I think your "potential to grow" argument is still flawed. A person lying in a moon-dirt field on the moon will die just as certainly as an embryo in a wheat field on Earth. An embryo *is* growing and developing, given a hospitable environment, it doesn't just have the potential to. An adult human is still growing and developing into an even further stage of human development, given they have a hospitable environment.
But still, like you said, God and souls aren't your metaphysics, and (as far as I'm aware) none of this embryo selection stuff is illegal, so I don't think anyone can rightfully condemn you for truly not believing the thing is morally wrong.
I don't understand - I was saying that "potential to grow" is irrelevant, so I'm not sure how this affects my position. Many of my counterexamples - like the sperm and egg in the cervix, or the computer programmed to turn on and run the sentient AI - are also growing. Can you give a clearer explanation of what point you're trying to make here?
I think a lot of people think that level of development is important. Human is not what is morally important. Having thoughts and feelings is. Why do we give moral weight to humans but not to bacteria?
If that's the case, let's run the numbers on IVF to see the moral impact that we're dealing with.
Between 5-20 eggs are harvested during a single in vitro fertilization (IVF) attempt. And the average number of blastocysts (which not yet embryos) created during each IVF cycle average 30-50% of fertilized eggs. So if 10 eggs are harvested, 3-5 will be fertilized and become blastocysts — of which 1 will be implanted in a womb. The others are left to expire without development. And since on average it takes 3 or 4 attempts at IVF to get pregnant, more than a dozen potential human lives are lost with with successful IVF. Yet with a successful IVF, we bring a human life to fruition where there would have likely been none before.
Autonomy is what makes something meaningfully a person.
A fetus is not capable of the basic physical autonomy required to continue existing for *any* length of time. It is attached to and completely dependent on a woman for all physical functions (beating the heart, etc).
And this sticks out about "leave the embryo in a field and it will die" that's not where you find them! Putting it in a field to die is an active choice.
It's slightly less of an active choice when people do IVF, though.
The IVF company is not leaving the extra embryos to die because of an active choice, it just sort of happens unless they make an active effort to prevent it.
Something like half of fertilized embryos fail to implant or spontaneously miscarry within the first week or two. Every time you try to conceive, you're dooming embryos.
I think the crux of the matter is what constitutes disruption. I'm not in the 'embryos are human' camp, but I'm going to try and steelman that argument.
Lets say we carve out a special category for all human biological tissue. And then we posit that 'natural' processes have a certain moral weight over 'non-natural processes.' This requires some level of belief in divine intention or teleology which not all people subscribe to.
So now, we say that if a conglomeration of human (non-cancerous) cells could continue growing and developing "naturally" if given basic things like food, water, and shelter then we cannot interfere with that 'natural' process. But is 'implanting an embryo in a uterus' equivalent to 'giving it food and shelter?' or is it equivalent to an unnatural medical intervention?
I think where we legally draw the barrier (given this information) is the bottleneck to growing into a full adult. For humans that's typically the process of pregnancy (which is long hard work), on the assumption that eggs/embryos are relatively available (something distressingly untrue for many women undergoing fertility treatment who only get a limited number of eggs successfully harvested, but which feels mostly true to most people).
Pizza as a counter-example? Scott, have you lost your mind? I know you're smarter than that and you're certainly able to argue better than that. This is "Every Sperm Is Sacred" deliberate lack of understanding the position.
Pizza has the potential to become a person if someone eats it and absorbs it, thus anti-IVF position is wrong. Yes, and thus we should never eat anything at all but just live on air, else we are contradicting our anti-IVF and anti-abortion position.
From anyone else I'd be calling rude names, I respect you too much to do that Scott, but I have to say I am disappointed.
I am trying to force people to come up with a real description of what they think rather than using the vague term "potential to become a person". I later propose some possibilities, for example "has all the information and will do it without being disrupted".
The fact that it is so obviously wrong is exactly why I used it - it proves that some vague sense of "might become a person" is extremely indefensible.
I think the whole problem here is that people like to say vague things that would also apply to obviously wrong cases, and when they try to get more specific, it doesn't work. I'm not going to stop pointing out the obviously wrong cases that disprove the vague things just because some people want to pretend they don't know what a counterexample is, or refuse to read on to the next paragraph where I discuss counterexamples at the next level of sophistication.
The argument is not that it is *potentially* a person. The argument is that the embryo is, actually, a person: that it is human (because it belongs to the human species), living (because it satisfies all biological definitions of being living) and that any living human is a person.
An embryo isn't a potential person. Pizza is potential *fuel* to help grow a person; sperm is a potential *building block* to help make a person; the embryo is in fact a person.
I don't see any reason (given the wealth of counterexamples, many mentioned already, where a human has either a temporary lack of sentience, permanent diminished capacity for sentience, or in some cases a total lack of sentience) that we should consider that the hallmark, sine qua non marker of "value" in a human.
The retarded or brain-damaged certainly have much diminished sentience. So do children and babies. Those who are asleep or unconscious often have none. I'm pretty sure you can't prove to me that you are an actually sentient being rather than some sort of advanced automata.
Therefore, this seems like a very slim reed to base human value on, and a frankly muddying device: not to be accusatory, but I think landing on "sentience" as the key property of human value is obviously a mechanism to arrive at a desired result rather than a legitimate clarifying addition to the concept of personhood that helps us arrive at morally clear decisions.
Speaking of "building a fence around the law", there are enough examples of very bad things happening when we start normalising "Sure, maybe it's a human being, but it isn't a proper person, and therefore doesn't have the same moral worth" that I think it's better not to draw any distinctions between being human and being a person, even leaving aside any metaphysical claims.
This is one of those Scissors Statements that will get us all at one another's throats. Trying to define what is a person is difficult, which is why I think this argument has slid over to that.
Because if we were arguing "is an embryo human?" then it obviously is. And we have said that deliberate destruction of a human is wrong and unethical. Not being able to fall back there, there were (and I have gone through this dance before) arguments over "that's not a human, it's just a potential human" or even "that's no more human than a banana".
If a human embryo is not human, what is it? It's alive (we've had the "it's not a life" denial dance) and if allowed to develop will become a Real Human with no Blue Fairies involved.
Just because it's done in a petri dish and not in a bed has nothing to do with conception (and yeah, we got that redefined to serve the ends of abortion etc.: "oh no, conception is no longer fusion of sperm and egg, it's when the fertilised ovum implants!")
For entrenched positions on both sides, there's little or nothing that will shift opinion. I venture to say you don't imagine any argument would shift your view on this, and I can say there's no argument will shift mine (because I've been arguing this for a long time in other places and getting a lot of the same shitty responses. Sorry if that sounds harsh, but pizza? really?)
Actually, upon thinking about it a little further, I can be clearer. The point I'm trying to make is that it's wrong to murder a human. An embryo actually *is* a thing in a stage of human development (a human), unlike sperm or pizza, which could *potentially* be pieces of a human, or a computer with information which could be a *representation* of a human but will never physically be one. But an embryo is the actual thing.
It seems like in your counterexamples you are trying to come up with generalizable rules for what things are okay to kill and what things aren't, based on consciousness, wants, etc. You can draw those lines where you feel is best for killing things in general, but I think "it is wrong to murder humans" is a different and additional rule to the rest.
An embryo doesn't naturally occur in a field, whoever put it there is murdering it in the same way that someone who throws another human onto the moon unprotected is murdering them. In the case where something goes wrong in the body and the embryo is going to die/potentially kill someone else, it's difficult to make a solid moral rule on whether you should prioritize the life of the mother or the embryo. It's easiest to save the mother's life and remove the embryo from where it was already going to die in most cases, I assume.
But producing many embryos and removing them from a hospitable environment and then discarding them purely out of choice is the murder of a human. If they are frozen rather than discarded, that's not murder, but it's definitely a weird area to get into.
I suppose this just comes down to us disagreeing on either the statement "something currently in a stage of human development is a human" or "it is wrong to murder a human". It seems odd to me to draw a line somewhere in the human development saying that everything before isn't a human and everything after is. Consciousness may be a different matter, but humanity seems quite clear. It isn't ambiguous what an embryo from human parents is in the embryonic stage of.
I hope this explanation is of sufficient clarity. I don't imagine that I'll change your mind in any way, but I think it's worth stating. Whatever the case, I don't have any idea that you're some evil person who intentionally/knowingly supports murder or anything like that.
EDIT: from the response you just made to Deiseach I understand what you were doing with your counterarguments to the "potentiality" argument, and I agree. I think hypotheticals are not very helpful in things like this. My argument is that a human embryo is a human, regardless of whatever else it could potentially develop later on (consciousness, wants, what have you).
do you mean "zygote" or "embryo"? The latter has cell differentiation which will (eventually) lead to organ development; the former doesn't.
If you feel a single cell that contains all genetic material is a human, then if we extract DNA from one of my cells, and inject it into a (DNA-emptied) human egg, is THAT a human?
Good point. I suppose I do mean zygote rather than embryo. It is still a cell in the very fist stage of human development, isn't it? An embryo and so on doesn't come from anything else, and a zygote won't grow into anything else, I assume.
I don't feel that a single cell that contains all genetic material is a human, otherwise, wouldn't all cells except sex cells be human? I mean that any organism that is in a stage of human development is a human, so in your example then (if things work how I think we both assume they work) yes I would say that it is a human. Isn't that one of the methods of cloning?
But *why* is it wrong to murder a human but not wrong to murder, say, a bacteria? Is "it is wrong to murder a human" just an axiomatic moral statement that is not derived from some deeper principle or that generalizes to others? If so, if you discover and alien world with a bunch of new life forms ranging from single-celled to complex and intelligent, how do you determine which are OK to kill?
I would submit that "it is wrong to murder a human" is an axiomatic moral statement. I'm not saying it isn't wrong to murder anything else. Generalizable principles would be helpful in hypothetical thought experiments like what aliens are okay to murder or if AI should get human rights, but I think those are separate and additional to the statement "it is wrong to murder a human".
Good point. I guess maybe I should say "it is wrong for humans to murder humans". You could say I'm moving goalposts, but it's what I was thinking from the beginning and didn't think to specify, as the topic that led to the discussion was relating to human actions towards humans.
The embryos in IVF are produced in the inhospitable environment (a petri dish). Eggs are removed from the body and fertilized outside the body in that process.
I would ask you, let's say there is a human who has had his head completely removed, but people are feeding him and keeping him alive like that one headless chicken experiment. Someone has an opportunity to inject it with something that will kill the body. Have they committed murder?
Obviously not. No brain = no person. A sleeping or otherwise unconscious brain will/can come back online. But if there is no brain, there is no person. Ergo, and embryo that hasn't developed a brain yet is not a person.
Also, considering the IVF embryos are created outside the womb, thawing and allowing them to die is more like unplugging a brain dead person from life support. It's a death from natural causes.
There's a difference between "can't ever" and "hasn't yet" which seems significant, and is why such cases always end up news headline controversies in practice: most often you can't be certain whether your Archie Battersbee might become a Dylan Askin.
I would say in that case, the person who removed the head from the body murdered the person, just as I would say that a person who begins a human life in a petri dish and then leaves it to die is a murderer.
The chickens in the situation you're referring to still have pieces of brain, that's why they're still running around.
Anyway, here's what I said to moonshadow for a similar situation to the life support thing:
"I think there's a difference between something going wrong that leads to a person's death (like a disease that puts a child into a long-term comatose state, or an embryo implanting itself into the fallopian tube) and someone intentionally putting an end to a human life in an immoral way (throwing a child in front of a moving vehicle, or removing an embryo from where it natrually already was thriving and then discarding it). I don't know any rule for what would make ending a human life moral, but I'm sure people can argue that killing in war or the death sentence or stuff like that is moral human killing.
I still think removing an embryo and freezing it indefinitely is very weird and *feels* wrong to me, but it isn't murder."
I just disagree that murder is the wrongful killing of a human person. I would say that it is the wrongful killing of a human life. I guess that's just where we'll have to disagree.
What if the head is not dead? What if it's alive and well in a jar awaiting transplant to a new (ethically sourced) body? Clearly terminating the human body it came from is not a murder. It might be a property crime against the transplantee who maybe wanted to use it as a backup or something, but it's not a murder.
To make it more like an embryo, imagine that the headless body is enhanced with technology that would have it eventually regenerate a fresh head that develops a new consciousness. I still say it's not a murder to terminate that body, or to keep trimming the head development back to keep it available for the return of the original owner. Obviously, it would once again be murder to terminate the body if a new head and consciousness was allowed to develop!
I could be wrong, but I think once you remove a human head from a body, the body is at that moment dead. Like I already pointed out, the chicken example doesn't work because those chickens still have some brains left, they just don't have most of their head. I don't think your hypothetical is helpful because that doesn't happen.
"it's difficult to make a solid moral rule on whether you should prioritize the life of the mother or the embryo."
No, not really. Now, I can buy that an embryo is a human, I won't gainsay you there. But wow, those are two categorically different states of human-ness. Then, on top of that, you have the fact that the embryo human is totally (yes you could come up with exceptions, but really...) dependent on the mother for life sustenance. Her human card is incontrovertibly the stronger, higher-ranking card. And I she so chooses to not deliver to term that embryo human, then so be it! Call it murder if you must, but all you do is cheapen the word murder.
As for this gene-selecting stuff, not my bag. I think there are real moral issues there, but "embryo is human and no killing humans" is not one of them.
I think I follow Wowzers point. Before you dismissed potential to grow as irrelevant you tried to dismiss embryos as unable to grow. If you're able to throw in extra arguments in a section you'll later bypass, isn't Wowzer allowed to correct them? After all if you thought they were definitely of no value then presumably you wouldn't have included them in your original article :-).
I had to pull the escape cord at the "pizza is a potential person" insult. But the deliberate discarding and destruction of the non-selected embryos is at issue. If you're not using them, keep them preserved.
You don't even need to have to fund their preservation, but they need to be passed off to an organization that will fund it. You can pass a law that they have no inheritance rights, and pass a law that they can't be implanted against the parents' wishes for N years and/or while the parents are alive so they don't have to worry about family squabbles.
We don't currently require e.g. brain dead / long term comatose children to be kept on indefinite life support, but this seems inconsistent with the rule you are proposing. Do you think we need adjustments there as well?
It's highly unusual for the doctors to be /completely/ certain. Are the frozen embryos in your proposal ever actually going to get defrosted and grown?
Are they going to get defrosted is a question about what care we offer them, not whether we expect them to grow and flourish if that care is not withheld.
Perhaps they may die. The freezer and its backups may fail tomorrow. If an axe murderer is trying to kill someone, I'll try to stop them, even if the person they're trying to kill may die in a car crash tomorrow.
We know they're still perfectly healthy 30 years later, not distinguishable at all from embryos made today. There's no reason to think we can't just keep all of them alive indefinitely. Maybe 50 years from now people have a sudden desire for 20th century babies. Maybe we achieve some great technological breakthrough and babies can be grown in artificial wombs and the baby shortage in America is resolved.
The question in both scenarios is, "is a nonzero chance the child ever wakes up worth the costs of keeping them alive". I think if we take the position that the answer to that is an unconditional "yes" for the embryos regardless of cost, we should take that same position for the comatose kids on life support situation.
Look, I'm old enough to remember Louise Brown and all the fol-de-rol about the precious miracle of sacred life and how could anyone be against this because it's allowing people to have desperately wanted babies, and then as soon as the industry shifted into gear all these "precious sacred miracles" frozen embryos became "rubbish cluttering up the place which needs to be disposed of", or "well if you're only going to dump them, give 'em to us for mad science experiments".
I think there's a difference between something going wrong that leads to a person's death (like a disease that puts a child into a long-term comatose state, or an embryo implanting itself into the fallopian tube) and someone intentionally putting an end to a human life in an immoral way (throwing a child in front of a moving vehicle, or removing an embryo from where it natrually already was thriving and then discarding it). I don't know any rule for what would make ending a human life moral, but I'm sure people can argue that killing in war or the death sentence or stuff like that is moral human killing.
I still think removing an embryo and freezing it indefinitely is very weird and *feels* wrong to me, but it isn't murder.
> removing an embryo from where it natrually already was thriving and then discarding it
Is that what happens? I thought the actual fertilisation for this family of techniques happened outside the womb, and only later would the selected embryo be reimplanted.
Oh oops I think you're right about that, and while that is a very different situation, I think a similar idea applies. Eggs and sperm don't naturally occur in a lab outside the body, so whoever intentionally combines those, thus beginning a human organism, and then discards it would be a murderer.
Maybe even saying "naturally occurs" is wrong. Whatever the case, a human intentionally bringing a human organism into being and then disposing of it would be a murderer.
The difference is that hypothetical you deliberately created the embryos, whereas you presumably didn't deliberately cause the comatose child to be comatose. That makes you responsible for the former in a way you aren't necessarily responsible for the latter.
There are certainly disagreements about what you can do with an embryo /before/ it becomes a child, including heated discussions in past comments sections here; but I've never before heard anyone argue that the parents aren't responsible for the well-being of a child /after/ it's been born.
I'm tempted to look for a "magic moment" we can set as the divider but there's another problem with it:
A large percent of early embryos don't make it to live birth, and many or most are nonviable to some degree. They may die within a minute, an hour, a day, a week, with or without implanting, with or without knowledge to science or to the mother. The cause of this could be luck, incompatibility, genes in either party doing some kind of selfish gene battle, or many other reasons. Some of them are probably savable today, others with minor modifications, others with major. They may be born with weaknesses which kill them immediately, after any amount of time, if they don't receive supplemental treatment costing 1$, 1m$, 1t$, or of any intensity, which may not exist yet. This necessary treatment may also be needed at any point before birth.
The point is we currently only see anything about a pregnancy or a birth well after natural filtering has been applied. Most previous moral theories had it easy because they didn't have to deal with this and include this filtering out of non-working combinations in their moral calculus since the world and the lack of tech made it sad but economically easy to just accept this as fate.
It's hard to count all of these but combining all stages of possible loss, there may be many more conceptions than live births we see today (gpt estimates at least 10% loss rates at compatibility, implantation, survival at various stages) and possibly much more.
The fact that men produce 100m plus sperm should be making you very suspicious of this line of argument.
Our view of conception is similar to 1990s popular views of AI - a reified significant all or nothing state which could be argued about as a whole. When we dig in, just like AI, I predict we'll see this area is incredibly messy with almost every possible state existing, meaning that you'll always be able to find a state which challenges any attempts at bright line drawing.
The world can be dangerous and nobody makes it out alive. Yet we don't kill existing people.
The transhumanists often propose transporters that can duplicate a baby. I'm not a transhumanist who thinks such a thing can exist. But if it did, while there's no requirement to just run the machine all day making babies, if you *do* run the machine, you have a human life with a human's moral worth. If you don't want the responsibility of taking care of that baby, don't run the machine. It's a 100% voluntary and 100% predictable action.
Just keeping the embryos alive is a massively low bar. You don't even need to pay for it. It makes PEPFAR look like some random charity run by a millionaire's bored wire.
See, I would have (grudgingly) given in on very early embryos as per your examples, except the pro-abortion lot just would not frickin' stop. Ever. At any limit.
It was always one more exception, then one more, then one more. Rape and incest and danger to physical life of the mother legalisation only? Yes, but what if it won't *physically* kill the mother but it will make her very mentally distressed.
Okay, then what about if it will make her financially distressed?
Term limits? Well you can never be precisely exactly sure how far along a pregnancy is, are you going to use The Force Of Law against a woman and her doctor who make a genuine mistake for a week or two too far along? What about poor women who have to save up for abortions?
What about, what about, what about and never, ever stopping. The unspoken, and then later admitted, position being "abortion on demand, no reasons needed, no limits".
Roe vs Wade was a kludge, and a lot of the cases subsequent to that were the same. But as foetal viability was pushed back earlier, the push to expand abortion intensified. Even the Guttmacher Institute, carrying out surveys, found that the vast majority of abortions were for financial reasons, that the "rape/incest/threat to life" examples that are the ones always used when arguing for abortion were miniscule by comparison (e.g. rape was something under 1% if I remember). That's a very old survey by now, but the broad outlines remain the same.
So since the pro-choice, pro-abortion set have shown they have no interest at all in compromise (and indeed that "compromise" to them means "you nutjob zealots give in on your principles and agree with everything we demand"), I have no reason at all to give in an inch because I know the mile will be taken.
I'm actually not pro abortion or involved with those ideas much at all. I'm just trying to find an agreeable and moral solution where people survive and life isn't too bad for them. I actually wish the default bright line system worked better. Or, if the tech existed to filter earlier, at the sperm or egg level, I'd do that. Cause for me I'm trying to avoid having evolution work against conscious beings; in the current system, we let people grow up and only then nature kills them for having random bad mutations as the main way necessary filtering happens. My goal is to lessen such suffering. As long as some filtering is necessary fir human sexual reproduction & adaptation systems, doing it abstractly seems better.
So my comment is why I think that a broad agreement to hold embryos as the main thing we agree to care about doesnt work very well. Because against the total loss rate, opposing abortion, or freezing embryos, isn't working, and the consensus on this will continually be undermined by people who find out about the 100m sperm and all that. We just didn't see it or know about most of it before. So to keep that view going, groups might get stuck avoiding the knowledge of how conception etc works. That isn't an attractive state since it wouldn't be strong as long as science still works. And even moreso the whole absolute sanctity of life generally skates free by delegating the necessary filtering to nature. If tech keeps improving, that'll stop too and the remaining view will lead to really bad outcomes.
So, I think that there are other options available which improve what I care about like not making life fearful or painful for consciousness. I would admit that this kind of heuristic isn't as good as the old "never cause abortion" rule. If I'm wrong about their actual effectiveness at saving lost of embryos, then I'd adjust.
See, it all *sounds* lovely: let's filter out so the bad things won't happen in future! Let's only have happy healthy babies!
Existence is going to hit us over the head with an anvil some day anyway. The happy healthy baby may grow up to be a teenager who drowns while swimming.
Yes, but on the other hand, I personally would happily destroy a billion Petri dishes full of embryos, if doing so would lead to total eradication of e.g. Down's Syndrome. Or Cystic Fibrosis. Or a slew of other genetic illnesses. Yes, the resulting children might still drown while swimming or whatever, but at least I can be sure they won't live a short life full of constant pain (due to e.g. Cystic Fibrosis).
Isn't this symmetrical? Yes, actions can have bad outcomes. But, inaction can have bad outcomes too. Our job is to decide what to do or not do based on whatever info, beliefs system etc
If you think ignoring prenatal risk factors is okay because people still drown, that's a view which most don't agree with for actual reasons. I'm convinceable to your view, if you can show that with proper weighting, your argument is right. As of now, it's not because even if my child could die, I still also don't want them to get cancer more than necessary.
You're the one with status quo bias. That is, the belief that the amount of something nature provides is the actually right amount we should accept or want. (Sorry if this is not accurate; what is your reason for suggesting we should not do more in the area of reproduction?)
Sometimes that's right, sometimes it's wrong. Mere existence of hypotheticals within which I'm wrong don't convince me to change my actions.
All cases have possible data and imaginary situations where they could be right. Just outlining one isn't enough to solve it
Imagine telling an abortion patient, who isn't a political activist and probably didn't even vote, that you don't think she should be able to get an abortion not because of philosophy, theology, or moral reasoning, but because you're annoyed with the people you have online political discussions with. Just goes to show that while this isn't true of every pro-lifer, for a great many of them it's got nothing to do with empathy for other people's fetuses, it's about them and their antisocial desire to exercise power over others. I dream of a society where that ability is permanently taken away.
If compromise clearly and consistently later leads to a new compromise even farther from your actual position, then compromising is not in your interest. As they said, if you give an inch, they will take a mile.
You trivialize it by saying "annoyed with people you have political discussions with" but what they're actually doing is making a strategic decision on how far they're willing to accept abortion goes in light of a side that will take advantage of any willingness to budge.
This is true for both sides of course, and probably true of all political issues in some sense. Calling this an "antisocial desire to exercise power over others" is just an attempt to unfairly portray someone you disagree with in a negative light, when they're playing the political field as it actually is.
>If compromise clearly and consistently later leads to a new compromise even farther from your actual position, then compromising is not in your interest.
Abortion being legal does not harm Deiseach's interests at all.
Pro-choicers have always been honest that they want the decision to be between a woman and her doctor. This is just accusation in a mirror, you talk about late-term abortion so you can get power and ban it all. I would encourage pro-lifers who see themselves as moral people to ask why their side contains so many dishonest people and dishonest arguments.
Yes, Alexander, we all know what you'd do if you were in power, such as the ad campaign you lovingly described about shaming teenage girls who got pregnant and didn't immediately get an abortion.
You'd tell an abortion patient, as you chivvied her out the door to the clinic, that since she was too impulsive and selfish to exercise self-control and not have sex, and too stupid to use contraception responsibly, then she should indeed get that abortion right away so as not to spawn a sub-human low intelligence low-value leech that will rely on being supported for life by the public purse. And while she's there, get her tubes tied as well so this doesn't happen in future!
I described an ad campaign I thought could help Democrats win elections.
Your second paragraph just more accusation in a mirror. You're the one who wants to stand outside an abortion clinic and yell judgmental stuff at patients.
What would I say to her? I wouldn't tell her she has a duty not to reproduce for eugenic reasons, as the much bigger issue is low fertility among the intelligent. I would tell her she should not expect society to support her if she does keep the pregnancy, whether that means the welfare system or her family.
I find it funny you condemn me for being too judgement of other people's sexual behavior, when the trad society you people wish for would be a thousand times worse in that respect.
On the other hand though, pregnant women don't undergo abortion just for the fun of it; rather, they do so because they really truly in their hearts of hearts do not want to raise the baby. Yes yes I'm sure you can find some extreme counter-examples, but those are outliers. So, it seems to me that if you force these women to carry the babies to term, you need some comprehensive program for ensuring that the babies would be raised by people who are actually interested in raising them. Otherwise, you end up creating more problems than you solve.
> you need some comprehensive program for ensuring that the babies would be raised by people who are actually interested in raising them.
I’m always intrigued by people raising this as an objection to not aborting babies, because we know both currently and historically that there is a very active market in babies that are even mostly-healthy. People will pay very large sums of money for newborn babies, even if they are not related to them, and most of those people seem to be interested in raising them. Demand greatly outstrips supply at the moment.
I’m pretty sure that when you think about it, you already know this. Think of the scandals around mother-and-baby-homes. Think of news around international adoptions. Think of stories around surrogacy. Think of stories you have seen about couples and individuals trying to find a pregnant teenager willing to hand over her baby as soon as it is born, and disputes about whether the mother can change her mind.
Finding willing parents for these babies is not a problem.
> Finding willing parents for these babies is not a problem.
It is arguably not a problem *right now*, when the number of unwanted babies is relatively low. Yet the system scales very poorly. Currently prospective parents who wish to adopt a child have to go through an extremely long and laborious vetting process; surrogacy is the same, but even worse. Even now, with abortion (and contraception) still being mostly legal (or at least available), many unwanted children are unable to find a family willing and able to raise them. And before you say, Libertarian-like, "just drop all the regulations, problem solved", note that this laborious vetting process has a purpose: it is to ensure that those babies would actually be raised in good conditions by people who would care for them. Finding such people is a legitimately difficult task.
Also BTW, I haven't mentioned contraception in my previous post because people who are opposed to abortion are usually also opposed to contraception on the same moral grounds. Still, from the strictly mechanical point of view, another way to reduce the demand for abortions would be to make contraception free (and perhaps even mandatory).
Ah, but did you not know that adoption is *worse* than abortion? See, if a woman goes through a pregnancy and gives birth and has any time with the baby, then she will get attached, and then giving up the baby will make her sad.
So instead of her being all sad and like that every time she thinks of the baby she gave up over the years, much much better to abort it while it's still in the "clump of cells" stage.
"Although there are positive perceptions about adoption, the rates of adoption in the U.S. are relatively low. Adoption isn’t a popular choice for pregnant people, because it is distressing and traumatic for birth mothers to relinquish their children, even in open adoptions, which don't solve all of the complications and differing interests that can occur among families, post-adoption. There was a brief decline in adoption rates for white women after the passage of Roe vs. Wade, but the steady decline overall isn't because of Roe v. Wade, but because of cultural changes that have resulted in less stigma for single women who become parents. Framing adoption as an alternative to abortion is not supported by the reasons women choose either abortion or adoption. Policies that try to promote adoption in an attempt to reduce abortion rates are misguided and misinformed. Instead, policies should reflect a reproductive justice framework that ensures that we all have rights and access to resources that support pregnant people's choice to parent or not, and promote safety, dignity, and well-being."
"Alito’s and Barrett’s arguments were greeted with immediate outcry: that a far-right SCOTUS was paving the way to treat pregnant women as the source of a commercial product, a domestic supply of adoptable babies. But Alito was only saying the quiet part out loud. Because in truth, that’s long been the reality across much of the adoption industry. For all the rhetoric of “win-win-win” solutions that surround adoption — domestic and foreign, private and public — for decades, adoption has too often functioned as a supply-and-demand industry, where mostly poorer women provide the supply to meet richer families’ demand.
That conclusion is unavoidable in reading Gretchen Sisson’s new book Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood. Sisson, a sociologist at the University of California, San Francisco and a researcher with the landmark Turnaway Study, which tracked outcomes for women denied abortions, undertook a 10-year study, from 2010 to 2020, of women who relinquished babies for adoption. She found that the overwhelmingly common factor to women choosing to relinquish children for adoption today is income disparity and poverty, and the overwhelming outcome for those women is enduring grief and loss."
"Then there are the adoptees. In 2019, there were roughly 115,000 domestic adoptions in the United States. In the same year, more than 122,000 children waited in foster care for adoption; the average wait for a child to be placed in a home was 31 months. By the numbers alone, we are already failing our most vulnerable children.
Among those who oppose abortion, the children’s very existence is often cast as a happy ending. But it’s not that simple.
Children in the foster system often experience the disruption of multiple placements and are likely to contend with significant mental health problems. Studies have shown that adoptees — who struggle with attachment, identity and the trauma of institutionalization — are four times as likely to attempt suicide as non-adoptees."
> pregnant women don't undergo abortion just for the fun of it
The problem with this kind of statement is the world is much larger than that and has every kind of person in it, and your interlocutors will always be able to dig up some random nutter who proudly proclaims in clickbait interviews that she regularly aborts for fun and everyone else also should.
Why are these specific clumps of cells afforded such value when the sperm and the egg and the shed uterine lining and the severed limb aren’t? The natural progression of all these things is death and decay without ever developing anything resembling a human consciousness.
And I think you can generalize that up until the point of implantation. The natural progression of an egg is death. Of a zygote, death. Of a blastocyst, death, *unless* it is also in the correct environment. There is no way to reach consciousness without the womb.
It works as an argument against abortion, but not against IVF.
My blood cells (and shed uterine lining when I was shedding) are parts of me but are not independent entities. Had I ever become pregnant, that would be a whole individual and different new life, not a piece of me like my toenails or appendix.
Take your question to the limit, and what are any of us except clumps of cells? That's the transhumanist quest right there - pull out this evanescent concept called a consciousness or a mind and turn it into some immortal machine thing.
Why think a mind has value? Why care if you develop Alzheimers', what are you losing anyway? Nobody has been able to cut a mind out of a dead brain and weigh it on a scales!
Nobody has been able to cut human-ness out of a dead body and weigh it on scales either. The things we care about are often things that arise from complex, ongoing interactions and not some physical substance that can be easily measured.
"The things we care about are often things that arise from complex, ongoing interactions and not some physical substance that can be easily measured."
Precisely, which is why attempts at "it's a person when it is sentient, and it is sentient when it's [this many months old/this IQ measurement]" are also blunt instruments to solve the complex question of what it is to be a human.
I agree that "it is sentient when it's [this many months old/this IQ measurement]" is a bad argument. Probably, degree of sentience is a continuous thing that generally increases with cognitive development. At the very least, if there is some effect that causes a discrete jump in sentience at some point, science hasn't found it yet.
But why depend on these blunt instruments at all? An embryo probably has a little bit more of whatever it is that we care about than a sperm and egg separately, a newborn has more than that, and perhaps an adult more than that.
A fetus is not independent. Neither is a freshly implanted blastocyst, nor a zygote free-floating in the Fallopian tube, nor the separate sperm and egg. If you think any of those things are worth protecting, it’s got to come from something other than independence.
I understand that your religion makes specific claims about the moment of conception. But no one has been able to cut out a soul any more than a mind. If we’re ruling out those ephemera, what is so special about the fertilized egg?
I don’t believe there is a principled, materialist way to separate a brainless, dependent zygote from the other brainless, dependent bits of biology we regularly discard.
"embryos, which have less of a brain and nervous system even than bugs, should be less valuable still"
That's a very weird value system. A cold dead human corpse has even less of functioning brain and nervous system and yet we do not handle corpses the same way we handle logs. The most rational explanation for that seems to be that a corpse and a foetus values are linked to what they were or what they could be - a human. In both cases, that human is currently non-existent, but this link is still obviously relevant. This link is arguably even more important in the case of a foetus we are about to kill, as nothing we can do with a corpse has a direct causal effect on the linked human and killing the foetus very much has.
Why did you lump "what they were" and "what they could be" together? Manifestly the crucial part of scott's argument is that the person has existed at some point. The way people handle corpses (out of belief for afterlife or leftover cognitive tendencies) doesn't really have anything to do with this conversation. Im willing to bet that someone who deals with corpses often is going to be much more cavalier in handling a corpse. I don't like how you're mixing the direction of time and causality in this fetus vs corpse argument.
As scott said in the article literally every molecule in your vicinity right now has the potential to be human right now. You obviously need to draw the line somewhere (between pizza and baby) but the point is going to be arbitrary.
I am not sure I understand your argument fully, especially the part around "leftover cognitive tendencies". I am sure an average human has a vague idea of what he is going or not going to do with his mother's corpse. These ideas would not be consistent with valuing lumps of organic matter in proportion to their nervous function, as Scott seems to suggest. Hence, this metric is not consistent with our morality and value systems.
I think the sleight-of-hand here is assuming the equivalence of “what they were” and “what they could be”. Maybe that equivalence is right and maybe it’s wrong, but Scott’s property rights argument and the argument about the effects on friends and family are enough to suggest to me that it isn’t.
I’ll admit to to a weird vaguely contradictory feature of my worldview: At one end, I believe that a woman who became pregnant through rape should be able to abort the embryo, possibly even if it has brain cells. But at the other end I also believe that if a woman who with her man has produced an embryo that they want deeply to be a child, and the woman is assaulted by a psychopath with a knife and loses the child as a result, even if it does not yet have a brain cell (!), then that psychopath is a murderer and should be treated as such. I can’t explain both of these by reference to the state of the embryo in isolation, but I am as sure as I can be about both. If you ask me to draw a line that separates them, I will, but if you ask me to put them on the same side of the line, I won’t.
A couple trying to have a child produces a lot of potential humans, at least in Scott’s sense of a sperm vaguely in the vicinity of an egg, and I can’t convince myself that the discarded embryos from IVF are different from that in any meaningful way. Production of the eventual child is the miracle.
I think your preferences are consistent with our practice of punishing uncertain/unintended outcomes of a crime differently from the same outcomes caused by legitimate actions. This is the principle behind the US legal concepts of "felony murder" and, broader, "transferred intent". In your examples, the uncertainty is metaphysical while "transferred intent" is usually applied to epistemic uncertainties, but it seems to be similar otherwise. Two humans - the woman in the first example and the psychopath in the second - should be treated differently despite the same outwards actions, because one of them is a victim and the other is committing other crimes, such as an assault.
I appreciate that you are at least aware of the tension between your two scenarios... It's sad that nature doesn't always give us clean answers, but we have to muddle along as best we can nonetheless. Recognizing the contradictory nature at least makes it much easier to sympathize with folks who draw the line elsewhere.
My two opinions are really in tension only if I insist on making my judgements focused only on the embryo’s putative rights or personhood. That tension is part of what convinces me that it’s not the right way to approach these questions.
This seems a bad example: we also handle a corpse very differently from a human being. We seem to care a lot about the "dignity" of the corpse but we don't care about, say, its autonomy or its free speech rights. And of course we destroy corpses all the time- if we valued embryos like corpses, abortion would be quite legal. I think these are just two very different cases with different justifications and looking at one doesn't actually tell us anything about the other.
Maybe I should have specific moral value, rather than ritual value.
I would definitely care a lot about my relative's corpse, but only in the same way I would care about their photo albums or their wedding ring.
I think the imperative to respect corpses comes from two places. First, if the person themselves wanted their corpse respected, we respect that for the same reason we respect the sleeping hermit. Second, if the family wants the corpse respected, we respect it out of respect for the family.
I don't think either of those considerations arise in embryo selection.
You are distinguishing here between "moral" and "ritual" values. The ritual value is probably similar to what Donald below calls "symbolism and ceremony". I am not sure why this distinction matters. Humans build rituals and ceremonies around things that they believe to be important; these rituals reflect their values and moral judgements these things. If we dismiss a ritual value because it is not a moral value, is it not the same as just dismissing value systems of those involved in rituals?
I am not sure your imperatives to respect corpses are sufficient to explain our intuitions and behaviours. For example, suppose you see a head of a just beheaded person lying on the street, with all of their family lying dead next to them. I think 1) you would have a very strong aversion to using the head as a football 2) you would feel this aversion without necessarily thinking about someone playing with your own head 3) this aversion would not come from the respect to the family of the beheaded as that family is also assumed to be dead.
So there must be something else giving moral value to corpses. I am not insisting that it is necessarily a link to a former human, but I do not see that much explanatory power in your two imperatives.
I mean I do have other reasons for not wanting to use the head as a football, but they are complicated social reasons that are probably hard to disentangle from the "symbolism and ceremony" related reasons.
The societal norms against mistreating dead bodies probably arose for a lot of reasons ranging from the symbolism, to hygienic, to making it harder to cover up murders. These norms are then internalized to some degree and not re-evaluated from first principles in cases where some of the original underlying reasons don't apply.
> A cold dead human corpse has even less of functioning brain and nervous system and yet we do not handle corpses the same way we handle logs.
The way corpses are handled depends on a mix of practical reasons like disease prevention, organ donation, medical science. It also makes it hard for murderers to get away with hiding a corpse. If it was common practice to throw a corpse in your trash can whenever someone died, then a corpse in a trash can would be much less suspicious, and getting away with murder would be easier.
Also, the living relatives like some symbolism and ceremony.
For the embryos, “what they were” is even less deserving of care. Women tend to throw away one egg a month. You’re leaning entirely on the “what they could be” side. Isn’t that exactly what Scott is arguing against?
I also was wondering about the "dead hermit's corpse" example, and was happy to see you bring it up. Virtue ethics solves this problem easily, of course (many such cases!) but it has nothing to do with the sentience of the hermit, at least not in the present moment. You'd handle the flag draped on your grandfather's casket carefully too, even though it was never sentient.
> we do not handle corpses the same way we handle logs.
Sure we do: we burn them to ash or bury them in the ground. We have health protocols around corpses because they can spread disease. To the extent that corpses are treated reverentially, that's strictly downstream of the property rights of bereaved family members. A corpse with no one to claim it IS, in fact, treated more-or-less exactly like a potentially-infectious log.
No, because skulls aren't really round. They wouldn't work very well. Also people have an instinctual disgust for dead bodies. That doesn't make it immoral. Many people have an instinctual disgust at seeing someone stabbed in the eye but that doesn't make eye surgery immoral.
If some isolated culture or town had developed a collective appreciation for using appropriately-disinfected heads as footballs, I don't think anyone would have any rational basis for morally condemning them.
I think the reductio-ad-absurdism for embryo personhood can be a lot simpler (than sentient robots and such):
There are lots of men and women around. If the sperms don't have personhood and the eggs don't have personhood, what about all of the sperm-egg pairs that are just walking around?
Any time *any* man and woman do not mate and become pregnant, that is a sperm-egg pair -- which could have become a person -- being wasted, and both sides killed. Are we concerned about this?
Well I'm pretty sure it's because pro-life people believe in souls, and it's not actually about "potential to become a person" at all. If I'm wrong about that, then alright I'll cop to the failure if curiosity.
I think you should talk to these guys if you're curious about why non-soul caring pro-lifers also don't feel implicated by your reductio. They're friendly! https://x.com/secularprolife
I've scrolled through a bit but twitter is kinda tough for finding the meat of the issue. If you have a link to a place where someone has written down the core of the secular argument, I would appreciate it.
I think we're a little misaligned in our conversation here. My reductio is specifically aimed at people who believe the morality hinges on "potential to become a person". I alreat know that not all pro-life people take that stance; of course those will big be compelled by it. So there's no wonder about that.
As far as just reaching out and asking them about it, I appreciate that but I'm going to decline. I'm a little suspicious of having to go through the route of 1-on-1 conversation rather than just reading something. I mean why don't I just go into the Scientologist building and have a little chat with them if I wanna really see where they're coming from, right?
Okay, what's a person? Are we talking minimum IQ levels? Should we therefore quietly and humanely knock off all the human-shaped-but-not-persons that are already existing but not reaching the set of standards that define a person as written by the best thinkers?
Two can play the game of "I'll make you sound as ridiculous as possible and not even be interested in why you think as you do, simply because you don't agree with what I want".
Not Op, but more than a decade ago, I was a pro-life person who abandoned those views precisely because of an argument of this nature.
“Every sperm is sacred” is the inevitable, but absurd conclusion of the “potential person” argument against abortion, which I always thought was the pro-life position’s best argument against abortion. Its failure forced me to accept the fact that the pro-life position was logically unworkable if you aren’t going to resort to religious arguments.
The thought of killing babies still makes me sad, but I try to imagine the child the mother would have had later on in her life when she felt more able to support one. A child that wouldn’t exist if the mother was forced to carry her current baby to term.
"I try to imagine the child the mother would have had later on in her life when she felt more able to support one. A child that wouldn’t exist if the mother was forced to carry her current baby to term."
Ah, yes: the child that might be, if mommy feels she wants a rugrat at some undefined future time.
If you want to force women to give birth to children against their will, there are probably more effective ways of doing that than just preventing them from getting legal abortions.
Most people have an urge to reproduce, and the ones that don’t are going to gradually become less and less common as natural selection does its work.
If a woman isn’t willing/able to have a child despite wanting one, then that says more about the morality of society than the woman.
Not if the right to life is a negative right, no. You’d be obligated not to take life, but *not* obligated to bring it about in the first place. Remember, Copenhagen ethics are pretty darn common!
I think this can actually come down in favor of IVF, since unimplanted, undeveloped embryos are absolutely not developing into human consciousness without further outside actions. But the debate rarely ends there. Most people have more stipulations on their ethical model.
A world where the rich have better genes than the poor looks really bad to me. Because of the extinction risk decreasing effects of higher IQ humans, I guess I'm grudgingly okay with it, but I don't see why others have their great enthusiasm for it. If we wouldn't be in a hurry, I would say let the state control this technology and dispense it evenly when we are wealthy enough.
I would argue that we live in and always have lived in a world in which the rich have better genes than the poor. They also have better educations, better food and so on.
What you say is true, but to such lesser extent compared to my imagined future that it's a mere technicality. Currently, there are tons of poor people who are smarter, taller, hotter or healthier than tons of rich people even if the population average is lower. This is not comparable to a state where nigh every rich person is better on all those traits than nigh every poor person.
EDIT: accidentally posted with other account first, sry
You can make a parallel argument about capitalism: it concentrates resources in the hands of the most capable. While that widens inequality it's more than compensated for by the surplus value created. The poor are further away from the rich but they're also further away from starvation. I think that's a clear net-positive and I expect the same to be true of embryo selection. Any inequality generated will be offset by positive spillovers and remedied by redistribution.
Are you sure? A lot of past royalty were the result of generations of inbreeding. They really did not have good genes by the end. And royalty, for a long time, was as rich as you could got get.
Gene selection would filter down. "The rich" is not a constant group. I've seen the kids of my cohort as an elite school and there is substantial reversion to the mean.
The problem is that it *will* be a constant group if this technology becomes capable enough. You can't really compete with people being better than you in every respect.
EDIT: again, sry for posting with other account first
Genetic enhancement would be more palatable the more equal society already was imo.
A lot of socialist and progressives from before WW2 were eugenicists. Redistributive economics seems like a natural complement to eugenics to me.
Currently the economy rewards people who just happen to have been born with the right genes and punishes people who didn't. But obviously no one deserves their genes and it does absolutely nothing to actually improve the population genetics overall.
It would be much more rational to just ensure as many people as possible have good genes but still compensate the people who happen not to.
I liked your comment, because I mostly agree with it, but because of your profile picture I'm compelled to note that I only agree if redistributive economics means something similar to Nordic countries and not communism. Capitalism has its faults, but giving up voluntary trades is much worse..
There are plenty of reasons not to support communism (I am also not a fan) but they should be grounded in what communists actually support; the cessation of all voluntary trades is not such.
Fair (I assume you mean theres still personal property that can be traded), my true objection is that I don't like when people or the state takes others' property without compensation. In my view, taxation can be just because the person who made the wealth profited from the surrounding society when making that wealth, but I can see that it's probably a difference in degree and not kind from communism.
I've lived through the time period covering cell phones being brick-sized hunks of plastic with huge antennas that only the wealthy owned, to being tiny advanced computers hooked up to the repository of all human knowledge which 98% of Americans own.
Technology tends to filter down quickly. In particular, it tends to filter down in less than 1 or 2 generations, which means that there wouldn't be enough time for heritable gaps to become very meaningful.
I considered adding caveats about the difference between huge expensive 'technologies' like yachts or skyscrapers, vs. consumer-grade 'technologies' that don't require lots of expensive physical resources or human labor. Felt like a diversion but maybe I should have included it.
Anyway, yes, space travel is limited because we don't have a technology that can be made resource-cheap; our best methods still require building a huge rocket, and burning huge amounts of fuel. Yachts and skyscrapers take a huge amount of physical resources, and also take up limited real estate in a dock or city.
I expect gene selection technologies to be more analogous to cellphones in this sense, something that requires a ton of innovation and effort to advance as a science and as a commodity, but afterwards can be produced with relatively low per-unit cost in terms of physical resources and human labor.
It's possible someone who knows more about the topic could tell me I'm wrong, that it requires some rare resource that will always be expensive or can never be divorced from huge amounts of specialized human labor. If that's true then my comment doesn't apply, but I don't think it's true.
