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> The argument for abortion isn't that it's somehow OK to kill really young human Not true! At least, if you asked me to make an argument in favor of abortion

by csense 14y ago

> The argument for abortion isn't that it's somehow OK to kill really young human Not true! At least, if you asked me to make an argument in favor of abortion, that's the argument that I would make. No human within the first year or so after conception has any of the distinguishing features which give intelligent beings a higher moral status: Tool use, language use, abstract thought, logical reasoning, permanent memory. Therefore, the moral status of a human immediately after the time of conception t_0 is akin to that of an animal. It's not okay to torture, abuse, or injure them for fun; it's not okay for people outside their family to interfere with them; it's morally and socially acceptable and even admirable for individuals to form very deep emotional attachments with them and spend enormous resources helping and protecting them; but it is okay to kill them humanely if there simply isn't a place for them. The moral status of the very young human rises from that of a proto-human animal to that of a full human at time t_I, the time when they become intelligent. The problem is that t_I is extremely difficult to measure. It depends on your definition of intelligence and can be very different for different individuals. (For severely brain-damaged individuals, it may even be the case that t_I = infinity.) To deal with the difficulty of measuring t_I, our culture and laws have instead picked a deadline t_D, such that t_D is much smaller than t_I in all cases (regardless of differing definitions or individual cases). We have declared that we should assume humans younger than t_D have proto-human legal status roughly equivalent to animal status, and humans older than t_D have full-human legal status. Killing before the deadline is legal if done in a humane way with the consent of the mother; killing after the deadline is treated the same as killing an adult would be (only allowable in very limited circumstances such as self-defense). Therefore our society can avoid some of the drains placed on it by humans who, it is known, will be born into far-from-ideal circumstances, while hopefully staying far away enough from t_I to avoid sanctioning the killing of anyone who has the moral status of a full human. (Obviously, t_D is the time of birth plus delta, where delta is less than one day (I'm not sure exactly what delta is, but I'm pretty sure it's less than one day). Delta is necessary to account for partial-birth abortions.) The problem with many pro-abortion arguments is that they are of the form "It is our belief that all humans have souls, and therefore full-human moral status, from the time of conception." It's not a problem that those are their religious beliefs; the problem is enshrining those beliefs into law in prohibitions on abortion. Logic and facts, not religious beliefs, must be the basis of our laws; to do otherwise would open up the very can of worms that we try to avoid by separating church and state. We can't observe souls, but we can observe intelligent behavior, and the latter seems not to preclude existing abortion laws in any way. (Existing abortion laws also don't interfere with the religious beliefs of abortion opponents; if you believe abortion is morally wrong, you don't have to have one. The law only steps in to the extent that anti-abortionists wish to impose their beliefs on others.) Hypothetically, if the laws were expanded to legalize infanticide as "extremely late abortion" at any time up to, say, age three, then a moral argument would hold weight; many two-year-olds do use language and can exhibit surprisingly intelligent behaviors. Likewise, if the laws were expanded to require abortions in certain circumstances (for example, to enforce a one-child-per-family policy like China has), that would also be wrong and almost surely unconstitutional; for it would interfere with the religious beliefs of most abortion opponents. (I say "most" since I suppose it is possible there is some faction whose religious beliefs, if any, don't forbid abortion, but bases an opposition to abortion on non-religious grounds. If they even exist, they're surely very small and not very vocal.) Of course, everyone (myself included) regards such expansions as extremely morally repugnant; I know of no one who would even consider supporting them. I'm just offering them against a hypothetical opponent who would say, "If you would sanction the killing of innocent babies, you clearly have no moral compass!" This worldview does have limitations on what is allowed; it just draws the line between "unallowable atrocity under any circumstances" and "the lesser of two evils" in a slightly different place than pro-lifers. As much of a tendency as it is among liberals to put all conservatives in the same boat, both on HN and everywhere else the left gathers, abortion is possibly the best place to draw the line between libertarians and social conservatives: The latter favor prohibitions, while the former should oppose them as unwanted government intrusion (although many do not, I suspect, due to simple realpolitik -- a sacrifice of a non-core position by a weaker leg of the stool to support a core position of a stronger leg to maintain the conservative coalition, presumably a compromise to be "renegotiated" -- possibly unilaterally -- when/if their relative strength ever changes.)

