Amble, Part One

It is difficult to know exactly how to continue on from my Preamble. I guess the first thing to do might be to state the question. One way would be to ask the question in the way it has often been asked, ‘when does life begin?’ This is not a very helpful way to ask the question, since life began somewhere billions of years ago, in the primordial ooze, and ever since then the lives of individuals have been tangled together in complicated ways. What we are really arguing about is, when does a particular life become individuated enough from other life that it is worthy of moral consideration. But I don’t think that is really the question either: the question is, how much moral consideration should we pay to an individual life during the process of individuation, relative to the amount of consideration we pay to a fully individuated life? I think that is what this debate is about.

I will not attempt to justify the assertion that individuated lives are worthy of moral consideration; this is a fairly constant feature of the morality given to us by the great sages and prophets of the past.

A logical place to set ‘individuation’ would seem to be ‘when the new individual is capable of independent existence’.

This is the position argued by the philsopher A.C.Grayling in a recent essay in the New Scientist on reproductive technologies. In it he asserts that people like me are ‘moral sentimentalists’, who are more interested in the quantity of life than its quality. In my case he is correct, though in a different sense than he intends: I am not interested in life as a ‘quality’, but in life as a ‘quantity’. Saying that life is a quality that is either there or not, and that at one stage in the life cycle an entity does not have this quality, and is therefore not worthy of any moral consideration, while at another stage it does have this quality, and therefore is- that does not make sense within a scientific worldview. It only makes sense in the context of a philsophy where the value of life is associated with a ‘soul’ which is explicitly united with the body at some particular time, before which the body is only a ‘tissue of water’, as the Talmudic scholars say. It is valid for St. Thomas Aquinas to talk about life as a quality, within his set of assumptions; it is valid for Talmudic scholars to talk about life as a quality; but for a secular philosopher like A.C.Grayling, life ought to be a quantity. How much of this thing called ‘life’ is present at each particular point of the life cycle? How much moral consideration should we give an entity with this particular quantity of life? I recognise that these two things are different questions, but I will collapse them into one question. I will assert that there is a quantity, Q, which is a measure of the moral consideration we should grant an entity on the basis of the Noachian commandment ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’, and consider the different ways in which Q might vary as a function of age. The Q(t) curve accepted by St. Thomas Aquinas and accepted (in theory) by our legal system is something like this:


Boolean/Thomistic/UK Common Law/Pre-persons Q(t) Curve

A logical place to set ‘individuation’ would seem to be ‘when the new individual is capable of independent existence’. From this assumption, it would make sense to extend it moral consideration to the extent that it is capable of independent existence.
This principle has never been followed strictly by any society that I know of, but something like it has been the practice of many societies with a high infant mortality. I think A. C. Grayling has made the implicit assumption- quite a common one- that ‘independent existence’ means ‘being able to breathe’, but this is very far from being independent existence; we would not call being able to breathe ‘independent existence’ at the other end of the life cycle; we would not call being able to eat food that is put in your mouth ‘independent existence’. Acquiring the capacity for independent existence is a continuum, and there is no rational reason for picking ‘being able to breathe’ as where it should be defined. Fully independent existence could possibly begin at an age of about four, if our system of education was radically different from what it is now. Before then- and long afterwards- we are all capable only of dependent existence.
A rational Q(t) curve based on the ‘capable of independent existence’ criterion would look something like this:


Independent Existence Q(t) Curve

Many people may never become capable of independent existence, or anything remotely like it, and yet would certainly be able to say, ‘don’t kill me’. Being able to say ‘don’t kill me’ would seem to be a more effective touchstone of whether an entity has a high Q value than whether the entity is capable of independent existence. When we were younger, we could not enunciate this sentiment; but we could express it in inarticulate noises and in actions. A rational Q(t) curve based on the ‘capable of asserting a preference for existing’ criterion would look something like this, mapping very closely onto the second Q(t) curve:


