I note that the same arguments apply equally to people concerned about the effects of climate change on future generations, or appeals to concern about future generations in relation to the national debt. Generally speaking politics is full of commitments to the not yet existent.
Yup. (I’m zooming in on pro-lifers because they’re the group who can least credibly claim that they’re actually only protecting the interests of living people [climate change, national debt, etc., might harm people who are already here, and some of those harms could be averted]).
> These days, by and large, the pro-life view isn’t arrived at emotionally or by cultural osmosis — if you’re pro-life, you were probably made that way by an argument. You kept an open mind, and had the courage to say ‘yep… abortion is murder’, even in spite of the immense social pressure to continue mouthing conformist bromides (emphasis on bro) like ‘it’s a choice’ and ‘who cares, it’s a ball of cells’.
I can imagine this to be locally true for you in the UK, but keep in mind they're are hundreds of millions of Evangelicals in the world and billions of Catholics and Muslims that are committed to pro lifeism. I myself grew up in the infamously progressive Netherlands but still my family is very pro life and that's the milieu I grew up in.
Your argument is going to apply to pro-choicers too -- many of whom would gladly fight to plant the seed of pro-choice ethics into a country's womb -- even if that country is thoroughly pro-life and won't take their ideas seriously for decades.
Yes — many political coalitions are implicitly on board with longtermism! (I picked pro-lifers because they’re the group that can least credibly claim to be only (or even mostly) fighting for the interests of actual people in practice).
But aren't you assuming that their pro-life commitments are context-invariant? Often people think they're committed to a cause or a set of principles, but then circumstances change and they do a 180 (like Democrats with campaign finance reform and Republicans with family values).
Idk, I suspect if pro-lifers had to choose between rejecting longtermism but restricting their activism only to abortion clinic buffer zones, crisis pregnancy centres, etc., the hardcore ones that matter for the movement would sooner embrace longtermism
I listened to some of the linked video that you cite as convincing you to support abortion. I didn't listen to all 40 minutes, so forgive me if this is addressed at some point in the video, though if it was I'd be curious what the response is. The fellow in the video simply makes the familiar argument that "you" are your "mind," not your whole physical being. How does this position not justify infanticide, granted that an infant displays little difference in kind from a later-stage fetus in regards to having a distinct "mind" that we would typically think of as separating human beings in moral worth from animals? Or is the response to simply yes-chad it and say "that's right killing babies is actually based?"
Well, infants are conscious, and so are late foetuses, so they both have minds on our view. (I don’t know whether Dustin thinks late abortions should be legal for autonomy reasons — I think maybe he’s on the fence), but I think late term abortions are murder.
It doesn’t entail that, no. You can say human minds have a higher moral status than non-human minds for the same reasons that pro-lifers typically say cognitively impaired humans have a higher moral status than non-human animals (the mind’s root capacity for agency, reason, moral deliberation, etc.; being made in the imagio dei; whatever move the pro-lifer makes to justify speciesist intuitions about human organisms, the pro-choices who thinks we’re minds can co-opt.)
(Dustin mentioned to me one time that he wants to write a paper called (I think) “Against Killing Babies”, which responds to pro-choice defences of infanticide.)
I think a better argument against the view that persons are minds rather than bodily organisms is that such a view would give to a particularly grotesque varient of the non-identity problem... It'd entail that certain forms of prenatal abuse—specifically ones which alter the identity of the fetus's future mind—are harmless, and so intentionally causing, say, cerebral palsy to an unborn child harms nobody (as long as the child goes on to have a life worth living).
Another strategy for pro-lifers would be to just grant Dustin's view, yet deny that it leads to a pro-choice conclusion. Even if persons are minds, it could be argued, a human organism could still have all the valuable experiences of a person [it has the same nervous system, why wouldn't it?], and it would be wrong to deprive THIS organism of such valuable experiences while it's an embryo. Granted, abortion would only be half as wrong as murder in this scenario, but it'd be enough to vindicate the pro-life view.
Not just the future of value argument, I think this latter strategy can salvage all pro-life arguments, even the traditional one from biological essentialism, and renders the "people are minds, not organisms" objection completely moot.
I'm still not entirely clear on what's involved in long-termism. :) But to take one specific issue, say climate change, a lot of the arguments on the "Maybe let's not pass a bunch of policy regulations around this stuff" side hinge on their own kind of long-termist concerns about the human misery such regulations will tend to cause.
