Thursday, August 31, 2006
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Neil Sinhababu's philosophy and politics blog, 2004-2015 ‡ neiladri, at gmail dot com
My other blogs
I've blogged in many different places. Here are some of them:
I'm very proud of War or Car, where I posted a new thing you could buy for the price of the Iraq War everyday, for 121 days. This was during the 2008 elections, and I was glad that the antiwar candidate won. The site got its name because you could buy every American household a Toyota Prius for the $3 trillion price of the war. Or you could buy the Irish their annual beer intake, in Guinness, for a millennium. Or you could buy all the world's pandas their own personal stealth bombers!
Probably my greatest era of internet awesomeness was guestblogging for Ezra Klein long before he achieved his current superstardom at Vox. My posts there are pretty scattered, so they'll be hard to find. My work for Ezra catapulted me into other opportunities like filling in for Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly. After that from 2008 to 2015, my friend Nick Beaudrot and I wrote a blog called Donkeylicious. As the name suggests, it was largely about Democratic politics.
During the 2012 elections, I created a little blog called VoteSeeing that tabulated election predictions and graded predictors on how well they did. The folks at Daily Kos Elections won the prediction contest, with Nate Silver and FiveThirtyEight a close second. Shortly afterward, a group of philosophers at a blog called NewAPPS got me to put up a few posts for them.
This post at the Philosophers' Cocoon has more about my job at the National University of Singapore, where I'm a philosophy professor.
1 comment:
Neil,
You say this:
"Frodo, Spock, Yoda, and many other fictional nonhumans have minds like ours so their moral status is like that of humans."
So is this the claim?
(1) For every thing X, if X has a mind like ours, then X's moral status is like that of humans.
Then you go on to say:
"Not all human organisms have minds -- zygotes certainly don’t."
So is this the claim?:
(2) For every zygote Z, Z does not have a mind (like ours).
But it seems you want this conclusion:
(3) For every zygote Z, Z's moral status is not "like" that of humans.
You want the moral status of zygotes to be so unlike that of humans that destruction of zygotes is permissible. But it's not obvious to me how (3) is meant to follow from (1) and (2).
Did you mean for (1) to be biconditional? Are we missing this conjunct of that biconditional?
(1a) For every thing X, X's moral status is "like" that of humans only if X has a mind like ours.
Do you -- either in your initial review or in your rebuttal -- offer evidence for (1a)?
About (1a). It's unclear what it takes to be a "mind like ours", and you'll have to deal with vagueness. At first glance, it seems that young children are clear cut cases of things that do NOT have "minds like ours". So they also do not have moral status "like" that of humans. Yet I don't think you'd agree that killing young children (up until adolescence?) is morally permissible. So though they may not have moral status "like" us, they may have another moral status that renders killing impermissible. And why can't the pro-lifer claim the same thing about fetuses and zygotes?
The only alternative I see is that young children, including infants, do have "minds like ours". In which case I can't see why babies about to be born do not have "minds like ours".
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You also say this:
"Birth provides a clear and natural line for the inception of a right to life."
I don't see that at all. Why is the baby's journey of several inches morally significant? That journey doesn't have a bearing on whether the baby has a "mind like ours". So what other criterion are you using here?
Also, you approvingly cite an article in JAMA saying that fetuses probably don't feel pain until 23-30 weeks. However, they presuppose this:
"Pain perception requires conscious recognition or awareness of a noxious stimulus."
It sounds like they're claiming that in order for an organism to feel pain, that organism must have the capacity for introspection, the capacity to be aware of or to recognize pain. That seems overly restrictive, to say the least. I'm pretty sure that some lower animals experience pain, even if they don't have the ability to introspect and be aware of their pain. The fetus doesn't have to recognize that he or she is in pain, in order to be in pain. I think we can agree on that.
Anyway, yours was a good article that was well written. I think it just needs some work.
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