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.
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.