‘Don’t kill me, please!’ Q(t) curve

While I think it is more likely to be shifted toward a younger age, as shown, I will not cavil, and for practical purposes the two curves could be considered to be the same. This is a perfectly logical curve for the valuation of human life- it could be accepted without rancour in many societies. This is the stable solution to which you will inexorably be led, I believe, if you follow either the “capable of independent’ existence or “asks not to be killed” paradigms. Both of these are both continua; they are both slippery things. Collapsing them to a Boolean curve of the type shown in the first figure whether the discontinuity is at the age of three months to be consistent with Aquinas, or twelve years as in Philip K. Dick’s “The Pre-Persons”, is an arbitrary exercise. No selection that we make on a ‘practical’ basis to make the curves more consistent with our instinctive moral sentimentality will be a stable solution.
Now, the fact that I find these curves morally unacceptable- and more importantly, the fact that the great sages and prophets found these curves unacceptable- is the primary reason that I have for rejecting them. But is there anything logically wrong with the assumptions behind them?

This is what I think the logical error is:
Things that exist in space-time cannot be assessed on their properties at one particular instant alone; their probable future properties must also be taken into account.

This is something that we do all the time. The medical powers-that-be frown on smoking because of the probable future properties of lungs that may be perfectly healthy now. We do not look any more favourably on the slugs that destroy the cucumber plants just because there are no cucumbers on the vines yet. The full force of the law falls upon the smuggler who brings in ingredients for making amphetamines, chemicals which may have no physiological effect. The insurance company will charge us higher premiums for living on a flood plain even if there has not been a flood in our lifetimes.

‘Probable’ is a quantitative, not a qualitative concept; it is something that can have a number attached to it. If there is a high probability that- if we do nothing- an entity existing at this point in time will acquire the capacity for ‘independent existence’ or the ability to say ‘don’t kill me’ at a future time, we cannot treat it in the same way as an entity that does not have that potential; we must treat it with a consideration proportional to that probability. Let us pick any end point we like- rudimentary ‘independence’ at seven months gestation; full independence after the fashion of Mowgli at five or six years; ability to speak; ability to do higher algebra- in all cases, the relative Q(t) curves will be identical, and will look like this:


Probabilistic Q(t) Curve

This curve has one very sharp, very prominent discontinuity, and only one: over a few hours or days at conception, the probability of a particular person X reaching any endpoint we select, if simply left alone from that point onward, increases by a factor of about nine orders of magnitude.

Me too!

I couldn't resist doing a Film Forensics as well...

The Day After Tomorrow

State of body: Perfectly preserved, as though flash frozen in an instant. Stomach contents still intact.

Detail of inspection: I had to drive home so I only had two glasses of wine and examined the body in a state of near-complete sobriety..

Forensic Investigator: Dr. Clam

Comments: This unfortunate corpse provides a wealth of scientific information about its historical epoch.

Although some of the fun has gone out of movies in which New York is reduced to ruins, there was such a lot of fun in those movies to start with that I found this one thoroughly enjoyable. I would love to see one of the classic ‘World Meets Well Deserved Fate’ novels done with the special effects we have today- the ‘Black Cloud’ or ‘Inferno’ by Fred Hoyle, Fritz Leiber’s ‘The Wanderer’, Frank Herbert’s ‘The White Plague’- to list some examples by people whose names begin with ‘F’.

Yes, I enjoyed this film. While the science was pretty silly, the heavily pushed message: ‘Listen to the wise scientists! They know better than the politicians!’ is one I could only applaud. It is good to see a film portraying us scientists as we really are- tough action hero types, stoic and self-sacrificing under pressure, the only ones who keep our heads when the world around us descends into madness, the ones who get the girl and save the world- or at least explain convincingly why it can’t be saved.

I loved the square-jawed, cardboard-cut out, completely ineffectual President. I could vote for somebody like that. Maybe I have, oops. And even Vice President Cheney- or whatever his name was, I forget- came across as clueless and avuncular rather than as some devious right-wing conspirator covered with oil company pocket lint. I don’t remember the last time I saw such a basically nice administration portrayed in fiction or non-fiction, notwithstanding the fact that they were supposed to be the bad guys. If this film was supposed to be satire, it was about as pointed and malicious as a sponge bath.

