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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   32488 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023

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More crime in the UK: The case against nurse Lucy Letby, charged with 8 murders and another 10 attempts of murder is nearing the end. Lucy Letby was a NICU nurse in Countess of Chester hospital at a time where there was a dramatic increase in mortality of new born infants. She was first arrested i 2018 after 1 year of investigations, and then again in 2019 and 2020 when she was was finally charged.

I have followed the court case which has lasted for 8 months somewhat sporadically, and I think the prosecution has made a strong case. The motive seems to be the thrill and excitement of being in the middle of life and death situations, and even to get the attention of a married doctor she fancied (and might have slept with!) Interestingly, the defense had no expert testimony. Their only witness, except Letby, was a plumper who testified that the ward had a sewage leak coinciding with some of the incidents. What has kept me coming back to this case, is how incredibly plain and even boring, Letby appears outside of these charges. No history of violence or aggression, no weird sexual fetishes, no drug use. They have gone through every last text message and email and not found anything offensive, bar discussing her job and the doctor. She had a normal upringing and good relations with her family. I think its very likely she would never have been a murderer if she didnt have access to vulnerable babies as a nurse, which makes it even more of a headf**k, because the crimes she is charged with are against babies! Its absolutely heinous, and my heart breaks for the helpless parents who had no choice but to trust her with the lives of their newborns. She targeted twins and triplets, and one set of parents lost 2 boys.

So where is the culture war angle? I guess the lack of attention and interest that this case has got is baffling to me. Neither BBC nor The Guardian nor Sky news have had it on their frontpage as far as ive seen this week. BBC has confined the whole story to a regional site for Merseyside: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-65920366

Apparently a nurse potentially being one of the most prolific female serial killers in history, is not all that exciting in todays newsworld. I guess everyone can have their own biases for why this is happening. Is it the "women are wonderful effect", where a female killer is just so bizarre that it does not warrant any closer scrutiny? Would there be some articles about toxic masculinity if it was a male nurse who killed babies to impress a female doctor? Are people just less upset because she is a conventionally beautiful young woman with blond hair and blue eyes? Some redditors seem to think so, as the first doctor to suspect her was Ravi Jayaram, an Indian male. But I dont buy this either. If her looks where protecting her people would be rallying to her defense, which does not seem to be happening either. The case is mostly ignored.

Is the case just too boring?

I mean, honestly, killing lots of babies in NICU is obviously a gruesome crime, but it’s justified by the exact same arguments that would be used to justify late term abortions. Is it just that the BBC, being good progressives, are squeamish about being conspicuously upset about murdering babies in a NICU?

That would be my go to assumption if this was a story in the US not being covered, but I admit that importing US culture war angles to Britain is a possible failure mode.

Hell, people treat Peter Singer as a perfectly legitimate, welcome-in-polite-society utilitarian and here's what he thinks about infanticide:

I did write that, in the 1979 edition of Practical Ethics. Today the term “defective infant” is considered offensive, and I no longer use it, but it was standard usage then. The quote is misleading if read without an understanding of what I mean by the term “person” (which is discussed in Practical Ethics). I use the term "person" to refer to a being who is capable of anticipating the future, of having wants and desires for the future. As I have said in answer to the previous question, I think that it is generally a greater wrong to kill such a being than it is to kill a being that has no sense of existing over time. Newborn human babies have no sense of their own existence over time. So killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living. That doesn’t mean that it is not almost always a terrible thing to do. It is, but that is because most infants are loved and cherished by their parents, and to kill an infant is usually to do a great wrong to her or his parents.

Murdering babies - mostly bad because it's upsetting for the parents. From this perspective, the only real problem was that she wasn't getting her joy from murdering sick orphans. In fact, if her level of satisfaction was high enough, if enough utils could be produced from the murder of sick orphans, she'd really be doing quite the disservice by not strangling them in the crib.

being that has no sense of existing over time.

Does he explain anywhere how he arrives at this criterion?

I use the term "person" to refer to a being who is capable of anticipating the future, of having wants and desires for the future. As I have said in answer to the previous question, I think that it is generally a greater wrong to kill such a being than it is to kill a being that has no sense of existing over time. Newborn human babies have no sense of their own existence over time. So killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living.

