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That's a fair question. And I'm not saying it is wrong, only that it might be. Let me give a slightly less fraught example: we have an instinct to "honor our

by lisper 4y ago

That's a fair question. And I'm not saying it is wrong, only that it might be. Let me give a slightly less fraught example: we have an instinct to "honor our dead" and not to "desecrate their bodies." Does that make sense? The dead person doesn't care. Does it even make sense to talk about a dead "person"? One might argue that no dead thing can be a person, it's just a (dead) thing that was once a person and still happens to look like a person but isn't actually a person any more. Likewise, a baby may look like a person, may even behave in some ways like a person, but not yet actually be one. Again I have to emphasize: I am not saying this is the case, only that it is a possibility that needs to be taken into account when doing the moral calculus.

prometheus76 4y ago
The identity of someone is not just their body, and, while they may not be aware of how their body is being treated, an assault on their body can still be quite traumatic for those who do remember the person and in whom their identity still lives.
- lisper 4y ago
  Yes, indeed, and I don't want to diminish in any way the value of mourning the dead. My point is just that that value accrues to the living, not to the dead. So there may well be value in minimizing the pain of infants even if they don't actually experience pain. The policy decisions do not turn exclusively on the answer to the philosophical question. But it's not a no-op either, because if you are going to (say) administer anesthetic to a baby you'd better be sure that the net benefits outweigh the costs to the baby.
bobthechef 4y ago
This borders on solipsism. The same argument can be made about any human being. At the very least, we presume there is pain by observing the behavior of animals in response to stimuli and interpreting what we see analogically. An in light of certain reasonable assumptions (like "natura nihil frustra facit"), we can quickly rule out a host of preposterous interpretations to conclude that the sensation felt is painful. That We don't need to factor into the moral calculus the possibility that no pain is felt since the most reasonable and rational conclusion is that infants do feel pain. What reason could there possibly be to believe that they don't that isn't some stretched exersize in special pleading and evasion? The baby is human!
- Morgawr 4y ago
  I think you're misunderstanding what the OP is talking about. They aren't defending the practice, just that it's not necessarily an obvious answer to a question that should not be asked. > the most reasonable and rational conclusion is that In the context of science, this statement is a very dangerous one to make. There's many many many many things that people thought were "reasonable and rational conclusions" that turned out to be completely wrong after some actual rational experimentation and application of the scientific method.
Dylan16807 4y ago
> Again I have to emphasize: I am not saying this is the case, only that it is a possibility that needs to be taken into account when doing the moral calculus. An important thing to note about babies is that at some point in the past few months they objectively couldn't feel anything, despite having a human body. So the question is when those various things switch over, not if.
- lmm 4y ago
  > An important thing to note about babies is that at some point in the past few months they objectively couldn't feel anything, despite having a human body. Is that actually true (if by "human body" you mean a humanoid body, rather than the vacuous-in-this-context sense of a body of a human)? I wouldn't be surprised if the ability to feel developed earlier than the human-like body.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    I mean it's the same body they have later, and it's made of human cells. Maybe it looked like a fish at the time, I wasn't trying to be specific in that way. There's a very good chance 'humanoid' comes before 'feeling' but I don't want to get too deep into the weeds.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
corsac 4y ago
Do people instinctively anthropomorphize? I bet the existence of that instinct has far less empirical support than the pain consciousness of newborn babies. Be that as it may, these comparisons to parents' "anthropomorphising" of their kids are not apples-to-apples. Chatbots and machines programmed to show feeling responses are mimicry. People can be tricked. If you want to fool ships with a fake iceberg, you won't bother with more than the tip. But if you're a glaciologist, examples of sailors getting spooked by fake plastic iceberg tips would not lead you to question whether natural icy marine bodies (especially ones that usually develop into icebergs!) have any mass below sea-level. Or if you're studying carcinization, the fact that robot crab decoys can pass for real tells you exactly nothing about why unrelated phylogenetic lines independently develop crab-like features. And the "people" in "dead people" refers to real people, who die. A corpse is a "dead person" like a puddle of water is "melted ice". Mourning, including respectful treatment of remains, is symbolic. None of that is anthropomorphism. It is established that human babies develop into human adults. Their pain and other distinctly human responses resemble the adult forms profoundly. Are babies "a system [that] responds to painful stimulus" but feels no pain? Occam's Razor says no. I see zero downside to reckoning that possibility out of the moral calculus.
- lisper 4y ago
  > Do people instinctively anthropomorphize? Yes. > I bet the existence of that instinct has far less empirical support than the pain consciousness of newborn babies. I'll take that bet. Why do you think human children play with dolls? > People can be tricked. Indeed. > A corpse is a "dead person" like a puddle of water is "melted ice". You're kind of making my point for me here. A corpse is an inanimate object. An inanimate object cannot be a person. A corpse was a person, but when that person died it ceased to be a person just as when ice melts it ceases to be ice. When a person dies, when ice melts, they cease to exhibit any of the distinguishing properties that made them a person or that made them ice. > It is established that human babies develop into human adults. Sure, but that in and of itself does not make them people any more than the fact that people die makes live people corpses. A live person will some day become a corpse, but while it is alive it is not yet a corpse. A baby will some day become a person, but while it is a baby it may or may not be a person. > Their pain and other distinctly human responses resemble the adult forms profoundly. That's simply not true. A baby's response to pain is all but indistinguishable from its being, say, hungry, or just in a bad mood, whereas in adults these are pretty easily distinguished. But even if it were true, so what? You could make an automaton that mimicked adult responses to pain, but that automaton would not feel pain. You can't conclude anything about subjective experience from I/O behavior alone. Look, I'm not saying that babies don't feel pain. I think they probably do. All I'm saying is that it's not the slam-dunk that many people here seem to think it is.

