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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

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Murderers, probably. Thieves? Probably not. There's a reason we don't have the death penalty for theft: it's less bad than dying.

Also also, people who have abortions are only weakly correlated with being murderers or thieves. If I had a button that would predict the future and abort only fetuses who were guaranteed to become murderers in the future, I'd probably agonize over the morality of punishing someone for a crime they hadn't yet committed, but if guaranteed of the accuracy of the prediction I'd probably reluctantly press it. If you give me a button that kills 10 completely innocent people in exchange for each murderer it kills I would not press that button. And that's what we have.

Also, the repugnant conclusion is about trying to maximize total quantity of life, while most sane versions of utilitarianism is about trying to maximize quality of existing people. Once a fetus exists, it's a person, and so its quality of life matters too. There's a huge moral difference between failing to bring people into existence, and literally killing them

(World with 10 billion happy people) > (World with 100 billion struggling people) > (World with 10 billion happy people and 90 billion corpses)