SIDS, Infanticide, and Abortion
moultano
Creator of ns_shiva. Join Date: 2002-12-14 Member: 10806Members, NS1 Playtester, Contributor, Constellation, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow, WC 2013 - Gold, NS2 Community Developer, Pistachionauts
Creator of ns_shiva. Join Date: 2002-12-14 Member: 10806Members, NS1 Playtester, Contributor, Constellation, NS2 Playtester, Squad Five Blue, Reinforced - Shadow, WC 2013 - Gold, NS2 Community Developer, Pistachionauts
in Discussions
<div class="IPBDescription">Is there any way to make sense of things?</div><!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->In my famously favorite passage from Arthur Machen's influential short story "The Great God Pan," just before the end, one of two amateur investigators has just uncovered the secret of what it was that was driving young, healthy, wealthy, secure young men to commit suicide on three continents, in a manuscript left behind by one of the suicides. After reading only a few words, the partner says, "Take it away, Villiers, never speak of this again. Are you made of stone, man? Why, the dread and horror of death itself, the thoughts of the man who stands in the keen morning air on the black platform, bound, the bell tolling in his ears, and waits for the harsh rattle of the bolt, are as nothing compared to this. I will not read it; I should never sleep again." The original investigator assures him that it is true, but finishes by agreeing with the sentiment: "Oh, Austin, how can it be? How is it that the very sunlight does not turn to blackness before this thing, the hard earth melt and boil beneath such a burden?"
I think that 30 scientists and researchers from a half dozen or more different fields who gathered in rural France in 1990 to check each others' work must have felt something of that same horror when they found that they could not disprove their mutual finding. It was something that none of them wanted to believe. It was a thought that only one of the 30 of them was willing to confront the implications of, and do further research to explore the implications of. And I'm sure that they knew or at least suspected that no matter how important their scientific finding was, they would be vilified for a lifetime if they made society confront this awful truth, and that was a price that they were unwilling to pay. And see, that, to me, is the fascinating thing, even more fascinating than the awful truth itself. On the contrary, almost all of my friends that I've discussed this with since I read the book have agreed with me that, given the weight of the evidence, the awful truth in question is pretty undeniable, is important to know, and (contrary to what some might think) it is something we can learn to live with the knowledge of. If this knowledge becomes widespread, it may and probably will cause some hardship for some innocent people. But the good to society will, I believe, out-weigh those harms. So no, really, the awful truth that I'm about to reveal to you will seem anti-climactic compared to the dread that the scientists who discovered it felt.
After a several year career as one of the second generation of women to do fieldwork in primatology, Sarah Hrdy and her husband decided to have their first child. She was already in the middle of preparations to shift her career from primatology to a subject that would allow her to do her fieldwork closer to home, with fewer long absences from home, and in a more comfortable setting to raise a baby in, namely evolutionary biology, when it occurred to her (as a mother to be) just out of personal interest to study the mothering patterns of the colony of monkeys she was observing. She knew to expect high infant mortality. Primatologists have known for over a hundred years that baby monkeys and baby apes are at extreme risk from any male other than their father. (As are baby humans.) But Hrdy was startled to discover, when she tracked the mothers of new infants carefully, that infants were at almost as much risk of murder from their own mothers as they were from unrelated male adults. This baffled her for several reasons, not least of which that while there had been a great deal of research into infanticide in primates, nobody had ever reported a case of a female primate killing her own offspring except by freakish accident. The other reason it baffled her was that, as an evolutionary biologist, she could make no sense whatsoever as to how evolution could produce individuals that destroyed their own offspring, especially among such slowly reproducing species as primates. So she contacted a few other primatologists studying other colonies of monkeys and asked them to carefully monitor the actions of new mothers ... and to their astonishment, they observed the same thing.
So she gave a preliminary paper on the subject in 1976, suggesting that more research was needed to explain how this behavior could possibly have evolved in primates, only to be interrupted in mid talk by an audience member, a prominent expert in her field. He stood up, tried to stop her from finishing reading her paper, announced that primate females absolutely do not every murder their own children, and that if she had observed a primate colony in which primate females were killing their own children, it could only be because of something she had done to them; she must have committed some horrible breach of experimental ethics that so deranged these monkeys that she had driven them insane enough to do something that no monkey had ever done before. He then stormed out of the talk and went directly to the scientific press to denounce her for whatever it was that she had done to that monkey colony, so it probably is a good thing that she was already planning on changing fields, no?
