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).
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).