religion or other. Maybe I mean those who are close to a certain processing capacity—and then what happens to those who exceed that capacity? And surely the AI itself would do so....
There are a lot of ways it can go wrong.
I’m observably a person.
You observe yourself to be a person. That’s not necessarily the same thing as being observably a person to someone else operating with different definitions.
Any AI which concluded otherwise is probably already so dangerous that worrying about how my opinions stated here would affect it is probably completely pointless. So… pretty sure.
The opinion you state may influence what sort of AI you end up with. And at the very least it seems liable to influence the sort of people you end up with.
Oh, and I’m never encouraging killing your newborns, just arguing that it should be allowed (if done for something other than sadism).
-shrug- You’re trying to weaken the idea that newborns are people, and are arguing for something that, I suspect, would increase the occurrence of their demise. Call it what you will.
I think I must have been unclear, since both you and wedrifid seemed to interpet the wrong thing. What I meant was that I don’t have a good definition for person, but no reasonable partial definition I can come up with includes babies.
How did I misinterpret? I read that you don’t include babies and I said that I do include babies. That’s (preference) disagreement, not a problem with interpretation.
This line gave me the impression that you thought I was saying I want my definition of “person”, for the moral calculus, to include things like “worthwhile”.Which was not what I was saying -
Intended as a tangential observation about my perceptions of people. (Some of them really are easier for me to model as objects running a machiavellian routine.)
If you don’t understand the distinction between “legal” and “encouraged”, we’re going to have a very difficult time communicating.
“Encouraged” is very clearly not absolute but relative here, “somewhat less discouraged than now” can just be written as “encouraged” for brevity’s sake.
I think I must have been unclear, since both you and wedrifid seemed to interpet the wrong thing. What I meant was that I don’t have a good definition for person, but no reasonable partial definition I can come up with includes babies. I didn’t at all mean that just because I would like people to be nice to each other, and so on, I wouldn’t consider people who aren’t nice not to be people. I’d intended to convey this distinction by the quotation marks.
How are you deciding whether your definition is reasonable?
Obviously. There’s a lot of ways any AI can go wrong. But you have to do something. Is your rule “don’t kill humans”? For what definition of human, and isn’t that going to be awfully unfair to aliens? I think “don’t kill people” is probably about as good as you’re going to do.
‘Don’t kill anything that can learn,’ springs to mind as a safer alternative—were I inclined to program this stuff in directly, which I’m not.
I don’t expect us to be explicitly declaring these rules, I expect the moral themes prevalent in our society—or at least an idealised model of part of it—will form much of the seed for the AI’s eventual goals. I know that the moral themes prevalent in our society form much of the seed for the eventual goals of people.
In either case, I don’t expect us to be in-charge. Which makes me kinda concerned when people talk about how we should be fine with going around offing the lesser life-forms.
I don’t want the rule to be “don’t kill people” for whatever values of “kill” and “people” you have in your book. For all I know you’re going to interpet this as something I’d understand more like “don’t eat pineapples”. I want the rule to be “don’t kill people” with your definitions in accordance with mine.
Yet my definitions are not in accordance with yours. And, if I apply the rule that I can kill everything that’s not a person, you’re not going to get the results you desire.
It’d be great if I could just say ‘I want you to do good—with your definition of good in accordance with mine.’ But it’s not that simple. People grow up with different definitions—AIs may well grow up with different definitions—and if you’ve got some rule operating over a fuzzy boundary like that, you may end up as paperclips, or dogmeat or something horrible.
If you do think both of the above things, then my task is either to understand why you don’t feel that infanticide should be legal or to point out that perhaps you really would agree that infanticide should be legal if you stopped and seriously considered the proposition for a bit.
I’m not certain whether or not it’s germane to the broader discussion, but “think X is immoral” and “think X should be illegal” are not identical beliefs.
Suppose hypothetically that I think “don’t kill people” is a good broad moral rule, and I think babies are people. It seems to follow from what you said that I therefore ought to agree that infanticide should be legal.
If that is what you meant to say, then I am deeply confused. If (hypothetically) I think babies are people, and if (hypothetically) I think “don’t kill people” is a good law, then all else being equal I should think “don’t kill babies” is a good law. That is, I should believe that infanticide ought not be any more legal than murder in general.
It seems like one of us dropped a negative sign somewhere along the line. Perhaps it was me, but if so, I seem incapable of finding it again.
Even if from this you decide not to kill pigs, the Bayesian spam filter that keeps dozens of viagra ads per day from cluttering up my inbox is also undoubtably learning. Learning, indeed, in much the same way that you or I do, or that pigs do, except that it’s arguably better at it. Have I committed a serious moral wrong if I delete its source code?
If I were programming an AI to be a perfect world-guiding moral paragon, I’d rather have it keep the spam filter in storage (the equivalent of a retirement home, or cryostasis) than delete it for the crime of obsolescence. Digital storage space is cheap, and getting cheaper all the time.
Somewhat late, I must have missed this reply agessss ago when it went up.
there’s a bunch of things in my mind for which the label “person” seems appropriate [...] There’s also a bunch of things for which said label seems inappropriate
That’s not a reasoned way to form definitions that have any more validity as referents than lists of what you approve of. What you’re doing is referencing your feelings and seeing what the objects of those feelings have in common. It so happens that I feel that infants are people. But we’re not doing anything particularly logical or reasonable here—we’re not drawing our boundaries using different tools. One of us just thinks they belong on the list and the other thinks they don’t.
If we try and agree on a common list. Well, you’re agreeing that aliens and powerful AIs go on the list—so biology isn’t the primary concern. If we try to draw a line through the commonalities what are we going to get? All of them seem able to gather, store, process and apply information to some ends. Even infants can—they’re just not particularly good at it yet.
Conversely, what do all your other examples have in common that infants don’t?
Pigs can learn, without a doubt. Even if from this you decide not to kill pigs, the Bayesian spam filter that keeps dozens of viagra ads per day from cluttering up my inbox is also undoubtably learning. Learning, indeed, in much the same way that you or I do, or that pigs do, except that it’s arguably better at it. Have I committed a serious moral wrong if I delete its source code?
Arguably that would be a good heuristic to keep around. I don’t know I’d call it a moral wrong – there’s not much reason to talk about morals when we can just say discouraged in society and have everyone on the same page. But you would probably do well to have a reluctance to destroy it. One day someone vastly more complex than you may well look on you in the same light you look on your spam filter.
[...] odd corner-cases are almost always indicative of ideas which we would not have arrived at ourselves if we weren’t conditioned with them from an early age. I strongly suspect the prohibition on infanticide is such a corner case.
I strongly suspect that societies where people had no reluctance to go around offing their infants wouldn’t have lasted very long. Infants are significant investments of time and resources. Offing your infants is a sign that there’s something emotionally maladjusted in you – by the standards of the needs of society. If we’d not had the precept, and magically appeared out of nowhere, I think we’d have invented it pretty quick.
You think I’m going to try to program an AI in English?
Not really about you specifically. But, in general – yeah, more or less. Maybe not write the source code, but instruct it. English, or uploads or some other incredibly high-level language with a lot of horrible dependencies built into its libraries (or concepts or what have you) that the person using it barely understands themselves. Why? Because it will be quicker. The guy who just tells the AI to guess what he means by good skips the step of having to calculate it herself.
Yeah, a lack of reply notification’s a real pain in the rear.
It seems to me that this thread of the debate has come down to “Should we consider babies to be people?” There are, broadly, two ways of settling this question: moving up the ladder of abstraction, or moving down. That is, we can answer this by attempting to define ‘people’ in terms of other, broader terms (this being the former case) or by defining ‘people’ via the listing of examples of things which we all agree are or are not people and then trying to decide by inspection in which category ‘babies’ belong.
Edit: You can skip to the next break line if you’re not interested in reading about the methodological component so much as you are continuing the infants argument.
What we’re doing here, ideally, is pattern matching. I present you with a pattern and part of that pattern is what I’m talking about. I present you with another pattern where some things have changed and the parts of the pattern I want to talk about are the same in that one. And I suppose to be strict we’d have to present you with patterns that are fairly similar and express disapproval for those.
Because we have a large set of existing patterns that we both know about—properties—it’s a lot quicker to make reference to some of those patterns than it is to continue to flesh out our lists to play guess the commonality. We can still do it both ways, as long as we can still head back down the abstraction pile fairly quickly. Compressing the search space by abstract reference to elements of patterns that members of the set share, is not the same thing as starting off with a word alone and then trying to decide on the pattern and then fit the members to that set.
If you cannot do that exercise, if you cannot explicitly declare at least some of the commonalities you’re talking about, then it leads me to believe that your definition is incoherent. The odds that, with our vast set of shared patterns—with our language that allows us to do this compression—that you can’t come up with at least a fairly rough definition fairly quickly seem remote.
If I wanted to define humans for instance—“Most numerous group of bipedal tools users on Earth.” That was a lot quicker than having to define humans by providing examples of different creatures. We can only think the way we do because we have these little compression tricks that let us leap around the search space, abstraction doesn’t have to lead to more confusion—as long as your terms refer to things that people have experience with.
Whereas if I provided you a selection of human genetic structures—while my terms would refer exactly, while I’d even be able to stick you in front of a machine and point to it directly—would you even recognise it without going to a computer? I wouldn’t. The reference falls beyond the level of my experience.
I don’t see why you think my definition needs to be complete. We have very few exact definitions for anything; I couldn’t exactly define what I mean by human. Even by reference to genetic structure I’ve no idea where it would make sense to set the deviation from any specific example that makes you human or not human.
But let’s go with your approach:
It seems to me that mentally disabled people belong on the people list. And babies seem more similar to mentally disabled people than they do to pigs and stones.
This is entirely orthogonal to the point I was trying to make. Keep in mind, most societies invented misogyny pretty quick too. Rather, I doubt that you personally, raised in a society much like this one except without the taboo on killing infants, would have come to the conclusion that killing infants is a moral wrong.
Well, no, but you could make that argument about anything. I raised in a society just like this one but without taboo X would never create taboo X on my own, taboos are created by their effects on society. It’s the fact that society would not have been like this one without taboo X that makes it taboo in the first place.
I can come up with a rough definition, but rough definitions fail in exactly those cases where there is potential disagreement.
Eh, functioning is a very rough definition and we’ve got to that pretty quickly.
So will we rather say that we include mentally disabled humans above a certain level of functioning? The problem then is that babies almost certainly fall well below that threshold, wherever you might set it.
Well, the question is whether food animals fall beneath the level of babies. If they do, then I can keep eating them happily enough; if they don’t, I’ve got the dilemma as to whether to stop eating animals or start eating babies.
And it’s not clear to me, without knowing what you mean by functioning, that pigs or cows are more intelligent than babies. I’ve not seen one do anything like that. Predatory animals—wolves and the like, on the other tentacle, are obviously more intelligent than a baby.
As to how I’d resolve the dilemma if it did occur, I’m leaning more towards stopping eating food animals than starting to eat babies. Despite the fact that food animals are really tasty, I don’t want to put a precedent in place that might get me eaten at some point.
I assume you’ve granted that sufficiently advanced AIs ought to be counted as people.
By fiat—sufficiently advanced for what? But I suppose I’ll grant any AI that can pass the Turing test qualifies, yes.
Am I killing a person if I terminate this script before compilation completes? That is, does “software which will compile and run an AI” belong to the “people” or the “not people” group?
That depends on the nature of the script. If it’s just performing some relatively simple task over and over, then I’m inclined to agree that it belongs in the not people group. If it is itself as smart as, say, a wolf, then I’m inclined to think it belongs in the people group.
Really? It seems to me that someone did invent the taboo[1] on, say, slavery.
I suppose, what I really mean to say is they’re taboos because that taboo has some desirable effect on society.
The point I’m trying to make here is that if you started with your current set of rules minus the rule about “don’t rape people” (not to say your hypothetical morals view it as acceptable, merely undecided), I think you could quite naturally come to conclude that rape was wrong. But it seems to me that this would not be the case if instead you left out the rule about “don’t kill babies”.
It seems to me that babies are quite valuable, and became so as their survival probability went up. In the olden days infanticide was relatively common—as was death in childbirth. People had a far more casual attitude towards the whole thing.
But as the survival probability went up the investment people made, and were expected to make, in individual children went up—and when that happened infanticide became a sign of maladaptive behaviour.
Though I doubt they’d have put it in these terms: People recognised a poor gambling strategy and wondered what was wrong with the person.
And I think it would be the same in any advanced society.
Regardless, I have no doubt that pigs are closer to functioning adult humans than babies are. You’d best give up pork.
I suppose I had, yes. It never really occurred to me that they might be that intelligent—but, yeah, having done a bit of reading they seem smart enough that I probably oughtn’t to eat them.
I’d be interested in what standard of “functional” you might propose that newborns would meet, though. Perhaps give examples of things which seem close to to line, on either side? For example, do wolves seem to you like people? Should killing a wolf be considered a moral wrong on par with murder?
Wolves definitely seem like people to me, yes. Adult humans are definitely on the list and wolves do pack behaviours which are very human-like. Killing a wolf for no good reason should be considered a moral wrong on par with murder. There’s not to say that I think it should result in legal punishment on par with killing a human, mind, it’s easier to work out that humans are people than it is to work out that wolves are—it’s a reasonable mistake.
Insects like wasps and flies don’t seem like people. Red pandas do. Dolphins do. Cows… don’t. But given what I’ve discovered about pigs that bears some checking—and now cows do. Hnn. Damn it, now I won’t be able to look at burgers without feeling sad.
All the videos with loads of blood and the like never bothered me, but learning that food-animals are that intelligent really does.
Have you imagined what life would be like if you were stupider, or were more intelligent but denied a body with which that intelligence was easy to express? If your person-hood is fundamental to your identity, then as long as you can imagine being stupider and still being you that still qualifies as a person. In terms of how old a person would be to have the sort of capabilities the person you’re imaging would have, at what point does your ability to empathise with the imaginary-you break down?
I have to ask, at this point: have you seriously considered the possibility that babies aren’t people?
As far as I know how, yes. If you’ve got some ways of thinking that we haven’t been talking about here, feel free to post them and I’ll do my best to run them.
If Babies weren’t people the world would be less horrifying. Just as if food-animals are people the world is more horrifying. But it would look the same in terms of behaviours—people kill people all the time, I don’t expect them not to without other criteria being involved.
We are supposing that it’s still on the first step, compilation. However, with no interaction on our part, it’s going to finish compiling and begin running the sufficiently-advanced AI. Unless we interrupt it before compilation finishes, in which case it will not.
Not a person.
It is, for example, almost certainly maladaptive to allow all women to go into higher education and industry, because those correlate strongly with having fewer children and that causes serious problems. (Witness Japan circa now.) This is, as you put it, a poor gambling strategy. Does that imply it’s immoral for society to allow women to be educated? Do reasonable people look at people who support women’s rights and wonder what’s wrong with them? Of course not.
No, because we’ve had that discussion. But people did and that attitude towards women was especially prevalent in Japan, where it was among the most maladaptive for the contrary to hold, until quite recently. Back in the 70s and 80s the idea for women was basically to get a good education and marry the person their family picked for them. Even today people who say they don’t want children or a relationship are looked on as rather weird and much of the power there, in practice, works in terms of family relationships.
It just so happens there are lots of adaptive reasons to have precedents that seem to extend to cover women too. I don’t think one can seriously forward an argument that keeps women at home and doesn’t create something that can be used against him in fairly horrifying ways. Even if you don’t have a fairly inclusive definition of people, it seems unwise to treat other humans in that way—you, after all, are the other human to another human.
What about fish? I’m pretty sure many fish are significantly more functional than one-month-old humans, possibly up to two or three months. (Younger than that I don’t think babies exhibit the ability to anticipate things. Haven’t actually looked this up anywhere reputable, though.)
I don’t know enough about them—given they’re so different to us in terms of gross biology I imagine it’s often going to be quite difficult to distinguish between functioning and instinct—this:
Frequently. It’s scary. But if I were in a body in which intelligence was not easy to express, and I was killed by someone who didn’t think I was sufficiently functional to be a person, that would be a tragic accident, not a moral wrong.
The legal definition of an accident is an unforeseeable event. I don’t agree with that entirely because, well everything’s foreseeable to an arbitrary degree of probability given the right assumptions. However, do you think that people have a duty to avoid accidents that they foresee a high probability-adjusted harm from? (i.e. the potential harm modified by the probability they foresee of the event.)
The thought here being that, if there’s much room for doubt, there’s so much suffering involved in killing and eating animals that we shouldn’t do it even if we only argue ourselves to some low probability of their being people.
About age four, possibly a year or two earlier. I’m reasonably confident I had introspection at age four; I don’t think I did much before that. I find myself completely unable to empathize with a ‘me’ lacking introspection.
Do you think that the use of language and play to portray and discuss fantasy worlds is a sign of introspection?
OK. So the point of this analogy is that newborns seem a lot like the script described, on the compilation step. Yes, they’re going to develop advanced, functioning behaviors eventually, but no, they don’t have them yet. They’re just developing the infrastructure which will eventually support those behaviors.
I agree, if it doesn’t have the capabilities that will make it a person there’s no harm in stopping it before it gets there. If you prevent an egg and a sperm combining and implanting, you haven’t killed a human.
I know the question I actually want to ask: do you think behaviors are immoral if and only if they’re maladaptive?
No, fitness is too complex a phenomena for our relatively inefficient ways of thinking and feeling to update on it very well. If we fix immediate lethal response from the majority as one end of the moral spectrum, and enthusiastic endorsement as the other, then maladaptive behaviour tends to move you further towards the lethal response end of things. But we’re not rational fitness maximisers, we just tend that way on the more readily apparent issues.
It doesn’t matter if a pig is smarter than a baby. It wouldn’t matter if a pig passed the Turing test. Babies are humans, so they get preferential treatment.
do you get less and less preferential treatment as you become less and less human?
I’d say so, yeah. It’s kind of a tricky function, though, since there are two reasons I’m logically willing to give preferential treatment to an organism: likelyhood of said organism eventually becoming the ancestor of a creature similar to myself, and likelyhood of that creature or it’s descendants contributing to an environment in which creatures similar to myself would thrive.
Anyway, “species” isn’t a hard-edged category built in to nature—do you get less and less preferential treatment as you become less and less human?
It’s a lot more hard-edged than intelligence. Of all the animals (I’m talking about individual animals, not species) in the world, practically all are really close to 0% or 100% human. On the other hand, there is a broad range of intelligence among animals, and even in humans. So if you want a standard that draws a clean line, humanity is better than intelligence.
Also, what’s the standard against which beings are compared to determine how “human” they are? Phenotypically average among the current population? Nasty prospects for the cryonics advocates among us. And the mind-uploading camp.
I can tell the difference between an uploaded/frozen human, and a pig. Even a uploaded/frozen pig. Transhumans are in the preferential treatment category, but transpigs aren’t..
Also veers dangerously close to negative eugenics, if you’re going to start declaring some people are less human than others.
This is a fully general counter-argument. Any standard of moral worth will have certain objects that meet the standard and certain objects that fail. If you say “All objects that have X property have moral worth”, I can immediately accuse you of eugenics against objects that do not have X property.
And a question for you :If you think that more intelligence equals more moral worth, does that mean that AI superintelligences have super moral worth? If Clippy existed, would you try and maximize the number of paperclips in order to satisfy the wants a superior intelligence?
I really like your point about the distinction between maladaptive behavior and immoral behavior. But I don’t think your example about women in higher education is as cut and dried as you present it.
For those who think that morality is the godshatter of evolution, maladaptive is practically the definition of immoral. For me, maladaptive-ness is the explanation for why certain possible moral memes (insert society-wide incest-marriage example) don’t exist in recorded history, even though I should otherwise expect them to exist given my belief in moral anti-realism.
For those who think that morality is the godshatter of evolution, maladaptive is practically the definition of immoral.
Disagree? What do you mean by this?
Edit:
If I believe that morality, either descriptively or prescriptively, consists of the values imparted to humans by the evolutionary process, I have no need to adhere to the process roughly used to select these values rather than the values themselves when they are maladaptive.
If one is committed to a theory that says morality is objective (aka moral realism), one needs to point at what it is that make morality objectively true. Obvious candidates include God and the laws of physics. But those two candidates have been disproved by the empiricism (aka the scientific method).
At this point, some detritus of evolution starts to look like a good candidate for the source of morality. There isn’t an Evolution Fairy who commanded the humans evolve to be moral, but evolution has created drives and preferences within us all (like hunger or desire for sex). More on this point here—the source of my reference to godshatter.
It might be that there is an optimal way of bringing these various drives into balance, and the correct choices to all moral decisions can be derived from this optimal path. As far as I can tell, those who are trying to derive morality from evo. psych endorse this position.
In short, if morality is the product of human drives created by evolution, then behavior that is maladaptive (i.e. counter to what is selected for by evolution) is by essentially correlated with immoral behavior.
That said, my summary of the position may be a bit thin, because I’m a moral anti-realist and don’t believe the evo. psych → morality story.
Ah, I see what you mean. I don’t think one has to believe in objective morality as such to agree that “morality is the godshatter of evolution”. Moreover, I think it’s pretty key to the “godshatter” notion that our values have diverged from evolution’s “value”, and we now value things “for their own sake” rather than for their benefit to fitness. As such, I would say that the “godshatter” notion opposes the idea that “maladaptive is practically the definition of immoral”, even if there is something of a correlation between evolutionarily-selectable adaptive ideas and morality.
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.
Figuring out how to define human (as in “don’t kill humans”) so as to include babies is relatively easy, since babies are extremely likely to grow up into humans.
The hard question is deciding which transhumans—including types not yet invented, possibly types not yet thought of, and certainly types which are only imagined in a sketchy abstract way—can reasonably be considered as entities which shouldn’t be killed.
And I agree that we should treat animals better. I’m vegetarian.
and will become people one day
I agree that this discussion is slightly complex. Gwern’s abortion dialogue contains a lot of relevant material.
However, I don’t feel that saying that “we should protect babies because one day they will be human” requires aggregate utilitarianism as opposed to average utilitarianism, which I in general prefer. Babies are already alive, and already experience things.
and lots of people care about them
This argument has two functions. One is the literal meaning of “we should respect people’s preferences”. See discussion on the Everybody Draw Mohammed day. The other is that other people’s strong moral preferences are some evidence towards the correct moral path.
ETA: I hate that I have to say this, but can people respond instead of just downvoting? I’m honestly curious as to why this particular post is controversial—or have I missed something?
