Q&A: Ages and Morality
Ages and Morality
Question
I keep hearing a lot of references to children and babies who were slaughtered or kidnapped that seem to treat their value as, supposedly, higher than that of adults.
Even here on the site, throughout this sad month, people keep referring to children and toddlers as having higher value than adults.
When everyone, myself included, reacts with greater empathy toward toddlers, that makes sense, and all kinds of psychological explanations can be given for the phenomenon (innocence, purity, etc.), and this isn’t really the place for a discussion about the objective correctness of emotions—we aren’t obligated to feel “correctly.” If you show someone a picture of a dead terrorist and tell him it is an Israeli civilian, his compassion will be stirred…
I’m talking about cases where people speak about the “value” or “price” of babies versus adults, and it is obvious to everyone that babies are “worth” more.
Broadly speaking, I think this is absurd, and trying to deal with the issue in order to reach objective conclusions is hopeless because of the sheer complexity. It would actually be easier for me to make arguments that assign higher value דווקא to adults, but arguments on this matter, of any kind, are a slippery slope. After all, I could argue that the life of a wise person is worth more than that of a fool, or that a person with many friends is worth more than a lonely person.
(I’ll just briefly note some of the considerations: in my view, the main insoluble questions are quantity versus quality, and what already exists versus potential. One could say that potential is of no objective interest at all—it’s not as though life is in short supply on this planet. On the other hand, “come on, really.”
A baby has more life ahead of him in terms of quantity, but how much of that life is actually “life”—quality—compared to an adult who has an enormous personality, countless human interactions, knowledge and skills that were acquired, and for whom cutting off his life is an immense act of vandalism… and the arguments in either direction are endless.)
But at the end of the day, all morality emerges from intuition, so maybe one could say that the very intuition itself (which I have no doubt is not merely personal, or Western, or whatever) that places a higher price on children makes their moral value higher?
Or is it really all just sentiments, and there is no one to determine what differences in value there are, if any.
What do you think?
Answer
All these calculations are irrelevant. Quite simply, children suffer more and their parents suffer more because of their absence, and therefore there is a tendency to pay more for them.
Discussion on Answer
First, there is a difference between emotion and intuition. The attitude toward children is an emotion, not an intuition. Once the counterarguments are raised, it seems to me that no trace of that intuition remains.
Evolutionary explanations prove nothing. For example, there are evolutionary explanations for altruism, and that does not mean altruism is not a value. And of course this is not an identity claim—that is, the fact that something is an evolutionary product does not mean it has value in it (the urge to speak malicious gossip is also an evolutionary product).
Is there a rule of thumb?
Because I can bring many more examples that lie on the borderline between intuition and emotion or subjective opinion. For example, my “intuition” says that animals are not equal in value to human beings. How would I know that this is a moral objectivity? Many claim that they are equal in value (some would even say more valuable than human beings 🤐)
—I wanted to write that the intuition of Americans in the 18th century was that Blacks were not equal in value to whites. But then I realized that’s not very likely; rather, there’s no shortage of social evils in societies throughout history, and it was probably easy to get used to that needed labor force—
Right. The case of children is a clear emotional bias (distortion). In other cases there are sometimes mistaken intuitions. There’s nothing to be done—human beings are sometimes wrong. And even if I give you a criterion, it itself could be mistaken or applied incorrectly. Don’t look for certainties, because you won’t find them.
I’ll just note that in the issues you mentioned there is progress over time, and that too is a hint that there is a right direction here that we are learning more and more about.
A bit frighteningly, I feel somewhat close to post-positivism. It feels like epistemologically there is an inherent uncertainty in all our basic intuitions about the world.
Thank you.
More generally, in morality, how do I distinguish between the objective and the subjective?
That is, how do I know whether to give weight to my moral intuition, for example regarding the value of babies? If I can give explanations for it (an evolutionary mechanism to protect offspring, for example), does that mean it is not an objective value, or is that precisely the point—that this itself is morality?