So she quietly continued her study, working behind the scenes with other researchers while she directed her own studies towards less controversial animals, such as insects. Eventually she discovered something that appalled even her with its simplicity. Not only do mothers sometimes kill their own children, they are almost never insane when they do so. On the contrary, for a mother to murder her own child is an evolutionary adaptation without which our species would not have survived some of the environmental and social disasters of the past. What's more, the actual reasoning behind this is so simple that a straightforward simple equation in four variables is sufficient to provide a reliable estimate of the probability that any particular mother will murder any particular infant: the age of the mother, whether or not this child is the gender that the mother wanted (which, itself, turns out to be easily and universally predicted based on only two variables, the mother's social status and the predicted reliability of the food supply), the child's birth weight (and to a lesser extent other indicators of long-term viability), and her estimate of whether or not attempting to nurture this particular child will only get both her and the child killed. When she took her early estimates for this equation to the 1990 conference, she discovered that epidemiologists studying SIDS, primatologists studying infanticide (following her 1976 tip), historians digging through old records to try to quantify infanticide throughout the ages, criminologists and social psychologists trying to come up with statistical models to predict mother-on-child infanticide, and anthropologists trying to statistically analyze what variables are most consistent with cultures that have high versus low rates of infanticide, had all independently discovered the same equation. And from her viewpoint as an evolutionary biologist, Hrdy demonstrates that any sane, healthy, normal, intelligent mothers who weren't capable of coldly murdering their own infant children almost certainly had no surviving descendants at all to be our ancestors during some of the species-wide threats that have been demonstrated to have happened from the fossil record and from studies of rates of genetic drift.
I mention SIDS. One of the researchers, she says, was an epidemiologist who, in the process of trying to quantify his hunch, initiated a study in which social workers and police very, very intensively interviewed and background checked a long string of crib deaths that had been explained away as unexplained random respiratory failure. It turns out that his equation was able to predict, with high (but not absolute) reliability, which infants had actually been the victims of homicide or malign neglect. If the infant was a boy when the mother wanted a girl or vice versa, if the infant was born weighing less than 8 pounds, or if the mother was in any kind of economic or physical danger if this child survived, then the baby was doomed. His final estimate, from that initial study, was that seventy five percent of all SIDS cases are actually homicides. But, he admitted, just acknowledging this possibility puts us in an awful dilemma. To catch the 3 out of 4 women whose babies suddenly die that were actually murderers, we have to treat all SIDS cases as potential homicides, therefore piling yet more heartbreak and tragedy on the 1 out of 4 who just randomly went through the worst tragedy any family can know, the sudden and unexpected death of a beloved child. Even using the predictive equation to narrow the field of homicide investigations, we'd still be casting a very scarily public accusation of homicide on an uncomfortably large number of grieving mothers.
I also mention social psychology. The central tenet of the field of social psychology is that if under a given situation, all or nearly all individuals will engage in the same unwanted behavior, then there is less to be gained by stigmatizing those individuals and lauding the ones who don't than by studying the situation with an eye towards changing it. And you can see in a heartbeat how that applies here: if infants are at extreme risk whenever one or more of three variables are present, then we can reduce the rate of (massively under-reported, intentionally under-investigated) maternal infanticide by decreasing the economic and evolutionary pressures behind gender preference, by providing mothers with as much economic assistance and physical protection as it would require for them to feel safe providing for this baby, and by intensify supervision for the first several months of life of mothers of infants who are born weighing less than 8 pounds or looking otherwise sickly. But addressing the issue in this way, and looking into the roots of the equation that predicts maternal infanticide, makes social psychologists confront the queasy implication of all of their work: if it's that sane and natural for them to do this awful thing, if this awful thing is so hard to resist, how can we justify stigmatizing and punishing them? And if we can't, then how can we live with ourselves having just (the historian points out) joined the 85% of all known historical societies, up to and including Christian western Europe as late as the late 19th century, that socially tolerated infanticide any time in the first couple of days after birth? There's pro-choice, I mean, and then there's being so pro-choice as to join the ranks of societies that have denied the humanity of a breathing infant up to 48 hours old ... are we willing to go there? Or to at least show understanding and compassion and tolerance towards societies that did or that do? The anthropologists at the conference were especially terrified of releasing their research findings, because they knew that the accusation that a society or tribe kills children has been used to justify no shortage of genocidal invasions.