I respect the infanticide-justifying position because it takes the reasoning of abortionists seriously. A fetus is a clump of cells. Rephrased, it lacks a thinking mind, and therefore it is morally irrelevant. So if a newborn baby lacks a thinking mind, it should also be morally irrelevant, or at least morally inferior to organisms of greater mental complexity like, say, pigs and rats. Why reject this? The difference is that humans have an instinctual disgust mechanism against blendering a cute little baby that they don't for livestock or vermin or 0.7in tall fetuses which can't be seen without advanced technology. Unless we want to talk about the potential of the baby, in which case, yeah, the anti-abortionists agree entirely. Maybe backport that insight by a few months.

Most of the pro-choice crowd, it seems to me, reason backward from the perceived social necessity of not mothering a child at an inopportune time. This is exactly what Heian-era Japanese mothers drowning their newborns in midwinter thought. Abortioners do not apply the reasoning fully, just to the specific area they psychologically require to excuse themselves in. Singer is taking the logic all the way.

To be fair, abortionists are maybe just smart enough to know that it'd be bad play. And at the end of the day, the way to deceive someone is doublethink- just avoid noticing the contradiction. Humans are very good at this. The unusual behavior from a human would be requiring consistency based on the actual cognitive features of the embryo or baby. "I don't see how that helps me win this conflict."

I was somewhat aware of this position of Singer, but still horrified when reading this position out loud.

I use the term "person" to refer to a being who is capable of anticipating the future, of having wants and desires for the future. As I have said in answer to the previous question, I think that it is generally a greater wrong to kill such a being than it is to kill a being that has no sense of existing over time. Newborn human babies have no sense of their own existence over time. So killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living.

There has to be more to this definition; I can think of plenty of easy knockdown arguments off the top of my head.

Moreover, although no newborn baby has a sense of the future, and therefore no newborn baby is a person

Apparently not.

Do people lose their moral value when they fall asleep, fall into comas, or simply get so high they lose all conception of time? Obviously not, so this definition is simply wrong.

Singer's response:

When a human being once had a sense of the future, but has now lost it, we should be guided by what he or she would have wanted to happen in these circumstances. So if someone would not have wanted to be kept alive after losing their awareness of their future, we may be justified in ending their life; but if they would not have wanted to be killed under these circumstances, that is an important reason why we should not do so.

Seems totally insufficient. Why should we care about the past desires of an entity which is no longer a person? I'm all for respecting people's wishes after their deaths but that's just personal sentiment; morally their wishes are completely worthless. I certainly wouldn't donate $100 of flowers to an unknown grave upon hearing it was the deceased's dying wish, let alone spend tens of thousands on food, lodging, healthcare, etc. when the person who asked for that treatment no longer inhabits the body.

What a cruel, sterile, and worst of all shortsighed and inaccurate set of beliefs. "I would kill this sleeping 10 year old body for his organs but for the fact that the person which previously inhabited it had other wishes. It's too bad those wishes are inexplicably so important to me when none of his other wishes rate any consideration at all. I'm such a moral and intelligent person."

I certainly wouldn't donate $100 of flowers to an unknown grave upon hearing it was the deceased's dying wish, let alone spend tens of thousands on food, lodging, healthcare, etc. when the person who asked for that treatment no longer inhabits the body.

Most people who are not weird Internet guys think action and inaction are different. Refusing to donate flowers is inaction; harvesting organs is action.

I think so as well, but the wishes of the dead just don't matter that much to me. Personally I'm OK with us not forcefully harvesting the dead's organs for mostly unrelated reasons (slippery slope, potential conflicts of interest, etc.) but wouldn't object all that much if we pivoted on that.

If the only reason you're not killing sleeping people is due to their previous wishes, that's startlingly weak. It strikes me as an unprincipled and poorly-reasoned attempt to declare murder bad now that you've argued against the real reason it's bad. "No it's not murder to kill sleeping people, but acktually we still shouldn't do it because it wouldn't be respecting their wishes. No we shouldn't respect their wishes on virtually anything else. No I'm not being inconsistent."

I suggest that there is a sliding scale of how close a currently nonthinking being is to a thinking one. If it takes a short time to start thinking, if it takes few or no resources to get it to start thinking, if it has continuity with a previous thinking entity, if the brain information that affects how it thinks is already present, that's low on the scale. Sleeping people are low on this scale. Fetuses and random lumps of matter are high on the scale.

