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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   32507 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.

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.

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