I cultivate a readership that's willing to think the unthinkable, so perhaps most of you are still baffled by what part of this spawned such a terror of confronting their own research findings that 29 out of 30 scientists who discovered it immediately and without any external pressure moved to suppress their own research findings. Frankly, good -- I distrust that impulse, too, and think that we are always better off knowing the truth than not knowing it. But as you go about your day, remember this: research shows that your own mother consciously or unconsciously considered murdering you in your crib, off and on for at least the first 48 hours after your birth and not improbably for the whole first two weeks of your life, maybe even the first two months. And if your mother was under 30 when she had you and you were born male in a poor family or female in a wealthy family during times of economic hardship, or weighing less than 8 pounds, or at a time when your mother thought that her own chances of survival would improve if you didn't survive so (for example) she could get pregnant by her new husband more quickly or so she could return to work more quickly, you very nearly didn't make it. And she would have gotten away with it, too, because mothers have traditionally had along list of potential murder weapons ready to hand, from handing you over to caretakers or adoption agencies even if she knew they had a 99% chance of killing you, to smothering you with a pillow, to switching you to infant formula that she knew was diluted with unsafe water, to declining to lift a hand to save you from some mortal peril. And because "everybody knows" that mothers don't kill their own children, nobody would have questioned her about it. Have a nice day!<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<a href="http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/328184.html" target="_blank">http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/328184.html</a>
Here's my assertion:
Human morality is an attempt to draw straight lines around inconsistent notions that developed ad-hoc as evolutionary responses. They will never be consistent and will almost always be arbitrary. Whenever you have a gut feeling that something is wrong, that's not your prefrontal cortex talking. Ethics will be either inconsistent or produce conclusions we find to be abhorrent.
I think that 30 scientists and researchers from a half dozen or more different fields who gathered in rural France in 1990 to check each others' work must have felt something of that same horror when they found that they could not disprove their mutual finding. It was something that none of them wanted to believe. It was a thought that only one of the 30 of them was willing to confront the implications of, and do further research to explore the implications of. And I'm sure that they knew or at least suspected that no matter how important their scientific finding was, they would be vilified for a lifetime if they made society confront this awful truth, and that was a price that they were unwilling to pay. And see, that, to me, is the fascinating thing, even more fascinating than the awful truth itself. On the contrary, almost all of my friends that I've discussed this with since I read the book have agreed with me that, given the weight of the evidence, the awful truth in question is pretty undeniable, is important to know, and (contrary to what some might think) it is something we can learn to live with the knowledge of. If this knowledge becomes widespread, it may and probably will cause some hardship for some innocent people. But the good to society will, I believe, out-weigh those harms. So no, really, the awful truth that I'm about to reveal to you will seem anti-climactic compared to the dread that the scientists who discovered it felt.
After a several year career as one of the second generation of women to do fieldwork in primatology, Sarah Hrdy and her husband decided to have their first child. She was already in the middle of preparations to shift her career from primatology to a subject that would allow her to do her fieldwork closer to home, with fewer long absences from home, and in a more comfortable setting to raise a baby in, namely evolutionary biology, when it occurred to her (as a mother to be) just out of personal interest to study the mothering patterns of the colony of monkeys she was observing. She knew to expect high infant mortality. Primatologists have known for over a hundred years that baby monkeys and baby apes are at extreme risk from any male other than their father. (As are baby humans.) But Hrdy was startled to discover, when she tracked the mothers of new infants carefully, that infants were at almost as much risk of murder from their own mothers as they were from unrelated male adults. This baffled her for several reasons, not least of which that while there had been a great deal of research into infanticide in primates, nobody had ever reported a case of a female primate killing her own offspring except by freakish accident. The other reason it baffled her was that, as an evolutionary biologist, she could make no sense whatsoever as to how evolution could produce individuals that destroyed their own offspring, especially among such slowly reproducing species as primates. So she contacted a few other primatologists studying other colonies of monkeys and asked them to carefully monitor the actions of new mothers ... and to their astonishment, they observed the same thing.
