Alright. I can see the usefulness of deontology in determining if an abortion doctor acted in a way worthy of praise or blame, but I feel as though the issue isn’t whether or not we put abortion doctors in prison, or whether we allow mothers to have abortions. The issue comes down to whether we want to live in a world where every possible potential human is realized, and has the opportunity to exist. Since humans are just a pattern of neurons, this goal isn’t realizable today, since the possible human “JohnWittle who, while writing a comment on a blog, got randomly teleported to the 1800s” doesn’t exist and doesn’t get to live out his experiences, while we might wish that he did. Every aborted human would have lived a whole life full of experiences, and maybe we would prefer to live in the world where that human had gotten to have those experiences.
Would a superintelligence later be able to simulate all of the possible humans we aborted, and all of the possible (good) experiences those humans might have had, along with every human which could have been made by you and I mating, you and King Loius XIV mating, King Loius XIV and some random peasant in feudal Japan mating, and all the potential offspring of all those potential people, algorithmically generating every possible brainstate which we would call ‘good’? Maybe.
In that case, perhaps we are not losing those experiences in an irrecoverable manner. How likely is it to happen this way? Who knows? Is the possibly temporary, possibly permanent loss of those people worth the increase in standard of living for whoever would be affected negatively by being forced to invest in that human? Is having an abortion morally equivalent to simply not conceiving the human in the first place? According to “simplified humanism”, we know that Life is Good, regardless of whether the life in question is 20 or 120 or 1020. Does that also apply to life that doesn’t exist but could? If we want to believe life is good, period, does that mean we should be creating as much life as possible? Is contraception morally equivalent to abortion? Is abstinence morally equivalent to contraception? Should people not willing to work on the immortality problem be spending all of their time conceiving as many humans as is possible? By not doing so, are we behaving suboptimally towards maximizing our values in the world around us?
I think the reason why the abortion debate is interesting is because there are all of these consequentialism issues surrounding it. If you are in favor of a woman’s being able to abort, does that mean you don’t actually value life, or are you banking on a future superintelligence giving those potential humans a better life than they would have had in the present time, or is that just a rationalization so you can say you value life when really you just want to maximize your own or your girlfriend’s quality of life? If you are against a woman’s ability to abort because you value life, are you also against abstinence because you value life? If you value life, does that not mean that you would prefer the presence of life to its absence? Should we be spending our effort on creating more life (through sex, or antiagathics research, or research into shortening pregnancy and/or moving the prenatal stage outside of the woman so she can conceive sooner afterward)?
Even while just looking at the problem through consequentialist eyes, there are still lots of issues to discuss. I had hoped to discuss some of them here, since I personally am a consequentialist who has yet to make up his mind. But if instead we’re arguing about deontological issues, then I’ll look elsewhere.
You are asking extremely basic questions. Try again after you’ve read the post I linked.
Alright. I can see the usefulness of deontology in determining if an abortion doctor acted in a way worthy of praise or blame, but I feel as though the issue isn’t whether or not we put abortion doctors in prison, or whether we allow mothers to have abortions. The issue comes down to whether we want to live in a world where every possible potential human is realized, and has the opportunity to exist. Since humans are just a pattern of neurons, this goal isn’t realizable today, since the possible human “JohnWittle who, while writing a comment on a blog, got randomly teleported to the 1800s” doesn’t exist and doesn’t get to live out his experiences, while we might wish that he did. Every aborted human would have lived a whole life full of experiences, and maybe we would prefer to live in the world where that human had gotten to have those experiences.
Would a superintelligence later be able to simulate all of the possible humans we aborted, and all of the possible (good) experiences those humans might have had, along with every human which could have been made by you and I mating, you and King Loius XIV mating, King Loius XIV and some random peasant in feudal Japan mating, and all the potential offspring of all those potential people, algorithmically generating every possible brainstate which we would call ‘good’? Maybe.
In that case, perhaps we are not losing those experiences in an irrecoverable manner. How likely is it to happen this way? Who knows? Is the possibly temporary, possibly permanent loss of those people worth the increase in standard of living for whoever would be affected negatively by being forced to invest in that human? Is having an abortion morally equivalent to simply not conceiving the human in the first place? According to “simplified humanism”, we know that Life is Good, regardless of whether the life in question is 20 or 120 or 1020. Does that also apply to life that doesn’t exist but could? If we want to believe life is good, period, does that mean we should be creating as much life as possible? Is contraception morally equivalent to abortion? Is abstinence morally equivalent to contraception? Should people not willing to work on the immortality problem be spending all of their time conceiving as many humans as is possible? By not doing so, are we behaving suboptimally towards maximizing our values in the world around us?
I think the reason why the abortion debate is interesting is because there are all of these consequentialism issues surrounding it. If you are in favor of a woman’s being able to abort, does that mean you don’t actually value life, or are you banking on a future superintelligence giving those potential humans a better life than they would have had in the present time, or is that just a rationalization so you can say you value life when really you just want to maximize your own or your girlfriend’s quality of life? If you are against a woman’s ability to abort because you value life, are you also against abstinence because you value life? If you value life, does that not mean that you would prefer the presence of life to its absence? Should we be spending our effort on creating more life (through sex, or antiagathics research, or research into shortening pregnancy and/or moving the prenatal stage outside of the woman so she can conceive sooner afterward)?
Even while just looking at the problem through consequentialist eyes, there are still lots of issues to discuss. I had hoped to discuss some of them here, since I personally am a consequentialist who has yet to make up his mind. But if instead we’re arguing about deontological issues, then I’ll look elsewhere.