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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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think the fact that I recently was a conscious intelligent entity with rights suffices, and will be again given a small intervention.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Somebody in a coma does though, sometimes even more than a baby.
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.
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.
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.
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