So she gave a preliminary paper on the subject in 1976, suggesting that more research was needed to explain how this behavior could possibly have evolved in primates, only to be interrupted in mid talk by an audience member, a prominent expert in her field. He stood up, tried to stop her from finishing reading her paper, announced that primate females absolutely do not every murder their own children, and that if she had observed a primate colony in which primate females were killing their own children, it could only be because of something she had done to them; she must have committed some horrible breach of experimental ethics that so deranged these monkeys that she had driven them insane enough to do something that no monkey had ever done before. He then stormed out of the talk and went directly to the scientific press to denounce her for whatever it was that she had done to that monkey colony, so it probably is a good thing that she was already planning on changing fields, no?
So she quietly continued her study, working behind the scenes with other researchers while she directed her own studies towards less controversial animals, such as insects. Eventually she discovered something that appalled even her with its simplicity. Not only do mothers sometimes kill their own children, they are almost never insane when they do so. On the contrary, for a mother to murder her own child is an evolutionary adaptation without which our species would not have survived some of the environmental and social disasters of the past. What's more, the actual reasoning behind this is so simple that a straightforward simple equation in four variables is sufficient to provide a reliable estimate of the probability that any particular mother will murder any particular infant: the age of the mother, whether or not this child is the gender that the mother wanted (which, itself, turns out to be easily and universally predicted based on only two variables, the mother's social status and the predicted reliability of the food supply), the child's birth weight (and to a lesser extent other indicators of long-term viability), and her estimate of whether or not attempting to nurture this particular child will only get both her and the child killed. When she took her early estimates for this equation to the 1990 conference, she discovered that epidemiologists studying SIDS, primatologists studying infanticide (following her 1976 tip), historians digging through old records to try to quantify infanticide throughout the ages, criminologists and social psychologists trying to come up with statistical models to predict mother-on-child infanticide, and anthropologists trying to statistically analyze what variables are most consistent with cultures that have high versus low rates of infanticide, had all independently discovered the same equation. And from her viewpoint as an evolutionary biologist, Hrdy demonstrates that any sane, healthy, normal, intelligent mothers who weren't capable of coldly murdering their own infant children almost certainly had no surviving descendants at all to be our ancestors during some of the species-wide threats that have been demonstrated to have happened from the fossil record and from studies of rates of genetic drift.
I mention SIDS. One of the researchers, she says, was an epidemiologist who, in the process of trying to quantify his hunch, initiated a study in which social workers and police very, very intensively interviewed and background checked a long string of crib deaths that had been explained away as unexplained random respiratory failure. It turns out that his equation was able to predict, with high (but not absolute) reliability, which infants had actually been the victims of homicide or malign neglect. If the infant was a boy when the mother wanted a girl or vice versa, if the infant was born weighing less than 8 pounds, or if the mother was in any kind of economic or physical danger if this child survived, then the baby was doomed. His final estimate, from that initial study, was that seventy five percent of all SIDS cases are actually homicides. But, he admitted, just acknowledging this possibility puts us in an awful dilemma. To catch the 3 out of 4 women whose babies suddenly die that were actually murderers, we have to treat all SIDS cases as potential homicides, therefore piling yet more heartbreak and tragedy on the 1 out of 4 who just randomly went through the worst tragedy any family can know, the sudden and unexpected death of a beloved child. Even using the predictive equation to narrow the field of homicide investigations, we'd still be casting a very scarily public accusation of homicide on an uncomfortably large number of grieving mothers.
