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Comment by dcow | Hacker News Reader

Being unfamiliar with Peter Singers ethical approach, it was not clear to me from the parent comment alone that the notion of suffering extended also to a developed fetus.

While an interesting approach, I'm not sure I agree that the ability to suffer is enough of a definition of humanity to use in isolation. It also does not account for scenarios where one might be willing to suffer on behalf of another. In other words, I'm not sure there exists an absolute scale of suffering which we can use to judge the morality of such a scenario. Again, maybe I'm not familiar enough with this ethical framework.

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Singer is definitively pro-abortion, for basically the reasons I mentioned. It's not terribly nuanced, it follows pretty directly from his basic ideas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Singer#Abortion.2C_eutha...

I'm not super expert about it either (at best a casual armchair philosopher), but from what I know Singers philosophy isn't specifically about suffering, it's about weighing interests. He assumes that the desire to avoid pain is one of the more important interests, hence it takes priority most (but not all) of the time. It's not black and white, it's more of a calculus about weighing the different competing interests of individuals, with certain classes of interests being given more weight than others.

I think Singers arguments in favor of abortion actually go farther than what OP's post implied regarding the fetus' capacity to feel pain. Singer argues that a fetus is unable to have any self-interests (including the desire to avoid pain), hence the interests of the mother should be given priority. I think this is taking it too far myself; I can agree with the delineation of the fetus' capacity to feel pain, but it is not clear to me at what point (if any) Singer feels it would be immoral to abort a fetus.

Just to clarify, Singer believes that you should be allowed to kill babies for years after birth.

I discovered last year that people are actually promoting this. I've been attacked by people because I do not agree with late-term (for no medical reason) and after-birth abortion:

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_natur...

It is almost in the same line of thinking that infants are not capable of feeling pain and why some operations on them were done without anesthesia:

http://www.nytimes.com/1987/12/17/opinion/l-why-infant-surge...

I believe some operations on infants are still being done without it:

http://gizmodo.com/why-are-so-many-newborns-still-being-deni...

"to this day, many procedures are performed on newborns without the benefit of analgesics. That’s largely because of an enduring misconception in the medical community that newborns don’t feel pain like adults."

Yep, there's also Antinatalism, which is the belief that having children is immoral. There are a few different strains, but greatly oversimplifying my favorite is that suffering in life outweighs pleasure, so bringing a new life into existence increases the net amount of suffering and is thus immoral.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinatalism

> It is almost in the same line of thinking that infants are not capable of feeling pain and why some operations on them were done without anesthesia

While that sentiment is certainly a part of medical history, there's a good reason why many procedures on infants are still carried out without anesthesia today. Infants are fragile and most forms of pain relief we use on adults are simply too dangerous for infants. Any anesthesiologist will weigh the benefits vs. the risks for each particular procedure and for infants that ratio is considerably different compared to adults.

Is it really that dangerous?

"Key medical objections to infant anesthesia - that it was (a) unnecessary and (b) dangerous - were resolved by the brilliant research of Kanwal Anand and colleagues at Oxford from 1985 to 1987. Making precise measurements of infant reactions to surgery, they proved that the babies experienced pain, needed and tolerated anesthesia well, and had probably been dying of metabolic and endocrine shock following unanesthetized operations."

Source: http://www.nocirc.org/symposia/second/chamberlain.html

I'm not a medical doctor and not necessarily current on the latest research. However, there is quite a lot of evidence that general anesthesia is fairly likely to cause actual brain damage in infants and young children [1,2] with significant consequences in later life and there are (less significant, but still non-trivial) issues with various methods of local anesthesia. As far as I know, there's a lot of unsolved issues in the field of infant anesthesiology and the general trend is to err on the side of caution.

[1] http://www.webmd.com/parenting/baby/news/20120820/anesthesia...

[2] https://www.fda.gov/ForConsumers/ConsumerUpdates/ucm364078.h...

If there is a need for "repeated or lengthy use of general anesthetic" on infants there is usually already something wrong which could attribute to the said symptoms as well. It would be crazy to not use anesthesia on young children based on this warning, as shock (Which usually happens when operated on without anesthetics and the reason the child is silent during and a while after the operation) may cause worse damage.

The first reference I linked specifically controlled not just for disorders that could lead to similar symptoms, but even things like the mother's socioeconomic status, etc. The effect was still huge.

I don't think anyone's seriously suggesting simply forgoing anesthesia in life threatening cases, but people might want to rethink a routine tonsillectomy or some dental work.

Yeah that's exactly what I was getting at. I couldn't remember if he had taken it that far but I thought I recalled reading that.

More shocking than that you would even be allowed to die when you are ill and suffering too much. You know like we do with our pets because we love them and don't want them to suffer.

"While an interesting approach, I'm not sure I agree that the ability to suffer is enough of a definition of humanity to use in isolation"

The statement was not about defining humanity. Why is it relevant if something is human or not? Would it be OK to torture non-human life that's clearly in possession of cautiousness just because it's not human?

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