I also found the heavy-handed preaching completely inoffensive. Because the results of global warming were portrayed in such a ludicrously over-the-top fashion, the preaching came across about as convincing as the preaching of some bucktoothed hillbilly preacher. [very badly done example of bucktoothed hillbilly preaching deleted here]

I loved the way the core of the film was a pastiche of ‘Scott of the Antarctic’ and Jack Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’ – a manly journey to somewhere for no particularly good reason; once you get there, you turn around and come back. I would not change that. I would keep that, that is archetypal and timeless.

These are things I would change:

• H.G. Wells said that the key to good science fiction set in the modern world (his modern world, of course, not ours) was to change just one thing and keep the rest as much like it is as possible. Hence, he did the invisible man thing; he did the Martians invade Earth thing; but he points out to us that he didn’t have invisible Martians invade Earth, that would be too much. The core premise of this movie was not as dumb as I was led to believe before I saw it- though it is still pretty dumb- and you could build a pretty decent film around it. The core assumption that is being made for the sake of science fictiony disaster movieness is that the failure of the North Atlantic Current could generate some wacky weather features of a kind never seen before in recorded history, with wacky cores of super-cold. So: cut all the references to weird weather in places like India and Australia. Ditto the tornadoes destroying Los Angeles, hard as I find it to condemn anything that destroys Los Angeles. The giant ice-age causing storms should take the world by surprise.

• A nastier set of bad guys. The administration could be oily and smooth and happy to say the right things and support Hero Scientist’s research, and all the time be taking trailer-loads of cash from the oil companies.

• The debate about what to do could be made much more exciting if it was more accurate. ‘But implementing the Kyoto Protocol will cost the world economy hundreds of trillions of dollars!’ ‘I’m sorry, Mr Vice President, the Kyoto Protocol isn’t enough. You must immediately begin genetically engineering super-soldier penguins to stop the flow of fresh water from the Antarctic ice shelves.’ Okay, so that isn’t more accurate, technically. Feel free to replace everything after ‘You must…’ with your own pipe-dream from your reading of New Scientist or Green Left Weekly.

• The Wolves. Dumb, dumb, dumb. Puke. Only people who have utterly forgotten what drama is could have considered putting them in.

• More panic-stricken nastiness among the citizens of New York. They were all too nice.

• A more convincing reason for Yoda and his friends to be left behind in a small group at the library. Maybe some grim-faced Men in Black types with helicopters could show up and organize things, rather than just one cop having a bright idea. This could reinforce the ‘scientist wise, politician clueless’ core message of the film.

• More sensible survival behaviour for Yoda and his friends- I get the feeling none of the writers grew up playing role playing games, so it is not surprising they didn’t think of these things immediately. For example: (1) Books make good insulation. Line the walls of the room with books. (2) There are lots of other building close by with food and stuff in them. It didn’t look hard at all to make furtive sallies to other buildings.

• If the air is below freezing already, it has hardly any moisture in it. Dropping the temperature suddenly by 10 degrees a second is not going to make frost dramatically grow all over everything. This was just more special-effects madness from people who have forgotten what drama is.

• I kept waiting for the homeless guy’s dog to be flash-frozen. I guess I just have very little self-control, but I would have flash-frozen his dog at some point.

These last two points might imperil the rating the producers were aiming for, but I would do them anyway:

• Fetching antibiotics- even if chased by wolves- does not compare with an emergency amputation under primitive conditions. Bite down on this, Laura.

• Of course, if Laura had gotten properly naked in order to effectively warm the hypothermic Yoda with her body heat, one of them could have noticed how nasty her wound was and they could start worrying about it. This could conveniently make them stop whatever else they were doing, avoiding any danger of the rating getting too out of control. The Laura’s wound subplot could then be milked all the way up to the emergency amputation, like the toe of that guy in ‘Scott of the Antarctic’.

This is one of those films that is dated almost before it appears in the cinemas, providing a flash-frozen picture of the Zeitgeist for future generations. The particular mixture of earnest preachiness about global warming, coy avoidance of its cause and cure, and timid deference to an administration that cries out for spirited mockery, could only have been created at this particular point in history.