This same argument could be made for almost every technology. When only the rich had access to books, one could say "the poor will never be able to compete against the rich now! They have all this stored knowledge at their disposal and we don't!" But everyone has books now. Just as with embryo selection. Costs for it have already come down a million fold, they will continue to come down, as demand for it grows. The smartphone only took about 10 years -- from the first iphone to billions of people having one -- not even a full generation.
It sounds like you would prefer a more equal distribution of technology at a very high cost: e.g. millions of more people suffering from genetic diseases in the meantime due to this technology being delayed. Why would this tradeoff be worth it?
Well, the difference is the degree of advantage. For example, I don't think I couldn't at all compete against a rich person with a book even if I don't have books.
As I said in another comment, if you can convince me that it will be available to most everyone in time then I'm okay with it, I'm just not comfortable banking on a maybe.
Surely, genetic disease prevention can be separated from hotness, smarts, diligence, etc.. improvements. With purely disease prevention I'm much more okay (yes I know there's some correlation, but again, it's the degree that matters). Also, I generally value tons of things higher than the prevention of suffering or death.
I actually find it hard to see why there is a moral issue with "the rich" having access to this technology first. It feels like it's just a statement of fact: "the set of people who have more resources will be able to purchase this new technology first" and "the other set of people who have less resources will not be able to purchase this new technology first." My thought is... so what?
Is the set of people who have more resources worse in some way than the set of people who have less resources? Are they more evil? Are they more likely to use this technology to do bad things? I don't see any morally relevant difference between them. Of course I think ideally everyone who wants this technology should have access to it, but there's no reason why we should be unhappy if at first, only a portion of everyone who wants it (the people who can afford it) are able to access it first.
As I said in two other comments, if everyone will have it after some time, then all's good.
If not, then I don't think my issue is moral, it's more aesthetic. If there's a permanent underclass, I feel that's a bad outcome not because of morality, but because of aesthetics, but as I alluded to in othet comment, I often value things above morality and I suspect the modal person (who you will need to convince! I'm just some guy on a toilet) does too.
I think the chance of not everyone having access to this technology after some time is the same chance that existed for most every other technology. I think the price will come down over time like every other technology, and if it proves really beneficial (like vaccines) the government will subsidize it and distribute it to anyone who wants it. The only way I see a bad distribution of this technology far into the future is if some evil actor(s) took power and created an underclass purposefully, not tied to the distribution of this genetic enhancement technology, but just generally created a separate underclass. So I think the release of this technology has no bearing on a permanent underclass's creation.
We already have a problem with the rich looking down on the poor, just imagine how much worse it'll be once the rich are literally a race of superior ubermenschen.
The previous Aga Khan (leader of Ismailite Islam) was married to two models in his lifetime. His son, the new Aga Khan, was married to just one so far, but still has time. Is the dynasty of Aga Khans going to produce humans so good looking that they’ll effectively be a different species of humans?
The practical objection to 3 probably falls foul of the fence around the law point; barring a sudden breakthrough, I expect polygenic trait selection in IVF is where the big culture war fight about "designer babies" is going to happen. The line between that and chromosome-selection, chromosome-arm selection and ultimately full-blown baby CRISPR is going to be less intuitively substantial for most people than allowing trait selection at all.
If society allows the killing of sleeping hermits, then people would know about it, and that would cause angst to awake hermits, especially if they were about to take a nap.
I think this is the correct way to approach this. It does however have the counterintuitive property whereby there is nothing intrinsically wrong with killing sleeping hermits, it is only wrong because of the broader context of human society.
"the reason we have things like legal personhood that protect sleeping hermits"
But why should we grant personhood to a sleeping hermit? That's the crux of the argument.
And what is given legally can be taken away legally, as well, if we feel so inclined. As we have done with abortion - before, the child in the womb was to be protected by law. Now law says nope, not a person, can kill it.
Suppose a law is passed that says "humans who are one-quarter Hispanic are now no longer in possession of legal personhood and so may be treated accordingly by those who are full persons", that is, as non-persons or on a par with animals or even property.
Would you go along with that? Would you continue to insist they had full human rights? Just because they are existing in some form? Yeah, they're existing, but they're not *people*, the law says so, Scott! Why be so sentimental about non-persons that can't even become potential persons (they can't scrub that one-quarter Hispanic out of their biology).
After fifty years of "quadtroos aren't people", just as with Roe Vs Wade, there would be those who had grown up under that knowing nothing else and being bemused to infuriated by the nutcases trying to turn the clock back to the bad old days when quadtroos had 'rights' like real people. And making the same "pizza is a person! every sperm is sacred!" arguments to jeer at those nutjobs and their position.
I just got through explaining this in the post, and my comment itself was saying part of the reason! If you really want me to repeat it:
- Because awake hermits could never be comfortable if they thought people could kill them in their sleep.
- Because society could never be stable if you could kill people in their sleep.
- Because any philosophy which cares about people's preferences must include some understanding where those preferences continue even when the people are not having them at that moment, since that's how human preferences work.
If you argue legality, then you have to accept that what is awarded by law can be taken away by law, rather than being an innate quality by reason of humanity.
"PORTIA, as Balthazar
A pound of that same merchant’s flesh is thine:
The court awards it, and the law doth give it.
SHYLOCK Most rightful judge!
PORTIA, as Balthazar
And you must cut this flesh from off his breast:
The law allows it, and the court awards it."
Be careful about appeals to law, they bind tighter than you might like.
"the embryo had everything it needed to grow into a person on its own[...]This isn’t entirely true - an embryo sitting in the middle of a field will just die"
While it is true that an embryo relies on a very specific environment to survive and be a human in the future, the same is true about all other living organisms. If a 6 month old child was placed in the middle of a field it would die. If you were placed in the middle of a field, with nothing else within 50 miles but a field, you would die (slowly.) If you were placed in a random spot in our galaxy, you would die with probability 99.9999...% (very quickly), this probability being the same for you as for the embryo to a very large precision. Does this devalue your humanhood in any way?
Irrelevant. We’re not looking for a reason to kill embryos, we’re looking for a reason we shouldn’t. If the alleged reason — that they have everything they need to survive — is something that doesn’t even apply to adults, then it’s a bogus reason.
Both adults and embryos have everything they need to survive _in the environment they are prior to our intervention_, which is the womb for the embryo and a room in a house for a hypothetical adult. Being relocated to a random spot in our galaxy would kill either of them.
Ah, and now you've slid the shiv right into my gut. It can *survive* in the fridge, but it can't *develop* in the fridge. I want to call that disqualifying, but I have a cryonics contract. Must think further.
No, but it does mean that "it has the potential to grow even without beneficial conditions" can't be the real barrier between life and non-life. That's all that I was trying to prove.
Just spitballing a potential objection: I feel like gender could be an unaccounted for component of objections to this technology. You wrote that you can’t imagine some other trait being widely selected for before intelligence, but I think that would look different if considered on gender lines. It probably makes sense to select boys for intelligence before something like beauty or athleticism, but for girls I think a strong argument could be made for selecting for beauty before intelligence. The cons of being an unattractive girls seem much worse than the cons of being less intelligent and, in a world where a lot of people think AI will be taking over a lot of feminized jobs (teaching, aspects of healthcare, customer service, HR, etc), sex (or at least beauty) will always sell as a means towards financial security.
And in fact, many countries already experience strong gender selection effects (India and China most notably) through selective abortion, and it's not good for their culture, their marriage matching down the line, or for girls.
There's post-birth selection, too. In the book, After the Spike, the authors talk about a hospital having Code Pinks for when parents try to take underweight/fragile baby girls home against medical advice, because they prefer they struggle and die at home, giving them a chance to try again for a boy. (It's a strong gender preference + 1-2 child preference that produces this outcome).
I'll note that this is very nearly morally fine by Scott's construction, since he rates a newborn as less morally salient than a cow, but for the need for the law to draw a line somewhere, and since the parents are rooting for their daughter to die, they are not made sad by her death.
Just want to add the interesting fact that sex selection of IVF embryos in the US (allowed by normal IVF clinics) skews females. Americans select for female more than they select for male.
It might matter even less in the future, if people decide that having gender non-conforming children is inconvenient and someone figures out the relevant genes.
If you want to play at being picky, then in the sociological and in the feminist senses, we are in fact discussing how gender is a component here, acting on people (as it always does) on the basis of their sex.
Only if one takes ‘gender’ as shorthand for some idea of ‘gender identity’ would the comment stop making sense, and so it is unlikely that this is how they are using the word.
Almost everyone is appalled at the idea killing a newborn. Most people seem OK with the idea of destroying embryos. Clearly, there is a transition point (or perhaps a fuzzy transition region) between fertilization and birth after which most people decide its wrong to destroy that organism. Personally, the most convincing transition point for me is conception, hence I'm against IVF (though I admit I still find it less appalling than infanticide, and I have friends that have conceived through IVF that I still think are good people).
I don't think the transition point exists. If a man and woman sit next to each other at a bar, their sperm and egg have thr full potential to become a new person. They just have to choose for it to be so.
Neither, of course. I'm saying the morality of destroying an organism is not related to whether or not it has the potential to become a person. If you think it is, then you should also oppose strangers choosing not to get pregnant with each other. Their sperms and eggs have the potential to become people, and when they walk away from each other that potential person is eliminated.
I think you misunderstood the point I was trying to make. There must be a transition (perhaps sharp, perhaps fuzzy) from "potential to become a person" to "an actual person". What criteria are you using to identify that transition point/region?
Fair enough, though I'm still interested in your answer to my question, if you care to share it. I readily admit this is a difficult question, and I like to hear reasonable different points of view.
In a certain sense, this is correct. My understanding of the pro-life position is not that the fertilized egg (or, for the minority position, the “quickened” fetus) has the *potential* to become a person but that it *is* a person and therefore has some kind of moral status, despite its vulnerability and lack of agency.
The questions that follow include (i) what duties might be owed to such a similarly situated person, (ii) who owes those duties, and (iii) what, if any, legal “fences” might be required to protect the interests of the person to whose those duties are owed.
Yeah I believe usually they don't talk about "potential to become a person", but sometimes they do, and my response is to that argument specifically. But you're right it's probably not the typical argument.
Of course there's a difference. But then again there's a clear difference between an embryo and an infant, too, and that's also basic biology. The whole reason we're all arguing is because a clear, basic difference is not clear enough.
That is not the question of this though - this is not letting a child have a disease that could have been prevented, this is not allowing a child to be born that could have that disease.
The ethics of technology that could cure these diseases but required IVF would be trickier for an anti-IVF position to deal with that what we are discussing at the moment, which is you don't get to exist (and in fact get discarded) if you drew a genetic short straw.
For some set of horrific conditions, this may be easier to support, it sounds a bit more harsh when you are talking about a few inches of height or points of IQ.
I think you're dead on that we need to draw a line somewhere between those points (at least for now? I'm not including magic future science helping us out more).
However, I've never really been convinced that conception makes a good point. If we have to draw our line somewhere arbitrary between fertilization and birth, I'd rather we pick one that is a biiiit more consequentialist, like "n weeks before memories can form" or something.
Would you mind picking my position apart for me? I'm curious why this is the """obvious""" place to draw the line for me when a different point is """obvious"""" to you
I don't actually think there is an obvious point, even though it's obvious when you're on either side of it (e.g. sperm have no moral weight, infanticide is appalling). That's why this is such a tough and contentious issue. Liberalism (which I adhere to, in the classical sense) places tremendous value on individual rights, but when does one become an individual with rights? Letting every individual decide for themselves is anarchy, but enforcing a single view on everyone seems like tyranny to many.
I don't think I've ever heard anyone use memory as a criterion, but I find it unsatisfactory for a few reasons. My earliest memories are *maybe* from around 2 years of age (assuming they're real memories). But my 1 year old son clearly remembers things that he'll later forget. So what kind of memories are we talking about? Also, lots of animals (most? all?) form memories, yet most people are OK with killing most animals (and I eat meat and squash lantern flies). Why is human memory special?
One potential answer is that humans are just different. I'm in that camp, but I have trouble fully articulating why. I know it has something to do with intelligence and consciousness, but intelligence and consciousness exist on a spectrum**. I don't know when something becomes intelligent/conscious enough that it has a right to not be killed. That leads me to adopt a conservative (not in a political sense) position, and conception seems like the "safest" option to me, since that is the point at which I am confident that a unique human organism of some sort comes into existence, even though I don't think an embryo is conscious or intelligent. But my uncertainty makes me reluctant to codify that position into law.
In practice, I think the solution I'm least uncomfortable with at a societal level is to adopt some criteria based on brain development.
But at the risk of undermining the entire discussion, I think there's a risk in trying too hard to reason about morality from first principles. Moral axioms are not obvious and there is no analytical or numerical moral function that one can solve for. Maybe that's because morality is just a human construct and humans are diverse. Maybe that's because we don't understand what God has tried to tell us. Or maybe it's because the devil has corrupted us and clouded our judgement. For whatever reason, trying to approach morality from a purely rational perspective seems to inevitably lead to some abhorrent places. I think that sometimes you just have to go with your gut and be willing to ask for and grant forgiveness.
** Incidentally, this is why I support laws against killing certain kinds of animals, but I admit that I don't know where to draw the line!
Almost certainly it is a smooth transition region. The law needs to draw a clean line somewhere, but often that line will be somewhat arbitrary.
I will say though that there is a practical reason to draw the line at birth (or maybe some notion of viability). After that point, adoption becomes a viable alternative.
I think what is missing from this (and many other rationalist discourses) is risk aversion. You recognise high uncertainty in determining where exactly humanhood starts in an embryo, but feel that you are "on a pretty solid ground" when putting this boundary in a particular spot. If your spot is too late, you are instrumental in organising a genocide of billions. If your spot is early enough, we can be improving average IQ by 5-10 points over a generation. These two outcomes seem to me to be too asymmetric for the boundary confidence of "pretty solid ground" being sufficient.
Okay, but if you ban this technology you make millions of people die of cancer and so on who would otherwise live! You can't just look at risks on one side!
Everybody dies eventually. The people who would die from cancer because of their inferior genes would not be born with this technology and some other people will be born who will live longer. I do not see in this any people dying "who would otherwise live". When I was driving a car this morning, I did not swerve right and thus did not kill the lady walking there. When this lady dies of cancer in 20 years, this will not be on me.
Because we need to distinguish between two situations: 1) We cause person A to live 20 years more and 2) We cause person A not to live at all, but instead person B get to live and is expected to live 20 years longer than A would have lived. Genocide is related to case 1) (except we cause someone to leave less, not more). Foetus selection is case 2).
I'm not sure I follow this. Why is 2) bad? Why is a counterfactual person granted moral consideration at all? At the embryo stage humans are just widgets. Replacing widget A with a superior widget B seems an unambiguous net-positive. In a consequentialist sense, humans only acquire value by virtue of them absorbing resources (food, shelter, education, etc) and forming positive-value social relationships that would be damaged by their death. That's why it's more tragic when an 18-year-old dies on graduation night (they have many friends and family who care about them and have absorbed many social resources that they haven't paid back yet) than either a baby (absorbed few resources, only has relationship with parents) or an old person (has paid back the social investment, social relations are prepared for their death).
yeah this is flawed - you are not making millions of people die of cancer who would otherwise live, you are preventing the people who would die of cancer of ever being born, and replacing them with different people.
In #2, your defense boils down to the fact that the effect size is too small to have meaningful negative second-order effects. But a few paragraphs later, you acknowledge that it "gets us on the road to more advanced technologies". You then jump straight to the point where it has advanced so much that people can have wings, but in between "select the best of 5" and "genetically engineer angels", there will probably be a substantial stretch of time where what we have is extra-strength positive-trait selection.
This seems like it undermines your defense, because now the counterargument becomes "this technology is bad because *it opens the door to more advanced technologies*, which will lead to <original complaints about lack of diversity>". Which I suspect is what the "regulators who hoped to strangle the field in the cradle" had in mind all along.
Some of the value of babies, embryos and cows comes from the observer being if only distantly a blood relative of the organism. I care less for the existence of crows, lizards or AI because there is less of a bond.
Baked into these “improvements” is the assumption that difficulty, or deviation from the norm, is a defect to be corrected. I don’t buy that. Some of the richest lives I’ve known came out of constraint. Some of the most grounded, self-aware, empathic people I know had to wrestle with what others might’ve screened out.
It’s not that suffering is noble. But friction sharpens us. If it doesn’t kill us, it shapes us. That’s both a concession and a risk; such is life.
A theme that recurs in this forum is how reasonable decisions, made by decent people, can still land us in places we never meant to go. Instead of a villain to be identified and extricated, we get a slow slide toward a world optimized for what we can measure, predict, and select for. That’s what makes me uneasy here. Not the tool itself, but the redefinition of what kind of person gets counted as a good bet.
Why can't you use this same argument to justify lobotomies? I think at some point you have to say that some things are worse than other things, and I'm happy including cancer, lobotomies, etc in that category.
Without agreeing fully with OP, they probably intuit some kind of double effect. A lobotomy introduces a difficulty, while not using IVF merely allows that difficulty to exist.
I agree this is a distinction from the point of view of the lobotomist, but surely it isn't one from the viewpoint of the anti-lobotomy activist. Either way they're going out into the world and trying to prevent something they didn't cause.
One thing-to-be-prevented is merely lamentable; the other is a moral wrong. We probably have more special duties to prevent and punish those.
Surely you're being a bit provocative? Consider: "This is a meaningful distinction from the point of view of the murderer, but the justice system's budget should really be going to givewell instead." Even if this were to save more net lives all-in, it's not persuasive to anyone who isn't already die-hard consequentialist.
While I directionally agree with you, your examples involve loss of function. In that sense, they're sort if inherently diminishing, whereas OP was making a claim about experiences that leave you stronger/better in the long run.
I think there's a meaningful qualitative barrier to draw between examples that involve loss of function/death, and examples which just involve unpleasant experiences/momentary suffering, but could in theory leave you the same or better afterwards.
I still think that you can come up with pure-suffering examples that we'd want to prevent which illustrate the point, it's just too easy to dismiss loss of function examples as not analogous.
Well, lobotomies were a kind of psychic amputation -- the harm was visible and brutal. What we’re talking about here feels more benign. It’s internal, voluntary, framed as care or foresight. The moral charge is subtler: tuning parameters rather than treating illness. But the risk isn’t just to those screened out, it’s to the moral intuition of the tuner.
Filtering for “better” installs a worldview -- one that tells us which lives are worth starting, which traits are lovable, which stories deserve a beginning.
It’s one thing to model the genome. Another to model a soul. Are we so sure we can tweak the dials on the future without flattening the human story along the way?
Grisly scenario: suppose I get a bunch of human embryos (let's say the ones discarded by parents during embryo selection) and I modify them to ensure that they never develop a proper nervous system, just the basics required for breathing etc. Then I bring them to full term, wait until they are born, fatten then up for a few months and then eat them. Have I done anything wrong?
It seems like you've done something gross that we should ban to stop I'm Not Touching You behavior but potentially nothing more wrong that scraping some tissue off your foot, cloning it a gazillion times, and eating that.
(Or, if you want, we can say you did something wrong when you did the modification, but I can't tell if that's "outside the hypothetical" or not)
(Assuming your giving birth to them yourself, and paying for everything, and prion diseases are a non issue etc.)
I would say that your doing something that
1) Raises a lot of heuristic warnings.
2) As best as I can see, isn't actually immoral.
3) There is no good reason to do.
4) If you screw up slightly on your nervous system modifications, it's easy to accidentally do something immoral.
Dancing 3 feet from the edge of a cliff won't kill you. But if there is no good reason to, it's still wise not to.
When writing laws, or ethical rules about how you should behave in practice, it's a good idea to make the line simpler, and to add a bit of margin for error. Especially when there is no reason to push the edge of the morally permissible.
In scenarios like this, it's almost impossible to imagine a real-world scenario where you have eliminated all possible risk of making a mistake in your process, of someone else hearing about it and being disturbed, of you yourself not being self-modifies by the experience in a way that makes you more dangerous/harmful to others in the future, etc.
Thus, it's one of those cases where in hypothetical-world where you can 100% define those things as not a problem, it's ok, but in any real world no one should ever do it because they could never actually be 100% sure about all those risks.
You've done something akin to walking around a city butt naked. It's okay for society to have some prohibitions that aren't defensible on a 100% objective level, but still gross every single person out enough that we prohibit it. Especially when the cost of prohibiting such behavior is nil.
IMO you have to consider higher-order effects to condemn this practice. For instance it would normalize cannibalism which would probably have nasty downstream social effects. Almost the entirety of our moral infrastructure is downstream of considering human life sacred, or at least more sacred than non-human life: we eat and hunt animals, not humans. Transgressing against that taboo would probably have very negative halo effects.
I guess my Neoplatonism will be showing, but isn’t metaphysical realism just much simpler than all these thought experiments trying to determine what degree of awareness is required for us to consider a person a person, whether sleeping hermit or newborn baby?
Maybe there is something that links an embryo to a fetus to being a baby to being an adult to being a sleeping hermit? Maybe that something is being a “human being,” and maybe that is a real thing rather than just loose scaffolding we construct in our minds.
This gets into the debate around simplicity. In some sense, saying "lightning is caused by witches" is simpler than inventing all of electrical theory, but this isn't the sense our theories should be privileging. See https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/f4txACqDWithRi7hs/occam-s-razor
I agree. But there is much more to argue for metaphysical realism than simplicity.
Reality is already categorized for us; everything is an instance of a general type.
In this case I meant more to draw attention to the unity of discrete instances. All things are in the process of becoming and have potentiality as well as actuality. Nevertheless something persists throughout all things that a thing is; its it-ness.
A tree just like a human person goes through many stages of development, yet something persists through the entire journey. Tree-ness.
It seems to me that it is the same thing with a human being.
If a person has the status of a human person, with all the recognition that entails, but then being a sleeping hermit or an embryo deprives them of that, it would mean that *one thing was totally replaced by another*, there was no unity in the thing you saw in the first place.
You're neglecting cultural evolution. A tradeoff with metaphysical simplicity is moral rigidity. Morality has changed quite a bit over that last 2000 years. Imagine the social progress that would've been lost if we'd locked in the notion that "only white males matter" 1000 years ago. Simple iron-clad rules like "don't eat pork" don't respond well to innovations in refrigeration technology or the development of antibiotics.
I don't really get the connection of this argument to metaphysical realism, which when I studied philosophy was just a term for the idea that a real world exists outside of and independent from our minds, and that the truth or falsity of a statement is determined by whether it corresponds to that world. You can get this from Aristotle 500 years before Neoplatonism, I don't see what they're bringing to the table here. And aside from that, you and I could both say "that sleeping hermit is a person" and in both cases be making a true statement, even though we had radically different semantic meanings for "person" and even if we had totally different ethical ideas of what moral obligations "personhood" creates in other actors. It's those things being debated here, not whether the external world exists and people can make true statements about it.
>I don't really get the connection of this argument to metaphysical realism, which when I studied philosophy was just a term for the idea that a real world exists outside of and independent from our minds, and that the truth or falsity of a statement is determined by whether it corresponds to that world.
No offence to your philosophy teacher, but he obviously wasn't very good.
Do you care to elaborate? This was what was meant by metaphysical realism in both early modern phil when we talked about skeptics of it (idealists like Bishop Berkeley) and in contemporary philosophy. Different professors, different contexts and different kinds of anti-realists lined up against it. I also independently read Searle’s “Mind Language and Society” which was defending the same from postmodernist attack.
At no point do I recall any of this Platonic form stuff being part of metaphysical realism. Whether two people who point at a human and say “there’s a human” are meaning the same thing or referring to the same thing or whether the statement was even capable of having a truth value under the circumstances in which it was uttered was semantics, not metaphysics of any kind.
Conceptualism: Forms exist in our minds, but not outside of them.
Nominalism: Forms don't exist, categories like "human" are just arbitrary labels we stick on things.
These ideas are fundamental to Western philosophy from Plato to *at least* Locke (and arguably afterwards). If your philosophy course never taught you about them, it wasn't a very good course.
Pretty much every philosopher agrees that a real world exists outside of and independent of our minds. Metaphysical realism (of the Plato and Aristotle variety) is an account of how that is so, given that minds and external reality have a great degree of concord (each bringing to the fore a Form eidetically).
I'm sure we'd agree that we have trees that already exist and trees that can come into being in the future. But what do those trees have in common? Some preexisting Form or essence that is referenced by each instance of the tree, answers Plato or Aristotle or Plotinus.
Disagreements with this are usually some form of nominalism. Saying that the trees don't actually have common treeness apart from how we speak or think about them.
This comes into play with abortion or questions of personhood because a human being *appears* to us by coming into reality as a unified, intelligible entity. There is no subdivision of the form necessary to determine what it is, by, for instance, trying to locate its humanness in some quality like awareness or intelligence, much like trying to define treeness by the quality of the wood or leaves would descend into mere sophistry.
I am really rich. Is there some costly way to biologically modify my future children (genetically or otherwise), so that they can later only mate with children who were modified the same way? So that I ensure that my children will only mate with other rich people, because no one else can afford to modify their kids this way.
The traditional way with culture and only exposing them to other rich kids seems boring.
You could probably engineer some chromosomal rearrangement that would cause infertility if they mated with a wild-type human. But the same engineering process could be used to reverse this.
If we get to the point of creating sperm and eggs from other cells, add complete infertility as a trait in your children. Then the only way they can reproduce is through expensive IVF (and they'll probably do genetic improvement then because you might as well) with the artificially created sperm/eggs.
Our knowledge base of which genes do what is derived from our research base. Having just had some medical genetic testing done for a family member, and now googling all the abnormalities, I see an over representation of knowledge about genetically linked diseases. We don’t seem to have as much information about which genes code for the artsy proteins or the poet proteins or even the abstraction proteins as we have about “linked to schizophrenia.” Unless the funding landscape really changes, in 10 years we will still know much more about the disease linkages than the beneficial trait linkages. My suspicion is that “linked to schizophrenia” (and there are quite a few) is a category with stuff in it we’d want to keep if we were broadly designing humanity, and that the early rounds of embryo designing will throw it out, and we will discover by trial and error what the benefits or protective effects of some or all of those genes may be. People who are enthusiastic about the potential of embryo selection should (if they’re not already) make effort to create this more broad spectrum genetic knowledge base. I’ll stop here for now.
The first proto-NICU was set up at Coney Island because hospitals weren't interested in saving the lives of sufficiently fragile babies. The incubators were funded by gawking tourists coming to see the preemies through glass. Just like in your construction, the fact that the babies were abjectly dependent was a mark against whether they were people.
Conception is the moment a distinct human person comes into existence, who can be differentiated from mother and father. The story of *that* person starts there. Most of the ways we've written off the personhood of babies we've come to regret—I think the evidentiary burden is higher on your side.
You say "Conception is the moment a distinct human person comes into existence, who can be differntiated from mother and father", but isn't that assuming the conclusion? Peter Postnatal could say "Oh, I agree with you that we should care about when a distinct human person forms, which is why I support abortions up to 12 years of age". I think his argument would be goofy, but I suspect yours isn't actually as simple as his.
I think he has a much harder time applying a brightline distinction than I do! What happens on the twelfth birthday? I have a pretty clear, biological, empirical *thing that happens* at conception.
Peter Singer *does* support infanticide of young children with disabilities if the parents prefer the child not live, but he would not say there's a brightline moment, just a gradual shift to consciousness/moral salience and that he thinks disabled lives are net negative if allowed to play out.
Let’s say conception is the start of personhood. How does probability of survival play into this model?
If a couple wants a child and conceives, but then miscarries, that’s a tragedy. But let’s say the likelihood of miscarriage is really high for this couple, and they know that. Are they committing murder (or manslaughter) every time they conceive and fail to carry to term?
If your answer is yes, then what is the bright line for that behavior? Miscarriage likelihood increases dramatically as women age. Should we ban women over a certain age from getting pregnant?
If your answer is no, then what is the difference between an awareness of a high miscarriage rate, and IVF? Both scenarios require multiple embryos in the pursuit of creating a human. Neither scenario desires the destruction of embryos, it’s an unfortunate side effect.
I've had six miscarriages and three children brought safely to term. I do not think conceiving and losing a child when you've had a pattern of loss is murder (any more than choosing to have a child when you have sickle cell is).
When you conceive naturally, you can hope for life for each child. With IVF, you are encouraged to err on the side of more embryos and are likely to have ones you do not give a chance to grow and develop.
When you miscarry, you are still a mother to the child you loved and lost for your whole life. Their life is just very short (as with a newborn who dies by SIDS in the first month). Because of our history of losses, we prioritize telling people we're pregnant early, so that the people we love share joy with us while our child is living, whatever happens next.
> When you conceive naturally, you can hope for life for each child. With IVF, you are encouraged to err on the side of more embryos and are likely to have ones you do not give a chance to grow and develop.
So the difference is hope? And couples whose only shot at having children is through IVF must be deprived of hope because they will likely be unable to implant every embryo and then hope for its success?
So one kind of hope is good, and the other is bad.
It is impossible, conceiving naturally, to create spare embryos who are on ice and likely to be discarded. This is a core part of the IVF structure.
Some ways of responding to infertility are not morally licit (even when sought in good faith) e.g. a number of international adoption agencies behaved wildly unethically (without the knowledge of adoptive parents) such that many lines of international adoption have now been throttled. Parents who once would have willingly welcomed a child no longer can, and that is an improvement, because the way we tried to meet that grief was unethical.
But it is possible (and sometimes likely) when conceiving naturally to result in the death of the embryo, and you are fine with that.
It is also possible when using IVF to use all the embryos and discard none of them.
Frankly, your argument here is really weak. You are fine accepting embryonic death as the cost of trying to have a child in one case, the one you experienced, but not the other. Very much a “rules for thee but not for me” situation.
All my children will die—I am always accepting the death of a child in being open to life. I don't know *when* and I hope it is later rather than sooner.
But IVF actively interrupts the progression toward development and birth and actively encourages creating spares, especially in the US. European countries have a better practice of limiting how many embryos you can create to make this less likely.
The difference is intentionality. When one conceives naturally, the intent is to carry and birth THAT child (or children in the case of multiples). With IVF, the intent is to create as many embryos as possible in order to offset the high failure rate of implantation attempts. No one creates just one embryo, hopes for success, and then starts all over again if it fails. Even for those couples hoping to have several children through IVF, the quantity of embryos created almost always far outstrips the number of hoped-for children (and I would argue that in most cases where only a few embryos are created, that is due to undesired setbacks in the IVF process - low egg count, poor sperm quality, etc, and generally not because any IVF clinic or prospective parent is intentionally trying to avoid surplus embryos).
I think there are Catholics who do this, actually. You can freeze the eggs and sperm separately, and create only the number of blastocysts you want to create at any given time.
A vast majority of people don't believe that blastocysts have the same moral consideration as fetuses or babies, though, so they don't have a problem with creating as many as possible. We had ours genetically tested and 40% of the ones we made had chromosomal issues, which means they would have resulted in a miscarriage if implanted (completely nonviable).
I posted something less succinct below lower in this thread, but your framing focuses on intent at the time of creation rather than death and the big difference is the intent at the time of death. Assuming an embryo dies, in the natural conception, there is no intent for the embryo to die. Even if the IVF couple intends to use all of their embryos at the time of creation (I don’t know how often that occurs), but fails to do so, at the time the embryo is destroyed, the intent is to cause the death of the embryo. That’s a rather big difference. The intent to cause death is not saved by an earlier good intention at the time of creation. The two are not the same.
It’s actually about trusting the Lord to give you the good desires of your heart and deny you the desires you have that will not result in your good. Attempting to deconstruct the ethics misses the point and puts man at the center.
The answer is no, and they are different because one is a tragic loss of a child, where the other is directly murdering children. If a couple is trying to have a child but failing to bring him/her to term, this is the exact opposite of killing or indefinitely freezing unwanted or “unsuitable” babies. Regardless of “desire,” IVF involves destroying or freezing embryos, where trying to have a child that dies is tragic because the couple was trying to raise the child. You may have a consequentialist moral framework that prevents you from understanding moral actions. See this article for more info:
This is the same utilitarian logic as the Violinist Argument. Where both fail is that they do not account for the teleology of natural processes and the moral value inherent in cooperating with them.
Crucially though, your stories are also stories of technological restraints and resource constraint.
Doctors didn't decline to give infants anesthetics *just* because they thought it wasn't needed. They also had valid fears that the current tech level of anesthetics were dangerous for babies, with a much higher risk of death or stopping the heart or lungs than in adult patients. As the technology improved and became safer, the people advocating for infant anesthetics suddenly had a much easier time making their arguments and forcing through change.
Same for premies, part of why doctors didn't try to save them is because they would fail, one way or another, and those resources were in high demand for other patients. Saving premies became more important as it became more possible, and as we got richer with less marginal cost on those resources.
Perhaps one day in the future we will be able to teleport a zygote out of a mother when it is 5 cells large, erase her memory of it so there is no emotional turmoil wondering about it in the future, raise it in a lab to a healthy infant, and give it to an endless waiting list of loving, dependable parents who don't want their own genetic offspring for some personal reason, and all of that will have zero marginal cost because we are so rich that it doesn't trade off against anything important.
On that day, I wouldn't be surprised if we develop a morality that says every conceived zygote is a person with full human rights. We love to paint a moral picture on the actions we are taking anyway.
But in all those cases, the moral system is trailing and justifying the practical reality. It's wrong to think of this as moral 'progress'; it's largely unmoored from any abstract, 'absolute' moral philosophy, and much more a reflection of practical utilitarianism that weighs costs and benefits in a given context.
In the context of pro/con abortion (I’m ambivalent) I thought hard about all this stuff. The results are here. https://ambivablog.typepad.com/ambivablog/2005/01/note_this_essay.html The TLDR: 1) What’s valuable about an embryo is that it’s the design for a unique individual who will never ever come again. Think about the difference individuals have made in your life, it’s epic. 2) On the other hand, life begins not at conception but at implantation, I.e. with relationship. Before that, embryos are “people seeds” (IVF has revealed this stage of human life). Nature (or God) wastes a lot of seeds, including people seeds—by some estimates 50% of conceptions do not implant. So IVF adds human will and science to the many factors determining which seeds get to grow and which do not.
It's my coinage AFAIK, but the analogy—and homology—is really very precise and accurate. It's a brief stage of human life that we could never SEE before IVF discovered that embryos could be frozen, thawed, and implanted. It's the only stage in which you can suspend development like that.
For the cellular reassembly surgery: I think the person to be reassembled made a contract (explicitly or implicitly) with the surgeon that they should reassamble them. A contract which is still binding when the person is dis-assembled, and probably the person would not have agreed to the procedure otherwise.
Likewise, in the heart surgery the patient made a contract with the surgeon that they should not stop the surgery mid-way. This contract is binding. Contracts do not stop when one side is unconscious, and many contracts do not even stop when one side is dead.
To see that the contract-thingy matters, imagine that the surgeon in either case dies halfway through the procedure. Another surgeon is in the next room and could finish the operation. In this snapshot, the second surgeon is in the same situation as in the original example: you are in a dying state, and they could save you by finishing the operation.
In this case the second surgeon still has a moral obligation to finish the operation and save you, but the obligation is *much* weaker than for the original surgeon. The original surgeon would commit murder if they stopped. If the second surgeon refused to help, that would still be a crime, but very far from murder.
> If the second surgeon refused to help, that would still be a crime, but very far from murder.
But very similar to the second surgeon refusing to jump into a pond to save someone they saw drowning. It's refusal to save a life when you easily could. Not murder. But that still means it's a life.
This is like the legal difference between contract obligations and equitable obligations. The first surgeon would be liable contract or no, because the clear expectation is that you are letting yourself be put under and cut open assuming the surgeon would stitch you back together, and relied to your detriment thereupon.
In the pond scenario, if I'm standing nearby and you're thinking of jumping in but aren't sure about the safety, and I say "hey man, no worries, I'm an expert swimmer if you have any problems I'll come in and help", then the person jumps in, he's only doing so because of that promise so even though no contract was formed (there's no mutual consideration) I'm obligated in equity. In terms of moral obligation, I'm willing to extend and loosen that up as far as perhaps any able-bodied adult visually standing in the vicinity of the pond, as the pond-jumper might well be reasonably relying on an implicit expectation that it's safer to hop in while people are around because they would likely aid him. That wouldn't be a legally sufficient promise, but I'm fine with it here. If I just happen to improbably walk by after some dummy jumps in while nobody was around, on a remote forest path with no expectation of getting aid from travelers, then there's no moral or legal obligation to save him. I may choose to do so, but that's a moral gratuity.
The second surgeon is probably closer to the guy visibly standing around the pond watching the jumper hop in, the patient reasonably expects a surgical facility to have backup surgeons capable of stepping in and may well be relying on that fact in deciding to have the surgery in some cases.
"If you hopped from Earth to that planet, and back to Earth again, would you even notice a major difference, beyond a couple fewer hospitals?"
I think you might.
First, we should recognize that in polygenic selection of embryos we aren't selecting the happiest/healthiest/most successful child from thousands of families at random, we're selecting them from families that are already wealthy and have a value system that leads them to embryo selection. We also aren't using a holistic definition of happiness and success.
So I would alter your scenario to be "select the happiest/healthiest/most successful child (measured in very specific ways) from the wealthiest, most success/status driven families, and send them to a new planet". And I think there's a real chance that such a society would have some very bad systemic failure modes.
#1 + your response captures where the abortion debate gets stuck in a loop. We'd see disagreement resolve faster if people lay their cards down entirely, but they don't: the pro-choice camp withholds saying that human life has no inherent value, and the pro-life camp withholds saying that such a value is contingent on human life being sacred, because they want the argument for personhood to play in secular-land.
Embryos are human beings, invariably based on DNA, but unconscious and undeveloped. Some people might care about losing one, but most don't think of them as persons.
Life is cheap, and valuing is subjective. Through the secular lens, people tend not to attribute personhood to fetuses/embryos. Not to say they couldn't, but they won't.
I will defend not wanting to say "human life has no inherent value", even though I do think the value of humans depends on things like thoughts/dreams/feelings/consciousness/etc.
If you want to be arbitrarily deceptive and misleading, you can even say that pro-life people think "humans have no inherent value", since they don't think dead bodies have value, and so humans' value is conditional on them being alive (and thus not inherent). It's technically true, but the sentence "humans have no inherent value" sounds much worse than the small condition you're placing on it.
I think describing my philosophy as "human life has no inherent value" is equally deceptive and misleading.
I think it's an implication that ought to be confronted, regardless of where one's stance falls. It's uncomfortable to think of as it reflects subjective nature of value and morality. If a living human being qua fetus/embryo can be killed for any reason, there can't be much weight to this value as society is concerned. Even if on the individual level we may feel differently or conflicted.
> you can even say that pro-life people think "humans have no inherent value", since they don't think dead bodies have value, and so humans' value is conditional on them being alive (and thus not inherent).
Will quibble that I more carefully used the words "human life has no inherent value", but also... I thought the consensus was that "essence" of humanity is contingent on being living.
The next obvious step here is "does a severed leg have inherent value"? Like, is it immoral to leave a severed leg to die in the same way it's immoral to leave the person whose leg was severed to die?
Repeat for all possible versions of "severed" or "surgically removed" and I imagine ~anyone who knows what a brain is and what it does will tend to disprefer the brain being abandoned, but not any other severed things- at least, not for the sake of the severed things themselves.
Furthermore, I doubt that ~anyone will be concerned about someone with a brain but missing some other organ, limb, or combination of organs and limbs not having a "soul".
So it seems like ~everyone is going to end up agreeing that the brain is "the important part", at least for post-birth humans.
The idea that "human life is inherently valuable" is a patch insofar as we then need to define what "human life" is, and to whatever degree we're going off of the obvious definition of "biologically human tissue" this seems clearly false.
Infants at zero or negative years old are not yet part of society, IMO, and this should not enter the weight of consideration we give a human in society.
All humans are created equal under the law, not because we are equal, but because we don't want ourselves, or high utility people, or our friends to get subjugated or murdered arbitrary.
I, as a meat eater, am okay with, but uneasy with murdering generations of dumb animals and their descendants in perpetuity. Infants are very dumb but very cute. I suspect destroying them when they are dumber than a chicken is okay, especially if it is a strongly diseased human, BUT I want to protect MY human rights and the rights of people I care about, and stability of society, so I'd rather ring fence the age of enshrined human rights back to something like 0 years old. NO killing humans IN society is a really easy rule. Also, killing dumb babies would make my friends REALLY unhappy.
We live in a society of luxury though, so we have fewer constraints than an agrarian society with limited resources, from which my instincts probably flow, so we can probably afford to do dumb things, like to protect all human forms, regardless of utility and health, to some extent. And, as a somewhat defective human, this makes me feel much safer, makes society more stable, and this makes me much happier.
>Infants at zero or negative years old are not yet part of society, IMO, and this should not enter the weight of consideration we give a human in society.
Agree 100%. This is the pragmatic, consequentialist way of looking at it. Notions of murder/personhood etc can be straightforwardly derived from social fitness arguments. Morality is just a set of heuristics for making the societies which adopt them flourish. Therefore moral precepts can be evaluated on the basis of whether they enhance societal survival. To first order, humans contribute to societal health by generating economic surplus. To second order, they contribute by helping other humans generate economic surplus (via positive social relationships). Murder is "bad" because inhibits both of these: it directly destroys human capital (which is valuable because it's already absorbed resources) and it harms the people who were in a social relationship with the murdered person. Embryos score zero on both of these measures: their replacement cost is ~zero and the only people who have a relationship with it (the parents) are the ones doing the selecting.
This is why I think birth is a very sensible bright line for determining when something deserves moral consideration. Before its born a fetus only has a relationship with its parents, therefore they have the moral right to kill it. As soon as its born a baby starts interacting with many more people who can potentially become invested in whether it lives. Much like a bitcoin transaction, it's that statistically irreversible entanglement with wider society that gives people their value.
Banned for one day, and prefer fewer comments like this - it doesn't add anything to the conversation and is just going to make those people feel bad. If you really want to know what they think, you can read their comments here and they'll explain them.
Another important consideration with whether blastocysts are people is that a blastocyst might end up becoming two identical twins, a single person, or half of a chimera.
Thanks, that is fascinating. I did not know this before reading this comment, and it seems like a pretty solid argument against considering conception to be the definitive "start" of an individual's moral personhood. GPT5 tells me that a twin can "branch off" from an implanted egg nearly two weeks after conception.
Identical twins are also a pretty strong argument against the "unique DNA defines a human" argument. Two identical twins are different people! So it sure seems like unique and continuous consciousness (or at least "potential to be continuous", for sleeping hermits) is our best bet here for moral personhood.
So, that means...moral personhood NO: pizza, sperm and egg physically separated, sperm and egg in a test tube together but not yet in contact, fertilized egg, early stage embryo, dead hermit's corpse, hermit on life support with irreversible brain damage.
Moral personhood YES: fetus at some point (to be argued about!) during development once conscious experience arises, newborn infant, awake hermit, sleeping hermit, hermit on life support with brain damage that is reversible with sufficiently advanced medical technology.
> Also related to fences around the law: in most cases, killing a baby will make their parents, relatives, and tender-hearted onlookers extremely sad.
In most real-life cases of infanticide, the parents are the ones doing the killing. (And yes, I'm talking about genuine infanticide, excluding abortion.) A view of personhood that doesn't endorse full moral rights of infants will end up condoning most baby murder.
Some philosophers have embraced this, see Jeff McMahan's "Ethics of Killing" - but for most people, me included, their examples fall firmly in the realm of "cautionary tales for how philosophy unmoored from experience can make you lose contact with our most basic moral intuitions".
I feel the force of, and agree with, your argument insofar as it says - line-drawing is difficult and almost necessarily unprincipled, but it's preferable to the "consistent" but radical positions on either side. (These radical positions include McMahan on one side and the Catholic Church on the other.)
But you lead in by saying - cows may be more conscious, and may have more intrinsic value than infants - and you "bite that bullet". Your argument is just meant to justify the *legal* order protecting them more, despite the ideal moral law protecting them less. (Sorry if I'm misreading you, please correct if so.) That's the part that strikes me as odd - treating the line-drawing as strictly a fence-drawing exercise, rather than something informative about morality. In my eyes, the fact that McMahan's extreme position is undesirable is informative about whether cows or infants have more moral value in the first place.
Our most basic intuitions about the *moral* law conflict with infanticide, legal line-drawing aside. That should make us reconsider whether infants or cows have more intrinsic moral worth (and whether moral worth is strictly a matter of mental capacity). And we don't have to use contrived examples to explore this, infanticide unfortunately occurs frequently (especially in less developed places) and is usually committed by a parent.
I guess is not worth reading past "Pizza has the potential to grow into a person (if a woman eats it while she’s pregnant) but is not itself a person with rights."
Potentiality terms are about what a thing can become based on its nature, not just a causal chain.
A pizza cannot *by its nature* become a person.
Learning the Aristotelian 4 causes might clear things out a bit for you.
Alternately, I suggest approaching things from a different perspective:
Since religious x non-religious can't agree whether or not an embryo is a human, and hence eliminating it is akin to murder, let's imagine both sides give in and grant the other side's argument a 50% probability of being right.
So, we agree on a 50% chance of a homicide happening with embryo "elimination".
Is there a sane person willing to push a red magic button knowing that 1 out 2 times someone will die because of it?
Alright, let's concede a larger margin the other side: 95% to 5%.
Would someone still find it morally nontrivial to pull the trigger given there's a 5% chance of there being a real person behind the aiming curtain?
Since vegans and non-vegans can't agree on whether or not an animal has the right to life, let's give in and grant that there's a 50% chance of a homicide happening each time you eat meat. Is a sane person willing to push a red magic button knowing that 1 out of 2 times someone will die because of it? Are you a vegan activist? Why not?
...and you can make the same argument for thousands of other things (if there's a 50-50 chance that each of climate change, superintelligent AI, and fertility collapse will destroy the world, you should be panicking right now!) At some point you have to admit that most things are much less than 50-50, some are trivially low, and that therefore benefits can outweigh risks.
First: You did not address the Pizza x nature argument.
Second: Systemic risks (climate change, AI, etc.) have nothing to do with immediate moral actions. One requires risk management, the other, a dealing with a personal conscience/moral.
Third: It's a whole different issue addressing a cost-benefit analysis x probabilistic moral reasoning. Unless you ride on the train where people who think the decision between murdering x not murdering is a just a cost/benefit margin analysis. By this logic, whole masses of people/ethnicities could be subjected to this cold equation.
But, I grant you know this is not a cost-benefit analysis.
