Although fetuses may well remain objects of moral concern, they become less sacrosanct, and so abortion becomes more conscionable.
Good point. I suspect this may end up being mathematically equivalent to the moral uncertainty argument, which in practice equates to counting fetuses as having 30% of the value of an adult. In both cases EA-concerns lead to taking a midpoint between the “fetuses don’t matter” and “unborn babies are equally valuable” points of view.
So the choice to abort (on the proviso to have a child in better circumstances) looks pretty good. (You are right to note there are other corrections, but they seem less significant).
My impression is that the largest determinant of child success is genetic, followed by shared environment—direct parental environmental influences are small. On the one hand, this suggests that simply waiting will not improve things all that much, especially as she should be uncertain as to whether her situation really will improve. On the other hand, it suggests an easy way to improve the ‘quality’ of the later baby—choose a higher quality father. This improvement quite possibly wouldn’t be included in QALYs (as they are bounded above by 1) but seems significant nonetheless.
There might be a regression to the mean issue where the considerations found compelling by-the-lights of one perspective will generally look less compelling when that perspective changes (so if one was ‘pre-EA’ strongly in favour of a liberal view on abortion, this enthusiasm would likely regress).
That’s a good point. Indeed, it seems that in basically every instance EA-considerations degrade the quality of the standard object-level arguments. They then make up for this by supplying entirely new arguments—moral uncertainty, replaceability.
Do you have any cases in mind where EA considerations case psychologically unpleasant updates?
Good point. I suspect this may end up being mathematically equivalent to the moral uncertainty argument, which in practice equates to counting fetuses as having 30% of the value of an adult. In both cases EA-concerns lead to taking a midpoint between the “fetuses don’t matter” and “unborn babies are equally valuable” points of view.
My impression is that the largest determinant of child success is genetic, followed by shared environment—direct parental environmental influences are small. On the one hand, this suggests that simply waiting will not improve things all that much, especially as she should be uncertain as to whether her situation really will improve. On the other hand, it suggests an easy way to improve the ‘quality’ of the later baby—choose a higher quality father. This improvement quite possibly wouldn’t be included in QALYs (as they are bounded above by 1) but seems significant nonetheless.
That’s a good point. Indeed, it seems that in basically every instance EA-considerations degrade the quality of the standard object-level arguments. They then make up for this by supplying entirely new arguments—moral uncertainty, replaceability.
Do you have any cases in mind where EA considerations case psychologically unpleasant updates?