The Blue Cross

Quoth Marco: One of my longest held beliefs has been that there isn't an absolute good. I am hoping that this won't necessarily mean I can't argue (with you) about what ought to be done, but this does explain to me why I have fallen short of saying what ought to be done, especially in regards to abortion law. I do believe in a sense of "relative" good with regards to humanity as a whole. I am not sure how you cope with things that look bad, but actually work towards the greater good. I think that "morally bad" things, that have the consequence of a net "moral good" should be taken into account.

It should be abundantly clear that I am willing that evil should be done in order that a greater good may result: viz. my support for the war in Iraq, my suggestion that the Pope encourage believers to shoot abortionists, and my concession that if the eternal damnation of non-Muslims (for instance) was positively proved, a reasonable moral response would be to destroy our species. If these instances of Menachem Begin’s dictum ‘some ends justify some means’ fall short of the hypothetical you are envisaging, I am a little nervous to think of what you might be contemplating...

In a technical sense, it is true that I would reject ‘the end justifies the means’, if ‘justify’ is meant in the ‘justified by faith’ sense of ‘made perfectly okay’. I think participation in a just war is not without sin. I think it is intrinsically bad to shoot abortionists rather than appeal to their reason. I think wiping out our species would be bad. We can quite easily find ourselves in options where all the options available to us are quite, quite, evil, and picking the best of a bad lot does not make us ‘good’.

I am curious about your belief that there is a relative morality ‘for humanity.’ This would seem to fall short of the strong relativist thesis that good and evil are social constructs. If you reject a morality that is intrinsically ‘true’, like mathematics, are you making the assertion that morality is a biological rather than social construct? That we have, as a species, evolved to consider some things good and some things evil, regardless of our cultural background? This is not implausible. However, I regret that if I believed morality was biologically constructed- and this is only me- I would also believe it was absolutely non-binding and irrelevant to me personally. If we had evolved to consider some things good and some things evil- and this consideration does not correspond to any objective reality- I would consider morality just another irritating fact of human biology to be overcome, like our human addiction to sugar, dependence on eating dead animals, or urge to have sex with lots of people.

But, Allahu akbar, I do not believe any such thing! I will close with the words of Chesterton’s Father Brown:

‘Reason and justice grip the remotest and loneliest star. Look at those stars. Don’t they look as if they were single diamonds and sapphires? Well, you can imagine any mad botany or geology you please. Think of forests of adamant with leaves of brilliants. Think the moon is a blue moon, a single elephantine sapphire. But don’t fancy that all that frantic astronomy would make the smallest difference to the reason and justice of conduct. On plains of opal, under cliffs cut of pearl, you would still find a notice-board, “Thou shalt not steal.”’

Preamble

I have been intending for some time to make a more rigorous exposition of my probabilistic position on the value of life. As Marco has pointed out, what we need is acost-benefit analysis of abortion, and for this we require a mechanism to quantify the value of human life as a function of age.

What I need to do first is outline the assumptions on which my argument will be based.

1. There is such a thing as absolute truth.
There are properties of the universe that are there, there are statements that are true, whether or not we believe them or not, whether or not anyone exists to believe them at all. Discussions of this kind are not intended for us to display our party colours, but should be attempts to approach closer to this thing called truth.

1a. We have no mechanism to know what truth is with certainty.
However, we can examine the evidence of our senses and make reasonable judgments about the probability of some statements being truer than others.

1b. A truer statement about the universe is one that involves us in fewer difficulties when we take action based on it.
To take one example, the breathairian statement: ‘It is possible for humans to exist without eating or drinking,’ involves us in serious difficulties almost immediately. The creationist statement: ‘The universe was created on October 23rd, 4004 BCE’ may not immediately involve us in difficulties in our everyday lives, but we will find it of much less utility than alternate statements if we are engaged in the practical business of looking for oil.

1c. To turn statement 1b around, the more our actions are based on a knowledge of the true state of the universe, the more likely they are to turn out the way we intended.
If we want our actions to be successful, however we chose to define success, we should:
1c.i. Strive for the most true understanding of the universe as we can, and
1c ii. Strive to make our actions as consistent with that understanding as possible.