When you point out that a sleeping person is not thinking, just like a fetus, you are saying "the sleeping person and the fetus are both somewhere above zero on the scale". But the fetus is much farther along, even if both are nonzero; the quantitative difference is enough to matter.

I suggest that there is a sliding scale of how close a currently nonthinking being is to a thinking one. If it takes a short time to start thinking, if it takes few or no resources to get it to start thinking, if it has continuity with a previous thinking entity, if the brain information that affects how it thinks is already present, that's low on the scale. Sleeping people are low on this scale. Fetuses and random lumps of matter are high on the scale.

I think we generally have a moral intuition that people are worth more than potential people. Your paragraph seems to be a more complex way to communicate this moral intuition which loses some value in the process.

If it takes a short time to start thinking

I think someone who will be in a coma for 10^10,000 years has the same amount of personhood as someone who will be in a coma for 10 seconds, barring external factors.

if it takes few or no resources to get it to start thinking

I think someone who requires 10^10,000 dollars for their life to be saved has the same amount of personhood as someone whose life will be saved for free. The same applies if they have not yet lived--I think a lump of mud has the same amount of personhood regardless of how much it will cost to turn it into a person.

if it has continuity with a previous thinking entity

This one I agree with (to an extent).

if the brain information that affects how it thinks is already present

This doesn't make much sense to me really, I don't see why it matters morally whether a given being's brain is present yet. I just wrap this into "resources necessary to turn this entity into a person" but perhaps I'm wrong here.

So yeah I think a better version of your argument is just that people are worth more than potential people, and beings which have previously been people and will be again are worth more than beings which have never been people. If you disagree, I'd love to hear about under what circumstances the proposed "sliding scale" model outperforms the "people vs. potential people" model for appealing to our moral intuitions.

When you point out that a sleeping person is not thinking, just like a fetus, you are saying "the sleeping person and the fetus are both somewhere above zero on the scale". But the fetus is much farther along, even if both are nonzero; the quantitative difference is enough to matter.

I'm mostly just trying to build an intuition pump without the thought experiments getting too complex. I think the intuition pump does hold up to this angle of attack. A sufficiently anomalous sleeping person (someone in a very expensive and long-term coma, perhaps) will be much farther along than the fetus, but I'd argue would still retain personhood.

Your paragraph seems to be a more complex way to communicate this moral intuition which loses some value in the process.

Just saying that people are worth more is subject to objections like "the sleeper is not conscious at the moment, so why does the sleeper even count as a person, rather than a potential person?"

I think someone who will be in a coma for 10^10,000 years has the same amount of personhood as someone who will be in a coma for 10 seconds, barring external factors.

If time doesn't matter, then destroying a lifeless planet is murder, because the planet could evolve sentient creatures in a few billion years.

I think someone who requires 10^10,000 dollars for their life to be saved has the same amount of personhood as someone whose life will be saved for free.

I wasn't thinking in terms of cash, but more in terms of where the complexity comes from. When you go from a fetus to a thinking person, the details of the mind are formed by the things that happen to the fetus afterwards, same as with the lump of matter. The previous state of the fetus or lump is essentially blank. This does not apply to the sleeping person.

Fetuses take only time and the mother’s standard care for herself, with relatively minor differences. If the process is uninterrupted, the child has a good chance of surviving gestation and birth. This is far, far lower on that scale than random lumps of unprogrammed matter, or even piles of formerly living biowaste with identical proportions of elements and tissues, such as corpses.

EDIT: Ninja’d by your edit, where you added the second paragraph.

Bryan Caplan, at least, has speculated that Peter Singer might lie at times for utilitarian reasons. I'm not sure whether that's the case in reality, but I suppose keep that in mind as you hear Singer saying implausible things that make what he's saying sound less distasteful.

(to be clear, I'm not trying to imply that his views are morally bad or distasteful, though I would probably do that with some of his views, the relevant part to this is whether it sounds so)

That's really wild. I'm not inclined to be more charitable as a result--if he's lying to make his position more palatable, and fails to do so, then that's on him.

Also, pretty crazy that he endorses the "murder" side of the forced organ donation hypothetical.

To be clear, I'm not saying that he does endorse that (assuming you're sourcing that from me, not some other source I don't know about). I'm saying that it's possible that he does so.

At the end of the article you linked, Caplan quotes Singer endorsing the "forced organ harvesting" side of the hypothetical.

