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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32787 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023

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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.

There has to be more to this definition; I can think of plenty of easy knockdown arguments off the top of my head.

Moreover, although no newborn baby has a sense of the future, and therefore no newborn baby is a person

Apparently not.

Do people lose their moral value when they fall asleep, fall into comas, or simply get so high they lose all conception of time? Obviously not, so this definition is simply wrong.

Singer's response:

When a human being once had a sense of the future, but has now lost it, we should be guided by what he or she would have wanted to happen in these circumstances. So if someone would not have wanted to be kept alive after losing their awareness of their future, we may be justified in ending their life; but if they would not have wanted to be killed under these circumstances, that is an important reason why we should not do so.

Seems totally insufficient. Why should we care about the past desires of an entity which is no longer a person? I'm all for respecting people's wishes after their deaths but that's just personal sentiment; morally their wishes are completely worthless. I certainly wouldn't donate $100 of flowers to an unknown grave upon hearing it was the deceased's dying wish, let alone spend tens of thousands on food, lodging, healthcare, etc. when the person who asked for that treatment no longer inhabits the body.

What a cruel, sterile, and worst of all shortsighed and inaccurate set of beliefs. "I would kill this sleeping 10 year old body for his organs but for the fact that the person which previously inhabited it had other wishes. It's too bad those wishes are inexplicably so important to me when none of his other wishes rate any consideration at all. I'm such a moral and intelligent person."

I certainly wouldn't donate $100 of flowers to an unknown grave upon hearing it was the deceased's dying wish, let alone spend tens of thousands on food, lodging, healthcare, etc. when the person who asked for that treatment no longer inhabits the body.

Most people who are not weird Internet guys think action and inaction are different. Refusing to donate flowers is inaction; harvesting organs is action.

I think so as well, but the wishes of the dead just don't matter that much to me. Personally I'm OK with us not forcefully harvesting the dead's organs for mostly unrelated reasons (slippery slope, potential conflicts of interest, etc.) but wouldn't object all that much if we pivoted on that.

If the only reason you're not killing sleeping people is due to their previous wishes, that's startlingly weak. It strikes me as an unprincipled and poorly-reasoned attempt to declare murder bad now that you've argued against the real reason it's bad. "No it's not murder to kill sleeping people, but acktually we still shouldn't do it because it wouldn't be respecting their wishes. No we shouldn't respect their wishes on virtually anything else. No I'm not being inconsistent."

I suggest that there is a sliding scale of how close a currently nonthinking being is to a thinking one. If it takes a short time to start thinking, if it takes few or no resources to get it to start thinking, if it has continuity with a previous thinking entity, if the brain information that affects how it thinks is already present, that's low on the scale. Sleeping people are low on this scale. Fetuses and random lumps of matter are high on the scale.

When you point out that a sleeping person is not thinking, just like a fetus, you are saying "the sleeping person and the fetus are both somewhere above zero on the scale". But the fetus is much farther along, even if both are nonzero; the quantitative difference is enough to matter.

I suggest that there is a sliding scale of how close a currently nonthinking being is to a thinking one. If it takes a short time to start thinking, if it takes few or no resources to get it to start thinking, if it has continuity with a previous thinking entity, if the brain information that affects how it thinks is already present, that's low on the scale. Sleeping people are low on this scale. Fetuses and random lumps of matter are high on the scale.

I think we generally have a moral intuition that people are worth more than potential people. Your paragraph seems to be a more complex way to communicate this moral intuition which loses some value in the process.

If it takes a short time to start thinking

I think someone who will be in a coma for 10^10,000 years has the same amount of personhood as someone who will be in a coma for 10 seconds, barring external factors.

if it takes few or no resources to get it to start thinking

I think someone who requires 10^10,000 dollars for their life to be saved has the same amount of personhood as someone whose life will be saved for free. The same applies if they have not yet lived--I think a lump of mud has the same amount of personhood regardless of how much it will cost to turn it into a person.

if it has continuity with a previous thinking entity

This one I agree with (to an extent).

if the brain information that affects how it thinks is already present

This doesn't make much sense to me really, I don't see why it matters morally whether a given being's brain is present yet. I just wrap this into "resources necessary to turn this entity into a person" but perhaps I'm wrong here.

So yeah I think a better version of your argument is just that people are worth more than potential people, and beings which have previously been people and will be again are worth more than beings which have never been people. If you disagree, I'd love to hear about under what circumstances the proposed "sliding scale" model outperforms the "people vs. potential people" model for appealing to our moral intuitions.

When you point out that a sleeping person is not thinking, just like a fetus, you are saying "the sleeping person and the fetus are both somewhere above zero on the scale". But the fetus is much farther along, even if both are nonzero; the quantitative difference is enough to matter.

I'm mostly just trying to build an intuition pump without the thought experiments getting too complex. I think the intuition pump does hold up to this angle of attack. A sufficiently anomalous sleeping person (someone in a very expensive and long-term coma, perhaps) will be much farther along than the fetus, but I'd argue would still retain personhood.

Your paragraph seems to be a more complex way to communicate this moral intuition which loses some value in the process.

Just saying that people are worth more is subject to objections like "the sleeper is not conscious at the moment, so why does the sleeper even count as a person, rather than a potential person?"

I think someone who will be in a coma for 10^10,000 years has the same amount of personhood as someone who will be in a coma for 10 seconds, barring external factors.

If time doesn't matter, then destroying a lifeless planet is murder, because the planet could evolve sentient creatures in a few billion years.

I think someone who requires 10^10,000 dollars for their life to be saved has the same amount of personhood as someone whose life will be saved for free.

I wasn't thinking in terms of cash, but more in terms of where the complexity comes from. When you go from a fetus to a thinking person, the details of the mind are formed by the things that happen to the fetus afterwards, same as with the lump of matter. The previous state of the fetus or lump is essentially blank. This does not apply to the sleeping person.

Fetuses take only time and the mother’s standard care for herself, with relatively minor differences. If the process is uninterrupted, the child has a good chance of surviving gestation and birth. This is far, far lower on that scale than random lumps of unprogrammed matter, or even piles of formerly living biowaste with identical proportions of elements and tissues, such as corpses.

EDIT: Ninja’d by your edit, where you added the second paragraph.

Bryan Caplan, at least, has speculated that Peter Singer might lie at times for utilitarian reasons. I'm not sure whether that's the case in reality, but I suppose keep that in mind as you hear Singer saying implausible things that make what he's saying sound less distasteful.

(to be clear, I'm not trying to imply that his views are morally bad or distasteful, though I would probably do that with some of his views, the relevant part to this is whether it sounds so)

That's really wild. I'm not inclined to be more charitable as a result--if he's lying to make his position more palatable, and fails to do so, then that's on him.

Also, pretty crazy that he endorses the "murder" side of the forced organ donation hypothetical.

To be clear, I'm not saying that he does endorse that (assuming you're sourcing that from me, not some other source I don't know about). I'm saying that it's possible that he does so.

At the end of the article you linked, Caplan quotes Singer endorsing the "forced organ harvesting" side of the hypothetical.

Ah, this is why I should reread articles instead of just vaguely remembering something and finding the source.

It's too bad those wishes are inexplicably so important to me when none of his other wishes rate any consideration at all. I'm such a moral and intelligent person."

...and when people accuse me of invoking an uncharitable strawman when I claim that utilitarianism is fundamentally stupid, evil, and incompatible with human flourishing, I cite Peter Singer and David Benatar.

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