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Comment by jessriedel | Hacker News Reader

Although no one uses eugenics to justify it anymore, there are still plenty of infants who are allowed to die because of severe birth defects that prevent mental development or give a high risk of early death. The moral situation arguably has greatly improved, but the difference between then and now is not nearly so clean cut.

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That's a different situation, isn't it?

I mean, it depends on the specifics, but if you have someone who'll never reach even the intelligence of a cat... It's hard to justify their life on ethical grounds, when effectively "they" don't exist. Maybe that wasn't the situation you had in mind.

Most people don't value human life in proportion to intelligence. You can certainly construct an ethical framework with various thresholds, but my point is that the actual rules in place today reflect a regulatory equilibrium rather than a self-consistent moral philosophy. Most sensible philosophies will consider at least some modern accepted practices to be morally reprehensible.

> but my point is that the actual rules in place today reflect a regulatory equilibrium rather than a self-consistent moral philosophy

I guess since people's morals are so varied, it's too hard to agree on a self-consistent moral philosophy. As an extreme example, just look at cases where people will ensure the right for a child to be born, but then not ensure rights to continuing health/nutrition/education. Beyond outliers like that there's a spectrum of every kind of opinion

Under that logic, we'd stop saving the lives of the homeless in ERs unless we also gauranteed their health and education.

Makes sense to me. Why save someone's life if you're going to kick them right back out onto the street to die in some alley again?

You may not be surprised to hear I'm from a country with a strong social safety net (which I guess works because there is more consensus on life over liberty)

How do you justify the cat's life then, or any life? What level of intelligence has to be met? Who defines that? Why is intelligence the defining attribute?

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