RE: Freedom and Infanticide

From: Smigrodzki, Rafal (SmigrodzkiR@msx.upmc.edu)
Date: Thu May 16 2002 - 14:20:13 MDT


                Lee Corbin [mailto:lcorbin@tsoft.com]
                Wrote:

                You make a good point. Suppose that some parents decide to
                snuff their kids publicly, and televise it via the internet.
                Would I then want to pass any laws stopping that?

                The answer is no

                ### Now, the one question which I forgot to ask you in the
previous posts was, up to which age should children be publicly snuffable.
Is it 1 year? 4 years? 12? 18? 21? (these correspond to a number of
traditional and/or objective developmental milestones)

                Where do you draw the line? Since you probably feel you may
not impose your own preferences, what will do about persons who insist on
owning children until age 50 (the full development of the orbitofrontal
cortex, so important for ethical reasoning)? How about trade in children,
let's say, made cheaply in brothels (from little girls pumped full of
estrogen - you can induce menarche at age 4), and processed in bulk for
organs? Please don't say that the distaste you personally might feel for
such practices (I hope) would be sufficient to prevent this potentially
lucrative business from being widely developed.

                Are you really going to idly stand by as industrious
businessmen gut toddlers for their livers, or organize TV shows with nude
early-teenage girls fighting hungry bears in an arena?

                Rafal



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