I am not sure any side of the abortion debate is particularly logical. The pro-life side seems just as emotional though coming from a different place. I think Carl Sagan’s take on it was the best and it was pro-choice mostly. As for longtermism I am pretty sure everyone is to some extent. The issue is we are pretty poor at predicting the future and while this does not mean we should ignore long-term issues like climate change I do think and exclusive focus on future generations and ignoring issues in the present is just as shortsighted. Besides maybe the AI everyone thinks will take over the world and kill all humans actually helps us solve some existential threat. It is possible.
So…sheepishly asking here…who is it that finds longtermism problematic or controversial? I don’t understand why there would be an objection to thinking ahead. I mean you have the Long Now Foundation, Danny Hillis, a 25,000-year clock, are these believed to pose some difficulty? Why would anyone actually oppose longtermism? 🐑
I mean, we do want to watch out for unintended consequences, we wouldn’t want to saddle future generations with debt to pay off 35-lane expressways we built for them when they’ll all work from home anyway
I've been pro life as long as I've had opinions. I'm sympathetic to EA and long-termism, and I definitely think they stem from a similar moral impulse.
On your last point though, I think you should probably try to steelman the virtue of Humility, instead of treating those arguments as object-level cope. In context, they're probably mostly cope, as Scott Alexander has pointed out innumerable times. I still think there is a stronger version of the point, though not as an argument. It is a basic perspective that leads people to be scared of bold moves or claims. It isn't useful in argument, it can't prove or convince anything or anyone. It doesn't work in arguments because it isn't an argument, it's just a ridiculously low prior on humanity's ability to do anything.
Longtermism is inherently wrong bc the people with access to the best technology will still be the same people as today - the ones creating the problems technology is meant to fix.
I note that the same arguments apply equally to people concerned about the effects of climate change on future generations, or appeals to concern about future generations in relation to the national debt. Generally speaking politics is full of commitments to the not yet existent.
Yup. (I’m zooming in on pro-lifers because they’re the group who can least credibly claim that they’re actually only protecting the interests of living people [climate change, national debt, etc., might harm people who are already here, and some of those harms could be averted]).
> These days, by and large, the pro-life view isn’t arrived at emotionally or by cultural osmosis — if you’re pro-life, you were probably made that way by an argument. You kept an open mind, and had the courage to say ‘yep… abortion is murder’, even in spite of the immense social pressure to continue mouthing conformist bromides (emphasis on bro) like ‘it’s a choice’ and ‘who cares, it’s a ball of cells’.
I can imagine this to be locally true for you in the UK, but keep in mind they're are hundreds of millions of Evangelicals in the world and billions of Catholics and Muslims that are committed to pro lifeism. I myself grew up in the infamously progressive Netherlands but still my family is very pro life and that's the milieu I grew up in.
Your argument is going to apply to pro-choicers too -- many of whom would gladly fight to plant the seed of pro-choice ethics into a country's womb -- even if that country is thoroughly pro-life and won't take their ideas seriously for decades.
Yes — many political coalitions are implicitly on board with longtermism! (I picked pro-lifers because they’re the group that can least credibly claim to be only (or even mostly) fighting for the interests of actual people in practice).
But aren't you assuming that their pro-life commitments are context-invariant? Often people think they're committed to a cause or a set of principles, but then circumstances change and they do a 180 (like Democrats with campaign finance reform and Republicans with family values).
Idk, I suspect if pro-lifers had to choose between rejecting longtermism but restricting their activism only to abortion clinic buffer zones, crisis pregnancy centres, etc., the hardcore ones that matter for the movement would sooner embrace longtermism
I listened to some of the linked video that you cite as convincing you to support abortion. I didn't listen to all 40 minutes, so forgive me if this is addressed at some point in the video, though if it was I'd be curious what the response is. The fellow in the video simply makes the familiar argument that "you" are your "mind," not your whole physical being. How does this position not justify infanticide, granted that an infant displays little difference in kind from a later-stage fetus in regards to having a distinct "mind" that we would typically think of as separating human beings in moral worth from animals? Or is the response to simply yes-chad it and say "that's right killing babies is actually based?"
Well, infants are conscious, and so are late foetuses, so they both have minds on our view. (I don’t know whether Dustin thinks late abortions should be legal for autonomy reasons — I think maybe he’s on the fence), but I think late term abortions are murder.
Does this mean killing any animal is equivalent to killing an infant?
It doesn’t entail that, no. You can say human minds have a higher moral status than non-human minds for the same reasons that pro-lifers typically say cognitively impaired humans have a higher moral status than non-human animals (the mind’s root capacity for agency, reason, moral deliberation, etc.; being made in the imagio dei; whatever move the pro-lifer makes to justify speciesist intuitions about human organisms, the pro-choices who thinks we’re minds can co-opt.)