If you have any problems with assumption 1, gentle reader - not that I expect you do, but God in heaven, there are enough people out there who would deny it! - then you may be a very fine person, but there is absolutely no use in trying to argue with you. You do not share the fundamental assumption that gives arguing whatever value it may have. One may as well argue with an eggplant.

2. There is such a thing as absolute good.
I don’t mean that there is a big box of white hats and another big box of black hats, and that all people and things and actions have to wear one or another. 'Good' is a direction in idea-space, like ‘up’ is a direction in near-Earth-space. I believe that all the possible actions one of us can take at any one time can be objectively ranked from best to worst. I believe this would be true whether or not I, or anyone, believed it. Even if there were no moral agents in the universe, this ranking would hold true for a hypothetical entity faced with the hypothetical situation.

2a. We cannot know what is good with certainty, but we can make reasonable statements about what actions are better than others based on the evidence of our senses.

2c. The word ‘ought’ has a real meeting. Thus, in addition to the criteria for assessing our actions above, we should also:
2c.i. Strive to know what is good.
2c.ii. Strive to make our actions as consistent with that understanding as possible.

I know that this second assumption is less likely to meet with agreement, and I can offer no argument in support of it. Like the first assumption, it is simply a pre-condition for being able to argue at all about certain matters. If you do not believe in absolute good, then you cannot logically argue with anyone about what ‘ought’ to be done. You can argue about will be most economical, or what will fulfill your goals, or the goals of your party, or planet, but you have no philosophical grounding for convincing others who do not share those goals. All you can really say is, ‘if you do not do what I say, you will fail,’ – which is not an argument about morality, or ‘if you do not do what I say, you will be punished,’ – which is tyranny.

I haven’t put a 2b, as a counterpart to 1b, because I do not have any simple operational statement to define what good is. We cannot do experiments to determine what is good. But I believe- and here is the most tenuous part of my assumptions- that there is such a thing as a moral sense which enables us to recognize good. I believe that in most of us it is vestigial, underdeveloped, like the eye of some sea creature sensitive only the gross variations in light and dark; but that some of us have a more developed moral sense than others, and by paying attention to their statements about what is good we cannot go too wrong. I am not claiming to be one of those people; my hubris is not quite as vast as that. I am only claiming that if we can discern a self-consistent core of moral ideas in the thought of all the sages of East and West, we would be unwise to set up a morality which does not incorporate this core.

I am sure that this all sounds either trivially self-evident or pathetically naïve. I will begin the argument proper soon…

Episode Four

This was written almost exactly a year ago, one of my last pre-blog rantings, and I never put it up since I felt it had too many identifying details in it. I did re-use the bit about John Kerry a while ago. It seemed appropriate to post it this week.

I have not been to church since September 2001 while living at home, only once in Armidale during the conference here in February 2002, and several times over Christmas 2002, when we were in Townsville. In both Armidale and Townsville I resolved to go to church regularly when I returned to Sydney, but I did not. I have not communicated for a longer time- I am not sure when. I know where, at the Chapel of the Resurrection at the University of Sydney, in 2000 or 2001.

I have written elsewhere of the one problem I have, the snag I am caught on. There are many things that I should write, but tonight I want to write about this coincidence of dates, if it is a coincidence. I went to St. Patricks, Guildford, where I had not been before, about ten days after September 11th 2001, and that was the last time I left my home and went to church. The homily did not mention what had happened in the United States- and why should it? Why should 3000 Americans be of more importance than 100,000 Algerians, or 600,000 Rwandans? They are not, of course. I know this, and I do not believe there was any singular horror or awfulness in the events of that day. Worse things have been done with machetes, with debt, with surgical instruments. They are being done now, to people who are much less legitimate targets for politically-motivated murder, in vastly greater numbers. But I have not been back to church since.

I have a sense of the impotence of the church that I did not have before. I do not want Catholics to blow themselves up in nightclubs, or hijack planes into buildings. But it seems we are incapable of doing anything. We raise money (mostly for schools and church buildings, which are futile) and we make pale and watery condemnations of the evils of the world. The children of the culture of death can ignore us, and mock us with impunity. We are a whited sepulchre, an empty shell.