I also mention social psychology. The central tenet of the field of social psychology is that if under a given situation, all or nearly all individuals will engage in the same unwanted behavior, then there is less to be gained by stigmatizing those individuals and lauding the ones who don't than by studying the situation with an eye towards changing it. And you can see in a heartbeat how that applies here: if infants are at extreme risk whenever one or more of three variables are present, then we can reduce the rate of (massively under-reported, intentionally under-investigated) maternal infanticide by decreasing the economic and evolutionary pressures behind gender preference, by providing mothers with as much economic assistance and physical protection as it would require for them to feel safe providing for this baby, and by intensify supervision for the first several months of life of mothers of infants who are born weighing less than 8 pounds or looking otherwise sickly. But addressing the issue in this way, and looking into the roots of the equation that predicts maternal infanticide, makes social psychologists confront the queasy implication of all of their work: if it's that sane and natural for them to do this awful thing, if this awful thing is so hard to resist, how can we justify stigmatizing and punishing them? And if we can't, then how can we live with ourselves having just (the historian points out) joined the 85% of all known historical societies, up to and including Christian western Europe as late as the late 19th century, that socially tolerated infanticide any time in the first couple of days after birth? There's pro-choice, I mean, and then there's being so pro-choice as to join the ranks of societies that have denied the humanity of a breathing infant up to 48 hours old ... are we willing to go there? Or to at least show understanding and compassion and tolerance towards societies that did or that do? The anthropologists at the conference were especially terrified of releasing their research findings, because they knew that the accusation that a society or tribe kills children has been used to justify no shortage of genocidal invasions.
I cultivate a readership that's willing to think the unthinkable, so perhaps most of you are still baffled by what part of this spawned such a terror of confronting their own research findings that 29 out of 30 scientists who discovered it immediately and without any external pressure moved to suppress their own research findings. Frankly, good -- I distrust that impulse, too, and think that we are always better off knowing the truth than not knowing it. But as you go about your day, remember this: research shows that your own mother consciously or unconsciously considered murdering you in your crib, off and on for at least the first 48 hours after your birth and not improbably for the whole first two weeks of your life, maybe even the first two months. And if your mother was under 30 when she had you and you were born male in a poor family or female in a wealthy family during times of economic hardship, or weighing less than 8 pounds, or at a time when your mother thought that her own chances of survival would improve if you didn't survive so (for example) she could get pregnant by her new husband more quickly or so she could return to work more quickly, you very nearly didn't make it. And she would have gotten away with it, too, because mothers have traditionally had along list of potential murder weapons ready to hand, from handing you over to caretakers or adoption agencies even if she knew they had a 99% chance of killing you, to smothering you with a pillow, to switching you to infant formula that she knew was diluted with unsafe water, to declining to lift a hand to save you from some mortal peril. And because "everybody knows" that mothers don't kill their own children, nobody would have questioned her about it. Have a nice day!<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
<a href="http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/328184.html" target="_blank">http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/328184.html</a>
Here's my assertion:
Human morality is an attempt to draw straight lines around inconsistent notions that developed ad-hoc as evolutionary responses. They will never be consistent and will almost always be arbitrary. Whenever you have a gut feeling that something is wrong, that's not your prefrontal cortex talking. Ethics will be either inconsistent or produce conclusions we find to be abhorrent.
Comments
Interesting article though, if indeed, as stated, a bit anticlimactic. It made me write a really sappy email to my own mother (with link enclosed) about how this doesn't matter to me at all. Hey, she made the right choice after all. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/biggrin-fix.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":D" border="0" alt="biggrin-fix.gif" />
And another tangent: In a way, it actually gets WORSE if we were to switch the figures around and say that "only" 25% of all SIDS cases are actually homicides (instead of the stated 75%). Because we'd STILL have to treat every single one as a potential homicide, only we've just tripled the number of innocent, grieving families placed under suspicion, aggravating their pain. Isn't that just lovely?
Essentially this situation and others like it make me believe that ethics is fatally flawed as a discipline. I'd be interested in what people have to say on that subject or just what people think should be done about the situation in the article.
Ethics is not a natural science, it's an entirely artificial construct just like, well, art. It's a consequence and a prerequisite of civilization. And since it is essentially pure fabrication on our part, there are no natural laws to govern it. There are no constants, no absolutes, save the ones we define - and even then, we can still redefine them. Ethics/morals are in a constant state of flux - some would say evolution.
It's also one of those "two steps forward, one step back" things. It doesn't always feel like it, but it's like any other discipline: We get better with practice.
Ethics is not a natural science, it's an entirely artificial construct just like, well, art. It's a consequence and a prerequisite of civilization. And since it is essentially pure fabrication on our part, there are no natural laws to govern it. There are no constants, no absolutes, save the ones we define - and even then, we can still redefine them. Ethics/morals are in a constant state of flux - some would say evolution.
