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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25582 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026

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By that logic, why not go full Murray Rothbard, and declare children to be the parents' property?

I'm on board. IMO it's simpler, more straightforward and practical and philosophically consistent than any of the competing theories.

Because some of us think that fetuses are qualitatively different from children. Children meet my definition of sentient human beings, but fetuses don't.

This is obviously not science though I guess without clear science picking 9 months post conception as sentient sort of works. But there is no science that makes outside of mother as suddenly sentient being. Somewhat similar to how we have different ages for adulthood but they’re basically made up.

The religious people have the better science argument of just declaring we don’t know when it’s sentient so let’s do none of this.

I don't actually think 9 months post conception is particularly human (the "human" part of "sentient human" is doing more work for me) either; it's just a convenient cutoff point since before it it for sure isn't and afterwards the cutoff is different for every instance.

Ya your human/fetus distinction is just is no longer in mother. But that can be manipulated. Kill a baby 2 days outside of mom and get life so legally it’s mattered.

The problem with sentient is it’s just as easy to say it’s ok to kill a 1 year old. But it’s a practical workable legal line since we don’t have technology that says this is now alive.

You don't meet the definition either when you're unconcious.

Since you apparently presume to know my definition, can you state it in your own words?

Sorry, was reading too fast and parsed "my" as "the". Feel free to explain to me why you think you're sentient when you're unconcious.

As I said in a different subthread, for me "human" is more load-bearing than "sentient" here, so I don't particularly like abbreviating to the latter, but sure.

In short, I take humans' moral value to lie in the unique configuration that their hardware compresses the totality of their human life experience into - more poetically, their "memories and personality", and more mechanistically, in ML terms, the "weights" as opposed to the "architecture".

Slightly related to the common computationalist saying that compression is intelligence: many years worth of human qualia is a large pile of mildly interesting data, but that information lossily squeezed into ~1kg of meat in a way that enables the meat to act in interesting ways and reprocess/reproduce parts of that data is a marvel.

I believe that the answer given to that problem in past discussions on this website⁎ is: a previously-conscious child has a future expectation of consciousness (barring an unrecoverable coma), while a never-previously-conscious fetus has no such future expectation.

⁎Which I failed to find in a few minutes of searching, so I unfortunately am forced to write this comment instead of just giving a terse "previous discussion" link.

a previously-conscious child has a future expectation of consciousness (barring an unrecoverable coma), while a never-previously-conscious fetus has no such future expectation.

But we very much do expect fetuses to become conscious? Or is the idea that previously-conscious people are the ones expecting to become conscious prior to the events leading to their unconsciousness? If so, how can the unrecoverable coma exception work? I don't think anyone actually expects their coma to be unrecoverable.

You mean full Rome?

Article

tl;dr: A child is a person in possession of the right of self-ownership but not yet competent to exercise that right, so it is placed under the pseudo-ownership/trusteeship of its parents. (The parents are not allowed to harm the child through action, but are allowed to let it come to harm through inaction, and are allowed to sell the trusteeship to others.) The child can assert its right of self-ownership and end the trusteeship once it is competent to do so (e. g., by leaving the parents' household).

Sure, also.

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