There seems to be a qualitative difference between the motivating power of Catholicism and Islam. The senile religion of fatalism- as Chesterton called it- breeds men with an insane audacity; but we are cowards. There are no more Catholic knights-errant, and our Pontiff condemns just wars. I wish we were Crusaders, as Osama bin Laden calls us. When he calls us Crusaders and Zionists he gives us better names than we deserve. Crusaders and Zionists are cognates with Mujahideen. They sacrifice their own comfort and give their own lives in the service of a noble ideal. The Catholic church is inward-looking, impotent to change the pagan world, incompetent to bring Catholics (such as I) to church, impotent even to make orthodox those who do go to church. Humanae vitae could have been based on universal moral principles, on the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic bedrock of the Noachian commandments; it could have been proclaimed fearlessly to the nations. Instead, it is based entirely on a peculiarly catholic philosophy of marriage, defined by celibates. Is it any wonder it has failed?

John Kerry, the Democrat candidate for president of the United States, is a ‘pro choice’ Catholic. Can there be a more loathsome thing? Either he is a moral idiot, who has never understood one jot or tittle of the meaning behind the ritual, or he is a moral pygmy who would stifle any qualm that opposed his pursuit of power, or he is a moral coward, so paralysed by polls that he does not dare to vote his conscience, or he is a pure blackguard and devil worshipper, a perverted maniac prostrate before the altar of Moloch.

Pius XII opposed fascism and nazism, to the extent that it was practicable. The dictators detested him for it. He saved 100,000, 200,000 lives, perhaps, in Italy and Bulgaria. But he did not go down as a martyr; he did not condemn evil as the Vicar of Christ on earth should condemn evil. He did not denounce as a true prophet should denounce, beyond the extent that is practicable- and now he is a scandal, a stumbling block to the Jews and to the pagans.

Our Popes now oppose the culture of death, to the extent that it is practicable. The worshippers of Moloch hate them…

I want to see a Papacy that is impractical in its denunciations of evil. I want excommunications more numerous than autumn leaves upon the pseudo-Catholics of the decadent west. I want a refusal to meet with leaders of nations where abortion is legal. I want a general absolution for all those who take up arms in the just war against the murderers of the unborn. But this is not likely to happen. I suppose I am describing a Caliph, rather than a Pope. I suppose the impotence of the Popes will be a stumbling block to the non-Catholics of the 22nd century. And where am I to go?

Habemus Califam?

A Liberal Education

Charles Sanders Peirce, 1903:

"If I were asked to give a young gentleman a liberal education in 100 lessons, I should devote 50 lessons to teaching some branch, no matter which, thoroughly- say perhaps to boiling an egg- or at any rate so nearly thoroughly that the young man should begin to know what thoroughness really means, and should never thereafter be guilty of the ridiculous conceit of fancying that he knew English, for example. The other fifty I would distribute as follows: three lessons should teach the science of mathematics, one esthetics, two ethics, one metaphysics, one psychology, one the living and dead languages, one history, geography, and statistics ancient and modern, one dynamics and physics, one chemistry, one biology, one astronomy, geology, and physical geography, one law, divinity, medicine and the other applied sciences, and the remaining 36 should be devoted to logic. Thereupon I would give him a certificate to the effect that he was a more truly educated man than two-thirds of the doctors of philosophy the world over, and this certificate would have the singularity of being strictly true."

A Sunday with Philip K. Dick

Young Dave over in Lexifab is reading Philip K. Dick novels as part of his preparations for a bout of the flu, populating his subconscious with appropriate scenarios for some world-class fever dreams. It didn’t seem right to let this blog bleed into that one, so I didn’t make the comment I first thought of, which is that Dick wrote the most overtly propagandist anti-abortion short story I have ever read, ‘The Pre-Persons.’ Unfortunately, like Aleister Crowley and William Burroughs, the two literary figures I have previously cited as abortion opponents, Philip K. Dick was apparently also wildly misogynistic. I shall have to find some better exemplars.