Ah, this is why I should reread articles instead of just vaguely remembering something and finding the source.

It's too bad those wishes are inexplicably so important to me when none of his other wishes rate any consideration at all. I'm such a moral and intelligent person."

...and when people accuse me of invoking an uncharitable strawman when I claim that utilitarianism is fundamentally stupid, evil, and incompatible with human flourishing, I cite Peter Singer and David Benatar.

While I'm not a utilitarian (I was credibly convinced that I was misunderstanding the position, I'm just a humble consequentialist with my own bespoke utility function), I completely agree with Singer here.

Babies are not sapient, not for months after birth. The majority of the harm in killing them is the waste of time, effort and grief on the part of the parents. When it's the parents doing the killing, it's morally neutral as far as I'm concerned, or outright laudable if the child has debilitating conditions that are incompatible with a normal life.

Since you are a consequentialist, shouldn't you weigh in how much the good under whatever utility function you have would be in each case? So if their life was going to be better (under your utility function) than the harm to whoever wanted them never to become sapient, you should disallow killing them?

My utility function has very high weighting on the rights of people not to be forced to raise children they don't want to, which as far as I can tell grossly overrides that.

Of course that's entirely contingent on circumstances, if the human race was near the brink, such that abortion or foeticide had a much larger impact on outcomes, then I would strongly disapprove of that, but with 8 billion people swimming about, individual babies are worth very little in my eyes.

Of course, I have libertarian sympathies, so if people do things I disapprove of but my principles suggest are simply not my business, then in most circumstances I swallow my affront and live and let kill. That's priced in.

My utility function has very high weighting on the rights of people not to be forced to raise children they don't want to

Do you live somewhere where they would be forced to raise those kids? Basically everywhere I know of allows for consequence-free abandonment of children at hospitals etc. "Don't force people to raise kids" sounds very noble, but really the objection is "Don't force people to experience the trauma of knowing that someone else is raising their children. Allow them to kill the children instead."

I'm not quite sure what the child abandonment process in India is like, but even with the availability of orphanages and no questions asked surrenders, I still advocate for the right of the parents to perform infanticide. It's their choice which one they avail, and as I've said before, I don't consider that any of my business. If they want to hand the child over, good for them, but they're still inflicting negative externalities on the rest of us in the process since the government has to raise the kids (or adopt them out, which is not a given).

By all means, I'm not going around killing kids, or suggesting anyone do so to their, but if they did, I'd just cock an eyebrow and continue about my day.

The original question was:

if their life was going to be better (under your utility function) than the harm to whoever wanted them never to become sapient, you should disallow killing them?

Your response invoked the rights of the parents to not be slaves to their children, and it seems that now we're on the same page that actually those rights aren't really being violated. So which of the following is your actual position?

  1. These children's lives are not worth living.

  2. These children's lives are worth living, but not enough worth living to justify the additional negative externalities.

More comments

Babies are not sapient, not for months after birth.

Neither is the average grad student, or Indian call center employee, they just mindlessly regurgitate whatever is fed to them by their professors/supervisors.

Like, @Meriadoc says, if your definition of personhood has no concept of past or future it is worthless.

Neither is the average grad student, or Indian call center employee, they just mindlessly regurgitate whatever is fed to them by their professors/supervisors.

Yes, but this is an argument for morally valuing useless demographics less, not for morally valuing babies more.

Except that babies are very obviously not "a useless demographic" for the reason already stated.

Ergo we should be assigning more value to babies than we due to grad students rather than less.

Babies are not sapient, not for months after birth.

Neither are we, for hours after we fall asleep, or months/years after we fall into comas. If your definition of personhood has no concept of past or future then it's worthless.

A bit of a difference between "mind that has been paused and will resume in X hours" and "no mind at all".

There are many components of personhood and "capacity for sapience" is just one of them. I'm not fully convinced that resuming a mind is actually any different than creating a new one, though. Say we could resurrect people--resurrected minds would be minds that ceased to exist for some period of time, and then were created anew. I don't think resurrection would be meaningfully different from creating a new mind with fake memories of a previous life, and I think resurrection would be a moral obligation.

The underrated Arnold Schwarzenegger film Sixth Day takes the moral position that clones with copied memories are their own people, whether their original still lives or not.