Fourth: IIRC we are talking about murder, which by definition, involves taking a human life. There's a reason why a whole array of words is available in a dictionary to define taking an animal's life for consumption: to butcher, slaughter, etc.
And changing the subject to whether or not it's ethical to butcher animals, smells like whataboutism with a pinch of red herring.
Else: I strongly suggest analysing this through Aristotle’s four causes. Ask: what is the material cause of an embryo? Its formal cause? Its efficient cause? And — most crucially — its final cause: what is the purpose of an embryo? Only then can you apply second-order thinking, as any rationalist should.
Even as someone sympathetic to your line of argument, not everyone agrees that Aristotle's four causes are the morally-relevant way to describe reality, so your argument could use shoring up there.
Also, especially given that... saying "learning the four causes might help you out here" comes across as condescending. More likely to alienate than persuade. You're better off describing why you think it matters, than telling your interlocutor to go read a book.
We are always so interested in deciding where to draw a line at when life/personhood begins, because it would simplify many questions.
Could we accept that personhood is a gradient? Some 30-40% of fertilized eggs are miscarried in the first trimester. The couple may feel some sense of loss if they notice, but at the same time they are usually aware that this is a fairly common occurrence.
If we are to assign any moral value to lab embryos at all, we could at most be disappointed.
That was an interesting read. So even if the personhood of a fetus is an important question, more pressing is whether social order is harmed by terminating embryos, or allowing the various other fertility technologies. Unlike murder or theft I'm inclined to think that terminating embryos doesn't cause any societal disorder; but I do wonder about the future that these fertility techs are leading us into, and whether that's a net axiological "good".
1) Having consciousness/personhood at least once in the past
2) Being able to gain consciousness/personhood
Sleeping hermit satisfies both: he was conscious before he fell asleep and is able to wake up. Embryo fails (1), and a human corpse fails (2). These two criteria seem to be fairly simple and complete.
Also I can think of this analogy: suppose citizens of a town want to build a church. Town council starts a contest for best architectural design. Five projects are proposed, and mayor approves only one of them. Does this mean that mayor has destroyed four churches?
To be pedantic, you seem to need a third criterion: that the consciousness to be gained has a significant amount in common with the consciousness that existed in the past. (I would add that that commonality should come from a part of the physical substrate of consciousness that remains about the same through the interval of unconsciousness, because my intuition for personhood is that physical continuity of the mind is important; someone who accepts the cellular dissection thought experiment in the article would probably not consider this addition important.) Otherwise you allow situations where the former & future consciousnesses have little connecting them except, at a lower level, the matter composing them. E.g. a computer running a sentient AI which has its memory erased & then has an entirely different sentient AI downloaded to it, or a corpse which rots & is used to fertilize crops which are eaten by a woman early in pregnancy so that its molecules are incorporated into the embryo's nervous system.
It's powerfully hard to express a moral difference between embryo selecting away from an embryo with a high chance of having a congenital disability and the choice of parents who are carriers of genes that create a risk of congenital disorder like Huntington's not to have children. Yet essentially 0% of people who oppose embryo selecting oppose the latter choice.
"So does a computer, currently turned off, which is programmed to turn on in one hour and run the code for a sentient robot."
This is incidental to the main argument, but isn't this an impossible scenario? If the computer is turned off, it can't run a program, and if it can't run a program, it can't turn itself on in an hour.
I think that what matters in the sleeping hermit problem is information.
Suppose you have the code for a sentient robot. Lets say it's a neural network. Before the robot is started up for the first time, it's just a randomly initialised network. A whole bunch of random numbers. A big pile of random numbers has no moral value.
Now you run this code. The robot wanders around and forms memories. The numbers on it's hard disk are no longer random, but now encode all sorts of memories and personality stuff.
You turn the robot off for maintenance. That information, currently on the hard drive, now has moral value as a person. If you copy the data to a new hard drive, and put the old hard drive in a crusher, that's fine. So long as the computation continues at some point in the future, you haven't killed the robot. (Although the robot might be irritated about skipping 100 years). But for that to happen, the information needs to be preserved.
This covers the sleeping hermit. And the open heart surgery. And presumably even in the case where you are disassembled into individual cells, the information is somewhere. It might be that some or all the information is on a computer system, not in the cells at all. In which case, you could throw all the cells in the trash and put the mind on a robot without it being murder.
Because we care about what computations get computed. And exactly when they get computed is less important. In particular, we want mind computations, once started, to be continued. That doesn't mean you can't pause them, it means you need to restart the computation sooner or later.
This is the correct way to think about it, IMO, and while you put it in pretty neutral terms, I'm a little surprised to see so few people in the comments going straight for the throat here, so:
"Potential to be X" has zero value! Unless you happen to be in dire need of X. For most of our evolutionary context, this was the case, even if X only meant "a child that will survive to adulthood", and so evolution has saddled us with a nurturing instinct causing us to find babies of all species cute and to want to protect them.
I believe (well, ok, it's very reductionist, but,) people who argue #1 feel that natural impulse in a way that causes them to interpret it as a fundamental moral truth about life. All further reasoning is downstream of that - because the instinct's purpose is to nurture more life, you would want to include embryos in the "must protect" clause, but because we don't feel much about things that don't look like cute babies yet, the specific form the justification takes for embryos is an appeal to "the potential to grow" (into a child that triggers the instinct).
If you instead bite the bullet and assert that the value of something is in its information content, then the logical response is completely backwards from the instinctual one: a wise old person has more value than a baby that knows nothing, a baby has more value than an embryo which doesn't even yet have the ability to know, and an embryo has more value than the idea that maybe a random human could potentially exist someday.
This covers all the weird edge cases in Scott's post, but unfortunately pushes the can down the road to the much harder question of "when do we consider a child to have acquired enough unique information content to have enough moral value as a person". There's no way to have a definite answer to such an ontologically fuzzy concept (even if you somehow managed the incredible feat of agreeing about how to measure information content in a person), but at least it requires a non-zero amount of life experience to elevate it above equivalent potential beings, and so that puts it pretty far away from the embryo stage.
"If destroying embryos were wrong, then IVF would be unethical"
I had a whole screed in reply planned out in my head, but I think this sentence is what gets to the crux of the matter: if I want to use IVF or if I have used IVF, are you saying I am a bad person?
Because none of us think we're bad persons. We're not rapists or murderers or even worse, MAGA! We live in accordance with the mores of our society and we just want nice, good things and babies are nice, good things. How can that be wrong? How can that make us bad people?
So let's consider a thought experiment, something very popular on here when considering ethical questions.
A slaveowner speaks:
So, you are telling me that because of my beliefs and actions I am a bad person? That I am engaging in unethical practices?
Well, let *me* put this case to *you* and then answer my question. You see that young slave over there, working in the house? My wife makes rather a pet of them, I have to say, but you must allow the ladies their fancies. We have owned that slave since it was born, indeed, since *before* it was born. It has grown up alongside my own children, you may say.
We are good masters and mistresses, here. We don't flog or brand or mutilate or use shackles or the rest of those tales you hear about bad owners. Some may do such things, but that has nothing to do with us, and it's unfair to put the crimes of a few on the heads of all. We feed and clothe our slaves properly, we allow them time after their duties to have their little celebrations and dances, we even call in a doctor to look after them if they're sick, and not everyone does that, I can tell you!
As to that particular slave? Well, one day my wife and I decided we wanted a new worker for the household, one to be brought up to do what tasks were necessary in the proper way, not the slapdash treatment you get by picking a slave out of the mass at random. So we went down to the auction house - a most respectable establishment, I can assure you, spoken of very highly by all and with the most scrupulous standards in place - and luckily there was the very thing: a dam in foal! The auctioneer told us the sire was of good breeding, and showed us the papers himself, and that this dam was intelligent (for one of her kind, one must make allowances of course) and well-behaved and in short, sure to produce offspring of a superior sort.
So we purchased her and then, when the child was about three or four and old enough to begin to be useful, sold her on (we didn't particularly want or need her since we had no interest in breeding stock ourselves).
And that slave has been brought up in our household ever since and well repaid all the trouble and expense we went through. Why, they are devoted to us and would be distraught if anyone spoke to them of "emancipation" and that is not merely fancy, sir, no let me tell you I know it to be true. Because a few years back, some busybody had got at old Mr Henshaw in the next estate over and he ended up 'freeing' all his slaves. Of course, all the slaves on the estates round about got wind of it and the next thing we knew, this slave here came weeping to us in a highly distressed state and begged us not to get rid of them, they would be good, they promised.
So my wife and I explained, in a way suited to their understanding, that of course we had no such notions. "You are special", we told them. "You're not like the rest who just happened along any old how. We picked you out, we selected you, we chose you and nobody else because we wanted you. Of course we are not going to get rid of you!"
Well, that settled the matter and everything has been going on excellently since. When I die, that slave will be left to my family, and I am assured my children will be good masters and mistresses in their turn to a devoted old family servant.
Abolition, forsooth! A bunch of foreigners in England who never owned a slave themselves and are all excitable Evangelicals, and a crowd of trouble-makers in the North who envy us down here, trying to poke their noses in where they're not wanted in our personal lives. There's many a so-called 'free' man and woman, aye and child too, in the mills and mines of England and the factories and big cities of the North who would be more than happy to swap places with that slave of mine.
I don't pretend to be a philosopher or great thinker, I'm just an ordinary man of affairs. But I know what the best scientific minds of the day say. I know what the doctors say. I know what the law, and grave, serious judges say. I know what moderate religion, not votaries and zealots, says. I know what ordinary, decent. society says, no matter what a few firebrands and crazy men and religious zealots say.
And they all agree with me: this is normal and natural and indeed, right.
So I turn the question back on *you*, sir: am I a bad person?
Isn’t it a bit disingenuous to accept that trait selection might result in a “net spiritual loss” for humanity while simultaneously disavowing any interest in the “metaphysics” of, for lack of a better expression, the industrial creation and disposition of embryos?
Are you saying that the question of whether the industry ought to exist is already moot and that the only question is how people ought to engage in it? It’s not clear to me that we would have any greater success in developing universal principles for the application of the technology. Take the principle of diversity: for the individual user, and maybe even the broader culture of users, the question of diversity is really an externality—as long as you have some reasonable expectation that others will make different choices, it’s not clear that individual choices on trait selection ought to be constrained. Moreover, even if you can justify constraints in one culture, that the same constraints should apply in a different culture.
>Then maybe the soul would enter the embryo at conception.
Note that this is inconsistent with the belief that souls are unique and indivisible, because embryos can split into identical twins at any point after conception and before gastrulation.
>and an egg in the cervix
Presumably you mean Fallopian tube. An egg isn't going to be in the cervix (which is between the uterus and vagina) unless something has gone wrong.
Thanks, fixed. I think Aristotelians and their descendants have some complicated version of soul that sort of survives this critique, although I would claim it's only able to simultaneously do this *and* support a life-begins-at-conception view by being so vague that it's incoherent.
"#3: Would you tell a disabled person to their face that you would rather they not exist, or that people like them not exist in the next generation?"
A similar argument applies to religion overall and culture in general. I'd like for no religion to exist and some cultures to be extinct over time. It does not mean I support killing people right now that support those beliefs. It's a gradual process, mainly of education, that would select against those traits until they're gone.
If you take objection 3 seriously, it implies at least two (imo silly) things.
1. If it would be bad to eliminate eg Downs, might we actually want *more* congenital disabilities than we have already?
2. If the ideal number of congenital disabilities is not zero, and if we can treat them, is it bad to treat them *too well*, because curing them would effectively eradicate the condition? (Alice Wong really makes this argument in her book year of the Tiger.)
The questions of what constitutes "personhood" or when a soul enters the body, etc are all empirically unknowable. They are metaphysical or religious arguments.
Your argument looks at a number of contingent characteristics. Thoughts, feelings, relationships, size, etc. Problem is - as you note - these are arbitrary. How do we determine which characters matter and which do not? This risks a slippery slope, where people push that line around. How do we argue against someone taking it to an extreme -- saying this group or that group is less-than-human and can thus be discarded (the disabled? mentally ill? racial groups?). If it is all arbitrary personal preference, we can say we don't like it, but can we really say it is objectively wrong?
So what are we left with? The biological reality of human life. This objectively comes into existence at the moment of conception, when the genetic material unites and a unique human life comes into existence. This is the only place you can clearly draw a line between human life and not human life.
Despite an limitations of this nascent human life, it is a *human life*. The comparison to the life of a bug is faulty. There is objectively a difference between human and bug -- as another commentator noted, even the dead corpse (if even the cremated remains!) are infinitely more valuable than a bug.
If we are to have any sort of rational morality on this subject, we must say that any human life must be treated as a human, as a person. The intentional ending of any human life must be considered murder.
"The questions of what constitutes personhood or when a soul enters the body, etc are all empirically unknowable. They are metaphysical or religious arguments."
I don't think this is true. I think this is similar to the question of how high a certain feature has to be before it's a "mountain" rather than a "hill". It's not that there's some real answer and we don't know it. It's that things are however high they are, and we might call them different things at different times.
My claim is that things are exactly how they look. An adult has thoughts and dreams (because they are using their brain, which creates them). An embryo does not have these. There is no extra question of "personhood", except for a legal/definitional question, like if there was some rule that mountains had to be in national parks, and the National Park Service had to come up with some reasonable definition of when a hill became a mountain.
"I think this is similar to the question of how high a certain feature has to be before it's a "mountain" rather than a "hill". It's not that there's some real answer and we don't know it. It's that things are however high they are, and we might call them different things at different times."
This is making my point. This IS arbitrary, subjective definition. Different people will say different things in different place. Perhaps you could even say mounts don't exist at all--it is just a construct. This is the same with personhood, existence of the soul--maybe there is no such thing. Maybe there is. What object argument can be made? The moral implications of mountain vs hill are minimal if any. The moral implication of murder or not murder is huge--maybe the most important moral question we can ask.
"...things are exactly how they look." Ok. How do they look? Who is looking at what? How can this be the basis of a moral argument?
"Adults have thoughts and dreams... and embryo doesn't" All adults? When do babies start to have thoughts and dreams? Maybe we can see brainwaves or something, but can we prove they are thoughts? That a lone standard, or is there more?
If we say, "murder is wrong" (and not that I, personally, don't like it), then we must be able to define it. Such a definition needs to rest on some objective reality. The only object reality that can be empirically established is human life, which starts at conception. Maybe that human life has a soul. We can't know absolutely.
Societies may decided other acts are undesirable & have laws/rules/norms against them, etc, that are not necessarily objectively morally wrong (drugs, speeding, jay-walking, leaving dirty dishes in the work sink, etc.) There is a distinction between objectively immoral and merely undesirable--we can argue about the status various acts, but murder is clearly objectively immoral. The alternative is moral relativism.
> The questions of what constitutes "personhood" or when a soul enters the body, etc are all empirically unknowable. They are metaphysical or religious arguments.
Personhood is an arbitrary value-judgement, i.e. a social construct. It's informed by a few factors including consciousness, which is void at conception.
Human life in itself, through the secular lens, is cheap since it's not sacred. It does not matter in and of itself.
Yes. So how are we then to act? Is murder wrong? Is there a rational reason it is wrong? Or only because the bible (or whatever religious text you like) says so?
I think collective values coalesce strongly around a center, and the legislative arm is our expression of that. While some might snark that "without God, everything is permitted", in practice this doesn't happen. Values have power even if we are the arbiters instead of the deities.
This leaves us at a loss with edge-cases. Even deontology, which generally facilitates legal matters, can struggle here.
Wouldn't a better choice be sometime after the blastocyst forms? One blastocyst can split and become two people and two can merge to become one person, so there's not really any notion of personhood yet.
I’ve noticed a lot of moral weight is put on IF SITUATIONS WERE DIFFERENT.
If we lived in a society with a huge shortage of embryos - we would value each embryo as much as a human child.
If we could keep each sperm and egg alive, and efficiently distribute to colonize other planets, we would be eager to do so.
If a child with a terminal illness is born at 1 week, and given 2 weeks to live, if we were to prematurely terminate the child’s life it would be seen as bad. Because - we see the situation where the child could pull through and make it.
There is something there about value of things in a world of scarcity.
I do think this quickly falls apart with regards to other animals. If we lived in a society where there was only 2 cows, we wouldn’t eat beef. And yet we do.
> It’s not clear what it means for the sleeping hermit to have “a mind”. He doesn’t seem to have the metaphysical mind, since (assuming sufficiently deep sleep) he’s not conscious or engaging in any mental activity. He does have a physical brain, but this doesn’t seem like the relevant criterion.
Imagine that there was a priceless piece of artwork that has been stored in a cave and forgotten by history. It was the pinnacle achievement of a once-in-a-century genius artist, taking her decades to perfect, and in its time was famous and revered across a wide region, inspiring poets and philosophers. But some jealous king stored it in a cave so only he could see it, and ordered references to it removed from books so no one looked for it, and no one now alive has ever heard of it.
You stumble into the cave and find this piece of artwork, and immediately recognize its beauty and worth. You recognizes that nothing in the modern world is like it, and that if it is lost, humanity will never see anything quite like it again.
Is it wrong for you to immediately burn it?
A mind isn't just the active experience of consciousness. Even when inactive, the brain encodes all the information necessary to produce the thoughts and experiences of that unique individual. That encoded information is the result of however many years or decades of experiences and interactions trained the neural network into its current shape. It is fractally complex in a way that reflects all it has seen and done in life.
If you had the eyes to see it properly, it would not be strange to call it a work of art.
If you come upon a cave and there is a bunch of paint and brushes and a canvas, no one will be particularly mad if you burn them for warmth, or just throw them in a dumpster to keep the cave tidy. You are not morally burning every potential painting that could ever possibly be created with those supplies. A brain with no experience/training is not very unique and not very valuable.
But once the brain has grown into something complex and unique, it has value, both to society and in and of itself.
In the modern day people make their diseases and disability part of their identity. Which is bad in many ways. Freddie has written several essays about this.
But it's the natural outgrowth of "me having AIDS is part of who I am" then "getting rid of people with AIDS" means getting rid of people like me which means "curing AIDS" is bad.
Concern #3 comes up a surprising amount and never fails to make me personally mad. I have cystic fibrosis and if I knew a couple who knew they were both carriers, and had the ability to select against CF in their kids, but chose not to, I would think they were the dumbest and worst people alive!
It is unethical to kill the hermit, because you take away future pleasure? IVF is not unethical, because it doesn't reduce future pleasure, it increases it. You will have one of these. Abortion is more complicated than that.
Weirdly, this would somehow infer that secretly killing the hermit at night and harvesting his organs for some Norwegian teens would be net ethical, as long as we don't live in a society where anyone has to fear that.
It is also a really cool thing of you to do to have children if you expect them to have a good life. Thanks Mom.
I have a question about the sleeping hermit problem, but it's not about embryos. I don't think embryos really matter at all, but I think there's an interesting question about "Why do we prefer life that already exists over life that doesn't exist yet?"
For instance:
Let's say there was this program that paired would-be parents who want kids and will likely be good parents with women who are willing to become surrogate mothers for them (and let's assume there's no children in the world that need adopting).
So you have three people all willing and ready to get going on this arrangement, but you're a government bureaucrat in charge of stamping whether they're allowed to or not.
Let's also assume 0% chance of pregnancy problems or child mortality.
Now let's say you have a trolley problem sort of choice: do you prevent the stamp of approval, or do you let an isolated hermit die?
Let's also say if you don't stamp, all 3 subjects will have their memories wiped and the parents' desires to be parents will be removed. So in either case there's no felt loss experienced by any party.
I think most people would choose to save the hermit, and I would to. But from a strict utilitarian perspective, wouldn't both options be equal?
My ethics professor in college (himself a utilitarian) sketched out a similar argument, and said he was baffled not to have seen any serious discussion of it in the literature.
Yeah, this is a fascinating issue. I think it ultimately comes down to whether distinctively "person-directed reasons" have weight over and above our undirected or impersonal reasons to promote good lives and well-being. A couple of posts where I discuss this in more detail:
(1) Killing vs Failing to Create: The strongest objection to total utilitarianism?
That is, a non-existent person that never comes into existence does not miss out. There's nothing / no one there to "miss out" on anything. But the isolated hermit already exists and their death is a net-negative under utilitarian perspectives in this scenario.
In programming terms, one side is null/void/None, and the other is -VALUE_OF_PERSON. Their values are incomparable.
"I answered that the hermit’s past personhood gives him some sort of property rights to continue having his personhood respected, the same way I may still own an object when I’m not physically holding it, or an absentee landlord may own a house when he isn’t present."
This sounds suspiciously like some kind of deontology. Is Scott ready to admit that utilitarianism by itself is not enough?
I would happily say yes, disabilities are bad and we should avoid having more people with disabilities by prioritizing genes that don't cause disabilities. I'd rather disabled people did not exist and were instead fully able bodied, I'd rather the next generation have fewer or no disabled people.
That said, disabled people may not agree. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(25)00724-X/fulltext argues that being deaf (they capitalize it, but I won't) is not a disability but instead a minority subculture, and would prefer to keep deaf children deaf rather than fixing it through genetic intervention.
If embryo selection takes off I'd imagine we see a lot more of this; one man's negative phenotype is another man's cultural heritage
"It involves taking your body apart cell by cell, then infusing each cell individually with special nanotechnology. This is a very involved process - at some points, no two cells that previously made up your body are touching one another, and some may be in entirely different laboratory rooms from others - but after a few hours all the cells should get successfully infused, you can be re-assembled on the operating table, and you’ll be good to go."
I just want to point out that this is not how animal bodies work. We are not just a collection of cells. Our cells are embedded in an extracellular matrix that is just as much a part of us as the cells. In fact, this is one of the things that separates the animals from the other kingdoms. Furthermore, our cells are tightly integrated with our extracellular matrix through proteins called integrins (and others), which connect through the cell membrane into the inside of the cell. One of the reasons it is so hard to grow artificial organs is that without these integrins, the cells die.
I know this has little to do with the argument presented, but this incorrect mental model annoys me.
I have yet to see an ethical argument that makes a distinction between a standard IVF process and embryo selection. Either you think embryos are living humans with rights, or you don't. The application of that embryo post-extraction shouldn't matter.
The fact that the vast majority of people who think IVF is wrong also happen to be very religious (admittedly anecdotal but I'd be shocked if the data showed otherwise) indicates to me that "do embryos have rights?" is primarily a religious question and therefore should not be legislated.
Whether or not you see it as such, this is bigoted. Religious people have opinions about ethics. Just because they also believe in God (or which one they believe in) doesn't mean their opinions, or their votes on that matter, shouldn't count.
Their opinions count in the privacy of their own minds and their own homes. I didn't say religious people should be forced to participate in embryo selection, I said their ethical opinions shouldn't get to become established law. Orthodox Jews have the right to only eat kosher beef but non-kosher beef should not be illegal. Or pick one of any infinite number of other analogies.
Sure, I'll pick another analogy: religious nuts in the North were the strongest abolitionist voices. The argument then was that they weren't being forced to participate in slave ownership, so they should just clam up.
That is a poor analogy because plenty of secular arguments exist against slavery. As I said in my original comment the vast majority of anti-embryo selection arguments come from religious individuals and are based in religious morals.
Plenty of secular arguments exist against ANYTHING. And most of the arguments that "come from religious individuals" are perfectly comprehensible by nonreligious people.
If you could see through your prejudices, I think you'd be more willing to recognize that. And to be clear, while I am upset, I'm not calling you prejudiced in an effort to upset you, or end the argument - I just genuinely think you're not approaching this consistently, and that's my best guess as to why, from prior experience with people who think similar things.
With that said, I think this conversation has gone as far as it can productively, maybe farther. I encourage you to pursue dialogue with people who think differently from you.
My understanding is that on the subject of slavery in the United States that secular arguments against slavery are, or were, privileged over religious arguments against slavery because slavery enforcement was not by the Church but by the State. There is also historical evidence of an intention for there to be a separation between Church and State, in the US. This does not itself preclude the value of expressing religious arguments, such as to persuade your fellow believers.
Since I arrived early this time, a question for those on the "it has potential, therefore it's special' side of the fence:
If we take some cells from my body, and coax them into being pluripotent, then they could (in vivo or vitro, but not in cryostorage) make a "whole", "new", "me"... is that batch of stem cells my identical twin? Do the stem cells have the same moral standing that I do?
What if we extract the DNA from a cell on my fingertip, and inject it into a human egg. It now has EXACTLY as much potential as "I" did when I was first fertilized many years ago... is it my identical twin? Does the fertilized egg have the same moral standing as I do? This isn't some weird thought experiment or something... it's how we have successfully cloned animals already!
For me, the obvious answer for those questions is "of course not"... but once the egg or cells had gotten far enough along (certainly by the stage it was an actual baby) then I'd say "of course is does"
Scientifically, this seems questionable. All zygotic cells are pluripotent, but not all pluripotent cells are zygotic. You probably have more work to do between pluripotence and cloning. Potentiality-believers would probably say that once you've done that work and turned them into a zygote, they have moral status. That seems consistent enough to me.
As for whether clones have "the same moral standing you do"... of course they do, right? Independent of this debate. Whenever you started having moral standing - whether you think that's as a zygote, at birth, or at age 18 - your clone will start having moral standing at that same time in its life. Its DNA being a carbon-copy of yours doesn't undermine that. Is there a serious argument against this?
"I mostly bite this bullet. I think a newborn baby deserves more rights than a cow for moral rather than axiological reasons (that is, for reasons that involve the fence around the law, rather than just the law). "
I am glad Scott recognizes (at least sort of implicitly) that there is no philosophically valid reason why this should be so. This is why there is no logically consistent philosophical defense of anthropocentrism. At least I've never come across one. And having read a lot of environmental ethics literature, I am inclined to say no one has come up with one yet.
Regarding #1, I think the honest answer is that we're biologically programmed to love and protect our babies, as well as pregnant women, to an extreme degree. Biology had not programmed us to deal with artificially selected embryos specifically (they are too new of an invention), and as the result we end up creating vastly overfitted models in a desperate attempt to handle such cases. Thus a fully consistent and reasonable moral model that handles embryos may not exist at all, because all we've got to work with is a sort of moral pareidolia.
Yeah. The example I've usually used for these cases is a coma patient with little to no current brain activity who - based on the progression of similar cases - will probably recover, with >80% odds. (I think us actually knowing that is medically unlikely, but as thought experiments go, that's a fairly mild implausibility.)
A genuine question for those who feel that the soul enters the body at conception: do identical twins have a single soul? Because the monozygotic split typically happens many divisions AFTER the first one, so, uh... I dunno, having a half-soul seems weird to me, but it's also not obvious that we can run a soul through a xerox machine when splitting the zygote.
What about if my DNA is extracted and injected into a viable human egg, previously stripped of genetic material (this is how we've cloned animals in the past, so it's not an absurd hypothetical). Does my cloned soul enter at the moment the needle injects the DNA? If we withdraw the DNA, does the soul get destroyed?
I'm genuinely asking; these kinds of questions are why I have difficulty agreeing with the "life begins at conception" position.
I think the "soul" talk tends to be a bit of a red herring for this conversation. People who do believe in souls, and think they enter at conception, usually infer that because they think conception is where personhood begins. They believe that for other reasons, and those reasons are the actual productive grounds for a conversation on the topic. Whether personhood looks like ensoulment or not is a somewhat separate conversation.
But to directly answer your question: people (Calvinists, I guess?) might think that there are two souls in a zygote that will become a twin, before division into those twins. Or people might think that there is one, and it persists into one of those twins, while a second one is created for the other at the time of division. Or they might think that at the time of division, the original one passes away while two more are generated. These all strike me as somewhat plausible - or at least, not *more implausible* than souls are in the first place.
It sounds like you're saying that "they don't actually believe that the soul corresponds to conception, even though they claim that it does"; is that correct?
I normally try to grant that people are telling me the truth about why they believe things, although I'll definitely look for inconsistencies.
I don't personally believe that life is sacred, so it's genuinely hard for me to understand the position, though.
I think people who believe in souls tend to think something like:
A) Personhood corresponds to being ensouled.
B) Personhood begins at conception.
C) THEREFORE, ensoulment begins at conception.
A secular person can easily engage in conversation with someone like this by discussing why they believe (B). If the soul-believer becomes convinced that personhood begins e.g. at a certain stage of CNS development, they might become convinced of (D) ensoulment begins at that stage of CNS development, instead of believing (C).
But rationalists without any exposure to those people tend to model soul-believers as thinking:
(A) Personhood corresponds to being ensouled.
(C) Ensoulment begins at conception.
(B) THEREFORE, personhood begins at conception.
The rationalist has no common ground with the soul-believer about (C), so it looks like the argument has nowhere to go, and all they can do is deride the soul-believer as committed to mystical weirdness. But this is all a misunderstanding.
My personal favorite model of child morality that is maximally internally consistent is to declare (by fiat) that children are *property* of parents until such time as the parents release them. Once released the child becomes a person with rights that people have. As property, any crimes committed by the children are blamed on the parents (somewhat encouraging release), and since a child is not a person they cannot vote or serve on a jury.
It operates on the assumption that the median (probably 5th percentile) parent cares more about a given child than anyone else on the planet cares about that child, so the median child (probably 5th percentile) will be "totally fine". It solves the pesky problem of there being no clear line in the sand between conception and personhood by just declaring the problem moot.
Interestingly, there are cultures around the world who sort of hold this view (though they usually don't extend it all the way to filicide). Places where the government will basically never take a child away from its parent, no matter how bad the situation is. This is often frowned on by westerners, but the vast majority of children in those cultures are "totally fine".
I'm mostly here with you, but surely there has to be some limitations on what people can do with their progeny-as-property. We wouldn't want these rights to be absolute, lest parents decide to sell or rent out their property to entities they know will harm it.
The open question is then whether the system that intervenes will be less net-harmful than nonintervention.
Given the increasing rate at which cops seem to be getting called on parents who dare to let their kids walk a couple blocks to school, the answer is not obvious, especially in the long run.
In the same sense that you want to put a bright-line rule in place for personhood because the whole thing is kinda logically messy and no single threshold event makes much sense out of it, people may want to put a bright line around what counts as "eugenics" or as transhumanism and draw it to include embryo selection.
I'm firmly against transhumanism, but my own instinct is that if you could replicate what's happening to a reasonable degree with just genetic screening and mate selection, it probably isn't that dangerous. Singapore has that program to get high IQ people to pair up and have kids, and I'm sure some people think that's fascist and evil, but it's not going to produce a Khan Singh superman, and is only barely more of a thumb on the scale than Western assortive mating already places there. Two Ivy League lawyers in DC using embryo selection is likely doing no more for their kid's IQ than the Singapore program does without it.
That seems like a defensible line, clearly drawing "designer babies" on the transhumanism side and embryo selection as more like a modern version of the animal husbandry and crop cultivation we've been doing for 10,000 years. The number of embryos you'd have to create and discard for it to approximate designer babies requires more eggs than anyone has-- and if you're cloning the eggs or something to make 1 million embryo combinations and then picking one, obviously you've crossed the line to what mate selection could not do.
It's much harder to draw a clear line if you wade too far into the morality of specific effects of the intervention. If you care about whether eliminating Down's Syndrome, enhancing IQs, ending autism, or increasing physical beauty, are good or bad interventions to take, then the whole thing gets quite muddled and irrational. There is almost certainly some type of purpose that a supermajority of people will think is abhorrent and want to draw the line there. If the line gets drawn on that sort of basis, it will almost certainly be politically contentious and hard to defend.
How about a two-part criterion for moral personhood:
(1). Has the physical potential to develop into an adult human.
AND
(2). Has an adult human capable of and committed to turning that potential into a reality.
Criterion (1) rules out sperms, eggs, AIs, and adult chimpanzees.
Criterion (2) rules out non-chosen IVF embryos, unwanted fetuses, and perhaps even newborns with birth defects if no one volunteers to adopt.
The two criteria together rule in fetuses within mothers who intend to carry to term and to nurture thereafter to adulthood. They also arguably rule in fetuses within surrogate mothers who agreed to carry the fetus to term, but now want to back out.
I'm sure I haven't considered all the edge cases, so I am curious what people think.
Incidentally, these criteria derive from my more fundamental belief that moral patiency derives from being embedded in a society of moral agents, rather than any more metaphysical characteristics like consciousness (actual or potential) or ability to feel pain. So I am also curious what people think of this meta-criterion.
Is there a scoring table available for this sort of thing. Like a gammy leg (-5), high IQ (+30), family trait of macabre hobbies (-7), good singing voice (+5), wet earwax (-16). Would make it a lot simpler.
A more interesting question that either went unasked or unanswered is, if polygenic screening really takes off then are we evolving the entire human race in ways that may be advantageous in our existing environment but could be problematic in a different environment. Will we discover, post apocalypse that we have cut off our own genetic noses. :)
This is certainly true in some sense; some of today's genetic effect is effect of genes allowing resistance to not-yet-defeated germs. But then AI is greater danger to humanity and I'd prefer people having 100 IQ higher than me to solve AI alignment problem.
If you're worried about AI, you don't need to try and genetically engineer a superhuman, you can just lobby for law banning AI development and/or try to convince a government or anti-AI billionaire to sabotage AI research centres.
"Is there some criterion that would keep embryos, while ruling out sperm-egg pairs and computers with robot code?"
To starman the position, I believe "developmental stage" is what they were going for. Contrasted with "ingredient" to use a term that covers iron, pizza and sperm in this context.
Yes, zygotes and embryos of humans are more dependent on their mother's body than those of say monotremes or other non-mamalian animals that spawn and lay. But they are still the developmental stage of a separate entity.
This is my best faith attempt. If anyone who holds this position feels it could be improved please let me know.
The slippery slope argument you eventually settle on for why human babies should have rights we don’t afford to cows seems to me to be the crux of Issue #1.
Mankind has struggled to define when personhood begins since the ancient Greeks, who (simplifying) split between the Pythagoreans who picked conception, the Stoics who picked birth, and Aristotle, who picked the fuzzy middle ground of “quickening.”
Relying on neurological development milestones alone doesn’t even rule out infanticide, as you note. So if you’re essentially landing on an answer of “we’ll start with neurological development milestones, then fudge on the early side to account for uncertainty and slippery slope considerations” then there’s still no clear principle for how far you should fudge.
It doesn’t even take a ton of imagining to make this slippery slope real — you just need artificial womb technology. Then a rich enough couple could see how all five IVF embryos gestate before deciding which one(s) to allow to be “born” and which ones to cull.
How far along would they be allowed to let the eventually-culled embryos gestate? Well, you might say the existence of brain cells is where you would want to draw the line. But say only 5% of the population agrees with that particular line, and someone else finds a super rare condition that doctors can reliably test for just a couple of weeks after brain cells develop, and who would ever want a child to be forced to grow up with that condition? You concede that the existence of brain cells isn't really that significant of a milestone and the line gets shifted later, and later, and later.
Pretty soon rich families are “trying out” their potential children for a few weeks at a time after their artificial "births" (by staggering the gestation start times) until they pick which one to keep, just like how families today foster a litter of kittens intending to keep one and put the rest up for adoption at the pet store, where they're quietly euthanized if no one wants to take them home.
The attraction of drawing the line at conception is not that it’s some perfectly defensible threshold from every possible perspective. It’s that there aren’t any such thresholds, and it’s the best Schelling point we have.
Seeing a lot of people (surprisingly) stuck on #1. Maybe it’s because criticism of embryo selection in #2 and #3 are so weak?
The truth is the world needs more smart people, not less, and this would be true if we were all 1 SD smarter. I suspect a lot of commenters are in very high IQ bubbles and think “these people suck, pretty much, so more smart people isn’t better.” Except I’m a farmer in a poor community. Lack of intelligence leads to insane amounts of pain and suffering, and much of it self inflicted and accidental.
In terms of the sleeping hermit, I think that a much simpler explanation of why not to kill him is an appeal to his previous preferences. The hermit was clearly an actively thinking person while awake, and when he went to sleep probably had a very strong preference to wake up again eventually. Even though the person who had that preference is no longer active, it still has moral weight.
I think your response to the second objection merits more effort to strengthen the theoretical case if you want to maintain that you're making an ethical argument rather than just a political one. In your practical case, I see you making a lot of points about the limitations of embryo-selection technology as it exists today. Those points are germane and astute for a debate about what if any laws we should pass today regulating the practice. But for an *ethics* debate, defending a practice by bringing up contingent facts about its limitations feels lazy to me. In a hypothetical future where we have an extremely detailed understanding of how nearly every known human allele maps onto phenotypes, and it's cheap and practical for parents to arbitrarily customize their child's genome, should they still be allowed unlimited freedom to do so? If not, what limitations should be drawn?
I do have a potential secondary argument to respond to #1, although I've not really seen it before, so I would like to know whether or not it is actually effective and convincing.
It seems reasonable to say that human values are largely based around continuing humanity's own existence and propagation. In particular, we should expect that our intuitive values should approximate this by natural selection. Comparing a population of a species with intuitive morals that align some amount with their continued existence to another population that aligns slightly more with it, no matter what the actual difference *is* between the two populations, we should expect that the second population's genes would be more represented in the future. So, over time, we should expect any species's "morals" to trend towards supporting their own future existence, including our own.
Of course, this process is not perfect, and especially for humans, these intuitive morals really only apply to our ancestral environment, after which point values are likely to develop pseudorandomly. However, we can extract a slightly non-obvious idea out of this: that it wouldn't be such a bad idea to continue following the arrow towards maximizing future existence (I could be more specific about this if you want).
So, rather than trying to associate the moral worth of various objects with certain conditions, I think it might be somewhat easier to pick out an approximate cutoff point for when an embryo or fetus could be terminated while trying to maximize this. Concretely, we would examine a range of societies who have suddenly decided a cutoff and see which of them "exists" the most in the future. Maybe this would be somewhat better than running around in circles about the definitions of the rights of various things?
I could write more about how I would then argue with #1 (and #2 and #3, but to lesser extents), although I mainly wonder if this actually makes any sense. If it has some critical flaw that makes it lead to various unacceptably repugnant conclusions, it probably wouldn't be worth commenting on much further. (Also, does anyone know if someone else is already using this argument? I tried looking online earlier, but it doesn't seem like a very common point of view).
Also, just to be transparent, my biases are pro-choice and pro-IVF, and I think that this argument at least partially advocates for those positions when I work it out, so you should update accordingly on the soundness of this.
I like Chappell's argument, presumably the fact that humans have (mostly) consistant preferences and desires indicates that we have our preferences "stored" somewhere in our brain that isn't conscious. That's why we have the same preferences when we go to bed and wake up, and why Scott can be said to have a strong preference not to die even when he isn't actively contemplating death.
That being said, for Scott's transhuman surgery hypothetical, I have no idea if the "stored" preferences in our brain would still "exist" in some sense or not if we were to be disassembled. Would the "recording" of the brain the transhuman surgery made as it disassembled you be "you" or not? I have no idea. So maybe Scott is right that preexisting people have some kind of "property" rights.
I'm not sure that js that counterintuitive when you think about it. Most people recognize some obligation to respect the "preferences" of dead people. For instance, defaming a dead person is generally regarded to be a bad thing because people have a preference to have a good reputation, and a person's reputation usually outlives them.
I have nothing to say on the main point but there are some statements here I would like to nitpick. :P
> and the carefully-tuned environment of the human uterus
Pretty sure this is false. A fetus can totally (with some artificial assistance to put it there) grow outside the uterus. It's just very bad for the host.
> I think this is similar to having age-of-consent laws at age 18
This is a California-ism. The age of consent is lower in most of the US (let alone other countries). Perhaps "age of majority" might be a better analogy?
> But if World War II hadn’t happened, there wouldn’t have been a baby boom
I think this is my first time commenting and I’m pretty nervous about it, not in the least because I suspect I’m significantly less smart than many of the parties taking about this. But I still have worries which it would be nice if Scott was able to ameliorate.
- when people are given access to technology in order to make choices, they tend to make simple choices. So I don’t necessarily expect under the rules of the free market for the choices people make about their kids’ genes to be sophisticated, especially if there’s a chance for companies to urge them to make more selections for upcharge. “Taller better faster stronger, why not?” The example which keeps coming to mind is one I read about in Temple Grandin’s “Animals in Translation” (thanks for making slaughterhouses 10% more efficient.) She said that chicken were bred for large breasts (valuable) and started getting foot problems and cysts and shit. Then were bred for strong legs and the health problems went away, but there were mysterious behavioral problems which arose - male roosters of this strain stopped doing mating dances, would get frustrated when hens didn’t respond, and would aggressively rape hens to death.
Humans have much longer generational periods, but I still worry about “unexpected disabilities” or “unexpected extremely negative behavioral associations” which cannot be nearly predicted for at the current level of technology. Nobody wanted or predicted the rapist roosters - they were a huge financial liability - but they couldn’t un-ring the bell.
- I do suspect as rich people do, they would engage with the technology out of a competitive desire for high status kids, which would create a genetically distinct upper class, probably more generically pretty. The social effects of this seem so incredibly toxic they’d boggle the mind. If the government subsidized it equally for everybody I’d be more supportive - this is a tech I see as only defensible if completely free for the most part. “Paying for designer babies” may not be what most people use it for, but SOME will, and the societal effects of that on a widespread level would ruin it for everybody. Evolution does seem to gradually be selecting against deleterious physical AND psychological traits, but humans cannot do so with the same amount of experimentation and sophistication.
- I suppose I see genetic connections to health (specifically polygenic traits) as highly complex and not well-understood, and the risks of introducing it unrestricted just because “well can’t help the march of progress” feel risky in a similar way AI does to me. Humans are not trustworthy (to me) with eugenics for sale, even if it’s great for eliminating certain diseases (which I agree is highly desirable,) we can’t know if that will have long term unexpected effects on the population which everybody consents to having introduced in their bloodline.
On rapist roosters: I think it's possible that something bad unexpectedly arises, but we're already countering something bad with the technology, so naively it seems to have to be pretty bad luck. Also, there's no way in our current world the technology would spread to all countries and social strata equally, so there will be plenty of time to assess the results.
On rich people evolving away: well, we already have the Ashkenazim who seem pretty "evolved" by a very important metric, and I wouldn't say life is generally terrible for them or for non-Jewish people, or if it is then it's probably for other reasons than their genetic superiority. Also given the number of IQ points the embryo selection is supposed to give, you'd need multiple generations for the effect to become noticeable, and by that point we're either done for or have a much better technology anyway. Maybe still with the same social concerns but we don't need to work out full 21st century aviation safety protocols in 1910.
(Also, "I'm afraid your children will be too much better off than mine so you shouldn't be allowed to do this thing for their well-being" sounds pretty horrible. That's already quite dystopian if this gets normalized.)
> “Paying for designer babies” may not be what most people use it for, but SOME will, and the societal effects of that on a widespread level would ruin it for everybody.
What kind of designer babies do you mean, and how would they ruin it for everybody?
might do responses in separate replies, lot to unpack here.
Point 1. The problem with the whole argument is that the status of an embryo or fetus depends on how much the person wants them.
"Bugs" yeah sure, if there happened to be a mixup and your wife's stored embryos were accidentally destroyed i'm sure you'd think they were still bugs. They are bugs if you need to dispose of them, people when implanted.
The issue is that we are weird on them in a way we aren't on other things . And a danger of that kind of weirdness is we do not want to extend it: people tend to do crazy things when subjective personhood is a thing. I think we permit it only by severely bounding the choice.
but we already slippery sloped it. IVF should be for younger people with significant fertility issues but some how its turned into "freeze your eggs so you can work on your career" and now its the method to introduce elective changes on your kids genes.
theres no objective limit to personhood: a lot of pro-life takes really can't escape Christian philosophy of being (and one could snark at Catholics by pointing out that their means of prolonging the faith is by birthing kids over fighting in the sphere of values.) but still that kind of schrodingers personhood is dangerous.
Jesus Scott, the whole AI risk thing is that disruptive tech about intelligence can be extremely dangerous due to it not being aligned to the mass of humanity's values. That can happen with regular smarter people too: its the root of a lot of bad philosophy or design, or treating others as inferiors to be farmed.
Like people worry about AI girlfriends but Vtubers act in the same role, and even "the girlfriend experience" is a service to whales. its possible to have similar but lower tech effects.
i feel like you can't assume more intelligence will be totally positive: intelligent people often have different, even alien values. The whole rationalist movement lol, if it ever had a Constantine, what would the world be like?
Struck me as weird divergence, possibly because you can't see you are closer to a superintelligent AI in some ways. Can achieve similar ends by changing humans.
im not a fan of the "i find it alamin, you don't trust in charles dawin, and let nature select, baby, select" view though either.
yes there always was a chance to not bring a soldier in the world, but engineering a pacifist isn't the same. Once you start engineering conditions, you value people in respect to fulfilling them.
and yes people will be cruel. just because your personal sphere currently values niceness to others doesn't mean that won't change.
> "Bugs" yeah sure, if there happened to be a mixup and your wife's stored embryos were accidentally destroyed i'm sure you'd think they were still bugs. They are bugs if you need to dispose of them, people when implanted.
Such a reaction seems to me to be sufficiently explained by the idea that stored embryos are valuable to their parents as property because of their utility in producing a child & the difficulty of creating them.
> still that kind of schrodingers personhood is dangerous.
What precisely is permissible in this area can be made stable/predictable by passing clear, hard-to-repeal laws defining what counts as a legal person. Of course it would still be apparent that that definition is partly arbitrary, more a line in the sand than a natural qualitative distinction, & significant numbers of people would disagree with it, but that is true for other related questions (abortion, euthanasia for incurably comatose people). A contrary example can be found in the recent news stories about premature declarations of brain-death to facilitate organ harvesting, but I don't know whether the law is, in fact, clear in defining brain-death.
"What precisely is permissible in this area can be made stable/predictable by passing clear, hard-to-repeal laws defining what counts as a legal person."
Yes, certainly no-one would ever repeal laws awarding personhood to a particular class! And we would not see screeds about racism if such laws are applied!
By 1910, abortion was not only restricted but outright illegal at every stage in pregnancy in every state in the country. These abortion bans had some exceptions in instances to save the patient’s life — a decision that only doctors, 95% of whom were men, had the power to make.
By this time, America had experienced several decades of increased immigration. Worried about losing their hold on the country, white men in power supported abortion bans as a way to get upper-class white women to have more children.
1976: Hyde Amendment Put Into Place
The Hyde Amendment is a discriminatory and racist policy that prevents federal dollars from being used in government insurance programs like Medicaid for abortion services (except in instances of incest, rape, or life-threatening risk to the pregnant person).
