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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33100 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023

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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.

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.

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.

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.

Sounds like motivated reasoning to me... whether or not we like the idea of nonexistence has nothing to do with what happens to us after we die.

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