Actually, I remember hearing someone mention that in general LWers are more okay with Infanticide (or post-birth abortion if you prefer) than the average population. The reasoning, I assume, being that their self-awareness is more similar to animals than to a human adult and that you aren’t really destroying a full human consciousness. I don’t remember where it was posted, but i do remember it sounding like someone was summarizing LW survey results.
Basically, what I’m saying is that I wasn’t sure either given the phrasing, since I’ve heard this kind of thing discussed before on LW.
Yeah, the infanticide thing is a classic Peter Singer bit which I imagine a lot of people on Less Wrong have heard and considered before. I think the standard counterargument is that we need a good Schelling fence for when it’s okay to kill people—pro-life folks would argue that it should be at conception or something, pro-choice folks would say it should be at birth, but so far nobody’s come up with any reasonable one that comes after that. So infanticide should be disallowed for societal reasons, even if we allow that it might be acceptable in various hypothetical scenarios.
pro-life folks would argue that it should be at conception or something, pro-choice folks would say it should be at birth, but so far nobody’s come up with any reasonable one that comes after that
That’s very much a description of the US landscape of memes. In the EU the situation is different as our abortions laws are made by elected parliaments.
In most EU states an abortion at 7 months (or 28 weeks) is illegal in the US it’s legal. I haven’t meet anyone in Germany who argued that Germany should allow abortion in more cases and have birth as the schelling fence.
Actually, I remember hearing someone mention that in general LWers are more okay with Infanticide (or post-birth abortion if you prefer) than the average population. The reasoning, I assume, being that their self-awareness is more similar to animals than to a human adult and that you aren’t really destroying a full human consciousness. I don’t remember where it was posted, but i do remember it sounding like someone was summarizing LW survey results.
Basically, what I’m saying is that I wasn’t sure either given the phrasing, since I’ve heard this kind of thing discussed before on LW.
Yeah, the infanticide thing is a classic Peter Singer bit which I imagine a lot of people on Less Wrong have heard and considered before. I think the standard counterargument is that we need a good Schelling fence for when it’s okay to kill people—pro-life folks would argue that it should be at conception or something, pro-choice folks would say it should be at birth, but so far nobody’s come up with any reasonable one that comes after that. So infanticide should be disallowed for societal reasons, even if we allow that it might be acceptable in various hypothetical scenarios.
That’s very much a description of the US landscape of memes. In the EU the situation is different as our abortions laws are made by elected parliaments.
In most EU states an abortion at 7 months (or 28 weeks) is illegal in the US it’s legal. I haven’t meet anyone in Germany who argued that Germany should allow abortion in more cases and have birth as the schelling fence.