The legislation was created by Rep. Henry Hyde. “I would certainly like to prevent, if I could legally, anybody having an abortion: a rich woman, a middle class woman, or a poor woman,” he said. “Unfortunately, the only vehicle available is the [Medicaid] bill.”
Because of centuries of systemic racism and bias, Medicaid disproportionately serves Black, Latino, and LGBTQ+ communities — people who already face other barriers to care and economic opportunity.
Despite the federal law, 16 states currently include abortion in their Medicaid programs using state funds. (The remaining 34 states and the District of Columbia do not have abortion coverage in their Medicaid programs due to the Hyde Amendment).
Thanks in large part to the advocacy of reproductive justice organizations, in 2021 the Biden-Harris administration became the first administration in decades to exclude the Hyde Amendment from its presidential budget."
I don't see why one would discount the existence of the soul. We have more reason to believe in idealism than to believe that there even exists a material world, let alone that it is all there is. I mean thoughts, feelings, and mental actions are all invisible. They have neural or other physical correlates, but those things aren't what they are as we experience them.
Doubtless it's an argument you've heard many times before. But think of that! It's an argument, i.e.: an immaterial thing. Scientific laws also have this property (I mean the actual laws that govern physical processes, not our formulations of those laws): immaterial, yet real.
So don't discount it. What are its properties, and how do you find out? How do you know it appears at the moment an egg is fertilized, and not a year before or when a child first prays to their god and have an account created for them in a heavenly/Olympic/... registry?
Indulging myself a bit---here's my theory about what's going on here / how people work. I think it's important because it underscores a lot of what's wrong with the internet / modernity:
You are debating some commenters about the moral value of embryos, but there is something sorta fundamentally "fruitless" about the debate. Each side has written lots of words, yet you talk past each other and no one's mind is changed by any of it. I would be astounded if all of the (perfectly well-formed) arguments about hermits or surgeries or whatever could ever make a difference; it's hard to imagine it happening at all. At the end of the day all of the words could have been replaced with "embryos matter!" "no, embryos don't matter!" "no, embryos matter!" "no, embryos don't matter!" with essentially no change in the result or in the feeling one gets from reading it. It seems like in a "moral" debate of this sort, "arguments" and "logic"... don't... work? Both sides are basically going to generate infinite stances of increasing complexity that extrapolate from their beliefs and dodge/weave around the other side. Eventually everyone will either get angry or delusional or their brains will hurt and they will give up.
The greater-rationalist community does, of course, celebrate changing one's mind on the basis of arguments, and there are definitely examples of it out there; I recall some ACX posts were of that flavor. But mostly people do not change their minds, even in this community, about the things they really care about, whether animal rights or AI safety or politics. For the most part one of these holds:
1. people don't change their mind about moral issues at all, or
2. people change their position about a moral issue as a "freebie", because they aren't that invested in it; their reversal serves to as a signal of politeness or respect to their counterparty, or
3. people change their mind out of submission to their counterparty, which can take various forms: because they look up to them (as many of the ACX commenters look up to Scott), or because they "lose" the joust (for example staking their argument on a serious mistake and then being called out), or they doubt their own strength and give in to someone who seems stronger, or they see social value in adopting the other opinion (for example it seems more elite or more likely to win others' favor), or as a straight up submission in hopes for tribal protection.
A simple explanation underlies all of this. Moral opinions simply do not follow logic at all. Instead there is a whole parallel-universe set of rhetorical rules by which they operate, a "calculus of power". A person arguing for a moral opinion in defense of X is basically saying: look, it is important to me that X be protected. If you're not going to personally be invested in the protection of X, then I'm going to disagree with you infinitely, unless I end up having to concede for external reasons. X can be embryos, pregnant teens, government regulation, states' rights, walkable cities, car-culture, the patriarchy, feminism, guns, gun control, whatever. Whatever it is, a person is defending it against the feeling that someone else won't protect what's important about it.
Society, however, mostly does not understand this, at an extremely fundamental level: we're missing the rhetorical technology to talk about it. We're stuck in a local maximum where we all believe that arguments are supposed to change minds, yet they don't, but the update to get to the truth is too large to jump to, so we get stuck and frustrated talking all day while no one changes their minds (e.g. the whole internet). The result is that the more verbally intelligent a person is, the more they may end up believing that words are supposed to change minds when they actually basically don't, and then they end up not being able to understand why all their words on some issue just make people more angry and defensive. This is basically the main issue with progressivism: it's not enough to say all morally right-sounding things to get people to agree with you. In fact, to get people on your side you have to actually *get them on your side*, which follows the calculus of power, not the calculus of logic. And that means either (a) win through domination or (b) show them some respect.
All to say, if you want this argument to resolve, you've basically got three options:
1. concede that embryos deserve some respect purely on the basis that other people care a lot about them, not because it makes some logical sense to you. For instance, change your stance to support a version of embryo-selection that minimizes the number of embryos that get harmed. If you show them some respect they will be able to show you some too.
2. explain that you simply do not care about embryos, sorry, they do not have moral value to you and that's the end of it. This will go over easier if you explain exactly when you do think things have moral value, so that it doesn't imply a slippery slope of "he'll discard anything if it serves his purposes." Defending the killing of embryos is a lot more palatable if paired with a strongly-held conviction that fetuses after the first trimester be treated as alive. (Were you actually in charge of embryo selection this would be more of a dominance-play, since you would be denying their morals in favor of your own. In which case they would be either resigned to losing or they'd have to get back at you with their own use of power, i.e. protesting or suing or violence. Since this is just an argument about stances the stakes are much lower and everyone can probably just walk away in a frustrated huff.)
3. earn such respect from your counterparties from your other actions in this world that they see you as a moral leader and update their beliefs to match yours.
Otherwise it's just endless talking.
As it happens, I agree with you that embryos just don't matter at all, and the people who think they should do should try out thinking that they just don't matter. Nevermind souls and God and all that, which are explanations that backfill a reason for protected embryos; I just think it's very practical to draw the line a few months later, giving all the benefits of protecting life without as many downsides. I suspect the embryo-defenders are generally skeptical that their counterparties will defend infants/fetuses' lives *at all*, given the chance, and so they can't budge an inch lest they give a mile. I would prefer to find the right amount of defense such that we could compromise. That is much more productive than debating where the philosophical line ought to be, because there is simply no such line: the universe does not provide an answer to what constitutes "life" or "murder". The argument has entirely do with power and what it takes to guarantee the safety of the things people care about. In this case it's progress vs. fetuses; in most abortion debates it is mothers' health and happiness vs. fetuses. In either case, a solution is not going to be found by talking about it, and explaining yourself doesn't do anything unless what you're explaining is your position on *exactly where your camp will stop using your power* in a way that's genuinely trustworthy.
reading all this makes me want to solve it even harder with simple religious dogma about humanity. It has "humanity" whether its has a "soul" theologically or not.
I concur with Scott's points here, and have made similar ones myself. I've discussed abortion several times with abortion opponents, at least one of whom claims his reasoning against abortion is entirely secular. While he does use entirely secular arguments, none of them seem to hold water. I introduce incisive questions like "why do we care about human life?", thought experiments exploring what has "potential to grow into a living human," and validation of potential concerns about the dangerous incentives that might be created or the opportunities for abuse that might open up if we accept that "human organism" is not the same thing as "person". These points seem to prompt no reflection on his part. I'll have to check out the secular pro-life website that Leah linked to and see if they have any arguments that I haven't seen and rebutted before. (Thanks, Leah!)
The ethics pertaining to the sleeping hermit, the surgery, and the transhuman cell-separating operation derive--like all ethics, as far as I can tell--from the concept of trust. A person who exists wants to trust that other people will not prevent their continued existence in the future, even if that existence may be temporarily interrupted by things like sleep or medical operations.
Most people have some level of individual identity that wants to exist in the future, at least for a while longer. An embryo has has not been given the opportunity to develop such an identity. It has no motivations, no mental model of reality, or at least no more than a mouse embryo at the same stage of development. It does have the potential to house a person's consciousness, but it doesn't yet. Nobody has yet started moving in. Destroying the embryo isn't betraying the embryo's trust because nobody was inside to care about whether they themselves woke up in the future.
That said, if the embryo's parent(s) want(s) the embryo to develop into a child, they might be in the process of emotionally bonding with the embryo and its potential, the better to be good parent(s) to the resulting child. Destroying the embryo against their wishes would be a betrayal of their trust.
Pro-choice and pro-life here. Fine with abortion-by-choice in the first 3 months, very much pro-embryo-selection. Still: IF a woman does a positive pregnancy test (say, 4 weeks in*), is happy, tells her partner and he decides to mix abortive chemicals into her next smoothy - terminating the pregnancy while giving her 'only' some cramps: I want him arrested for murder, first degree. - Otoh, someone breaking into the clinic and destroying all fertilized eggs - some of which were to be implanted: Jeez, very bad, in some was much worse - but imho slightly more "massive property damage" than "manslaughter" - but I am fine with a legal system that defines this as murder, too. - (*if the guy serves her that smoothy right after the act - say, condom broke+he knows her days+he assumes she would not abort while she did not know, he is max. anti-natalist: maybe just manslaughter. Tricky; that is why we have not just laws, but judges.) - Fun fact: In Austria, mothers who kill their baby the first 24 hrs after birth may get away with 6 months/5yrs max.. A day later, she may expect 20 years. https://www.theinternational.at/vienna-mother-sentenced-to-20-years-for-killing-newborn-daughter/
I'm confused by your responses to #1. It's just the age old abortion debate, is it not? The response feels too long to simply point that out, and too short to really dive into pro-life vs pro-choice. All the words sort of obscures if there's anything unique about this particular situation.
In other words, is it fair to say that "if you're pro-life, embryo selection is obviously bad, and if you're pro-choice you may have other issues with it but the personhood argument is obviously a non-issue"? Or is there some nuance to embryo selection beyond that? Are there pro-choice people who think that embryos - when made for selection - are worthy of personhood in a way that they're not normally? Or pro-life people who think that embryo selection is fine for some reason?
>A second, more speculative reason is that very slightly increasing the skill of the top few percent of people can significantly affect the human race, and I expect the top few percent to disproportionately use this technology. Suppose that, as above, 10% of the population uses this technology, but that includes half of the smartest 1%. By my (actually o3’s, but I checked them) calculations, this would increase the number of geniuses (IQ > 140) by ~40%, and the number of supergeniuses (IQ > 160) by ~160%. Why can such small adoption increase these numbers so much? Because of the shape of the normal distribution, very small shifts in the right tail of the distribution can result in very large absolute changes in the number of people at any given high-outlier rank.
Is this assuming a best-of-5 IQ choice or a noisy signal scenario? I get roughly this number in the best-of-5 case but if the real signal is much noisier it should be less.
It's far from true that "in most cases" killing a newborn baby will make its parents, onlookers, etc sad. The default position in human history is that infanticide is basically fine and normal. (I mean, peasants exposing their babies don't write to us, and probably in some cases they're at least a *little* sad, but peasants killing their cows are also often sad; the point, I think, stands.) In my very non-expert awareness, it's pretty much only Christian-descended civilizations that find it self-evident that "the moment of birth" is an upper bound for where to put the fence-around-the-law position for murder.
As far as clarifying how an embryo is more like a human than a separate sperm and egg, well, the obvious pre-IVF reason was that the moment of fertilization is the clearest moment at which the zygote will *by default* eventually turn into a human. Especially if you think a baby is a human, nobody has to do any particular act of will between fertilization and birth particularly to make the baby come into being. This isn't a perfect argument on its own terms, and it's by all means possible to say you don't accept the terms themselves, but I think it's something reasonably close to what, like, Aquinas or somebody would have said, in a way that's not explicitly reliant on Christian theology. The big ethical challenge is that it's only just now become at all normal for there to be embryos that aren't already inside a woman who will, generically and without intentional intervention, grow them into a baby. Presumably screwing up this whole model is at the heart of why some people who had always held to the argument above are opposed to doing any IVF at all, though it seems like a bit of a cop-out of a response, since the embryo-in-a-Petri-dish really will not develop, all else being equal, into a human.
[In my very non-expert awareness, it's pretty much only Christian-descended civilizations that find it self-evident that "the moment of birth" is an upper bound for where to put the fence-around-the-law position for murder.]
Oh, I actually have something to offer on that! There's a Youtube channel called "Linfamy" who does videos on Japanese history. Do a search for it and scroll down to two videos:
"Makibi: The Japanese Practice of Killing Your Own Baby"
and its followup
"The Anti-Baby Killing Movement in Japan"
Japan has never been that strongly influenced by Christianity, so it's an interesting look at how infanticide was viewed there in relatively recent history. We're talking last couple of hundred years, not thousands of years. As the title of the second video implies, there was a homegrown anti-infanticide movement. Interesting stuff, give it a listen.
Thanks for the reference, it's an interesting suggestion (though I really dislike having to watch a video to get some factual information.) I think "Japan has never been that strongly influenced by Christianity" is a very questionable claim, though, in the relevant sesnse--in my model Japan is in effect a secular liberal democracy and secular liberal democracy is almost literally just a Protestant heresy, i.e. a lot of Christian influence on modernity is via the Enlightenment, so you don't have to have many professing Christians around for there to be major Christian influence (as indeed is the case even in modern Europe!) So anyway, if this had happened in the 16th century it would be rock-solid evidence against my claim but this case seems closer to an exception that proves the rule. I would love to find a case of a major civilization that either never approved infanticide, or stopped doing so before contact with Christian cultures.
I know it's annoying to go to videos for information, but they are pretty short (one is 12 minutes, the other 11). I'm not even out to disprove you exactly; I just thought you might be interested in more context. We're not looking for "rock solid evidence" here.
In fact, the Japan stuff arguably supports your claim to some extent. Part of the justification of Makini was an explicitly religious one, that new-borns were still partially of the spirit world and killing them was sending them back to the gods. Not that they weren't people, but that they weren't people fully in the world. On the other hand, while sure there was contact with Christianity it appears to be buddhist monks who were the biggest opponents of the practice and helped stamp it out. So maybe you simply need to expand your theory to "Christianity or Buddhism"?
Well, I don’t have any evidence that Buddhism generally has cared much about infanticide, which is well attested across south and Southeast Asia. Usually it hasn’t seems to be particularly concerned with the ethics of the laity at all, whereas ending infanticide was a central interest of Christian writers and emperors from the very beginning: So I don’t see very much support for adding Buddhism. I did find that apparently ancient Egyptians did not commit infanticide but did allow abortion, which is a very interesting example of a society with roughly our same set of rules. But we don’t have a very detailed understanding of the religious basis for these practices, unfortunately.
>By allowing people to construct buildings, we both homogenize - people in Dubai and Siberia can both be in identical 70 degree concrete cubes - and overdiversify - there can be saunas and ice skating rinks in the same city. But this is not an argument against allowing buildings.
Since the majority of people has decided to allow fewer buildings than you want, this may not be the most convincing example. Also, about 1% of the worlds land area is covered by buildings currently. I assume you would have some diversity objections before we reach Coruscant levels.
>what about rape? what about war?
Im not sure why you think all events which causally contributed to your existence are comparable to genetics. Being born of rape wont have much of an effect on what youre like, the war probably not at all. What about you is it supposed to declare inferior to prevent these? The lobotomies are relevant, and do say being lobotomised is inferior - those people just dont particularly object and probably cant. See also my response to the genetic inferiority post.
#1. There are some ethical positions that I think fail due to impracticality, and 'life begins at conception' is one of them. Embryos are typically embedded in people, and those people cannot be reasonably expected to have a moral or legal obligation to cells which they may not even know are there and which they may not know how to protect. Consider eg the high school soccer player who stops the ball with her midriff and miscarries later that day. Did she know she was pregnant? DId she know her play might cause the miscarriage? Did it cause the miscarriage? Did she do something wrong? Giving some sort of human value to these cells feels like wishful thinking.
#2 In my experience people who are looking for someone with whom to make babies typically look for the smartest, most attractive, healthiest person that will have them, with some conditioning on assortive features (eg, similar culture or ethnicity) and wealth. That is, already people try to make babies that are selected for certain positive traits. I think this is good, and more would be better. Maybe with exception of selection for gender, but I expect if the sexes became less diverse (ie, more concentration of either males or females) then there would be strong incentive for the pendulum to swing the other way; after a bit of back and forth hopefully people would learn their lesson.
#3 To me this argument is perverse, in that it demonstrates complete lack of empathy with the people meant to provoke empathy. Who on earth with any sort of genetic limitation wishes that more people had that limitation? Thanks to certain genes I have thin hair and a predisposition to certain cancers, and have only ever wished for my children that they not get those specific genes. Am I bad person? I have a friend diagnosed in his 40s with Huntington's disease and his last desperate hope before he entirely lost his mind was that his children did not inherit the HTT gene. He did not wish for dead children, he wished for healthy ones. I don't think anyone with a genetic condition that negatively impacts their life wishes for anyone else to have that condition, and I think it is cruelly insensitive to equate that with self-loathing or a wish for such people to die.
>#1. There are some ethical positions that I think fail due to impracticality, and 'life begins at conception' is one of them. Embryos are typically embedded in people, and those people cannot be reasonably expected to have a moral or legal obligation to cells which they may not even know are there and which they may not know how to protect. Consider eg the high school soccer player who stops the ball with her midriff and miscarries later that day. Did she know she was pregnant? DId she know her play might cause the miscarriage? Did it cause the miscarriage? Did she do something wrong? Giving some sort of human value to these cells feels like wishful thinking.
And what if, on my way to the game, I stop my car to let another driver pull out in font of me, meaning that driver is later slightly further along than he would be when a little girl runs out into the road, meaning he doesn't have time to break and instead has to swerve to avoid her and crashes into a tree and dies? Did I murder him? Did I know that slightly altering how far along he is in his journey might result in him dying? Did I do something wrong? Obviously the ethical position "drivers are alive" fails due to impracticality.
This was a valient effort, Scott, but ultimately the detractors you're addressing are coming at their position from irrational sentimentality about what it is to be a person. The vast majority of that irrational sentimentality is a product of religious indoctrination, most of the rest of it is religious indoctrination in secular clothing, and perhaps a not insignificant amount of it is trolling and/or intellectual wankery for the sake of the exercise.
And lest I be accused of trolling myself, I'd like to make it clear I am *exquisitely* serious about what I write below, and I think it needs to be taken seriously by people whose anti-abortion and anti-IVF intuitions are informed by a belief in God:
Because every time this topic pops up, I like to point out that *if* a God who disapproves of medically induced abortion is real, then it's pretty weird that He's by far humanity's greatest abortionist, responsible for between 15-45% of all pregnancies ending in spontaneous abortion (a more precise phrase than "miscarriage," though if God was real, the most precise phrase would be "God-induced abortion").
So if God is real, it sure looks like he really, really, *REALLY* doesn't believe in the value or rights of fetuses, particularly those fetuses with genetic abnormalities which make them incompatible with a thriving life.
And it follows that if God really loves giving abortions, and he made man in His image, then surely He doesn't begrudge mankind following God's example when it comes to abortions.
Abortion is abortion, whether it's induced by God or induced by a human. There's no meaningful difference to the fetus involved.
And murder is murder, but there are those who valiantly try to say that death from natural causes is exactly the same thing as murder so murder is not in fact murder, or bad at all.
"If this is true, doesn’t it suggest I can’t be too in favor of embryo selection either? What’s the argument for saying the technology is powerful enough to be worth it, but not powerful enough to worry about?"
"My impression is that there are much stronger technologies about 10-20 years down the line, ones that probably disrupt things so profoundly that your opinions should be more related to your general opinions on transhumanism and technological singularities than on specifics of the selection process."
You argue that the future tech is more important than the present tech, but spend more time arguing present tech is safe than that future tech is safe. "Present tech isn't strong enough to make GATTACA, so it's fine. What really matters is much-stronger future tech, which is also fine because [mumble]."
(It may help to imagine the corresponding arguments about AI - current tech is safe (but boring), future tech is exciting (but dangerous); safe+exciting=full steam ahead!)
I think "we have to draw a line somewhere" is the worst sociological trope. Many things demand that we be particularists (in this case, perhaps the difference between "aww, what a cute couple" and "uh-oh, one party to this 'voluntary' liaison is forcing the issue"). While a mere baby putting his thumbprint on a contract probably shouldn't stand up in court, "age" of consent is imbecilic. Do persons who have not attained the age of majority consent to have their consent thrown under the rug? It's a highly salient example of that BETA-MEALR stuff (see "Fake Consensualism", Slate Star Codex) - your rights can only be violated if you're allowed to have them in the first place!
Great post! fwiw, I actually agree that "past personhood" is also sufficient. When I appealed to the fact that the sleeping hermit unquestionably "has a mind", I didn't mean to rest anything on the present tense (I agree that your cellular-disassembly case shows that the present moment isn't essential). So I guess I didn't word that very well. The crucial thing is just that their mind for sure *exists* (timelessly speaking), and *that existing being* will be worse off if their brain and body is not re-assembled. This contrasts with the mindless embryo, for which - if it does not develop further - there never exists a mind that is personally harmed by a failure to extend its life further.
A point we may(?) disagree on is that your initial explanations appealed to the hermit's past *preference* not to be killed. I think that "temporary depression" cases show that such a preference is not essential. What matters is just that the candidate future life, psychologically continuous with the past person, would be a positive one (adding to the overall welfare of the person's complete life, considered timelessly).
(Though given your latest comments about "convenient fictions", perhaps you didn't mean to rest too much on the preference talk either, and our views are more or less equivalent!)
As an unwilling lifetime subscriber to major depressive disorder, I will tell _me_ to my face that people like me should not exist in the next generation, and I'll precommit right now to throwing a street party for anyone who manages to pull that feat off.
(Disability activism is extremely weird to me. I have this thing that made my life suck for many years before discovering the exact correct combination of Eleven Secret Drugs and Supplements, and I'm supposed to be in favor of making other people live through twenty, thirty miserable years for... reasons? I cannot comprehend this at all.
That would be eugenics? Damn right it would be eugenics, and it would be _awesome_ eugenics.)
I think the distinction you’re looking for is how close is the fetus/cow/bug to us socially. There is, for example, a difference between an implanted zygote whose mother hopes to give birth, and a frozen zygote who has a one-in-ten chance of being selected for implantation.
>Isn’t it possible that embryos are alive, or have personhood, or are moral patients?
I've never understood the intellectual contortions non-religious people go through in trying to come up with an objective definition of personhood for questions like this. I think consequentialism provides a very obvious answer: killing an embryo has zero detectable consequence, therefore they shouldn't be considered persons. Murder is "immoral" because it leads to predictably bad social outcomes: 1) it destroys human capital, 2) creates cycles of value-destroying violence (if you kill my brother then I'm gonna try to kill you and then your cousin will try to kill me etc), and 3) leads to low-trust societies where people spend their time building walled compounds to keep the murderers out instead of engaging in value-producing activity. In other words, murder has clear and significant social costs and so society has a strong incentive to disincentivize it.
None of these argument apply to embryo selection. 1) The replacement cost for an embryo is ~zero 2) The only people in a position to care about the embryo and therefore be potentially motivated to avenge its loss are the parents doing the selection, and 3) no one is going around doing selection on other people's embryos so social trust isn't lowered. No negative social consequence for embryo selection => no reason to consider it immoral.
If the long-term consequences are negative (diversity loss, etc) *then* it would be reasonable to consider it immoral. But in my view there's no compelling reason to believe that anything bad will happen and I don't think this represents some irreversible letting-the-genie-out-of-the-bottle advance. This technology will be adopted very slowly. If there are emergent problems then we'll be able to course-correct easily. Certainly any risks are outweighed by the potential upside, at least given what we know now.
I think even non-religious consequentialists believe that some things have value beyond their social effects. Like supposed you have a coma patient that is able to experience things but will never be able to wake up and interact with the outside world. Is it morally acceptable to secretly administer a drug that causes them to experience extreme pain for an extended period?
The cost of the drug is basically nothing, the person will never wake up, so the effects on them will not hurt the economy, and because it was done in secret nobody else will change their behavior to avoid this happening to them. So it doesn't matter, right?
Well no. I think that most people would say that torturing people is bad even if it has no additional social consequences. But if you accept that causing certain qualia is good/bad, then have to struggle with questions about what is a qualia and who is capable of experiencing them.
I actually don't think most people would care about this in a pragmatic sense. Let's say, for example, that doing this caused the patient's brain to secrete a hormone that was impossible to create any other way. I think that the value of that hormone would have to be surprisingly low before society was willing to expend any effort to stop it. This is analogous to the Omelas suffering child, which I've always considered to be a shockingly naive moral argument. If one person's suffering could truly generate utopia, not only would morality evolve to tolerate it, it would probably be considered highly taboo to even question it. If I was running for mayor of Omelas my platform would be to argue that we should have *more* suffering children because maybe that would increase the utopia. The real-world Omelas would have the suffering child emblazoned on its flag as a symbol of cultural pride, much like churches have images of the crucifixion everywhere.
Also consider that if the coma patient never woke up we'd have no way of knowing whether they were actually suffering. If there was any economic benefit to it then I'm positive society would go out of its way to avoid acknowledging that there was any suffering.
And lest you think I'm being unrealistically monstrous, let me tell you about my favorite historical moral counterfactual. When British sailors first discovered Tahiti in the 18th century, they were amazed by the Tahitians' relative wealth (plenty of food, most people led leisurely lives). The key here is to understand that pre-industrial societies are poor for Malthusian reasons: wealth is limited by food production and the population will always grow to be in edge-of-survival equilibrium with the food supply. The Tahitians sidestepped that limitation by killing three-quarters of all newborns. That functioned as birth control which kept the population comfortably below the Malthusian edge.
In my view morality ultimately derives from economic considerations, not deontological principles. The principles are just compressed representations designed for efficient cultural transmission.
1) Note how my scenario did not specify that this torture produced a highly socially useful substance. This is not Omelas where suffering of one causes huge benefits to everyone else. This is a case of one person suffering greatly for no particular reason.
2) Society being willing to accept something is a best a weak argument for its morality. German society accepted the Holocaust. Your example has Tahitian society accepting mass infanticide. Unless you want to bite the bullet and say that these were good actually, society accepting something does not necessarily make it good.
3) Sure. People's moral ideas are heavily shaped by economic circumstances. That doesn't mean that morality boils down entirely to what policies lead to the best economic outcomes.
1) Your example is contrived. I don't think that contrived examples offer much in the way of useful guidance in discussions like this so I invented an equally contrived example to demonstrate its limitation. In any case I think there's a more straightforward economic counter to it: the expectation that being in a coma could result in untold suffering would distort healthy people's decisions around medical care. That would likely lead to suboptimal economic outcomes and therefore society has an economic interest in discouraging it.
2) If Germany had won the war then the holocaust would have been considered moral, at least by Germans. That's not to say *I* consider it moral. My point is that morality is highly contingent and that you should therefore be very skeptical about any absolute deontological rules. I have zero problems with the Tahitian infanticide, just as I have zero problems with abortions, historical slavery, what Europeans did to Native Americans, what Rome did to Gaul, or any number of other things that were appropriate to their time even if we would consider them abhorrent now.
3) I disagree. In my view morality is nothing but the compressed wisdom of generations: the socially-transmitted genetic code that undergirds society and tries to tell people what works and what doesn't. In most cases that wisdom can be understood in economic terms.
If morality were just socially compressed wisdom about what works and what doesn't, why aren't debates about morality focused largely about whether things work or not? Is it possible that when other people say "morality" that they are actually referring to something different?
>why aren't debates about morality focused largely about whether things work or not?
Because people are unsophisticated. That's the only thing those debates should be about.
>Is it possible that when other people say "morality" that they are actually referring to something different?
100%. Most of them are implicit arguments about which interest group is more important. Take abortion for example. Those arguments are only incidentally about when life begins, they're primarily about how important women's opinions are in society. That's why it's never resolved. There *is* no objective resolution, just an ongoing competition for relative status.
In the context of IVF it's not zero but in the wider "value of human" life context - that objections to embryo selection begin from - it is. People who object to embryo selection aren't making arguments of the form "you spent 20k harvesting that embryo therefore it's immoral for you to discard it". They make arguments of the form "all embryos are human beings and therefore have a value equal to every other human being". That is the specific argument that I'm targeting and in that context the value of a replacement embryo is ~zero.
If you want to argue about the value of an embryo in the context of IVF and want to make reference to the 20k that was spent harvesting it then that's fine, but then you don't get to smuggle in wider moral considerations that apply more generally to all people. At that point you're essentially just saying "hey these people paid a lot of money for this and you should be careful" which really doesn't have the moral force that I suspect you want it to. In any case that then becomes an economic decision and, as various failed experiments in economic collectivism have demonstrated over the years, those are best made by people directly involved.
All the analysis of these edge cases of consciousness (not only in this article, but others I've heard before) seem to drive me to a conclusion that whatever my position and subjective intuition is on rights and moral behavior, it apparently is so disconnected from any particular aspect of consciousness that considering consciousness with regards those topics is apparently counterproductive to me, and I should utterly ignore any argument based on consciousness (or lack of it) as not only irrelevant but also distracting and thus harmful to analysis and discussion.
Perhaps the criterion I'm internally using is something more similar to "membership in my tribe", and "my tribe" in the wider, humanitarian approach for me includes all humans and excludes cows and embryos; and the decision whether hypothetical aliens or artificial intelligences should be accorded rights and moral value based on various arbitrary criteria like whether we'd want to include them in our tribe, (for example but not limited to, simply based on whether doing so would benefit humanity, i.e. the current members of my tribe), and not be automatic just because they happen to fulfil some criteria of intelligence, consciousness or anything else.
And that seems to work in many of these case studies. We accord rights to the unconscious patient or the hypothetical patient under reconstruction, because that's a role I or specific people I care about might be in, so I have a practical reason to defend those rights as universal, "once a member of my tribe, always a member of my tribe", unless they die or the tribe decides to not make them a full member anymore and punish them by revoking their rights to liberty or life. We (in my community) don't accord full rights to embryos (we do defend them from malicious interference by other people, e.g.. poisoning a would-be mother to cause a miscarriage) because we expect that in reasonably likely scenarios I or people I care about might reasonably want to choose a tradeoff that benefits the mother at the expense of the embryo, so I have a practical reason to deny those rights as universal, and not yet treat them as a member of my tribe until some event; which currently is at birth but historically (at least in my area) used to be slightly later i.e. at "naming" to treat very early child mortality (or abandonment/exposure) as different. Cynical, perhaps selfish, but practical, and IMHO that's the basis for all the rights societies have choosen to grant and restrictions to impose, core concepts like murder and theft stem not from some philosophical ideal of rights but a need for practical solutions to reasonably frequent conflict scenarios in society.
There is no universal way to place these guardrails, of course, and different cultures and subcultures do it differently and not necessarily self-consistently. If one subscribes to morality being constructed, an emergent phenomenon downstream of the need to make a society function, then one can trace the argument about embryo selection or related topics back to the societies from which the moralities driving these arguments emerged.
And whatever arguments people are making now, they will be obsoleted by the mores of whatever other societies emerge and establish themselves over time. It seems that the only moral constant in post-subsistence societies is a version of "live and let live".
"Suppose that, as above, 10% of the population uses this technology, but that includes half of the smartest 1%. By my (actually o3’s, but I checked them) calculations, this would increase the number of geniuses (IQ > 140) by ~40%, and the number of supergeniuses (IQ > 160) by ~160%. Why can such small adoption increase these numbers so much? Because of the shape of the normal distribution, very small shifts in the right tail of the distribution can result in very large absolute changes in the number of people at any given high-outlier rank. If you think that increasing the number of geniuses by 40%, or the number of supergeniuses by 160%, could have a large effect on society, then this technology could have a large effect on society even with relatively limited adoption."
It's true that shifting a normal distribution to the right can increase the # of people past a certain limit by a large percent. But that's a very misleading way to look at it. It's true that you are increasing the number of supergeniuses (IQ >160) by 160%. But those are all people whose IQ was raised (for example) from 159 to 161. The absolute number above 160 is much higher. But the IQ of those people is only raised slightly. So Scott asks if "...you think that increasing the number ... of supergeniuses by 160%, could have a large effect on society". If those people used to have an IQ of 100 and now have an IQ of 161, then yes that would have a big impact. But that's not what's happening. Actually those people used to have an IQ of 159 and now have an IQ of 161, so the impact on society would be quite small.
Ohh man, love the children of rape response. It's soo good.
But ultimately, I do think we need to bite the bullet and say that there is no intrinsic harm to ending a life (like that of the sleeping hermit) -- assuming that we don't announce such a policy. There is a lot of harm in announcing a policy which doesn't try to prospectively protect the sleeping hermit.
It's really no different than the standard transplant surgeon example (should I kill this organ donor to save 5 people) in the real world you can't decide to kill the hermit and be perfectly guaranteed no one will find out and be worried about it happening to them.
I find it both shocking and kinda sad how little attention is paid to the possibility that **we can engineer future generations to be happier**. Yah yah, getting rid of some nasty disability sounds important but the ultimate (and arguably the only really bad) disability is unhappiness and we can fix that!
There is considerable interpersonal variation in happiness set points and people who have them higher seem to generally do better in almost all aspects in the modern world. We can fucking change that. Why worry so much about stopping all these various debilitating conditions when we can just make it the case that they don't bum you out so much. Yes, go back and fix them later (higher set point doesn't mean you still wouldn't prefer to eg walk) but surely this should be our primary target!
That seems directly equivalent to wireheading or other means of artificial happiness (e.g. why not attach a drip of heroin-like substance to every person to make them more happier?). Negative emotions such as pain, boredom, burnout, etc generally have a functional purpose in our motivational systems, and unless those systems are broken (such as in some mental ilnesses) we should be fixing the external causes of unhappiness instead of altering the perception to feel happier in objectively bad conditions.
We can't fix unhappiness. Unless you mean "turn down the brain so much people don't know they're living shitty lives" and (1) kinda defeats the purpose of the bright shiny promise of "moar smarter! moar better!" for this entire programme and (2) smacks a little too much of "Brave New World":
"They were passing metre 320 on rack eleven. A young Beta-Minus mechanic was busy with screw-driver and spanner on the blood-surrogate pump of a passing bottle. The hum of the electric motor deepened by fractions of a tone as he turned the nuts. Down, down... A final twist, a glance at the revolution-counter, and he was done. He moved two paces down the line and began the same process on the next pump.
'Reducing the number of revolutions per minute,' Mr. Foster explained. 'The surrogate goes round slower; therefore passes through the lung at longer intervals; therefore gives the embryo less oxygen. Nothing like oxygen-shortage for keeping an embryo below par.' Again he rubbed his hands.
'But why do you want to keep the embryo below par?' asked an ingenuous student.
'Ass!' said the Director, breaking a long silence. 'Hasn't it occurred to you that an Epsilon embryo must have an Epsilon environment as well as an Epsilon heredity?'
It evidently hadn't occurred to him. He was covered with confusion.
'The lower the caste,' said Mr. Foster, 'the shorter the oxygen.' The first organ affected was the brain. After that the skeleton. At seventy per cent. of normal oxygen you got dwarfs. At less than seventy, eyeless monsters.
'Who are no use at all,' concluded Mr. Foster.
Whereas (his voice became confidential and eager), if they could discover a technique for shortening the period of maturation what a triumph, what a benefaction to Society!
'Consider the horse.'
They considered it.
Mature at six; the elephant at ten. While at thirteen a man is not yet sexually mature; and is only full grown at twenty. Hence, of course, that fruit of delayed development, the human intelligence.
'But in Epsilons,' said Mr. Foster very justly, 'we don't need human intelligence.'
Didn't need and didn't get it. But though the Epsilon mind was mature at ten, the Epsilon body was not fit to work till eighteen. Long years of superfluous and wasted immaturity. If the physical development could be speeded up till it was as quick, say, as a cow's, what an enormous saving to the Community!
'Enormous!' murmured the students. Mr. Foster's enthusiasm was infectious.
…Their wanderings through the crimson twilight had brought them to the neighbourhood of Metre 170 on Rack 9. From this point onwards Rack 9 was enclosed and the bottles performed the remainder of their journey in a kind of tunnel, interrupted here and there by openings two or three metres wide.
'Heat conditioning,' said Mr. Foster.
Hot tunnels alternated with cool tunnels. Coolness was wedded to discomfort in the form of hard X-rays. By the time they were decanted the embryos had a horror of cold. They were predestined to emigrate to the tropics, to be miners and acetate silk spinners and steel workers. Later on their minds would be made to endorse the judgment of their bodies. 'We condition them to thrive on heat,' concluded Mr. Foster. 'Our colleagues upstairs will teach them to love it.'
'And that,' put in the Director sententiously, 'that is the secret of happiness and virtue--liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.'"
I find the arguments in point #1 feeble. The bright-line distinctions between a human embryo and all predecessors, or between a human embryo and non-human creatures, are straightforward and intuitive, but imo people muddle it because 1. They want the right to get abortions so unwanted children can go away, and 2. They want the right to customize their children, and create a fiction in their head that different embryos really all represent the same hypothetical child, like they're just rerolling character creations in an RPG.
I really can't see a way to summarize this position short of "I really want to do embryo selection to make future grown children more impressive, so let's construct an argument for why human life doesn't matter early on."
To me, it's always been telling that when it was discovered in the 1800s that fetuses were alive even before quickening, there was an immediate push from the medical community to strengthen abortion laws since it was now obvious human lives were at stake even early on and early abortions were not just an equivalent of birth control. The moral intuition is that they WERE people, and we've created mental justifications to break this down for the sake of convenience.
Well, have we all sufficiently torn strips off one another about this, or is there more bloodletting to go? Even "agree to disagree" is not going to get us past this one.
To any filthy centrists on this topic out there, may I say I appreciate your attempts to see both sides and your neutrality, and I don't even mean that in the Zapp Brannigan way:
> A flash drive with an embryo’s genome and a description of how cells work contains all of the necessary information. So does a printed book containing the code for a sentient robot. But neither of these are people.
Yes and no. If the latter really existed, I think it should be a murder-adjacent crime to destroy that book if it were the only copy in existence. Suppose you printed out the code of a *brain upload of a formerly human individual*, and doesn't this become fairly intuitive?
Lest I only comment to quibble and criticise, I do want to say that I like your answer to the "diversity" question, which has done much to alleviate my concerns (indeed, I find it more persuasive than your in-thread reply to my original comment on the topic). Thanks!
1a. What percentage of people commenting on the previous ACX post are *actually* opposed to embryo selection, vs just playing devil’s advocate for the sake of a fun philosophical debate?
1b. Are we (the readers) and Scott basically just talking in an echo chamber of embryo selection supporters, speculating about what arguments could *possibly* be made against embryo selection in order to sharpen the “debate toolkit” for public discussions?
2a. If the point is to properly harden the “rhetorical toolbox,” is there really a non-trivial number of politicians or would-be customers of a $53k selection service whose opinions can be changed by cleverly answering all their objections in advance?
- Testifying before Congress? “Senator, I know you’re probably wondering why we won’t be killing sleeping hermits next. Allow me to explain…”
- Convincing parents concerned about ethics? “Folks, you’re probably asking yourself if this brings us one step closer towards demanding Anschluss with Canada? Worry not, all we have to do is imagine a man having open heart surgery…”
- Convincing the Swedish IRB to let you get data from their DNA bank? “Ahh, worry not friends, we have no interest in building a society of superwhites. Worry not, our true goal is to increase the number of Elons by 160%!”
3a. When Scott posts a debate like this, are we engaging in a kind of subtle social “kayfabe” or “suspension of disbelief,” where everyone understands it’s more fun if some people argue for X and others argue against X, because otherwise it would be a boring one-sided discussion?
3b. Is this something people consciously think about when reading a topic like embryo selection?
3c. Or is it only trolls who engage in “edgy devil’s advocate” behavior, while “good readers” always state their genuine views?
Maybe a better rule is that it’s not acceptable to kill something if it causes reduced utility in the future. This would correctly separate the person undergoing heart surgery and the baby from embryos, because only one embryo was going to be born into a full human anyway - with or without IVF
"If you think that increasing the number of geniuses by 40%, or the number of supergeniuses by 160%, could have a large effect on society, then this technology could have a large effect on society even with relatively limited adoption."
This is true, but I want to point out that "large effect on society" does not imply directionality. I am watching the geniuses and the supergeniuses, and on net their current impacts might be slightly positive if one grades generously, and on net slightly negative if one does not. Also, you could long tail it in EITHER direction, as far as my guess goes (I can make a case for the long-tail negative, but we will will all be dead so where's the joy in being right?).
Still, this post is one of my favorites from you, good stuff!
I think your "potential to grow" argument is still flawed. A person lying in a moon-dirt field on the moon will die just as certainly as an embryo in a wheat field on Earth. An embryo *is* growing and developing, given a hospitable environment, it doesn't just have the potential to. An adult human is still growing and developing into an even further stage of human development, given they have a hospitable environment.
But still, like you said, God and souls aren't your metaphysics, and (as far as I'm aware) none of this embryo selection stuff is illegal, so I don't think anyone can rightfully condemn you for truly not believing the thing is morally wrong.
I don't understand - I was saying that "potential to grow" is irrelevant, so I'm not sure how this affects my position. Many of my counterexamples - like the sperm and egg in the cervix, or the computer programmed to turn on and run the sentient AI - are also growing. Can you give a clearer explanation of what point you're trying to make here?
Except our laws clearly make a difference between "developing if not disrupted" and "does not develop unless further action taken".
Endangered species laws don't protect Bald Eagle sperm but it does cover their fertilized eggs.
Pointing to the law in a discussion about morality is not helpful. The law is downstream of (and in some cases completely orthogonal to) morality.
If the unborn is growing, it must be alive.
If it has human parents, it must be human.
What are the differences between the unborn human being and born human beings?
S—Size
L—Level of development
E—Environment
D—Degree of dependency
These are not sufficient to justify destruction for newborns.
Therefore, embryos have equal moral consideration to newborns.
I think a lot of people think that level of development is important. Human is not what is morally important. Having thoughts and feelings is. Why do we give moral weight to humans but not to bacteria?
Because one is human. Any justification to terminate embryo would apply to premature 5.5 month outside the womb.
If that's the case, let's run the numbers on IVF to see the moral impact that we're dealing with.
Between 5-20 eggs are harvested during a single in vitro fertilization (IVF) attempt. And the average number of blastocysts (which not yet embryos) created during each IVF cycle average 30-50% of fertilized eggs. So if 10 eggs are harvested, 3-5 will be fertilized and become blastocysts — of which 1 will be implanted in a womb. The others are left to expire without development. And since on average it takes 3 or 4 attempts at IVF to get pregnant, more than a dozen potential human lives are lost with with successful IVF. Yet with a successful IVF, we bring a human life to fruition where there would have likely been none before.
Does that change your moral calculus?
Of course not. It is not worth choosing to begin existence of a dozen humans with the plan to terminate them to preserve one.
Autonomy.
Autonomy is what makes something meaningfully a person.
A fetus is not capable of the basic physical autonomy required to continue existing for *any* length of time. It is attached to and completely dependent on a woman for all physical functions (beating the heart, etc).
A fetus is a parasite, not a person.
And this sticks out about "leave the embryo in a field and it will die" that's not where you find them! Putting it in a field to die is an active choice.
It's slightly less of an active choice when people do IVF, though.
The IVF company is not leaving the extra embryos to die because of an active choice, it just sort of happens unless they make an active effort to prevent it.
It is an active choice to bring the sperm and egg together to become a human life, knowing that you will leave most of them to die, though.
Something like half of fertilized embryos fail to implant or spontaneously miscarry within the first week or two. Every time you try to conceive, you're dooming embryos.
I think the crux of the matter is what constitutes disruption. I'm not in the 'embryos are human' camp, but I'm going to try and steelman that argument.
Lets say we carve out a special category for all human biological tissue. And then we posit that 'natural' processes have a certain moral weight over 'non-natural processes.' This requires some level of belief in divine intention or teleology which not all people subscribe to.
So now, we say that if a conglomeration of human (non-cancerous) cells could continue growing and developing "naturally" if given basic things like food, water, and shelter then we cannot interfere with that 'natural' process. But is 'implanting an embryo in a uterus' equivalent to 'giving it food and shelter?' or is it equivalent to an unnatural medical intervention?
I think where we legally draw the barrier (given this information) is the bottleneck to growing into a full adult. For humans that's typically the process of pregnancy (which is long hard work), on the assumption that eggs/embryos are relatively available (something distressingly untrue for many women undergoing fertility treatment who only get a limited number of eggs successfully harvested, but which feels mostly true to most people).
Pizza as a counter-example? Scott, have you lost your mind? I know you're smarter than that and you're certainly able to argue better than that. This is "Every Sperm Is Sacred" deliberate lack of understanding the position.
Pizza has the potential to become a person if someone eats it and absorbs it, thus anti-IVF position is wrong. Yes, and thus we should never eat anything at all but just live on air, else we are contradicting our anti-IVF and anti-abortion position.
From anyone else I'd be calling rude names, I respect you too much to do that Scott, but I have to say I am disappointed.
I am trying to force people to come up with a real description of what they think rather than using the vague term "potential to become a person". I later propose some possibilities, for example "has all the information and will do it without being disrupted".
The fact that it is so obviously wrong is exactly why I used it - it proves that some vague sense of "might become a person" is extremely indefensible.
I think the whole problem here is that people like to say vague things that would also apply to obviously wrong cases, and when they try to get more specific, it doesn't work. I'm not going to stop pointing out the obviously wrong cases that disprove the vague things just because some people want to pretend they don't know what a counterexample is, or refuse to read on to the next paragraph where I discuss counterexamples at the next level of sophistication.
The argument is not that it is *potentially* a person. The argument is that the embryo is, actually, a person: that it is human (because it belongs to the human species), living (because it satisfies all biological definitions of being living) and that any living human is a person.
An embryo isn't a potential person. Pizza is potential *fuel* to help grow a person; sperm is a potential *building block* to help make a person; the embryo is in fact a person.
But why should we care that it's a human when it doesn't have the key property that makes humans valuable: sentience?
Baby survives outside the womb at 5.5 months. At what day does it gain sentience?
Here's the new rewriting: now a human is something that has sentience.
If the AI chatbots are deemed to be sentient (by some stupid metric) does that now make them humans?
I'm going to shut up now because the degree of heat this is engendering is shoving me too close to start yelling and being rude.
I don't see any reason (given the wealth of counterexamples, many mentioned already, where a human has either a temporary lack of sentience, permanent diminished capacity for sentience, or in some cases a total lack of sentience) that we should consider that the hallmark, sine qua non marker of "value" in a human.