By contrast, the Star Trek transporter moves someone’s consciousness-in-brain instead of just copying it. The transporter in The Prestige you really should see the film before spoiling or discussing it here, but if you have, you can probably figure out why I referenced it in the Star Trek section.

As a Christian, I follow the teaching of my Rabbi upon seeing the dead girl, before resurrecting her: "Do not weep; for she is not dead, but sleeps." I am an odd duck on theology; I do not believe the mind can exist without a brain (mind-machine, not mind-container). Thus I expect upon death to have my mind moved into an upgraded, backwards-compatible, spirit-stuff mind-machine, a flawless brain in a body made of something more substantial than Fermionic matter.

I am an odd duck on theology; I do not believe the mind can exist without a brain (mind-machine, not mind-container). Thus I expect upon death to have my mind moved into an upgraded, backwards-compatible, spirit-stuff mind-machine, a flawless brain in a body made of something more substantial than Fermionic matter.

Ha, something like this is pretty typical doctrine among knowledgeable members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. The exact nature of our souls etc. is extremely unimportant relative to moral teachings, so it's not the sort of thing that's spread around much, but we believe that spirits are made of spiritual matter, i.e. matter we aren't currently able to perceive.

I'll go a step further and agree with you entirely on that.

More comments

It looks like your stance on afterlife is similar to my conception of it. Since the self cannot perceive nonexistence and is defined by perceiving, it must continue to exist.

More comments

That argument proves too much, any random pile of biomatter has a chance to be sapient over a long enough time frame.

That argument proves too much

No it doesn't. I claimed that personhood should take past and future into account, not that we should consider things to be people if they are ever or will ever be sapient. Still, though, I think your misrepresentation of my argument is closer to the truth than the original argument was. Though both situations would be terrible, I'd much rather live in a world where we honor and respect biomass as people than one where we kill sleeping people without compunction.

My moral calculus is different in that I care about future potential. Babies have their whole life ahead and murdering them snuffs out so much potential possibilities. Children are literally the future!

That is why I fundamentally disagree with Singer and find it a great tragedy that western countries locked down young children, despite them not vulnerable to Covid, and who then missed school years and crucial socializing with friends and forced them masking up, just to protect 80+ year old geezers.

Another aspect is that infants are helpless and innocent. Because of that I have much higher empathy and instincts to protect them instead of an adult who can fend for himself. Not-yet-sapiency is in that respect a bonus.

Thinking about Covid more I would even go further: The lockdown and other measures lowered birth rates. Even this (only virtual) loss of life I value much higher than the protection of senior citizens. Maybe my main objection to Singer ethics is that they are individualistic and are not strengthening, but weakening the tribe.

My moral calculus is different in that I care about future potential. Babies have their whole life ahead and murdering them snuffs out so much potential possibilities. Children are literally the future!

This argument seems to prove too much. The very same can be said for a random spermatozoan swimming about in my balls, would you raise concerns about anyone jacking off or send 99.99% of teenage males to the Hague?

Or a random lump of biomass, it might one day be incorporated into a sapient entity, so does it deserve rights?

What makes babies special in this regard, barring cuteness? I don't advocate killing 2 or 3 year olds, they're clearly sapient to the degree they deserve some rights IMO, if not to vote or drive.

That is why I fundamentally disagree with Singer and find it a great tragedy that western countries locked down young children, despite them not vulnerable to Covid, and who then missed school years and crucial socializing with friends and forced them masking up, just to protect 80+ year old geezers.

No disagreement there, the whole thing was a travesty and lockdowns ought to have been lifted for kids as soon as we knew the virus wasn't dangerous to them.

Another aspect is that infants are helpless and innocent. Because of that I have much higher empathy and instincts to protect them instead of an adult who can fend for himself. Not-yet-sapiency is in that respect a bonus.

A lot of things are helpless and innocent, but that doesn't mean that we ought to necessarily care for them! On the contrary, I think age and experience increase moral worth more, such that the death of an adult is a much greater tragedy than the death of a child, even though the latter can be said to be less fair in most regards. Adults have much greater economic and social potential, and represent decades and thousands of dollars of investment that can't be recouped, while babies are 9ish months and mom taking maternity leave in comparison.

We're not running out of humans, and with the Singularity in sniffing distance, infanticide makes no real difference to longterm outcomes as far as I can tell.