At the opposite end of the spectrum is Sheri S. Tepper- who in real life was a big wheel in the abortion industry. Curiously enough, her pseudo-science fictiony fantasy novels are the other things that immediately leap to mind when I think of good stuff for inducing horrible dreams in the bedridden.

Who should I find quoted in the Jerusalem Post today but Philip K. Dick? Something like: ‘Reality is that thing that if you stop believing in it, it is still there.’ We need a word for that subset of ‘reality’ that would continue to exist if you or I or any particular person ceased to believe in it, and would only stop existing once nobody believed in it.

Also in the Jerusalem Post, Amir Taheri makes something like my cro-magnon metaphysics point with reference to the celebrated land war in Asia. There seems to be this idea among the ‘anti-war’ community that because there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in April 2003 the Ba’athist regime was no more dangerous than Belgium or Costa Rica, and Bush and Blair et al. owe us some sort of apology in sackcloth and ashes. But Iraq had had weapons of mass destruction; it had the capabilities to make them again; it had deliberately muddied the waters to make it impossible to tell whether it had them or not. It is not rational to make judgments merely on the properties an entity has at the present time: the probable future properties of the entity, projected forward from the recorded past properties of the entity, must also be taken into account.

Does it matter when a winning lottery ticket turns into a million dollars?
Does it matter when an irreplaceable handwritten manuscript turns into a Booker-Prize-winning novel?
Does it matter when a patent turns into a multimillion dollar product?
You wouldn’t steal any of those things, because, as Buffy the Vampire Slayer says: ‘You can’t do that. It’s wrong.’

And I ought to say something about the Pope being dead. I will not enter the arena of ‘What is the greatest evil, suffering or failing to realise your potential by, e.g., sitting around playing World of Warcraft all day?’ but instead will talk very briefly about something else. Everyone has mentioned Pope John Paul II’s greatest triumph, in the fall of communism, but I haven’t yet read one word about what I think he must have seen as his biggest failure. It is the same thing Bill Clinton thought was his greatest failure. I don’t think there has been a time and place since Croatia in the Second World War when so many Catholic clergy were personally involved in genocide. The whole country was nominally Catholic. Then one day half of them wake up and start killing the other half with machetes. I know I asked myself: What the hell is the good of this religion? Is it achieving anything at all? Is it just a paper-thin veneer of empty words? It would have really really bugged me, if I had been Pope. Most of those people in the eastern Congo who are still killing each other are nominally Catholic, too. I shouldn’t forget them.

Across the border from those two places is Uganda, with its abstinence and fidelity program, which they are currently arguing about in the medical journals, as to whether it has been better or worse than the anti-AIDS programs in neighbouring countries. Dave thinks I going too far in my Cephalopd Masters analogy by saying pregnancy is a ‘well-known and easily avoidable’ hazard, because human sexual behaviour is, like, I don’t know, basically the behaviour of idiots. Controlling this problem is easy. There are lots of good libido-destroying drugs that we could put in the water. I don’t think this is inconsistent with Humanae Vitae or an affront to the dignity of mankind. Freedom from unwanted sexual desire should be an inalienable human right, like freedom from unwanted fear, unwanted want, and unwanted having to hear John Laws on the radio. If you want to be afraid, you can move to one of those countries that still has a secret police; if you want to be hungry, don’t eat; if you decide that you really want to suffer sexual desire, buy the blocking medication- heavily taxed in order to cover the social costs of sexuality, naturally. I’ll vote for the first politician who suggests something like this. Secure in the knowledge that my household is totally dependent on rainwater, of course...

The Panglossian Imperative

It was claimed a while back in our discussion of global warming that it is better to be pessimistic and wrong than optimistic and wrong. This seems incontrevertible. By the same token, it is self-evidently better to be optimistic and right than to be pessimistic and right. This leads us to the tautological conclusion that if we expect to be wrong, we should be pessimists, and if we expect to be right, we should be optimists.