The retarded or brain-damaged certainly have much diminished sentience. So do children and babies. Those who are asleep or unconscious often have none. I'm pretty sure you can't prove to me that you are an actually sentient being rather than some sort of advanced automata.
Therefore, this seems like a very slim reed to base human value on, and a frankly muddying device: not to be accusatory, but I think landing on "sentience" as the key property of human value is obviously a mechanism to arrive at a desired result rather than a legitimate clarifying addition to the concept of personhood that helps us arrive at morally clear decisions.
Speaking of "building a fence around the law", there are enough examples of very bad things happening when we start normalising "Sure, maybe it's a human being, but it isn't a proper person, and therefore doesn't have the same moral worth" that I think it's better not to draw any distinctions between being human and being a person, even leaving aside any metaphysical claims.
This is one of those Scissors Statements that will get us all at one another's throats. Trying to define what is a person is difficult, which is why I think this argument has slid over to that.
Because if we were arguing "is an embryo human?" then it obviously is. And we have said that deliberate destruction of a human is wrong and unethical. Not being able to fall back there, there were (and I have gone through this dance before) arguments over "that's not a human, it's just a potential human" or even "that's no more human than a banana".
If a human embryo is not human, what is it? It's alive (we've had the "it's not a life" denial dance) and if allowed to develop will become a Real Human with no Blue Fairies involved.
Just because it's done in a petri dish and not in a bed has nothing to do with conception (and yeah, we got that redefined to serve the ends of abortion etc.: "oh no, conception is no longer fusion of sperm and egg, it's when the fertilised ovum implants!")
For entrenched positions on both sides, there's little or nothing that will shift opinion. I venture to say you don't imagine any argument would shift your view on this, and I can say there's no argument will shift mine (because I've been arguing this for a long time in other places and getting a lot of the same shitty responses. Sorry if that sounds harsh, but pizza? really?)
Actually, upon thinking about it a little further, I can be clearer. The point I'm trying to make is that it's wrong to murder a human. An embryo actually *is* a thing in a stage of human development (a human), unlike sperm or pizza, which could *potentially* be pieces of a human, or a computer with information which could be a *representation* of a human but will never physically be one. But an embryo is the actual thing.
It seems like in your counterexamples you are trying to come up with generalizable rules for what things are okay to kill and what things aren't, based on consciousness, wants, etc. You can draw those lines where you feel is best for killing things in general, but I think "it is wrong to murder humans" is a different and additional rule to the rest.
An embryo doesn't naturally occur in a field, whoever put it there is murdering it in the same way that someone who throws another human onto the moon unprotected is murdering them. In the case where something goes wrong in the body and the embryo is going to die/potentially kill someone else, it's difficult to make a solid moral rule on whether you should prioritize the life of the mother or the embryo. It's easiest to save the mother's life and remove the embryo from where it was already going to die in most cases, I assume.
But producing many embryos and removing them from a hospitable environment and then discarding them purely out of choice is the murder of a human. If they are frozen rather than discarded, that's not murder, but it's definitely a weird area to get into.
I suppose this just comes down to us disagreeing on either the statement "something currently in a stage of human development is a human" or "it is wrong to murder a human". It seems odd to me to draw a line somewhere in the human development saying that everything before isn't a human and everything after is. Consciousness may be a different matter, but humanity seems quite clear. It isn't ambiguous what an embryo from human parents is in the embryonic stage of.
I hope this explanation is of sufficient clarity. I don't imagine that I'll change your mind in any way, but I think it's worth stating. Whatever the case, I don't have any idea that you're some evil person who intentionally/knowingly supports murder or anything like that.
EDIT: from the response you just made to Deiseach I understand what you were doing with your counterarguments to the "potentiality" argument, and I agree. I think hypotheticals are not very helpful in things like this. My argument is that a human embryo is a human, regardless of whatever else it could potentially develop later on (consciousness, wants, what have you).
do you mean "zygote" or "embryo"? The latter has cell differentiation which will (eventually) lead to organ development; the former doesn't.
If you feel a single cell that contains all genetic material is a human, then if we extract DNA from one of my cells, and inject it into a (DNA-emptied) human egg, is THAT a human?
Good point. I suppose I do mean zygote rather than embryo. It is still a cell in the very fist stage of human development, isn't it? An embryo and so on doesn't come from anything else, and a zygote won't grow into anything else, I assume.
I don't feel that a single cell that contains all genetic material is a human, otherwise, wouldn't all cells except sex cells be human? I mean that any organism that is in a stage of human development is a human, so in your example then (if things work how I think we both assume they work) yes I would say that it is a human. Isn't that one of the methods of cloning?
But *why* is it wrong to murder a human but not wrong to murder, say, a bacteria? Is "it is wrong to murder a human" just an axiomatic moral statement that is not derived from some deeper principle or that generalizes to others? If so, if you discover and alien world with a bunch of new life forms ranging from single-celled to complex and intelligent, how do you determine which are OK to kill?
I would submit that "it is wrong to murder a human" is an axiomatic moral statement. I'm not saying it isn't wrong to murder anything else. Generalizable principles would be helpful in hypothetical thought experiments like what aliens are okay to murder or if AI should get human rights, but I think those are separate and additional to the statement "it is wrong to murder a human".
If you were a non-human intelligence would you still accept "it is wrong to murder humans" as an axiomatic moral statement?
Good point. I guess maybe I should say "it is wrong for humans to murder humans". You could say I'm moving goalposts, but it's what I was thinking from the beginning and didn't think to specify, as the topic that led to the discussion was relating to human actions towards humans.
"Murder" is a proper subset of "kill" with the additional characteristic of wrongness.
The statement "it is wrong to murder a human" is either tautological or assuming the conclusion.
The statement "it is wrong to kill a human" is not uniformly true without further qualification.
The embryos in IVF are produced in the inhospitable environment (a petri dish). Eggs are removed from the body and fertilized outside the body in that process.
I would ask you, let's say there is a human who has had his head completely removed, but people are feeding him and keeping him alive like that one headless chicken experiment. Someone has an opportunity to inject it with something that will kill the body. Have they committed murder?
Obviously not. No brain = no person. A sleeping or otherwise unconscious brain will/can come back online. But if there is no brain, there is no person. Ergo, and embryo that hasn't developed a brain yet is not a person.
Also, considering the IVF embryos are created outside the womb, thawing and allowing them to die is more like unplugging a brain dead person from life support. It's a death from natural causes.
There's a difference between "can't ever" and "hasn't yet" which seems significant, and is why such cases always end up news headline controversies in practice: most often you can't be certain whether your Archie Battersbee might become a Dylan Askin.
I would say in that case, the person who removed the head from the body murdered the person, just as I would say that a person who begins a human life in a petri dish and then leaves it to die is a murderer.
The chickens in the situation you're referring to still have pieces of brain, that's why they're still running around.
Anyway, here's what I said to moonshadow for a similar situation to the life support thing:
"I think there's a difference between something going wrong that leads to a person's death (like a disease that puts a child into a long-term comatose state, or an embryo implanting itself into the fallopian tube) and someone intentionally putting an end to a human life in an immoral way (throwing a child in front of a moving vehicle, or removing an embryo from where it natrually already was thriving and then discarding it). I don't know any rule for what would make ending a human life moral, but I'm sure people can argue that killing in war or the death sentence or stuff like that is moral human killing.
I still think removing an embryo and freezing it indefinitely is very weird and *feels* wrong to me, but it isn't murder."
I'm saying that, until a brain is present, there's no person, and therefore can be no murder.
We recognize brain death as the end of personhood. Ergo, I recognize brain development as the beginning of personhood.
Leaving a blastocyst to die in a petri dish is just like unplugging a brain dead person from life support. No person, no murder.
I just disagree that murder is the wrongful killing of a human person. I would say that it is the wrongful killing of a human life. I guess that's just where we'll have to disagree.
What if the head is not dead? What if it's alive and well in a jar awaiting transplant to a new (ethically sourced) body? Clearly terminating the human body it came from is not a murder. It might be a property crime against the transplantee who maybe wanted to use it as a backup or something, but it's not a murder.
To make it more like an embryo, imagine that the headless body is enhanced with technology that would have it eventually regenerate a fresh head that develops a new consciousness. I still say it's not a murder to terminate that body, or to keep trimming the head development back to keep it available for the return of the original owner. Obviously, it would once again be murder to terminate the body if a new head and consciousness was allowed to develop!
I could be wrong, but I think once you remove a human head from a body, the body is at that moment dead. Like I already pointed out, the chicken example doesn't work because those chickens still have some brains left, they just don't have most of their head. I don't think your hypothetical is helpful because that doesn't happen.
"it's difficult to make a solid moral rule on whether you should prioritize the life of the mother or the embryo."
No, not really. Now, I can buy that an embryo is a human, I won't gainsay you there. But wow, those are two categorically different states of human-ness. Then, on top of that, you have the fact that the embryo human is totally (yes you could come up with exceptions, but really...) dependent on the mother for life sustenance. Her human card is incontrovertibly the stronger, higher-ranking card. And I she so chooses to not deliver to term that embryo human, then so be it! Call it murder if you must, but all you do is cheapen the word murder.
As for this gene-selecting stuff, not my bag. I think there are real moral issues there, but "embryo is human and no killing humans" is not one of them.
I think I follow Wowzers point. Before you dismissed potential to grow as irrelevant you tried to dismiss embryos as unable to grow. If you're able to throw in extra arguments in a section you'll later bypass, isn't Wowzer allowed to correct them? After all if you thought they were definitely of no value then presumably you wouldn't have included them in your original article :-).
I had to pull the escape cord at the "pizza is a potential person" insult. But the deliberate discarding and destruction of the non-selected embryos is at issue. If you're not using them, keep them preserved.
You don't even need to have to fund their preservation, but they need to be passed off to an organization that will fund it. You can pass a law that they have no inheritance rights, and pass a law that they can't be implanted against the parents' wishes for N years and/or while the parents are alive so they don't have to worry about family squabbles.
Deontologically value human life.
We don't currently require e.g. brain dead / long term comatose children to be kept on indefinite life support, but this seems inconsistent with the rule you are proposing. Do you think we need adjustments there as well?
Are they going to get better?
It's highly unusual for the doctors to be /completely/ certain. Are the frozen embryos in your proposal ever actually going to get defrosted and grown?
Are they going to get defrosted is a question about what care we offer them, not whether we expect them to grow and flourish if that care is not withheld.
They are dead without your care - without you freezing them and keeping them frozen - so it is the same question.
Perhaps they may die. The freezer and its backups may fail tomorrow. If an axe murderer is trying to kill someone, I'll try to stop them, even if the person they're trying to kill may die in a car crash tomorrow.
We know they're still perfectly healthy 30 years later, not distinguishable at all from embryos made today. There's no reason to think we can't just keep all of them alive indefinitely. Maybe 50 years from now people have a sudden desire for 20th century babies. Maybe we achieve some great technological breakthrough and babies can be grown in artificial wombs and the baby shortage in America is resolved.
The question in both scenarios is, "is a nonzero chance the child ever wakes up worth the costs of keeping them alive". I think if we take the position that the answer to that is an unconditional "yes" for the embryos regardless of cost, we should take that same position for the comatose kids on life support situation.
There was a recent case of a thirty year frozen embryo resulting in a successful birth, so at least some clinics are keeping them long term.
Ah, I must correct myself: it was due to a "Christian embryo adoption agency", else (presumably) the clinic would have disposed of it.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/07/29/1120769/exclusive-record-breaking-baby-born-embryo-over-30-years-old/
Look, I'm old enough to remember Louise Brown and all the fol-de-rol about the precious miracle of sacred life and how could anyone be against this because it's allowing people to have desperately wanted babies, and then as soon as the industry shifted into gear all these "precious sacred miracles" frozen embryos became "rubbish cluttering up the place which needs to be disposed of", or "well if you're only going to dump them, give 'em to us for mad science experiments".
Humans? What humans?
> so at least some clinics are keeping them long term
Sure, completely agree. The question is whether /all/ clinics should be forced to keep them /forever/.
...which, y'know, might well be a "yes". I just want to see it reasoned through all the way.
I think there's a difference between something going wrong that leads to a person's death (like a disease that puts a child into a long-term comatose state, or an embryo implanting itself into the fallopian tube) and someone intentionally putting an end to a human life in an immoral way (throwing a child in front of a moving vehicle, or removing an embryo from where it natrually already was thriving and then discarding it). I don't know any rule for what would make ending a human life moral, but I'm sure people can argue that killing in war or the death sentence or stuff like that is moral human killing.
I still think removing an embryo and freezing it indefinitely is very weird and *feels* wrong to me, but it isn't murder.
> removing an embryo from where it natrually already was thriving and then discarding it
Is that what happens? I thought the actual fertilisation for this family of techniques happened outside the womb, and only later would the selected embryo be reimplanted.
Oh oops I think you're right about that, and while that is a very different situation, I think a similar idea applies. Eggs and sperm don't naturally occur in a lab outside the body, so whoever intentionally combines those, thus beginning a human organism, and then discards it would be a murderer.
Maybe even saying "naturally occurs" is wrong. Whatever the case, a human intentionally bringing a human organism into being and then disposing of it would be a murderer.
The difference is that hypothetical you deliberately created the embryos, whereas you presumably didn't deliberately cause the comatose child to be comatose. That makes you responsible for the former in a way you aren't necessarily responsible for the latter.
Who is the "you" you are talking about, exactly?
As a society we generally make parents responsible for decisions about their children's wellbeing. We have laws about it and everything. e.g. https://www.gov.uk/parental-rights-responsibilities
There are certainly disagreements about what you can do with an embryo /before/ it becomes a child, including heated discussions in past comments sections here; but I've never before heard anyone argue that the parents aren't responsible for the well-being of a child /after/ it's been born.
I'm tempted to look for a "magic moment" we can set as the divider but there's another problem with it:
A large percent of early embryos don't make it to live birth, and many or most are nonviable to some degree. They may die within a minute, an hour, a day, a week, with or without implanting, with or without knowledge to science or to the mother. The cause of this could be luck, incompatibility, genes in either party doing some kind of selfish gene battle, or many other reasons. Some of them are probably savable today, others with minor modifications, others with major. They may be born with weaknesses which kill them immediately, after any amount of time, if they don't receive supplemental treatment costing 1$, 1m$, 1t$, or of any intensity, which may not exist yet. This necessary treatment may also be needed at any point before birth.
The point is we currently only see anything about a pregnancy or a birth well after natural filtering has been applied. Most previous moral theories had it easy because they didn't have to deal with this and include this filtering out of non-working combinations in their moral calculus since the world and the lack of tech made it sad but economically easy to just accept this as fate.
It's hard to count all of these but combining all stages of possible loss, there may be many more conceptions than live births we see today (gpt estimates at least 10% loss rates at compatibility, implantation, survival at various stages) and possibly much more.
The fact that men produce 100m plus sperm should be making you very suspicious of this line of argument.
Our view of conception is similar to 1990s popular views of AI - a reified significant all or nothing state which could be argued about as a whole. When we dig in, just like AI, I predict we'll see this area is incredibly messy with almost every possible state existing, meaning that you'll always be able to find a state which challenges any attempts at bright line drawing.
The world can be dangerous and nobody makes it out alive. Yet we don't kill existing people.
The transhumanists often propose transporters that can duplicate a baby. I'm not a transhumanist who thinks such a thing can exist. But if it did, while there's no requirement to just run the machine all day making babies, if you *do* run the machine, you have a human life with a human's moral worth. If you don't want the responsibility of taking care of that baby, don't run the machine. It's a 100% voluntary and 100% predictable action.
Just keeping the embryos alive is a massively low bar. You don't even need to pay for it. It makes PEPFAR look like some random charity run by a millionaire's bored wire.
See, I would have (grudgingly) given in on very early embryos as per your examples, except the pro-abortion lot just would not frickin' stop. Ever. At any limit.
It was always one more exception, then one more, then one more. Rape and incest and danger to physical life of the mother legalisation only? Yes, but what if it won't *physically* kill the mother but it will make her very mentally distressed.
Okay, then what about if it will make her financially distressed?
Term limits? Well you can never be precisely exactly sure how far along a pregnancy is, are you going to use The Force Of Law against a woman and her doctor who make a genuine mistake for a week or two too far along? What about poor women who have to save up for abortions?
What about, what about, what about and never, ever stopping. The unspoken, and then later admitted, position being "abortion on demand, no reasons needed, no limits".
Roe vs Wade was a kludge, and a lot of the cases subsequent to that were the same. But as foetal viability was pushed back earlier, the push to expand abortion intensified. Even the Guttmacher Institute, carrying out surveys, found that the vast majority of abortions were for financial reasons, that the "rape/incest/threat to life" examples that are the ones always used when arguing for abortion were miniscule by comparison (e.g. rape was something under 1% if I remember). That's a very old survey by now, but the broad outlines remain the same.
So since the pro-choice, pro-abortion set have shown they have no interest at all in compromise (and indeed that "compromise" to them means "you nutjob zealots give in on your principles and agree with everything we demand"), I have no reason at all to give in an inch because I know the mile will be taken.
I'm actually not pro abortion or involved with those ideas much at all. I'm just trying to find an agreeable and moral solution where people survive and life isn't too bad for them. I actually wish the default bright line system worked better. Or, if the tech existed to filter earlier, at the sperm or egg level, I'd do that. Cause for me I'm trying to avoid having evolution work against conscious beings; in the current system, we let people grow up and only then nature kills them for having random bad mutations as the main way necessary filtering happens. My goal is to lessen such suffering. As long as some filtering is necessary fir human sexual reproduction & adaptation systems, doing it abstractly seems better.
So my comment is why I think that a broad agreement to hold embryos as the main thing we agree to care about doesnt work very well. Because against the total loss rate, opposing abortion, or freezing embryos, isn't working, and the consensus on this will continually be undermined by people who find out about the 100m sperm and all that. We just didn't see it or know about most of it before. So to keep that view going, groups might get stuck avoiding the knowledge of how conception etc works. That isn't an attractive state since it wouldn't be strong as long as science still works. And even moreso the whole absolute sanctity of life generally skates free by delegating the necessary filtering to nature. If tech keeps improving, that'll stop too and the remaining view will lead to really bad outcomes.
So, I think that there are other options available which improve what I care about like not making life fearful or painful for consciousness. I would admit that this kind of heuristic isn't as good as the old "never cause abortion" rule. If I'm wrong about their actual effectiveness at saving lost of embryos, then I'd adjust.
See, it all *sounds* lovely: let's filter out so the bad things won't happen in future! Let's only have happy healthy babies!
Existence is going to hit us over the head with an anvil some day anyway. The happy healthy baby may grow up to be a teenager who drowns while swimming.
Yes, but on the other hand, I personally would happily destroy a billion Petri dishes full of embryos, if doing so would lead to total eradication of e.g. Down's Syndrome. Or Cystic Fibrosis. Or a slew of other genetic illnesses. Yes, the resulting children might still drown while swimming or whatever, but at least I can be sure they won't live a short life full of constant pain (due to e.g. Cystic Fibrosis).
Isn't this symmetrical? Yes, actions can have bad outcomes. But, inaction can have bad outcomes too. Our job is to decide what to do or not do based on whatever info, beliefs system etc
If you think ignoring prenatal risk factors is okay because people still drown, that's a view which most don't agree with for actual reasons. I'm convinceable to your view, if you can show that with proper weighting, your argument is right. As of now, it's not because even if my child could die, I still also don't want them to get cancer more than necessary.
You're the one with status quo bias. That is, the belief that the amount of something nature provides is the actually right amount we should accept or want. (Sorry if this is not accurate; what is your reason for suggesting we should not do more in the area of reproduction?)
Sometimes that's right, sometimes it's wrong. Mere existence of hypotheticals within which I'm wrong don't convince me to change my actions.
All cases have possible data and imaginary situations where they could be right. Just outlining one isn't enough to solve it
Imagine telling an abortion patient, who isn't a political activist and probably didn't even vote, that you don't think she should be able to get an abortion not because of philosophy, theology, or moral reasoning, but because you're annoyed with the people you have online political discussions with. Just goes to show that while this isn't true of every pro-lifer, for a great many of them it's got nothing to do with empathy for other people's fetuses, it's about them and their antisocial desire to exercise power over others. I dream of a society where that ability is permanently taken away.
If compromise clearly and consistently later leads to a new compromise even farther from your actual position, then compromising is not in your interest. As they said, if you give an inch, they will take a mile.
You trivialize it by saying "annoyed with people you have political discussions with" but what they're actually doing is making a strategic decision on how far they're willing to accept abortion goes in light of a side that will take advantage of any willingness to budge.
This is true for both sides of course, and probably true of all political issues in some sense. Calling this an "antisocial desire to exercise power over others" is just an attempt to unfairly portray someone you disagree with in a negative light, when they're playing the political field as it actually is.
>If compromise clearly and consistently later leads to a new compromise even farther from your actual position, then compromising is not in your interest.
Abortion being legal does not harm Deiseach's interests at all.
Pro-choicers have always been honest that they want the decision to be between a woman and her doctor. This is just accusation in a mirror, you talk about late-term abortion so you can get power and ban it all. I would encourage pro-lifers who see themselves as moral people to ask why their side contains so many dishonest people and dishonest arguments.
Yes, Alexander, we all know what you'd do if you were in power, such as the ad campaign you lovingly described about shaming teenage girls who got pregnant and didn't immediately get an abortion.
You'd tell an abortion patient, as you chivvied her out the door to the clinic, that since she was too impulsive and selfish to exercise self-control and not have sex, and too stupid to use contraception responsibly, then she should indeed get that abortion right away so as not to spawn a sub-human low intelligence low-value leech that will rely on being supported for life by the public purse. And while she's there, get her tubes tied as well so this doesn't happen in future!
I described an ad campaign I thought could help Democrats win elections.
Your second paragraph just more accusation in a mirror. You're the one who wants to stand outside an abortion clinic and yell judgmental stuff at patients.
What would I say to her? I wouldn't tell her she has a duty not to reproduce for eugenic reasons, as the much bigger issue is low fertility among the intelligent. I would tell her she should not expect society to support her if she does keep the pregnancy, whether that means the welfare system or her family.
I find it funny you condemn me for being too judgement of other people's sexual behavior, when the trad society you people wish for would be a thousand times worse in that respect.
On the other hand though, pregnant women don't undergo abortion just for the fun of it; rather, they do so because they really truly in their hearts of hearts do not want to raise the baby. Yes yes I'm sure you can find some extreme counter-examples, but those are outliers. So, it seems to me that if you force these women to carry the babies to term, you need some comprehensive program for ensuring that the babies would be raised by people who are actually interested in raising them. Otherwise, you end up creating more problems than you solve.
> you need some comprehensive program for ensuring that the babies would be raised by people who are actually interested in raising them.
I’m always intrigued by people raising this as an objection to not aborting babies, because we know both currently and historically that there is a very active market in babies that are even mostly-healthy. People will pay very large sums of money for newborn babies, even if they are not related to them, and most of those people seem to be interested in raising them. Demand greatly outstrips supply at the moment.
I’m pretty sure that when you think about it, you already know this. Think of the scandals around mother-and-baby-homes. Think of news around international adoptions. Think of stories around surrogacy. Think of stories you have seen about couples and individuals trying to find a pregnant teenager willing to hand over her baby as soon as it is born, and disputes about whether the mother can change her mind.
Finding willing parents for these babies is not a problem.
> Finding willing parents for these babies is not a problem.
It is arguably not a problem *right now*, when the number of unwanted babies is relatively low. Yet the system scales very poorly. Currently prospective parents who wish to adopt a child have to go through an extremely long and laborious vetting process; surrogacy is the same, but even worse. Even now, with abortion (and contraception) still being mostly legal (or at least available), many unwanted children are unable to find a family willing and able to raise them. And before you say, Libertarian-like, "just drop all the regulations, problem solved", note that this laborious vetting process has a purpose: it is to ensure that those babies would actually be raised in good conditions by people who would care for them. Finding such people is a legitimately difficult task.
Also BTW, I haven't mentioned contraception in my previous post because people who are opposed to abortion are usually also opposed to contraception on the same moral grounds. Still, from the strictly mechanical point of view, another way to reduce the demand for abortions would be to make contraception free (and perhaps even mandatory).
Ah, but did you not know that adoption is *worse* than abortion? See, if a woman goes through a pregnancy and gives birth and has any time with the baby, then she will get attached, and then giving up the baby will make her sad.
So instead of her being all sad and like that every time she thinks of the baby she gave up over the years, much much better to abort it while it's still in the "clump of cells" stage.
I wish I was making that up.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/ie/blog/the-third-wave/201905/adoption-is-not-a-solution-for-abortion
"Although there are positive perceptions about adoption, the rates of adoption in the U.S. are relatively low. Adoption isn’t a popular choice for pregnant people, because it is distressing and traumatic for birth mothers to relinquish their children, even in open adoptions, which don't solve all of the complications and differing interests that can occur among families, post-adoption. There was a brief decline in adoption rates for white women after the passage of Roe vs. Wade, but the steady decline overall isn't because of Roe v. Wade, but because of cultural changes that have resulted in less stigma for single women who become parents. Framing adoption as an alternative to abortion is not supported by the reasons women choose either abortion or adoption. Policies that try to promote adoption in an attempt to reduce abortion rates are misguided and misinformed. Instead, policies should reflect a reproductive justice framework that ensures that we all have rights and access to resources that support pregnant people's choice to parent or not, and promote safety, dignity, and well-being."
https://inthesetimes.com/article/alito-adoption-abortion-reproductive-justice-parenthood
"Alito’s and Barrett’s arguments were greeted with immediate outcry: that a far-right SCOTUS was paving the way to treat pregnant women as the source of a commercial product, a domestic supply of adoptable babies. But Alito was only saying the quiet part out loud. Because in truth, that’s long been the reality across much of the adoption industry. For all the rhetoric of “win-win-win” solutions that surround adoption — domestic and foreign, private and public — for decades, adoption has too often functioned as a supply-and-demand industry, where mostly poorer women provide the supply to meet richer families’ demand.
That conclusion is unavoidable in reading Gretchen Sisson’s new book Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood. Sisson, a sociologist at the University of California, San Francisco and a researcher with the landmark Turnaway Study, which tracked outcomes for women denied abortions, undertook a 10-year study, from 2010 to 2020, of women who relinquished babies for adoption. She found that the overwhelmingly common factor to women choosing to relinquish children for adoption today is income disparity and poverty, and the overwhelming outcome for those women is enduring grief and loss."
https://archive.ph/PrVZf
"Then there are the adoptees. In 2019, there were roughly 115,000 domestic adoptions in the United States. In the same year, more than 122,000 children waited in foster care for adoption; the average wait for a child to be placed in a home was 31 months. By the numbers alone, we are already failing our most vulnerable children.
Among those who oppose abortion, the children’s very existence is often cast as a happy ending. But it’s not that simple.
Children in the foster system often experience the disruption of multiple placements and are likely to contend with significant mental health problems. Studies have shown that adoptees — who struggle with attachment, identity and the trauma of institutionalization — are four times as likely to attempt suicide as non-adoptees."
> pregnant women don't undergo abortion just for the fun of it
The problem with this kind of statement is the world is much larger than that and has every kind of person in it, and your interlocutors will always be able to dig up some random nutter who proudly proclaims in clickbait interviews that she regularly aborts for fun and everyone else also should.
Why?
Why are these specific clumps of cells afforded such value when the sperm and the egg and the shed uterine lining and the severed limb aren’t? The natural progression of all these things is death and decay without ever developing anything resembling a human consciousness.
> Why are these specific clumps of cells afforded such value when the sperm and the egg and the shed uterine lining and the severed limb aren’t?
I once read a really good answer to this. Here it is:
The natural progression of all these things is death and decay without ever developing anything resembling a human consciousness.
And I think you can generalize that up until the point of implantation. The natural progression of an egg is death. Of a zygote, death. Of a blastocyst, death, *unless* it is also in the correct environment. There is no way to reach consciousness without the womb.
It works as an argument against abortion, but not against IVF.
My blood cells (and shed uterine lining when I was shedding) are parts of me but are not independent entities. Had I ever become pregnant, that would be a whole individual and different new life, not a piece of me like my toenails or appendix.
Take your question to the limit, and what are any of us except clumps of cells? That's the transhumanist quest right there - pull out this evanescent concept called a consciousness or a mind and turn it into some immortal machine thing.
Why think a mind has value? Why care if you develop Alzheimers', what are you losing anyway? Nobody has been able to cut a mind out of a dead brain and weigh it on a scales!
Nobody has been able to cut human-ness out of a dead body and weigh it on scales either. The things we care about are often things that arise from complex, ongoing interactions and not some physical substance that can be easily measured.
"The things we care about are often things that arise from complex, ongoing interactions and not some physical substance that can be easily measured."
Precisely, which is why attempts at "it's a person when it is sentient, and it is sentient when it's [this many months old/this IQ measurement]" are also blunt instruments to solve the complex question of what it is to be a human.
I agree that "it is sentient when it's [this many months old/this IQ measurement]" is a bad argument. Probably, degree of sentience is a continuous thing that generally increases with cognitive development. At the very least, if there is some effect that causes a discrete jump in sentience at some point, science hasn't found it yet.
But why depend on these blunt instruments at all? An embryo probably has a little bit more of whatever it is that we care about than a sperm and egg separately, a newborn has more than that, and perhaps an adult more than that.
Quite.
A fetus is not independent. Neither is a freshly implanted blastocyst, nor a zygote free-floating in the Fallopian tube, nor the separate sperm and egg. If you think any of those things are worth protecting, it’s got to come from something other than independence.
I understand that your religion makes specific claims about the moment of conception. But no one has been able to cut out a soul any more than a mind. If we’re ruling out those ephemera, what is so special about the fertilized egg?
I don’t believe there is a principled, materialist way to separate a brainless, dependent zygote from the other brainless, dependent bits of biology we regularly discard.
"embryos, which have less of a brain and nervous system even than bugs, should be less valuable still"
That's a very weird value system. A cold dead human corpse has even less of functioning brain and nervous system and yet we do not handle corpses the same way we handle logs. The most rational explanation for that seems to be that a corpse and a foetus values are linked to what they were or what they could be - a human. In both cases, that human is currently non-existent, but this link is still obviously relevant. This link is arguably even more important in the case of a foetus we are about to kill, as nothing we can do with a corpse has a direct causal effect on the linked human and killing the foetus very much has.
Why did you lump "what they were" and "what they could be" together? Manifestly the crucial part of scott's argument is that the person has existed at some point. The way people handle corpses (out of belief for afterlife or leftover cognitive tendencies) doesn't really have anything to do with this conversation. Im willing to bet that someone who deals with corpses often is going to be much more cavalier in handling a corpse. I don't like how you're mixing the direction of time and causality in this fetus vs corpse argument.
As scott said in the article literally every molecule in your vicinity right now has the potential to be human right now. You obviously need to draw the line somewhere (between pizza and baby) but the point is going to be arbitrary.
I am not sure I understand your argument fully, especially the part around "leftover cognitive tendencies". I am sure an average human has a vague idea of what he is going or not going to do with his mother's corpse. These ideas would not be consistent with valuing lumps of organic matter in proportion to their nervous function, as Scott seems to suggest. Hence, this metric is not consistent with our morality and value systems.
I think the sleight-of-hand here is assuming the equivalence of “what they were” and “what they could be”. Maybe that equivalence is right and maybe it’s wrong, but Scott’s property rights argument and the argument about the effects on friends and family are enough to suggest to me that it isn’t.
I’ll admit to to a weird vaguely contradictory feature of my worldview: At one end, I believe that a woman who became pregnant through rape should be able to abort the embryo, possibly even if it has brain cells. But at the other end I also believe that if a woman who with her man has produced an embryo that they want deeply to be a child, and the woman is assaulted by a psychopath with a knife and loses the child as a result, even if it does not yet have a brain cell (!), then that psychopath is a murderer and should be treated as such. I can’t explain both of these by reference to the state of the embryo in isolation, but I am as sure as I can be about both. If you ask me to draw a line that separates them, I will, but if you ask me to put them on the same side of the line, I won’t.
A couple trying to have a child produces a lot of potential humans, at least in Scott’s sense of a sperm vaguely in the vicinity of an egg, and I can’t convince myself that the discarded embryos from IVF are different from that in any meaningful way. Production of the eventual child is the miracle.
I think your preferences are consistent with our practice of punishing uncertain/unintended outcomes of a crime differently from the same outcomes caused by legitimate actions. This is the principle behind the US legal concepts of "felony murder" and, broader, "transferred intent". In your examples, the uncertainty is metaphysical while "transferred intent" is usually applied to epistemic uncertainties, but it seems to be similar otherwise. Two humans - the woman in the first example and the psychopath in the second - should be treated differently despite the same outwards actions, because one of them is a victim and the other is committing other crimes, such as an assault.
I appreciate that you are at least aware of the tension between your two scenarios... It's sad that nature doesn't always give us clean answers, but we have to muddle along as best we can nonetheless. Recognizing the contradictory nature at least makes it much easier to sympathize with folks who draw the line elsewhere.
My two opinions are really in tension only if I insist on making my judgements focused only on the embryo’s putative rights or personhood. That tension is part of what convinces me that it’s not the right way to approach these questions.
This seems a bad example: we also handle a corpse very differently from a human being. We seem to care a lot about the "dignity" of the corpse but we don't care about, say, its autonomy or its free speech rights. And of course we destroy corpses all the time- if we valued embryos like corpses, abortion would be quite legal. I think these are just two very different cases with different justifications and looking at one doesn't actually tell us anything about the other.
Maybe I should have specific moral value, rather than ritual value.
I would definitely care a lot about my relative's corpse, but only in the same way I would care about their photo albums or their wedding ring.
I think the imperative to respect corpses comes from two places. First, if the person themselves wanted their corpse respected, we respect that for the same reason we respect the sleeping hermit. Second, if the family wants the corpse respected, we respect it out of respect for the family.
I don't think either of those considerations arise in embryo selection.
You are distinguishing here between "moral" and "ritual" values. The ritual value is probably similar to what Donald below calls "symbolism and ceremony". I am not sure why this distinction matters. Humans build rituals and ceremonies around things that they believe to be important; these rituals reflect their values and moral judgements these things. If we dismiss a ritual value because it is not a moral value, is it not the same as just dismissing value systems of those involved in rituals?
I am not sure your imperatives to respect corpses are sufficient to explain our intuitions and behaviours. For example, suppose you see a head of a just beheaded person lying on the street, with all of their family lying dead next to them. I think 1) you would have a very strong aversion to using the head as a football 2) you would feel this aversion without necessarily thinking about someone playing with your own head 3) this aversion would not come from the respect to the family of the beheaded as that family is also assumed to be dead.
So there must be something else giving moral value to corpses. I am not insisting that it is necessarily a link to a former human, but I do not see that much explanatory power in your two imperatives.
I would have an aversion to using a head as a football because
A) It would make a really bad football
B) It would be gross (an intuition planted in me by evolution, when it realized that close interaction with dead bodies can lead to disease)
I don't think either of these say much about whether or not it is morally OK to use a head as a football.
It is not my place to judge you, but it does not look that you are driven by normative morals of our society.
I mean I do have other reasons for not wanting to use the head as a football, but they are complicated social reasons that are probably hard to disentangle from the "symbolism and ceremony" related reasons.
The societal norms against mistreating dead bodies probably arose for a lot of reasons ranging from the symbolism, to hygienic, to making it harder to cover up murders. These norms are then internalized to some degree and not re-evaluated from first principles in cases where some of the original underlying reasons don't apply.
> A cold dead human corpse has even less of functioning brain and nervous system and yet we do not handle corpses the same way we handle logs.
The way corpses are handled depends on a mix of practical reasons like disease prevention, organ donation, medical science. It also makes it hard for murderers to get away with hiding a corpse. If it was common practice to throw a corpse in your trash can whenever someone died, then a corpse in a trash can would be much less suspicious, and getting away with murder would be easier.
Also, the living relatives like some symbolism and ceremony.
You are making a point very similar to Scott's. See the first paragraph of my reply to him here https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/my-responses-to-three-concerns-from?r=ga8xm&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=147330993
For the embryos, “what they were” is even less deserving of care. Women tend to throw away one egg a month. You’re leaning entirely on the “what they could be” side. Isn’t that exactly what Scott is arguing against?
I also was wondering about the "dead hermit's corpse" example, and was happy to see you bring it up. Virtue ethics solves this problem easily, of course (many such cases!) but it has nothing to do with the sentience of the hermit, at least not in the present moment. You'd handle the flag draped on your grandfather's casket carefully too, even though it was never sentient.
> we do not handle corpses the same way we handle logs.
Sure we do: we burn them to ash or bury them in the ground. We have health protocols around corpses because they can spread disease. To the extent that corpses are treated reverentially, that's strictly downstream of the property rights of bereaved family members. A corpse with no one to claim it IS, in fact, treated more-or-less exactly like a potentially-infectious log.
Are you saying that with enough antiseptic you would play football with a severed head in the example above? If not, why not?
https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/my-responses-to-three-concerns-from?r=ga8xm&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=147330993
(edited href)
No, because skulls aren't really round. They wouldn't work very well. Also people have an instinctual disgust for dead bodies. That doesn't make it immoral. Many people have an instinctual disgust at seeing someone stabbed in the eye but that doesn't make eye surgery immoral.
If some isolated culture or town had developed a collective appreciation for using appropriately-disinfected heads as footballs, I don't think anyone would have any rational basis for morally condemning them.
If a human corpse was grown in a vat without a brain then it would be no morally different than a log.
The reason we care about corpses is generally because we still give some (albeit less) moral consideration to the preferences of the no longer alive.
I think the reductio-ad-absurdism for embryo personhood can be a lot simpler (than sentient robots and such):
There are lots of men and women around. If the sperms don't have personhood and the eggs don't have personhood, what about all of the sperm-egg pairs that are just walking around?
Any time *any* man and woman do not mate and become pregnant, that is a sperm-egg pair -- which could have become a person -- being wasted, and both sides killed. Are we concerned about this?
I think this is a failure of curiosity about why no pro-life person actually holds that view or feels convicted by that reductio.
1. Make up a value system for someone you don't like.
2. Observe they don't follow the value system you made up in your head.
3. Declare that that someone has no value system.
Let's shy away from meta-sniping please. LLS has a strong and simple post
he's meta-sniping David V, not LLS?
Well I'm pretty sure it's because pro-life people believe in souls, and it's not actually about "potential to become a person" at all. If I'm wrong about that, then alright I'll cop to the failure if curiosity.
I think you should talk to these guys if you're curious about why non-soul caring pro-lifers also don't feel implicated by your reductio. They're friendly! https://x.com/secularprolife
I've scrolled through a bit but twitter is kinda tough for finding the meat of the issue. If you have a link to a place where someone has written down the core of the secular argument, I would appreciate it.
If you're on twitter and you just tag them and ask why they're not compelled by the reductio they will answer in a good faith way.
I think we're a little misaligned in our conversation here. My reductio is specifically aimed at people who believe the morality hinges on "potential to become a person". I alreat know that not all pro-life people take that stance; of course those will big be compelled by it. So there's no wonder about that.
As far as just reaching out and asking them about it, I appreciate that but I'm going to decline. I'm a little suspicious of having to go through the route of 1-on-1 conversation rather than just reading something. I mean why don't I just go into the Scientologist building and have a little chat with them if I wanna really see where they're coming from, right?
Okay, what's a person? Are we talking minimum IQ levels? Should we therefore quietly and humanely knock off all the human-shaped-but-not-persons that are already existing but not reaching the set of standards that define a person as written by the best thinkers?
Two can play the game of "I'll make you sound as ridiculous as possible and not even be interested in why you think as you do, simply because you don't agree with what I want".
Not Op, but more than a decade ago, I was a pro-life person who abandoned those views precisely because of an argument of this nature.
“Every sperm is sacred” is the inevitable, but absurd conclusion of the “potential person” argument against abortion, which I always thought was the pro-life position’s best argument against abortion. Its failure forced me to accept the fact that the pro-life position was logically unworkable if you aren’t going to resort to religious arguments.
The thought of killing babies still makes me sad, but I try to imagine the child the mother would have had later on in her life when she felt more able to support one. A child that wouldn’t exist if the mother was forced to carry her current baby to term.
"I try to imagine the child the mother would have had later on in her life when she felt more able to support one. A child that wouldn’t exist if the mother was forced to carry her current baby to term."
Ah, yes: the child that might be, if mommy feels she wants a rugrat at some undefined future time.
And if she never has that child?
If you want to force women to give birth to children against their will, there are probably more effective ways of doing that than just preventing them from getting legal abortions.
Most people have an urge to reproduce, and the ones that don’t are going to gradually become less and less common as natural selection does its work.
If a woman isn’t willing/able to have a child despite wanting one, then that says more about the morality of society than the woman.
And here we go now with this new canard! Forced birth! Chaining women down to rape and impregnate them! The Handmaid's Tale!
I have not yet used the term "babykillers" and I don't want to, let's not go down this path.
Not if the right to life is a negative right, no. You’d be obligated not to take life, but *not* obligated to bring it about in the first place. Remember, Copenhagen ethics are pretty darn common!
I think this can actually come down in favor of IVF, since unimplanted, undeveloped embryos are absolutely not developing into human consciousness without further outside actions. But the debate rarely ends there. Most people have more stipulations on their ethical model.
A world where the rich have better genes than the poor looks really bad to me. Because of the extinction risk decreasing effects of higher IQ humans, I guess I'm grudgingly okay with it, but I don't see why others have their great enthusiasm for it. If we wouldn't be in a hurry, I would say let the state control this technology and dispense it evenly when we are wealthy enough.
I would argue that we live in and always have lived in a world in which the rich have better genes than the poor. They also have better educations, better food and so on.
What you say is true, but to such lesser extent compared to my imagined future that it's a mere technicality. Currently, there are tons of poor people who are smarter, taller, hotter or healthier than tons of rich people even if the population average is lower. This is not comparable to a state where nigh every rich person is better on all those traits than nigh every poor person.
EDIT: accidentally posted with other account first, sry
You can make a parallel argument about capitalism: it concentrates resources in the hands of the most capable. While that widens inequality it's more than compensated for by the surplus value created. The poor are further away from the rich but they're also further away from starvation. I think that's a clear net-positive and I expect the same to be true of embryo selection. Any inequality generated will be offset by positive spillovers and remedied by redistribution.
Are you sure? A lot of past royalty were the result of generations of inbreeding. They really did not have good genes by the end. And royalty, for a long time, was as rich as you could got get.
Gene selection would filter down. "The rich" is not a constant group. I've seen the kids of my cohort as an elite school and there is substantial reversion to the mean.
The problem is that it *will* be a constant group if this technology becomes capable enough. You can't really compete with people being better than you in every respect.
EDIT: again, sry for posting with other account first
Genetic enhancement would be more palatable the more equal society already was imo.
A lot of socialist and progressives from before WW2 were eugenicists. Redistributive economics seems like a natural complement to eugenics to me.
Currently the economy rewards people who just happen to have been born with the right genes and punishes people who didn't. But obviously no one deserves their genes and it does absolutely nothing to actually improve the population genetics overall.
It would be much more rational to just ensure as many people as possible have good genes but still compensate the people who happen not to.
I liked your comment, because I mostly agree with it, but because of your profile picture I'm compelled to note that I only agree if redistributive economics means something similar to Nordic countries and not communism. Capitalism has its faults, but giving up voluntary trades is much worse..
There are plenty of reasons not to support communism (I am also not a fan) but they should be grounded in what communists actually support; the cessation of all voluntary trades is not such.
Fair (I assume you mean theres still personal property that can be traded), my true objection is that I don't like when people or the state takes others' property without compensation. In my view, taxation can be just because the person who made the wealth profited from the surrounding society when making that wealth, but I can see that it's probably a difference in degree and not kind from communism.
I've lived through the time period covering cell phones being brick-sized hunks of plastic with huge antennas that only the wealthy owned, to being tiny advanced computers hooked up to the repository of all human knowledge which 98% of Americans own.
Technology tends to filter down quickly. In particular, it tends to filter down in less than 1 or 2 generations, which means that there wouldn't be enough time for heritable gaps to become very meaningful.
Well, that depends on the technology. Yuri went to space more than 60 years ago, and I still can't go.
In this case, you might be right (it doesn't seem inherently super expensive to do?) and you could convince me to endorse it this way.
I considered adding caveats about the difference between huge expensive 'technologies' like yachts or skyscrapers, vs. consumer-grade 'technologies' that don't require lots of expensive physical resources or human labor. Felt like a diversion but maybe I should have included it.
Anyway, yes, space travel is limited because we don't have a technology that can be made resource-cheap; our best methods still require building a huge rocket, and burning huge amounts of fuel. Yachts and skyscrapers take a huge amount of physical resources, and also take up limited real estate in a dock or city.
I expect gene selection technologies to be more analogous to cellphones in this sense, something that requires a ton of innovation and effort to advance as a science and as a commodity, but afterwards can be produced with relatively low per-unit cost in terms of physical resources and human labor.
It's possible someone who knows more about the topic could tell me I'm wrong, that it requires some rare resource that will always be expensive or can never be divorced from huge amounts of specialized human labor. If that's true then my comment doesn't apply, but I don't think it's true.
Then we are in complete agreement, ie: it depends on whether it can be made cheap fast enough and neither of us know anything about that.
This same argument could be made for almost every technology. When only the rich had access to books, one could say "the poor will never be able to compete against the rich now! They have all this stored knowledge at their disposal and we don't!" But everyone has books now. Just as with embryo selection. Costs for it have already come down a million fold, they will continue to come down, as demand for it grows. The smartphone only took about 10 years -- from the first iphone to billions of people having one -- not even a full generation.
It sounds like you would prefer a more equal distribution of technology at a very high cost: e.g. millions of more people suffering from genetic diseases in the meantime due to this technology being delayed. Why would this tradeoff be worth it?
Well, the difference is the degree of advantage. For example, I don't think I couldn't at all compete against a rich person with a book even if I don't have books.
As I said in another comment, if you can convince me that it will be available to most everyone in time then I'm okay with it, I'm just not comfortable banking on a maybe.
Surely, genetic disease prevention can be separated from hotness, smarts, diligence, etc.. improvements. With purely disease prevention I'm much more okay (yes I know there's some correlation, but again, it's the degree that matters). Also, I generally value tons of things higher than the prevention of suffering or death.