I often “claim” my downvotes (aka I will post “downvoted” and then give reason.) However, I know that when I do this, I will be downvoted myself. So that is probably one big deterrent to others doing the same.
For one thing, the person you are downvoting will generally retaliate by downvoting you (or so it seems to me, since I tend to get an instant −1 on downvoting comments), and people who disagree with your reason for downvoting will also downvote you.
Also, many people on this site are just a-holes. Sorry.
Common reasons I downvote with no comment: I think the mistake is obvious to most readers (or already mentioned) and there’s little to be gained from teaching the author. I think there’s little insight and much noise—length, unpleasant style, politically disagreeable implications that would be tedious to pick apart (especially in tone rather than content). I judge that jerkishness is impairing comprehension; cutting out the courtesies and using strong words may be defensible, but using insults where explanations would do isn’t.
On the “just a-holes” note (yes, I thought “Is this about me?”): It might be that your threshold for acceptable niceness is unusually high. We have traditions of bluntness and flaw-hunting (mostly from hackers, who correctly consider niceness noise when discussing bugs in X), so we ended up rather mean on average, and very tolerant of meanness. People who want LW to be nicer usually do it by being especially nice, not by especially punishing meanness. I notice you’re on my list of people I should be exceptionally nice to, but not on my list of exceptionally nice people, which is a bad thing if you love Postel’s law. (Which, by Postel’s law, nobody but me has to.) The only LessWronger I think is an asshole is wedrifid, and I think this is one of his good traits.
We have traditions of bluntness and flaw-hunting (mostly from hackers, who correctly consider niceness noise when discussing bugs in X), so we ended up rather mean on average, and very tolerant of meanness.
I think there is a difference between choosing bluntness where niceness would tend to obscure the truth, and choosing between two forms of expression which are equally illuminating but not equally nice. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m using “a-hole” here to mean “One who routinely chooses the less nice variant in the latter situation.”
(This is not a specific reference to you; your comment just happened to provide a good anchor for it.)
I notice you’re on my list of people I should be exceptionally nice to, but not on my list of exceptionally nice people,
Would you mind discussing this with me, because I find it disturbing that I come off as having double-standards, and am interested to know more about where that impression comes from. I personally feel that I do not expect better behaviour from others than I practice, but would like to know (and update my behaviour) if I am wrong about this.
I admit to lowering my level of “niceness” on LW, because I can’t seem to function when I am nice and no one else is. However MY level of being “not nice” means that I don’t spend a lot of time finding ways to word things in the most inoffensive manner. I don’t feel like I am exceptionally rude, and am concerned if I give off that impression.
I also feel like I keep my “punishing meanness” levels to a pretty high standard too: I only “punish” (by downvoting or calling out) what I consider to be extremely rude behavior (ie “I wish you were dead” or “X is crap.”) that is nowhere near the level of “meanness” that I feel like my posts ever get near.
You come off as having single-standards. That is, I think the minimal level of niceness you accept from others is also the minimal level of niceness you practice—you don’t allow wiggle room for others having different standards. I sincerely don’t resent that! My model of nice people in general suggests y’all practice Postel’s law (“Be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you send”), but I don’t think it’s even consistent to demand that someone follow it.
extremely rude behavior (ie “I wish you were dead” or “X is crap.”)
...I’m never going to live that one down, am I? Let’s just say that there’s an enormous amount of behaviours that I’d describe as “slightly blunter than politeness would allow, for the sake of clarity” and you’d describe as “extremely rude”.
Also, while I’ve accepted the verdict that ” is crap” is extremely rude and I shouldn’t ever say it, I was taken aback at your assertion that it doesn’t contribute anything. Surely “Don’t use this thing for this purpose” is non-empty. By the same token, I’d actually be pretty okay with being told “I wish you were dead” in many contexts. For example, in a discussion of eugenics, I’d be quite fine with a position that implies I should be dead, and would much rather hear it than have others dance around the implication.
Maybe the lesson for you is that many people suck really bad at phrasing things, so you should apply the principle of charity harder and be tolerant if they can’t be both as nice and as clear as you’d have been and choose to sacrifice niceness? The lesson I’ve learned is that I should be more polite in general, more polite to you in particular, look harder for nice phrasings, and spell out implications rather than try to bake them in connotations.
For example, in a discussion of eugenics, I’d be quite fine with a position that implies I should be dead, and would much rather hear it than have others dance around the implication.
I’m fine with positions that imply I should never have been born (although I have yet to hear one that includes me), but I’d feel very differently about one implying that I should be dead!
Many people don’t endorse anything similar to the principle that “any argument for no more of something should explain why there is a perfect amount of that thing or be counted as an argument for less of that thing.”
E.g. thinking arguments that “life extension is bad” generally have no implications regarding killing people were it to become available. So those who say I shouldn’t live to be 200 are not only basically arguing I should (eventually, sooner than I want) be dead, the implication I take is often that I should be killed (in the future).
If someone tells me I should die now, I understand that to mean that my life from this point forward is of negative value to them. If they tell me I should never have been born, I understand that to mean not only that my life from this point forward is of negative value, but also that my life up to this point has been of negative value.
Interesting. I don’t read it as necessarily a judgment of value at all to be told that I should never have been born (things that should not have happened may accidentally have good consequences). Additionally, someone who doesn’t think that I should have been born, but also doesn’t think I should die, will not try to kill me, though they may push policies that will prevent future additions to my salient reference class; someone who thinks I should die could try to make that happen!
For my part, I don’t treat saying things like “I think you should be dead” as particularly predictive of actually trying to kill me. Perhaps I ought to, but I don’t.
If it helps, I didn’t even remember that one of the times I’ve called someone out on “X is crap” was you. So consider it “lived down”.
taken aback at your assertion that it doesn’t contribute anything.
You’re right. How about an assertion that it doesn’t contribute anything that couldn’t be easily rephrased in a much better way? Your example of “Don’t use this thing for this purpose”, especially if followed by a brief explanation, is an order of magnitude better than “X is crap”, and I doubt it took you more than 5 seconds to write.
I often “claim” my downvotes (aka I will post “downvoted” and then give reason.) However, I know that when I do this, I will be downvoted myself. So that is probably one big deterrent to others doing the same.
On the other hand if people agree with your reasons they often upvote it (especially back up towards zero if it dropped negative).
For one thing, the person you are downvoting will generally retaliate by downvoting you (or so it seems to me, since I tend to get an instant −1 on downvoting comments)
I certainly hope so. I would expect that they disagree with your reasons for downvoting or else they would have not made their comment. It would take a particularly insightful explanation for your vote for them to believe that you influencing others toward thinking their contribution is negative is itself a valuable contribution.
Also, many people on this site are just a-holes. Sorry.
For one thing, the person you are downvoting will generally retaliate by downvoting you (or so it seems to me, since I tend to get an instant −1 on downvoting comments)
I certainly hope so. I would expect that they disagree with your reasons for downvoting or else they would have not made their comment. It would take a particularly insightful explanation for your vote for them to believe that you influencing others toward thinking their contribution is negative is itself a valuable contribution.
Do you think that’s a good thing, or just a likely outcome?
Downvoting explanations of downvotes seems like a really bad idea, regardless how you feel about the downvote. It strongly incentives people to not explain themselves, not open themselves up for debates, but just vote and then remove themselves from the discussion.
I don’t see how downvoting explanations and more explicit behavior is helpful for rational discourse in any way.
It strongly incentives people to not explain themselves, not open themselves up for debates, but just vote and then remove themselves from the discussion.
This is exactly the reaction I want to trolls, basic questions outside of dedicated posts, and stupid mistakes. Are downvotes of explanations in those cases also read as an incentive not to post explanations in general?
Speaking for myself, yes. I read it as “don’t engage this topic on this site, period”.
I agree with downvoting (and ignoring) the types of comments you mentioned, but not explanations of such downvotes. The explanations don’t add any noise, so they shouldn’t be punished. (Maybe if they got really excessive, but currently I have the impression that too few downvotes are explained, rather than too many.)
Do you think that’s a good thing, or just a likely outcome?
Comments can serve as calls to action encouraging others to downvote or priming people with a negative or unintended interpretation of a comment—be it yours or that of someone else -that influence is something to be discouraged. This is not the case with all explanations of downvotes but it certainly describes the effect and often intent of the vast majority of “Downvoted because” declarations. Exceptions include explanations that are requested and occasionally reasons that are legitimately surprising or useful. Obviously also an exception is any time when you actually agree they have a point.
I might well consider an explanation of a downvote on a comment of mine to be a valuable contribution, even if I continue to disagree with the thinking behind it. Actually, that’s not uncommon.
If I downvote with comment, it’s usually for a fairly specific problem, and usually one that I expect can be addressed if it’s pointed out; some very clear logical problem that I can throw a link at, for example, or an isolated offensive statement. I may also comment if the post is problematic for a complicated reason that the poster can’t reasonably be expected to figure out, or if its problems are clearly due to ignorance.
Otherwise it’s fairly rare for me to do so; I see downvotes as signaling that I don’t want to read similar posts, and replying to such a post is likely to generate more posts I don’t want to read. This goes double if I think the poster is actually trolling rather than just exhibiting some bias or patch of ignorance. Basically it’s a cost-benefit analysis regarding further conversation; if continuing to reply would generate more heat than light, better to just downvote silently and drive on.
It’s uncommon for me to receive retaliatory downvotes when I do comment, though.
Also, many people on this site are just a-holes. Sorry.
I think it’s more that there are a few a-holes, but they are very prolific (well, that and the same bias that causes us to notice how many red lights we get stopped at but not how many green lights we speed through also focuses our attention on the worst posting behavior).
Explicitly naming names accomplishes nothing except inducing hostility, as it will be taken as a status challenge. Not explicitly naming names, one hopes, leaves everyone re-examining whether their default tone is appropriately calibrated.
I agree with you that naming names can be taken as a status challenge. Of course, this whole topic positions you as an abjudicator of appropriate calibration, which can be taken as a status grab, for the excellent reason that it is one. Not that there’s anything wrong with going for status. All of that notwithstanding, if you prefer to diffuse your assertions of individual inappropriate behavior over an entire community, that’s your privilege.
I care about my status on this site only to the extent that it remains above some minimum required for people not to discount my posts simply because they were written by me.
My interest in this thread is that like Daenerys I think the current norm for discourse is suboptimal, but I think I give greater weight to the possibility of that some of the suboptimal behavior is people defecting by accident; hence the subtle push for occasional recalibration of tone.
Just to be clear: I’m fine with you pushing for a norm that’s optimal for you. Blatantly, if you want to; subtly if you’d rather.
But I don’t agree that the norm you’re pushing is optimal for me, and I consider either of us pushing for the establishment of norms that we’re most comfortable with to be a status-linked social maneuver.
I agree that pretty much all communication does this, yes. Sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly.
As to why… because I see the norm you’re pushing as something pretty close to the cultural baseline of the “friendly” pole of the American mainstream, which I see as willing to trade off precision and accuracy for getting along. You may even be pushing for something even more “get along” optimized than that.
I mostly don’t mind that the rest of my life more or less optimizes for getting along, though I often find it frustrating when it means that certain questions simply can’t ever be asked in the first place, and that certain answers can’t be believed when they’re given because alternative answers are deemed too impolite to say. Still, as I say, I accept it as a fact about my real-life environment. I probably even prefer it, as I acknowledge that optimizing for precision and accuracy at the expense of getting along would be problematic if I could never get away from it, however tired or upset I was.
That said, I value the fact that LW uses a different standard, one that optimizes for accuracy and precision, and therefore efforts to introduce the baseline “get along” standard to LW remove local value for me.
Again, let me stress that I’m not asserting that you ought not make those efforts. If that’s what you want, then by all means push for it. If you are successful, LW will become less valuable to me, but you’re not under any kind of moral obligation to preserve the value of the Internet to me.
But speaking personally, I’d prefer you didn’t insist as you did so that those efforts are actually in my best interests, with the added implication that I can’t recognize my interests as well as you can.
Not explicitly naming names, one hopes, leaves everyone re-examining whether their default tone is appropriately calibrated.
It left me evaluating whether it was me personally that was being called an asshole or others in the community and whether those others are people that deserve the insult or not. Basically I needed to determine whether it was a defection against me, an ally or my tribe in general. Then I had to decide what, if any, was an appropriate, desirable and socially acceptable tit-for-tat response. I decided to mostly ignore him because engaging didn’t seem like it would do much more than giving him a platform from which to gripe more.
Why do you feel it’s correct to interpret it as defection in the first place?
In case you were wondering the translation of this from social-speak to Vulcan is:
Calling people assholes isn’t a defection, therefore you saying—and in particular feeling—that labeling people as assholes is a defection says something personal about you. I am clever and smooth for communicating this rhetorically.
So this too is a defection. Not that I mind—because it is a rather mild defection that is well within the bounds of normal interaction. I mean… it’s not like you called me an asshole or anything. ;)
That is not a correct translation. Calling someone an asshole may or may not be defection. In this case, I’m not sure whether it was. Examining why you feel that it was may be enlightening to me or to you or hopefully both. Defecting by accident is a common flaw, for sure, but interpreting a cooperation as a defection is no less damaging and no less common.
I’m already working on not being an asshole in general, and on not being an asshole to specific people on LW. If someone answers “yes” to that I’ll work harder at being a non-asshole on LW. Or post less. Or try to do one of those for two days then forget about the whole thing.
You haven’t stood out as someone who has been an asshole to me or anyone I didn’t think deserved it in the context, those being the only cases salient enough that I could expect myself to remember.
If you’re already working on it, you’re probably in the clear. Not being an a-hole is a high-effort activity for many of us; in this case I will depart from primitive consquentialism and say that effort counts for something.
Yeah, I do retailate quite commonly (less than 60% retailation ITT though), but I’ve never been an asshole on LW until this thread. Not particularly planning on repeating this, but I’m not sorry at all. Forced civility just doesn’t fit the mood of this topic at all in my eyes.
Tiny kittens are also cute and haven’t even done anything to death yet. But if you accidentally lock one in a car and it suffocates, that’s merely unfortunate, and should probably not be a crime. The same is true for infants and all other non-person life. If you kill a kitten for some reason other than sadism, well, it’s unfortunate that you felt that was necessary, but again, they’re not people.
Yeah, I get it, you don’t consider babies people and I do. So pretty much we just throw down (ie. trying to reason each other into having the same values as ourselves would be pointless). You vote for baby killing, I vote against it. If there is a war of annihilation and I’m forced to choose sides between the baby killers and the non-baby killers and they seem evenly matched then I choose the non-baby killers side and go kill all the baby killers.
Tiny kittens are also cute and haven’t even done anything to death yet. But if you accidentally lock one in a car and it suffocates, that’s merely unfortunate, and should probably not be a crime. The same is true for infants and all other non-person life. If you kill a kitten for some reason other than sadism, well, it’s unfortunate that you felt that was necessary, but again, they’re not people.
Yeah, I get it, you don’t consider babies people and I do. So pretty much we just throw down (ie. trying to reason each other into having the same values as ourselves would be pointless). You vote for baby killing, I vote against it. If there is a war of annihilation and I’m forced to choose sides between the baby killers and the non-baby killers and they seem evenly matched then I choose the non-baby killers side and go kill all the baby killers. If I somehow have the option to exclude all consideration of your preferences from the optimisation function of an FAI then I take it. Just a plain ol’ conflict of terminal values.
It is a core belief of Bakkot’s—nothing is going to change that. His thinking on the matter is also self consistent. Only strong social or personal influence has a chance of making a difference (for example, if he has children, all his friends have children and he becomes embedded in a tribe where non-baby-killing is a core belief). For my part I understand Bakkot’s reasoning but do not share his preference based premises. As such changing my mind regarding the conclusion would make no sense.
More succinctly I don’t expect reasoning with each other to change our minds because neither of us is wrong (in the intellectual sense). We shouldn’t change our minds based on intellectual arguments—if we do then we are making a mistake.
It is a core belief of Bakkot’s—nothing is going to change that.
Yes, and my question is how do you know? Admittedly I haven’t read the entire thread from the beginning, but in the large part I have, I see nothing to suggest that there is anything particularly immutable about either of your positions such that neither of you could possibly change your mind based on normal moral-philosophical arguments. What makes you so quick to dismiss your interlocutor as a babyeating alien?
What makes you so quick to dismiss your interlocutor
You’re spinning this into a dismissal, disrespect of Bakkot’s intellectual capability or ability to reason. Yet disagreement does not equal disrespect when it is a matter of different preferences. It is only when I think an ‘interlocutor’ is incapable of understanding evidence and reasoning coherently (due to, say, biases or ego) that observing that reason cannot persuade each other is a criticism.
as a babyeating alien?
He is a [babykilling advocate]. He says he is a babykilling advocate. He says why. That I acknowledge that he is an advocate of infanticide rights is not, I would hope, offensive to him.
I note that while Bakkot’s self expression is novel, engaging and coherent (albeit contrary to my values), your own criticism is not coherent. You asked “how do you know?” and I gave you a straight answer. Continued objection makes no sense.
You’re spinning this into a dismissal, disrespect of Bakkot’s intellectual capability or ability to reason. Yet disagreement does not equal disrespect when it is a matter of different preferences.
Spinning? I’m not trying to spin anything into anything. You said this was a matter of different preferences before, and I understood the first time. You don’t need to repeat it. My criticism is about why you think this a difference in values rather than a mere confusion of them. (Also, “dismissal” has connotations, but I can’t think of a better word to capture “throwing up your hands and going to war with them”)
He is a [babykilling advocate]. He says he is a babykilling advocate. He says why. That I acknowledge that he is an advocate of infanticide rights is not, I would hope, offensive to him.
Emphasis was meant to be on alien. Aliens are distinguished by, among other things, not living in our moral reference frame.
Akon was resting his head in his hands. “You know,” Akon said, “I thought about composing a message like this to the Babyeaters. It was a stupid thought, but I kept turning it over in my mind. Trying to think about how I might persuade them that eating babies was… not a good thing.”
The Xenopsychologist grimaced. “The aliens seem to be even more given to rationalization than we are—which is maybe why their society isn’t so rigid as to actually fall apart—but I don’t think you could twist them far enough around to believe that eating babies was not a babyeating thing.”
“And by the same token,” Akon said, “I don’t think they’re particularly likely to persuade us that eating babies is good.” He sighed. “Should we just mark the message as spam?”
The question was “how do you know?”, not “what do you mean?”. Aliens are almost certain to fundamentally disagree with humans in a variety of important matters, by simple virtue of not being genetically related to us. Bakkot is a human. Different priors are called for.
Oh, and to clarify the extent of my disagreement: When I say “You vote for baby killing, I vote against it” that assumes I don’t live in some backwards country without compulsory voting. If voting is optional then I’m staying home. Other people killing babies is not my problem—because I don’t have the power to stop a mob of humans from killing babies and I’m not interested in making the token gesture.
Once we get artificial uteri I think it should be illegal except in cases of rape, but it should be legal to renounce all responsibility for it and put it up for adoption or let the other biological parent finance the babies coming to term. This has the neat and desirable effect of equalizing the position of the biological father and the biological mother.
Just remember that if it ends with -us, it probably pluralizes to -i. That’s only for latin-based words. Greek-based words, like octopus, can either be pluralized to octopuses or octopodes (pronounced Ahk-top-o-dees). And sometimes you have a new or technical latin-based word like “virus” which just pluralizes to “viruses.” It’s perfectly fine to pluralize uterus to uteruses, too, since it’s so uncommon. English is a bitch.
! I didn’t realize I’d broke all the old .html links—turned out that when I thought I was removing the gzip encoding, I also removed the Apache rewrite rules. I’ve fixed that and also pointed the Discussion at the most current URL, just in case.
Allowing sadists to kill their babies creates incentive to produce babies for the sole purpose of killing them, which is a behavior which is long-run going to be very damaging to society.
Its illegal to torture an animal. Why wouldn’t it be illegal to torture a baby while killing him? If a sadist can get jollies out of killing with painless poison his children and keeps making them for that purpose, I can’t really see how this harms wider society if he pays for the pills and children himself.
If a sadist can get jollies out of killing with painless poison his children and keeps making them for that purpose, I can’t really see how this harms wider society if he pays for the pills and children himself.
Please rethink this. E.g. are you at all confident that this sadist wouldn’t slip and go on to adults after their 10th child? Wouldn’t you, personally, force people who practice this to wear some mandatory identification in public, so you don’t have to wonder about every creepy-looking stranger? Don’t you just have an intuition about the myriad ways that giving sadists such rights could undermine society?
E.g. are you at all confident that this sadist wouldn’t slip and go on to adults after their 10th child?
Fine make it illegal for this to be done except by experts.
Wouldn’t you, personally, force people who practice this to wear some mandatory identification in public, so you don’t have to wonder about every creepy-looking stranger?
No, why?
Don’t you just have an intuition about the myriad ways that giving sadists such rights could undermine society?
We already give sadists lots of rights to psychologically and physical abuse people when this is done with consent or when we don’t feel like being morally consistent or when there is some societal benefit to be had.
Wouldn’t you, personally, force people who practice this to wear some mandatory identification in public, so you don’t have to wonder about every creepy-looking stranger? - No, why?
For your own safety, in every regard that such people could threaten it.
We already give sadists lots of rights to psychologically and physical abuse people when this is done with consent or when we don’t feel like being morally consistent or when there is some societal benefit to be had.
Well, I’ve always thought that it’s enormously and horribly wrong of us.
For your own safety, in every regard that such people could threaten it.
I don’t think society considers that a valid reason for discrimination.
Also please remember surgeons can do nasty things to me without flinching if they wanted to, people do also occasionally have such fears since we even invoke this trope in horror movies.
Well, I’ve always thought that it’s enormously and horribly wrong of us.
I generally agree.
But on the other hand I think we should give our revealed preference some weight as well, remember we are godshatter, maybe we should just accept that perhaps we don’t care as much about other people’s suffering as we’d like to believe or say we do.
I don’t think society considers that a valid reason for discrimination.
Yes society might, if society takes into account that it loathes most people with those characteristics to begin with.
remember we are godshatter, maybe we should just accept that perhaps we don’t care as much about other people’s suffering as we’d like to believe or say we do.
Maybe if we do bother to self-modify in some direction along one of our “shard”’s vectors, it could as well be a direction we see as more virtuous? Making ourselves care as much as we’d privately want to, at least to try and see how it goes?
Making ourselves care as much as we’d privately want to, at least to try and see how it goes?