These useful guidelines, however, are only strictly applicable to situations that are completely beyond our control. Surely it is a bad thing to be pessimistic about Cephalopod United's chances in the Cup Final if we are their goalkeeper? Once we consider any situation in which we are a factor, to however small an extent, our atttitude becomes one of the factors that will determine the outcome. In such cases I believe we have a moral duty to be optmistic. By 'optimistic' I don't mean that we should deny that a problem exists, or that a potential problem will never come to pass, but that we should assume that the problem is soluble, and that it will be solved. We should not be 'realistic' and make our goal anything less than a solution of the problem- settling for the goal of containing communism rather than defeating it, for instance, or for limiting terminations to less than 18 weeks gestation. Once we assume that our true goal is unattainable, we have already lost.

But I am really advancing this not as a general theory- I have already argued in a few places that there are problems that we cannot solve, and must be endured in the hope that future generations will solve them- but as a prelude to answering Marco's 'home abortion kit' scenario with spurious meta-logic.

I, personally, must be inordinately optimistic in the ultimate victory of my cause, because doing so enables me to lead a normal life.

I could be pessimistic, and assume abortion will be with us forever. In that case I would have no choice but to retreat into a fantasy world, and spend all my time playing 'World of Warcraft'. (Hang on...)

Or, I could be somewhat pessimistic (or somewhat optimistic) and assume that the matter hung in the balance, so that my actions would play a part, however small, in swinging the matter one way or another. I could then either:
Live my life in an agony of guilt, because I am standing by and seeing genocide done; OR,
Seek to employ the formidable powers of Dr. Clam in the battle agaisnt evil, imperiling my comfortable existence as an employed non-fugitive.

Hence my refusal to seriously consider Marco's (perfectly plausible and logical) vision of the future.

Back to the Bathtub Curve

Now I am having fun! When I should be working and all, I know, I know...

Quoth Dave: How do you figure that demographics fits it? Are you just arguing from the perspective of the current neutral-to-slightly negative Western birth rate (i.e. poor population replacement rates leading to economic ruination etcetera)?

I think this is the first generation where people from what for want of a better term we could call the 'progressive' side of politics are not reproducing themselves.
I guess I am hoping that the Middle Eastern and Latin American populations that are making up the demographic shortfall in the West will remain true to their principles, and not become acculturated in the Culture of Death. I emoted about this back in the early days of the accidental blog, 'Now we are Thirty'.

Quoth Jenny: My point is, what happens when we get incubators? At that time, how far do we take medical intervention?

I think that inevitably, we will have to 'play God'. I think our modelling of the in vivo situation will be such that we will able to say, 'this embryo would have had a 60% chance of spontaneous abortion' in vivo; and I would think killing that person would be very much less than a full murder. Unavoidably there will be a cost-benefit analysis that will lead to certain foetuses with severe defects beings killed. I also think will probably be best not to incubate prior to about three months anyway, which would avoid some of these problems. There are a couple of previous posts over in Marco's blog that are kind of relevant to this question, this one and this one...

Our Octopoid Brethren

Dave said...
The foetus is not part of the mother? Then you go along with the 'parasitic infection' school of argument, used famously - and I presume with some degree of irony - by radical feminists to argue in favour of abortion?

The parasite analogy is purely emotive. It is just an elaborate way of saying: ‘You wouldn’t like it if you were in that position!’

If there were a race of blameless parasites with such a high probability of achieving free-living sentience, contracted so frequently in such a well-known and easily avoidable way, my position would be exactly the same. It would be a great evil to kill them. I do not have any irrational reverence for human life in particular: our slimy tentacular co-sentients are equally deserving of our consideration.

O Frabjous Day!

Quoth Dave: That is absolutely the first cogent argument I've ever heard against abortion.

On the other hand, as I have said before, I find the pro-abortion arguments perfectly reasonable. I just consider that they are based on fundamentally dumb premises. (This gives me no reason to hope they will stop being argued anytime soon, given the number of homeopaths, creationists, and astrologers in the world...) The idea that a foetus is somehow part of the mother is Pre-Copernican science, and the idea that only the properties of an entity at this particular instant should be considered when making moral judgments about it is Cro-magnon metaphysics.