I actually find it hard to see why there is a moral issue with "the rich" having access to this technology first. It feels like it's just a statement of fact: "the set of people who have more resources will be able to purchase this new technology first" and "the other set of people who have less resources will not be able to purchase this new technology first." My thought is... so what?
Is the set of people who have more resources worse in some way than the set of people who have less resources? Are they more evil? Are they more likely to use this technology to do bad things? I don't see any morally relevant difference between them. Of course I think ideally everyone who wants this technology should have access to it, but there's no reason why we should be unhappy if at first, only a portion of everyone who wants it (the people who can afford it) are able to access it first.
As I said in two other comments, if everyone will have it after some time, then all's good.
If not, then I don't think my issue is moral, it's more aesthetic. If there's a permanent underclass, I feel that's a bad outcome not because of morality, but because of aesthetics, but as I alluded to in othet comment, I often value things above morality and I suspect the modal person (who you will need to convince! I'm just some guy on a toilet) does too.
I think the chance of not everyone having access to this technology after some time is the same chance that existed for most every other technology. I think the price will come down over time like every other technology, and if it proves really beneficial (like vaccines) the government will subsidize it and distribute it to anyone who wants it. The only way I see a bad distribution of this technology far into the future is if some evil actor(s) took power and created an underclass purposefully, not tied to the distribution of this genetic enhancement technology, but just generally created a separate underclass. So I think the release of this technology has no bearing on a permanent underclass's creation.
We already have a problem with the rich looking down on the poor, just imagine how much worse it'll be once the rich are literally a race of superior ubermenschen.
Sure, you don't have to convince me it would be bad, but is it worse than complete human extinction from AI?
The previous Aga Khan (leader of Ismailite Islam) was married to two models in his lifetime. His son, the new Aga Khan, was married to just one so far, but still has time. Is the dynasty of Aga Khans going to produce humans so good looking that they’ll effectively be a different species of humans?
The practical objection to 3 probably falls foul of the fence around the law point; barring a sudden breakthrough, I expect polygenic trait selection in IVF is where the big culture war fight about "designer babies" is going to happen. The line between that and chromosome-selection, chromosome-arm selection and ultimately full-blown baby CRISPR is going to be less intuitively substantial for most people than allowing trait selection at all.
If society allows the killing of sleeping hermits, then people would know about it, and that would cause angst to awake hermits, especially if they were about to take a nap.
Can they stay awake forever? Wouldn't that kill them?
I think this is the correct way to approach this. It does however have the counterintuitive property whereby there is nothing intrinsically wrong with killing sleeping hermits, it is only wrong because of the broader context of human society.
That counter-intuitive property is shared by everything else!
I think that's part, though not all, of the reason we have things like legal personhood that protect sleeping hermits.
"the reason we have things like legal personhood that protect sleeping hermits"
But why should we grant personhood to a sleeping hermit? That's the crux of the argument.
And what is given legally can be taken away legally, as well, if we feel so inclined. As we have done with abortion - before, the child in the womb was to be protected by law. Now law says nope, not a person, can kill it.
Suppose a law is passed that says "humans who are one-quarter Hispanic are now no longer in possession of legal personhood and so may be treated accordingly by those who are full persons", that is, as non-persons or on a par with animals or even property.
Would you go along with that? Would you continue to insist they had full human rights? Just because they are existing in some form? Yeah, they're existing, but they're not *people*, the law says so, Scott! Why be so sentimental about non-persons that can't even become potential persons (they can't scrub that one-quarter Hispanic out of their biology).
After fifty years of "quadtroos aren't people", just as with Roe Vs Wade, there would be those who had grown up under that knowing nothing else and being bemused to infuriated by the nutcases trying to turn the clock back to the bad old days when quadtroos had 'rights' like real people. And making the same "pizza is a person! every sperm is sacred!" arguments to jeer at those nutjobs and their position.
I just got through explaining this in the post, and my comment itself was saying part of the reason! If you really want me to repeat it:
- Because awake hermits could never be comfortable if they thought people could kill them in their sleep.
- Because society could never be stable if you could kill people in their sleep.
- Because any philosophy which cares about people's preferences must include some understanding where those preferences continue even when the people are not having them at that moment, since that's how human preferences work.
I am using "legal personhood" as a pointer towards the parts of morality that are more like law than like axiology - for more, see https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/28/contra-askell-on-moral-offsets/
If you argue legality, then you have to accept that what is awarded by law can be taken away by law, rather than being an innate quality by reason of humanity.
"PORTIA, as Balthazar
A pound of that same merchant’s flesh is thine:
The court awards it, and the law doth give it.
SHYLOCK Most rightful judge!
PORTIA, as Balthazar
And you must cut this flesh from off his breast:
The law allows it, and the court awards it."
Be careful about appeals to law, they bind tighter than you might like.
So in order to be protected against abortion, you need to be old enough to understand the law and be anxious about it?
Seems extreme, but sure that's a good upper bound.
"the embryo had everything it needed to grow into a person on its own[...]This isn’t entirely true - an embryo sitting in the middle of a field will just die"
While it is true that an embryo relies on a very specific environment to survive and be a human in the future, the same is true about all other living organisms. If a 6 month old child was placed in the middle of a field it would die. If you were placed in the middle of a field, with nothing else within 50 miles but a field, you would die (slowly.) If you were placed in a random spot in our galaxy, you would die with probability 99.9999...% (very quickly), this probability being the same for you as for the embryo to a very large precision. Does this devalue your humanhood in any way?
Irrelevant. We’re not looking for a reason to kill embryos, we’re looking for a reason we shouldn’t. If the alleged reason — that they have everything they need to survive — is something that doesn’t even apply to adults, then it’s a bogus reason.
Both adults and embryos have everything they need to survive _in the environment they are prior to our intervention_, which is the womb for the embryo and a room in a house for a hypothetical adult. Being relocated to a random spot in our galaxy would kill either of them.
Hmm. I don't think a discarded IVF embryo was ever in a womb?
You are right, it should be a fridge/womb, not just womb.
Ah, and now you've slid the shiv right into my gut. It can *survive* in the fridge, but it can't *develop* in the fridge. I want to call that disqualifying, but I have a cryonics contract. Must think further.
props to you for this, honestly.
No, but it does mean that "it has the potential to grow even without beneficial conditions" can't be the real barrier between life and non-life. That's all that I was trying to prove.
Just spitballing a potential objection: I feel like gender could be an unaccounted for component of objections to this technology. You wrote that you can’t imagine some other trait being widely selected for before intelligence, but I think that would look different if considered on gender lines. It probably makes sense to select boys for intelligence before something like beauty or athleticism, but for girls I think a strong argument could be made for selecting for beauty before intelligence. The cons of being an unattractive girls seem much worse than the cons of being less intelligent and, in a world where a lot of people think AI will be taking over a lot of feminized jobs (teaching, aspects of healthcare, customer service, HR, etc), sex (or at least beauty) will always sell as a means towards financial security.
And in fact, many countries already experience strong gender selection effects (India and China most notably) through selective abortion, and it's not good for their culture, their marriage matching down the line, or for girls.
There's post-birth selection, too. In the book, After the Spike, the authors talk about a hospital having Code Pinks for when parents try to take underweight/fragile baby girls home against medical advice, because they prefer they struggle and die at home, giving them a chance to try again for a boy. (It's a strong gender preference + 1-2 child preference that produces this outcome).
I'll note that this is very nearly morally fine by Scott's construction, since he rates a newborn as less morally salient than a cow, but for the need for the law to draw a line somewhere, and since the parents are rooting for their daughter to die, they are not made sad by her death.
Just want to add the interesting fact that sex selection of IVF embryos in the US (allowed by normal IVF clinics) skews females. Americans select for female more than they select for male.
That's biological sex, not gender.
Thankfully, even if you believe there's a difference, they coincide in enough cases that it doesn't matter for purposes of this conversation.
It might matter even less in the future, if people decide that having gender non-conforming children is inconvenient and someone figures out the relevant genes.
If you want to play at being picky, then in the sociological and in the feminist senses, we are in fact discussing how gender is a component here, acting on people (as it always does) on the basis of their sex.
Only if one takes ‘gender’ as shorthand for some idea of ‘gender identity’ would the comment stop making sense, and so it is unlikely that this is how they are using the word.
Distinction without a difference.
How's this an objection? What's wrong with selecting for beauty?
Almost everyone is appalled at the idea killing a newborn. Most people seem OK with the idea of destroying embryos. Clearly, there is a transition point (or perhaps a fuzzy transition region) between fertilization and birth after which most people decide its wrong to destroy that organism. Personally, the most convincing transition point for me is conception, hence I'm against IVF (though I admit I still find it less appalling than infanticide, and I have friends that have conceived through IVF that I still think are good people).
I don't think the transition point exists. If a man and woman sit next to each other at a bar, their sperm and egg have thr full potential to become a new person. They just have to choose for it to be so.
I'm confused...are you saying that you think it's wrong to destroy a sperm or an unfertilized egg? Or are you saying that you think infanticide is OK?
Neither, of course. I'm saying the morality of destroying an organism is not related to whether or not it has the potential to become a person. If you think it is, then you should also oppose strangers choosing not to get pregnant with each other. Their sperms and eggs have the potential to become people, and when they walk away from each other that potential person is eliminated.
I think you misunderstood the point I was trying to make. There must be a transition (perhaps sharp, perhaps fuzzy) from "potential to become a person" to "an actual person". What criteria are you using to identify that transition point/region?
Okay I gotcha, I think we are arguing about different things.
Fair enough, though I'm still interested in your answer to my question, if you care to share it. I readily admit this is a difficult question, and I like to hear reasonable different points of view.
In a certain sense, this is correct. My understanding of the pro-life position is not that the fertilized egg (or, for the minority position, the “quickened” fetus) has the *potential* to become a person but that it *is* a person and therefore has some kind of moral status, despite its vulnerability and lack of agency.
The questions that follow include (i) what duties might be owed to such a similarly situated person, (ii) who owes those duties, and (iii) what, if any, legal “fences” might be required to protect the interests of the person to whose those duties are owed.
Yeah I believe usually they don't talk about "potential to become a person", but sometimes they do, and my response is to that argument specifically. But you're right it's probably not the typical argument.
I have said the latter https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2008/02/09/rhymes-with-shmashmortion/
"Potential" is a red herring term.
There is a clear divide between organisms and non-organisms. Sperm given just nutrients never grow into anything.
The embryo is at present an organism that is growing, it is no longer a potential organism.
The question is if an organism that would become conscious given time and environment is currently considered for moral protections.
I find this line of thought absurd. There is a very clear difference between separate sperm & egg and an embryo after conception. Basic biology.
Of course there's a difference. But then again there's a clear difference between an embryo and an infant, too, and that's also basic biology. The whole reason we're all arguing is because a clear, basic difference is not clear enough.
Ok, so when does it become bad to end a human life?
I'll answer that if you answer, "When does it become okay to willfully let a child have a disease that could have been prevented?"
I don't actually want you to answer that, I just want to point out that the difficult questions cut both ways.
That is not the question of this though - this is not letting a child have a disease that could have been prevented, this is not allowing a child to be born that could have that disease.
The ethics of technology that could cure these diseases but required IVF would be trickier for an anti-IVF position to deal with that what we are discussing at the moment, which is you don't get to exist (and in fact get discarded) if you drew a genetic short straw.
For some set of horrific conditions, this may be easier to support, it sounds a bit more harsh when you are talking about a few inches of height or points of IQ.
I think you're dead on that we need to draw a line somewhere between those points (at least for now? I'm not including magic future science helping us out more).
However, I've never really been convinced that conception makes a good point. If we have to draw our line somewhere arbitrary between fertilization and birth, I'd rather we pick one that is a biiiit more consequentialist, like "n weeks before memories can form" or something.
Would you mind picking my position apart for me? I'm curious why this is the """obvious""" place to draw the line for me when a different point is """obvious"""" to you
I don't actually think there is an obvious point, even though it's obvious when you're on either side of it (e.g. sperm have no moral weight, infanticide is appalling). That's why this is such a tough and contentious issue. Liberalism (which I adhere to, in the classical sense) places tremendous value on individual rights, but when does one become an individual with rights? Letting every individual decide for themselves is anarchy, but enforcing a single view on everyone seems like tyranny to many.
I don't think I've ever heard anyone use memory as a criterion, but I find it unsatisfactory for a few reasons. My earliest memories are *maybe* from around 2 years of age (assuming they're real memories). But my 1 year old son clearly remembers things that he'll later forget. So what kind of memories are we talking about? Also, lots of animals (most? all?) form memories, yet most people are OK with killing most animals (and I eat meat and squash lantern flies). Why is human memory special?
One potential answer is that humans are just different. I'm in that camp, but I have trouble fully articulating why. I know it has something to do with intelligence and consciousness, but intelligence and consciousness exist on a spectrum**. I don't know when something becomes intelligent/conscious enough that it has a right to not be killed. That leads me to adopt a conservative (not in a political sense) position, and conception seems like the "safest" option to me, since that is the point at which I am confident that a unique human organism of some sort comes into existence, even though I don't think an embryo is conscious or intelligent. But my uncertainty makes me reluctant to codify that position into law.
In practice, I think the solution I'm least uncomfortable with at a societal level is to adopt some criteria based on brain development.
But at the risk of undermining the entire discussion, I think there's a risk in trying too hard to reason about morality from first principles. Moral axioms are not obvious and there is no analytical or numerical moral function that one can solve for. Maybe that's because morality is just a human construct and humans are diverse. Maybe that's because we don't understand what God has tried to tell us. Or maybe it's because the devil has corrupted us and clouded our judgement. For whatever reason, trying to approach morality from a purely rational perspective seems to inevitably lead to some abhorrent places. I think that sometimes you just have to go with your gut and be willing to ask for and grant forgiveness.
** Incidentally, this is why I support laws against killing certain kinds of animals, but I admit that I don't know where to draw the line!
Almost certainly it is a smooth transition region. The law needs to draw a clean line somewhere, but often that line will be somewhat arbitrary.
I will say though that there is a practical reason to draw the line at birth (or maybe some notion of viability). After that point, adoption becomes a viable alternative.
I think what is missing from this (and many other rationalist discourses) is risk aversion. You recognise high uncertainty in determining where exactly humanhood starts in an embryo, but feel that you are "on a pretty solid ground" when putting this boundary in a particular spot. If your spot is too late, you are instrumental in organising a genocide of billions. If your spot is early enough, we can be improving average IQ by 5-10 points over a generation. These two outcomes seem to me to be too asymmetric for the boundary confidence of "pretty solid ground" being sufficient.
Okay, but if you ban this technology you make millions of people die of cancer and so on who would otherwise live! You can't just look at risks on one side!
Everybody dies eventually. The people who would die from cancer because of their inferior genes would not be born with this technology and some other people will be born who will live longer. I do not see in this any people dying "who would otherwise live". When I was driving a car this morning, I did not swerve right and thus did not kill the lady walking there. When this lady dies of cancer in 20 years, this will not be on me.
If "everybody dies eventually" is an argument against eugenic-derived life extension, then how isn't it also an argument against genocide being bad?
Because we need to distinguish between two situations: 1) We cause person A to live 20 years more and 2) We cause person A not to live at all, but instead person B get to live and is expected to live 20 years longer than A would have lived. Genocide is related to case 1) (except we cause someone to leave less, not more). Foetus selection is case 2).
I'm not sure I follow this. Why is 2) bad? Why is a counterfactual person granted moral consideration at all? At the embryo stage humans are just widgets. Replacing widget A with a superior widget B seems an unambiguous net-positive. In a consequentialist sense, humans only acquire value by virtue of them absorbing resources (food, shelter, education, etc) and forming positive-value social relationships that would be damaged by their death. That's why it's more tragic when an 18-year-old dies on graduation night (they have many friends and family who care about them and have absorbed many social resources that they haven't paid back yet) than either a baby (absorbed few resources, only has relationship with parents) or an old person (has paid back the social investment, social relations are prepared for their death).
Embryo A with cancer risk and embryo B without are not the same embryos, so no, they wouldn't "otherwise live."
yeah this is flawed - you are not making millions of people die of cancer who would otherwise live, you are preventing the people who would die of cancer of ever being born, and replacing them with different people.
Those are not the same thing.
That's not what 'genocide' means. Words mean things.
In #2, your defense boils down to the fact that the effect size is too small to have meaningful negative second-order effects. But a few paragraphs later, you acknowledge that it "gets us on the road to more advanced technologies". You then jump straight to the point where it has advanced so much that people can have wings, but in between "select the best of 5" and "genetically engineer angels", there will probably be a substantial stretch of time where what we have is extra-strength positive-trait selection.
This seems like it undermines your defense, because now the counterargument becomes "this technology is bad because *it opens the door to more advanced technologies*, which will lead to <original complaints about lack of diversity>". Which I suspect is what the "regulators who hoped to strangle the field in the cradle" had in mind all along.
Some of the value of babies, embryos and cows comes from the observer being if only distantly a blood relative of the organism. I care less for the existence of crows, lizards or AI because there is less of a bond.
Baked into these “improvements” is the assumption that difficulty, or deviation from the norm, is a defect to be corrected. I don’t buy that. Some of the richest lives I’ve known came out of constraint. Some of the most grounded, self-aware, empathic people I know had to wrestle with what others might’ve screened out.
It’s not that suffering is noble. But friction sharpens us. If it doesn’t kill us, it shapes us. That’s both a concession and a risk; such is life.
A theme that recurs in this forum is how reasonable decisions, made by decent people, can still land us in places we never meant to go. Instead of a villain to be identified and extricated, we get a slow slide toward a world optimized for what we can measure, predict, and select for. That’s what makes me uneasy here. Not the tool itself, but the redefinition of what kind of person gets counted as a good bet.
Why can't you use this same argument to justify lobotomies? I think at some point you have to say that some things are worse than other things, and I'm happy including cancer, lobotomies, etc in that category.
Without agreeing fully with OP, they probably intuit some kind of double effect. A lobotomy introduces a difficulty, while not using IVF merely allows that difficulty to exist.
I agree this is a distinction from the point of view of the lobotomist, but surely it isn't one from the viewpoint of the anti-lobotomy activist. Either way they're going out into the world and trying to prevent something they didn't cause.
One thing-to-be-prevented is merely lamentable; the other is a moral wrong. We probably have more special duties to prevent and punish those.
Surely you're being a bit provocative? Consider: "This is a meaningful distinction from the point of view of the murderer, but the justice system's budget should really be going to givewell instead." Even if this were to save more net lives all-in, it's not persuasive to anyone who isn't already die-hard consequentialist.
While I directionally agree with you, your examples involve loss of function. In that sense, they're sort if inherently diminishing, whereas OP was making a claim about experiences that leave you stronger/better in the long run.
I think there's a meaningful qualitative barrier to draw between examples that involve loss of function/death, and examples which just involve unpleasant experiences/momentary suffering, but could in theory leave you the same or better afterwards.
I still think that you can come up with pure-suffering examples that we'd want to prevent which illustrate the point, it's just too easy to dismiss loss of function examples as not analogous.
Well, lobotomies were a kind of psychic amputation -- the harm was visible and brutal. What we’re talking about here feels more benign. It’s internal, voluntary, framed as care or foresight. The moral charge is subtler: tuning parameters rather than treating illness. But the risk isn’t just to those screened out, it’s to the moral intuition of the tuner.
Filtering for “better” installs a worldview -- one that tells us which lives are worth starting, which traits are lovable, which stories deserve a beginning.
It’s one thing to model the genome. Another to model a soul. Are we so sure we can tweak the dials on the future without flattening the human story along the way?
Grisly scenario: suppose I get a bunch of human embryos (let's say the ones discarded by parents during embryo selection) and I modify them to ensure that they never develop a proper nervous system, just the basics required for breathing etc. Then I bring them to full term, wait until they are born, fatten then up for a few months and then eat them. Have I done anything wrong?
I think yes but I have trouble identifying what.
It seems like you've done something gross that we should ban to stop I'm Not Touching You behavior but potentially nothing more wrong that scraping some tissue off your foot, cloning it a gazillion times, and eating that.
(Or, if you want, we can say you did something wrong when you did the modification, but I can't tell if that's "outside the hypothetical" or not)
Does that gel with your intuition?
Cannibalism. That’s the crime you’d be committing.
If you decided to raise them for organ harvesting though there would be no objections, you’d be saving lives.
(Assuming your giving birth to them yourself, and paying for everything, and prion diseases are a non issue etc.)
I would say that your doing something that
1) Raises a lot of heuristic warnings.
2) As best as I can see, isn't actually immoral.
3) There is no good reason to do.
4) If you screw up slightly on your nervous system modifications, it's easy to accidentally do something immoral.
Dancing 3 feet from the edge of a cliff won't kill you. But if there is no good reason to, it's still wise not to.
When writing laws, or ethical rules about how you should behave in practice, it's a good idea to make the line simpler, and to add a bit of margin for error. Especially when there is no reason to push the edge of the morally permissible.
In scenarios like this, it's almost impossible to imagine a real-world scenario where you have eliminated all possible risk of making a mistake in your process, of someone else hearing about it and being disturbed, of you yourself not being self-modifies by the experience in a way that makes you more dangerous/harmful to others in the future, etc.
Thus, it's one of those cases where in hypothetical-world where you can 100% define those things as not a problem, it's ok, but in any real world no one should ever do it because they could never actually be 100% sure about all those risks.
You've done something akin to walking around a city butt naked. It's okay for society to have some prohibitions that aren't defensible on a 100% objective level, but still gross every single person out enough that we prohibit it. Especially when the cost of prohibiting such behavior is nil.
IMO you have to consider higher-order effects to condemn this practice. For instance it would normalize cannibalism which would probably have nasty downstream social effects. Almost the entirety of our moral infrastructure is downstream of considering human life sacred, or at least more sacred than non-human life: we eat and hunt animals, not humans. Transgressing against that taboo would probably have very negative halo effects.
I guess my Neoplatonism will be showing, but isn’t metaphysical realism just much simpler than all these thought experiments trying to determine what degree of awareness is required for us to consider a person a person, whether sleeping hermit or newborn baby?
Maybe there is something that links an embryo to a fetus to being a baby to being an adult to being a sleeping hermit? Maybe that something is being a “human being,” and maybe that is a real thing rather than just loose scaffolding we construct in our minds.
This gets into the debate around simplicity. In some sense, saying "lightning is caused by witches" is simpler than inventing all of electrical theory, but this isn't the sense our theories should be privileging. See https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/f4txACqDWithRi7hs/occam-s-razor
I agree. But there is much more to argue for metaphysical realism than simplicity.
Reality is already categorized for us; everything is an instance of a general type.
In this case I meant more to draw attention to the unity of discrete instances. All things are in the process of becoming and have potentiality as well as actuality. Nevertheless something persists throughout all things that a thing is; its it-ness.
A tree just like a human person goes through many stages of development, yet something persists through the entire journey. Tree-ness.
It seems to me that it is the same thing with a human being.
If a person has the status of a human person, with all the recognition that entails, but then being a sleeping hermit or an embryo deprives them of that, it would mean that *one thing was totally replaced by another*, there was no unity in the thing you saw in the first place.
You're neglecting cultural evolution. A tradeoff with metaphysical simplicity is moral rigidity. Morality has changed quite a bit over that last 2000 years. Imagine the social progress that would've been lost if we'd locked in the notion that "only white males matter" 1000 years ago. Simple iron-clad rules like "don't eat pork" don't respond well to innovations in refrigeration technology or the development of antibiotics.
I don't really get the connection of this argument to metaphysical realism, which when I studied philosophy was just a term for the idea that a real world exists outside of and independent from our minds, and that the truth or falsity of a statement is determined by whether it corresponds to that world. You can get this from Aristotle 500 years before Neoplatonism, I don't see what they're bringing to the table here. And aside from that, you and I could both say "that sleeping hermit is a person" and in both cases be making a true statement, even though we had radically different semantic meanings for "person" and even if we had totally different ethical ideas of what moral obligations "personhood" creates in other actors. It's those things being debated here, not whether the external world exists and people can make true statements about it.
>I don't really get the connection of this argument to metaphysical realism, which when I studied philosophy was just a term for the idea that a real world exists outside of and independent from our minds, and that the truth or falsity of a statement is determined by whether it corresponds to that world.
No offence to your philosophy teacher, but he obviously wasn't very good.
Do you care to elaborate? This was what was meant by metaphysical realism in both early modern phil when we talked about skeptics of it (idealists like Bishop Berkeley) and in contemporary philosophy. Different professors, different contexts and different kinds of anti-realists lined up against it. I also independently read Searle’s “Mind Language and Society” which was defending the same from postmodernist attack.
At no point do I recall any of this Platonic form stuff being part of metaphysical realism. Whether two people who point at a human and say “there’s a human” are meaning the same thing or referring to the same thing or whether the statement was even capable of having a truth value under the circumstances in which it was uttered was semantics, not metaphysics of any kind.
Realism: Forms exist independently of our minds.
Conceptualism: Forms exist in our minds, but not outside of them.
Nominalism: Forms don't exist, categories like "human" are just arbitrary labels we stick on things.
These ideas are fundamental to Western philosophy from Plato to *at least* Locke (and arguably afterwards). If your philosophy course never taught you about them, it wasn't a very good course.
Pretty much every philosopher agrees that a real world exists outside of and independent of our minds. Metaphysical realism (of the Plato and Aristotle variety) is an account of how that is so, given that minds and external reality have a great degree of concord (each bringing to the fore a Form eidetically).
I'm sure we'd agree that we have trees that already exist and trees that can come into being in the future. But what do those trees have in common? Some preexisting Form or essence that is referenced by each instance of the tree, answers Plato or Aristotle or Plotinus.
Disagreements with this are usually some form of nominalism. Saying that the trees don't actually have common treeness apart from how we speak or think about them.
This comes into play with abortion or questions of personhood because a human being *appears* to us by coming into reality as a unified, intelligible entity. There is no subdivision of the form necessary to determine what it is, by, for instance, trying to locate its humanness in some quality like awareness or intelligence, much like trying to define treeness by the quality of the wood or leaves would descend into mere sophistry.
I am really rich. Is there some costly way to biologically modify my future children (genetically or otherwise), so that they can later only mate with children who were modified the same way? So that I ensure that my children will only mate with other rich people, because no one else can afford to modify their kids this way.
The traditional way with culture and only exposing them to other rich kids seems boring.
Asking for a friend, of course.
You could probably engineer some chromosomal rearrangement that would cause infertility if they mated with a wild-type human. But the same engineering process could be used to reverse this.
If we get to the point of creating sperm and eggs from other cells, add complete infertility as a trait in your children. Then the only way they can reproduce is through expensive IVF (and they'll probably do genetic improvement then because you might as well) with the artificially created sperm/eggs.
No but that sounds like a really good premise for a sci fi story.
Our knowledge base of which genes do what is derived from our research base. Having just had some medical genetic testing done for a family member, and now googling all the abnormalities, I see an over representation of knowledge about genetically linked diseases. We don’t seem to have as much information about which genes code for the artsy proteins or the poet proteins or even the abstraction proteins as we have about “linked to schizophrenia.” Unless the funding landscape really changes, in 10 years we will still know much more about the disease linkages than the beneficial trait linkages. My suspicion is that “linked to schizophrenia” (and there are quite a few) is a category with stuff in it we’d want to keep if we were broadly designing humanity, and that the early rounds of embryo designing will throw it out, and we will discover by trial and error what the benefits or protective effects of some or all of those genes may be. People who are enthusiastic about the potential of embryo selection should (if they’re not already) make effort to create this more broad spectrum genetic knowledge base. I’ll stop here for now.
One key thing you exclude from consideration is: which way have we tended to err and what led us there?
It was common through the 1980s to not give newborns any pain medication when going through intense, invasive surgery, because their pain-looking responses were dismissed as reflex, not suffering (https://www.nytimes.com/1987/12/17/opinion/l-why-infant-surgery-without-anesthesia-went-unchallenged-832387.html).
The first proto-NICU was set up at Coney Island because hospitals weren't interested in saving the lives of sufficiently fragile babies. The incubators were funded by gawking tourists coming to see the preemies through glass. Just like in your construction, the fact that the babies were abjectly dependent was a mark against whether they were people.
Conception is the moment a distinct human person comes into existence, who can be differentiated from mother and father. The story of *that* person starts there. Most of the ways we've written off the personhood of babies we've come to regret—I think the evidentiary burden is higher on your side.
You say "Conception is the moment a distinct human person comes into existence, who can be differntiated from mother and father", but isn't that assuming the conclusion? Peter Postnatal could say "Oh, I agree with you that we should care about when a distinct human person forms, which is why I support abortions up to 12 years of age". I think his argument would be goofy, but I suspect yours isn't actually as simple as his.
I think he has a much harder time applying a brightline distinction than I do! What happens on the twelfth birthday? I have a pretty clear, biological, empirical *thing that happens* at conception.
Peter Singer *does* support infanticide of young children with disabilities if the parents prefer the child not live, but he would not say there's a brightline moment, just a gradual shift to consciousness/moral salience and that he thinks disabled lives are net negative if allowed to play out.
Let’s say conception is the start of personhood. How does probability of survival play into this model?
If a couple wants a child and conceives, but then miscarries, that’s a tragedy. But let’s say the likelihood of miscarriage is really high for this couple, and they know that. Are they committing murder (or manslaughter) every time they conceive and fail to carry to term?
If your answer is yes, then what is the bright line for that behavior? Miscarriage likelihood increases dramatically as women age. Should we ban women over a certain age from getting pregnant?
If your answer is no, then what is the difference between an awareness of a high miscarriage rate, and IVF? Both scenarios require multiple embryos in the pursuit of creating a human. Neither scenario desires the destruction of embryos, it’s an unfortunate side effect.
I've had six miscarriages and three children brought safely to term. I do not think conceiving and losing a child when you've had a pattern of loss is murder (any more than choosing to have a child when you have sickle cell is).
When you conceive naturally, you can hope for life for each child. With IVF, you are encouraged to err on the side of more embryos and are likely to have ones you do not give a chance to grow and develop.
When you miscarry, you are still a mother to the child you loved and lost for your whole life. Their life is just very short (as with a newborn who dies by SIDS in the first month). Because of our history of losses, we prioritize telling people we're pregnant early, so that the people we love share joy with us while our child is living, whatever happens next.
> When you conceive naturally, you can hope for life for each child. With IVF, you are encouraged to err on the side of more embryos and are likely to have ones you do not give a chance to grow and develop.
So the difference is hope? And couples whose only shot at having children is through IVF must be deprived of hope because they will likely be unable to implant every embryo and then hope for its success?
So one kind of hope is good, and the other is bad.
It is impossible, conceiving naturally, to create spare embryos who are on ice and likely to be discarded. This is a core part of the IVF structure.
Some ways of responding to infertility are not morally licit (even when sought in good faith) e.g. a number of international adoption agencies behaved wildly unethically (without the knowledge of adoptive parents) such that many lines of international adoption have now been throttled. Parents who once would have willingly welcomed a child no longer can, and that is an improvement, because the way we tried to meet that grief was unethical.
But it is possible (and sometimes likely) when conceiving naturally to result in the death of the embryo, and you are fine with that.
It is also possible when using IVF to use all the embryos and discard none of them.
Frankly, your argument here is really weak. You are fine accepting embryonic death as the cost of trying to have a child in one case, the one you experienced, but not the other. Very much a “rules for thee but not for me” situation.
All my children will die—I am always accepting the death of a child in being open to life. I don't know *when* and I hope it is later rather than sooner.
But IVF actively interrupts the progression toward development and birth and actively encourages creating spares, especially in the US. European countries have a better practice of limiting how many embryos you can create to make this less likely.
The difference is intentionality. When one conceives naturally, the intent is to carry and birth THAT child (or children in the case of multiples). With IVF, the intent is to create as many embryos as possible in order to offset the high failure rate of implantation attempts. No one creates just one embryo, hopes for success, and then starts all over again if it fails. Even for those couples hoping to have several children through IVF, the quantity of embryos created almost always far outstrips the number of hoped-for children (and I would argue that in most cases where only a few embryos are created, that is due to undesired setbacks in the IVF process - low egg count, poor sperm quality, etc, and generally not because any IVF clinic or prospective parent is intentionally trying to avoid surplus embryos).
I think there are Catholics who do this, actually. You can freeze the eggs and sperm separately, and create only the number of blastocysts you want to create at any given time.
A vast majority of people don't believe that blastocysts have the same moral consideration as fetuses or babies, though, so they don't have a problem with creating as many as possible. We had ours genetically tested and 40% of the ones we made had chromosomal issues, which means they would have resulted in a miscarriage if implanted (completely nonviable).
I posted something less succinct below lower in this thread, but your framing focuses on intent at the time of creation rather than death and the big difference is the intent at the time of death. Assuming an embryo dies, in the natural conception, there is no intent for the embryo to die. Even if the IVF couple intends to use all of their embryos at the time of creation (I don’t know how often that occurs), but fails to do so, at the time the embryo is destroyed, the intent is to cause the death of the embryo. That’s a rather big difference. The intent to cause death is not saved by an earlier good intention at the time of creation. The two are not the same.
It’s actually about trusting the Lord to give you the good desires of your heart and deny you the desires you have that will not result in your good. Attempting to deconstruct the ethics misses the point and puts man at the center.
This answer is meaningless to people who don't believe in the same god as you.
If there is no god, then do what you want and don’t worry about the ethics of it
The answer is no, and they are different because one is a tragic loss of a child, where the other is directly murdering children. If a couple is trying to have a child but failing to bring him/her to term, this is the exact opposite of killing or indefinitely freezing unwanted or “unsuitable” babies. Regardless of “desire,” IVF involves destroying or freezing embryos, where trying to have a child that dies is tragic because the couple was trying to raise the child. You may have a consequentialist moral framework that prevents you from understanding moral actions. See this article for more info:
This is the same utilitarian logic as the Violinist Argument. Where both fail is that they do not account for the teleology of natural processes and the moral value inherent in cooperating with them.
Crucially though, your stories are also stories of technological restraints and resource constraint.
Doctors didn't decline to give infants anesthetics *just* because they thought it wasn't needed. They also had valid fears that the current tech level of anesthetics were dangerous for babies, with a much higher risk of death or stopping the heart or lungs than in adult patients. As the technology improved and became safer, the people advocating for infant anesthetics suddenly had a much easier time making their arguments and forcing through change.
Same for premies, part of why doctors didn't try to save them is because they would fail, one way or another, and those resources were in high demand for other patients. Saving premies became more important as it became more possible, and as we got richer with less marginal cost on those resources.
Perhaps one day in the future we will be able to teleport a zygote out of a mother when it is 5 cells large, erase her memory of it so there is no emotional turmoil wondering about it in the future, raise it in a lab to a healthy infant, and give it to an endless waiting list of loving, dependable parents who don't want their own genetic offspring for some personal reason, and all of that will have zero marginal cost because we are so rich that it doesn't trade off against anything important.
On that day, I wouldn't be surprised if we develop a morality that says every conceived zygote is a person with full human rights. We love to paint a moral picture on the actions we are taking anyway.
But in all those cases, the moral system is trailing and justifying the practical reality. It's wrong to think of this as moral 'progress'; it's largely unmoored from any abstract, 'absolute' moral philosophy, and much more a reflection of practical utilitarianism that weighs costs and benefits in a given context.
>"Conception is the moment a distinct human person comes into existence"
How would you reconcile this with identical twins and/or chimerism?
In the context of pro/con abortion (I’m ambivalent) I thought hard about all this stuff. The results are here. https://ambivablog.typepad.com/ambivablog/2005/01/note_this_essay.html The TLDR: 1) What’s valuable about an embryo is that it’s the design for a unique individual who will never ever come again. Think about the difference individuals have made in your life, it’s epic. 2) On the other hand, life begins not at conception but at implantation, I.e. with relationship. Before that, embryos are “people seeds” (IVF has revealed this stage of human life). Nature (or God) wastes a lot of seeds, including people seeds—by some estimates 50% of conceptions do not implant. So IVF adds human will and science to the many factors determining which seeds get to grow and which do not.
People seeds! That’s a new one for me.
It's my coinage AFAIK, but the analogy—and homology—is really very precise and accurate. It's a brief stage of human life that we could never SEE before IVF discovered that embryos could be frozen, thawed, and implanted. It's the only stage in which you can suspend development like that.
And until it successfully implants, it's a human life "in potentia" only—as witness how many of them are naturally lost.
For the cellular reassembly surgery: I think the person to be reassembled made a contract (explicitly or implicitly) with the surgeon that they should reassamble them. A contract which is still binding when the person is dis-assembled, and probably the person would not have agreed to the procedure otherwise.
Likewise, in the heart surgery the patient made a contract with the surgeon that they should not stop the surgery mid-way. This contract is binding. Contracts do not stop when one side is unconscious, and many contracts do not even stop when one side is dead.
To see that the contract-thingy matters, imagine that the surgeon in either case dies halfway through the procedure. Another surgeon is in the next room and could finish the operation. In this snapshot, the second surgeon is in the same situation as in the original example: you are in a dying state, and they could save you by finishing the operation.
In this case the second surgeon still has a moral obligation to finish the operation and save you, but the obligation is *much* weaker than for the original surgeon. The original surgeon would commit murder if they stopped. If the second surgeon refused to help, that would still be a crime, but very far from murder.
> If the second surgeon refused to help, that would still be a crime, but very far from murder.
But very similar to the second surgeon refusing to jump into a pond to save someone they saw drowning. It's refusal to save a life when you easily could. Not murder. But that still means it's a life.
This is like the legal difference between contract obligations and equitable obligations. The first surgeon would be liable contract or no, because the clear expectation is that you are letting yourself be put under and cut open assuming the surgeon would stitch you back together, and relied to your detriment thereupon.
In the pond scenario, if I'm standing nearby and you're thinking of jumping in but aren't sure about the safety, and I say "hey man, no worries, I'm an expert swimmer if you have any problems I'll come in and help", then the person jumps in, he's only doing so because of that promise so even though no contract was formed (there's no mutual consideration) I'm obligated in equity. In terms of moral obligation, I'm willing to extend and loosen that up as far as perhaps any able-bodied adult visually standing in the vicinity of the pond, as the pond-jumper might well be reasonably relying on an implicit expectation that it's safer to hop in while people are around because they would likely aid him. That wouldn't be a legally sufficient promise, but I'm fine with it here. If I just happen to improbably walk by after some dummy jumps in while nobody was around, on a remote forest path with no expectation of getting aid from travelers, then there's no moral or legal obligation to save him. I may choose to do so, but that's a moral gratuity.
The second surgeon is probably closer to the guy visibly standing around the pond watching the jumper hop in, the patient reasonably expects a surgical facility to have backup surgeons capable of stepping in and may well be relying on that fact in deciding to have the surgery in some cases.
"If you hopped from Earth to that planet, and back to Earth again, would you even notice a major difference, beyond a couple fewer hospitals?"
I think you might.
First, we should recognize that in polygenic selection of embryos we aren't selecting the happiest/healthiest/most successful child from thousands of families at random, we're selecting them from families that are already wealthy and have a value system that leads them to embryo selection. We also aren't using a holistic definition of happiness and success.
So I would alter your scenario to be "select the happiest/healthiest/most successful child (measured in very specific ways) from the wealthiest, most success/status driven families, and send them to a new planet". And I think there's a real chance that such a society would have some very bad systemic failure modes.
Banned for contentless insult without any explanation or argument.
#1 + your response captures where the abortion debate gets stuck in a loop. We'd see disagreement resolve faster if people lay their cards down entirely, but they don't: the pro-choice camp withholds saying that human life has no inherent value, and the pro-life camp withholds saying that such a value is contingent on human life being sacred, because they want the argument for personhood to play in secular-land.
Embryos are human beings, invariably based on DNA, but unconscious and undeveloped. Some people might care about losing one, but most don't think of them as persons.
Life is cheap, and valuing is subjective. Through the secular lens, people tend not to attribute personhood to fetuses/embryos. Not to say they couldn't, but they won't.
I will defend not wanting to say "human life has no inherent value", even though I do think the value of humans depends on things like thoughts/dreams/feelings/consciousness/etc.
If you want to be arbitrarily deceptive and misleading, you can even say that pro-life people think "humans have no inherent value", since they don't think dead bodies have value, and so humans' value is conditional on them being alive (and thus not inherent). It's technically true, but the sentence "humans have no inherent value" sounds much worse than the small condition you're placing on it.
I think describing my philosophy as "human life has no inherent value" is equally deceptive and misleading.
I think it's an implication that ought to be confronted, regardless of where one's stance falls. It's uncomfortable to think of as it reflects subjective nature of value and morality. If a living human being qua fetus/embryo can be killed for any reason, there can't be much weight to this value as society is concerned. Even if on the individual level we may feel differently or conflicted.
> you can even say that pro-life people think "humans have no inherent value", since they don't think dead bodies have value, and so humans' value is conditional on them being alive (and thus not inherent).
Will quibble that I more carefully used the words "human life has no inherent value", but also... I thought the consensus was that "essence" of humanity is contingent on being living.
The next obvious step here is "does a severed leg have inherent value"? Like, is it immoral to leave a severed leg to die in the same way it's immoral to leave the person whose leg was severed to die?
Repeat for all possible versions of "severed" or "surgically removed" and I imagine ~anyone who knows what a brain is and what it does will tend to disprefer the brain being abandoned, but not any other severed things- at least, not for the sake of the severed things themselves.
Furthermore, I doubt that ~anyone will be concerned about someone with a brain but missing some other organ, limb, or combination of organs and limbs not having a "soul".
So it seems like ~everyone is going to end up agreeing that the brain is "the important part", at least for post-birth humans.
The idea that "human life is inherently valuable" is a patch insofar as we then need to define what "human life" is, and to whatever degree we're going off of the obvious definition of "biologically human tissue" this seems clearly false.
Erm, is it in fact true that pro-life people think dead bodies don’t have value?
Moral monster here!
Infants at zero or negative years old are not yet part of society, IMO, and this should not enter the weight of consideration we give a human in society.
All humans are created equal under the law, not because we are equal, but because we don't want ourselves, or high utility people, or our friends to get subjugated or murdered arbitrary.
I, as a meat eater, am okay with, but uneasy with murdering generations of dumb animals and their descendants in perpetuity. Infants are very dumb but very cute. I suspect destroying them when they are dumber than a chicken is okay, especially if it is a strongly diseased human, BUT I want to protect MY human rights and the rights of people I care about, and stability of society, so I'd rather ring fence the age of enshrined human rights back to something like 0 years old. NO killing humans IN society is a really easy rule. Also, killing dumb babies would make my friends REALLY unhappy.
We live in a society of luxury though, so we have fewer constraints than an agrarian society with limited resources, from which my instincts probably flow, so we can probably afford to do dumb things, like to protect all human forms, regardless of utility and health, to some extent. And, as a somewhat defective human, this makes me feel much safer, makes society more stable, and this makes me much happier.
>Infants at zero or negative years old are not yet part of society, IMO, and this should not enter the weight of consideration we give a human in society.
Agree 100%. This is the pragmatic, consequentialist way of looking at it. Notions of murder/personhood etc can be straightforwardly derived from social fitness arguments. Morality is just a set of heuristics for making the societies which adopt them flourish. Therefore moral precepts can be evaluated on the basis of whether they enhance societal survival. To first order, humans contribute to societal health by generating economic surplus. To second order, they contribute by helping other humans generate economic surplus (via positive social relationships). Murder is "bad" because inhibits both of these: it directly destroys human capital (which is valuable because it's already absorbed resources) and it harms the people who were in a social relationship with the murdered person. Embryos score zero on both of these measures: their replacement cost is ~zero and the only people who have a relationship with it (the parents) are the ones doing the selecting.
This is why I think birth is a very sensible bright line for determining when something deserves moral consideration. Before its born a fetus only has a relationship with its parents, therefore they have the moral right to kill it. As soon as its born a baby starts interacting with many more people who can potentially become invested in whether it lives. Much like a bitcoin transaction, it's that statistically irreversible entanglement with wider society that gives people their value.
Banned for one day, and prefer fewer comments like this - it doesn't add anything to the conversation and is just going to make those people feel bad. If you really want to know what they think, you can read their comments here and they'll explain them.
Another important consideration with whether blastocysts are people is that a blastocyst might end up becoming two identical twins, a single person, or half of a chimera.
Thanks, that is fascinating. I did not know this before reading this comment, and it seems like a pretty solid argument against considering conception to be the definitive "start" of an individual's moral personhood. GPT5 tells me that a twin can "branch off" from an implanted egg nearly two weeks after conception.
Identical twins are also a pretty strong argument against the "unique DNA defines a human" argument. Two identical twins are different people! So it sure seems like unique and continuous consciousness (or at least "potential to be continuous", for sleeping hermits) is our best bet here for moral personhood.
So, that means...moral personhood NO: pizza, sperm and egg physically separated, sperm and egg in a test tube together but not yet in contact, fertilized egg, early stage embryo, dead hermit's corpse, hermit on life support with irreversible brain damage.
Moral personhood YES: fetus at some point (to be argued about!) during development once conscious experience arises, newborn infant, awake hermit, sleeping hermit, hermit on life support with brain damage that is reversible with sufficiently advanced medical technology.
> Also related to fences around the law: in most cases, killing a baby will make their parents, relatives, and tender-hearted onlookers extremely sad.
In most real-life cases of infanticide, the parents are the ones doing the killing. (And yes, I'm talking about genuine infanticide, excluding abortion.) A view of personhood that doesn't endorse full moral rights of infants will end up condoning most baby murder.
Some philosophers have embraced this, see Jeff McMahan's "Ethics of Killing" - but for most people, me included, their examples fall firmly in the realm of "cautionary tales for how philosophy unmoored from experience can make you lose contact with our most basic moral intuitions".
That's why that was just an aside I made after giving my main argument, rather than the full argument.
I feel the force of, and agree with, your argument insofar as it says - line-drawing is difficult and almost necessarily unprincipled, but it's preferable to the "consistent" but radical positions on either side. (These radical positions include McMahan on one side and the Catholic Church on the other.)
But you lead in by saying - cows may be more conscious, and may have more intrinsic value than infants - and you "bite that bullet". Your argument is just meant to justify the *legal* order protecting them more, despite the ideal moral law protecting them less. (Sorry if I'm misreading you, please correct if so.) That's the part that strikes me as odd - treating the line-drawing as strictly a fence-drawing exercise, rather than something informative about morality. In my eyes, the fact that McMahan's extreme position is undesirable is informative about whether cows or infants have more moral value in the first place.