DannoHung 14y ago
I think your premises are incorrect. Create a machine that is like a human in all respects that you cite, tool use, language use, abstract thought, logical reasoning, permanent memory, and if it is just comprised of that, we will call it a very amazing robot. You could even add self-preservation routines, and we will call it an amazing robot that knows its own value. But unless you add emotions that are recognizable to humans, you will find a very hard time convincing people that it is a person. Similarly, I believe that emotional response is the reason why humans agree that it is not correct to destroy babies, but that some find it fine to destroy embryos. Those that disagree feel that the potential for emotions overrides any other concern. Now, personally, I would hate to be a rationalist. Emotions provide the depth that make being alive worth experiencing. Divorcing my emotions from every decision making process would just be disgusting... well, see, I can't even describe it without emotion.
- csense 14y ago
  > Create a machine that is like a human in all respects that you cite, tool use, language use, abstract thought, logical reasoning, permanent memory, and if it is just comprised of that, we will call it a very amazing robot. You could even add self-preservation routines, and we will call it an amazing robot that knows its own value. I disagree. Much science fiction (for example Asimov) deals with the social positions of intelligent robots. I would assume, based on the number of people that find the arguments these works make compelling or at least interesting enough to buy them, that if such robots did exist, they would quickly gain at least a small faction of human political supporters. Eventually, through normal human social and political processes, our society and culture would hopefully reach some kind of position on what exactly makes something morally equivalent to humans, in a way that assigns some definite and logically consistent moral status to these robots. > Similarly, I believe that emotional response is the reason why humans agree that it is not correct to destroy babies, but that some find it fine to destroy embryos. It's probably true that emotional responses are a big part of the reason for much of the support behind most laws and policies, from the least controversial (murder is illegal) to the most (abortion, Obamacare, death penalty, affirmative action, welfare...). But that doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't come up with abstract intellectual justifications for them. > Divorcing my emotions from every decision making process would just be disgusting... Emotions are basically heuristics which the human brain has evolved. They quickly give you guidelines for how you should act in a given situation without wasting valuable time and intellectual effort creating an elaborate argument as a justification of the obvious. Emotions are usually right, but sometimes they lead us astray. And we're at a complete loss when we have to make a law that goes either one way or the other on something, but different people in our society have different emotional responses that lead them to different positions on the issue. And besides, emotions can lead to things like racism or Nazism if followed blindly. (Godwin's Law, I know.) That's where debate and argument come into play. In a good debate, your empathy should let you experience the emotions on both sides of the issue, freeing your brain to decide which argument has a good logical structure and is adequately supported by facts. Once you've decided, you should try to partially (but not totally! -- your brain can be wrong too!) suppress your empathy for the losing side and encourage your empathy for the winning side. You can actually train your emotions -- basically calibrating your heuristics to agree with your intellectual decisions, so in the future you can remember your position on the issue in your gut, without having to remember and fully reconstruct the argument you made. Yeah, I've found that hacking my own brain is awesome :) By the way, using emotional heuristics as a shortcut is something I relied on in my reductio point against using emotions as your sole means of political decision-making -- your emotions immediately tell you that racism and Nazism are bad things, because you've been trained to think of them that way. While you can probably come up with a sound argument that racism and Nazism are bad, your emotions tell you those are bad things without you having to consciously construct or remember a justification of why they're bad. So you can immediately sense that the structure of my argument -- "relying blindly on emotions without consulting reason is bad because it leads to bad things" -- is sound, without having to go into an entire sub-argument about whether racism and Nazism are good or bad, and why, and whether the logical structure of the sub-argument is okay, and mentally fact-checking the facts cited by the sub-argument against what you know of the history of Hitler and World War II and slavery and Jim Crow and Martin Luther King...and then more sub-sub-arguments about fundamental moral questions like whether genocide is morally okay, or whether slavery is morally okay, or whether it's morally okay to treat people badly based on a certain set of genetic traits without actually enslaving them...without those emotional shortcuts to help us out, we'd never be able to communicate moral ideas efficiently or make moral decisions fast enough for them to matter in a fast-moving real-life situation. (FYI, I suspect this feedback mechanism is what Terence Tao was talking about when he discussed how mathematicians train themselves to quickly decide whether something is true or false without constructing an airtight proof [1].) [1] http://www.quora.com/Mathematics/What-is-it-like-to-have-an-understanding-of-very-advanced-mathematics http://www.quora.com/Mathematics/What-is-it-like-to-have-an-...

