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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   33105 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

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Why would we distinguish these scenarios?

I think choosing not to count potential lives rules out a lot of really stupid gotchas. It brings utilitarianism closer to something usable.

Because actively destroying something is fundamentally different than preventing its creation? This is one of those things that is so intuitive I do think the onus would be on you to prove the inverse, but:

  • The end result is not the same. Things that are destroyed leave ghosts, things that were never made do not. Memories, physical damage, emotional attachments, etc are all left behind and change the calculus.

  • The process is obviously different, and processes have by-products and side effects. In the case of abortion, a case could be made that normalizing abortion weakens norms around the inherent value of human life, or the value of facing the consequences of your own actions (I don’t necessarily believe this, but it is just an example)

  • Different rate of change. Abortion is quick, education and cultural change are slow.

  • Different subgroup impacts. Sex education will likely have stronger impacts on the more educable, and abortion on the more avoidant.

This applies to basically every instance of prevention/elimination. Why prevent cavities when we can simply fill them? Why prevent infections when we have antibiotics? Prevention and elimination are only the same in the most spherical-cow utilitarian nonsense world imaginable.

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