Our most basic intuitions about the *moral* law conflict with infanticide, legal line-drawing aside. That should make us reconsider whether infants or cows have more intrinsic moral worth (and whether moral worth is strictly a matter of mental capacity). And we don't have to use contrived examples to explore this, infanticide unfortunately occurs frequently (especially in less developed places) and is usually committed by a parent.
I guess is not worth reading past "Pizza has the potential to grow into a person (if a woman eats it while she’s pregnant) but is not itself a person with rights."
Potentiality terms are about what a thing can become based on its nature, not just a causal chain.
A pizza cannot *by its nature* become a person.
Learning the Aristotelian 4 causes might clear things out a bit for you.
Alternately, I suggest approaching things from a different perspective:
Since religious x non-religious can't agree whether or not an embryo is a human, and hence eliminating it is akin to murder, let's imagine both sides give in and grant the other side's argument a 50% probability of being right.
So, we agree on a 50% chance of a homicide happening with embryo "elimination".
Is there a sane person willing to push a red magic button knowing that 1 out 2 times someone will die because of it?
Alright, let's concede a larger margin the other side: 95% to 5%.
Would someone still find it morally nontrivial to pull the trigger given there's a 5% chance of there being a real person behind the aiming curtain?
Since vegans and non-vegans can't agree on whether or not an animal has the right to life, let's give in and grant that there's a 50% chance of a homicide happening each time you eat meat. Is a sane person willing to push a red magic button knowing that 1 out of 2 times someone will die because of it? Are you a vegan activist? Why not?
...and you can make the same argument for thousands of other things (if there's a 50-50 chance that each of climate change, superintelligent AI, and fertility collapse will destroy the world, you should be panicking right now!) At some point you have to admit that most things are much less than 50-50, some are trivially low, and that therefore benefits can outweigh risks.
First: You did not address the Pizza x nature argument.
Second: Systemic risks (climate change, AI, etc.) have nothing to do with immediate moral actions. One requires risk management, the other, a dealing with a personal conscience/moral.
Third: It's a whole different issue addressing a cost-benefit analysis x probabilistic moral reasoning. Unless you ride on the train where people who think the decision between murdering x not murdering is a just a cost/benefit margin analysis. By this logic, whole masses of people/ethnicities could be subjected to this cold equation.
But, I grant you know this is not a cost-benefit analysis.
Fourth: IIRC we are talking about murder, which by definition, involves taking a human life. There's a reason why a whole array of words is available in a dictionary to define taking an animal's life for consumption: to butcher, slaughter, etc.
And changing the subject to whether or not it's ethical to butcher animals, smells like whataboutism with a pinch of red herring.
Else: I strongly suggest analysing this through Aristotle’s four causes. Ask: what is the material cause of an embryo? Its formal cause? Its efficient cause? And — most crucially — its final cause: what is the purpose of an embryo? Only then can you apply second-order thinking, as any rationalist should.
You’ll see why much of your text collapses.
Even as someone sympathetic to your line of argument, not everyone agrees that Aristotle's four causes are the morally-relevant way to describe reality, so your argument could use shoring up there.
Also, especially given that... saying "learning the four causes might help you out here" comes across as condescending. More likely to alienate than persuade. You're better off describing why you think it matters, than telling your interlocutor to go read a book.
We are always so interested in deciding where to draw a line at when life/personhood begins, because it would simplify many questions.
Could we accept that personhood is a gradient? Some 30-40% of fertilized eggs are miscarried in the first trimester. The couple may feel some sense of loss if they notice, but at the same time they are usually aware that this is a fairly common occurrence.
If we are to assign any moral value to lab embryos at all, we could at most be disappointed.
Yes, I agree it's a gradient, but to have a morality (rather than just an axiology) we need to simplify the gradient into bright line rules, even though those are kind of fake. See https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/28/contra-askell-on-moral-offsets/
That was an interesting read. So even if the personhood of a fetus is an important question, more pressing is whether social order is harmed by terminating embryos, or allowing the various other fertility technologies. Unlike murder or theft I'm inclined to think that terminating embryos doesn't cause any societal disorder; but I do wonder about the future that these fertility techs are leading us into, and whether that's a net axiological "good".
I think there must be two criteria:
1) Having consciousness/personhood at least once in the past
2) Being able to gain consciousness/personhood
Sleeping hermit satisfies both: he was conscious before he fell asleep and is able to wake up. Embryo fails (1), and a human corpse fails (2). These two criteria seem to be fairly simple and complete.
Also I can think of this analogy: suppose citizens of a town want to build a church. Town council starts a contest for best architectural design. Five projects are proposed, and mayor approves only one of them. Does this mean that mayor has destroyed four churches?
To be pedantic, you seem to need a third criterion: that the consciousness to be gained has a significant amount in common with the consciousness that existed in the past. (I would add that that commonality should come from a part of the physical substrate of consciousness that remains about the same through the interval of unconsciousness, because my intuition for personhood is that physical continuity of the mind is important; someone who accepts the cellular dissection thought experiment in the article would probably not consider this addition important.) Otherwise you allow situations where the former & future consciousnesses have little connecting them except, at a lower level, the matter composing them. E.g. a computer running a sentient AI which has its memory erased & then has an entirely different sentient AI downloaded to it, or a corpse which rots & is used to fertilize crops which are eaten by a woman early in pregnancy so that its molecules are incorporated into the embryo's nervous system.
It's powerfully hard to express a moral difference between embryo selecting away from an embryo with a high chance of having a congenital disability and the choice of parents who are carriers of genes that create a risk of congenital disorder like Huntington's not to have children. Yet essentially 0% of people who oppose embryo selecting oppose the latter choice.
"So does a computer, currently turned off, which is programmed to turn on in one hour and run the code for a sentient robot."
This is incidental to the main argument, but isn't this an impossible scenario? If the computer is turned off, it can't run a program, and if it can't run a program, it can't turn itself on in an hour.
IDK, maybe it's hibernating, or maybe there's a second object that's programmed to press the power button in one hour.
I think that what matters in the sleeping hermit problem is information.
Suppose you have the code for a sentient robot. Lets say it's a neural network. Before the robot is started up for the first time, it's just a randomly initialised network. A whole bunch of random numbers. A big pile of random numbers has no moral value.
Now you run this code. The robot wanders around and forms memories. The numbers on it's hard disk are no longer random, but now encode all sorts of memories and personality stuff.
You turn the robot off for maintenance. That information, currently on the hard drive, now has moral value as a person. If you copy the data to a new hard drive, and put the old hard drive in a crusher, that's fine. So long as the computation continues at some point in the future, you haven't killed the robot. (Although the robot might be irritated about skipping 100 years). But for that to happen, the information needs to be preserved.
This covers the sleeping hermit. And the open heart surgery. And presumably even in the case where you are disassembled into individual cells, the information is somewhere. It might be that some or all the information is on a computer system, not in the cells at all. In which case, you could throw all the cells in the trash and put the mind on a robot without it being murder.
Because we care about what computations get computed. And exactly when they get computed is less important. In particular, we want mind computations, once started, to be continued. That doesn't mean you can't pause them, it means you need to restart the computation sooner or later.
This is the correct way to think about it, IMO, and while you put it in pretty neutral terms, I'm a little surprised to see so few people in the comments going straight for the throat here, so:
"Potential to be X" has zero value! Unless you happen to be in dire need of X. For most of our evolutionary context, this was the case, even if X only meant "a child that will survive to adulthood", and so evolution has saddled us with a nurturing instinct causing us to find babies of all species cute and to want to protect them.
I believe (well, ok, it's very reductionist, but,) people who argue #1 feel that natural impulse in a way that causes them to interpret it as a fundamental moral truth about life. All further reasoning is downstream of that - because the instinct's purpose is to nurture more life, you would want to include embryos in the "must protect" clause, but because we don't feel much about things that don't look like cute babies yet, the specific form the justification takes for embryos is an appeal to "the potential to grow" (into a child that triggers the instinct).
If you instead bite the bullet and assert that the value of something is in its information content, then the logical response is completely backwards from the instinctual one: a wise old person has more value than a baby that knows nothing, a baby has more value than an embryo which doesn't even yet have the ability to know, and an embryo has more value than the idea that maybe a random human could potentially exist someday.
This covers all the weird edge cases in Scott's post, but unfortunately pushes the can down the road to the much harder question of "when do we consider a child to have acquired enough unique information content to have enough moral value as a person". There's no way to have a definite answer to such an ontologically fuzzy concept (even if you somehow managed the incredible feat of agreeing about how to measure information content in a person), but at least it requires a non-zero amount of life experience to elevate it above equivalent potential beings, and so that puts it pretty far away from the embryo stage.
"If destroying embryos were wrong, then IVF would be unethical"
I had a whole screed in reply planned out in my head, but I think this sentence is what gets to the crux of the matter: if I want to use IVF or if I have used IVF, are you saying I am a bad person?
Because none of us think we're bad persons. We're not rapists or murderers or even worse, MAGA! We live in accordance with the mores of our society and we just want nice, good things and babies are nice, good things. How can that be wrong? How can that make us bad people?
So let's consider a thought experiment, something very popular on here when considering ethical questions.
A slaveowner speaks:
So, you are telling me that because of my beliefs and actions I am a bad person? That I am engaging in unethical practices?
Well, let *me* put this case to *you* and then answer my question. You see that young slave over there, working in the house? My wife makes rather a pet of them, I have to say, but you must allow the ladies their fancies. We have owned that slave since it was born, indeed, since *before* it was born. It has grown up alongside my own children, you may say.
We are good masters and mistresses, here. We don't flog or brand or mutilate or use shackles or the rest of those tales you hear about bad owners. Some may do such things, but that has nothing to do with us, and it's unfair to put the crimes of a few on the heads of all. We feed and clothe our slaves properly, we allow them time after their duties to have their little celebrations and dances, we even call in a doctor to look after them if they're sick, and not everyone does that, I can tell you!
As to that particular slave? Well, one day my wife and I decided we wanted a new worker for the household, one to be brought up to do what tasks were necessary in the proper way, not the slapdash treatment you get by picking a slave out of the mass at random. So we went down to the auction house - a most respectable establishment, I can assure you, spoken of very highly by all and with the most scrupulous standards in place - and luckily there was the very thing: a dam in foal! The auctioneer told us the sire was of good breeding, and showed us the papers himself, and that this dam was intelligent (for one of her kind, one must make allowances of course) and well-behaved and in short, sure to produce offspring of a superior sort.
So we purchased her and then, when the child was about three or four and old enough to begin to be useful, sold her on (we didn't particularly want or need her since we had no interest in breeding stock ourselves).
And that slave has been brought up in our household ever since and well repaid all the trouble and expense we went through. Why, they are devoted to us and would be distraught if anyone spoke to them of "emancipation" and that is not merely fancy, sir, no let me tell you I know it to be true. Because a few years back, some busybody had got at old Mr Henshaw in the next estate over and he ended up 'freeing' all his slaves. Of course, all the slaves on the estates round about got wind of it and the next thing we knew, this slave here came weeping to us in a highly distressed state and begged us not to get rid of them, they would be good, they promised.
So my wife and I explained, in a way suited to their understanding, that of course we had no such notions. "You are special", we told them. "You're not like the rest who just happened along any old how. We picked you out, we selected you, we chose you and nobody else because we wanted you. Of course we are not going to get rid of you!"
Well, that settled the matter and everything has been going on excellently since. When I die, that slave will be left to my family, and I am assured my children will be good masters and mistresses in their turn to a devoted old family servant.
Abolition, forsooth! A bunch of foreigners in England who never owned a slave themselves and are all excitable Evangelicals, and a crowd of trouble-makers in the North who envy us down here, trying to poke their noses in where they're not wanted in our personal lives. There's many a so-called 'free' man and woman, aye and child too, in the mills and mines of England and the factories and big cities of the North who would be more than happy to swap places with that slave of mine.
I don't pretend to be a philosopher or great thinker, I'm just an ordinary man of affairs. But I know what the best scientific minds of the day say. I know what the doctors say. I know what the law, and grave, serious judges say. I know what moderate religion, not votaries and zealots, says. I know what ordinary, decent. society says, no matter what a few firebrands and crazy men and religious zealots say.
And they all agree with me: this is normal and natural and indeed, right.
So I turn the question back on *you*, sir: am I a bad person?
Not according to God, who has lots of rules about how masters are to treat their slaves (and rules for slaves to obey their masters).
It sounds like this particular guy is following God's rules about owning slaves, so he can reasonably consider himself a very good person indeed.
Exactly! And yet some completely unreasonable people say that even being a good owner of human property is wrong!
How can we live in a society like that?
Isn’t it a bit disingenuous to accept that trait selection might result in a “net spiritual loss” for humanity while simultaneously disavowing any interest in the “metaphysics” of, for lack of a better expression, the industrial creation and disposition of embryos?
Are you saying that the question of whether the industry ought to exist is already moot and that the only question is how people ought to engage in it? It’s not clear to me that we would have any greater success in developing universal principles for the application of the technology. Take the principle of diversity: for the individual user, and maybe even the broader culture of users, the question of diversity is really an externality—as long as you have some reasonable expectation that others will make different choices, it’s not clear that individual choices on trait selection ought to be constrained. Moreover, even if you can justify constraints in one culture, that the same constraints should apply in a different culture.
>Then maybe the soul would enter the embryo at conception.
Note that this is inconsistent with the belief that souls are unique and indivisible, because embryos can split into identical twins at any point after conception and before gastrulation.
>and an egg in the cervix
Presumably you mean Fallopian tube. An egg isn't going to be in the cervix (which is between the uterus and vagina) unless something has gone wrong.
Thanks, fixed. I think Aristotelians and their descendants have some complicated version of soul that sort of survives this critique, although I would claim it's only able to simultaneously do this *and* support a life-begins-at-conception view by being so vague that it's incoherent.
"#3: Would you tell a disabled person to their face that you would rather they not exist, or that people like them not exist in the next generation?"
A similar argument applies to religion overall and culture in general. I'd like for no religion to exist and some cultures to be extinct over time. It does not mean I support killing people right now that support those beliefs. It's a gradual process, mainly of education, that would select against those traits until they're gone.
If you take objection 3 seriously, it implies at least two (imo silly) things.
1. If it would be bad to eliminate eg Downs, might we actually want *more* congenital disabilities than we have already?
2. If the ideal number of congenital disabilities is not zero, and if we can treat them, is it bad to treat them *too well*, because curing them would effectively eradicate the condition? (Alice Wong really makes this argument in her book year of the Tiger.)
There are some significant issues with #1.
The questions of what constitutes "personhood" or when a soul enters the body, etc are all empirically unknowable. They are metaphysical or religious arguments.
Your argument looks at a number of contingent characteristics. Thoughts, feelings, relationships, size, etc. Problem is - as you note - these are arbitrary. How do we determine which characters matter and which do not? This risks a slippery slope, where people push that line around. How do we argue against someone taking it to an extreme -- saying this group or that group is less-than-human and can thus be discarded (the disabled? mentally ill? racial groups?). If it is all arbitrary personal preference, we can say we don't like it, but can we really say it is objectively wrong?
So what are we left with? The biological reality of human life. This objectively comes into existence at the moment of conception, when the genetic material unites and a unique human life comes into existence. This is the only place you can clearly draw a line between human life and not human life.
Despite an limitations of this nascent human life, it is a *human life*. The comparison to the life of a bug is faulty. There is objectively a difference between human and bug -- as another commentator noted, even the dead corpse (if even the cremated remains!) are infinitely more valuable than a bug.
If we are to have any sort of rational morality on this subject, we must say that any human life must be treated as a human, as a person. The intentional ending of any human life must be considered murder.
"The questions of what constitutes personhood or when a soul enters the body, etc are all empirically unknowable. They are metaphysical or religious arguments."
I don't think this is true. I think this is similar to the question of how high a certain feature has to be before it's a "mountain" rather than a "hill". It's not that there's some real answer and we don't know it. It's that things are however high they are, and we might call them different things at different times.
My claim is that things are exactly how they look. An adult has thoughts and dreams (because they are using their brain, which creates them). An embryo does not have these. There is no extra question of "personhood", except for a legal/definitional question, like if there was some rule that mountains had to be in national parks, and the National Park Service had to come up with some reasonable definition of when a hill became a mountain.
See https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GKfPL6LQFgB49FEnv/replace-the-symbol-with-the-substance
"I think this is similar to the question of how high a certain feature has to be before it's a "mountain" rather than a "hill". It's not that there's some real answer and we don't know it. It's that things are however high they are, and we might call them different things at different times."
This is making my point. This IS arbitrary, subjective definition. Different people will say different things in different place. Perhaps you could even say mounts don't exist at all--it is just a construct. This is the same with personhood, existence of the soul--maybe there is no such thing. Maybe there is. What object argument can be made? The moral implications of mountain vs hill are minimal if any. The moral implication of murder or not murder is huge--maybe the most important moral question we can ask.
"...things are exactly how they look." Ok. How do they look? Who is looking at what? How can this be the basis of a moral argument?
"Adults have thoughts and dreams... and embryo doesn't" All adults? When do babies start to have thoughts and dreams? Maybe we can see brainwaves or something, but can we prove they are thoughts? That a lone standard, or is there more?
If we say, "murder is wrong" (and not that I, personally, don't like it), then we must be able to define it. Such a definition needs to rest on some objective reality. The only object reality that can be empirically established is human life, which starts at conception. Maybe that human life has a soul. We can't know absolutely.
Societies may decided other acts are undesirable & have laws/rules/norms against them, etc, that are not necessarily objectively morally wrong (drugs, speeding, jay-walking, leaving dirty dishes in the work sink, etc.) There is a distinction between objectively immoral and merely undesirable--we can argue about the status various acts, but murder is clearly objectively immoral. The alternative is moral relativism.
> The questions of what constitutes "personhood" or when a soul enters the body, etc are all empirically unknowable. They are metaphysical or religious arguments.
Personhood is an arbitrary value-judgement, i.e. a social construct. It's informed by a few factors including consciousness, which is void at conception.
Human life in itself, through the secular lens, is cheap since it's not sacred. It does not matter in and of itself.
Yes. So how are we then to act? Is murder wrong? Is there a rational reason it is wrong? Or only because the bible (or whatever religious text you like) says so?
There's the rub.
I think collective values coalesce strongly around a center, and the legislative arm is our expression of that. While some might snark that "without God, everything is permitted", in practice this doesn't happen. Values have power even if we are the arbiters instead of the deities.
This leaves us at a loss with edge-cases. Even deontology, which generally facilitates legal matters, can struggle here.
Wouldn't a better choice be sometime after the blastocyst forms? One blastocyst can split and become two people and two can merge to become one person, so there's not really any notion of personhood yet.
I’ve noticed a lot of moral weight is put on IF SITUATIONS WERE DIFFERENT.
If we lived in a society with a huge shortage of embryos - we would value each embryo as much as a human child.
If we could keep each sperm and egg alive, and efficiently distribute to colonize other planets, we would be eager to do so.
If a child with a terminal illness is born at 1 week, and given 2 weeks to live, if we were to prematurely terminate the child’s life it would be seen as bad. Because - we see the situation where the child could pull through and make it.
There is something there about value of things in a world of scarcity.
I do think this quickly falls apart with regards to other animals. If we lived in a society where there was only 2 cows, we wouldn’t eat beef. And yet we do.
> It’s not clear what it means for the sleeping hermit to have “a mind”. He doesn’t seem to have the metaphysical mind, since (assuming sufficiently deep sleep) he’s not conscious or engaging in any mental activity. He does have a physical brain, but this doesn’t seem like the relevant criterion.
Imagine that there was a priceless piece of artwork that has been stored in a cave and forgotten by history. It was the pinnacle achievement of a once-in-a-century genius artist, taking her decades to perfect, and in its time was famous and revered across a wide region, inspiring poets and philosophers. But some jealous king stored it in a cave so only he could see it, and ordered references to it removed from books so no one looked for it, and no one now alive has ever heard of it.
You stumble into the cave and find this piece of artwork, and immediately recognize its beauty and worth. You recognizes that nothing in the modern world is like it, and that if it is lost, humanity will never see anything quite like it again.
Is it wrong for you to immediately burn it?
A mind isn't just the active experience of consciousness. Even when inactive, the brain encodes all the information necessary to produce the thoughts and experiences of that unique individual. That encoded information is the result of however many years or decades of experiences and interactions trained the neural network into its current shape. It is fractally complex in a way that reflects all it has seen and done in life.
If you had the eyes to see it properly, it would not be strange to call it a work of art.
If you come upon a cave and there is a bunch of paint and brushes and a canvas, no one will be particularly mad if you burn them for warmth, or just throw them in a dumpster to keep the cave tidy. You are not morally burning every potential painting that could ever possibly be created with those supplies. A brain with no experience/training is not very unique and not very valuable.
But once the brain has grown into something complex and unique, it has value, both to society and in and of itself.
I would tell a disabled person to their face that I would rather people like them not exist in the next generation.
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRl6yT3QbOnF-QyG9X4m-JCBjthJvCFVqQNXw&s
In the modern day people make their diseases and disability part of their identity. Which is bad in many ways. Freddie has written several essays about this.
But it's the natural outgrowth of "me having AIDS is part of who I am" then "getting rid of people with AIDS" means getting rid of people like me which means "curing AIDS" is bad.
Concern #3 comes up a surprising amount and never fails to make me personally mad. I have cystic fibrosis and if I knew a couple who knew they were both carriers, and had the ability to select against CF in their kids, but chose not to, I would think they were the dumbest and worst people alive!
It is unethical to kill the hermit, because you take away future pleasure? IVF is not unethical, because it doesn't reduce future pleasure, it increases it. You will have one of these. Abortion is more complicated than that.
Weirdly, this would somehow infer that secretly killing the hermit at night and harvesting his organs for some Norwegian teens would be net ethical, as long as we don't live in a society where anyone has to fear that.
It is also a really cool thing of you to do to have children if you expect them to have a good life. Thanks Mom.
I have a question about the sleeping hermit problem, but it's not about embryos. I don't think embryos really matter at all, but I think there's an interesting question about "Why do we prefer life that already exists over life that doesn't exist yet?"
For instance:
Let's say there was this program that paired would-be parents who want kids and will likely be good parents with women who are willing to become surrogate mothers for them (and let's assume there's no children in the world that need adopting).
So you have three people all willing and ready to get going on this arrangement, but you're a government bureaucrat in charge of stamping whether they're allowed to or not.
Let's also assume 0% chance of pregnancy problems or child mortality.
Now let's say you have a trolley problem sort of choice: do you prevent the stamp of approval, or do you let an isolated hermit die?
Let's also say if you don't stamp, all 3 subjects will have their memories wiped and the parents' desires to be parents will be removed. So in either case there's no felt loss experienced by any party.
I think most people would choose to save the hermit, and I would to. But from a strict utilitarian perspective, wouldn't both options be equal?
My ethics professor in college (himself a utilitarian) sketched out a similar argument, and said he was baffled not to have seen any serious discussion of it in the literature.
Yeah, this is a fascinating issue. I think it ultimately comes down to whether distinctively "person-directed reasons" have weight over and above our undirected or impersonal reasons to promote good lives and well-being. A couple of posts where I discuss this in more detail:
(1) Killing vs Failing to Create: The strongest objection to total utilitarianism?
https://www.goodthoughts.blog/p/killing-vs-failing-to-create
(2) Types of Replaceability: Not all equally objectionable
https://www.goodthoughts.blog/p/types-of-replaceability
I believe population ethics is the relevant subfield for this question. Specifically, I think a lot of people (including me) have a person-affecting view in this scenario: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_ethics#Person-affecting_views
That is, a non-existent person that never comes into existence does not miss out. There's nothing / no one there to "miss out" on anything. But the isolated hermit already exists and their death is a net-negative under utilitarian perspectives in this scenario.
In programming terms, one side is null/void/None, and the other is -VALUE_OF_PERSON. Their values are incomparable.
Except under JavaScript—of course—where null is comparable to numeric values because of type coercion (an automatic, implicit type change by the rules of the language, as opposed to an explicit type *conversion* by the developer): https://medium.com/@maxwellarmah01/understanding-javascript-comparisons-why-0-is-null-and-not-null-372d84d65284.
Never write a universe simulator that will have sentient beings in it using JavaScript.
"I answered that the hermit’s past personhood gives him some sort of property rights to continue having his personhood respected, the same way I may still own an object when I’m not physically holding it, or an absentee landlord may own a house when he isn’t present."
This sounds suspiciously like some kind of deontology. Is Scott ready to admit that utilitarianism by itself is not enough?
3.
I would happily say yes, disabilities are bad and we should avoid having more people with disabilities by prioritizing genes that don't cause disabilities. I'd rather disabled people did not exist and were instead fully able bodied, I'd rather the next generation have fewer or no disabled people.
That said, disabled people may not agree. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(25)00724-X/fulltext argues that being deaf (they capitalize it, but I won't) is not a disability but instead a minority subculture, and would prefer to keep deaf children deaf rather than fixing it through genetic intervention.
If embryo selection takes off I'd imagine we see a lot more of this; one man's negative phenotype is another man's cultural heritage
"It involves taking your body apart cell by cell, then infusing each cell individually with special nanotechnology. This is a very involved process - at some points, no two cells that previously made up your body are touching one another, and some may be in entirely different laboratory rooms from others - but after a few hours all the cells should get successfully infused, you can be re-assembled on the operating table, and you’ll be good to go."
I just want to point out that this is not how animal bodies work. We are not just a collection of cells. Our cells are embedded in an extracellular matrix that is just as much a part of us as the cells. In fact, this is one of the things that separates the animals from the other kingdoms. Furthermore, our cells are tightly integrated with our extracellular matrix through proteins called integrins (and others), which connect through the cell membrane into the inside of the cell. One of the reasons it is so hard to grow artificial organs is that without these integrins, the cells die.
I know this has little to do with the argument presented, but this incorrect mental model annoys me.
I have yet to see an ethical argument that makes a distinction between a standard IVF process and embryo selection. Either you think embryos are living humans with rights, or you don't. The application of that embryo post-extraction shouldn't matter.
The fact that the vast majority of people who think IVF is wrong also happen to be very religious (admittedly anecdotal but I'd be shocked if the data showed otherwise) indicates to me that "do embryos have rights?" is primarily a religious question and therefore should not be legislated.
Whether or not you see it as such, this is bigoted. Religious people have opinions about ethics. Just because they also believe in God (or which one they believe in) doesn't mean their opinions, or their votes on that matter, shouldn't count.
Their opinions count in the privacy of their own minds and their own homes. I didn't say religious people should be forced to participate in embryo selection, I said their ethical opinions shouldn't get to become established law. Orthodox Jews have the right to only eat kosher beef but non-kosher beef should not be illegal. Or pick one of any infinite number of other analogies.
Sure, I'll pick another analogy: religious nuts in the North were the strongest abolitionist voices. The argument then was that they weren't being forced to participate in slave ownership, so they should just clam up.
That is a poor analogy because plenty of secular arguments exist against slavery. As I said in my original comment the vast majority of anti-embryo selection arguments come from religious individuals and are based in religious morals.
Plenty of secular arguments exist against ANYTHING. And most of the arguments that "come from religious individuals" are perfectly comprehensible by nonreligious people.
If you could see through your prejudices, I think you'd be more willing to recognize that. And to be clear, while I am upset, I'm not calling you prejudiced in an effort to upset you, or end the argument - I just genuinely think you're not approaching this consistently, and that's my best guess as to why, from prior experience with people who think similar things.
With that said, I think this conversation has gone as far as it can productively, maybe farther. I encourage you to pursue dialogue with people who think differently from you.
My understanding is that on the subject of slavery in the United States that secular arguments against slavery are, or were, privileged over religious arguments against slavery because slavery enforcement was not by the Church but by the State. There is also historical evidence of an intention for there to be a separation between Church and State, in the US. This does not itself preclude the value of expressing religious arguments, such as to persuade your fellow believers.
Since I arrived early this time, a question for those on the "it has potential, therefore it's special' side of the fence:
If we take some cells from my body, and coax them into being pluripotent, then they could (in vivo or vitro, but not in cryostorage) make a "whole", "new", "me"... is that batch of stem cells my identical twin? Do the stem cells have the same moral standing that I do?
What if we extract the DNA from a cell on my fingertip, and inject it into a human egg. It now has EXACTLY as much potential as "I" did when I was first fertilized many years ago... is it my identical twin? Does the fertilized egg have the same moral standing as I do? This isn't some weird thought experiment or something... it's how we have successfully cloned animals already!
For me, the obvious answer for those questions is "of course not"... but once the egg or cells had gotten far enough along (certainly by the stage it was an actual baby) then I'd say "of course is does"
Scientifically, this seems questionable. All zygotic cells are pluripotent, but not all pluripotent cells are zygotic. You probably have more work to do between pluripotence and cloning. Potentiality-believers would probably say that once you've done that work and turned them into a zygote, they have moral status. That seems consistent enough to me.
As for whether clones have "the same moral standing you do"... of course they do, right? Independent of this debate. Whenever you started having moral standing - whether you think that's as a zygote, at birth, or at age 18 - your clone will start having moral standing at that same time in its life. Its DNA being a carbon-copy of yours doesn't undermine that. Is there a serious argument against this?
"I mostly bite this bullet. I think a newborn baby deserves more rights than a cow for moral rather than axiological reasons (that is, for reasons that involve the fence around the law, rather than just the law). "
I am glad Scott recognizes (at least sort of implicitly) that there is no philosophically valid reason why this should be so. This is why there is no logically consistent philosophical defense of anthropocentrism. At least I've never come across one. And having read a lot of environmental ethics literature, I am inclined to say no one has come up with one yet.
Regarding #1, I think the honest answer is that we're biologically programmed to love and protect our babies, as well as pregnant women, to an extreme degree. Biology had not programmed us to deal with artificially selected embryos specifically (they are too new of an invention), and as the result we end up creating vastly overfitted models in a desperate attempt to handle such cases. Thus a fully consistent and reasonable moral model that handles embryos may not exist at all, because all we've got to work with is a sort of moral pareidolia.
"He’s asleep for the night - so he currently has no consciousness, hopes, dreams, etc. "
Sleeping people have dreams. Do hermits dream of embryo selected sheep?
Yeah. The example I've usually used for these cases is a coma patient with little to no current brain activity who - based on the progression of similar cases - will probably recover, with >80% odds. (I think us actually knowing that is medically unlikely, but as thought experiments go, that's a fairly mild implausibility.)
A genuine question for those who feel that the soul enters the body at conception: do identical twins have a single soul? Because the monozygotic split typically happens many divisions AFTER the first one, so, uh... I dunno, having a half-soul seems weird to me, but it's also not obvious that we can run a soul through a xerox machine when splitting the zygote.
What about if my DNA is extracted and injected into a viable human egg, previously stripped of genetic material (this is how we've cloned animals in the past, so it's not an absurd hypothetical). Does my cloned soul enter at the moment the needle injects the DNA? If we withdraw the DNA, does the soul get destroyed?
I'm genuinely asking; these kinds of questions are why I have difficulty agreeing with the "life begins at conception" position.
I think the "soul" talk tends to be a bit of a red herring for this conversation. People who do believe in souls, and think they enter at conception, usually infer that because they think conception is where personhood begins. They believe that for other reasons, and those reasons are the actual productive grounds for a conversation on the topic. Whether personhood looks like ensoulment or not is a somewhat separate conversation.
But to directly answer your question: people (Calvinists, I guess?) might think that there are two souls in a zygote that will become a twin, before division into those twins. Or people might think that there is one, and it persists into one of those twins, while a second one is created for the other at the time of division. Or they might think that at the time of division, the original one passes away while two more are generated. These all strike me as somewhat plausible - or at least, not *more implausible* than souls are in the first place.
It sounds like you're saying that "they don't actually believe that the soul corresponds to conception, even though they claim that it does"; is that correct?
I normally try to grant that people are telling me the truth about why they believe things, although I'll definitely look for inconsistencies.
I don't personally believe that life is sacred, so it's genuinely hard for me to understand the position, though.
I think people who believe in souls tend to think something like:
A) Personhood corresponds to being ensouled.
B) Personhood begins at conception.
C) THEREFORE, ensoulment begins at conception.
A secular person can easily engage in conversation with someone like this by discussing why they believe (B). If the soul-believer becomes convinced that personhood begins e.g. at a certain stage of CNS development, they might become convinced of (D) ensoulment begins at that stage of CNS development, instead of believing (C).
But rationalists without any exposure to those people tend to model soul-believers as thinking:
(A) Personhood corresponds to being ensouled.
(C) Ensoulment begins at conception.
(B) THEREFORE, personhood begins at conception.
The rationalist has no common ground with the soul-believer about (C), so it looks like the argument has nowhere to go, and all they can do is deride the soul-believer as committed to mystical weirdness. But this is all a misunderstanding.
This is a good differentiation.
My personal favorite model of child morality that is maximally internally consistent is to declare (by fiat) that children are *property* of parents until such time as the parents release them. Once released the child becomes a person with rights that people have. As property, any crimes committed by the children are blamed on the parents (somewhat encouraging release), and since a child is not a person they cannot vote or serve on a jury.
It operates on the assumption that the median (probably 5th percentile) parent cares more about a given child than anyone else on the planet cares about that child, so the median child (probably 5th percentile) will be "totally fine". It solves the pesky problem of there being no clear line in the sand between conception and personhood by just declaring the problem moot.
Interestingly, there are cultures around the world who sort of hold this view (though they usually don't extend it all the way to filicide). Places where the government will basically never take a child away from its parent, no matter how bad the situation is. This is often frowned on by westerners, but the vast majority of children in those cultures are "totally fine".
I'm mostly here with you, but surely there has to be some limitations on what people can do with their progeny-as-property. We wouldn't want these rights to be absolute, lest parents decide to sell or rent out their property to entities they know will harm it.
Puppy mills are bad enough.
The open question is then whether the system that intervenes will be less net-harmful than nonintervention.
Given the increasing rate at which cops seem to be getting called on parents who dare to let their kids walk a couple blocks to school, the answer is not obvious, especially in the long run.
In the same sense that you want to put a bright-line rule in place for personhood because the whole thing is kinda logically messy and no single threshold event makes much sense out of it, people may want to put a bright line around what counts as "eugenics" or as transhumanism and draw it to include embryo selection.
I'm firmly against transhumanism, but my own instinct is that if you could replicate what's happening to a reasonable degree with just genetic screening and mate selection, it probably isn't that dangerous. Singapore has that program to get high IQ people to pair up and have kids, and I'm sure some people think that's fascist and evil, but it's not going to produce a Khan Singh superman, and is only barely more of a thumb on the scale than Western assortive mating already places there. Two Ivy League lawyers in DC using embryo selection is likely doing no more for their kid's IQ than the Singapore program does without it.
That seems like a defensible line, clearly drawing "designer babies" on the transhumanism side and embryo selection as more like a modern version of the animal husbandry and crop cultivation we've been doing for 10,000 years. The number of embryos you'd have to create and discard for it to approximate designer babies requires more eggs than anyone has-- and if you're cloning the eggs or something to make 1 million embryo combinations and then picking one, obviously you've crossed the line to what mate selection could not do.
It's much harder to draw a clear line if you wade too far into the morality of specific effects of the intervention. If you care about whether eliminating Down's Syndrome, enhancing IQs, ending autism, or increasing physical beauty, are good or bad interventions to take, then the whole thing gets quite muddled and irrational. There is almost certainly some type of purpose that a supermajority of people will think is abhorrent and want to draw the line there. If the line gets drawn on that sort of basis, it will almost certainly be politically contentious and hard to defend.
How about a two-part criterion for moral personhood:
(1). Has the physical potential to develop into an adult human.
AND
(2). Has an adult human capable of and committed to turning that potential into a reality.
Criterion (1) rules out sperms, eggs, AIs, and adult chimpanzees.
Criterion (2) rules out non-chosen IVF embryos, unwanted fetuses, and perhaps even newborns with birth defects if no one volunteers to adopt.
The two criteria together rule in fetuses within mothers who intend to carry to term and to nurture thereafter to adulthood. They also arguably rule in fetuses within surrogate mothers who agreed to carry the fetus to term, but now want to back out.
I'm sure I haven't considered all the edge cases, so I am curious what people think.
Incidentally, these criteria derive from my more fundamental belief that moral patiency derives from being embedded in a society of moral agents, rather than any more metaphysical characteristics like consciousness (actual or potential) or ability to feel pain. So I am also curious what people think of this meta-criterion.
TBH point (2) sounds extremely dubious to me, and I strongly suspect you put it in specifically to make things like IVF and abortion acceptable.
Is there a scoring table available for this sort of thing. Like a gammy leg (-5), high IQ (+30), family trait of macabre hobbies (-7), good singing voice (+5), wet earwax (-16). Would make it a lot simpler.
A more interesting question that either went unasked or unanswered is, if polygenic screening really takes off then are we evolving the entire human race in ways that may be advantageous in our existing environment but could be problematic in a different environment. Will we discover, post apocalypse that we have cut off our own genetic noses. :)
This is certainly true in some sense; some of today's genetic effect is effect of genes allowing resistance to not-yet-defeated germs. But then AI is greater danger to humanity and I'd prefer people having 100 IQ higher than me to solve AI alignment problem.
If you're worried about AI, you don't need to try and genetically engineer a superhuman, you can just lobby for law banning AI development and/or try to convince a government or anti-AI billionaire to sabotage AI research centres.
"Is there some criterion that would keep embryos, while ruling out sperm-egg pairs and computers with robot code?"
To starman the position, I believe "developmental stage" is what they were going for. Contrasted with "ingredient" to use a term that covers iron, pizza and sperm in this context.
Yes, zygotes and embryos of humans are more dependent on their mother's body than those of say monotremes or other non-mamalian animals that spawn and lay. But they are still the developmental stage of a separate entity.
This is my best faith attempt. If anyone who holds this position feels it could be improved please let me know.
The slippery slope argument you eventually settle on for why human babies should have rights we don’t afford to cows seems to me to be the crux of Issue #1.
Mankind has struggled to define when personhood begins since the ancient Greeks, who (simplifying) split between the Pythagoreans who picked conception, the Stoics who picked birth, and Aristotle, who picked the fuzzy middle ground of “quickening.”
Relying on neurological development milestones alone doesn’t even rule out infanticide, as you note. So if you’re essentially landing on an answer of “we’ll start with neurological development milestones, then fudge on the early side to account for uncertainty and slippery slope considerations” then there’s still no clear principle for how far you should fudge.
It doesn’t even take a ton of imagining to make this slippery slope real — you just need artificial womb technology. Then a rich enough couple could see how all five IVF embryos gestate before deciding which one(s) to allow to be “born” and which ones to cull.
How far along would they be allowed to let the eventually-culled embryos gestate? Well, you might say the existence of brain cells is where you would want to draw the line. But say only 5% of the population agrees with that particular line, and someone else finds a super rare condition that doctors can reliably test for just a couple of weeks after brain cells develop, and who would ever want a child to be forced to grow up with that condition? You concede that the existence of brain cells isn't really that significant of a milestone and the line gets shifted later, and later, and later.
Pretty soon rich families are “trying out” their potential children for a few weeks at a time after their artificial "births" (by staggering the gestation start times) until they pick which one to keep, just like how families today foster a litter of kittens intending to keep one and put the rest up for adoption at the pet store, where they're quietly euthanized if no one wants to take them home.
The attraction of drawing the line at conception is not that it’s some perfectly defensible threshold from every possible perspective. It’s that there aren’t any such thresholds, and it’s the best Schelling point we have.
Seeing a lot of people (surprisingly) stuck on #1. Maybe it’s because criticism of embryo selection in #2 and #3 are so weak?
The truth is the world needs more smart people, not less, and this would be true if we were all 1 SD smarter. I suspect a lot of commenters are in very high IQ bubbles and think “these people suck, pretty much, so more smart people isn’t better.” Except I’m a farmer in a poor community. Lack of intelligence leads to insane amounts of pain and suffering, and much of it self inflicted and accidental.
In terms of the sleeping hermit, I think that a much simpler explanation of why not to kill him is an appeal to his previous preferences. The hermit was clearly an actively thinking person while awake, and when he went to sleep probably had a very strong preference to wake up again eventually. Even though the person who had that preference is no longer active, it still has moral weight.
I think your response to the second objection merits more effort to strengthen the theoretical case if you want to maintain that you're making an ethical argument rather than just a political one. In your practical case, I see you making a lot of points about the limitations of embryo-selection technology as it exists today. Those points are germane and astute for a debate about what if any laws we should pass today regulating the practice. But for an *ethics* debate, defending a practice by bringing up contingent facts about its limitations feels lazy to me. In a hypothetical future where we have an extremely detailed understanding of how nearly every known human allele maps onto phenotypes, and it's cheap and practical for parents to arbitrarily customize their child's genome, should they still be allowed unlimited freedom to do so? If not, what limitations should be drawn?
I do have a potential secondary argument to respond to #1, although I've not really seen it before, so I would like to know whether or not it is actually effective and convincing.
It seems reasonable to say that human values are largely based around continuing humanity's own existence and propagation. In particular, we should expect that our intuitive values should approximate this by natural selection. Comparing a population of a species with intuitive morals that align some amount with their continued existence to another population that aligns slightly more with it, no matter what the actual difference *is* between the two populations, we should expect that the second population's genes would be more represented in the future. So, over time, we should expect any species's "morals" to trend towards supporting their own future existence, including our own.
Of course, this process is not perfect, and especially for humans, these intuitive morals really only apply to our ancestral environment, after which point values are likely to develop pseudorandomly. However, we can extract a slightly non-obvious idea out of this: that it wouldn't be such a bad idea to continue following the arrow towards maximizing future existence (I could be more specific about this if you want).
So, rather than trying to associate the moral worth of various objects with certain conditions, I think it might be somewhat easier to pick out an approximate cutoff point for when an embryo or fetus could be terminated while trying to maximize this. Concretely, we would examine a range of societies who have suddenly decided a cutoff and see which of them "exists" the most in the future. Maybe this would be somewhat better than running around in circles about the definitions of the rights of various things?
I could write more about how I would then argue with #1 (and #2 and #3, but to lesser extents), although I mainly wonder if this actually makes any sense. If it has some critical flaw that makes it lead to various unacceptably repugnant conclusions, it probably wouldn't be worth commenting on much further. (Also, does anyone know if someone else is already using this argument? I tried looking online earlier, but it doesn't seem like a very common point of view).
Also, just to be transparent, my biases are pro-choice and pro-IVF, and I think that this argument at least partially advocates for those positions when I work it out, so you should update accordingly on the soundness of this.
I like Chappell's argument, presumably the fact that humans have (mostly) consistant preferences and desires indicates that we have our preferences "stored" somewhere in our brain that isn't conscious. That's why we have the same preferences when we go to bed and wake up, and why Scott can be said to have a strong preference not to die even when he isn't actively contemplating death.
That being said, for Scott's transhuman surgery hypothetical, I have no idea if the "stored" preferences in our brain would still "exist" in some sense or not if we were to be disassembled. Would the "recording" of the brain the transhuman surgery made as it disassembled you be "you" or not? I have no idea. So maybe Scott is right that preexisting people have some kind of "property" rights.
I'm not sure that js that counterintuitive when you think about it. Most people recognize some obligation to respect the "preferences" of dead people. For instance, defaming a dead person is generally regarded to be a bad thing because people have a preference to have a good reputation, and a person's reputation usually outlives them.
I have nothing to say on the main point but there are some statements here I would like to nitpick. :P
> and the carefully-tuned environment of the human uterus
Pretty sure this is false. A fetus can totally (with some artificial assistance to put it there) grow outside the uterus. It's just very bad for the host.
> I think this is similar to having age-of-consent laws at age 18
This is a California-ism. The age of consent is lower in most of the US (let alone other countries). Perhaps "age of majority" might be a better analogy?
> But if World War II hadn’t happened, there wouldn’t have been a baby boom
According to this article, the baby boom actually started before WW2: https://www.derekthompson.org/p/what-caused-the-baby-boom-what-would
I think this is my first time commenting and I’m pretty nervous about it, not in the least because I suspect I’m significantly less smart than many of the parties taking about this. But I still have worries which it would be nice if Scott was able to ameliorate.
- when people are given access to technology in order to make choices, they tend to make simple choices. So I don’t necessarily expect under the rules of the free market for the choices people make about their kids’ genes to be sophisticated, especially if there’s a chance for companies to urge them to make more selections for upcharge. “Taller better faster stronger, why not?” The example which keeps coming to mind is one I read about in Temple Grandin’s “Animals in Translation” (thanks for making slaughterhouses 10% more efficient.) She said that chicken were bred for large breasts (valuable) and started getting foot problems and cysts and shit. Then were bred for strong legs and the health problems went away, but there were mysterious behavioral problems which arose - male roosters of this strain stopped doing mating dances, would get frustrated when hens didn’t respond, and would aggressively rape hens to death.
Humans have much longer generational periods, but I still worry about “unexpected disabilities” or “unexpected extremely negative behavioral associations” which cannot be nearly predicted for at the current level of technology. Nobody wanted or predicted the rapist roosters - they were a huge financial liability - but they couldn’t un-ring the bell.
- I do suspect as rich people do, they would engage with the technology out of a competitive desire for high status kids, which would create a genetically distinct upper class, probably more generically pretty. The social effects of this seem so incredibly toxic they’d boggle the mind. If the government subsidized it equally for everybody I’d be more supportive - this is a tech I see as only defensible if completely free for the most part. “Paying for designer babies” may not be what most people use it for, but SOME will, and the societal effects of that on a widespread level would ruin it for everybody. Evolution does seem to gradually be selecting against deleterious physical AND psychological traits, but humans cannot do so with the same amount of experimentation and sophistication.
- I suppose I see genetic connections to health (specifically polygenic traits) as highly complex and not well-understood, and the risks of introducing it unrestricted just because “well can’t help the march of progress” feel risky in a similar way AI does to me. Humans are not trustworthy (to me) with eugenics for sale, even if it’s great for eliminating certain diseases (which I agree is highly desirable,) we can’t know if that will have long term unexpected effects on the population which everybody consents to having introduced in their bloodline.
On rapist roosters: I think it's possible that something bad unexpectedly arises, but we're already countering something bad with the technology, so naively it seems to have to be pretty bad luck. Also, there's no way in our current world the technology would spread to all countries and social strata equally, so there will be plenty of time to assess the results.