Revealed preferences are precisely what we end up doing and actually desire once we get in a certain situation. Why not work it out the other way around? How can you be sure maximum utility is going with this shard line and not the other?
Because it sounds good? To 21st century Westerners?
My current values simply DO point in the direction of rewriting parts of my utility function like I suggest, and not like you suggest.
When currently thinking in far mode about this you like the idea, but seeing it in practice might easily horrify you.
In any case when I was talking about maximising utility, I was talking about you maximising your utility. You can easily be mistaken about what does and dosen’t do that.
Uh huh, thanks. The difference is, I’m quite a bit more distrustful of your legal infanticide’s perspectives than you’re distrustful of my personal self-modification’s perspectives.
The difference is, I’m quite a bit more distrustful of your legal infanticide’s perspectives than you’re distrustful of my personal self-modification’s perspectives.
I’m not sure this is so. We should update towards each other estimates of the other’s distrustfulness. I’m literally horrified by the possibility of a happy death spiral around universal altruism.
The idea is that a woman repeatedly getting pregnant and then killing the child is putting a lot of strain on society, both in terms of resources and in terms of comfort. We allow a lot of privileges for pregnant women and new mothers, with the expectation that they’re trying to bring new people into society, something we encourage.
I’d think that that the bulk of the resource cost of a newborn is the physiological cost (and medical risks) the mother endured during pregnancy. The general societal cost seems small in comparison.
Sure, that seems true. Note that Bakkot didn’t say that the costs to everyone else outweighed the costs to the mother, merely that the costs to everyone else were also substantial.
This point is less important. The idea is that a woman repeatedly getting pregnant and then killing the child is putting a lot of strain on society, both in terms of resources and in terms of comfort. We allow a lot of privileges for pregnant women and new mothers, with the expectation that they’re trying to bring new people into society, something we encourage. If you’re killing your kid out of sadism, you’re not doing this, and society will have to adjust how all pregnant women are treated.
We already treat accidental pregnant women basically the same as those who planned their pregnancy. Clearly we should distinguish and discriminate between them rather than lump them into the “pregnant woman” category (I take a lighter tone in some of my other posts here to provoke thought, but I’m dead serious about this).
Also many people are way to stuck in their 21st century Eurocentric frame of mind to comprehend the personhood argument for infanticide properly. Let me help:
This point is less important. The idea is that a woman repeatedly getting pregnant and then aborting the child is putting a lot of strain on society, both in terms of resources and in terms of comfort. We allow a lot of privileges for pregnant women and new mothers, with the expectation that they’re trying to bring new people into society, something we encourage. If you’re killing your fetus out of sadism, you’re not doing this, and society will have to adjust how all pregnant women are treated.
On infanticide, is this a reasonable summary of your position:
Adult humans have a moral quality (let’s call it “blicket”) that most animals lack. One major consequence of blicket is that morally acceptable killings require much more significant justifications when the victim is a blicket-creature (“I killed him in self-defense”) than when the victim is not a blicket-creature (“Cows are delicious, and I was hungry”). Empirically, cows don’t have blicket and never will without some extraordinary intervention. Six-month old babies lack blicket, but are likely to develop it during ordinary maturation.
Ok. I agree with you on the empirical assertions (I actually suspect that 10-month-olds also lack blicket). But my moral theory gives significant weight to blicket-potential (because blicket is that awesome), while your system does not appear to do so. Why not?
You mentioned to someone that the current system of being forced to provide for a child or place the child in foster care is suboptimal. I assume a substantial part of that position is that foster care is terrible (i.e. unlikely to produce high-functioning adults).
I agree that one solution to this problem is to end the parental obligation (i.e. allow infanticide). This solution has the benefit of being very inexpensive. But why do you think that solution is better than the alternative solution of fixing foster care (and low quality child-rearing practice generally) so that it is likely to produce high-quality adults?
I agree there is a scale about how much weight to give blicket-potential. But I support a meta-norm about constructing a morality that the morality should add up to normal, absent compelling justification.
That is, if a proposed moral system says that some common practice is deeply wrong, or some common prohibition has relatively few negative consequences if permitted, that’s a reason to doubt the moral construction unless a compelling case can be made. It’s not impossible, but a moral theory that says we’ve all doing it wrong should not be expected either.
The fact that my calibration of my blicket-potential sensitivity mostly adds up to normal is evidence to me that the model is a fairly accurate description of the morality people say they are applying.
making infanticide illegal is something which appears to be a very Judeo-Christian affection, rather than a moral universalism.
This is a historical claim that requires a bit more evidence in support. I don’t doubt that infanticide has a rich historical pedigree. But I don’t think infanticide was ever justified on a “human autonomy” basis, which seems to be your justification. For example, the relatively recent dynamic of Chinese sex-selection infanticide has not been based on any concept of personal autonomy, as far as I can tell.
In general, I suspect that most cultures that tolerated infanticide were much lower on the human-autonomy scale than our current civilization (i.e. valued individual human life less than we do).
I did some reading on the ancients and infanticide, and the picture is murky—the Christians were not responsible for making infanticide illegal, that seems to have preceded them, but they claimed the laws were honored mostly in the breach, so whether you give any credit to them depends on your theories of causality, large-scale trends, and whether the Christians made any meaningful difference to the actual infanticide rate.
It’s difficult to make conclusions about this, because most historical cultures made fairly little effort to support their conventions at all. However, it’s certainly been my impression that a lot more cultures were OK with casual infanticide than casual murder. This suggests strongly to me that the view of newborns as people is not universal.
Cultures are often fine with killing wives and children too, if they get too far out of line. They are yours after all.
Sigh. How did the post-modern moral nihilist become the defender of moral universalism? My argument is more that infanticide fits extremely poorly within the cluster of values that we’ve currently adopted.
most historical cultures made fairly little effort to support their conventions at all.
Specifically, I can’t understand why a coroner would not take actions to facilitate the prosecution of a crime (infanticide is murder), because that is one of the jobs of a coroner.
By contrast, I’ve heard that coroners are quite wiling to label a death as accidental when they believe it was suicide, because any legal violations are not punishable (suicide is generally illegal, but everyone agrees that prosecution is pointless).
Specifically, I can’t understand why a coroner would not take actions to facilitate the prosecution of a crime (infanticide is murder), because that is one of the jobs of a coroner.
Because he, like some who have posted here, is sympathetic to the baby-killing mothers under certain circumstances and doesn’t mind helping them avoid prosecution? I wouldn’t judge him, heavens forbid. I’d likely do the opposite in his place, but I respect his position.
How much overlap do you think there is between “influential members of the criminal justice system” and “people who are sympathetic to infanticide”? Especially considering how far from mainstream the infanticide position is.
By contrast, I’ve heard that coroners are quite wiling to label a death as accidental when they believe it was suicide, because any legal violations are not punishable (suicide is generally illegal, but everyone agrees that prosecution is pointless).
Labelling a suicide as an accident isn’t legally trivial. It is, at least in some cases, an action that favors the interests of the heirs of suicides and disfavors the interests of life insurance companies.
I agree that it isn’t legally trivial. But the social consequences of labeling a death as suicide are much more immediate than any financial consequences from labeling a death as accidental. Also, I’m not sure what percentage of the suicidal have life insurance, so I’m not sure how much weight the hypothetical coroner would place on the life insurance issue.
I’m not saying the position is rational or morally correct, but it wouldn’t surprise me that an influential person like a coroner held a position vaguely like “screw insurance companies.” (>>75%) By contrast, I would be extremely surprised to learn that a coroner was willing to ignore an infanticide, absent collusion (i.e. bribery) of some kind (<<<1%)
(I don’t believe CharlieSheen’s anecdote either. I was challenging the suicide point in isolation.)
But the social consequences of labeling a death as suicide are much more immediate than any financial consequences from labeling a death as accidental.
Say what now? Possibly it’s because my background is Jewish, not Christian, but I don’t buy that at all.
Normatively, suicide is shameful in modern society. By contrast, I don’t think most suicide-victim families (or their social network) are thinking about the life insurance proceeds at the time (within a week?) that the coroner is determining cause of death.
I know I’ve heard of a survey of coroner in which some substantial percentage (20-50%, sorry don’t remember better) of coroners reported that the following had ever occurred in their career: they believed the cause of death of the body they were examining was suicide, but listed the cause as accident.
I can’t find that survey in a quick search, but this research result talks about the effect of elected coroners on cause of death determinations. Specifically, elected coroners were slightly less likely to declare suicide as the cause of death.
most historical cultures made fairly little effort to support their conventions at all.
I am highly skeptical that this is true.
It looks like I misread you. I thought you were referring to moral conventions generally, while you seem to have been referring to moral conventions on infanticide. I agree that many historical cultures did not oppose infanticide as strongly as the current culture.
our current standard seems to be “don’t kill people”
Major objection. When talking about society at large and not the small cluster of “rationalist” utilitarians (who are ever tempted to be smarter than their ethics), the current standard is “don’t kill what our instincts register as people”. The distinction being that John Q. Public hardly reflects on the matter at all. I believe that it’s a hugely useful standard because it strengthens the relevant ethical injunctions, regardless of any inconveniences that it brings from an act utilitarian standpoint.
The fact that infanticide has been practiced so widely suggests strongly that most people don’t “instinctively” see babies as people.
NO! As you have yourself correctly pointed out, it is because most cultures, with ours being a notable exception, assign a low value to “useless” people or people who they feel are a needless drain on society. (mistake fixed)
Hm. So what seems to follow from this is that most people don’t actually consider killing people to be a particularly big deal, what they’re averse to is killing people who contribute something useful to society… or, more generally, that most people are primarily motivated by maximizing social value.
Yes? (I don’t mean to be pedantic here, I just want to make sure I’m not putting words in your mouth.)
Blast me! I meant to say that our culture is an exception, not an “inclusion”. So this statement is largely true about non-western cultures, but western ones mostly view the relatively recent concept of “individuality and personhood are sacred” as their main reason against murder.
So is your position that we inherited an aversion to murder from earlier non-western cultures, and then when we sanctified personhood we made that our main reason for our pre-existing aversion? Or that earlier cultures weren’t averse to murder, and our sanctification caused us to develop such an aversion? Or something else?
Both, probably. We inherited all of their aversion (being a modest amount), and then we developed the sacredness, which, all on its own, added several times more aversion on top of that.
But my moral theory gives significant weight to blicket-potential (because blicket is that awesome), while your system does not appear to do so. Why not?
If you say you don’t want to kill an infant because of its potential for blicket, then you would also have to apply that logic to abortion and birth control, and come to the conclusion that these are just as wrong as killing infants, since they both destroy blicket-potential.
Fetus- does not have blicket, has potential for blicket—killing it is legal abortion
Infant- does not have blicket (you agreed with this), has potential for blicket—killing it is illegal murder
Does not compute. One or the other outcomes needs to be changes, and I’m sure not going to support the illegalization of birth control.
Note: I apologize if this is getting too close to politics, but it is a significant part of the killing babies debate, and not mentioning it just to avoid mentioning a political issue would not give accurate reasons.
At a certain level, all morality is about balancing the demands of conflicting blicket-supported desires. So the balance comes out different at different stages. Yes, the difference between stages is quite arbitrary (and worse: obviously historically contingent).
In short, I wish I had a better answer for you than I am comfortable with arbitrary distinctions (why is the speed limit 55 mph rather than 56?). From an outsider perspective, I’m sure it looks like I’ve been mind-killed by some version of “The enemy of my enemy (politically active religious conservatives) is my friend.”
Somebody did some math about reaction times, kinetic energy from impacts, and fuel economy. That turned out to be a good place to draw the line. For practical purposes, people can drive 60 in a 55 zone under routine circumstances and not get in trouble.
The 55 mph speed limit was a vain attempt by the Federal government to reduce gasoline consumption; initially passed in the 1974 Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act the law was relaxed in 1987 and finally repealed in 1995 allowing states to choose their speed limits. Highways and cars are safer today than in the 1970s and on many highways speed limits were increased to 65 mph. Higher speed limits are often safer because what is worse than speed is variable speed, some people driving fast and some driving slow. When the speed limit is set too low you get lots of people who safely break the law and a few law-abiders who make the roads more dangerous.
Unfortunately vestiges of the 55mph limit remain, in part because police like the 55mph limit which lets them write tickets at will whenever they need an increase in revenues.
So, Alejandro’s response is correct, but all of this seems rather tangential to the question you quote. The reason the speed limit is 55 rather than 56 or 54 is because we have a cultural preference for multiples of 5… which is also why all the other speed limits I see posted are multiples of 5. Seeing a speed limit sign that read “33” or something would cause me to do a potentially life-threatening double-take.
Huh. Some of these I can understand, but I’m really curious about the 19mph one… is there a story behind that? (If I had to guess I’d say it relates to some more global 20mph limit.)
One day in the future, if we somehow survive the existential threats that await us and a Still More Glorious Dawn does, in fact, dawn, one day we might have machines akin to 3D printers that allow us to construct, atom-by-atom, anything we desire so long has we know its composition and structure.
Suppose I take one of these machines and program it to build me a human, then leave when it’s half done. Does the construction chamber have blicket-potential?
Sure. Unborn babies have blicket-potential. Heck, the only reason I don’t say that unconceived babies have blicket potential is that I’m not sure that the statement is coherent.
Blicket and blicket-potential are markers that special moral considerations apply. They don’t control the moral decision without any reference to context.
The utilitarian bioethicist Peter Singer claims that it’s pretty much OK to kill a disabled newborn, but states that killing normal infants who are impossible for their parents to raise doesn’t follow from that, and, while not being as bad as murdering an adult, is hardly justifiable. Note that he doesn’t quite consider any wider social repercussions.
I’m having trouble finding philosophers apart from Singer and Tooley who have written on this topic at all, and both seem to have come to roughly the same conclusions that I did.
Consider Heinlein:
All societies are based on rules to protect pregnant women and young children. All else is surplusage, excrescence, adornment, luxury, or folly, which can — and must — be dumped in emergency to preserve this prime function. As racial survival is the only universal morality, no other basic is possible. Attempts to formulate a “perfect society” on any foundation other than “Women and children first!” is not only witless, it is automatically genocidal. Nevertheless, starry-eyed idealists (all of them male) have tried endlessly — and no doubt will keep on trying.
For one, the idea of basing morality on “racial survival” terrifies me
Eh heh heh. So you can be terrified by some kinds of utilitarian reasoning. Well, this one does terrify me too, but in the context of this conversation I’m tempted to cite my people’s saying: “What’s fine for a Russian would kill a German.”
It feels pretty complex, and I just self-report as undecided on some preferences, but, although a part of my function seems to be optimizing for LW-”fun” too, another, smaller part is a preference for “Niceness with a capital N”, or “the world feeling wholesome”.
I’m not good enough at introspection and self-expression to describe this value of “Niceness”, but it seems to resonate with some Christian ideals and images (“love your enemies”), the complex, indirect ethical teachings seen in classical literature (e.g. Akutagawa or Dostoevsky; I love and admire both), and even, on an aesthetic level, the modern otaku culture’s concept of “moe” (see this great analysis on how that last one, although looking like a mere pop culture craze to outsiders, can tie in into a larger sensibility).
So, there’s an ever-present “minority group” in my largely LW-normal values cluster. I can’t quite label it with something like “conservative” or “romantic”, but I recognize it when I feel it.
...shit, I feel like some kind of ethical hipster now, lol.
Tl;dr: there might be some kind of “Niceness” (permitting “fun” that’s not directly fun) a level or so above “fun” for me, just as there is some kind of “fun” above pleasure for most people (permitting “pleasure” that’s not directly pleasant). If people don’t wirehead so they can have “fun” and not just pleasure, I’m totally able not to optimize for “fun” so I can have “Niceness” and not just “fun”.
Recently, Francesca Minerva published in the Journal of Medical Ethics arguing the case that :
“what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.”
“what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.”
In many (most?) countries abortion is normally only allowed in the first few months of pregnancy. (Also, I can’t imagine why anyone would want to carry a pregnancy nine months, give birth to a child and then kill it rather than just aborting as soon as possible, anyway.)
Can you imagine how the experiences of childbirth and being the primary caregiver for a newborn might alter someone’s desires with respect to bearing and raising a child?
As for bearing, once the child is born that’s a sunk cost; as for “being the primary caregiver for a newborn”… Wait. So we’re not talking about killing a child straight after birth but after a while? (A week? A month? A year?)
I can’t see why that makes a difference in the context of my question, so feel free to choose whichever interpretation you prefer.
For my part, it seems entirely plausible to me that a person’s understanding of what it means to be the primary caregiver for a child will change between time T1, when they are pregnant with that child, and time T2, when the child has been born… just as it seems plausible that a person’s understanding of what a three-week stay in the Caribbean will be like will change between time T1, when they are at home looking at brochures, and time T2, when their airplane is touching down. That sort of thing happens to people all the time. So it doesn’t seem at all odd to me that they might want one thing at T1 and a different thing at T2, which was the behavior you were expressing incredulity about. That seems even more true the more time passes… say, at time T3, when they’ve been raising the child for a month.
Incidentally, I certainly agree with you that bearing the child is a sunk cost once the child is born. If you’re suggesting that, therefore, parents can’t change their desires with respect to bearing the child once it’s born, I conclude that our models of humans are vastly different. If, alternatively, you’re suggesting that it’s an error for parents to change their desires with respect to bearing the child once it’s born, you may well be right, but in that case I have to conclude “I can’t imagine why” was meant rhetorically.
If, alternatively, you’re suggesting that it’s an error for parents to change their desires with respect to bearing the child once it’s born, you may well be right, but in that case I have to conclude “I can’t imagine why” was meant rhetorically.
More like I was assuming too much stuff in the implicit antecedent of the conditional whose consequent is “would want”, but yeah, what I meant is that it’s an error for parents to change their desires with respect to bearing the child once it’s born.
Infanticide of one’s own children should be legal (if done for some reason other than sadism) for up to ten months after birth. Reason: extremely young babies aren’t yet people.
You’re not the first one to argue this on LW. I’ll find you the link in a second. Why can’t sadists kill their babies? Why ten months, precisely? More importantly, why can’t we kill babies?
Why do you particularly bring up the “discrimination against youth” thing?
Would you approve of a man killing a child which his wife recently gave birth to, without the mother’s permission, on the grounds that he does not believe himself to be the child’s father? That’s certainly not sadism.
Or, if genetic testing has been done and the child’s biological father is known, would you say it should be legal for the father to kill the child… say, because he disagrees with the married couple’s religious beliefs and wants to deny them an easy recruit?
How would you define “parent,” then? It’s not a tangent, it’s an important edge case. I’m trying to understand exactly where our views on the issue differ.
For what it’s worth, I agree with you unreservedly on the age discrimination thing. In fact, I think it’s the root of a lot of the current economic problems: a majority of the population is essentially being warehoused during their formative years, and then expected to magically transform into functional, productive adults afterward.
We had a couple of fair-sized threads on infanticide before. I suggest that everyone who hasn’t seen them yet skims through before posting further arguments.
Infanticide of one’s own children should be legal (if done for some reason other than sadism) for up to ten months after birth.
What benefit, other than satisfaction of sadism, do you see in infanticide of one’s own children that wouldn’t be satisfied by merely giving them up for adoption?
I don’t think things should be illegal just because we can’t think of a good reason for people to be doing them
This rule has to be examined very very closely. While it sounds good, it spawns so many strawmen against libertarianism and such, we ought to try and unscrew that applause light of “liberty” from there. Liberty is an applause light to me, too (a reflected one from freedom-in-general), and a fine value it is, but still we’d better clinically examine anything that allows us to sidestep our intuitions so much.
[fucking politics, watch out] *(note that I’m a socialist and rather opposed to libertarianism as well, but I’m very willing to examine and consider its ups and downs)
We have some activity. We see no particular reason to prevent people from doing that activity. We see no good reason for people to do that activity. We have a proposed law that makes that activity illegal. Do I endorse that law?
The only case I can think of where I’d say yes is if the law also performs some other function, the benefit of which outweighs the inefficiencies associated with preventing this activity, and for some reason separating those two functions is more expensive than just preventing the activity. (This sort of thing happens in the real world all the time.)
Can you think of other cases?
I agree with you, by the way, that liberty-as-applause-light is a distraction from thinking clearly about these sorts of questions. Perhaps efficiency is as well, but if so it’s one I have much more trouble reasoning past… I neither love that law nor hate it, but it is taking up energy I could use for something else.
As pointed out here, tribal traditions tend to have been adopted and maintained for some good reason or other, even if people can’t properly explain what that reason is, and that goes double for the traditions that are inconvenient or silly-sounding.
Pace Chesterton, I don’t see that much difference, especially when the context changes significantly from decade to decade. If there’s a pre-existing law preventing the activity, I will probably devote significantly more effort to looking for a good reason to prevent that activity than for a proposed law, but not an infinite amount of effort; at some point either I find such a reason or I don’t endorse the law.
Look at the youngest children in any adoption photolisting. The kids you usually see there are either part of a sibling group, or very disabled. (Example). There are children born with severe disabilities who are given up by their birth parents and are never adopted. (Example) The government pays foster parents to care for them. That’s up to $2,000 per month for care, plus all medical expenses.
Meanwhile, other kids are dying for lack of cheap mosquito nets. This use of money does not seem right to me.
At national level and above, the argument about “use of money” just plain fails. If you’re looking for expenses to cut so that the money could be redirected for glaring needs like mosquito nets, foster care can’t realistically appear on the cut list next to nuclear submarines and spaceflight.
Infanticide of one’s own children should be legal (if done for some reason other than sadism) for up to ten months after birth. Reason: extremely young babies aren’t yet people.
Why not permit the killing of babies not your own, for the same reason?
It causes me a certain level of distress when a baby is harmed or killed, even if it is of no relation to me. Many people (perhaps almost all people) experience a similar amount of distress. Is it your point of view that the aggregate amount of harm caused in this way is not large enough to justify the prohibition on killing babies?
Perhaps what you mean to argue with the house analogy is not that the parent is harmed, but that his property rights have been violated.
Sure, adoption markets basically already exist, why not make them legal?
Not only are wealthier people better candidates on average because they can provide for the material needs much better and will on average have a more suitable psychological profile (we can impose legal screening of adopters too, so they need to match other current criteria before they can legally buy on the adoption market if you feel uncomfortable with “anyone can buy”). It also provides incentives for people with desirable traits to breed, far more than just subsidising them having kids of their own.
