From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Fri May 03 2002 - 18:27:00 MDT
Lee Corbin wrote:
>
> But questions concerning children or animals are tougher yet:
> just what do reasonable people actually do when seeing some
> parent beating a child in public? You definitely have to "be
> there" before you even have the first clue. For societies to
> attempt to write laws about that, it's true, does keep a lot
> of dangerous bureaucrats sidelined who would otherwise do far
> greater damage when directing their omnivorous gaze at economic
> issues, say, but cannot otherwise said to be accomplishing any
> good.
You're ducking the question again. If bureaucrats screwed up the job of
legislating against spousal abuse, then we would have to seek other
solutions to spousal abuse. Reducing spousal abuse would still be a morally
appropriate goal; we would simply have to concede that legislation is not an
effective means to this goal. Despite common usage, the purpose of law is
more than creating the illusion of accomplishment while actually making
things worse for the supposed beneficiaries. But spousal abuse would still
be immoral and would be moral to outlaw spousal abuse if we expected
legislation to be an effective means of reducing the total violation of
rights. (Of course, in a correctly structured legal system, spousal abuse
is not specially outlawed but is a general case of nonconsensual violence.)
By contrast, if someone is having sex with his pet goat, it is wrong for me
to intervene *even if* this is an effective way of reducing the total amount
of bestiality going on. Bestiality is not a morally appropriate subject of
legislation, regardless of whether legislation would be effective.
I am asking you now whether you consider "child abuse" to be the morally
protected exercise of rights over private property or the morally abhorrent
violation of rights of a fellow citizen - bearing in mind that, on this
mailing list as opposed to less rational forums, it is perfectly possible to
concede that something is morally abhorrent and yet carry the point that
laws against it would do more harm than good. In the past, you've made it
clear that, if you are a computer simulation, you would consider yourself to
be the private property of the simulator. Do you consider children to be
the private property of their parents?
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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