>the mind’s root capacity for agency, reason, moral deliberation<
What is the evidence that a late-stage fetus has more capacity for these things than a cat?
(Dustin mentioned to me one time that he wants to write a paper called (I think) “Against Killing Babies”, which responds to pro-choice defences of infanticide.)
I think a better argument against the view that persons are minds rather than bodily organisms is that such a view would give to a particularly grotesque varient of the non-identity problem... It'd entail that certain forms of prenatal abuse—specifically ones which alter the identity of the fetus's future mind—are harmless, and so intentionally causing, say, cerebral palsy to an unborn child harms nobody (as long as the child goes on to have a life worth living).
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11406-021-00409-4
Another strategy for pro-lifers would be to just grant Dustin's view, yet deny that it leads to a pro-choice conclusion. Even if persons are minds, it could be argued, a human organism could still have all the valuable experiences of a person [it has the same nervous system, why wouldn't it?], and it would be wrong to deprive THIS organism of such valuable experiences while it's an embryo. Granted, abortion would only be half as wrong as murder in this scenario, but it'd be enough to vindicate the pro-life view.
Not just the future of value argument, I think this latter strategy can salvage all pro-life arguments, even the traditional one from biological essentialism, and renders the "people are minds, not organisms" objection completely moot.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bioe.12692
I'm still not entirely clear on what's involved in long-termism. :) But to take one specific issue, say climate change, a lot of the arguments on the "Maybe let's not pass a bunch of policy regulations around this stuff" side hinge on their own kind of long-termist concerns about the human misery such regulations will tend to cause.
Well, you’ll be glad to hear that in practice, the main left-wing criticism of longtermism is that longtermists don’t make climate change an especially high priority (e.g., https://thebulletin.org/2022/11/what-longtermism-gets-wrong-about-climate-change/amp/ ; https://www.sav.sk/journals/uploads/1211174710.31577filozofia.2023.78.10.Suppl.11.pdf). In reality, longtermists have pretty diverse views on climate change (it’s pretty broad church), and many are skeptical of progressive climate policy. In general, they’re not super focused on climate change in practice because (a) they think it has a significantly lower chance of wiping out human civilisation than AI misalignment, synthetic biology, and nuclear war, and (b) because the climate change is already getting a lot of policy attention, whereas the main things longtermists are worried about are much more neglected (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/BvNxD66sLeAT8u9Lv/climate-change-and-longtermism-new-book-length-report).
So, yeah, the big three issues for most longtermists are biorisk, AI alignment, and nuclear war. It would take a while to summarise everything, but here’s an article that sums up the movement https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220805-what-is-longtermism-and-why-does-it-matter, and here are sone links to articles on the specific threats to future people longtermists are worried about https://theprecipice.com/syllabus
I am not sure any side of the abortion debate is particularly logical. The pro-life side seems just as emotional though coming from a different place. I think Carl Sagan’s take on it was the best and it was pro-choice mostly. As for longtermism I am pretty sure everyone is to some extent. The issue is we are pretty poor at predicting the future and while this does not mean we should ignore long-term issues like climate change I do think and exclusive focus on future generations and ignoring issues in the present is just as shortsighted. Besides maybe the AI everyone thinks will take over the world and kill all humans actually helps us solve some existential threat. It is possible.
So…sheepishly asking here…who is it that finds longtermism problematic or controversial? I don’t understand why there would be an objection to thinking ahead. I mean you have the Long Now Foundation, Danny Hillis, a 25,000-year clock, are these believed to pose some difficulty? Why would anyone actually oppose longtermism? 🐑
I mean, we do want to watch out for unintended consequences, we wouldn’t want to saddle future generations with debt to pay off 35-lane expressways we built for them when they’ll all work from home anyway
Yeah.
I've been pro life as long as I've had opinions. I'm sympathetic to EA and long-termism, and I definitely think they stem from a similar moral impulse.
On your last point though, I think you should probably try to steelman the virtue of Humility, instead of treating those arguments as object-level cope. In context, they're probably mostly cope, as Scott Alexander has pointed out innumerable times. I still think there is a stronger version of the point, though not as an argument. It is a basic perspective that leads people to be scared of bold moves or claims. It isn't useful in argument, it can't prove or convince anything or anyone. It doesn't work in arguments because it isn't an argument, it's just a ridiculously low prior on humanity's ability to do anything.
I don't really see where any pro-lifer is supposed to be bothered by any of this? What's the controversy?
Longtermism is inherently wrong bc the people with access to the best technology will still be the same people as today - the ones creating the problems technology is meant to fix.