by lisper 4y ago

prometheus76 4y ago

The identity of someone is not just their body, and, while they may not be aware of how their body is being treated, an assault on their body can still be quite traumatic for those who do remember the person and in whom their identity still lives.

lisper 4y ago
Yes, indeed, and I don't want to diminish in any way the value of mourning the dead. My point is just that that value accrues to the living, not to the dead. So there may well be value in minimizing the pain of infants even if they don't actually experience pain. The policy decisions do not turn exclusively on the answer to the philosophical question. But it's not a no-op either, because if you are going to (say) administer anesthetic to a baby you'd better be sure that the net benefits outweigh the costs to the baby.

bobthechef 4y ago

This borders on solipsism. The same argument can be made about any human being. At the very least, we presume there is pain by observing the behavior of animals in response to stimuli and interpreting what we see analogically. An in light of certain reasonable assumptions (like "natura nihil frustra facit"), we can quickly rule out a host of preposterous interpretations to conclude that the sensation felt is painful. That We don't need to factor into the moral calculus the possibility that no pain is felt since the most reasonable and rational conclusion is that infants do feel pain. What reason could there possibly be to believe that they don't that isn't some stretched exersize in special pleading and evasion? The baby is human!

Morgawr 4y ago
I think you're misunderstanding what the OP is talking about. They aren't defending the practice, just that it's not necessarily an obvious answer to a question that should not be asked. > the most reasonable and rational conclusion is that In the context of science, this statement is a very dangerous one to make. There's many many many many things that people thought were "reasonable and rational conclusions" that turned out to be completely wrong after some actual rational experimentation and application of the scientific method.

Dylan16807 4y ago

> Again I have to emphasize: I am not saying this is the case, only that it is a possibility that needs to be taken into account when doing the moral calculus. An important thing to note about babies is that at some point in the past few months they objectively couldn't feel anything, despite having a human body. So the question is when those various things switch over, not if.

lmm 4y ago
> An important thing to note about babies is that at some point in the past few months they objectively couldn't feel anything, despite having a human body. Is that actually true (if by "human body" you mean a humanoid body, rather than the vacuous-in-this-context sense of a body of a human)? I wouldn't be surprised if the ability to feel developed earlier than the human-like body.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  I mean it's the same body they have later, and it's made of human cells. Maybe it looked like a fish at the time, I wasn't trying to be specific in that way. There's a very good chance 'humanoid' comes before 'feeling' but I don't want to get too deep into the weeds.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

corsac 4y ago

Do people instinctively anthropomorphize? I bet the existence of that instinct has far less empirical support than the pain consciousness of newborn babies. Be that as it may, these comparisons to parents' "anthropomorphising" of their kids are not apples-to-apples. Chatbots and machines programmed to show feeling responses are mimicry. People can be tricked. If you want to fool ships with a fake iceberg, you won't bother with more than the tip. But if you're a glaciologist, examples of sailors getting spooked by fake plastic iceberg tips would not lead you to question whether natural icy marine bodies (especially ones that usually develop into icebergs!) have any mass below sea-level. Or if you're studying carcinization, the fact that robot crab decoys can pass for real tells you exactly nothing about why unrelated phylogenetic lines independently develop crab-like features. And the "people" in "dead people" refers to real people, who die. A corpse is a "dead person" like a puddle of water is "melted ice". Mourning, including respectful treatment of remains, is symbolic. None of that is anthropomorphism. It is established that human babies develop into human adults. Their pain and other distinctly human responses resemble the adult forms profoundly. Are babies "a system [that] responds to painful stimulus" but feels no pain? Occam's Razor says no. I see zero downside to reckoning that possibility out of the moral calculus.

lisper 4y ago
> Do people instinctively anthropomorphize? Yes. > I bet the existence of that instinct has far less empirical support than the pain consciousness of newborn babies. I'll take that bet. Why do you think human children play with dolls? > People can be tricked. Indeed. > A corpse is a "dead person" like a puddle of water is "melted ice". You're kind of making my point for me here. A corpse is an inanimate object. An inanimate object cannot be a person. A corpse was a person, but when that person died it ceased to be a person just as when ice melts it ceases to be ice. When a person dies, when ice melts, they cease to exhibit any of the distinguishing properties that made them a person or that made them ice. > It is established that human babies develop into human adults. Sure, but that in and of itself does not make them people any more than the fact that people die makes live people corpses. A live person will some day become a corpse, but while it is alive it is not yet a corpse. A baby will some day become a person, but while it is a baby it may or may not be a person. > Their pain and other distinctly human responses resemble the adult forms profoundly. That's simply not true. A baby's response to pain is all but indistinguishable from its being, say, hungry, or just in a bad mood, whereas in adults these are pretty easily distinguished. But even if it were true, so what? You could make an automaton that mimicked adult responses to pain, but that automaton would not feel pain. You can't conclude anything about subjective experience from I/O behavior alone. Look, I'm not saying that babies don't feel pain. I think they probably do. All I'm saying is that it's not the slam-dunk that many people here seem to think it is.