Killing Babies Is Not Especially Bad

(N.B: This is much more about personhood than abortion or anything culture war-y)

There’s this weird thing in abortion debates where pro-choice people try to simultaneously hold two fairly conflicting positions:

• killing a fetus shortly before birth is okay
• killing a baby just after birth is bad There are a fair few arguments here on why this actually makes sense. Bodily autonomy is the main one for me. That being said, I think there’s a much simpler resolution. Killing babies is pretty fine actually.

(context: I was at an annual work conference. I got into a discussion about surrogacy with a colleague who is both very smart and christian. The conversation moved to abortion. He hit me with “do you think crossing out of the vagina makes a moral difference when it comes to abortion?”, hoping to dive into the standard inconsistency. My response was “no”. He was confused. I clarified that I thought killing babies was fine. A great discussion ensued with a dozen other colleagues gradually clustering around to listen. It was a good night)

Okay. So the 101 of why killing things is bad. Ceteris paribus in all cases. My intuitions are roughly that:

• Killing a plant is minimally bad. Ditto for bacteria, etc…
• Killing an insect is not very bad.
• Killing a higher order mammal (cow, sheep, bison, etc…) is bad
• Killing orangutans, chimps, dolphins, etc… is really bad
• Killing an adult human is really, really bad What’s the commonality here? It’s basically that the innate moral badness of killing correlates to how far on the personhood scale I think a given agent is. Plants are basically not moral subjects/people. Adult humans are almost always people. Dolphins are nearly people (or at least very, very close). Etc…

While I do have a certain emotional fondness for humans over other minds, I don’t think, that caries moral weight.

Let’s bite some bullets:

• Let’s say you gave me two beings, on one hand a super intelligent dolphin with the level of self-awareness, memory, experience, etc… of an adult human and on the other a severely and permanently retarded human with the intelligence/consciousness/relevant mental traits equivalent to a dog. If forced to choose which life to save, I would save the uber dolphin.
• Is killing a retarded person less morally valuable than others? Yes.

(Mandatory sidebar on pure vs practical ethics time. Skip to after this if you already get the difference. Also Jesus christ this is a fairly load bearing concept that I need to get around to finishing my article on at some point)

Okay. So when deciding what is right we have two separate questions.

1. What, morally, do we actually believe
2. What set of moral norms leads to the best outcomes in reality 1 & 2 are basically pure and practical ethics in Srdjan-speak. I think that in pure terms, killing babies is not that different from killing a dog. In practical terms, I think it’s good that we have strong norms around human life being sacred and killing people being bad. Yes, even those people who are part of the outgroup and you dislike and can make all kinds of convoluted justifications for why they’re not actually people.

[[Practical vs Pure ethics]]

(sidebar over)

Okay, what are some objections to this view? There are a few:

• Human life is innately sacred
• Babies have the potential/are in the process of becoming people
• You’re defecting in a game-theoretic sense if you kill human seeds

Okay, so let’s go through these one by one.

The “Human life is sacred” thing I just don’t share the intuition for. I don’t think being a homo-sapien makes you magically special. If you want to broaden it to “all life is sacred”, you get stuck with a lot of inconvenient questions you have to make increasingly convoluted justifications for. “If all life is sacred, would you give equal weight to an insects and a human adults life?”. Actually I guess you can say that life is sacred, killing is thus bad, but then there are also other reasons like consciousness that make it additionally bad and explain the hierarchy of value we place different lives on. Wait, nope that doesn’t work. You then still need to explain why stepping on an insect on the way to work is fine but driving over a baby isn’t.

The whole “potential to become a person” thing fails for various reasons. There are a few more complex and interesting objections and one very simple but effective one. The simple one is “Is killing babies with incurable, terminal cancer fine then?”. If not, then the whole potential thing is not your True Rejection

The game theoretic argument goes something like this. You exist because people didn’t kill you. Killing other babies now that you’re past the filter is bad. I’m not sure I see the link here from reasoning to conclusion. I exist because my parents had unprotected sex. Hence I should have unprotected sex a lot otherwise I’m defecting against my possible kids. The fact that some set of decisions by agents in the past led to me existing does not mean I should make the same decisions. Maybe there’s some weird acausal trading argument buried here somewhere, but I don’t see it at a glance.

So yeah, in conclusion I tend to believe that while norms against killing are good, in actual moral fact killing babies is really not that bad and the main badness that comes from it is the harm to the parents/other actual people.