Reply #47: Based on neuroscience [View All]

[Viktor Runeberg]

At birth a baby's brain is largely not connected up yet. Over the next year billions of synapses grow to connect the brain cells together and make the brain capable of learning and conceptual thought. There is brain imagery showing this - it is startling in what it shows about how unconnected the brain cells in the newborn are. Therefore, based on neuroscience, it should be morally okay to kill a baby up through its first month or two beyond the womb.

However, babies are evolved to be incredibly cute to the parents virtually from birth. Because of this cuteness killing the recently born is frowned on in most cultures (although in China, the longest-civilized place on earth, it has long been considered acceptable). The cuteness factor probably precludes actually legalizing the killing of babies during their first months, even by the parents. However, SID - sudden infant death a/k/a crib death - is a common diagnosis that lets parents off the hook in our culture when the baby just somehow manages to stop breathing.

Still, since cuteness generally works for the good - for instance in preserving baby seals and whales and tigers and so on - we shouldn't challenge the status quo on baby killing. Killing fetuses, however, up to the point of "viability" - sure, a neuroscientific understanding of what a self is suggests that there's nothing there that we should recognize as cognitively human - nothing remotely like a mind or soul.