You've failed to address the obvious objection in this thread--why should sleeping people be considered people, besides due to their potential to be sapient? We can reductio ad absurdum each other to death, but if you expect people to take your arguments seriously then you should seriously engage with ours. Sleeping people are not any more sapient than babies are, and your original claim was that it is moral to kill non-sapient beings provided it doesn't harm a sapient being.

That said, I'll take your points seriously and trust that you're not just trying to distract from the obvious issues with your original argument.

This argument seems to prove too much. The very same can be said for a random spermatozoan swimming about in my balls, would you raise concerns about anyone jacking off or send 99.99% of teenage males to the Hague?

Or a random lump of biomass, it might one day be incorporated into a sapient entity, so does it deserve rights?

What makes babies special in this regard, barring cuteness? I don't advocate killing 2 or 3 year olds, they're clearly sapient to the degree they deserve some rights IMO, if not to vote or drive.

There is a huge difference between an entity which will soon be a person, barring interference, and one which will not be a person barring interference. If you leave a sleeping person alone they will soon become sapient, while if you leave a lump of biomass alone it will stay a lump of biomass forever. Fetuses fall more into the former category than the latter, and so are definitely people.

That's not to say the latter category are never people. Babies seem to fall more into the latter category, as do other entities like people in comas or people unconscious because they are drowning. So let me give you a hypothetical: let's say you were just hit by a car, and are now standing dazed in the middle of the road as another car barrels towards you. Why should anybody save you? What makes you a person in this instance besides your future potential to regain awareness?

In general you simply cannot freeze time and then decide what people are. People exist across time. No brain is sapient during a single instant--it is impossible to retain self awareness or process a self-aware thought while time is frozen. So I'd argue that often, potential for sapience is actually more important than actual sapience. I value your life in that hypothetical much more than I'd value the life of a healthy sapient person with one remaining day to live.

What's the alternative? What's your justification for giving sapient people rights anyways? If you believe people should have rights for utilitarian reasons, then surely many fetuses should have rights too, and even those lumps of biomass should be given rights if they will enable happy people to come into existence.

Adults have much greater economic and social potential

No, children have much greater economic and social potential, and babies still more. I get that you were talking more short-term, as in, "what could an adult accomplish tomorrow vs. a baby" but we're literally talking about potential so I don't see why we should restrict the discussion to that timeframe.

and represent decades and thousands of dollars of investment that can't be recouped, while babies are 9ish months and mom taking maternity leave in comparison.

Maternity windows are relatively short, and children born to younger parents are genetically much better off than those born to older parents. So even if we're just talking about loss to potential etc., either we're talking about a mother losing a potential child (i.e. having 1 child instead of 2) or having her second child later than she would otherwise. The latter leads to worse outcomes for everyone due to genetic issues.

We're not running out of humans, and with the Singularity in sniffing distance, infanticide makes no real difference to longterm outcomes as far as I can tell.

Same with geriatricide, or just straight-up murder. If you know a healthy person will die tomorrow is it moral to kill them today? The proximity of the Singularity seems irrelevant.

It doesn't take a very inelegant patch to say that there's a qualitative difference between something that was sapient and will likely become so if either left alone or given minimal care, versus something that is not, never was, but may become sapient if a large amount of time and resources were to be poured into it.

If you leave a sleeping person alone they will soon become sapient, while if you leave a lump of biomass alone it will stay a lump of biomass forever. Fetuses fall more into the former category than the latter, and so are definitely people.

A baby has obviously less need for cultivation than a random pile of biomass to become sapient, yet it still needs a great deal more to attain its potential. A sleeping person doesn't. If I had to draw a line where in practice, it's clear to me where I'm putting it, several years after birth.

I draw a distinction between denying rights to something that never had any, versus respecting the rights of someone who is only temporarily and unavoidably unconscious, and will likely resume consciousness soon.

let me give you a hypothetical: let's say you were just hit by a car, and are now standing dazed in the middle of the road as another car barrels towards you. Why should anybody save you? What makes you a person in this instance besides your future potential to regain awareness?

I think the fact that I recently was a conscious intelligent entity with rights suffices, and will be again given a small intervention.

No, children have much greater economic and social potential, and babies still more. I get that you were talking more short-term, as in, "what could an adult accomplish tomorrow vs. a baby" but we're literally talking about potential so I don't see why we should restrict the discussion to that timeframe.