It's also one of those "two steps forward, one step back" things. It doesn't always feel like it, but it's like any other discipline: We get better with practice.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Agreed. Ethics and morality are indeed relative. Like hot and cold, good has no meaning without bad. If you consider a plane where all possible human actions or reactions to a situation exist, you could say that no action is any "better" than any other action unless you define some rules. Two poles, good and not good. Stick them into the plane, and suddenly actions polarize around them like a magnetic field. As humans we do need such rules in order to decide how to choose one action over another.
Morality defines a protocol of life and interaction for a people like TCP/IP defines a protocol for interaction between computers. It's not necessary that a community takes a specific ethics code over any other ethics code, but it <i>is</i> necessary that the majority of the community subscribes and follows the same code.
The interesting thing to take away from this is that even knowing how relative morals are doesn't take away from their importance nor serve as a reason to lose hope. Your author says to consider that my mother at some point considered killing me. I guess that's supposed to shock me or something. It doesn't. The important thing is that she didn't. And you know what? If she had, and it saved her life, I suppose she still made the right choice, and it really wouldn't make any difference to me, would it?
Laws and morals build on each other. We consider it morally wrong to kill another member of society, and our laws back that notion up. Likely the moral impulse came before the legal, but that's "chicken and egg" stuff really. But even where abortion is legal up to a certain point, by the actual time of BIRTH these options have vanished.
We can't separate morals and laws here, because it's not possible to allow infanticide one way while forbidding it the other way. So the question should be, then, should infanticide be legal? I see no reason why. Gender and birth weight don't provide an excuse.
We'll need to stick to our guns here, morally and legally. Which means the only way we can stop this from happening is by trying to remove the factors that cause it.
Let's talk about what ethics mean in the first place. Can we agree that each ethical rule's purpose should be to encourage behavior that most often helps the population reach a unified goal? For instance, take the medical community. For doctors, ethics is a major part of curriculum, and we know that the reason for their ethical rules is to both reduce harm to patients while also reducing the liability of doctors. At one level higher than this, the goal is to maximize the amount of healing a particular doctor can do, and you could say it's a greedy strategy because we assume that if we maximize this value for each doctor, we maximize it for the community as a whole. If a doctor's license is revoked because he killed a patient while practicing good ethics, it's just as bad to the medical community as if the same doctor lost his license for being drunk.
My point is that it's useless to talk about right and wrong unless you define what right and wrong mean, and you can't do that without defining a goal. National goals are pretty complex, so let's not even try to figure those out. <img src="style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/tounge.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=":p" border="0" alt="tounge.gif" />
To bring this train around to the track, let me try to link in with the article. The impulse of a mother to murder her child was based on a simple equation whose variables are all logically important factors in survival. If you subscribe to evolution and life's ultimate goal of survival, than it's a simple thing to say that the "right" decision for a mother when faced with the death of her child and the death of her AND her child (if she couldn't provide for the child or something similar) is the death of just her child.
The mother's goal may be more than just survival though. She may want a better life for her offspring than she had, and she may only get one or two chances to raise a child towards such an end. In that case, if the choice is between a child with a tortured life, even beyond physical or mental issues - say a child born into slavery, or a child born into the lower class or something, and no child at all, no child may be the "right" choice.
Viewed from a national level where the moral code is "children are always better off alive," these same choices are "wrong." As with any complex system, paradoxes like this are natural and there usually isn't a universal answer. I'm just playing devil's advocate here, personally I believe every child should be given a chance because you never know which child will be the next great one. Sorry for rambling.
I believe that in modern western societies, it'll be hard for a mother to credibly establish that her child threatens her life (and I don't mean with a kitchen knife, I mean with the additional burden placed on her). Any credible threats (stress, reduction of quality of life etc.) are a lot less simple. At what point does a mother's peace of mind/stress-free life gain priority over the life of her child?
moultano mentioned abortion, though the article didn't. Here's a quick primer of my stance on abortion: It should be legal by simple request up to a certain point in the pregnancy, and beyond that for medical reasons.
That being sad, I view abortion as an evil, albeit a sadly necessary one. In that ideal world I always dream of, abortion would not be forbidden, yet it would not exist except for the rarest of cases. Children would be either wanted or never conceived. Birth defects cured by gene therapy in the womb. But we can't legislate our way to that world. A ban on abortion doesn't prevent abortion, it only criminalises those who have one (and probably places them in mortal danger, too). It wouldn't bring us closer to that ideal.
