Abortion
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With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas.I’m not sure newborn babies are “people” in any meaningful sense yet.
In which case, even ‘aborting’ 6 months after birth would be fine.
A child does not seem anything like a functionally complete person until somewhere between 9 to 15 months old. Most people cannot recall memories from before age 3.
I’m skeptical a newborn is anything more than a robot until their creativity comes online.
It would be gross and upsetting, though, so let’s settle for abortion up until the child can be delivered and adoption for any unwanted babies.
(John)
It would be gross and upsetting, though, so let’s settle for abortion up until the child can be delivered and adoption for any unwanted babies.
That’s an inversion of morals and emotions. The emotional response should come after you form a moral judgment, as a result of that judgment. Conversely, moral judgment shouldn’t be the result of an emotion.
How do you define personhood?
I use David Deutsch’s concept of the universal explainer.
(John)
A child does not seem anything like a functionally complete person until somewhere between 9 to 15 months old.
Basing personhood on ‘functional completeness’ is fudging smarts and intelligence.
I don’t see why forgetting things that happened before age 3 is meaningful here.
I wasn’t talking about forgetting things. Memories might not even be stored before age 3.
(John)
According to WebMD:
Most babies will start walking between about 10 and 18 months old, although some babies may walk as early as 9 months old.
And they retain that ability. So something must be being stored here.
They also start saying basic words by age 1, which they retain as well.
It’s possible creativity, and with it, personhood and rights, only comes online after birth. For example, the universal-explainer program may be partly memetic, as David Deutsch argues in The Beginning of Infinity. In which case creativity only comes online upon exposure to other people.
But that’s highly speculative. The program might as well be wholly genetic and start running before birth.