This doesn’t follow. Just because you don’t have data about what counterfactually the baby would have turned into doesn’t mean that the babies are fungible. We don’t in general keep the genetic code of aborted babies or calculate how that would interact with their environment. Just because we can’t easily predict what the distinctions would be doesn’t mean that the babies are all identical.
When you’re considering a decision of exchanging two babies, you’re making it based on what you know to anticipate. If you know nothing relevant, you’re ambivalent between exchanging and not exchanging, which is what “fungible” means.
(The dollar bills are also not identical, and where one bill can buy you a snack, another won’t work by being suspected counterfeit in a manner you didn’t expect. Such considerations don’t make cash non-fungible.)
If you know nothing relevant, you’re ambivalent between exchanging and not exchanging, which is what “fungible” means.
I see where you’re coming from, but I’m not sure that’s a useful use of the concept of “fungible”. The reason why it’s useful to think of dollar bills as fungible is because we can use them to think about more complicated exchanges (i.e. dollars → cow → cow + milk → cow + dollars → …) and figure out a net result by comparing before and after quantities of the highly fungible little notes. Sure, it’s possible that a given dollar might turn out to be counterfeit, but it only takes a little knowledge and a few moments of examination to become very confident about whether or not that’s the case for a given note.
On the other hand, I’d be very reluctant to use babies as a unit of exchange even if I ignored the obvious moral problems: babies are much much harder to compare for equality than dollars.
This doesn’t follow. Just because you don’t have data about what counterfactually the baby would have turned into doesn’t mean that the babies are fungible. We don’t in general keep the genetic code of aborted babies or calculate how that would interact with their environment. Just because we can’t easily predict what the distinctions would be doesn’t mean that the babies are all identical.
When you’re considering a decision of exchanging two babies, you’re making it based on what you know to anticipate. If you know nothing relevant, you’re ambivalent between exchanging and not exchanging, which is what “fungible” means.
(The dollar bills are also not identical, and where one bill can buy you a snack, another won’t work by being suspected counterfeit in a manner you didn’t expect. Such considerations don’t make cash non-fungible.)
I see where you’re coming from, but I’m not sure that’s a useful use of the concept of “fungible”. The reason why it’s useful to think of dollar bills as fungible is because we can use them to think about more complicated exchanges (i.e. dollars → cow → cow + milk → cow + dollars → …) and figure out a net result by comparing before and after quantities of the highly fungible little notes. Sure, it’s possible that a given dollar might turn out to be counterfeit, but it only takes a little knowledge and a few moments of examination to become very confident about whether or not that’s the case for a given note.
On the other hand, I’d be very reluctant to use babies as a unit of exchange even if I ignored the obvious moral problems: babies are much much harder to compare for equality than dollars.