Ages and Morals
I hear a lot of references to children and babies who have been slaughtered or kidnapped, supposedly valuing them higher than adults.
Here on the site too, throughout this sad month, children and toddlers continue to be treated as having higher value than adults.
When everyone, including me, responds with more empathy for toddlers, it’s understandable and a variety of psychological explanations can be given to the phenomenon (innocence, purity, etc.), and a discussion about the objective correctness of feelings is not appropriate here – we don’t have to feel right – if someone is shown a picture of a dead terrorist and told that it’s an Israeli citizen, they will have mercy…
I’m talking about times when the “value” or “price” of babies versus adults is discussed and it’s clear to everyone that babies are “worth” more.
In general, I think this is absurd and dealing with the issue with the aim of reaching objective conclusions is hopeless due to its great complexity. It is easier for me to bring arguments that give higher value to adults, but arguments on the matter, of any kind, are a steep slope. After all, I can argue that the life of a wise man is worth more than that of a fool or that a person with many friends is worth more than a person alone.
(I’ll just mention a few of the sides: The main unsolvable questions in my opinion are, quantity versus quality and existence versus potential. It can be said that potential is not interesting at all objectively, it’s not as if there is a lack of life on the planet. On the other hand, “Come on.”
A baby has more quantity of life ahead of him, but how much of his life is “life” – quality – compared to an adult who has a huge personality, countless human interactions, acquired knowledge and skills, and enormous vandalism to cut his life short… and the arguments one way or the other are endless)
But the entire moral philosophy stems from intuition, so perhaps we could say that the very intuition (which I have no doubt is not a personal or Western subject or whatever) that values children makes their moral value higher?
Or is it really all just sentiments, and no one can decide what and if there are differences in their value.
What do you think?
All these bills are irrelevant. It’s just that children suffer more and their parents suffer more because of their absence, so there is a tendency to pay more for them.
Thank you.
In general, in morality, how do I separate object from subject?
That is, how do I know whether to give weight to my moral intuition, for example, regarding the value of babies. Is it because I can give explanations (an evolutionary mechanism to protect offspring, for example) that it is not an objective value or is it the one who gives and that is what morality is?
First, there is a difference between emotion and intuition. The attitude towards children is an emotion, not intuition. After raising the counterarguments, it seems to me that there is no trace of this intuition left.
Evolutionary explanations do not prove anything. For example, there are evolutionary explanations for altruism, and that does not mean that altruism is not a value. And of course it is not the same, that is, the fact that it is an evolutionary result does not mean that it has value (the tendency to speak slander is also an evolutionary result).
Is there a rule of thumb?
Because I can give many more examples that are on the seam line between intuition and emotion or subjective opinion. For example, my ”intuition” says that sheep are not of equal value to humans. How do I know that this is a moral object? Many claim that they are of equal value (some would say that they are of equal value to humans 🤐)
—I wanted to write that the intuition of Americans in the 18th century was that blacks were not of equal value to whites. But I soon realized that this was not very likely, but that there is no lack of ills in societies in history, and it was probably easy to get used to this consumed labor force—
True. The case of children is a clear emotional bias (deception). In other cases, sometimes there are wrong intuitions. There is nothing to be done, people sometimes make mistakes. And even if I give you a criterion, it itself can be mistaken or applied incorrectly. Don't look for certainties because you won't find them.
I will just note that in the issues you mentioned there is progress with the timeline, and this is also a hint that there is a right direction here that we are learning more and more about.
Sadly, I feel a bit close to post-positivism. I feel that epistemologically there is inherent uncertainty in all our basic intuitions about the world.
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