One of the standard topics in economic approaches to the law is to discuss the massive market failures caused by not permitting markets in infants; see for example, Landes and Richard Posner’s “The Economics of the Baby Shortage”. I thought their analysis pretty convincing.
It causes me a certain level of distress when a baby is harmed or killed, even if it is of no relation to me. Many people (perhaps almost all people) experience a similar amount of distress.
Don’t worry, in the right culture and society this distress would be pretty minor.
I disagree with that statement on at least two points.
1) How can you so easily predict others’ level of distress if you don’t feel much distress from that source in the first place?
2) Don’t forget about scale insensitivity. Don’t forget that some scale insensitivity can be useful on non-astronomical scales, as it gives bounds to utility functions and throws a light on ethical injunctions.
1) How can you so easily predict others’ level of distress if you don’t feel much distress from that source in the first place?
Looking at other humans. Perhaps even humans in actually existing different cultures.
2) Don’t forget about scale insensitivity. Don’t forget that some scale insensitivity can be useful on non-astronomical scales, as it gives bounds to utility functions and throws a light on ethical injunctions.
This is a good counter point. I just think applying this principle selectively is too easy to game a metric, to put too much weight to it in preliminary discussion.
Perhaps even humans in actually existing different cultures.
Ah, but the culture you’d want and are arguing for here is way, way closer to our current culture than to any existing culture where distress to people from infanticide is “minor”!
How can you be so sure? Historically speaking, infanticide is the human norm.
It is just the last few centuries that some societies have gotten all upset over it.
In some respects modern society is closer in norms to societies that practised infanticide 100 years ago than to Western society of 100 years ago and we consider this a good thing. Why assume no future changes or no changes at all would go in this direction? And that likewise we’ll eventually consider these changes good?
It is certainly weak evidence in favour of a practice being nasty that societies which practice it are generally nasty in other ways. But it is just that, weak evidence.
In some respects modern society is closer in norms to societies that practised infanticide 100 years ago than to Western society of 100 years ago
Doesn’t look that way to me at all, and never did. For every example you list (polyamory, etc) I bet I can find you a counterexample of equivalent strength.
I think you mean “for every example you are likley to list”, I didn’t list any.
Yup.
I didn’t say on net or overall.
That’s the rub. I repeat my claim: the culture you want is, on net or overall, closer to our society than to societies that are OK with infanticide. It’s evidence against your extrapolated-volition utopia being OK with infanticide. (unless I have absolutely zero understanding of Bayes)
That’s the rub. I repeat my claim: the culture you want is, on net or overall, closer to our society than to societies that are OK with infanticide. It’s evidence against your extrapolated-volition utopia being OK with infanticide. (unless I have absolutely zero understanding of Bayes)
Look two comments up.
It is certainly weak evidence in favour of a practice being nasty that societies which practice it are generally nasty in other ways. But it is just that, weak evidence.
That’s the rub. I repeat my claim: the culture you want is, on net or overall, closer to our society than to societies that are OK with infanticide. It’s evidence against your extrapolated-volition utopia being OK with infanticide. (unless I have absolutely zero understanding of Bayes)
Please please just for a second try to look at your own society as the alien one for the purposes of analysis, to ascertain is rather than should when it comes to such questions. I find this has helped me more than anything else in thinking about social questions and avoiding political thinking.
The more interesting question is what to do when parents disagree about infanticide and the complications that come about from custody.
Also adoption contracts would probably need to have a “don’t kill my baby that I’ve given up clause” lest some people wouldn’t want to give up children for adoption.
So, premeditated killing of someone else’s child should be criminal damage rather than murder?
What monetary value does the child have, for the purpose of calculating damages I wonder? We should do early testing to see how much status the parents were likely to gain via the impressiveness of their possession in the future. Facial symmetry, genetic indicators...
The emotional investment a parent makes in their child must be huge, and the damages similarly so. It seems perfectly reasonable for a parent to say, “There’s nothing available that I value more than I valued my child, consequently no sum of money will suffice to cover my damages. Whatever you give me it’s still going to work out as a loss.”
The emotional investment a parent makes in their child must be huge, and the damages similarly so. It seems perfectly reasonable for a parent to say, “There’s nothing available that I value more than I valued my child, consequently no sum of money will suffice to cover my damages. Whatever you give me it’s still going to work out as a loss.”
This is reasoning we may use now. But it does not apply in the spirit of the weirdtopia where we evaluate children only as property without moral value beyond that.
Sewing-Machine says: Why not permit the killing of babies not your own, for the same reason?
Konkvistador says: Because its illegal to kill other people’s pets or destroy their property? Duh.
Jayson_Virissimo says: So, premeditated killing of someone else’s child should be criminal damage rather than murder?
And then we’re back to the bit I was responding to. But we all seem to be talking about what should be the case, where we want to end up. The reasoning we can apply at the moment seems the relevant thing to that. If weirdtopia doesn’t look like a place our reasoning would work, if we wouldn’t want to live there.… Well, so much the worse for weirdtopia.
A weirdtopia. The premises that lead to the reasoning and conclusions here are only premises I could consider reasoning from from the perspective of a weird alternate reality. I certainly don’t endorse anything we’re talking about here myself but do suggest that they are incompatible with the nice sounding “Whatever you give me it’s still going to work out as a loss” kind of moral expressions you mention—at least to the extent that they are embedded in the law.
Testing would be a lot of work and potential corruption for comparatively little gain in nailing down the sig figs. The EPA is already willing to put an approximate dollar value on the life of a random citizen shortened by pollution (for cost-benefit purposes when evaluating proposed cleanup plans), so I’d say just estimate the average or typical value and use that as the standard, preferably showing your work well enough to allow adjustments over time or judicial discretion in unusual cases.
Testing would be a lot of work and potential corruption for comparatively little gain in nailing down the sig figs.
This is a situation in which “Speak for yourself!” would apply. In the weirdtopia where killing other people’s children is criminal damage and such damages are calculated being able to prove higher value of said property would and should influence the amount of recompense they receive. For the same reason that Shane Warne could insure his finger for more than I could insure my finger an owner of an impressive child would be able to have that child evaluated and treated as a more valuable piece of property than an inferior child. They would aggressively and almost certainly successfully fight any attempt to make their child evaluated as a mediocre child.
That’s what I meant by ‘judicial discretion in unusual cases.’
Setting the default value a standard deviation or three above the actual average would probably be sensible. Cuts down on expensive investigations and appeals, since most bereaved parents would realize on some level that they won’t actually gain by nitpicking, and erring on the side of punitive damages would help appease the victim and discourage recklessness.
Downvoted for sarcasm. I was under the impression that (unsubtle forms of) sarcasm in non-humorous discussions are outlawed on LW, and that’s very OK with me.
Downvoted for sarcasm. I was under the impression that (unsubtle forms of) sarcasm in non-humorous discussions are outlawed on LW, and that’s very OK with me.
Downvoted for being a wet blanket and incorrect assumption of sarcasm. If it’s ok to talk about the implications of legalizing infanticide then it is ok to follow the weirdtopia through and have fun with it. I adamantly refuse to take on a sombre tone just because people are talking about killing babies. My due diligence to the seriousness of babykilling with my expression of clear opposition—with that out of the way I am (and should be) free to join Konk and Jayson counterfactual wherein the actual logical implications related to killing other people’s non-people infants are considered.
On a related note—of all the movies I was forced to endure and study in high school the only one I don’t resent as a boring waste of my time is Gattaca!
I’d never agree with being called a fucking-idiot-in-general! :D It’s just an observation that my mind feels numb and sluggish tonight, probably because of the weather.
Leaving aside the amusing notion of LW outlawing sarcasm, I’m curious about how you concluded that wedrifid’s comment was (unsubtle) sarcasm.
(Just to be clear: I’m not contesting your freedom to downvote the comment for that reason or any other, including simply being irritated by people saying such things about children.)
He started “investigating” a child’s value to parents with things like the status they could gain from it, instead of obvious things like their instinctive emotional response to it, etc. That’s manifestly not what most parents think and feel like.
He started “investigating” a child’s value to parents with things like the status they could gain from it, instead of obvious things like their instinctive emotional response to it, etc. That’s manifestly not what most parents think and feel like.
Emotional distress caused does seem like another important consideration when calculating damages received for baby/property destruction. It probably shouldn’t be the only consideration. Just like if I went and cut someone’s arm off it would be appropriate to consider the future financial and social loss to that person as well as his emotional attachment to his arm.
It doesn’t seem very egalitarian but it may be a bigger crime to cut off the arm of a world class spin bowler (or pitcher) than the arm of a middle manager. It’s not like the latter does anything that really needs his arm.
True enough, but it simply doesn’t feel to me that a child can be meaningfully called “property” at all. Hell, I’m not completely sure that a pet dog can be called property.
Hypothetical question: if my child expresses the desire to go live with some other family, and that family is willing, and in my judgment that family will treat my child roughly as well as I will, is it OK for me to deny that expressed desire and keep my child with me?
OK, then… I suspect you and I have very different understandings of what being property entails. If you’re interested in unpacking your understanding, I’m interested in hearing it.
While I don’t fully disagree, I’m not sure that’s a meaningful objection. One implication of the status-signaling frame is that our instinctive emotional responses (among other cognitive patterns) are calibrated at least partly in terms of maximizing status; it doesn’t require any conscious attention to status at all, let alone an explicit campaign of manipulation.
Well, I think that self-signaling especially—and likely even signaling to very close people like family members too—is one of the basic needs of humans, and, being as entangled with human worldview as it is, deserves to be counted under the blanket term “emotional response”.
Even granting that, it’s still true that if Nornagest is right and my emotional responses are calibrated in terms of expected status-maximization, then it makes sense to consider emotional responses in terms of (among other things) status-maximization for legal purposes.
We clearly need to find out what kinds of emotional responses are calibrated by what adaptations in what proportion. Nominating status-seeking as the most important human drive here out of the blue just seems unjustified to me in this moment.
There’s a tradition of examining that frame here that’s probably inherited from Overcoming Bias; it’s related to a model of human cognitive evolution as driven primarily by political selection pressures, which seems fairly plausible to me. I should probably mention, though, that I don’t think it’s a complete model; it’s fairly hard to come up with an unambiguous counterexample to it, but it shares with a lot of evo-psych the problem of having much more explanatory than predictive power.
I think it’s best viewed as one of several complementary models of behavior rather than as a totalizing model, hence the “frame” descriptor.
I described it as a frame because I think it’s best viewed as one of several complementary models of behavior rather than as a totalizing model.
I have a suspicion that we’ll only be able to produce any totalizing model that’s much good after we crack human intelligence in general. I mean, look at all this entangled mess.
Well, “that’s much good” is the tough part. It’s not at all hard to make a totalizing model, and only a little harder to make one that’s hard to disprove in hindsight (there are dozens in the social sciences) but all the existing ones I know of tend to be pretty bad at prediction. The status-seeking model is one of the better ones—people in general seem more prone to avoiding embarrassment than to maximizing expected money or sexual success, to name two competing models—but it’s far from perfect.
Well, couching things in terms of status-signaling is conventional around here. But, sure, there are probably better candidates. Do you have anything in particular in mind you think should have been nominated instead?
Nothing in particular, no, just skepticism. A (brief, completely uneducated) outside view of the field especially suggests that elegant-sounding theories of the mind are likely to fail bad at prediction sooner or later.
For my own part, in the hypothetical context Konkvistador and Jayson_Virissimo established, of infanticide being a property crime, it seems at least superficially reasonable to consider how our legal system would assess damages for infanticide and how that would differ from the real world where infanticide isn’t a property crime.
And evaluating the potential gain that could in the future be obtained by the destroyed property is a pretty standard way of assessing such damages, much as damages found if someone accidentally chops my arm off generally take into account my likely future earnings had I kept both arms.
So I guess I’m saying that while I’m fairly sure wedrifid was being ironic (especially since I think he’s come out elsewhere as pro-babies and anti-infanticide on grounds other than potential gain to their parents), I found his use of irony relatively subtle.
Again, that doesn’t in any way preclude your objecting to his post.
The funny thing is, I haven’t felt even a tingle of outrage/whatever, I only objected to tone, on a formal principle, for a stupid reason which seems to have already vanished somewhere.
Maybe we could just keep it murder, I don’t know. There is no law (heh) we have to be consistent about this. In many places across the world killing a pregnant women is tried as a double murder (I think this includes some US states).
Actually selling your baby on the adoption market should probably be legal too.
I weakly agree, if only for the reason that it sounds better than foster care and could well curb infanticide. On the other hand, in countries that have a problem with slavery it could weaken any injunction against slave trade, by the same argument as the one I support against infanticide. Or it could harm the sacredness of the child-parent bond in general. Well, on the whole it seems just about worth it to me, and no part of it even feels creepy or alarmingly counterintuitive.
The slave trade thing might be prevented by specifically forbidding the quick or anonymous sale of children. Have the current and prospective parents jump through some hoops, get interviewed by a social worker, etc. and the whole thing thoroughly documented. Find an equilibrium that keeps the nonmonetary transaction costs high enough that low-level slave traders won’t think it’s worth the trouble to ‘go legit,’ and the paper trail thick enough that corrupt aristocrats won’t want to take the risk of public humiliation, without actually making it more difficult for the beleaguered biological parents than raising an unwanted child themselves.
Working from the assumption that slave-traders are in it for the money? Yeah. Slavery stops happening when it becomes more cost-effective to pay the workers directly, than to pay guards to coerce them.
The main use of slave labor is agriculture, because it’s easy to have a large group within a single overseer’s line of sight, and output is easy to measure. Child labor has historically succeeded there because of the low skill requirement, and because an individual child’s lower productivity was matched by lower housing and food costs. If a child costs more to acquire than an adult—specifically if that difference in up-front costs outweighs the net present value of that slim productivity-per-upkeep-cost advantage—anyone who keeps using children for unpaid ag labor will simply be driven out of the market by competitors willing to do the math.
The app people worry about is sex. Police and prosecuting attorneys (in the US, at least) are already willing to resort to extremely dubious tactics to score a pedophile conviction; this would give them a legitimate audit trail to follow. Someone seeking to purchase a child for such purposes would not dare attract so much official attention… unless they were suicidally stupid, which is the sort of problem that solves itself.
Slavery stops happening when it becomes more cost-effective to pay the workers directly, than to pay guards to coerce them.
Hell no, it does not; only the label might change. If the only employers are would-be slavers with no financial, public or moral pressure to look to their workers’ welfare, then wage slavery is little better than traditional slavery—in fact it’s often worse because a capitalist employer, unlike a slaver, has zero investment in a slave, drawing from a huge pool of unskilled manpower with no acquisition cost. You don’t need any guards if a person has no choice but work for you, work for another employer like you or starve!
I said “slavery stops,” not “quality of life improves.” Getting employers to compete in a way that benefits workers is a different problem, and obtaining for the workers the freedom to choose to starve (rather than, say, being executed as an example to others) is only the first step.
Quality of life for workers is also a very different problem from quality of life for open-market-adopted children, which was the original topic.
Ah the rapid response prevented me from deleting my post (I wanted to do so because the points have been raised elsewhere and I didn’t want to bloat the debate, not because I didn’t think the post was relevant).
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.
In other posts in this thread I’ve discussed infanticide, and proposed ways to reduce parental grief in cultures that would adopt it (I didn’t say it should be adopted btw). But only now did I remember that the practice of infanticide where others preform the killing (something I proposed down thread as an implementation that would reduce psychological stress) reminded me of the practice of killing “mingi” (cursed) children in Ethiopia. Many of the individuals exposed to outside culture would prefer to adopt it or at least find ways to not kill the children while still severing them from the parents.
While obviously CNN as always has a progressive-Eurocentric-mind-projection-fallacy spin in its reporting and the tribes in question may be just adopting preferences of higher status tribes and groups rather than because not practising it seems so much better than practising it. I do think this is weak evidence that people prefer to live in societies that don’t practice infanticide. Also reading some of the accounts has caused me (rightfully or not) to increase the estimated psychological suffering of parents. But consider that this wasn’t a choice in most cases, it isn’t that large either. I shouldn’t be surprised, humans are built to live in a world where life is cheap after all.
I have no doubt that the practice of mingi historically did indeed help the tribe, taken as a whole traditions do tend to be adaptive in the environment in which they where established, but now that their (social) envrionment has changed, the practice seems to be falling out of favour.
I won’t argue that newborns are people, because I have the same problem defining person that you seem to have. But until I can come up with a cogent reduction distilling person to some quality or combination of qualities that actually exist—some state of a region of the universe—then it seems prudent to err on the side of caution.
Cool. Would I still be a person while in a coma that I will naturally come out of in five years but not before? (I recognize that no observer could know that this was the case, I’m just asking whether in fact I would be, if it were. Put another way: after I woke up, would we conclude that I’d been a person all along?)
Infanticide of one’s own children should be legal (if done for some reason other than sadism) for up to ten months after birth. Reason: extremely young babies aren’t yet people.
What’s your discount rate?
(That is, if I offered you $100 now, or $X a year from now, what is the lowest value of X that would make you choose the latter option?)
I would love to loan you money at 20% interest. Send me a private message if you’re interested.
but they’re not yet;
When playing chess, how many moves ahead do you look?
you’re not doing harm to a person by infanticide any more than you are by using contraception.
A man produces about 47 billion sperm a year; a woman releases 13 eggs a year; a couple that tries to become pregnant over the course of a year will have a 75% chance of live birth pregnancy if the female is 30. So each feasible sperm-egg combination over the course of a year has about a trillionth chance of making it to a live birth. *
As soon as conception happens, then you’ve got a zygote which is very likely to make it to live birth. And once it makes it to live birth, it’s very likely to make it to adulthood. So there seems to be a very bright line at conception. (Contraceptives prevent conception; condoms by preventing sperm from entering, the pill by preventing ovulation, and so on.)
(I should note that I think there are sound reasons to treat a risk that will end one out of a trillion people chosen at random as less of a concern than a risk that is certain to end a certain person, and that this line of reasoning depends heavily on this premise, but it would take too long to go into those reasons here. I can in another comment if you’re interested.)
*Noting that ‘potential resulting individual DNAs’ are individually much less likely than just sperm-egg combinations.
It is estimated that up to half of all fertilized eggs die and are lost (aborted) spontaneously, usually before the woman knows she is pregnant. Among those women who know they are pregnant, the miscarriage rate is about 15-20%. Most miscarriages occur during the first 7 weeks of pregnancy. The rate of miscarriage drops after the baby’s heart beat is detected.
So your bright line should be heartbeat, or at least zygote implantation. This does not significantly affect your conclusions.
The jump from 1e-12 to .5 seems brighter to me than the jump from .5 to .8. (.5 is also historically significant, as only about half of born children would live to see puberty for much of human history.)
One or two, but for me deciding which move to make is practically instinct, less lookahead. Also I’m not entirely sure how this is relevant.
What role should the future play in decision-making?
For me, it seems that if you’re confident that having more people in the world is a net positive, then as a necessary conclusion the moral thing to do is to try to have as many children as possible.
It is not clear to me that prohibiting murder derives from that position or mandates birth.
If you’re not sure of this, I don’t undersand how you can conclude it’s a moral wrong to destroy something which is not yet a person but merely has the potential to become one.
By quantification of “merely.” If we determine that a particular coma patient has a 90% chance of reawakening and becoming a person again, then it seems almost as bad to end them as it would be to end them once they were awake. If we determine that a particular coma patient has a 5% chance of reawakening and becoming a person again, then it seems not nearly as bad to end them. If we determine that a particular coma patient has a 1e-6 chance of reawakening and becoming a person again, then it seems that ending them has little moral cost.
If infants are nearly guaranteed to become people, then failing to protect them because we are impatient does not strike me as wisdom.
Several people have alreadt given good answers to your position on infanticide, but they haven’t mentioned what is in my opinion the crucial concept involved here: Schelling points.
We are all agreed that is is wrong to kill people (meaning, fully conscious and intelligent beings). We agree that adult humans beings are people (perhaps excluding those in irreversible coma). The law needs to draw a bright line separating those beings which are people, and hence cannot be killed, from those who are not. Given the importance of the “non-killing” rule to a functioning society. this line needs to be clear and intuitive to all. Any line based on some level of brain development does not satisfy this criterion.
There are only two Schelling points, that is obvious, intuitive places to draw the line: conception and birth. Many people support the first one, and the strongest argument for the anti-abortion position is that conception is in fact in many ways a better Schelling point than birth, since being born does not affect the intrinsic nature of the infant. However, among people without a metaphysical commitment to fetus personhood, most agree that the burdens that prohibition of abortion place on pregnant women are enough to outweigh these considerations, and make birth the chosen Schelling point.
There is no other Schelling point at a later date (your ten-month rule seems arbitrary to me), and a rule against baby infanticide does not place so strong burdens on mothers (giving for adoption is always an option). So there is no good reason to change the law in the direction you propose. Doing it would undermine the strengh of the universal agreement that “people cannot be killed”, since the line separating people from non-people would be obscure and arbitrarily drawn.
But there is no universal agreement on the “age of informed consent”, it varies from country to country! And yes, the fact that the limit is arbitrary does undermine its strength; there are often scenarios of “reasonable” sex (in that most people don’t consider it as wrong) that would be consider statutory rape or whatnot if the law was taken at the letter.
(Also, heck, 10 months is a pretty crappy limit, why not 8 months five days and 42 minutes? 12 months would be much cleaner)
People disagree about obviousness of such things. For some people, a fetus is obviously a person too. For others, even a mentally deficient adult might not qualify as being obviously a person. Unlike you, I don’t expect these disagreements to disappear anytime soon, and they are the reason that the law works better with bright Schelling point lines, if such exist.
Age is non-ambiguous, but not non-arbitrary.
Re your final objection, I agree that there are cases such as sexual consent where there are no clear Schelling points, and we need arbitrary lines. This does not mean that it is not best to use Schelling points whenever they exist. In the case of sexual consent, the arbitrariness of the line does have some unfortunate effects: for example, since the lines are drawn differently in different jurisdictions, people who move accross jurisdictions and are not epecially well informed might commit a felony without being aware. There are also problems with people not being aware of their partner’s age, etc.
Such problems are not too big and in any case unavoidable, but consider the following counterfactual: if all teenagers underwent a significant and highly visible discrete biological event at exactly age 16, it would make sense (and be an improvement over current law) to have an universal law using this event as trigger for the age of consent, even if the event had no connection to sexual and mental development and these were continuous. The event would be a Schelling point, such as birth is for personhood.