by csense 14y ago

DannoHung 14y ago

I think your premises are incorrect. Create a machine that is like a human in all respects that you cite, tool use, language use, abstract thought, logical reasoning, permanent memory, and if it is just comprised of that, we will call it a very amazing robot. You could even add self-preservation routines, and we will call it an amazing robot that knows its own value. But unless you add emotions that are recognizable to humans, you will find a very hard time convincing people that it is a person. Similarly, I believe that emotional response is the reason why humans agree that it is not correct to destroy babies, but that some find it fine to destroy embryos. Those that disagree feel that the potential for emotions overrides any other concern. Now, personally, I would hate to be a rationalist. Emotions provide the depth that make being alive worth experiencing. Divorcing my emotions from every decision making process would just be disgusting... well, see, I can't even describe it without emotion.

csense 14y ago
> Create a machine that is like a human in all respects that you cite, tool use, language use, abstract thought, logical reasoning, permanent memory, and if it is just comprised of that, we will call it a very amazing robot. You could even add self-preservation routines, and we will call it an amazing robot that knows its own value. I disagree. Much science fiction (for example Asimov) deals with the social positions of intelligent robots. I would assume, based on the number of people that find the arguments these works make compelling or at least interesting enough to buy them, that if such robots did exist, they would quickly gain at least a small faction of human political supporters. Eventually, through normal human social and political processes, our society and culture would hopefully reach some kind of position on what exactly makes something morally equivalent to humans, in a way that assigns some definite and logically consistent moral status to these robots. > Similarly, I believe that emotional response is the reason why humans agree that it is not correct to destroy babies, but that some find it fine to destroy embryos. It's probably true that emotional responses are a big part of the reason for much of the support behind most laws and policies, from the least controversial (murder is illegal) to the most (abortion, Obamacare, death penalty, affirmative action, welfare...). But that doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't come up with abstract intellectual justifications for them. > Divorcing my emotions from every decision making process would just be disgusting... Emotions are basically heuristics which the human brain has evolved. They quickly give you guidelines for how you should act in a given situation without wasting valuable time and intellectual effort creating an elaborate argument as a justification of the obvious. Emotions are usually right, but sometimes they lead us astray. And we're at a complete loss when we have to make a law that goes either one way or the other on something, but different people in our society have different emotional responses that lead them to different positions on the issue. And besides, emotions can lead to things like racism or Nazism if followed blindly. (Godwin's Law, I know.) That's where debate and argument come into play. In a good debate, your empathy should let you experience the emotions on both sides of the issue, freeing your brain to decide which argument has a good logical structure and is adequately supported by facts. Once you've decided, you should try to partially (but not totally! -- your brain can be wrong too!) suppress your empathy for the losing side and encourage your empathy for the winning side. You can actually train your emotions -- basically calibrating your heuristics to agree with your intellectual decisions, so in the future you can remember your position on the issue in your gut, without having to remember and fully reconstruct the argument you made. Yeah, I've found that hacking my own brain is awesome :) By the way, using emotional heuristics as a shortcut is something I relied on in my reductio point against using emotions as your sole means of political decision-making -- your emotions immediately tell you that racism and Nazism are bad things, because you've been trained to think of them that way. While you can probably come up with a sound argument that racism and Nazism are bad, your emotions tell you those are bad things without you having to consciously construct or remember a justification of why they're bad. So you can immediately sense that the structure of my argument -- "relying blindly on emotions without consulting reason is bad because it leads to bad things" -- is sound, without having to go into an entire sub-argument about whether racism and Nazism are good or bad, and why, and whether the logical structure of the sub-argument is okay, and mentally fact-checking the facts cited by the sub-argument against what you know of the history of Hitler and World War II and slavery and Jim Crow and Martin Luther King...and then more sub-sub-arguments about fundamental moral questions like whether genocide is morally okay, or whether slavery is morally okay, or whether it's morally okay to treat people badly based on a certain set of genetic traits without actually enslaving them...without those emotional shortcuts to help us out, we'd never be able to communicate moral ideas efficiently or make moral decisions fast enough for them to matter in a fast-moving real-life situation. (FYI, I suspect this feedback mechanism is what Terence Tao was talking about when he discussed how mathematicians train themselves to quickly decide whether something is true or false without constructing an airtight proof [1].) [1] http://www.quora.com/Mathematics/What-is-it-like-to-have-an-understanding-of-very-advanced-mathematics http://www.quora.com/Mathematics/What-is-it-like-to-have-an-...