I'm sure you're familiar with the idea of temporal discounting, all else being equal, saving a grown adult versus a newborn will incur far lower opportunity costs, and $1000 now is better than $10,000 50 years later in most contexts. If I was confronted with a drowning baby versus an adult, I'd save the adult because they represent a great deal of investment and are already productive.

Maternity windows are relatively short, and children born to younger parents are genetically much better off than those born to older parents. So even if we're just talking about loss to potential etc., either we're talking about a mother losing a potential child (i.e. having 1 child instead of 2) or having her second child later than she would otherwise. The latter leads to worse outcomes for everyone due to genetic issues.

I can't disagree, and you won't find me arguing that my views don't have drawbacks and tradeoffs. Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided, but in this case if it's the parent's doing the deed, I see no principled reason for society to intervene unless we're also rounding up mother's who smoke crack or treat themselves to red wine while pregnant. I still don't see it as major enough to override personal autonomy in such matters, unless society bites the bullet and also punishes the idiots engaging in such obviously dysgenic activities.

Same with geriatricide, or just straight-up murder.

You're mixing up my personal ethics with what I'm ok with for society at large. If someone is so geriatric and debilitated that they're at the level of cognitive function of a baby, then by all means I support euthanasia for them! If I was the dependent of someone who had to care for me in that state, I'd be fine with their decision. I don't condone murder of the modal person for what I hope are obvious reasons.

If you know a healthy person will die tomorrow is it moral to kill them today?

Killing them would be a net negative in my eyes, but also OOMs less bad a crime than killing someone who had their whole lives ahead of them. Before you gotcha me, this period is being counted after they gained sapience and thus rights, not before. I don't recommend that judicial systems weight that too much because of perverse incentives, but that's not the same as it not being true!

The proximity of the Singularity seems irrelevant.

Imagine that, as a doctor, I'm counseling a person with a terminal illness and terrible QOL in two different scenarios:

In one, medical science has stalled, and I can credibly claim that no treatment or cure will ever be found for the condition they're facing, they're doomed to having their remaining life be worse than death with no recourse. In that case, I'd earnestly suggest they opt for euthanasia instead of suffering till the end.

In the other scenario, I've received word that very promising clinical trials are underway, and that there's a greater than even chance that a cure is forthcoming before the patient expects to die. If they can stomach the pain of some period, they have a long and healthy life ahead of them. Why on earth would I encourage them to euthanize themselves? I'd tell them to grit their teeth and pull through, but only because of a credible hope, not because I fetishize extending a life of suffering.

Similarly, I genuinely believe that in the next 10 years we either solve nearly all of our technological and societal problems, or die in the process, with only small odds of a business-as-usual outcome.

The death of an 80 year old man in the 1950s is far less tragic than the death of one in 2028, when it's plausible that we have working senolytic drugs or other therapies.

It doesn't take a very inelegant patch to say that there's a qualitative difference between something that was sapient and will likely become so if either left alone or given minimal care, versus something that is not, never was, but may become sapient if a large amount of time and resources were to be poured into it.

This addresses my arguments pretty well, but I think you're contorting things by starting with the central definition of a person as a being who is sapient.

Sleeping people are still people, so a person should be "a being who is or recently was sapient."

OK, but dead people are no longer people, so a person should be "a being who is or recently was sapient and will be in the future."

OK, but people in comas are still people, even if the comas last a long time. So a person should be "a being who was ever previously sapient and will be in the future."

People in comas may not wake up, but they're still people. So a person should be "anyone who was previously sapient and may again be sapient".

Do they need to have previously been sapient though? I'd argue that if people came into existence as fully-formed adults, needing only to be woken up, those people would be people even though they have never previously been sapient. So now we're back to square one, "people are any beings which may become sapient." At that point we run into obvious issues like the ones you've mentioned--do we classify random biomass as a person?

I'd prefer to start with an alternate definition: a person is any theoretically sapient being. Most such beings do not and will not ever exist, but I consider it a moral obligation to bring as many of them into existence as possible, so long as existing people aren't harmed too much by this. Sleeping people, people in comas, and dead people are all included by this definition. Do dead people have a right to life? I'd say so, if we could give it to them. Do unborn people (so far nonexistent) have a right to life? Yes, I'd say so. I think we're morally obligated to bring more people into existence to share in our enjoyment of this wonderful life. Going a step further, I think even very miserable people are still better off existing than not. I was one myself for a very long time, and noticed that all the things that caused me the most misery were not actually bad things, but rather the absence of good things, which implies that from an objective standpoint life is far better than the baseline of nonexistence.