This is a very good response, that allows us to make our disagreement more precise. I agree that choosing menstruation, or its hypothetical unisex counterpart, is unreasonable because it is too early. I disagree that birth is too early in the same way. Pretty much everyone in our society agrees that 12-year olds cannot meaningfully consent to sex (especially with adults), whereas many believe 6-month old children to be people—in fact, many believe fetuses to be people! You might say that they are obviously wrong, but the “obviously” is suspicious when so many disagree with you, at the very least for Aumann reasons.
To put it in another way: What makes you so certain that birth is so far off from what is reasonable as a line for personhood, when you are willing to draw your line at 10 months? That is much closer to birth than 17 is to 12 years old.
Also, I think your analogy needs a bit of amending: the relevant question is, if there was a visible unisex menstruation happening at 17 years old, and an established tradition of taking that as the age of consent, why on earth would a society change the law to make it 16 years and 2 months instead?
One rough effort at such definition would be: “any post-birth member of a species whose adult members are intelligent and conscious”, where “birth” can be replaced by an analogous Schelling point in the development in an alien species, or by an arbitrary chosen line at a similar stage of development, if no such Schelling point exists.
You might say that this definition is an arbtrary kludge that does not “carve Nature at the joints”. My reply would be that ethics is adapted for humans, and does not need to carve Nature at intrinsic joints but at the places that humans find relevant.
Your point about different rates of development is well taken, however. I am also not an expert in this topic, so we’ll have to let it rest for the moment.
For computers, hardware and software can be separated in a way that is not possible with humans (with current technology). When the separation is possible, I agree personhood should be attributed to the software rather than the hardware, so your machine should not be considered a person. If in the future it becomes routinely possible to scan, duplicate and emulate human minds, then killing a biological human will probably also be less of a crime than it is now, as long as his/her mind is preserved. (Maybe there would be a taboo instead about deleting minds with no backup, even when they are not “running” on hardware).
It is also possible than in such a future where the concept of a person is commonly associated with a mind pattern, legalizing infanticide before brain development seats in would be acceptable. So perhaps we are not in disagreement after all, since on a different subthread you have said you do not really support legalization of infanticide in our current society.
I still think there is a bit of a meta diagreement: you seem to think that the laws and morality of this hypothetical future society would be better than our current ones, while I see it as a change in what are the appropriate Schelling points for the law to rule, in response to technological changes, without the end point being more “correct” in any absolute sense than our current law.
Well, yes. This seems obvious to me.
Oh, of course. I’ve taken it that you were asking about a case where such software had indeed been installed on the machine. The potential of personhood on its own seems hardly worth anything to me.
As a data point for your statistics, I think that a 12-year old can meaningfully consent to sex. When it comes to issues of pregnancy and having children, the consequences are greater and I don’t think such yound people can consent to this, but fortunately sex and children can be kept separate today with only weak side effects.
I think that a 12-year old from a society with sensible policies would be able to give meaningful consent, but for some reason an enormous amount of work has been put into keeping American 12-year olds dangerously ignorant. That needs to be fixed first.
I do think there are some advantages to setting the cutoff point just slightly later than birth, even if by just a few hours:
*evaluations of whether a person should come into existence can rest on surer information when the infant is out of the womb
non-maternal reproductive autonomy—under the current legal personhood cutoff, I can count this as an acceptable loss, as I consider maternal bodily autonomy and the interests of the child to be more important, but with infanticide all three can be reconciled
psychologically, parents (especially fathers) might feel more buy-in to their status, even if almost none actually end up choosing otherwise, and if infant non-personhood catches on culturally infant deaths very close to births might cause less grief among parents
(All this assumes that late-term abortions are a morally acceptable choice to make in their own right, of course, rather than something which must be legally tolerated to preserve maternal bodily autonomy.)
Perhaps the detachment of the umbilical cord would be a suitably symbolic point?
Mild updating of my original position due to this conversation:
I still don’t have many moral qualms about allowing parents to kill children, but realize that actually legalizing it in our current society would lead to some unintended consequences, due to considerations such as the Schelling point, and killing infants as a gateway to further sociopathic behaviours.
Part of my difficulty is that some humans, such as infants, have less blicket than animals. If its ok to kill animals, then there’s no reason to say it’s not ok to kill blicket-less humans. Then I realize that even though it’s legal to kill animals, it’s still something I can’t do for anything except certain bugs. Even spiders I let be, or take outside.
So maybe a wiser way to reconcile these would be to say that since infants have less blicket than animals, and we don’t kill infants, that we also shouldn’t kill animals. It’s what I live by anyway, and seems to cause less disturbance than saying that since infants have less blicket than animals and we kill animals, that it’s ok to kill infants.
Don’t worry, there would probably be a baby killing service if it were legal. Just like we have other people to kill animals for us.
I just want to point out this alternative position: Healthy (mentally and otherwise) babies can gain sufficient mental acuity/self-awareness to outstrip animals in their normal trajectory—i.e. babies become people after a while.
Although I don’t wholeheartedly agree with this position, it seems consistent. The stance that such a position would imply is that babies with severe medical conditions (debilitating birth defects, congenital diseases etc.) could be killed with parental consent, and fetuses likely to develop birth defects can be aborted, but healthy fetuses cannot be aborted, and healthy babies cannot be killed. I bring this up in particular because of your other post about the family with the severely disabled 6-year-old.
I think it becomes a little more complicated when we’re talking about situations in which we have the ability to impart self-awareness that was previously not there. On the practical level I certainly wouldn’t want to force a family to either face endless debt from an expensive procedure or a lifetime of grief from a child that can’t function in day to day tasks. It also brings up the question of whether to make animals self-aware, which is… kind of interesting but probably starting to drift off topic.
Are you aware that in many countries it’s illegal to kill animals without good reason, and that wanting to get rid of a pet does not qualify?
I would recommend against expressing this opinion in your OKCupid profile.
Yeah, opinions deliberately selected to be my most controversial were exactly what I was planning to use when trying to make new friends. But now that you mention it, that’s probably a bad idea, huh?
Arbitrary limits like “ten months” don’t make for good rules—especially when there’s a natural limit that’s much more prominent: childbirth.
What exactly counts as “people” is a matter of convention; it’s best to settle on edges that are as crisp as possible, to minimize potential disagreement and conflict.
Also “any reason other than sadism”, eh? Like “the dog was hungry” would be okay?
EDIT: in the ensuing discussion, we came to an agreement that the psychopathy argument is only true of our present society, and, while strengthening our reasons to keep infanticide illegal right now, wouldn’t apply to someplace without a strong revulsion to infanticide in the first place. I’ve updated my stance and switched to other arguments against infanticide-in-general.
I’m sorry, I just can’t parse your sentence, especially “anyone who seriously doesn’t understand why punishing all parents able to kill their infant is an incredibly good idea”. I suspect you chained too many clauses together and ended up saying the opposite of what you meant.
Followed up with a clarification here.
I broadly agree that babies aren’t people, but I still think infanticide should be illegal, simply because killing begets insensitivity to killing. I know this has the sound of a slippery slope argument, but there is evidence that desire for sadism in most people is low, and increases as they commit sadistic acts, and that people feel similarly about murder.
From The Better Angels of Our Nature: “Serial killers too carry out their first murder with trepidation, distaste, and in its wake, disappointment: the experience had not been as arousing as it had been in their imaginations. But as time passes and their appetite is rewhetted, they find the next on easier and more gratifying, and then they escalate the cruelty to feed what turns into an addiction.”
Similarly, cathartic violence against non-person objects (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharsis#Therapeutic_uses) can lead to further aggression in personal interactions.
I don’t think we want to encourage or allow killing of anything anywhere near as close to people as babies. The psychological effects on people who kill their own children and on a society that views the killing of babies as good are too potentially terrible. Without actual data, I can say I would never want to live in a society that valued people as little as Sparta did.
We’re not talking about making new laws, and we’re certainly not encouraging the government to make in-discriminatory laws about things that are possibly bad. This is a law that already exists, where changing it would lead to a worse world. Feel free to campaign against those other laws you talked about coming into existence if someone tries to make them happen, but you shouldn’t be trying to get baby killing legalized.
By what criterion do you consider babies sufficiently “close to people” that this is an issue, but not late term fetuses or adult animals? Specific example, an adult bonobo seems to share more of the morally relevant characteristics of adult humans than a newborn baby but are not afforded the same legal protection.
I don’t think killing bonobos should be particularly legal.
As far as fetuses, since my worry is psychological, I don’t think there’s a significant risk of desensitization to killing people since the action of going under surgery or taking plan b is so vastly removed from the act of murder.
What if only surgeons are licensed for infanticide on request, which must be done in privacy away from parent’s eyes?
That way desensitisation isn’t worse than with surgeons or doctors who preform abortion, especially if aesthetics or poison is used. Before anyone raises the Hippocratic oath as an objection, let me give them a stern look and ask them to consider the context of the debate and figure out on their own why it isn’t applicable.
I would probably be ok with this, though I don’t see particularly strong incentives to put effort in to legalize it.
The damage would’ve been already done elsewhere by that point. The parent would likely have already
1) seen their born, living infant, experiencing what their instincts tell them to (if wired normally in this regard)
2) made the decision and signed the paperwork
3) (maybe) even taken another look at the infant with the knowledge that it’s the last time they see it
I feel that every one of those little points could subtly damage (or totally wreck) a person.
I’m afraid you may have your bottom line written already. In the age of ultrasound and computer generated images or even better in the future age of transhuman sensory enhancement or fetuses being grown outside the human body the exact same argument can be used against abortion.
Especially once you remember the original context was a 10 month old baby, not say a 10 year old child.
Then I might well have to use it against abortion at some point, for the same reason: we should forbid people from overriding this part of their instincts.
Upvoted for bullet-biting.
Why is overriding of instincts inherently bad?
http://lesswrong.com/lw/v0/ethical_inhibitions/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/v1/ethical_injunctions/
First, I’m understandably modeling this on myself, and second, it doesn’t really make this speculation any less valid in itself.
Can’t this same be said of last trimester abortions?
In any case much like we find pictures or videos of abortion distasteful, I’m sure future baby-killing society would still find videos of baby killings distasteful. We could legislate infanticide needs to be done by professionals away from the eyes of parents and other onlookers to avoid psychological damage. Also forbid media depicting it except for educational purposes.
For legal reasons, there’d just have to be a clear procedure where parents would take or refuse the decision, probably after being informed of the baby’s overall condition and potential in the presence of a witness. I can’t imagine how it could be realistically practiced without one. Such a procedure could ironically wind up more psychologically damaging than, say, simply distracting one’s parental instinct with something like intoxication and personally abandoning/suffocating/poisoning the baby.
Potential for tension and cognitive dissonance. Few things in our culture are censored this way, not even executions and torture. Would feel unusually hypocritical.
Humans are pretty ok with making cold decisions in the abstract that they could never carry out themselves due to physical revulsion and/or emotional trauma.
The number of people that would sign a death order is greater than the number of people that would kill someone else personally.
Does society feel conflicted bothered that child pornography is censored? We can even extend existing child pornography laws with a few good judicial decisions to cover this.
Read more Robin Hanson.
Good point. If they aren’t even people...
In my own country pornography involving animals is illegal. It shows no signs of being legalized soon. And I live in a pretty liberal central European first world country.
I live in Russia and here the legal status of all pornography is murky but no law de facto prosecutes anything but production and distribution of child porn, and simple possession of child porn is not illegal. There’s nothing about animals, violence, or such.
Much greater? I think that people signing death orders for criminals could generally execute those criminals themselves if forced to choose between that and the criminal staying alive.
4chan could be an argument that it’s beginning to feel so :) Society just hasn’t thought it through yet.
Don’t think so, because
1) such foetuses would likely only be seen by a surgeon if the abortion is done properly
2) they probably instinctively appear much less “person-like” or “likely to become a human” even if the mother sees one while doing a crude abortion on her own—maybe even for an evolutionary reason—so that she wouldn’t be left with a memory of killing something that looks like a human.
blinks
How can a LWer even think this way? I suggest you reread this. I’m tempted to ask you to think 4 minutes by the physical clock about this, but I’ll rather just spell it out.
Lets say you are 8 months pregnant in the early stone age. What is a better idea for you, fitness wise, wait another month to terminate reproduction attempt or try to do it right now?
I’m even tempted to say there is a reason women kill their own children more often than men.
Higher expected future resource investment per allelle carried?
More or less. I’m pretty sure that controlling for certainty of the child being “yours” and time spent with them, men would on average find killing their children a greater psychological burden in the long run than women.
Because after all that time spent with them some start to find them really damn annoying?
We get attached to children and lovers with exposure due to oxytocin. Only when the natural switches for releasing it are shut off does exposure cease to have this effect.
Finding them annoying is a separate effect.
I’m trying to relate this to your theory that men find it harder to kill their infants than women do. The influence of oxytocin discourages killing of those you are attached to and mothers get more of this than fathers if for no other reason than a crap load getting released during childbirth.
Thanks a lot. I fully support your line of thinking, all of your points and your conclusion.
They’re just p-zombies pretending to be people. They only get their soul at 10 months and thereafter are able to detect qualia.
I would vote against this law. I’d vote with guns if necessary. Reason: I like babies. Tiny humans are cute and haven’t even done anything to deserve death yet (or indicate that they aren’t valuable instances of human). I’d prefer you went around murdering adults (adults being the group with the economic, physical and political power to organize defense.)
Most adults don’t have traits I’d want a “person” to have. At least with babies there is a chance they’ll turn out as worthwhile people.
Adults have a small chance of acquiring those traits too. Due to selection effects adults that don’t have traits have a much lower probability than a fresh new baby of turning out this way.
In a few decades genetic technology and better psychology and sociology may let us make decent probabilistic predictions about how they will turn out as adults. Are you ok with babies with very low probabilities of getting such traits being killed?
As well as, of course, as having far less malleable minds that have yet to crystallize the habits their upbringing gives them.
Far less averse, particularly in an environment where negative externalities cannot be easily prevented. Mind you I would still oppose legalization of killing people (whether babies or adults) just because they are Jerks. Not because of the value of the Jerks themselves (which is offset by their effects on others) but because it isn’t just Jerks that would be killed. I don’t want other people to have the right to choose who lives and who dies and I’m willing to waive that right myself by way of cooperation in order to see it happen.
I’m not sure why this is getting down voted. “Person” is basically LW speak for “particular kind of machine that has value to me in of itself”. I don’t see any good reason why I personally should value all people equally. I can see some instrumental value in living in a society that makes rules that operate on this principle.
But generally I do not love my enemies and neighbours like myself. I’m sorry, I guess that’s not very Christian of me. ;)
Yes. The explanation given was significant.
It takes a 110 years to make a 110 year old . In most cases I’d prefer to keep a 30 year old than either of them. More to the point I don’t intrinsically value creating more humans. The replacement cost of a dead human isn’t anything to do with the moral aversion I have to murder.
Do you really think it’s wise to have a precedent that allows agents of Type X to go around killing off all of the !X group ? Doesn’t bode well if people end up with a really sharp intelligence gradient.
I haven’t downvoted, for what it is worth. Sure, you may be an evil baby killing advocate but it’s not like l care!
I think you accidentally a word.
I haven’t seen anyone respond to your request for feedback about votes, so let me do so, despite not being one of the downvoters.
By my lights, at least, your posts have been fine. Obviously, I can’t speak for the site as a whole… then again, neither can anyone else.
Basically, it’s complicated, because the site isn’t homogenous. Expressing conventionally “bad” moral views will usually earn some downvotes from people who don’t want such views expressed; expressing them clearly and coherently and engaging thoughtfully with the responses will usually net you upvotes.
I think you may have taken me to be talking about whether it was acceptable or moral in the sense that society will allow it, that was not my intent. Society allows many unwise, inefficient things and no doubt will do so for some time.
My question was simply whether you thought it wise. If we do make an FAI, and encoded it with some idealised version of our own morality then do we want a rule that says ‘Kill everything that looks unlike yourself’? If we end up on the downside of a vast power gradient with other humans do we want them thinking that everything that has little or no value to them should be for the chopping block?
In a somewhat more pithy form, I guess what I’m asking you is: Given that you cannot be sure you will always be strong enough to have things entirely your way, how sure are you this isn’t going to come back and bite you in the arse?
If it is unwise, then it would make sense to weaken that strand of thought in society—to destroy less out of hand, rather than more. That the strand is already quite strong in society would not alter that.
You did not answer me on the human question—how we’d like powerful humans to think .
This sounds fine as long as you and everything you care about are and always will be included in the group of, ‘people.’ However, by your own admission, (earlier in the discussion to wedrifid,) you’ve defined people in terms of how closely they realise your ideology:
You’ve made it something fluid; a matter of mood and convenience. If I make an AI and tell it to save only ‘people,’ it can go horribly wrong for you—maybe you’re not part of what I mean by ‘people.’ Maybe by people I mean those who believe in some religion or other. Maybe I mean those who are close to a certain processing capacity—and then what happens to those who exceed that capacity? And surely the AI itself would do so....
There are a lot of ways it can go wrong.
You observe yourself to be a person. That’s not necessarily the same thing as being observably a person to someone else operating with different definitions.
The opinion you state may influence what sort of AI you end up with. And at the very least it seems liable to influence the sort of people you end up with.
-shrug- You’re trying to weaken the idea that newborns are people, and are arguing for something that, I suspect, would increase the occurrence of their demise. Call it what you will.
How did I misinterpret? I read that you don’t include babies and I said that I do include babies. That’s (preference) disagreement, not a problem with interpretation.
Intended as a tangential observation about my perceptions of people. (Some of them really are easier for me to model as objects running a machiavellian routine.)
“Encouraged” is very clearly not absolute but relative here, “somewhat less discouraged than now” can just be written as “encouraged” for brevity’s sake.
How are you deciding whether your definition is reasonable?
‘Don’t kill anything that can learn,’ springs to mind as a safer alternative—were I inclined to program this stuff in directly, which I’m not.
I don’t expect us to be explicitly declaring these rules, I expect the moral themes prevalent in our society—or at least an idealised model of part of it—will form much of the seed for the AI’s eventual goals. I know that the moral themes prevalent in our society form much of the seed for the eventual goals of people.
In either case, I don’t expect us to be in-charge. Which makes me kinda concerned when people talk about how we should be fine with going around offing the lesser life-forms.
Yet my definitions are not in accordance with yours. And, if I apply the rule that I can kill everything that’s not a person, you’re not going to get the results you desire.
It’d be great if I could just say ‘I want you to do good—with your definition of good in accordance with mine.’ But it’s not that simple. People grow up with different definitions—AIs may well grow up with different definitions—and if you’ve got some rule operating over a fuzzy boundary like that, you may end up as paperclips, or dogmeat or something horrible.
I’m not certain whether or not it’s germane to the broader discussion, but “think X is immoral” and “think X should be illegal” are not identical beliefs.
I was with you, until your summary.
Suppose hypothetically that I think “don’t kill people” is a good broad moral rule, and I think babies are people.
It seems to follow from what you said that I therefore ought to agree that infanticide should be legal.
If that is what you meant to say, then I am deeply confused. If (hypothetically) I think babies are people, and if (hypothetically) I think “don’t kill people” is a good law, then all else being equal I should think “don’t kill babies” is a good law. That is, I should believe that infanticide ought not be any more legal than murder in general.
It seems like one of us dropped a negative sign somewhere along the line. Perhaps it was me, but if so, I seem incapable of finding it again.
Oh good! I don’t usually nitpick about such things, but you had me genuinely puzzled.
If I were programming an AI to be a perfect world-guiding moral paragon, I’d rather have it keep the spam filter in storage (the equivalent of a retirement home, or cryostasis) than delete it for the crime of obsolescence. Digital storage space is cheap, and getting cheaper all the time.
Somewhat late, I must have missed this reply agessss ago when it went up.
That’s not a reasoned way to form definitions that have any more validity as referents than lists of what you approve of. What you’re doing is referencing your feelings and seeing what the objects of those feelings have in common. It so happens that I feel that infants are people. But we’re not doing anything particularly logical or reasonable here—we’re not drawing our boundaries using different tools. One of us just thinks they belong on the list and the other thinks they don’t.
If we try and agree on a common list. Well, you’re agreeing that aliens and powerful AIs go on the list—so biology isn’t the primary concern. If we try to draw a line through the commonalities what are we going to get? All of them seem able to gather, store, process and apply information to some ends. Even infants can—they’re just not particularly good at it yet.
Conversely, what do all your other examples have in common that infants don’t?
Arguably that would be a good heuristic to keep around. I don’t know I’d call it a moral wrong – there’s not much reason to talk about morals when we can just say discouraged in society and have everyone on the same page. But you would probably do well to have a reluctance to destroy it. One day someone vastly more complex than you may well look on you in the same light you look on your spam filter.
I strongly suspect that societies where people had no reluctance to go around offing their infants wouldn’t have lasted very long. Infants are significant investments of time and resources. Offing your infants is a sign that there’s something emotionally maladjusted in you – by the standards of the needs of society. If we’d not had the precept, and magically appeared out of nowhere, I think we’d have invented it pretty quick.
Not really about you specifically. But, in general – yeah, more or less. Maybe not write the source code, but instruct it. English, or uploads or some other incredibly high-level language with a lot of horrible dependencies built into its libraries (or concepts or what have you) that the person using it barely understands themselves. Why? Because it will be quicker. The guy who just tells the AI to guess what he means by good skips the step of having to calculate it herself.
Yeah, a lack of reply notification’s a real pain in the rear.
Edit: You can skip to the next break line if you’re not interested in reading about the methodological component so much as you are continuing the infants argument.
What we’re doing here, ideally, is pattern matching. I present you with a pattern and part of that pattern is what I’m talking about. I present you with another pattern where some things have changed and the parts of the pattern I want to talk about are the same in that one. And I suppose to be strict we’d have to present you with patterns that are fairly similar and express disapproval for those.
Because we have a large set of existing patterns that we both know about—properties—it’s a lot quicker to make reference to some of those patterns than it is to continue to flesh out our lists to play guess the commonality. We can still do it both ways, as long as we can still head back down the abstraction pile fairly quickly. Compressing the search space by abstract reference to elements of patterns that members of the set share, is not the same thing as starting off with a word alone and then trying to decide on the pattern and then fit the members to that set.
If you cannot do that exercise, if you cannot explicitly declare at least some of the commonalities you’re talking about, then it leads me to believe that your definition is incoherent. The odds that, with our vast set of shared patterns—with our language that allows us to do this compression—that you can’t come up with at least a fairly rough definition fairly quickly seem remote.
