Comment by eloisant | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eloisant | Hacker News Reader

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> As a non-American, I find bizarre the suggestion that crimes against children are especially grave is somehow a uniquely American value.

I don't know if it's American but it's not universal, especially if you go back in time.

There was a time in Europe where children were considered a bit like wild animals who needed to be "civilized" as they grow up into adults, who had a good chance of dying of sickness before they reach adulthood anyway, and who were plenty because there was not much contraception.

Also fathers were considered as "owners" of their children and allowed to do pretty much they wanted with them.

In this context, of course hurting children was bad but it wasn't much worse than hurting an adult.

A lot of this sounds to me like common prejudices about the past. And repeating ideas ultimately coming from Philippe Ariès' 1960 book Centuries of Childhood, which most mediaevalists nowadays consider largely discredited.

Many people in the Middle Ages loved their children just as much as anyone today does. Others treated their own kids as expendable, but such people exist today as well. If you are arguing loving one's children was less common in the Middle Ages than today, how strong evidence do you have to support that claim?

And mediaeval Christian theologians absolutely taught that sins against young children were worse. Herod the Great's purported slaughter of the male toddlers of Bethlehem (Matthew 2:16–18) was commemorated every year in the liturgy, and was viewed as an especially heinous sin due to the young age of its victims. Of course, as a historical matter, it seems very unlikely the event ever actually happened – but that's irrelevant to the question of how it influenced their values, since they absolutely did believe it had happened.

You would love your children, but had 10 so didn’t know them the way you would an only child, and half would die.

You don’t need to go back to Middle Ages, just back a century in Africa.

In those contexts, an AI of the day would emphatically support those practices.

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