I would like to have some clarification on why you think personhood is what drives the immorality of killing. (At least, that was the impression I got from reading through the earlier thread.) More concretely, I would like to know what you think about the following sorts of consideration:
(1) The argument that what makes killing being X prima facie seriously morally wrong is that being X would have future experiences worth having were it not killed. Interestingly, this tracks in the opposite direction as your replacement calculation: younger beings are more valuable than older beings.
(2) The argument that destruction of any kind is prima facie morally wrong and that the wrongness tracks the complexity of the thing destroyed. One might have the view that the destruction of things like cats, computers, Rembrandt paintings, tables, and so forth requires some justification and that without justification, acts of destruction should be penalized, say by fines or imprisonment. I guess what I want here is some more precision about your “if done for some reason other than sadism” clause: what sorts of reasons, on which side does the law err if there is controversy about the goodness of the reasons, etc.
(3) I know that you are ducking giving an account of what makes something a person, but it would be very helpful if you at least sketch some of your thoughts. You said a few times something along the lines that you couldn’t come up with a definition of person that would make babies people, but that claim is a bit empty until we’ve seen some of your thinking.
I would like to have some clarification on why you think personhood is what drives the immorality of killing. (At least, that was the impression I got from reading through the earlier thread.) More concretely, I would like to know what you think about the following sorts of consideration:
(1) The argument that what makes killing being X prima facie seriously morally wrong is that being X would have future experiences worth having were it not killed. Interestingly, this tracks in the opposite direction as your replacement calculation: younger beings are more valuable than older beings.
(2) The argument that destruction of any kind is prima facie morally wrong and that the wrongness tracks the complexity of the thing destroyed. One might have the view that the destruction of things like cats, computers, Rembrandt paintings, tables, and so forth requires some justification and that without justification, acts of destruction should be penalized, say by fines or imprisonment. I guess what I want here is some more precision about your “if done for some reason other than sadism” clause: what sorts of reasons, on which side does the law err if there is controversy about the goodness of the reasons, etc.
(3) I know that you are ducking giving an account of what makes something a person, but it would be very helpful if you at least sketch some of your thoughts. You said a few times something along the lines that you couldn’t come up with a definition of person that would make babies people, but that claim is a bit empty until we’ve seen some of your thinking.