If I wanted to define humans for instance—“Most numerous group of bipedal tools users on Earth.” That was a lot quicker than having to define humans by providing examples of different creatures. We can only think the way we do because we have these little compression tricks that let us leap around the search space, abstraction doesn’t have to lead to more confusion—as long as your terms refer to things that people have experience with.
Whereas if I provided you a selection of human genetic structures—while my terms would refer exactly, while I’d even be able to stick you in front of a machine and point to it directly—would you even recognise it without going to a computer? I wouldn’t. The reference falls beyond the level of my experience.
I don’t see why you think my definition needs to be complete. We have very few exact definitions for anything; I couldn’t exactly define what I mean by human. Even by reference to genetic structure I’ve no idea where it would make sense to set the deviation from any specific example that makes you human or not human.
But let’s go with your approach:
It seems to me that mentally disabled people belong on the people list. And babies seem more similar to mentally disabled people than they do to pigs and stones.
Well, no, but you could make that argument about anything. I raised in a society just like this one but without taboo X would never create taboo X on my own, taboos are created by their effects on society. It’s the fact that society would not have been like this one without taboo X that makes it taboo in the first place.
Eh, functioning is a very rough definition and we’ve got to that pretty quickly.
Well, the question is whether food animals fall beneath the level of babies. If they do, then I can keep eating them happily enough; if they don’t, I’ve got the dilemma as to whether to stop eating animals or start eating babies.
And it’s not clear to me, without knowing what you mean by functioning, that pigs or cows are more intelligent than babies. I’ve not seen one do anything like that. Predatory animals—wolves and the like, on the other tentacle, are obviously more intelligent than a baby.
As to how I’d resolve the dilemma if it did occur, I’m leaning more towards stopping eating food animals than starting to eat babies. Despite the fact that food animals are really tasty, I don’t want to put a precedent in place that might get me eaten at some point.
By fiat—sufficiently advanced for what? But I suppose I’ll grant any AI that can pass the Turing test qualifies, yes.
That depends on the nature of the script. If it’s just performing some relatively simple task over and over, then I’m inclined to agree that it belongs in the not people group. If it is itself as smart as, say, a wolf, then I’m inclined to think it belongs in the people group.
I suppose, what I really mean to say is they’re taboos because that taboo has some desirable effect on society.
It seems to me that babies are quite valuable, and became so as their survival probability went up. In the olden days infanticide was relatively common—as was death in childbirth. People had a far more casual attitude towards the whole thing.
But as the survival probability went up the investment people made, and were expected to make, in individual children went up—and when that happened infanticide became a sign of maladaptive behaviour.
Though I doubt they’d have put it in these terms: People recognised a poor gambling strategy and wondered what was wrong with the person.
And I think it would be the same in any advanced society.
I suppose I had, yes. It never really occurred to me that they might be that intelligent—but, yeah, having done a bit of reading they seem smart enough that I probably oughtn’t to eat them.
Wolves definitely seem like people to me, yes. Adult humans are definitely on the list and wolves do pack behaviours which are very human-like. Killing a wolf for no good reason should be considered a moral wrong on par with murder. There’s not to say that I think it should result in legal punishment on par with killing a human, mind, it’s easier to work out that humans are people than it is to work out that wolves are—it’s a reasonable mistake.
Insects like wasps and flies don’t seem like people. Red pandas do. Dolphins do. Cows… don’t. But given what I’ve discovered about pigs that bears some checking—and now cows do. Hnn. Damn it, now I won’t be able to look at burgers without feeling sad.
All the videos with loads of blood and the like never bothered me, but learning that food-animals are that intelligent really does.
Have you imagined what life would be like if you were stupider, or were more intelligent but denied a body with which that intelligence was easy to express? If your person-hood is fundamental to your identity, then as long as you can imagine being stupider and still being you that still qualifies as a person. In terms of how old a person would be to have the sort of capabilities the person you’re imaging would have, at what point does your ability to empathise with the imaginary-you break down?
As far as I know how, yes. If you’ve got some ways of thinking that we haven’t been talking about here, feel free to post them and I’ll do my best to run them.
If Babies weren’t people the world would be less horrifying. Just as if food-animals are people the world is more horrifying. But it would look the same in terms of behaviours—people kill people all the time, I don’t expect them not to without other criteria being involved.
Not a person.
No, because we’ve had that discussion. But people did and that attitude towards women was especially prevalent in Japan, where it was among the most maladaptive for the contrary to hold, until quite recently. Back in the 70s and 80s the idea for women was basically to get a good education and marry the person their family picked for them. Even today people who say they don’t want children or a relationship are looked on as rather weird and much of the power there, in practice, works in terms of family relationships.
It just so happens there are lots of adaptive reasons to have precedents that seem to extend to cover women too. I don’t think one can seriously forward an argument that keeps women at home and doesn’t create something that can be used against him in fairly horrifying ways. Even if you don’t have a fairly inclusive definition of people, it seems unwise to treat other humans in that way—you, after all, are the other human to another human.
I don’t know enough about them—given they’re so different to us in terms of gross biology I imagine it’s often going to be quite difficult to distinguish between functioning and instinct—this:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_yorkshire/3189941.stm
Says that scientists observed some of them using tools, and that definitely seems like people though.
Yes.
Shared attention, recognition, prediction, bonding -
The legal definition of an accident is an unforeseeable event. I don’t agree with that entirely because, well everything’s foreseeable to an arbitrary degree of probability given the right assumptions. However, do you think that people have a duty to avoid accidents that they foresee a high probability-adjusted harm from? (i.e. the potential harm modified by the probability they foresee of the event.)
The thought here being that, if there’s much room for doubt, there’s so much suffering involved in killing and eating animals that we shouldn’t do it even if we only argue ourselves to some low probability of their being people.
Do you think that the use of language and play to portray and discuss fantasy worlds is a sign of introspection?
I agree, if it doesn’t have the capabilities that will make it a person there’s no harm in stopping it before it gets there. If you prevent an egg and a sperm combining and implanting, you haven’t killed a human.
No, fitness is too complex a phenomena for our relatively inefficient ways of thinking and feeling to update on it very well. If we fix immediate lethal response from the majority as one end of the moral spectrum, and enthusiastic endorsement as the other, then maladaptive behaviour tends to move you further towards the lethal response end of things. But we’re not rational fitness maximisers, we just tend that way on the more readily apparent issues.
Am I the only who bit the speciesist bullet?
It doesn’t matter if a pig is smarter than a baby. It wouldn’t matter if a pig passed the Turing test. Babies are humans, so they get preferential treatment.
I’d say so, yeah. It’s kind of a tricky function, though, since there are two reasons I’m logically willing to give preferential treatment to an organism: likelyhood of said organism eventually becoming the ancestor of a creature similar to myself, and likelyhood of that creature or it’s descendants contributing to an environment in which creatures similar to myself would thrive.
It’s a lot more hard-edged than intelligence. Of all the animals (I’m talking about individual animals, not species) in the world, practically all are really close to 0% or 100% human. On the other hand, there is a broad range of intelligence among animals, and even in humans. So if you want a standard that draws a clean line, humanity is better than intelligence.
I can tell the difference between an uploaded/frozen human, and a pig. Even a uploaded/frozen pig. Transhumans are in the preferential treatment category, but transpigs aren’t..
This is a fully general counter-argument. Any standard of moral worth will have certain objects that meet the standard and certain objects that fail. If you say “All objects that have X property have moral worth”, I can immediately accuse you of eugenics against objects that do not have X property.
And a question for you :If you think that more intelligence equals more moral worth, does that mean that AI superintelligences have super moral worth? If Clippy existed, would you try and maximize the number of paperclips in order to satisfy the wants a superior intelligence?
I really like your point about the distinction between maladaptive behavior and immoral behavior. But I don’t think your example about women in higher education is as cut and dried as you present it.
For those who think that morality is the godshatter of evolution, maladaptive is practically the definition of immoral. For me, maladaptive-ness is the explanation for why certain possible moral memes (insert society-wide incest-marriage example) don’t exist in recorded history, even though I should otherwise expect them to exist given my belief in moral anti-realism.
Disagree? What do you mean by this?
Edit: If I believe that morality, either descriptively or prescriptively, consists of the values imparted to humans by the evolutionary process, I have no need to adhere to the process roughly used to select these values rather than the values themselves when they are maladaptive.
If one is committed to a theory that says morality is objective (aka moral realism), one needs to point at what it is that make morality objectively true. Obvious candidates include God and the laws of physics. But those two candidates have been disproved by the empiricism (aka the scientific method).
At this point, some detritus of evolution starts to look like a good candidate for the source of morality. There isn’t an Evolution Fairy who commanded the humans evolve to be moral, but evolution has created drives and preferences within us all (like hunger or desire for sex). More on this point here—the source of my reference to godshatter.
It might be that there is an optimal way of bringing these various drives into balance, and the correct choices to all moral decisions can be derived from this optimal path. As far as I can tell, those who are trying to derive morality from evo. psych endorse this position.
In short, if morality is the product of human drives created by evolution, then behavior that is maladaptive (i.e. counter to what is selected for by evolution) is by essentially correlated with immoral behavior.
That said, my summary of the position may be a bit thin, because I’m a moral anti-realist and don’t believe the evo. psych → morality story.
Ah, I see what you mean. I don’t think one has to believe in objective morality as such to agree that “morality is the godshatter of evolution”. Moreover, I think it’s pretty key to the “godshatter” notion that our values have diverged from evolution’s “value”, and we now value things “for their own sake” rather than for their benefit to fitness. As such, I would say that the “godshatter” notion opposes the idea that “maladaptive is practically the definition of immoral”, even if there is something of a correlation between evolutionarily-selectable adaptive ideas and morality.
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.
Figuring out how to define human (as in “don’t kill humans”) so as to include babies is relatively easy, since babies are extremely likely to grow up into humans.
The hard question is deciding which transhumans—including types not yet invented, possibly types not yet thought of, and certainly types which are only imagined in a sketchy abstract way—can reasonably be considered as entities which shouldn’t be killed.
Well, it sure looks like babies have a lot of things in common with people, and will become people one day, and lots of people care about them.
I meant humans, not people. Sorry.
And I agree that we should treat animals better. I’m vegetarian.
I agree that this discussion is slightly complex. Gwern’s abortion dialogue contains a lot of relevant material.
However, I don’t feel that saying that “we should protect babies because one day they will be human” requires aggregate utilitarianism as opposed to average utilitarianism, which I in general prefer. Babies are already alive, and already experience things.
This argument has two functions. One is the literal meaning of “we should respect people’s preferences”. See discussion on the Everybody Draw Mohammed day. The other is that other people’s strong moral preferences are some evidence towards the correct moral path.
I often “claim” my downvotes (aka I will post “downvoted” and then give reason.) However, I know that when I do this, I will be downvoted myself. So that is probably one big deterrent to others doing the same.
For one thing, the person you are downvoting will generally retaliate by downvoting you (or so it seems to me, since I tend to get an instant −1 on downvoting comments), and people who disagree with your reason for downvoting will also downvote you.
Also, many people on this site are just a-holes. Sorry.
Common reasons I downvote with no comment: I think the mistake is obvious to most readers (or already mentioned) and there’s little to be gained from teaching the author. I think there’s little insight and much noise—length, unpleasant style, politically disagreeable implications that would be tedious to pick apart (especially in tone rather than content). I judge that jerkishness is impairing comprehension; cutting out the courtesies and using strong words may be defensible, but using insults where explanations would do isn’t.
On the “just a-holes” note (yes, I thought “Is this about me?”): It might be that your threshold for acceptable niceness is unusually high. We have traditions of bluntness and flaw-hunting (mostly from hackers, who correctly consider niceness noise when discussing bugs in X), so we ended up rather mean on average, and very tolerant of meanness. People who want LW to be nicer usually do it by being especially nice, not by especially punishing meanness. I notice you’re on my list of people I should be exceptionally nice to, but not on my list of exceptionally nice people, which is a bad thing if you love Postel’s law. (Which, by Postel’s law, nobody but me has to.) The only LessWronger I think is an asshole is wedrifid, and I think this is one of his good traits.
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I think there is a difference between choosing bluntness where niceness would tend to obscure the truth, and choosing between two forms of expression which are equally illuminating but not equally nice. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m using “a-hole” here to mean “One who routinely chooses the less nice variant in the latter situation.”
(This is not a specific reference to you; your comment just happened to provide a good anchor for it.)
Of course, if that’s the meaning, then before I judge someone to be an “a-hole” I need to know what they intended to illumine.
Would you mind discussing this with me, because I find it disturbing that I come off as having double-standards, and am interested to know more about where that impression comes from. I personally feel that I do not expect better behaviour from others than I practice, but would like to know (and update my behaviour) if I am wrong about this.
I admit to lowering my level of “niceness” on LW, because I can’t seem to function when I am nice and no one else is. However MY level of being “not nice” means that I don’t spend a lot of time finding ways to word things in the most inoffensive manner. I don’t feel like I am exceptionally rude, and am concerned if I give off that impression.
I also feel like I keep my “punishing meanness” levels to a pretty high standard too: I only “punish” (by downvoting or calling out) what I consider to be extremely rude behavior (ie “I wish you were dead” or “X is crap.”) that is nowhere near the level of “meanness” that I feel like my posts ever get near.
You come off as having single-standards. That is, I think the minimal level of niceness you accept from others is also the minimal level of niceness you practice—you don’t allow wiggle room for others having different standards. I sincerely don’t resent that! My model of nice people in general suggests y’all practice Postel’s law (“Be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you send”), but I don’t think it’s even consistent to demand that someone follow it.
...I’m never going to live that one down, am I? Let’s just say that there’s an enormous amount of behaviours that I’d describe as “slightly blunter than politeness would allow, for the sake of clarity” and you’d describe as “extremely rude”.
Also, while I’ve accepted the verdict that ” is crap” is extremely rude and I shouldn’t ever say it, I was taken aback at your assertion that it doesn’t contribute anything. Surely “Don’t use this thing for this purpose” is non-empty. By the same token, I’d actually be pretty okay with being told “I wish you were dead” in many contexts. For example, in a discussion of eugenics, I’d be quite fine with a position that implies I should be dead, and would much rather hear it than have others dance around the implication.
Maybe the lesson for you is that many people suck really bad at phrasing things, so you should apply the principle of charity harder and be tolerant if they can’t be both as nice and as clear as you’d have been and choose to sacrifice niceness? The lesson I’ve learned is that I should be more polite in general, more polite to you in particular, look harder for nice phrasings, and spell out implications rather than try to bake them in connotations.
I’m fine with positions that imply I should never have been born (although I have yet to hear one that includes me), but I’d feel very differently about one implying that I should be dead!
Many people don’t endorse anything similar to the principle that “any argument for no more of something should explain why there is a perfect amount of that thing or be counted as an argument for less of that thing.”
E.g. thinking arguments that “life extension is bad” generally have no implications regarding killing people were it to become available. So those who say I shouldn’t live to be 200 are not only basically arguing I should (eventually, sooner than I want) be dead, the implication I take is often that I should be killed (in the future).
Personally, I’d be far more insulted by the suggestion that I should never have been born, than by the suggestion that I should die now.
Why?
If someone tells me I should die now, I understand that to mean that my life from this point forward is of negative value to them. If they tell me I should never have been born, I understand that to mean not only that my life from this point forward is of negative value, but also that my life up to this point has been of negative value.
Interesting. I don’t read it as necessarily a judgment of value at all to be told that I should never have been born (things that should not have happened may accidentally have good consequences). Additionally, someone who doesn’t think that I should have been born, but also doesn’t think I should die, will not try to kill me, though they may push policies that will prevent future additions to my salient reference class; someone who thinks I should die could try to make that happen!
Interesting.
For my part, I don’t treat saying things like “I think you should be dead” as particularly predictive of actually trying to kill me. Perhaps I ought to, but I don’t.
Upvoted, and thank you for the explanation.
If it helps, I didn’t even remember that one of the times I’ve called someone out on “X is crap” was you. So consider it “lived down”.
You’re right. How about an assertion that it doesn’t contribute anything that couldn’t be easily rephrased in a much better way? Your example of “Don’t use this thing for this purpose”, especially if followed by a brief explanation, is an order of magnitude better than “X is crap”, and I doubt it took you more than 5 seconds to write.
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Correcting for my differing speech patterns across languages and need to speak to stuck-up authorities… probably roughly as much.
On the other hand if people agree with your reasons they often upvote it (especially back up towards zero if it dropped negative).
I certainly hope so. I would expect that they disagree with your reasons for downvoting or else they would have not made their comment. It would take a particularly insightful explanation for your vote for them to believe that you influencing others toward thinking their contribution is negative is itself a valuable contribution.
*arch*
Do you think that’s a good thing, or just a likely outcome?
Downvoting explanations of downvotes seems like a really bad idea, regardless how you feel about the downvote. It strongly incentives people to not explain themselves, not open themselves up for debates, but just vote and then remove themselves from the discussion.
I don’t see how downvoting explanations and more explicit behavior is helpful for rational discourse in any way.
This is exactly the reaction I want to trolls, basic questions outside of dedicated posts, and stupid mistakes. Are downvotes of explanations in those cases also read as an incentive not to post explanations in general?
Speaking for myself, yes. I read it as “don’t engage this topic on this site, period”.
I agree with downvoting (and ignoring) the types of comments you mentioned, but not explanations of such downvotes. The explanations don’t add any noise, so they shouldn’t be punished. (Maybe if they got really excessive, but currently I have the impression that too few downvotes are explained, rather than too many.)
Comments can serve as calls to action encouraging others to downvote or priming people with a negative or unintended interpretation of a comment—be it yours or that of someone else -that influence is something to be discouraged. This is not the case with all explanations of downvotes but it certainly describes the effect and often intent of the vast majority of “Downvoted because” declarations. Exceptions include explanations that are requested and occasionally reasons that are legitimately surprising or useful. Obviously also an exception is any time when you actually agree they have a point.
I might well consider an explanation of a downvote on a comment of mine to be a valuable contribution, even if I continue to disagree with the thinking behind it. Actually, that’s not uncommon.
If I downvote with comment, it’s usually for a fairly specific problem, and usually one that I expect can be addressed if it’s pointed out; some very clear logical problem that I can throw a link at, for example, or an isolated offensive statement. I may also comment if the post is problematic for a complicated reason that the poster can’t reasonably be expected to figure out, or if its problems are clearly due to ignorance.
Otherwise it’s fairly rare for me to do so; I see downvotes as signaling that I don’t want to read similar posts, and replying to such a post is likely to generate more posts I don’t want to read. This goes double if I think the poster is actually trolling rather than just exhibiting some bias or patch of ignorance. Basically it’s a cost-benefit analysis regarding further conversation; if continuing to reply would generate more heat than light, better to just downvote silently and drive on.
It’s uncommon for me to receive retaliatory downvotes when I do comment, though.
I think it’s more that there are a few a-holes, but they are very prolific (well, that and the same bias that causes us to notice how many red lights we get stopped at but not how many green lights we speed through also focuses our attention on the worst posting behavior).
Interesting. Who are the prolific “a-holes”?
Explicitly naming names accomplishes nothing except inducing hostility, as it will be taken as a status challenge. Not explicitly naming names, one hopes, leaves everyone re-examining whether their default tone is appropriately calibrated.
I agree with you that naming names can be taken as a status challenge.
Of course, this whole topic positions you as an abjudicator of appropriate calibration, which can be taken as a status grab, for the excellent reason that it is one. Not that there’s anything wrong with going for status.
All of that notwithstanding, if you prefer to diffuse your assertions of individual inappropriate behavior over an entire community, that’s your privilege.
I care about my status on this site only to the extent that it remains above some minimum required for people not to discount my posts simply because they were written by me.
My interest in this thread is that like Daenerys I think the current norm for discourse is suboptimal, but I think I give greater weight to the possibility of that some of the suboptimal behavior is people defecting by accident; hence the subtle push for occasional recalibration of tone.
There was a subtle push? I must of missed that while I was distracted by the blatant one!
See, it’s working!
Just to be clear: I’m fine with you pushing for a norm that’s optimal for you. Blatantly, if you want to; subtly if you’d rather.
But I don’t agree that the norm you’re pushing is optimal for me, and I consider either of us pushing for the establishment of norms that we’re most comfortable with to be a status-linked social maneuver.
Why? (A sincere question, not a rhetorical one)
I’m not sure how every post doesn’t do this; many posts push to maintain a status-quo, but all posts implicitly favor some set of norms.
I agree that pretty much all communication does this, yes. Sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly.
As to why… because I see the norm you’re pushing as something pretty close to the cultural baseline of the “friendly” pole of the American mainstream, which I see as willing to trade off precision and accuracy for getting along. You may even be pushing for something even more “get along” optimized than that.
I mostly don’t mind that the rest of my life more or less optimizes for getting along, though I often find it frustrating when it means that certain questions simply can’t ever be asked in the first place, and that certain answers can’t be believed when they’re given because alternative answers are deemed too impolite to say. Still, as I say, I accept it as a fact about my real-life environment. I probably even prefer it, as I acknowledge that optimizing for precision and accuracy at the expense of getting along would be problematic if I could never get away from it, however tired or upset I was.
That said, I value the fact that LW uses a different standard, one that optimizes for accuracy and precision, and therefore efforts to introduce the baseline “get along” standard to LW remove local value for me.
Again, let me stress that I’m not asserting that you ought not make those efforts. If that’s what you want, then by all means push for it. If you are successful, LW will become less valuable to me, but you’re not under any kind of moral obligation to preserve the value of the Internet to me.
But speaking personally, I’d prefer you didn’t insist as you did so that those efforts are actually in my best interests, with the added implication that I can’t recognize my interests as well as you can.
It left me evaluating whether it was me personally that was being called an asshole or others in the community and whether those others are people that deserve the insult or not. Basically I needed to determine whether it was a defection against me, an ally or my tribe in general. Then I had to decide what, if any, was an appropriate, desirable and socially acceptable tit-for-tat response. I decided to mostly ignore him because engaging didn’t seem like it would do much more than giving him a platform from which to gripe more.
If it makes you feel better, when I read his post I thought lovingly of you. (I also believe your response was appropriate.)
Why do you feel it’s correct to interpret it as defection in the first place?
