Comment by skissane
7 hours ago
> What do you consider torture? and what do you consider sport?
By "torturing babies for sport" I mean inflicting pain or injury on babies for fun, for pleasure, for enjoyment, as a game or recreation or pastime or hobby.
Doing it for other reasons (be they good reasons or terrible reasons) isn't "torturing babies for sport". Harming or killing babies in war or genocide isn't "torturing babies for sport", because you aren't doing it for sport, you are doing it for other reasons.
> BTW: it’s a pretty American (or western) value that children are somehow more sacred than adults.
As a non-American, I find bizarre the suggestion that crimes against children are especially grave is somehow a uniquely American value.
It isn't even a uniquely Western value. The idea that crimes against babies and young children – by "crimes" I mean acts which the culture itself considers criminal, not accepted cultural practices which might be considered a crime in some other culture – are especially heinous, is extremely widespread in human history, maybe even universal. If you went to Mecca 500 years ago and asked any ulama "is it a bigger sin to murder a 5 year old than a 25 year old", do you honestly think he'd say "no"? And do you think any Hindu or Buddhist or Confucian scholars of that era would have disagreed? (Assuming, of course, that you translated the term "sin" into their nearest conceptual equivalent, such as "negative karma" or whatever.)
> 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.
In those contexts, an AI of the day would emphatically support those practices.
People absolutely "torture" babies for their own enjoyment. It's just "in good fun", so you don't think about it as "torture", you think of it as "teasing". Cognitive blind spot. People do tons of things that are displeasant or emotionally painful to their children to see the child's funny or interesting reaction. It serves an evolutionary purpose even, challenging the child. "Mothers stroke and fathers poke" and all that.
I don't think you are using "torture" in the same sense as I am.
When I say "torture", I mean acts which cause substantial physical pain or injury.
People smother their infants to stop them from crying in order to have some quiet. Causing physical harm for their own satisfaction. I mean shit, if we're going there, people sexually abuse their children for their own gratification.
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> I think there are effectively universal moral standards, which essentially nobody disagrees with.
...
> I don't think you are using "torture" in the same sense as I am.
Just throwing this out here, you haven't even established "Universal Moral Standards", not to mention needing it to do that across all of human history. And we haven't even addressed the "nobody disagrees with" issue you haven't even addressed.
I for one can easily look back on the past 100 years and see why "universal moral standards, which essentially nobody disagrees with" is a bad argument to make.
You can find many ancient cultures who tortured babies for sport when they captured them in raids.
Exposure and infanticide was also very common in many places.
> You can find many ancient cultures who tortured babies for sport when they captured them in raids.
Can you? Sources, please. And pay attention to the authors of those sources and how they relate to the culture in question.
If you have to ask, you didn't even look very hard. I'm not a historian and I learned about this stuff in World History class. Hell, there's even movies about it (unless you think there just happened to not be any children in all those villages they burned down in the movies?)...
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