A baby has obviously less need for cultivation than a random pile of biomass to become sapient, yet it still needs a great deal more to attain its potential. A sleeping person doesn't.

Somebody in a coma does though, sometimes even more than a baby.

I can't disagree, and you won't find me arguing that my views don't have drawbacks and tradeoffs. Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided, but in this case if it's the parent's doing the deed, I see no principled reason for society to intervene unless we're also rounding up mother's who smoke crack or treat themselves to red wine while pregnant. I still don't see it as major enough to override personal autonomy in such matters, unless society bites the bullet and also punishes the idiots engaging in such obviously dysgenic activities.

Ha, I would be totally down to round people up for that sort of thing as well. In some states (including mine) that sort of behavior is classified as child abuse which I think is the right approach.

I'm sure you're familiar with the idea of temporal discounting, all else being equal, saving a grown adult versus a newborn will incur far lower opportunity costs, and $1000 now is better than $10,000 50 years later in most contexts. If I was confronted with a drowning baby versus an adult, I'd save the adult because they represent a great deal of investment and are already productive.

This is part of what @Blueberry was gesturing towards when he mentioned how helpless babies are. If an adult and baby are both drowning, the former is likely to survive longer without assistance, be harmed less by temporary oxygen deprivation, and be more likely to recover from a longer stay in the water than the baby. If you absolutely had to choose one then I don't think choosing the adult is necessarily the wrong choice (they may have people relying on them at home etc.), but in practice most of the time the baby will be a better choice, and our moral intuitions should ideally guide us towards the best choices in those practical situations.

I get that it's just a thought experiment but I really want to stress that saving the baby would usually be the correct choice.

More importantly, I'm not sure temporal discounting should apply to happiness. Yes, it does apply in our day-to-day decisions, but that's because nothing in real life is guaranteed and we are built accordingly. In real life the choice isn't "one marshmallow right now vs two in ten minutes", it's "99% chance of a marshmallow right now vs. 99-x% chance of a marshmallow in ten minutes", which is further worsened because two marshmallows isn't double as good as one. I think the QALY of the baby and the adult should just be compared directly, taking things like lifespan, expected happiness, etc. into account. Most of the time the baby would come out on top, but maybe if the baby is disabled, or the adult is young and very happy or has lots of people depending on them, then the calculus changes.

If we were to apply temporal discounting to QALYs then we'd have to conclude that people from the past were morally more valuable than we are.

Imagine that, as a doctor, I'm counseling a person with a terminal illness and terrible QOL in two different scenarios:

In one, medical science has stalled, and I can credibly claim that no treatment or cure will ever be found for the condition they're facing, they're doomed to having their remaining life be worse than death with no recourse. In that case, I'd earnestly suggest they opt for euthanasia instead of suffering till the end.

In the other scenario, I've received word that very promising clinical trials are underway, and that there's a greater than even chance that a cure is forthcoming before the patient expects to die. If they can stomach the pain of some period, they have a long and healthy life ahead of them. Why on earth would I encourage them to euthanize themselves? I'd tell them to grit their teeth and pull through, but only because of a credible hope, not because I fetishize extending a life of suffering.

Similarly, I genuinely believe that in the next 10 years we either solve nearly all of our technological and societal problems, or die in the process, with only small odds of a business-as-usual outcome.

The death of an 80 year old man in the 1950s is far less tragic than the death of one in 2028, when it's plausible that we have working senolytic drugs or other therapies.

Sure, and this sounds like the second scenario. There's a credible hope that even very miserable people will become quite happy in a few years. Even if they don't contribute to the Singularity their lives still have value.

More comments

This is an extremely uncharitable strawman. No utilitarian believes murder is justified if the murderer enjoys it very much. Among people who do endorse euthanasia in certain cases, none consider any pleasure derived from administering euthanasia to be a relevant factor in the moral calculus.

"No utilitarian" is a pretty absolute claim. I don't know if the author of the "bike cuck" comic is utilitarian, but he makes a very utilitarian argument about bike theft that follows the same logic as Walterodim's:

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/314/087/c1a.jpg

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