On rich people evolving away: well, we already have the Ashkenazim who seem pretty "evolved" by a very important metric, and I wouldn't say life is generally terrible for them or for non-Jewish people, or if it is then it's probably for other reasons than their genetic superiority. Also given the number of IQ points the embryo selection is supposed to give, you'd need multiple generations for the effect to become noticeable, and by that point we're either done for or have a much better technology anyway. Maybe still with the same social concerns but we don't need to work out full 21st century aviation safety protocols in 1910.
(Also, "I'm afraid your children will be too much better off than mine so you shouldn't be allowed to do this thing for their well-being" sounds pretty horrible. That's already quite dystopian if this gets normalized.)
> “Paying for designer babies” may not be what most people use it for, but SOME will, and the societal effects of that on a widespread level would ruin it for everybody.
What kind of designer babies do you mean, and how would they ruin it for everybody?
might do responses in separate replies, lot to unpack here.
Point 1. The problem with the whole argument is that the status of an embryo or fetus depends on how much the person wants them.
"Bugs" yeah sure, if there happened to be a mixup and your wife's stored embryos were accidentally destroyed i'm sure you'd think they were still bugs. They are bugs if you need to dispose of them, people when implanted.
The issue is that we are weird on them in a way we aren't on other things . And a danger of that kind of weirdness is we do not want to extend it: people tend to do crazy things when subjective personhood is a thing. I think we permit it only by severely bounding the choice.
but we already slippery sloped it. IVF should be for younger people with significant fertility issues but some how its turned into "freeze your eggs so you can work on your career" and now its the method to introduce elective changes on your kids genes.
theres no objective limit to personhood: a lot of pro-life takes really can't escape Christian philosophy of being (and one could snark at Catholics by pointing out that their means of prolonging the faith is by birthing kids over fighting in the sphere of values.) but still that kind of schrodingers personhood is dangerous.
point 2.
Jesus Scott, the whole AI risk thing is that disruptive tech about intelligence can be extremely dangerous due to it not being aligned to the mass of humanity's values. That can happen with regular smarter people too: its the root of a lot of bad philosophy or design, or treating others as inferiors to be farmed.
Like people worry about AI girlfriends but Vtubers act in the same role, and even "the girlfriend experience" is a service to whales. its possible to have similar but lower tech effects.
i feel like you can't assume more intelligence will be totally positive: intelligent people often have different, even alien values. The whole rationalist movement lol, if it ever had a Constantine, what would the world be like?
Struck me as weird divergence, possibly because you can't see you are closer to a superintelligent AI in some ways. Can achieve similar ends by changing humans.
im not a fan of the "i find it alamin, you don't trust in charles dawin, and let nature select, baby, select" view though either.
Point 3...eh.
yes there always was a chance to not bring a soldier in the world, but engineering a pacifist isn't the same. Once you start engineering conditions, you value people in respect to fulfilling them.
and yes people will be cruel. just because your personal sphere currently values niceness to others doesn't mean that won't change.
> "Bugs" yeah sure, if there happened to be a mixup and your wife's stored embryos were accidentally destroyed i'm sure you'd think they were still bugs. They are bugs if you need to dispose of them, people when implanted.
Such a reaction seems to me to be sufficiently explained by the idea that stored embryos are valuable to their parents as property because of their utility in producing a child & the difficulty of creating them.
> still that kind of schrodingers personhood is dangerous.
What precisely is permissible in this area can be made stable/predictable by passing clear, hard-to-repeal laws defining what counts as a legal person. Of course it would still be apparent that that definition is partly arbitrary, more a line in the sand than a natural qualitative distinction, & significant numbers of people would disagree with it, but that is true for other related questions (abortion, euthanasia for incurably comatose people). A contrary example can be found in the recent news stories about premature declarations of brain-death to facilitate organ harvesting, but I don't know whether the law is, in fact, clear in defining brain-death.
"What precisely is permissible in this area can be made stable/predictable by passing clear, hard-to-repeal laws defining what counts as a legal person."
Yes, certainly no-one would ever repeal laws awarding personhood to a particular class! And we would not see screeds about racism if such laws are applied!
https://www.plannedparenthoodaction.org/issues/abortion/abortion-central-history-reproductive-health-care-america/historical-abortion-law-timeline-1850-today
"1910: Abortion Bans Nationwide
By 1910, abortion was not only restricted but outright illegal at every stage in pregnancy in every state in the country. These abortion bans had some exceptions in instances to save the patient’s life — a decision that only doctors, 95% of whom were men, had the power to make.
By this time, America had experienced several decades of increased immigration. Worried about losing their hold on the country, white men in power supported abortion bans as a way to get upper-class white women to have more children.
1976: Hyde Amendment Put Into Place
The Hyde Amendment is a discriminatory and racist policy that prevents federal dollars from being used in government insurance programs like Medicaid for abortion services (except in instances of incest, rape, or life-threatening risk to the pregnant person).
The legislation was created by Rep. Henry Hyde. “I would certainly like to prevent, if I could legally, anybody having an abortion: a rich woman, a middle class woman, or a poor woman,” he said. “Unfortunately, the only vehicle available is the [Medicaid] bill.”
Because of centuries of systemic racism and bias, Medicaid disproportionately serves Black, Latino, and LGBTQ+ communities — people who already face other barriers to care and economic opportunity.
Despite the federal law, 16 states currently include abortion in their Medicaid programs using state funds. (The remaining 34 states and the District of Columbia do not have abortion coverage in their Medicaid programs due to the Hyde Amendment).
Thanks in large part to the advocacy of reproductive justice organizations, in 2021 the Biden-Harris administration became the first administration in decades to exclude the Hyde Amendment from its presidential budget."
I don't see why one would discount the existence of the soul. We have more reason to believe in idealism than to believe that there even exists a material world, let alone that it is all there is. I mean thoughts, feelings, and mental actions are all invisible. They have neural or other physical correlates, but those things aren't what they are as we experience them.
Doubtless it's an argument you've heard many times before. But think of that! It's an argument, i.e.: an immaterial thing. Scientific laws also have this property (I mean the actual laws that govern physical processes, not our formulations of those laws): immaterial, yet real.
So don't discount it. What are its properties, and how do you find out? How do you know it appears at the moment an egg is fertilized, and not a year before or when a child first prays to their god and have an account created for them in a heavenly/Olympic/... registry?
Indulging myself a bit---here's my theory about what's going on here / how people work. I think it's important because it underscores a lot of what's wrong with the internet / modernity:
You are debating some commenters about the moral value of embryos, but there is something sorta fundamentally "fruitless" about the debate. Each side has written lots of words, yet you talk past each other and no one's mind is changed by any of it. I would be astounded if all of the (perfectly well-formed) arguments about hermits or surgeries or whatever could ever make a difference; it's hard to imagine it happening at all. At the end of the day all of the words could have been replaced with "embryos matter!" "no, embryos don't matter!" "no, embryos matter!" "no, embryos don't matter!" with essentially no change in the result or in the feeling one gets from reading it. It seems like in a "moral" debate of this sort, "arguments" and "logic"... don't... work? Both sides are basically going to generate infinite stances of increasing complexity that extrapolate from their beliefs and dodge/weave around the other side. Eventually everyone will either get angry or delusional or their brains will hurt and they will give up.
The greater-rationalist community does, of course, celebrate changing one's mind on the basis of arguments, and there are definitely examples of it out there; I recall some ACX posts were of that flavor. But mostly people do not change their minds, even in this community, about the things they really care about, whether animal rights or AI safety or politics. For the most part one of these holds:
1. people don't change their mind about moral issues at all, or
2. people change their position about a moral issue as a "freebie", because they aren't that invested in it; their reversal serves to as a signal of politeness or respect to their counterparty, or
3. people change their mind out of submission to their counterparty, which can take various forms: because they look up to them (as many of the ACX commenters look up to Scott), or because they "lose" the joust (for example staking their argument on a serious mistake and then being called out), or they doubt their own strength and give in to someone who seems stronger, or they see social value in adopting the other opinion (for example it seems more elite or more likely to win others' favor), or as a straight up submission in hopes for tribal protection.
A simple explanation underlies all of this. Moral opinions simply do not follow logic at all. Instead there is a whole parallel-universe set of rhetorical rules by which they operate, a "calculus of power". A person arguing for a moral opinion in defense of X is basically saying: look, it is important to me that X be protected. If you're not going to personally be invested in the protection of X, then I'm going to disagree with you infinitely, unless I end up having to concede for external reasons. X can be embryos, pregnant teens, government regulation, states' rights, walkable cities, car-culture, the patriarchy, feminism, guns, gun control, whatever. Whatever it is, a person is defending it against the feeling that someone else won't protect what's important about it.
Society, however, mostly does not understand this, at an extremely fundamental level: we're missing the rhetorical technology to talk about it. We're stuck in a local maximum where we all believe that arguments are supposed to change minds, yet they don't, but the update to get to the truth is too large to jump to, so we get stuck and frustrated talking all day while no one changes their minds (e.g. the whole internet). The result is that the more verbally intelligent a person is, the more they may end up believing that words are supposed to change minds when they actually basically don't, and then they end up not being able to understand why all their words on some issue just make people more angry and defensive. This is basically the main issue with progressivism: it's not enough to say all morally right-sounding things to get people to agree with you. In fact, to get people on your side you have to actually *get them on your side*, which follows the calculus of power, not the calculus of logic. And that means either (a) win through domination or (b) show them some respect.
All to say, if you want this argument to resolve, you've basically got three options:
1. concede that embryos deserve some respect purely on the basis that other people care a lot about them, not because it makes some logical sense to you. For instance, change your stance to support a version of embryo-selection that minimizes the number of embryos that get harmed. If you show them some respect they will be able to show you some too.
2. explain that you simply do not care about embryos, sorry, they do not have moral value to you and that's the end of it. This will go over easier if you explain exactly when you do think things have moral value, so that it doesn't imply a slippery slope of "he'll discard anything if it serves his purposes." Defending the killing of embryos is a lot more palatable if paired with a strongly-held conviction that fetuses after the first trimester be treated as alive. (Were you actually in charge of embryo selection this would be more of a dominance-play, since you would be denying their morals in favor of your own. In which case they would be either resigned to losing or they'd have to get back at you with their own use of power, i.e. protesting or suing or violence. Since this is just an argument about stances the stakes are much lower and everyone can probably just walk away in a frustrated huff.)
3. earn such respect from your counterparties from your other actions in this world that they see you as a moral leader and update their beliefs to match yours.
Otherwise it's just endless talking.
As it happens, I agree with you that embryos just don't matter at all, and the people who think they should do should try out thinking that they just don't matter. Nevermind souls and God and all that, which are explanations that backfill a reason for protected embryos; I just think it's very practical to draw the line a few months later, giving all the benefits of protecting life without as many downsides. I suspect the embryo-defenders are generally skeptical that their counterparties will defend infants/fetuses' lives *at all*, given the chance, and so they can't budge an inch lest they give a mile. I would prefer to find the right amount of defense such that we could compromise. That is much more productive than debating where the philosophical line ought to be, because there is simply no such line: the universe does not provide an answer to what constitutes "life" or "murder". The argument has entirely do with power and what it takes to guarantee the safety of the things people care about. In this case it's progress vs. fetuses; in most abortion debates it is mothers' health and happiness vs. fetuses. In either case, a solution is not going to be found by talking about it, and explaining yourself doesn't do anything unless what you're explaining is your position on *exactly where your camp will stop using your power* in a way that's genuinely trustworthy.
Who has two thumbs and is pointing both of them up at this comment?
Me!
reading all this makes me want to solve it even harder with simple religious dogma about humanity. It has "humanity" whether its has a "soul" theologically or not.
I concur with Scott's points here, and have made similar ones myself. I've discussed abortion several times with abortion opponents, at least one of whom claims his reasoning against abortion is entirely secular. While he does use entirely secular arguments, none of them seem to hold water. I introduce incisive questions like "why do we care about human life?", thought experiments exploring what has "potential to grow into a living human," and validation of potential concerns about the dangerous incentives that might be created or the opportunities for abuse that might open up if we accept that "human organism" is not the same thing as "person". These points seem to prompt no reflection on his part. I'll have to check out the secular pro-life website that Leah linked to and see if they have any arguments that I haven't seen and rebutted before. (Thanks, Leah!)
The ethics pertaining to the sleeping hermit, the surgery, and the transhuman cell-separating operation derive--like all ethics, as far as I can tell--from the concept of trust. A person who exists wants to trust that other people will not prevent their continued existence in the future, even if that existence may be temporarily interrupted by things like sleep or medical operations.
Most people have some level of individual identity that wants to exist in the future, at least for a while longer. An embryo has has not been given the opportunity to develop such an identity. It has no motivations, no mental model of reality, or at least no more than a mouse embryo at the same stage of development. It does have the potential to house a person's consciousness, but it doesn't yet. Nobody has yet started moving in. Destroying the embryo isn't betraying the embryo's trust because nobody was inside to care about whether they themselves woke up in the future.
That said, if the embryo's parent(s) want(s) the embryo to develop into a child, they might be in the process of emotionally bonding with the embryo and its potential, the better to be good parent(s) to the resulting child. Destroying the embryo against their wishes would be a betrayal of their trust.
Does that all make sense?
Pro-choice and pro-life here. Fine with abortion-by-choice in the first 3 months, very much pro-embryo-selection. Still: IF a woman does a positive pregnancy test (say, 4 weeks in*), is happy, tells her partner and he decides to mix abortive chemicals into her next smoothy - terminating the pregnancy while giving her 'only' some cramps: I want him arrested for murder, first degree. - Otoh, someone breaking into the clinic and destroying all fertilized eggs - some of which were to be implanted: Jeez, very bad, in some was much worse - but imho slightly more "massive property damage" than "manslaughter" - but I am fine with a legal system that defines this as murder, too. - (*if the guy serves her that smoothy right after the act - say, condom broke+he knows her days+he assumes she would not abort while she did not know, he is max. anti-natalist: maybe just manslaughter. Tricky; that is why we have not just laws, but judges.) - Fun fact: In Austria, mothers who kill their baby the first 24 hrs after birth may get away with 6 months/5yrs max.. A day later, she may expect 20 years. https://www.theinternational.at/vienna-mother-sentenced-to-20-years-for-killing-newborn-daughter/
I'm confused by your responses to #1. It's just the age old abortion debate, is it not? The response feels too long to simply point that out, and too short to really dive into pro-life vs pro-choice. All the words sort of obscures if there's anything unique about this particular situation.
In other words, is it fair to say that "if you're pro-life, embryo selection is obviously bad, and if you're pro-choice you may have other issues with it but the personhood argument is obviously a non-issue"? Or is there some nuance to embryo selection beyond that? Are there pro-choice people who think that embryos - when made for selection - are worthy of personhood in a way that they're not normally? Or pro-life people who think that embryo selection is fine for some reason?
>A second, more speculative reason is that very slightly increasing the skill of the top few percent of people can significantly affect the human race, and I expect the top few percent to disproportionately use this technology. Suppose that, as above, 10% of the population uses this technology, but that includes half of the smartest 1%. By my (actually o3’s, but I checked them) calculations, this would increase the number of geniuses (IQ > 140) by ~40%, and the number of supergeniuses (IQ > 160) by ~160%. Why can such small adoption increase these numbers so much? Because of the shape of the normal distribution, very small shifts in the right tail of the distribution can result in very large absolute changes in the number of people at any given high-outlier rank.
Is this assuming a best-of-5 IQ choice or a noisy signal scenario? I get roughly this number in the best-of-5 case but if the real signal is much noisier it should be less.
It's far from true that "in most cases" killing a newborn baby will make its parents, onlookers, etc sad. The default position in human history is that infanticide is basically fine and normal. (I mean, peasants exposing their babies don't write to us, and probably in some cases they're at least a *little* sad, but peasants killing their cows are also often sad; the point, I think, stands.) In my very non-expert awareness, it's pretty much only Christian-descended civilizations that find it self-evident that "the moment of birth" is an upper bound for where to put the fence-around-the-law position for murder.
As far as clarifying how an embryo is more like a human than a separate sperm and egg, well, the obvious pre-IVF reason was that the moment of fertilization is the clearest moment at which the zygote will *by default* eventually turn into a human. Especially if you think a baby is a human, nobody has to do any particular act of will between fertilization and birth particularly to make the baby come into being. This isn't a perfect argument on its own terms, and it's by all means possible to say you don't accept the terms themselves, but I think it's something reasonably close to what, like, Aquinas or somebody would have said, in a way that's not explicitly reliant on Christian theology. The big ethical challenge is that it's only just now become at all normal for there to be embryos that aren't already inside a woman who will, generically and without intentional intervention, grow them into a baby. Presumably screwing up this whole model is at the heart of why some people who had always held to the argument above are opposed to doing any IVF at all, though it seems like a bit of a cop-out of a response, since the embryo-in-a-Petri-dish really will not develop, all else being equal, into a human.
[In my very non-expert awareness, it's pretty much only Christian-descended civilizations that find it self-evident that "the moment of birth" is an upper bound for where to put the fence-around-the-law position for murder.]
Oh, I actually have something to offer on that! There's a Youtube channel called "Linfamy" who does videos on Japanese history. Do a search for it and scroll down to two videos:
"Makibi: The Japanese Practice of Killing Your Own Baby"
and its followup
"The Anti-Baby Killing Movement in Japan"
Japan has never been that strongly influenced by Christianity, so it's an interesting look at how infanticide was viewed there in relatively recent history. We're talking last couple of hundred years, not thousands of years. As the title of the second video implies, there was a homegrown anti-infanticide movement. Interesting stuff, give it a listen.
Thanks for the reference, it's an interesting suggestion (though I really dislike having to watch a video to get some factual information.) I think "Japan has never been that strongly influenced by Christianity" is a very questionable claim, though, in the relevant sesnse--in my model Japan is in effect a secular liberal democracy and secular liberal democracy is almost literally just a Protestant heresy, i.e. a lot of Christian influence on modernity is via the Enlightenment, so you don't have to have many professing Christians around for there to be major Christian influence (as indeed is the case even in modern Europe!) So anyway, if this had happened in the 16th century it would be rock-solid evidence against my claim but this case seems closer to an exception that proves the rule. I would love to find a case of a major civilization that either never approved infanticide, or stopped doing so before contact with Christian cultures.
I know it's annoying to go to videos for information, but they are pretty short (one is 12 minutes, the other 11). I'm not even out to disprove you exactly; I just thought you might be interested in more context. We're not looking for "rock solid evidence" here.
In fact, the Japan stuff arguably supports your claim to some extent. Part of the justification of Makini was an explicitly religious one, that new-borns were still partially of the spirit world and killing them was sending them back to the gods. Not that they weren't people, but that they weren't people fully in the world. On the other hand, while sure there was contact with Christianity it appears to be buddhist monks who were the biggest opponents of the practice and helped stamp it out. So maybe you simply need to expand your theory to "Christianity or Buddhism"?
Well, I don’t have any evidence that Buddhism generally has cared much about infanticide, which is well attested across south and Southeast Asia. Usually it hasn’t seems to be particularly concerned with the ethics of the laity at all, whereas ending infanticide was a central interest of Christian writers and emperors from the very beginning: So I don’t see very much support for adding Buddhism. I did find that apparently ancient Egyptians did not commit infanticide but did allow abortion, which is a very interesting example of a society with roughly our same set of rules. But we don’t have a very detailed understanding of the religious basis for these practices, unfortunately.
If there's debate over whether baby-killing is wrong or not, then society obviously doesn't find it *self-evident* that it's wrong.
>By allowing people to construct buildings, we both homogenize - people in Dubai and Siberia can both be in identical 70 degree concrete cubes - and overdiversify - there can be saunas and ice skating rinks in the same city. But this is not an argument against allowing buildings.
Since the majority of people has decided to allow fewer buildings than you want, this may not be the most convincing example. Also, about 1% of the worlds land area is covered by buildings currently. I assume you would have some diversity objections before we reach Coruscant levels.
>what about rape? what about war?
Im not sure why you think all events which causally contributed to your existence are comparable to genetics. Being born of rape wont have much of an effect on what youre like, the war probably not at all. What about you is it supposed to declare inferior to prevent these? The lobotomies are relevant, and do say being lobotomised is inferior - those people just dont particularly object and probably cant. See also my response to the genetic inferiority post.
https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1ddzj7r/nobody_can_make_you_feel_genetically_inferior/l891hht/
#1. There are some ethical positions that I think fail due to impracticality, and 'life begins at conception' is one of them. Embryos are typically embedded in people, and those people cannot be reasonably expected to have a moral or legal obligation to cells which they may not even know are there and which they may not know how to protect. Consider eg the high school soccer player who stops the ball with her midriff and miscarries later that day. Did she know she was pregnant? DId she know her play might cause the miscarriage? Did it cause the miscarriage? Did she do something wrong? Giving some sort of human value to these cells feels like wishful thinking.
#2 In my experience people who are looking for someone with whom to make babies typically look for the smartest, most attractive, healthiest person that will have them, with some conditioning on assortive features (eg, similar culture or ethnicity) and wealth. That is, already people try to make babies that are selected for certain positive traits. I think this is good, and more would be better. Maybe with exception of selection for gender, but I expect if the sexes became less diverse (ie, more concentration of either males or females) then there would be strong incentive for the pendulum to swing the other way; after a bit of back and forth hopefully people would learn their lesson.
#3 To me this argument is perverse, in that it demonstrates complete lack of empathy with the people meant to provoke empathy. Who on earth with any sort of genetic limitation wishes that more people had that limitation? Thanks to certain genes I have thin hair and a predisposition to certain cancers, and have only ever wished for my children that they not get those specific genes. Am I bad person? I have a friend diagnosed in his 40s with Huntington's disease and his last desperate hope before he entirely lost his mind was that his children did not inherit the HTT gene. He did not wish for dead children, he wished for healthy ones. I don't think anyone with a genetic condition that negatively impacts their life wishes for anyone else to have that condition, and I think it is cruelly insensitive to equate that with self-loathing or a wish for such people to die.
>#1. There are some ethical positions that I think fail due to impracticality, and 'life begins at conception' is one of them. Embryos are typically embedded in people, and those people cannot be reasonably expected to have a moral or legal obligation to cells which they may not even know are there and which they may not know how to protect. Consider eg the high school soccer player who stops the ball with her midriff and miscarries later that day. Did she know she was pregnant? DId she know her play might cause the miscarriage? Did it cause the miscarriage? Did she do something wrong? Giving some sort of human value to these cells feels like wishful thinking.
And what if, on my way to the game, I stop my car to let another driver pull out in font of me, meaning that driver is later slightly further along than he would be when a little girl runs out into the road, meaning he doesn't have time to break and instead has to swerve to avoid her and crashes into a tree and dies? Did I murder him? Did I know that slightly altering how far along he is in his journey might result in him dying? Did I do something wrong? Obviously the ethical position "drivers are alive" fails due to impracticality.
This was a valient effort, Scott, but ultimately the detractors you're addressing are coming at their position from irrational sentimentality about what it is to be a person. The vast majority of that irrational sentimentality is a product of religious indoctrination, most of the rest of it is religious indoctrination in secular clothing, and perhaps a not insignificant amount of it is trolling and/or intellectual wankery for the sake of the exercise.
And lest I be accused of trolling myself, I'd like to make it clear I am *exquisitely* serious about what I write below, and I think it needs to be taken seriously by people whose anti-abortion and anti-IVF intuitions are informed by a belief in God:
Because every time this topic pops up, I like to point out that *if* a God who disapproves of medically induced abortion is real, then it's pretty weird that He's by far humanity's greatest abortionist, responsible for between 15-45% of all pregnancies ending in spontaneous abortion (a more precise phrase than "miscarriage," though if God was real, the most precise phrase would be "God-induced abortion").
So if God is real, it sure looks like he really, really, *REALLY* doesn't believe in the value or rights of fetuses, particularly those fetuses with genetic abnormalities which make them incompatible with a thriving life.
And it follows that if God really loves giving abortions, and he made man in His image, then surely He doesn't begrudge mankind following God's example when it comes to abortions.
Abortion is abortion, whether it's induced by God or induced by a human. There's no meaningful difference to the fetus involved.
And murder is murder, but there are those who valiantly try to say that death from natural causes is exactly the same thing as murder so murder is not in fact murder, or bad at all.
Occult philosophy of the type I favor says the soul enters the fetus at quickening: no motus, no vita. Ez.
"If this is true, doesn’t it suggest I can’t be too in favor of embryo selection either? What’s the argument for saying the technology is powerful enough to be worth it, but not powerful enough to worry about?"
"My impression is that there are much stronger technologies about 10-20 years down the line, ones that probably disrupt things so profoundly that your opinions should be more related to your general opinions on transhumanism and technological singularities than on specifics of the selection process."
You argue that the future tech is more important than the present tech, but spend more time arguing present tech is safe than that future tech is safe. "Present tech isn't strong enough to make GATTACA, so it's fine. What really matters is much-stronger future tech, which is also fine because [mumble]."
(It may help to imagine the corresponding arguments about AI - current tech is safe (but boring), future tech is exciting (but dangerous); safe+exciting=full steam ahead!)
I think "we have to draw a line somewhere" is the worst sociological trope. Many things demand that we be particularists (in this case, perhaps the difference between "aww, what a cute couple" and "uh-oh, one party to this 'voluntary' liaison is forcing the issue"). While a mere baby putting his thumbprint on a contract probably shouldn't stand up in court, "age" of consent is imbecilic. Do persons who have not attained the age of majority consent to have their consent thrown under the rug? It's a highly salient example of that BETA-MEALR stuff (see "Fake Consensualism", Slate Star Codex) - your rights can only be violated if you're allowed to have them in the first place!
>While a mere baby putting his thumbprint on a contract probably shouldn't stand up in court, "age" of consent is imbecilic.
What about a mere baby having sex? Is it "imbecilic" to want to stop that?
Great post! fwiw, I actually agree that "past personhood" is also sufficient. When I appealed to the fact that the sleeping hermit unquestionably "has a mind", I didn't mean to rest anything on the present tense (I agree that your cellular-disassembly case shows that the present moment isn't essential). So I guess I didn't word that very well. The crucial thing is just that their mind for sure *exists* (timelessly speaking), and *that existing being* will be worse off if their brain and body is not re-assembled. This contrasts with the mindless embryo, for which - if it does not develop further - there never exists a mind that is personally harmed by a failure to extend its life further.
A point we may(?) disagree on is that your initial explanations appealed to the hermit's past *preference* not to be killed. I think that "temporary depression" cases show that such a preference is not essential. What matters is just that the candidate future life, psychologically continuous with the past person, would be a positive one (adding to the overall welfare of the person's complete life, considered timelessly).
(Though given your latest comments about "convenient fictions", perhaps you didn't mean to rest too much on the preference talk either, and our views are more or less equivalent!)
As an unwilling lifetime subscriber to major depressive disorder, I will tell _me_ to my face that people like me should not exist in the next generation, and I'll precommit right now to throwing a street party for anyone who manages to pull that feat off.
(Disability activism is extremely weird to me. I have this thing that made my life suck for many years before discovering the exact correct combination of Eleven Secret Drugs and Supplements, and I'm supposed to be in favor of making other people live through twenty, thirty miserable years for... reasons? I cannot comprehend this at all.
That would be eugenics? Damn right it would be eugenics, and it would be _awesome_ eugenics.)
I think the distinction you’re looking for is how close is the fetus/cow/bug to us socially. There is, for example, a difference between an implanted zygote whose mother hopes to give birth, and a frozen zygote who has a one-in-ten chance of being selected for implantation.
>Isn’t it possible that embryos are alive, or have personhood, or are moral patients?
I've never understood the intellectual contortions non-religious people go through in trying to come up with an objective definition of personhood for questions like this. I think consequentialism provides a very obvious answer: killing an embryo has zero detectable consequence, therefore they shouldn't be considered persons. Murder is "immoral" because it leads to predictably bad social outcomes: 1) it destroys human capital, 2) creates cycles of value-destroying violence (if you kill my brother then I'm gonna try to kill you and then your cousin will try to kill me etc), and 3) leads to low-trust societies where people spend their time building walled compounds to keep the murderers out instead of engaging in value-producing activity. In other words, murder has clear and significant social costs and so society has a strong incentive to disincentivize it.
None of these argument apply to embryo selection. 1) The replacement cost for an embryo is ~zero 2) The only people in a position to care about the embryo and therefore be potentially motivated to avenge its loss are the parents doing the selection, and 3) no one is going around doing selection on other people's embryos so social trust isn't lowered. No negative social consequence for embryo selection => no reason to consider it immoral.
If the long-term consequences are negative (diversity loss, etc) *then* it would be reasonable to consider it immoral. But in my view there's no compelling reason to believe that anything bad will happen and I don't think this represents some irreversible letting-the-genie-out-of-the-bottle advance. This technology will be adopted very slowly. If there are emergent problems then we'll be able to course-correct easily. Certainly any risks are outweighed by the potential upside, at least given what we know now.
I think even non-religious consequentialists believe that some things have value beyond their social effects. Like supposed you have a coma patient that is able to experience things but will never be able to wake up and interact with the outside world. Is it morally acceptable to secretly administer a drug that causes them to experience extreme pain for an extended period?
The cost of the drug is basically nothing, the person will never wake up, so the effects on them will not hurt the economy, and because it was done in secret nobody else will change their behavior to avoid this happening to them. So it doesn't matter, right?
Well no. I think that most people would say that torturing people is bad even if it has no additional social consequences. But if you accept that causing certain qualia is good/bad, then have to struggle with questions about what is a qualia and who is capable of experiencing them.
I actually don't think most people would care about this in a pragmatic sense. Let's say, for example, that doing this caused the patient's brain to secrete a hormone that was impossible to create any other way. I think that the value of that hormone would have to be surprisingly low before society was willing to expend any effort to stop it. This is analogous to the Omelas suffering child, which I've always considered to be a shockingly naive moral argument. If one person's suffering could truly generate utopia, not only would morality evolve to tolerate it, it would probably be considered highly taboo to even question it. If I was running for mayor of Omelas my platform would be to argue that we should have *more* suffering children because maybe that would increase the utopia. The real-world Omelas would have the suffering child emblazoned on its flag as a symbol of cultural pride, much like churches have images of the crucifixion everywhere.
Also consider that if the coma patient never woke up we'd have no way of knowing whether they were actually suffering. If there was any economic benefit to it then I'm positive society would go out of its way to avoid acknowledging that there was any suffering.
And lest you think I'm being unrealistically monstrous, let me tell you about my favorite historical moral counterfactual. When British sailors first discovered Tahiti in the 18th century, they were amazed by the Tahitians' relative wealth (plenty of food, most people led leisurely lives). The key here is to understand that pre-industrial societies are poor for Malthusian reasons: wealth is limited by food production and the population will always grow to be in edge-of-survival equilibrium with the food supply. The Tahitians sidestepped that limitation by killing three-quarters of all newborns. That functioned as birth control which kept the population comfortably below the Malthusian edge.
In my view morality ultimately derives from economic considerations, not deontological principles. The principles are just compressed representations designed for efficient cultural transmission.
1) Note how my scenario did not specify that this torture produced a highly socially useful substance. This is not Omelas where suffering of one causes huge benefits to everyone else. This is a case of one person suffering greatly for no particular reason.
2) Society being willing to accept something is a best a weak argument for its morality. German society accepted the Holocaust. Your example has Tahitian society accepting mass infanticide. Unless you want to bite the bullet and say that these were good actually, society accepting something does not necessarily make it good.
3) Sure. People's moral ideas are heavily shaped by economic circumstances. That doesn't mean that morality boils down entirely to what policies lead to the best economic outcomes.
1) Your example is contrived. I don't think that contrived examples offer much in the way of useful guidance in discussions like this so I invented an equally contrived example to demonstrate its limitation. In any case I think there's a more straightforward economic counter to it: the expectation that being in a coma could result in untold suffering would distort healthy people's decisions around medical care. That would likely lead to suboptimal economic outcomes and therefore society has an economic interest in discouraging it.
2) If Germany had won the war then the holocaust would have been considered moral, at least by Germans. That's not to say *I* consider it moral. My point is that morality is highly contingent and that you should therefore be very skeptical about any absolute deontological rules. I have zero problems with the Tahitian infanticide, just as I have zero problems with abortions, historical slavery, what Europeans did to Native Americans, what Rome did to Gaul, or any number of other things that were appropriate to their time even if we would consider them abhorrent now.
3) I disagree. In my view morality is nothing but the compressed wisdom of generations: the socially-transmitted genetic code that undergirds society and tries to tell people what works and what doesn't. In most cases that wisdom can be understood in economic terms.
If morality were just socially compressed wisdom about what works and what doesn't, why aren't debates about morality focused largely about whether things work or not? Is it possible that when other people say "morality" that they are actually referring to something different?
>why aren't debates about morality focused largely about whether things work or not?
Because people are unsophisticated. That's the only thing those debates should be about.
>Is it possible that when other people say "morality" that they are actually referring to something different?
100%. Most of them are implicit arguments about which interest group is more important. Take abortion for example. Those arguments are only incidentally about when life begins, they're primarily about how important women's opinions are in society. That's why it's never resolved. There *is* no objective resolution, just an ongoing competition for relative status.
"1) The replacement cost for an embryo is ~zero"
I suggest you read the comments about undergoing IVF treatment from the person who had a very bad experience. It is by no means a cost-free process.
In the context of IVF it's not zero but in the wider "value of human" life context - that objections to embryo selection begin from - it is. People who object to embryo selection aren't making arguments of the form "you spent 20k harvesting that embryo therefore it's immoral for you to discard it". They make arguments of the form "all embryos are human beings and therefore have a value equal to every other human being". That is the specific argument that I'm targeting and in that context the value of a replacement embryo is ~zero.
If you want to argue about the value of an embryo in the context of IVF and want to make reference to the 20k that was spent harvesting it then that's fine, but then you don't get to smuggle in wider moral considerations that apply more generally to all people. At that point you're essentially just saying "hey these people paid a lot of money for this and you should be careful" which really doesn't have the moral force that I suspect you want it to. In any case that then becomes an economic decision and, as various failed experiments in economic collectivism have demonstrated over the years, those are best made by people directly involved.
I'm reminded this smbc comic about when the metaphysical implications of being able to split the zygote into sperm and egg: https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2799
All the analysis of these edge cases of consciousness (not only in this article, but others I've heard before) seem to drive me to a conclusion that whatever my position and subjective intuition is on rights and moral behavior, it apparently is so disconnected from any particular aspect of consciousness that considering consciousness with regards those topics is apparently counterproductive to me, and I should utterly ignore any argument based on consciousness (or lack of it) as not only irrelevant but also distracting and thus harmful to analysis and discussion.
Perhaps the criterion I'm internally using is something more similar to "membership in my tribe", and "my tribe" in the wider, humanitarian approach for me includes all humans and excludes cows and embryos; and the decision whether hypothetical aliens or artificial intelligences should be accorded rights and moral value based on various arbitrary criteria like whether we'd want to include them in our tribe, (for example but not limited to, simply based on whether doing so would benefit humanity, i.e. the current members of my tribe), and not be automatic just because they happen to fulfil some criteria of intelligence, consciousness or anything else.
And that seems to work in many of these case studies. We accord rights to the unconscious patient or the hypothetical patient under reconstruction, because that's a role I or specific people I care about might be in, so I have a practical reason to defend those rights as universal, "once a member of my tribe, always a member of my tribe", unless they die or the tribe decides to not make them a full member anymore and punish them by revoking their rights to liberty or life. We (in my community) don't accord full rights to embryos (we do defend them from malicious interference by other people, e.g.. poisoning a would-be mother to cause a miscarriage) because we expect that in reasonably likely scenarios I or people I care about might reasonably want to choose a tradeoff that benefits the mother at the expense of the embryo, so I have a practical reason to deny those rights as universal, and not yet treat them as a member of my tribe until some event; which currently is at birth but historically (at least in my area) used to be slightly later i.e. at "naming" to treat very early child mortality (or abandonment/exposure) as different. Cynical, perhaps selfish, but practical, and IMHO that's the basis for all the rights societies have choosen to grant and restrictions to impose, core concepts like murder and theft stem not from some philosophical ideal of rights but a need for practical solutions to reasonably frequent conflict scenarios in society.
To borrow multiple ideas from Scott's old classics, while the central modal case (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world) is rarely questioned (don't kill post-birth humans) the category of a human moral patient, like all categories made for man (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/), has fuzzy and variable boundaries. But since humans need to agree on something to function as a society, the argument is about a Schelling fence (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kbm6QnJv9dgWsPHQP/schelling-fences-on-slippery-slopes) and where it place it to avoid slippery slopes.
There is no universal way to place these guardrails, of course, and different cultures and subcultures do it differently and not necessarily self-consistently. If one subscribes to morality being constructed, an emergent phenomenon downstream of the need to make a society function, then one can trace the argument about embryo selection or related topics back to the societies from which the moralities driving these arguments emerged.
And whatever arguments people are making now, they will be obsoleted by the mores of whatever other societies emerge and establish themselves over time. It seems that the only moral constant in post-subsistence societies is a version of "live and let live".
This argument from Scott is very misleading:
"Suppose that, as above, 10% of the population uses this technology, but that includes half of the smartest 1%. By my (actually o3’s, but I checked them) calculations, this would increase the number of geniuses (IQ > 140) by ~40%, and the number of supergeniuses (IQ > 160) by ~160%. Why can such small adoption increase these numbers so much? Because of the shape of the normal distribution, very small shifts in the right tail of the distribution can result in very large absolute changes in the number of people at any given high-outlier rank. If you think that increasing the number of geniuses by 40%, or the number of supergeniuses by 160%, could have a large effect on society, then this technology could have a large effect on society even with relatively limited adoption."
It's true that shifting a normal distribution to the right can increase the # of people past a certain limit by a large percent. But that's a very misleading way to look at it. It's true that you are increasing the number of supergeniuses (IQ >160) by 160%. But those are all people whose IQ was raised (for example) from 159 to 161. The absolute number above 160 is much higher. But the IQ of those people is only raised slightly. So Scott asks if "...you think that increasing the number ... of supergeniuses by 160%, could have a large effect on society". If those people used to have an IQ of 100 and now have an IQ of 161, then yes that would have a big impact. But that's not what's happening. Actually those people used to have an IQ of 159 and now have an IQ of 161, so the impact on society would be quite small.
Ohh man, love the children of rape response. It's soo good.
But ultimately, I do think we need to bite the bullet and say that there is no intrinsic harm to ending a life (like that of the sleeping hermit) -- assuming that we don't announce such a policy. There is a lot of harm in announcing a policy which doesn't try to prospectively protect the sleeping hermit.
It's really no different than the standard transplant surgeon example (should I kill this organ donor to save 5 people) in the real world you can't decide to kill the hermit and be perfectly guaranteed no one will find out and be worried about it happening to them.
I find it both shocking and kinda sad how little attention is paid to the possibility that **we can engineer future generations to be happier**. Yah yah, getting rid of some nasty disability sounds important but the ultimate (and arguably the only really bad) disability is unhappiness and we can fix that!
There is considerable interpersonal variation in happiness set points and people who have them higher seem to generally do better in almost all aspects in the modern world. We can fucking change that. Why worry so much about stopping all these various debilitating conditions when we can just make it the case that they don't bum you out so much. Yes, go back and fix them later (higher set point doesn't mean you still wouldn't prefer to eg walk) but surely this should be our primary target!
That seems directly equivalent to wireheading or other means of artificial happiness (e.g. why not attach a drip of heroin-like substance to every person to make them more happier?). Negative emotions such as pain, boredom, burnout, etc generally have a functional purpose in our motivational systems, and unless those systems are broken (such as in some mental ilnesses) we should be fixing the external causes of unhappiness instead of altering the perception to feel happier in objectively bad conditions.
We can't fix unhappiness. Unless you mean "turn down the brain so much people don't know they're living shitty lives" and (1) kinda defeats the purpose of the bright shiny promise of "moar smarter! moar better!" for this entire programme and (2) smacks a little too much of "Brave New World":
"They were passing metre 320 on rack eleven. A young Beta-Minus mechanic was busy with screw-driver and spanner on the blood-surrogate pump of a passing bottle. The hum of the electric motor deepened by fractions of a tone as he turned the nuts. Down, down... A final twist, a glance at the revolution-counter, and he was done. He moved two paces down the line and began the same process on the next pump.
'Reducing the number of revolutions per minute,' Mr. Foster explained. 'The surrogate goes round slower; therefore passes through the lung at longer intervals; therefore gives the embryo less oxygen. Nothing like oxygen-shortage for keeping an embryo below par.' Again he rubbed his hands.
'But why do you want to keep the embryo below par?' asked an ingenuous student.
'Ass!' said the Director, breaking a long silence. 'Hasn't it occurred to you that an Epsilon embryo must have an Epsilon environment as well as an Epsilon heredity?'
It evidently hadn't occurred to him. He was covered with confusion.
'The lower the caste,' said Mr. Foster, 'the shorter the oxygen.' The first organ affected was the brain. After that the skeleton. At seventy per cent. of normal oxygen you got dwarfs. At less than seventy, eyeless monsters.
'Who are no use at all,' concluded Mr. Foster.
Whereas (his voice became confidential and eager), if they could discover a technique for shortening the period of maturation what a triumph, what a benefaction to Society!
'Consider the horse.'
They considered it.
Mature at six; the elephant at ten. While at thirteen a man is not yet sexually mature; and is only full grown at twenty. Hence, of course, that fruit of delayed development, the human intelligence.
'But in Epsilons,' said Mr. Foster very justly, 'we don't need human intelligence.'
Didn't need and didn't get it. But though the Epsilon mind was mature at ten, the Epsilon body was not fit to work till eighteen. Long years of superfluous and wasted immaturity. If the physical development could be speeded up till it was as quick, say, as a cow's, what an enormous saving to the Community!
'Enormous!' murmured the students. Mr. Foster's enthusiasm was infectious.
…Their wanderings through the crimson twilight had brought them to the neighbourhood of Metre 170 on Rack 9. From this point onwards Rack 9 was enclosed and the bottles performed the remainder of their journey in a kind of tunnel, interrupted here and there by openings two or three metres wide.
'Heat conditioning,' said Mr. Foster.
Hot tunnels alternated with cool tunnels. Coolness was wedded to discomfort in the form of hard X-rays. By the time they were decanted the embryos had a horror of cold. They were predestined to emigrate to the tropics, to be miners and acetate silk spinners and steel workers. Later on their minds would be made to endorse the judgment of their bodies. 'We condition them to thrive on heat,' concluded Mr. Foster. 'Our colleagues upstairs will teach them to love it.'
'And that,' put in the Director sententiously, 'that is the secret of happiness and virtue--liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.'"
I find the arguments in point #1 feeble. The bright-line distinctions between a human embryo and all predecessors, or between a human embryo and non-human creatures, are straightforward and intuitive, but imo people muddle it because 1. They want the right to get abortions so unwanted children can go away, and 2. They want the right to customize their children, and create a fiction in their head that different embryos really all represent the same hypothetical child, like they're just rerolling character creations in an RPG.
I really can't see a way to summarize this position short of "I really want to do embryo selection to make future grown children more impressive, so let's construct an argument for why human life doesn't matter early on."
To me, it's always been telling that when it was discovered in the 1800s that fetuses were alive even before quickening, there was an immediate push from the medical community to strengthen abortion laws since it was now obvious human lives were at stake even early on and early abortions were not just an equivalent of birth control. The moral intuition is that they WERE people, and we've created mental justifications to break this down for the sake of convenience.
Well, have we all sufficiently torn strips off one another about this, or is there more bloodletting to go? Even "agree to disagree" is not going to get us past this one.
To any filthy centrists on this topic out there, may I say I appreciate your attempts to see both sides and your neutrality, and I don't even mean that in the Zapp Brannigan way:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2WD1SJiRjo
> A flash drive with an embryo’s genome and a description of how cells work contains all of the necessary information. So does a printed book containing the code for a sentient robot. But neither of these are people.
Yes and no. If the latter really existed, I think it should be a murder-adjacent crime to destroy that book if it were the only copy in existence. Suppose you printed out the code of a *brain upload of a formerly human individual*, and doesn't this become fairly intuitive?
Lest I only comment to quibble and criticise, I do want to say that I like your answer to the "diversity" question, which has done much to alleviate my concerns (indeed, I find it more persuasive than your in-thread reply to my original comment on the topic). Thanks!
Let’s go meta:
1a. What percentage of people commenting on the previous ACX post are *actually* opposed to embryo selection, vs just playing devil’s advocate for the sake of a fun philosophical debate?
1b. Are we (the readers) and Scott basically just talking in an echo chamber of embryo selection supporters, speculating about what arguments could *possibly* be made against embryo selection in order to sharpen the “debate toolkit” for public discussions?
2a. If the point is to properly harden the “rhetorical toolbox,” is there really a non-trivial number of politicians or would-be customers of a $53k selection service whose opinions can be changed by cleverly answering all their objections in advance?
- Testifying before Congress? “Senator, I know you’re probably wondering why we won’t be killing sleeping hermits next. Allow me to explain…”
- Convincing parents concerned about ethics? “Folks, you’re probably asking yourself if this brings us one step closer towards demanding Anschluss with Canada? Worry not, all we have to do is imagine a man having open heart surgery…”
- Convincing the Swedish IRB to let you get data from their DNA bank? “Ahh, worry not friends, we have no interest in building a society of superwhites. Worry not, our true goal is to increase the number of Elons by 160%!”
3a. When Scott posts a debate like this, are we engaging in a kind of subtle social “kayfabe” or “suspension of disbelief,” where everyone understands it’s more fun if some people argue for X and others argue against X, because otherwise it would be a boring one-sided discussion?
3b. Is this something people consciously think about when reading a topic like embryo selection?
3c. Or is it only trolls who engage in “edgy devil’s advocate” behavior, while “good readers” always state their genuine views?
Maybe a better rule is that it’s not acceptable to kill something if it causes reduced utility in the future. This would correctly separate the person undergoing heart surgery and the baby from embryos, because only one embryo was going to be born into a full human anyway - with or without IVF
"If you think that increasing the number of geniuses by 40%, or the number of supergeniuses by 160%, could have a large effect on society, then this technology could have a large effect on society even with relatively limited adoption."
This is true, but I want to point out that "large effect on society" does not imply directionality. I am watching the geniuses and the supergeniuses, and on net their current impacts might be slightly positive if one grades generously, and on net slightly negative if one does not. Also, you could long tail it in EITHER direction, as far as my guess goes (I can make a case for the long-tail negative, but we will will all be dead so where's the joy in being right?).
Still, this post is one of my favorites from you, good stuff!