In case you were wondering the translation of this from social-speak to Vulcan is:
So this too is a defection. Not that I mind—because it is a rather mild defection that is well within the bounds of normal interaction. I mean… it’s not like you called me an asshole or anything. ;)
That is not a correct translation. Calling someone an asshole may or may not be defection. In this case, I’m not sure whether it was. Examining why you feel that it was may be enlightening to me or to you or hopefully both. Defecting by accident is a common flaw, for sure, but interpreting a cooperation as a defection is no less damaging and no less common.
Am I an asshole?
I’m already working on not being an asshole in general, and on not being an asshole to specific people on LW. If someone answers “yes” to that I’ll work harder at being a non-asshole on LW. Or post less. Or try to do one of those for two days then forget about the whole thing.
You haven’t stood out as someone who has been an asshole to me or anyone I didn’t think deserved it in the context, those being the only cases salient enough that I could expect myself to remember.
If you’re already working on it, you’re probably in the clear. Not being an a-hole is a high-effort activity for many of us; in this case I will depart from primitive consquentialism and say that effort counts for something.
And, equivalently, signalling effectively that you are expending effort counts for something.
Yeah, I do retailate quite commonly (less than 60% retailation ITT though), but I’ve never been an asshole on LW until this thread. Not particularly planning on repeating this, but I’m not sorry at all. Forced civility just doesn’t fit the mood of this topic at all in my eyes.
Yeah, I get it, you don’t consider babies people and I do. So pretty much we just throw down (ie. trying to reason each other into having the same values as ourselves would be pointless). You vote for baby killing, I vote against it. If there is a war of annihilation and I’m forced to choose sides between the baby killers and the non-baby killers and they seem evenly matched then I choose the non-baby killers side and go kill all the baby killers.
Yeah, I get it, you don’t consider babies people and I do. So pretty much we just throw down (ie. trying to reason each other into having the same values as ourselves would be pointless). You vote for baby killing, I vote against it. If there is a war of annihilation and I’m forced to choose sides between the baby killers and the non-baby killers and they seem evenly matched then I choose the non-baby killers side and go kill all the baby killers. If I somehow have the option to exclude all consideration of your preferences from the optimisation function of an FAI then I take it. Just a plain ol’ conflict of terminal values.
If babies were made of bacon then I’d have to rerun the moral calculus all over again! ;)
Well, they are made of eggs. Actual eggs and counterfactual bacon are an important part of this nutritious breakfast.
How do you know?
It is a core belief of Bakkot’s—nothing is going to change that. His thinking on the matter is also self consistent. Only strong social or personal influence has a chance of making a difference (for example, if he has children, all his friends have children and he becomes embedded in a tribe where non-baby-killing is a core belief). For my part I understand Bakkot’s reasoning but do not share his preference based premises. As such changing my mind regarding the conclusion would make no sense.
More succinctly I don’t expect reasoning with each other to change our minds because neither of us is wrong (in the intellectual sense). We shouldn’t change our minds based on intellectual arguments—if we do then we are making a mistake.
Yes, and my question is how do you know? Admittedly I haven’t read the entire thread from the beginning, but in the large part I have, I see nothing to suggest that there is anything particularly immutable about either of your positions such that neither of you could possibly change your mind based on normal moral-philosophical arguments. What makes you so quick to dismiss your interlocutor as a babyeating alien?
I trust his word.
You’re spinning this into a dismissal, disrespect of Bakkot’s intellectual capability or ability to reason. Yet disagreement does not equal disrespect when it is a matter of different preferences. It is only when I think an ‘interlocutor’ is incapable of understanding evidence and reasoning coherently (due to, say, biases or ego) that observing that reason cannot persuade each other is a criticism.
He is a [babykilling advocate]. He says he is a babykilling advocate. He says why. That I acknowledge that he is an advocate of infanticide rights is not, I would hope, offensive to him.
I note that while Bakkot’s self expression is novel, engaging and coherent (albeit contrary to my values), your own criticism is not coherent. You asked “how do you know?” and I gave you a straight answer. Continued objection makes no sense.
He said his mind could never be changed on this?
Spinning? I’m not trying to spin anything into anything. You said this was a matter of different preferences before, and I understood the first time. You don’t need to repeat it. My criticism is about why you think this a difference in values rather than a mere confusion of them. (Also, “dismissal” has connotations, but I can’t think of a better word to capture “throwing up your hands and going to war with them”)
Emphasis was meant to be on alien. Aliens are distinguished by, among other things, not living in our moral reference frame.
I answered your question. And I will not repeat it again.
The question was “how do you know?”, not “what do you mean?”. Aliens are almost certain to fundamentally disagree with humans in a variety of important matters, by simple virtue of not being genetically related to us. Bakkot is a human. Different priors are called for.
Oh, and to clarify the extent of my disagreement: When I say “You vote for baby killing, I vote against it” that assumes I don’t live in some backwards country without compulsory voting. If voting is optional then I’m staying home. Other people killing babies is not my problem—because I don’t have the power to stop a mob of humans from killing babies and I’m not interested in making the token gesture.
What do you think of abortion?
Once we get artificial uteri I think it should be illegal except in cases of rape, but it should be legal to renounce all responsibility for it and put it up for adoption or let the other biological parent finance the babies coming to term. This has the neat and desirable effect of equalizing the position of the biological father and the biological mother.
Uteri?
Not a native speaker. And uterus is a surprisingly sparingly used word.
Uterus. Uterus. Uterus.
Thanks for the correction! :)
Any time ;)
Just remember that if it ends with -us, it probably pluralizes to -i. That’s only for latin-based words. Greek-based words, like octopus, can either be pluralized to octopuses or octopodes (pronounced Ahk-top-o-dees). And sometimes you have a new or technical latin-based word like “virus” which just pluralizes to “viruses.” It’s perfectly fine to pluralize uterus to uteruses, too, since it’s so uncommon. English is a bitch.
[Edited to give a longer explanation]
I have to say, http://lesswrong.com/lw/47k/an_abortion_dialogue/ seems relevant to this entire comment tree.
Your link (in the Discussion post) is broken.
! I didn’t realize I’d broke all the old .html links—turned out that when I thought I was removing the gzip encoding, I also removed the Apache rewrite rules. I’ve fixed that and also pointed the Discussion at the most current URL, just in case.
This link works. http://www.gwern.net/An%20Abortion%20Dialogue
Better late than never?
(From the looks of gwern’s link I’m more interested in homophones.)
Why is sadism worse than indifference? Are we punishing people for their mental states?
Why does that seem like a reasonable thing to do? Isn’t that just an incentive to lie about motives?
Its illegal to torture an animal. Why wouldn’t it be illegal to torture a baby while killing him? If a sadist can get jollies out of killing with painless poison his children and keeps making them for that purpose, I can’t really see how this harms wider society if he pays for the pills and children himself.
Please rethink this. E.g. are you at all confident that this sadist wouldn’t slip and go on to adults after their 10th child? Wouldn’t you, personally, force people who practice this to wear some mandatory identification in public, so you don’t have to wonder about every creepy-looking stranger? Don’t you just have an intuition about the myriad ways that giving sadists such rights could undermine society?
Fine make it illegal for this to be done except by experts.
No, why?
We already give sadists lots of rights to psychologically and physical abuse people when this is done with consent or when we don’t feel like being morally consistent or when there is some societal benefit to be had.
For your own safety, in every regard that such people could threaten it.
Well, I’ve always thought that it’s enormously and horribly wrong of us.
I don’t think society considers that a valid reason for discrimination.
Also please remember surgeons can do nasty things to me without flinching if they wanted to, people do also occasionally have such fears since we even invoke this trope in horror movies.
I generally agree.
But on the other hand I think we should give our revealed preference some weight as well, remember we are godshatter, maybe we should just accept that perhaps we don’t care as much about other people’s suffering as we’d like to believe or say we do.
Yes society might, if society takes into account that it loathes most people with those characteristics to begin with.
Maybe if we do bother to self-modify in some direction along one of our “shard”’s vectors, it could as well be a direction we see as more virtuous? Making ourselves care as much as we’d privately want to, at least to try and see how it goes?
Revealed preferences are precisely what we end up doing and actually desire once we get in a certain situation. Why not work it out the other way around? How can you be sure maximum utility is going with this shard line and not the other?
Because it sounds good? To 21st century Westerners?
My current values simply DO point in the direction of rewriting parts of my utility function like I suggest, and not like you suggest.
Sure, might as well stick with this reason. I haven’t yet seen an opposing one that’s convincing to me.
When currently thinking in far mode about this you like the idea, but seeing it in practice might easily horrify you.
In any case when I was talking about maximising utility, I was talking about you maximising your utility. You can easily be mistaken about what does and dosen’t do that.
I say the same about the general shape of your modern-society-with-legalized-infanticide.
And you are right to say so!
Uh huh, thanks. The difference is, I’m quite a bit more distrustful of your legal infanticide’s perspectives than you’re distrustful of my personal self-modification’s perspectives.
I’m not sure this is so. We should update towards each other estimates of the other’s distrustfulness. I’m literally horrified by the possibility of a happy death spiral around universal altruism.
I don’t understand your reasoning for either of those dot points.
I’d think that that the bulk of the resource cost of a newborn is the physiological cost (and medical risks) the mother endured during pregnancy. The general societal cost seems small in comparison.
Sure, that seems true. Note that Bakkot didn’t say that the costs to everyone else outweighed the costs to the mother, merely that the costs to everyone else were also substantial.
We already treat accidental pregnant women basically the same as those who planned their pregnancy. Clearly we should distinguish and discriminate between them rather than lump them into the “pregnant woman” category (I take a lighter tone in some of my other posts here to provoke thought, but I’m dead serious about this).
Also many people are way to stuck in their 21st century Eurocentric frame of mind to comprehend the personhood argument for infanticide properly. Let me help:
On infanticide, is this a reasonable summary of your position:
Ok. I agree with you on the empirical assertions (I actually suspect that 10-month-olds also lack blicket). But my moral theory gives significant weight to blicket-potential (because blicket is that awesome), while your system does not appear to do so. Why not?
You mentioned to someone that the current system of being forced to provide for a child or place the child in foster care is suboptimal. I assume a substantial part of that position is that foster care is terrible (i.e. unlikely to produce high-functioning adults).
I agree that one solution to this problem is to end the parental obligation (i.e. allow infanticide). This solution has the benefit of being very inexpensive. But why do you think that solution is better than the alternative solution of fixing foster care (and low quality child-rearing practice generally) so that it is likely to produce high-quality adults?
I agree there is a scale about how much weight to give blicket-potential. But I support a meta-norm about constructing a morality that the morality should add up to normal, absent compelling justification.
That is, if a proposed moral system says that some common practice is deeply wrong, or some common prohibition has relatively few negative consequences if permitted, that’s a reason to doubt the moral construction unless a compelling case can be made. It’s not impossible, but a moral theory that says we’ve all doing it wrong should not be expected either.
The fact that my calibration of my blicket-potential sensitivity mostly adds up to normal is evidence to me that the model is a fairly accurate description of the morality people say they are applying.
This is a historical claim that requires a bit more evidence in support. I don’t doubt that infanticide has a rich historical pedigree. But I don’t think infanticide was ever justified on a “human autonomy” basis, which seems to be your justification. For example, the relatively recent dynamic of Chinese sex-selection infanticide has not been based on any concept of personal autonomy, as far as I can tell.
In general, I suspect that most cultures that tolerated infanticide were much lower on the human-autonomy scale than our current civilization (i.e. valued individual human life less than we do).
I did some reading on the ancients and infanticide, and the picture is murky—the Christians were not responsible for making infanticide illegal, that seems to have preceded them, but they claimed the laws were honored mostly in the breach, so whether you give any credit to them depends on your theories of causality, large-scale trends, and whether the Christians made any meaningful difference to the actual infanticide rate.
Cultures are often fine with killing wives and children too, if they get too far out of line. They are yours after all.
Sigh. How did the post-modern moral nihilist become the defender of moral universalism? My argument is more that infanticide fits extremely poorly within the cluster of values that we’ve currently adopted.
I am highly skeptical that this is true.
An uncle of mine who is a doctor said that SIDS is a codeword for infanticide and that many of his colleagues admit as much.
Either my model is false or this story is wrong.
Specifically, I can’t understand why a coroner would not take actions to facilitate the prosecution of a crime (infanticide is murder), because that is one of the jobs of a coroner.
By contrast, I’ve heard that coroners are quite wiling to label a death as accidental when they believe it was suicide, because any legal violations are not punishable (suicide is generally illegal, but everyone agrees that prosecution is pointless).
Because he, like some who have posted here, is sympathetic to the baby-killing mothers under certain circumstances and doesn’t mind helping them avoid prosecution? I wouldn’t judge him, heavens forbid. I’d likely do the opposite in his place, but I respect his position.
How much overlap do you think there is between “influential members of the criminal justice system” and “people who are sympathetic to infanticide”? Especially considering how far from mainstream the infanticide position is.
Labelling a suicide as an accident isn’t legally trivial. It is, at least in some cases, an action that favors the interests of the heirs of suicides and disfavors the interests of life insurance companies.
I agree that it isn’t legally trivial. But the social consequences of labeling a death as suicide are much more immediate than any financial consequences from labeling a death as accidental. Also, I’m not sure what percentage of the suicidal have life insurance, so I’m not sure how much weight the hypothetical coroner would place on the life insurance issue.
I’m not saying the position is rational or morally correct, but it wouldn’t surprise me that an influential person like a coroner held a position vaguely like “screw insurance companies.” (>>75%)
By contrast, I would be extremely surprised to learn that a coroner was willing to ignore an infanticide, absent collusion (i.e. bribery) of some kind (<<<1%)
(I don’t believe CharlieSheen’s anecdote either. I was challenging the suicide point in isolation.)
Say what now? Possibly it’s because my background is Jewish, not Christian, but I don’t buy that at all.
Normatively, suicide is shameful in modern society. By contrast, I don’t think most suicide-victim families (or their social network) are thinking about the life insurance proceeds at the time (within a week?) that the coroner is determining cause of death.
I know I’ve heard of a survey of coroner in which some substantial percentage (20-50%, sorry don’t remember better) of coroners reported that the following had ever occurred in their career: they believed the cause of death of the body they were examining was suicide, but listed the cause as accident.
I can’t find that survey in a quick search, but this research result talks about the effect of elected coroners on cause of death determinations. Specifically, elected coroners were slightly less likely to declare suicide as the cause of death.
If it works that way with euthanasia…
It looks like I misread you. I thought you were referring to moral conventions generally, while you seem to have been referring to moral conventions on infanticide. I agree that many historical cultures did not oppose infanticide as strongly as the current culture.
Major objection. When talking about society at large and not the small cluster of “rationalist” utilitarians (who are ever tempted to be smarter than their ethics), the current standard is “don’t kill what our instincts register as people”. The distinction being that John Q. Public hardly reflects on the matter at all. I believe that it’s a hugely useful standard because it strengthens the relevant ethical injunctions, regardless of any inconveniences that it brings from an act utilitarian standpoint.
NO! As you have yourself correctly pointed out, it is because most cultures, with ours being a notable exception, assign a low value to “useless” people or people who they feel are a needless drain on society. (mistake fixed)
Hm. So what seems to follow from this is that most people don’t actually consider killing people to be a particularly big deal, what they’re averse to is killing people who contribute something useful to society… or, more generally, that most people are primarily motivated by maximizing social value.
Yes? (I don’t mean to be pedantic here, I just want to make sure I’m not putting words in your mouth.)
Blast me! I meant to say that our culture is an exception, not an “inclusion”. So this statement is largely true about non-western cultures, but western ones mostly view the relatively recent concept of “individuality and personhood are sacred” as their main reason against murder.
Ah, gotcha. That makes sense.
So is your position that we inherited an aversion to murder from earlier non-western cultures, and then when we sanctified personhood we made that our main reason for our pre-existing aversion?
Or that earlier cultures weren’t averse to murder, and our sanctification caused us to develop such an aversion?
Or something else?
Both, probably. We inherited all of their aversion (being a modest amount), and then we developed the sacredness, which, all on its own, added several times more aversion on top of that.
If you say you don’t want to kill an infant because of its potential for blicket, then you would also have to apply that logic to abortion and birth control, and come to the conclusion that these are just as wrong as killing infants, since they both destroy blicket-potential.
Fetus- does not have blicket, has potential for blicket—killing it is legal abortion
Infant- does not have blicket (you agreed with this), has potential for blicket—killing it is illegal murder
Does not compute. One or the other outcomes needs to be changes, and I’m sure not going to support the illegalization of birth control.
Note: I apologize if this is getting too close to politics, but it is a significant part of the killing babies debate, and not mentioning it just to avoid mentioning a political issue would not give accurate reasons.
At a certain level, all morality is about balancing the demands of conflicting blicket-supported desires. So the balance comes out different at different stages. Yes, the difference between stages is quite arbitrary (and worse: obviously historically contingent).
In short, I wish I had a better answer for you than I am comfortable with arbitrary distinctions (why is the speed limit 55 mph rather than 56?). From an outsider perspective, I’m sure it looks like I’ve been mind-killed by some version of “The enemy of my enemy (politically active religious conservatives) is my friend.”
Somebody did some math about reaction times, kinetic energy from impacts, and fuel economy. That turned out to be a good place to draw the line. For practical purposes, people can drive 60 in a 55 zone under routine circumstances and not get in trouble.
Actually...
So, Alejandro’s response is correct, but all of this seems rather tangential to the question you quote. The reason the speed limit is 55 rather than 56 or 54 is because we have a cultural preference for multiples of 5… which is also why all the other speed limits I see posted are multiples of 5. Seeing a speed limit sign that read “33” or something would cause me to do a potentially life-threatening double-take.
They’re unusual but they do happen. The “19 MPH” one happens to be from the campus of my alma mater.
Huh. Some of these I can understand, but I’m really curious about the 19mph one… is there a story behind that? (If I had to guess I’d say it relates to some more global 20mph limit.)
One day in the future, if we somehow survive the existential threats that await us and a Still More Glorious Dawn does, in fact, dawn, one day we might have machines akin to 3D printers that allow us to construct, atom-by-atom, anything we desire so long has we know its composition and structure.
Suppose I take one of these machines and program it to build me a human, then leave when it’s half done. Does the construction chamber have blicket-potential?
Sure. Unborn babies have blicket-potential. Heck, the only reason I don’t say that unconceived babies have blicket potential is that I’m not sure that the statement is coherent.
Blicket and blicket-potential are markers that special moral considerations apply. They don’t control the moral decision without any reference to context.
(Let’s collect academic opinions here)
The utilitarian bioethicist Peter Singer claims that it’s pretty much OK to kill a disabled newborn, but states that killing normal infants who are impossible for their parents to raise doesn’t follow from that, and, while not being as bad as murdering an adult, is hardly justifiable. Note that he doesn’t quite consider any wider social repercussions.
http://www.princeton.edu/~psinger/faq.html
Consider Heinlein:
Eh heh heh. So you can be terrified by some kinds of utilitarian reasoning. Well, this one does terrify me too, but in the context of this conversation I’m tempted to cite my people’s saying: “What’s fine for a Russian would kill a German.”
It feels pretty complex, and I just self-report as undecided on some preferences, but, although a part of my function seems to be optimizing for LW-”fun” too, another, smaller part is a preference for “Niceness with a capital N”, or “the world feeling wholesome”.
I’m not good enough at introspection and self-expression to describe this value of “Niceness”, but it seems to resonate with some Christian ideals and images (“love your enemies”), the complex, indirect ethical teachings seen in classical literature (e.g. Akutagawa or Dostoevsky; I love and admire both), and even, on an aesthetic level, the modern otaku culture’s concept of “moe” (see this great analysis on how that last one, although looking like a mere pop culture craze to outsiders, can tie in into a larger sensibility).
So, there’s an ever-present “minority group” in my largely LW-normal values cluster. I can’t quite label it with something like “conservative” or “romantic”, but I recognize it when I feel it.
...shit, I feel like some kind of ethical hipster now, lol.
Tl;dr: there might be some kind of “Niceness” (permitting “fun” that’s not directly fun) a level or so above “fun” for me, just as there is some kind of “fun” above pleasure for most people (permitting “pleasure” that’s not directly pleasant). If people don’t wirehead so they can have “fun” and not just pleasure, I’m totally able not to optimize for “fun” so I can have “Niceness” and not just “fun”.
More infanticide advocacy here :
Recently, Francesca Minerva published in the Journal of Medical Ethics arguing the case that :
“what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.”
Random press coverage complete with indignant comments
Actual paper, pdf, freely available
In many (most?) countries abortion is normally only allowed in the first few months of pregnancy. (Also, I can’t imagine why anyone would want to carry a pregnancy nine months, give birth to a child and then kill it rather than just aborting as soon as possible, anyway.)
Can you imagine how the experiences of childbirth and being the primary caregiver for a newborn might alter someone’s desires with respect to bearing and raising a child?
As for bearing, once the child is born that’s a sunk cost; as for “being the primary caregiver for a newborn”… Wait. So we’re not talking about killing a child straight after birth but after a while? (A week? A month? A year?)
I can’t see why that makes a difference in the context of my question, so feel free to choose whichever interpretation you prefer.
For my part, it seems entirely plausible to me that a person’s understanding of what it means to be the primary caregiver for a child will change between time T1, when they are pregnant with that child, and time T2, when the child has been born… just as it seems plausible that a person’s understanding of what a three-week stay in the Caribbean will be like will change between time T1, when they are at home looking at brochures, and time T2, when their airplane is touching down. That sort of thing happens to people all the time. So it doesn’t seem at all odd to me that they might want one thing at T1 and a different thing at T2, which was the behavior you were expressing incredulity about. That seems even more true the more time passes… say, at time T3, when they’ve been raising the child for a month.
Incidentally, I certainly agree with you that bearing the child is a sunk cost once the child is born. If you’re suggesting that, therefore, parents can’t change their desires with respect to bearing the child once it’s born, I conclude that our models of humans are vastly different. If, alternatively, you’re suggesting that it’s an error for parents to change their desires with respect to bearing the child once it’s born, you may well be right, but in that case I have to conclude “I can’t imagine why” was meant rhetorically.
More like I was assuming too much stuff in the implicit antecedent of the conditional whose consequent is “would want”, but yeah, what I meant is that it’s an error for parents to change their desires with respect to bearing the child once it’s born.
Hmm. Maybe you could’ve picked out a more respectable source of “press coverage” than the goddamn Daily Mail.
You’re not the first one to argue this on LW. I’ll find you the link in a second. Why can’t sadists kill their babies? Why ten months, precisely? More importantly, why can’t we kill babies?
Why do you particularly bring up the “discrimination against youth” thing?
