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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.
Comas are not made alike. Someone who is outright brain dead isn't coming back.
The word "may" is doing a lot of heavy lifting, unless one quantifies how likely they are to resume being sapient as the same entity.
Someone asleep has a 99.999% chance of resuming consciousness.
Someone in a coma might have 20% odds, without checking.
Someone freshly dead and cryopreserved before the brain decomposed might have a 1-5% chance of ever being revived.
Someone rotting or dead decades back? Even given singularity tech I would wager it's impossible to revive them, at most you can get sorta close.
In an ideal scenario, we would weigh ever case accordingly, but even in the murkier aspects, I'm sure you can see a difference between someone napping and someone with their brainstem missing.
You have no idea how incredibly alarming I find this, and I can only hope it's because you haven't thought the ramifications of this approach through.
Modern society exists in the Dream Time, when humanity has temporarily overcome Malthusian constraints but hasn't physically, mentally or memetically become adapted to exploiting all of the surplus in the system.
We live in what seems to be a fundamentally resource constrained universe according to most models of physics and cosmology. One day, the stars will die (this is not a big deal).
Several orders of magnitude of time later, the last blackholes will evaporate, and then the civilizations clinging to them as an energy source will die in the endless cold.
It only takes a few thousand years of 2% growth, as the human race has been performing on average, to require more biomass than there is mass in the observable universe.
No technological advance, short of literally infinite energy, solved this fundamental issue.
Not fusion, not blackhole farming, not direct matter to energy conversion. Their is a fixed energy budget, and the more thinly you slice the pie, the less everyone gets to eat.
Sure, I'm fully ok with us going from ~10 billion to quintillions eventually without denting the living standards of a galactic or extragalactic civilization too badly, but the idea of instantiating every possible consciousness that ever could exist will leave us all as beggars even when we own the stars.
On the other hand, resurrecting the mere 97 billion anatomically modern humans who have ever lived isn't a biggie, but most of them died without any hope of returning from tech advances I consider plausible.
My intuition also suggests that simply going for numbers is a bad move, since a post human consciousness might have OOMs richer internal experiences than the same energy budget of humans, in the same manner 1 ton of humans is worth a lot more than 1 ton of chimps.
Given that I intend to live till Heat Death, I am very leery of unnecessarily increasing the number of people a dying universe needs to host.
Mostly agreed, depending on how miserable in question the person is.
I am very depressed. This is the worst bout I've had in years to the point I have mild suicidal ideation half a dozen times a day.
However, I wager that I'm not a significant suicide risk, because my rational brain knows that there's a good chance I can eventually find a treatment that works and an outright cure in less than a decade.
My life would have to get a lot worse before I rationally decide it's not worth living, even though I am very unhappy right now.
This seems to be overly fixating on the exact mechanics of the thought experiment and not the actual point. Replace death from drowning with a bomb strapped to the chest and only one code to switch one off and then the survival advantages of being a baby become nil.
That seems to be taking the concept outside of where it's useful, unless you want to elaborate further.
I don't agree here. To me someone has the same amount of personhood regardless of the chance that they ever regain sapience. Very elderly people have a much greater chance of dying in their sleep but have the same amount of personhood as much younger sleeping people. Someone in a medically induced coma may have a 40% chance of recovery, but imo does not have 40% of the personhood of a sleeping person--they still just have the same amount of personhood.
I am highly optimistic about future technological advances etc. and highly pessimistic about the quality of our current understanding of the laws of physics. There still appear to be many holes in our understanding big enough to drive a literally infinite utopia through. That may change in the future but for now we are far from a complete understanding, and any new discoveries are much more likely to help our future prospects than hurt them.
I'd say go for both. Human internal experiences seem qualitatively different from chimp experiences in a unique way. In other words I think sapience >>> sentience but there's no big step above sapience, just marginal improvements in the intelligence etc. of sapient beings.
I'm very sorry to hear that. Totally agree that an eventual cure seems likely; I'd go so far as to say that one seems virtually guaranteed. I have lived through some darkness--long periods of pretty extreme chronic pain with very little social support or (more importantly to me) redeeming qualities to my own personality. What I found was that:
Pain, even extreme pain, isn't really all that bad at all. Infinite Jest has a great quote about this which I unfortunately don't fully remember. In essence any single instant of pain is pretty easily tolerable. It only begins to feel intolerable when our minds look forward at all those instants of pain lined up together, and we try to experience them all at once rather than just enduring them as they come.
The vast majority of my suffering came from a mismatch between expectations and reality. When I forgot my goals and expectations for a moment I was capable of finding simple joy in small things like the beauty of my surroundings and the naturally comedic nature of surrounding people's actions. Forgetting expectations is a very hard thing to do, and I'm not sure even a correct thing to do (my goals/expectations are probably the thing that most makes me who I am) but being able to do this for even a moment does put things into perspective. I could live as a hermit out on some desolate island or something and still be quite happy, so everything that happens to me in life instead of that is just a big bonus.
I don't know if either of these unsolicited insights will be helpful to you at all. Maybe they are only meaningful to me, or they are universally meaningful but can only be learned through personal experience, never communicated. If they are meaningful then of course that matters infinitely more than whatever we've been arguing about though.
I just don't think in general that our lives are worth more than future lives. I think temporal discounting exists so that we as imperfect humans take guaranteed things above risky things. When it comes to economics, it seems that we are capable of growing money, so temporal discounting has become a valid universal law of economics. When it comes to QALYs I don't think temporal discounting applies at all.
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This seems to imply endorsing the Repugnant Conclusion.
I think the Repugnant Conclusion is very overhyped. There's room in this universe for countless quintillions of people, and who knows what will be possible when our understanding of physics is further along. Also I don't think bringing new people into the world actually decreases the others' standard of living. For quite a few reasons (economies of scale, increased specialization, etc.) I think we are all better off when there are more people around.
If miserable people were miserable by definition then I'm not sure I'd want to tile the universe with them, but if we ever get to that point then surely we will have solutions to their problems. As I mentioned though, I don't think miserable people are really all that miserable at all anyways. I think the vast majority of people dealing with terrible situations are quite happy.
The Repugnant Conclusion deviates enough from everything I understand about reality to not seem very insightful or useful to me.
People have tried using this explanation already.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/
...
Yes, people have tried using all sorts of explanations. The existence of counterarguments doesn't automatically make the original argument wrong. This is especially true when my argument was less "in theory the repugnant conclusion is wrong" and more "In practice the repugnant conclusion seems highly unlikely to ever be relevant or useful." I feel like the Repugnant Conclusion, more than any other thought experiment, directly leads people to make conclusions about real life, and this is highly unwarranted. Whether you think it's true or not has very very little to do with whether the current population of the earth should be increased or decreased.
Still, to the extent that I must pick a repugnant conclusion, the repugnant conclusion seems far more correct than the other conclusions. See Magic9Mushroom's comment on astralcodexten:
If you don't endorse the repugnant conclusion, which of those do you endorse? I'd ordinarily be very sympathetic to arguments along the lines of "all of these thought experiments are just thought experiments, and real ethics in the real world must be more practical" but you're the one trying to constrain me into endorsing a highly theoretical thought experiment, so I expect you to have some kind of answer here, or a good reason why these 29 philosophers are wrong.
Here's another good article, responding to what Scott wrote on the subject. In short, utilitarian attempts to "dodge" one of these conclusions seem to lead to either obvious contradictions or to even worse repugnant conclusions.
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