An ethical debate that's turning very sour

post by Multiheaded · 2012-01-01T19:36:50.337Z · LW · GW · Legacy · 12 comments

(Okay, this has more or less run its course. Deleting the post.)

 

http://lesswrong.com/lw/90l/welcome_to_less_wrong_2012/5kk8

Right now I seem to be losing my last scraps of clear-headedness concerning the topic.

I'd dearly like anyone who feels they're up to it to 1) step in to provide a more rounded perspective and 2) help me the hell out in whatever way you consider useful, because such moral predicaments are known to be a point of obsession for me and haunt me for a long time (see my first post on LW).

 

Relevant: some of the exchange I just had with Orthonormal, with him inquiring about a possible factor to my behavior:

 

Orthonormal:

I'm not going to do this publicly (for several obvious reasons), but I want to ask: do you occasionally worry that you have some sociopathic impulses?

Me:

I certainly do (and I don't view that in a solely negative light at that), and I understand that I might be exhibiting some complexly motivated cognition here. But this understanding isn't swaying my opinion.

Orthonormal: 

Oh, I wasn't arguing against you- I was just curious.

I noticed that you had an unusual amount of passion on this topic, and wanted to test the generalization that the most passionate proponents of prohibiting something (or keeping it prohibited) are often those who feel some temptation themselves- both because an external prohibition seems like it helps their internal self-control, and because it signals to themselves and others that they're not the sort of person who would do that thing. (Getting evidence for that theory was more significant to me than any actual info about sociopathic impulses.)

 

 EDIT: thanks to everyone who responded.

I'll be coming back to this. In the meanwhile, to make my post less bad-useless-kind-of-meta, here's a comment by drethelin that offers a better arguments for and summary of my position than any of mine:

I broadly agree that babies aren't people, but I still think infanticide should be illegal, simply because killing begets insensitivity to killing. I know this has the sound of a slippery slope argument, but there is evidence that desire for sadism in most people is low, and increases as they commit sadistic acts, and that people feel similarly about murder.

From The Better Angels of Our Nature: "Serial killers too carry out their first murder with trepidation, distaste, and in its wake, disappointment: the experience had not been as arousing as it had been in their imaginations. But as time passes and their appetite is rewhetted, they find the next on easier and more gratifying, and then they escalate the cruelty to feed what turns into an addiction."

Similarly, cathartic violence against non-person objects (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharsis#Therapeutic_uses) can lead to further aggression in personal interactions.

I don't think we want to encourage or allow killing of anything anywhere near as close to people as babies. The psychological effects on people who kill their own children and on a society that views the killing of babies as good are too potentially terrible. Without actual data, I can say I would never want to live in a society that valued people as little as Sparta did.

12 comments

Comments sorted by top scores.