But yeah, welcome to LW and all that.
If anything it would seem more appropriate to prevent sadists from torturing their babies (including before and during the murder).
Would you approve of a man killing a child which his wife recently gave birth to, without the mother’s permission, on the grounds that he does not believe himself to be the child’s father? That’s certainly not sadism.
Or, if genetic testing has been done and the child’s biological father is known, would you say it should be legal for the father to kill the child… say, because he disagrees with the married couple’s religious beliefs and wants to deny them an easy recruit?
How would you define “parent,” then? It’s not a tangent, it’s an important edge case. I’m trying to understand exactly where our views on the issue differ.
For what it’s worth, I agree with you unreservedly on the age discrimination thing. In fact, I think it’s the root of a lot of the current economic problems: a majority of the population is essentially being warehoused during their formative years, and then expected to magically transform into functional, productive adults afterward.
We had a couple of fair-sized threads on infanticide before. I suggest that everyone who hasn’t seen them yet skims through before posting further arguments.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/2l/closet_survey_1/1ou
http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ww/undiscriminating_skepticism/1rmf
Also: http://lesswrong.com/lw/35h/why_abortion_looks_more_okay_to_us_than_killing/
What benefit, other than satisfaction of sadism, do you see in infanticide of one’s own children that wouldn’t be satisfied by merely giving them up for adoption?
This rule has to be examined very very closely. While it sounds good, it spawns so many strawmen against libertarianism and such, we ought to try and unscrew that applause light of “liberty” from there. Liberty is an applause light to me, too (a reflected one from freedom-in-general), and a fine value it is, but still we’d better clinically examine anything that allows us to sidestep our intuitions so much.
[fucking politics, watch out] *(note that I’m a socialist and rather opposed to libertarianism as well, but I’m very willing to examine and consider its ups and downs)
Well, OK, let’s examine it then.
We have some activity.
We see no particular reason to prevent people from doing that activity.
We see no good reason for people to do that activity.
We have a proposed law that makes that activity illegal.
Do I endorse that law?
The only case I can think of where I’d say yes is if the law also performs some other function, the benefit of which outweighs the inefficiencies associated with preventing this activity, and for some reason separating those two functions is more expensive than just preventing the activity. (This sort of thing happens in the real world all the time.)
Can you think of other cases?
I agree with you, by the way, that liberty-as-applause-light is a distraction from thinking clearly about these sorts of questions. Perhaps efficiency is as well, but if so it’s one I have much more trouble reasoning past… I neither love that law nor hate it, but it is taking up energy I could use for something else.
Proposed law, or preexisting law?
As pointed out here, tribal traditions tend to have been adopted and maintained for some good reason or other, even if people can’t properly explain what that reason is, and that goes double for the traditions that are inconvenient or silly-sounding.
Pace Chesterton, I don’t see that much difference, especially when the context changes significantly from decade to decade. If there’s a pre-existing law preventing the activity, I will probably devote significantly more effort to looking for a good reason to prevent that activity than for a proposed law, but not an infinite amount of effort; at some point either I find such a reason or I don’t endorse the law.
Look at the youngest children in any adoption photolisting. The kids you usually see there are either part of a sibling group, or very disabled. (Example). There are children born with severe disabilities who are given up by their birth parents and are never adopted. (Example) The government pays foster parents to care for them. That’s up to $2,000 per month for care, plus all medical expenses.
Meanwhile, other kids are dying for lack of cheap mosquito nets. This use of money does not seem right to me.
At national level and above, the argument about “use of money” just plain fails. If you’re looking for expenses to cut so that the money could be redirected for glaring needs like mosquito nets, foster care can’t realistically appear on the cut list next to nuclear submarines and spaceflight.
True. I’d be happy to see those things cut as well. Though foster care is funded at a state level, I believe.
Why not permit the killing of babies not your own, for the same reason?
It causes me a certain level of distress when a baby is harmed or killed, even if it is of no relation to me. Many people (perhaps almost all people) experience a similar amount of distress. Is it your point of view that the aggregate amount of harm caused in this way is not large enough to justify the prohibition on killing babies?
Perhaps what you mean to argue with the house analogy is not that the parent is harmed, but that his property rights have been violated.
Are those property rights transferable? Would you permit a market in infants?
Sure, adoption markets basically already exist, why not make them legal?
Not only are wealthier people better candidates on average because they can provide for the material needs much better and will on average have a more suitable psychological profile (we can impose legal screening of adopters too, so they need to match other current criteria before they can legally buy on the adoption market if you feel uncomfortable with “anyone can buy”). It also provides incentives for people with desirable traits to breed, far more than just subsidising them having kids of their own.
One of the standard topics in economic approaches to the law is to discuss the massive market failures caused by not permitting markets in infants; see for example, Landes and Richard Posner’s “The Economics of the Baby Shortage”. I thought their analysis pretty convincing.
Don’t worry, in the right culture and society this distress would be pretty minor.
I disagree with that statement on at least two points.
1) How can you so easily predict others’ level of distress if you don’t feel much distress from that source in the first place?
2) Don’t forget about scale insensitivity. Don’t forget that some scale insensitivity can be useful on non-astronomical scales, as it gives bounds to utility functions and throws a light on ethical injunctions.
Looking at other humans. Perhaps even humans in actually existing different cultures.
This is a good counter point. I just think applying this principle selectively is too easy to game a metric, to put too much weight to it in preliminary discussion.
Ah, but the culture you’d want and are arguing for here is way, way closer to our current culture than to any existing culture where distress to people from infanticide is “minor”!
How can you be so sure? Historically speaking, infanticide is the human norm.
It is just the last few centuries that some societies have gotten all upset over it.
In some respects modern society is closer in norms to societies that practised infanticide 100 years ago than to Western society of 100 years ago and we consider this a good thing. Why assume no future changes or no changes at all would go in this direction? And that likewise we’ll eventually consider these changes good?
It is certainly weak evidence in favour of a practice being nasty that societies which practice it are generally nasty in other ways. But it is just that, weak evidence.
Doesn’t look that way to me at all, and never did. For every example you list (polyamory, etc) I bet I can find you a counterexample of equivalent strength.
I think you mean “for every example you are likley to list”, I didn’t list any.
What exactly would that accomplish? I said more similar in some respects, didn’t I? I didn’t say on net or overall.
Yup.
That’s the rub. I repeat my claim: the culture you want is, on net or overall, closer to our society than to societies that are OK with infanticide. It’s evidence against your extrapolated-volition utopia being OK with infanticide. (unless I have absolutely zero understanding of Bayes)
sigh
Look two comments up.
Tsk tsk tsk, not very multicultural of you.
Please please just for a second try to look at your own society as the alien one for the purposes of analysis, to ascertain is rather than should when it comes to such questions. I find this has helped me more than anything else in thinking about social questions and avoiding political thinking.
The more interesting question is what to do when parents disagree about infanticide and the complications that come about from custody.
Also adoption contracts would probably need to have a “don’t kill my baby that I’ve given up clause” lest some people wouldn’t want to give up children for adoption.
Because its illegal to kill other people’s pets or destroy their property? Duh.
Actually selling your baby on the adoption market should probably be legal too.
I would vote this up if not for the retract… accept my pseodo-vote.
Feel free to up vote other comments in this thread where I say basically the same thing.
So, premeditated killing of someone else’s child should be criminal damage rather than murder?
What monetary value does the child have, for the purpose of calculating damages I wonder? We should do early testing to see how much status the parents were likely to gain via the impressiveness of their possession in the future. Facial symmetry, genetic indicators...
The emotional investment a parent makes in their child must be huge, and the damages similarly so. It seems perfectly reasonable for a parent to say, “There’s nothing available that I value more than I valued my child, consequently no sum of money will suffice to cover my damages. Whatever you give me it’s still going to work out as a loss.”
This is reasoning we may use now. But it does not apply in the spirit of the weirdtopia where we evaluate children only as property without moral value beyond that.
Where did we start talking about weirdtopia?
And then we’re back to the bit I was responding to. But we all seem to be talking about what should be the case, where we want to end up. The reasoning we can apply at the moment seems the relevant thing to that. If weirdtopia doesn’t look like a place our reasoning would work, if we wouldn’t want to live there.… Well, so much the worse for weirdtopia.
A weirdtopia. The premises that lead to the reasoning and conclusions here are only premises I could consider reasoning from from the perspective of a weird alternate reality. I certainly don’t endorse anything we’re talking about here myself but do suggest that they are incompatible with the nice sounding “Whatever you give me it’s still going to work out as a loss” kind of moral expressions you mention—at least to the extent that they are embedded in the law.
Testing would be a lot of work and potential corruption for comparatively little gain in nailing down the sig figs. The EPA is already willing to put an approximate dollar value on the life of a random citizen shortened by pollution (for cost-benefit purposes when evaluating proposed cleanup plans), so I’d say just estimate the average or typical value and use that as the standard, preferably showing your work well enough to allow adjustments over time or judicial discretion in unusual cases.
This is a situation in which “Speak for yourself!” would apply. In the weirdtopia where killing other people’s children is criminal damage and such damages are calculated being able to prove higher value of said property would and should influence the amount of recompense they receive. For the same reason that Shane Warne could insure his finger for more than I could insure my finger an owner of an impressive child would be able to have that child evaluated and treated as a more valuable piece of property than an inferior child. They would aggressively and almost certainly successfully fight any attempt to make their child evaluated as a mediocre child.
That’s what I meant by ‘judicial discretion in unusual cases.’
Setting the default value a standard deviation or three above the actual average would probably be sensible. Cuts down on expensive investigations and appeals, since most bereaved parents would realize on some level that they won’t actually gain by nitpicking, and erring on the side of punitive damages would help appease the victim and discourage recklessness.
Downvoted for sarcasm. I was under the impression that (unsubtle forms of) sarcasm in non-humorous discussions are outlawed on LW, and that’s very OK with me.
Downvoted for being a wet blanket and incorrect assumption of sarcasm. If it’s ok to talk about the implications of legalizing infanticide then it is ok to follow the weirdtopia through and have fun with it. I adamantly refuse to take on a sombre tone just because people are talking about killing babies. My due diligence to the seriousness of babykilling with my expression of clear opposition—with that out of the way I am (and should be) free to join Konk and Jayson counterfactual wherein the actual logical implications related to killing other people’s non-people infants are considered.
On a related note—of all the movies I was forced to endure and study in high school the only one I don’t resent as a boring waste of my time is Gattaca!
I’m being a fucking idiot tonight.
If I downvote you for calling a valuable lesswrong contributor a fucking idiot is that a compliment or a criticism? ;)
If I tell you you have a perverse wit will you hold it against me?
I’d never agree with being called a fucking-idiot-in-general! :D It’s just an observation that my mind feels numb and sluggish tonight, probably because of the weather.
Leaving aside the amusing notion of LW outlawing sarcasm, I’m curious about how you concluded that wedrifid’s comment was (unsubtle) sarcasm.
(Just to be clear: I’m not contesting your freedom to downvote the comment for that reason or any other, including simply being irritated by people saying such things about children.)
He started “investigating” a child’s value to parents with things like the status they could gain from it, instead of obvious things like their instinctive emotional response to it, etc. That’s manifestly not what most parents think and feel like.
Emotional distress caused does seem like another important consideration when calculating damages received for baby/property destruction. It probably shouldn’t be the only consideration. Just like if I went and cut someone’s arm off it would be appropriate to consider the future financial and social loss to that person as well as his emotional attachment to his arm.
It doesn’t seem very egalitarian but it may be a bigger crime to cut off the arm of a world class spin bowler (or pitcher) than the arm of a middle manager. It’s not like the latter does anything that really needs his arm.
True enough, but it simply doesn’t feel to me that a child can be meaningfully called “property” at all. Hell, I’m not completely sure that a pet dog can be called property.
Hypothetical question: if my child expresses the desire to go live with some other family, and that family is willing, and in my judgment that family will treat my child roughly as well as I will, is it OK for me to deny that expressed desire and keep my child with me?
(quick edit)
Yes, it’s OK, just the same as with a mentally impaired relative under your care, and for roughly the same reasons.
If said relative couldn’t be considered property, then neither does this judgment signify that children are property.
OK, then… I suspect you and I have very different understandings of what being property entails. If you’re interested in unpacking your understanding, I’m interested in hearing it.
Ok, maybe later.
While I don’t fully disagree, I’m not sure that’s a meaningful objection. One implication of the status-signaling frame is that our instinctive emotional responses (among other cognitive patterns) are calibrated at least partly in terms of maximizing status; it doesn’t require any conscious attention to status at all, let alone an explicit campaign of manipulation.
Well, I think that self-signaling especially—and likely even signaling to very close people like family members too—is one of the basic needs of humans, and, being as entangled with human worldview as it is, deserves to be counted under the blanket term “emotional response”.
Even granting that, it’s still true that if Nornagest is right and my emotional responses are calibrated in terms of expected status-maximization, then it makes sense to consider emotional responses in terms of (among other things) status-maximization for legal purposes.
We clearly need to find out what kinds of emotional responses are calibrated by what adaptations in what proportion. Nominating status-seeking as the most important human drive here out of the blue just seems unjustified to me in this moment.
There’s a tradition of examining that frame here that’s probably inherited from Overcoming Bias; it’s related to a model of human cognitive evolution as driven primarily by political selection pressures, which seems fairly plausible to me. I should probably mention, though, that I don’t think it’s a complete model; it’s fairly hard to come up with an unambiguous counterexample to it, but it shares with a lot of evo-psych the problem of having much more explanatory than predictive power.
I think it’s best viewed as one of several complementary models of behavior rather than as a totalizing model, hence the “frame” descriptor.
I have a suspicion that we’ll only be able to produce any totalizing model that’s much good after we crack human intelligence in general. I mean, look at all this entangled mess.
Well, “that’s much good” is the tough part. It’s not at all hard to make a totalizing model, and only a little harder to make one that’s hard to disprove in hindsight (there are dozens in the social sciences) but all the existing ones I know of tend to be pretty bad at prediction. The status-seeking model is one of the better ones—people in general seem more prone to avoiding embarrassment than to maximizing expected money or sexual success, to name two competing models—but it’s far from perfect.
Yup. My point exactly.
Well, couching things in terms of status-signaling is conventional around here. But, sure, there are probably better candidates. Do you have anything in particular in mind you think should have been nominated instead?
Nothing in particular, no, just skepticism. A (brief, completely uneducated) outside view of the field especially suggests that elegant-sounding theories of the mind are likely to fail bad at prediction sooner or later.
Agreed on both counts, and thanks for clarifying.
For my own part, in the hypothetical context Konkvistador and Jayson_Virissimo established, of infanticide being a property crime, it seems at least superficially reasonable to consider how our legal system would assess damages for infanticide and how that would differ from the real world where infanticide isn’t a property crime.
And evaluating the potential gain that could in the future be obtained by the destroyed property is a pretty standard way of assessing such damages, much as damages found if someone accidentally chops my arm off generally take into account my likely future earnings had I kept both arms.
So I guess I’m saying that while I’m fairly sure wedrifid was being ironic (especially since I think he’s come out elsewhere as pro-babies and anti-infanticide on grounds other than potential gain to their parents), I found his use of irony relatively subtle.
Again, that doesn’t in any way preclude your objecting to his post.
The funny thing is, I haven’t felt even a tingle of outrage/whatever, I only objected to tone, on a formal principle, for a stupid reason which seems to have already vanished somewhere.
Nor was I inferring outrage.
Maybe.
Maybe we could just keep it murder, I don’t know. There is no law (heh) we have to be consistent about this. In many places across the world killing a pregnant women is tried as a double murder (I think this includes some US states).
I weakly agree, if only for the reason that it sounds better than foster care and could well curb infanticide. On the other hand, in countries that have a problem with slavery it could weaken any injunction against slave trade, by the same argument as the one I support against infanticide. Or it could harm the sacredness of the child-parent bond in general. Well, on the whole it seems just about worth it to me, and no part of it even feels creepy or alarmingly counterintuitive.
The slave trade thing might be prevented by specifically forbidding the quick or anonymous sale of children. Have the current and prospective parents jump through some hoops, get interviewed by a social worker, etc. and the whole thing thoroughly documented. Find an equilibrium that keeps the nonmonetary transaction costs high enough that low-level slave traders won’t think it’s worth the trouble to ‘go legit,’ and the paper trail thick enough that corrupt aristocrats won’t want to take the risk of public humiliation, without actually making it more difficult for the beleaguered biological parents than raising an unwanted child themselves.
The ultimate slavery counter: red tape!
Working from the assumption that slave-traders are in it for the money? Yeah. Slavery stops happening when it becomes more cost-effective to pay the workers directly, than to pay guards to coerce them.
The main use of slave labor is agriculture, because it’s easy to have a large group within a single overseer’s line of sight, and output is easy to measure. Child labor has historically succeeded there because of the low skill requirement, and because an individual child’s lower productivity was matched by lower housing and food costs. If a child costs more to acquire than an adult—specifically if that difference in up-front costs outweighs the net present value of that slim productivity-per-upkeep-cost advantage—anyone who keeps using children for unpaid ag labor will simply be driven out of the market by competitors willing to do the math.
The app people worry about is sex. Police and prosecuting attorneys (in the US, at least) are already willing to resort to extremely dubious tactics to score a pedophile conviction; this would give them a legitimate audit trail to follow. Someone seeking to purchase a child for such purposes would not dare attract so much official attention… unless they were suicidally stupid, which is the sort of problem that solves itself.
Hell no, it does not; only the label might change. If the only employers are would-be slavers with no financial, public or moral pressure to look to their workers’ welfare, then wage slavery is little better than traditional slavery—in fact it’s often worse because a capitalist employer, unlike a slaver, has zero investment in a slave, drawing from a huge pool of unskilled manpower with no acquisition cost. You don’t need any guards if a person has no choice but work for you, work for another employer like you or starve!
Picture related.
I said “slavery stops,” not “quality of life improves.” Getting employers to compete in a way that benefits workers is a different problem, and obtaining for the workers the freedom to choose to starve (rather than, say, being executed as an example to others) is only the first step.
Quality of life for workers is also a very different problem from quality of life for open-market-adopted children, which was the original topic.
Link broken.
Better now?
no, still broken.
Changed the URL.
It works for me.
Ah the rapid response prevented me from deleting my post (I wanted to do so because the points have been raised elsewhere and I didn’t want to bloat the debate, not because I didn’t think the post was relevant).
(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.
Ah, I was wondering how the welcome thread got to more than 500 comments so quickly!
In other posts in this thread I’ve discussed infanticide, and proposed ways to reduce parental grief in cultures that would adopt it (I didn’t say it should be adopted btw). But only now did I remember that the practice of infanticide where others preform the killing (something I proposed down thread as an implementation that would reduce psychological stress) reminded me of the practice of killing “mingi” (cursed) children in Ethiopia. Many of the individuals exposed to outside culture would prefer to adopt it or at least find ways to not kill the children while still severing them from the parents.
While obviously CNN as always has a progressive-Eurocentric-mind-projection-fallacy spin in its reporting and the tribes in question may be just adopting preferences of higher status tribes and groups rather than because not practising it seems so much better than practising it. I do think this is weak evidence that people prefer to live in societies that don’t practice infanticide. Also reading some of the accounts has caused me (rightfully or not) to increase the estimated psychological suffering of parents. But consider that this wasn’t a choice in most cases, it isn’t that large either. I shouldn’t be surprised, humans are built to live in a world where life is cheap after all.
I have no doubt that the practice of mingi historically did indeed help the tribe, taken as a whole traditions do tend to be adaptive in the environment in which they where established, but now that their (social) envrionment has changed, the practice seems to be falling out of favour.
Thanks for updating.
Please let me know if I’ve missed a discussion of this point; it seems important, but I haven’t seen it answered.
What is the particular and demonstrable quality of personhood that defines this okay to kill/not okay to kill threshold? In short, what is blicket?
I won’t argue that newborns are people, because I have the same problem defining person that you seem to have. But until I can come up with a cogent reduction distilling person to some quality or combination of qualities that actually exist—some state of a region of the universe—then it seems prudent to err on the side of caution.
Well, one relatively simple question that might help clarify some things: do I remain a person when I’m asleep?
Cool. Would I still be a person while in a coma that I will naturally come out of in five years but not before? (I recognize that no observer could know that this was the case, I’m just asking whether in fact I would be, if it were. Put another way: after I woke up, would we conclude that I’d been a person all along?)
OK, cool… that clarifies matters. Thanks.
What’s your discount rate?
(That is, if I offered you $100 now, or $X a year from now, what is the lowest value of X that would make you choose the latter option?)
I would love to loan you money at 20% interest. Send me a private message if you’re interested.
When playing chess, how many moves ahead do you look?
A man produces about 47 billion sperm a year; a woman releases 13 eggs a year; a couple that tries to become pregnant over the course of a year will have a 75% chance of live birth pregnancy if the female is 30. So each feasible sperm-egg combination over the course of a year has about a trillionth chance of making it to a live birth. *
As soon as conception happens, then you’ve got a zygote which is very likely to make it to live birth. And once it makes it to live birth, it’s very likely to make it to adulthood. So there seems to be a very bright line at conception. (Contraceptives prevent conception; condoms by preventing sperm from entering, the pill by preventing ovulation, and so on.)
(I should note that I think there are sound reasons to treat a risk that will end one out of a trillion people chosen at random as less of a concern than a risk that is certain to end a certain person, and that this line of reasoning depends heavily on this premise, but it would take too long to go into those reasons here. I can in another comment if you’re interested.)
*Noting that ‘potential resulting individual DNAs’ are individually much less likely than just sperm-egg combinations.
From the NIH:
So your bright line should be heartbeat, or at least zygote implantation. This does not significantly affect your conclusions.
The jump from 1e-12 to .5 seems brighter to me than the jump from .5 to .8. (.5 is also historically significant, as only about half of born children would live to see puberty for much of human history.)
What role should the future play in decision-making?
It is not clear to me that prohibiting murder derives from that position or mandates birth.
By quantification of “merely.” If we determine that a particular coma patient has a 90% chance of reawakening and becoming a person again, then it seems almost as bad to end them as it would be to end them once they were awake. If we determine that a particular coma patient has a 5% chance of reawakening and becoming a person again, then it seems not nearly as bad to end them. If we determine that a particular coma patient has a 1e-6 chance of reawakening and becoming a person again, then it seems that ending them has little moral cost.
If infants are nearly guaranteed to become people, then failing to protect them because we are impatient does not strike me as wisdom.