This is the other way around: We can (and do) forbid mothers from killing their children, but how the hell are we going to prevent it?
I agree with you every step of the way on abortion(except maybe genetic modification, sometimes that scares me), and even if it were completely legal and unrestricted as long as it was done by registered and licensed professionals, some women would still get it done on the black market.
Sadly, I believe that the simple rules that govern life and also give it resilience would also prevent us from ever stopping black market abortions and infanticide. Any attempt to breed out or directly modify such behavior through genetics or what have you could have unforeseen and very damaging consequences. What if, for example, this same motivation to kill children is also part of a check and balance with our sexual drives. With out it, we may all have families with seven or eight kids in them!
What if it's inseparable from our drive to protect our children later? Would we stop caring entirely and die out?
The solution, from a moral standpoint, is to do what we've already done: make it the "wrong" choice and handle each breach of moral code one and a time, because sometimes it may not really be the "wrong" choice, and sometimes we don't even have the authority to decide one way or another.
Take the kids away and have the state raise the in a barracks!
Really, though, the article's interesting but this whole thread is one big agree-fest because all it's saying is that far from dropping dead all the time for no good reason, dead babies happen to come from somewhere. It makes pretty good sense that "Sudden Infant Death Syndrome" is the kind of thing that wouldn't be especially tenacious evolutionarily, because there's nothing much worse when it comes to propogating your genes than having a gene that says "SOMETIMES THE BABY JUST DIES." Infanticide seems a lot more logical to me. Unless moultano graces us with his presence again and supplies something more grounded than "ethics is wrong forever" we'll just go in circles about "are there any absolute right and wrongs" which has already been answered like three times by two people.
/me puts up his hand
I find it hard to accept the notion that there is no absolutely rational level of ethics. In the first season of Stargate SG-1 comes across a civilisation that have highly advanced ethics and technology. They have a "no killing" stance, even if it means not killing someone actively trying to kill them. Their technology allows them to teleport antagonists away from eachother to prevent deaths.
Surely there is some kind of ultimate ethics that's merely beyond the mental powers and/or technology of the current human race? A set of rules that are absolutely correct and inviolable? A position beyond any moral reproach?
Perhaps we need only wait for the technological singularity and ask SHODAN for some rules by which to live.
--Scythe--
So my case is that given their technology, we'd probably have the same ethical code.
What we have here is a case of virtue through wealth, in a manner of speaking. That civilization can AFFORD stricter ethics because they have the means to pay the cost. And perhaps ethics can really be described as a "luxury commodity." Whether there is some "position beyond any moral reproach" I cannot say.
It may be flawed but it is necessary not just for social justice but for common goodwill. You'd have to be pretty cold-hearted to not mind unethical cruelty. I agree that legal black & white creates an incompatibility with issues that are shades of gray, but to discredit all ethics as "fatally flawed", which implies unnecessary futility, is more problematic in the end. Getting rid of ethics entirely is a colossally stupid and horrifying concept, but I do suppose the Nha Si'Marat would approve.
I find it hard to accept the notion that there is no absolutely rational level of ethics. In the first season of Stargate SG-1 comes across a civilisation that have highly advanced ethics and technology. They have a "no killing" stance, even if it means not killing someone actively trying to kill them. Their technology allows them to teleport antagonists away from eachother to prevent deaths.
Surely there is some kind of ultimate ethics that's merely beyond the mental powers and/or technology of the current human race? A set of rules that are absolutely correct and inviolable? A position beyond any moral reproach?
Perhaps we need only wait for the technological singularity and ask SHODAN for some rules by which to live.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
The problem is that you're basing your "absolutely rational level on ethics" on a slightly higher level of technology. Let's accelerate this to the far future, where we have the power not only to keep people from killing each other, but to keep people from dying, ever. We can keep everyone alive. Is our super-ethics going to tell us to pack the universe full of people, forever, until we are cramming every person into a tiny capsule just large enough to contain them and feed them? Obviously not; we would find something wrong with that. Or maybe we wouldn't! Unless you come up with something more defensible, I don't think you've established that there is an objective right and wrong.